They say it is ‘technology agnostic’ which is shorthand for it is going to get stolen for fixed wireless that will fail to reach people.
Then 8 or 12 years from now when the Democrats get elected again they will do it all over again and it will be a lot more money but only for unaffordable and unworkable technology, not fiber.
Not only is there no particular reason to believe anything you are saying, but even if it were true, it would still represent a meaningful investment. Fixed wireless will fail to reach some people, but would represent a big step up for a lot of other people.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good and don't let cynicism be the enemy of getting anything done.
It was in my area as part of the CARES act. The entire valley has fiber in front of every home and most homes/businesses were connected with the digging costs refunded. I missed out on the refund but still benefit from the fiber.
Once you get 200 or so miles from the East Coast you encounter the "Appalachian Mountains" which are mostly a set of dissected plateaus. It is a place where radio goes to die.
In my area there are ridges that are consistently about 2000 feet above sea level, and none of them stick up above the others. If you build a tower at a reasonable height on top of one it can sorta kinda see into the valleys on both sides and maybe VHF waves can propagate a little into the next valley.
The ridge on top might be roadless so you have to build a road, power lines, optic fiber, etc. You probably have to run at least 1/3 the length of optic fiber to serve the towers that you'd have to run to serve the roads.
Wireless base stations are crazy expensive and the cost is only justified by the astronomical cost of wireless plans (compared to how much bandwidth you actually get.)
Fiber optic has potential performance that is 1000s of times great than the alternatives and unlike DSL and Fixed Wireless it has the range to cover rural areas. Fixed Wireless vendors have a long history of coming into small towns like this
and only covering a small fraction of residents if any. If the market can support a scheme that's great, but the government has to stop paying for scams.
In some other country your thinking might be valid but here in the US our #1 problem is that we keep inventing expensive partial solutions that require more expensive partial solutions.
For instance we not only have a dazzling array of private health plans that may or may not accept you but we also have a large number of government plans and public-private insurance plans.
Someday we're going to realize that people still aren't covered under Obamacare and invent yet another new program. What I do know is that we'll never scrap something old or consolidate two programs into one.
We got to the moon by making a realistic plan to get all the way there and get all the way back. We didn't create a "public-private partnership" that would get the astronauts 80% of the way there and hope they'd be able to ride the bus back.
Any plan that serves a few people who are convenient to serve who aren't already served is just going to make the remaining unserved people harder to serve.
A realistic plan is that you can wrap an optic fiber around power lines and old-school power lines at relatively low cost.
---
It's a fairly big problem that industry focused on the west coast has a distorted idea of what you can do with radio. Several million people have a line-of-sight to the Hollywood sign. There are no "white spaces" in Southern California, instead you can tune in 100+ OTA channels. The "ring of fire" topography makes it easy to offer services.
The 2 meter ham band is crazy crowded in So Cal and has driven people into the 1.2 GHz band. Even in NYC the 2 meter band is pretty dead in comparison. San Francisco startups keep piling devices into the 2.4 GHz band instead of the 900 MhZ band. They think 900 MhZ is crowded (it is in San Jose) but in most of the country 900 Mhz is all dead air. In most of the country about 10% of the possible TV channels are used.
Broadband is one of the primary signifiers of modern oligarchical capitalism, which I personally would argue is the practical end-state of real-world laissez-faire free market deregulation:
A bunch of entrenched supercorps or single large corp that then establishes entry barriers to stifle competition, and then take huge handouts enabled by lobbyists from large governments to further the competitive imbalance with upstarts.
That's why almost every major market in the US is dominated by a cartel of companies if not a monopoly. Even markets that have been "well tuned" to be fairly commodified aren't, like cars (Toyota and GM dominate), and mobile communications (we're almost down to two: AT&T and Verizon, would have been if the T-Mobile merger wasn't shot down), health insurance (down to like UHG and two others), etc etc etc.
Even agriculture, about as decentralized and commodified a market as I can imagine, has ADM and Cargill dominating secondary markets (I am not an expert here that's just what I'm told) in subtle ways and family farms aren't competitive with industrial farming operations.
I'm not going to deny "The Democrats" may be engineering a giveaway, but "The Democrats" are just one of the two public faces of an underlying oligarchical controlling system that either uses "The Republicans" or "The Democrats" to extract what they need from the US government, depending on who is in powers.
If Democrats are in power - extract stimulus money as they use Keynesian economics to stimulate the economy
If Republicans are in power - extract tax cuts as they use Milton Friedman economics / trickle down
Regardless of who is in power - tweak every bill to include barriers to entry and strengthen their market position.
All this hustling and bustling about doing something big to help people out, and we ended up with a highway bill that includes some telecom pork. The Democrats are DOA at midterms after this.
This is just the bill that some Republicans could get on board with. The Build Back Better bill that actually helps people is supposedly going to be voted on in the house tomorrow, and then it has to get through the Senate.
There are other massive bills in the pipeline and also next year's legislative session.
Democrats are DOA at midterms, but it will likely be due to the normal pendulum of politics (backlash against party in power) and unfavorable demographic shifts.
> When the Democratic party wins they gerrymander as much as the Republicans.
Absolutely false. Democrats do it far less, in fewer places, and with much less effect on outcomes. Please don't "both sides" this issue.
In fact, Democrats changed laws to try to end gerrymandering in three states they won: Oregon, Virginia, and Colorado[1]. They did this against their own self-interest and likely ended up helping Republicans[2].
Multiple independent, transparent measures of extreme gerrymandering have found that Republicans do it more[3].
Republicans have also been found by courts to be using racial gerrymandering to dilute the votes of minorities over[4] and over[5].
That shouldn't be surprising, because we now know that racial gerrymandering was an explicit tactic that Republicans illegally pursued[6].
One political party in the US is ideologically wed to the idea that government, _any_ government, cannot accomplish anything. That would be a big reason way you hear so much of that point of view.
This bill will lead to a bunch of rural internet being a lot less crappy. Will it be perfect? No. Will it be better than it was? Yes.
I'm no expert, but is extending broadband to the areas that have none really more important than or offering competition in areas that have one? Won't this bring the ability to wfh to areas where people who need to wfh have already left?
I remember reading several years ago that the cost of a 1gb connection in Seoul was $20/mo. There are lots of places in the US where 1/10 of that costs 3x that. If we're going to subsidize infrastructure (and pretend that municipal broadband is evil), that seems like a better target.
Starlink is the most signifiant rural broadband access development in decades, and the FCC seems somewhat hostile to it.
Its only difficulty is that you need almost a totally clear view of the sky since it's not like a geosync satellite where you point to one place in the sky. They need to track satellites in motion, so a single tree will disrupt a bit.
I would guess as the flotilla expands they might not need as much of the sky and the "arc" would decrease, and their software will adapt on the fly.
Starlink is another example of a "Musk" company with an active software update loop that shows active ongoing improvement. It's not quite as revolutionary in this space but it is nice to see.
5G also has a lot of potential but still requires a lot of towers.
Of course the biggest economic revolution in broadband is 5G and Starlink in the third world. Starlink should bring good broadband to all of Africa, rural Asia, etc. Combined with Solar+Storage for independent power, that leaves water and food as the primary necessities for living in places / off grid.
Global Warming is of course extremely dangerous, but the amount of habitable land that will be opened in Siberia is enormous. Which is good, because we might need to resettle billions of people there.
It’s even worse than that; most rural areas don’t even have a 100gbps option, and what exists is more than $60/mo. My anecdotes put it at 5x the cost for 1/100 the speed. ($100 for a 10mbps option, and I know plenty of people with worse than that!)
I am extremely cynical about this after Clinton’s national broadband initiative resulted in telecom companies taking $100 billion and not doing anything.
You are right to be cynical. I'm looking at the CPUC "Proposed Middle Mile" network that would be funded in California -- and it largely overlaps existing service. The Metropolitan Bay Area would be well-funded with this project, while entire rural areas are not included at all.
I am quite dejected at the United States' ability to do anything that's both difficult and unsexy, at this point. Anything related to boring infrastructure (replacing lead water pipes, bridges, leaking subway systems, etc) just seems untenable.
There are escalators in the DC Metro Area that are out of service for months and years while they get replaced. I can't even begin to understand what would cause a 1 year long escalator replacement in this age of unlimited power tools and incredible amounts of supply chain efficiency, when it probably took 2-3 years to build the whole metro station to begin with, in the 70s (including the escalator)
35 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 99.2 ms ] threadThen 8 or 12 years from now when the Democrats get elected again they will do it all over again and it will be a lot more money but only for unaffordable and unworkable technology, not fiber.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good and don't let cynicism be the enemy of getting anything done.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...
In my area there are ridges that are consistently about 2000 feet above sea level, and none of them stick up above the others. If you build a tower at a reasonable height on top of one it can sorta kinda see into the valleys on both sides and maybe VHF waves can propagate a little into the next valley.
The ridge on top might be roadless so you have to build a road, power lines, optic fiber, etc. You probably have to run at least 1/3 the length of optic fiber to serve the towers that you'd have to run to serve the roads.
Wireless base stations are crazy expensive and the cost is only justified by the astronomical cost of wireless plans (compared to how much bandwidth you actually get.)
Fiber optic has potential performance that is 1000s of times great than the alternatives and unlike DSL and Fixed Wireless it has the range to cover rural areas. Fixed Wireless vendors have a long history of coming into small towns like this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Music_Man
and only covering a small fraction of residents if any. If the market can support a scheme that's great, but the government has to stop paying for scams.
For instance we not only have a dazzling array of private health plans that may or may not accept you but we also have a large number of government plans and public-private insurance plans.
Someday we're going to realize that people still aren't covered under Obamacare and invent yet another new program. What I do know is that we'll never scrap something old or consolidate two programs into one.
We got to the moon by making a realistic plan to get all the way there and get all the way back. We didn't create a "public-private partnership" that would get the astronauts 80% of the way there and hope they'd be able to ride the bus back.
Any plan that serves a few people who are convenient to serve who aren't already served is just going to make the remaining unserved people harder to serve.
A realistic plan is that you can wrap an optic fiber around power lines and old-school power lines at relatively low cost.
---
It's a fairly big problem that industry focused on the west coast has a distorted idea of what you can do with radio. Several million people have a line-of-sight to the Hollywood sign. There are no "white spaces" in Southern California, instead you can tune in 100+ OTA channels. The "ring of fire" topography makes it easy to offer services.
The 2 meter ham band is crazy crowded in So Cal and has driven people into the 1.2 GHz band. Even in NYC the 2 meter band is pretty dead in comparison. San Francisco startups keep piling devices into the 2.4 GHz band instead of the 900 MhZ band. They think 900 MhZ is crowded (it is in San Jose) but in most of the country 900 Mhz is all dead air. In most of the country about 10% of the possible TV channels are used.
A bunch of entrenched supercorps or single large corp that then establishes entry barriers to stifle competition, and then take huge handouts enabled by lobbyists from large governments to further the competitive imbalance with upstarts.
That's why almost every major market in the US is dominated by a cartel of companies if not a monopoly. Even markets that have been "well tuned" to be fairly commodified aren't, like cars (Toyota and GM dominate), and mobile communications (we're almost down to two: AT&T and Verizon, would have been if the T-Mobile merger wasn't shot down), health insurance (down to like UHG and two others), etc etc etc.
Even agriculture, about as decentralized and commodified a market as I can imagine, has ADM and Cargill dominating secondary markets (I am not an expert here that's just what I'm told) in subtle ways and family farms aren't competitive with industrial farming operations.
I'm not going to deny "The Democrats" may be engineering a giveaway, but "The Democrats" are just one of the two public faces of an underlying oligarchical controlling system that either uses "The Republicans" or "The Democrats" to extract what they need from the US government, depending on who is in powers.
If Democrats are in power - extract stimulus money as they use Keynesian economics to stimulate the economy
If Republicans are in power - extract tax cuts as they use Milton Friedman economics / trickle down
Regardless of who is in power - tweak every bill to include barriers to entry and strengthen their market position.
Democrats are DOA at midterms, but it will likely be due to the normal pendulum of politics (backlash against party in power) and unfavorable demographic shifts.
Absolutely false. Democrats do it far less, in fewer places, and with much less effect on outcomes. Please don't "both sides" this issue.
In fact, Democrats changed laws to try to end gerrymandering in three states they won: Oregon, Virginia, and Colorado[1]. They did this against their own self-interest and likely ended up helping Republicans[2].
Multiple independent, transparent measures of extreme gerrymandering have found that Republicans do it more[3].
Republicans have also been found by courts to be using racial gerrymandering to dilute the votes of minorities over[4] and over[5].
That shouldn't be surprising, because we now know that racial gerrymandering was an explicit tactic that Republicans illegally pursued[6].
1. https://apnews.com/article/redistricting-579984fa53d99795674...
2. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/10/democra...
3. https://election.princeton.edu/2012/12/30/gerrymanders-part-...
4. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-court-gerrymandering/...
5. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/05/north-c...
6. https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-secret-files-of...
This bill will lead to a bunch of rural internet being a lot less crappy. Will it be perfect? No. Will it be better than it was? Yes.
I was under the impression the US had tried similar before... and Comcast et. al. just pocketed the money and bumped their prices up some more.
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6c5e97/e...
One thing we have to face as a populous, is how to establish justice when it involves big companies and millions of people.
I remember reading several years ago that the cost of a 1gb connection in Seoul was $20/mo. There are lots of places in the US where 1/10 of that costs 3x that. If we're going to subsidize infrastructure (and pretend that municipal broadband is evil), that seems like a better target.
Its only difficulty is that you need almost a totally clear view of the sky since it's not like a geosync satellite where you point to one place in the sky. They need to track satellites in motion, so a single tree will disrupt a bit.
I would guess as the flotilla expands they might not need as much of the sky and the "arc" would decrease, and their software will adapt on the fly.
Starlink is another example of a "Musk" company with an active software update loop that shows active ongoing improvement. It's not quite as revolutionary in this space but it is nice to see.
5G also has a lot of potential but still requires a lot of towers.
Of course the biggest economic revolution in broadband is 5G and Starlink in the third world. Starlink should bring good broadband to all of Africa, rural Asia, etc. Combined with Solar+Storage for independent power, that leaves water and food as the primary necessities for living in places / off grid.
Global Warming is of course extremely dangerous, but the amount of habitable land that will be opened in Siberia is enormous. Which is good, because we might need to resettle billions of people there.
Do you mean 100Mbps?
I didn’t see any mention of municipal broadband.
https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=e17e4e...
I am quite dejected at the United States' ability to do anything that's both difficult and unsexy, at this point. Anything related to boring infrastructure (replacing lead water pipes, bridges, leaking subway systems, etc) just seems untenable.
There are escalators in the DC Metro Area that are out of service for months and years while they get replaced. I can't even begin to understand what would cause a 1 year long escalator replacement in this age of unlimited power tools and incredible amounts of supply chain efficiency, when it probably took 2-3 years to build the whole metro station to begin with, in the 70s (including the escalator)