Summary: $200B Broadband Scandal (2005)
newnetworks.com
newnetworks.com
Growing up in India, we used to read and see stories about the West (Europe and the US) and were just amazed at what can be done with infrastructure if the people and government had the will to do so.
Now, I've lived in the US for 23 years, and I look longingly elsewhere at Europe and Asia to see what can be done with infrastructure if the people and government had the will to do so. From broadband, to high speed rail, to public transportation, to food safety, to medical care.
The problem is, as a population, we still haven't come to terms that we're slipping behind badly. We just say "but, but, silicon valley!" or "but we innovate!" and move on.
But you're right; the US got overrun by nationalism post-9/11 which led to a feeling that because we were already the best, greatest, freest nation given to man by god -- and the rest of the world surpassed us in many ways.
The US is hardly the first nation to think that at the peak of its power and almost certainly won't be the last.
It's just that the large infrastructure projects that can only be undertaken by government have gotten so paralyzed by special interests, that the stories just sound like anything you'd hear from developing nations with woefully corrupt governments. That billions of dollars were spent, there is literally NOTHING to show for it, AND nobody was punished either.
I say this living in an area (DC Metro) that now has gigabit fiber from the local telco. But I know our situation is rare.
I miss my FiOS - I don't miss the weather :-)
It's not just D.C. though. The whole surrounding area is pretty lax about development. The Chesapeake Bay area in Maryland is pretty rural, but also has fiber internet because ISPs are permitted to build where it's profitable to build.
For perspective, Clinton's campaign national infrastructure bill proposed spending $240B over 10 years, and a national high-speed rail network might cost around $500B. Those are huge expenditures, but they are investments in the American public.
War in the Middle East? Our money just goes up in smoke...
[1] Summary of Costs of the US Wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan and Homeland Security: http://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/201...
The scary part is when I read about the roaring 20s. It reminds me of many of my experiences in silicon valley.
I often wonder, if the market crashes again will we be in another great depression that leads us to ww3.
Could you elaborate a bit on that?
It's still unclear that we would need another one. Going by the WWII timeline, the invasion of Poland would be roughly in the next year.
And then the baby boomers came along. And they have just cash cowed that infrastructure, not doing a good job maintaining it, not advancing it, letting it rot, while they pocket the benefit, stuffing it into the stock, bond, and real estate markets, benefiting really no one but themselves. They are a hoarding generation. And they seem fairly OK with a re-emergence of aristocracy as a result: I've got mine, you go get your own. Everything is a product. Rich people get more. Cooperation is socialism. Etc.
So it'll be up to gen X and millenials to decide what comes next.
I don't know if we can just blame baby boomers, unless somehow they were responsible for voting all the current politicians in.
To be fair to Boomers and contrary to the popular current Boomers.v. Millenials (with Gen X occasionally acknowledged) narrative, the effects you describe began under the social, economic, and political dominance of the “Greatest” Generation, not the boomers.
Further, it's not really a generational thing, it's about shifting distribution of power among economic classes over time; which generation is ascendant at the time isn't the controlling factor, and generation v. generation narrative obstructs the kind of coalition building that could work to reverse the problem.
Also, broadband and high speed rail are infinitely easier when the landmass is over 15-40x smaller and population density 2-10x greater than the US.
Our medical care system sucks though - service is excellent, costs are not.
Lower life expectancy suggests the service isn't that excellent.
My favorite thing to do when I visit a different country is tour the grocery store. I compare the price of milk, bread, eggs, cheese, and beef.
In Italy and London I have found that similar quality products are much more expensive usually. However the stores caring more high quality local foods, and less of the cheap processed foods that we American's love.
No, the US has MUCH worse food safety standards than the EU for example. I am tired of reading articles about all kinds of toxins and carcinogens that are byproducts of mass production, that are allowed by the FDA in "small quantities" but are completely banned in the EU. Same goes for food labeling.
Update: Regarding high speed rail and density, it should actually be the opposite. The hard part of building something like HSR is getting the correct permits and buying land, not just the construction. With the US being so spread out, there's fewer parties to negotiate land purchases from.
The U.S. is unusual in making telecom construction and licensing a largely municipal issue, which subjects it to local NIMBY-ism. Philadelphia, D.C., New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Austin, etc., have broadband that's quite competitive with Europe. They also tend to be places that are laissez faire in general about development in general. The Bay Area, in contrast, is anti-development about everything, apparently including broadband. There's a reason Google chose to build fiber in Atlanta, but not in its own back yard.
What the book's account leaves out is that (1) the law required only 1.5 Mbps to qualify for alternative regulation, and (2) the State of Pennsylvania didn't pay anything for this failed promise. And at the end of the day, Pennsylvania has fiber to 40% of households (more than the Netherlands, less than Sweden). The book isn't lying, it's just not the full picture.
Has it? The best numbers I could find was ~60% for Sweden, and ~40% for PA.
http://broadbandnow.com/Pennsylvania https://www.pts.se/sv/Nyheter/Pressmeddelanden/2016/Snabb-br...
A year later (October 2016, rather than October 2015): 66.4%
https://www.pts.se/sv/Nyheter/Pressmeddelanden/2017/Sju-av-t...
"the Netherlands is ranked with Switzerland in having the most broadband subscriptions per 100 inhabitants,[1] has no bandwidth caps,[2] and has the most homes passed in Europe in terms of connection speeds of 50 Mbit/s and higher.[3]" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_Netherlands
Yes, they use a lot of DSL, but you can have 20+Mbit DSL connections. The cap is actually ~120 megabit under the right conditions. Though you need a telecom willing to make a few investments which seem rare in the US.
The "homes passed with 50 mbps+" statistic you cite is to a pay-walled article, but this source says https://www.telecompaper.com/research/netherlands-most-homes... that the Netherlands, Japan, and South Korea are above 80%, while Sweden, Hong Kong, Denmark, and Taiwan are between 50% and 80%. The number in Pennsylvania is 88%: http://broadbandnow.com/Pennsylvania.
Average connection speed is also meaningless as it's minimum speeds that matter. (From you link %Above 25 Mbps Pennsylvania 26%) 1 Gbit conneciton does not make up for 40 1mbps connections. 2 county's have less than 30% access to 25MBPS connections, and no the few 1Gbps connections in no way make up for this deficit.
PS: Though I agree PA has solid internet access. I just disagree with how you are measuring it.
[1] I think in a developed society, people have the right to lots of different services, including maybe even internet connectivity. I strongly disagree they have the right to get it wherever they want to live. The government shouldn't be in the business of creating incentives to live in places that are expensive to build infrastructure to, at the cost of everyone else.
Further, if netflix wants to roll out 4k service they don't really care about max bandwidth just percentage of households over a given threshold.
The same idea is why the broadband report you linked cares about % over some threshold not simply averages.
PS: Internet connections are surprisingly cheap to deploy, we have roads to 'everyone's' house. Fiber is fairly cheap, companies simply have no incentive to build it vs. say they will build it.
Prior we were maxed with "minimum speeds" of 25/5. With 4 people doing streaming and games, the service barely became useful. That's WITH an ISP that plays nice with Netflix peering setup.
The government should be in the business of meeting the needs of the people that put government officials in office. Full stop.
I mean are some towers that can be upgraded with 4G, 5G, etc going to break that bank compared to all the boon-doggles out there? It would be fair, IMO, to be concerned over the rollout becoming a boon-doggle.
Is spending on ubiquitous access everywhere really a line in the sand for you?
Focus on preventing charter schools from using taxes to peddle sky wizard philosophy or just outright fraud. SOMETHING that truly prevents a bad outcome. This just feels very arbitrary.
If the government wants to have fiber in rural Pennsylvania, it should build it. If voters won't countenance raising taxes enough to pay for that, well that's your answer. What it shouldn't do is try to end-run around the market, e.g. by forcing some customers to subsidize other customers, or imposing industry-specific taxes, or trying to get companies to build infrastructure by fiat. That just robs Peter to pay Paul.
Example: Verizon wanted to come into Baltimore to build fiber in competition with Comcast. Unlike D.C., Baltimore would not permit it to go neighborhood-by-neighborhood--the city demanded universal coverage. Baltimore doesn't have the money to build a network itself, and nobody else, including Google, would answer its pleas to build a fiber network on those terms. Baltimore is now stuck with a de facto Comcast monopoly. Meanwhile, almost everywhere else in Maryland has fiber. Who is served by that result?
> Is spending on ubiquitous access everywhere really a line in the sand for you?
The focus on ubiquitous infrastructure, rather than good infrastructure, is an anchor around the neck of America. E.g. it's why we have shitty train service everywhere, instead of decent train service along important routes.
Not because access has existential value. But because sportsball metaphors!
There are also a lot of very high net worth areas northwest of Philadelphia (which is all served by FiOS, as is most of the inner city). Median household income is the primary reason telecom deployment happens in one neighborhood vs. another; and the suburbs outside Philly have some of the highest-income zip codes in the country.
They still don't plan on doing anything with it for another 5+ years, and will be servicing business customers first before residential.
20 Mbps is cool too I guess.
Let's round up to 250 billion for corporate/politician bribery greed/pork and double it for today at 500 billion. That is about $2500 per household for fiber internet nationwide, built to be expanded later, quite affordable. With our wars for the last 2 decades coming in at 6 trillion we could have bought that 10+ times.
[1] http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Nationwide-Google-Fiber-B...