Finland makes 1Mb broadband access a legal right (2009)
news.cnet.com
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I understand that having access to the Internet is an important thing for numerous reasons, but why the arbitrary speeds? What benefits does a 100MB connection offer over a 1MB connection?
You can enjoy engage and benefit from the vast majority of important stuff on the Internet with a 250kb connection.
It's a marketing/political thing. Most users think that a fatter pipe == faster connection, when of course we know that's not the case. Heck, most of the time when you hit higher port speeds it's a case of the content server on the other end not being able to saturate your 100Mbit pipe anyway!
Governments promise these "minimum" speeds or "universal access" as an attempt to appear in touch with technology.
For context, the Government here in Australia has started rolling out a national fibre network (National Broadband Network; NBN), with tiered port speeds of 12/25/50/100Mbps. It's going to be a shock to many (and ISP's are going to bear the brunt of the complaints) when people realise their 50Mbit connection isn't going to give them 5-6MB/s throughput from any/every source.
It opens up the possibility of 'What shall we watch tonight? Oh we don't have that yet? I'll just grab it now. Should be done in ten minutes.' Most digital distribution services seem able to handle uploading that fast these days.
So the main uses are downloading of videos and computer games. Not life-changing, probably not worth calling a human right at this point, but pretty convenient.
The _availability_ of some level of access though does appear to be worth making universal (within the UK). Access to government services is increasingly being focussed through the WWW. This can have the effect of leaving behind those without a reasonable level of internet access available; making services for that sector of society more difficult to reach (a Trademark search say, or a check of the statute databases or ordering a book from the library or checking up on the MP or ...).
If such a disparity of available services can be readily avoided then it seems that it should be.
My parents have a 100 mbit connection and the only demanding thing they use it for is watching digital TV and sports online, and the reality is a high quality HDTV stream uses up 10-20 mbit, and if you got 3 TVs (or just a TiVo that eats 4 streams on it's own) that mandates a 50 mbit connection at least.
No not really. Streaming videos down, or streaming videos up (i.e. video chat) is harder at low speeds like that. With 250kb/sec you can consume textual content easier.
The right to free speech doesn't promise every citizen a printing press.
>the Finnish government said that no household "would be farther than 2 kilometers from a connection capable of delivering broadband Internet with a capacity of at least 100 megabits of data a second."
That doesn't say anything on who's going to pay, probably the people.
What do you mean by "cheapens the concept"? I don't understand this formulation. What concept?
From my point of view, water and food could be called consumer goods. Access to food is already a human right (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_food) while it's not yet settled 100% that water is a human right (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_water)
That's why I said access to a consumer good and nothing about who pays. That said, as far as I can tell, there isn't a western democracy that forbids their people from buying internet access. So if this doesn't have anything to do with assisting people to pay for it and they aren't banned from buying it themselves, what does it do?
In reality this does have to do with assisting them to pay for it, because mandating construction of broadband connections is just a roundabout way of helping pay for it.
>What do you mean by "cheapens the concept"? I don't understand this formulation. What concept? >From my point of view, water and food could be called consumer goods. Access to food is already a human right (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_food) while it's not yet settled 100% that water is a human right (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_water)
This is exactly what I mean. You are comparing getting internet access to getting food and water. If you don't have food and water, you die. If you don't have internet access, then yes you don't have access to the best, most modern way to communicate. However, in a nation with free speech you have access to many other ways to express yourself. I'm sure resourceful people will find ways to exercise that right without mandating some telco run fiber to within 2km of their house.
The right to food means that you may not be artificially constrained from growing and producing food for yourself by your own means. It doesn't mean that anyone's obligated to give you free food; the UN's concept of rights, as implied by the linked Wikipedia article, is simply wrong. How can you have a right that can only be invoked by the action of third parties?
Having a right and possessing the object of that right are two entirely different things.
Questions of "rights" devolve into discussions of fairness with each person asserting that their sense of justice is the one that society ought to satisfy. It makes more sense to examine an issue like this from a perspective of utility: the internet is incredibly useful for education and communication, both of which benefit society.
There are public libraries in nearly every city with free Internet access.
There's a fantastic article from a librarian on the topic of helping people to use library computers and the problems users have, although a quick hunt doesn't seem to turn it up - anyone?
[1]: Here's a list of the 20 largest municipalities: http://www.stat.fi/tup/suoluk/suoluk_vaesto.html#suurimmat. The smallest of those has population of 48 907. About half of Finland's population is spread around municipalities smaller than that.
It's entirely worthwhile to pursue goals like maximizing the availability of internet access for as many people is feasible and practicable. But putting this pursuit on the same level as fundamental rights - which inhere in every individual irrespective of any external infrastructure or institutions - does indeed dilute the concept of rights.
So why can't that change if it's easy and cheap enough to do it for every citizen, seeing how it's so important for a person's freedom of speech?
A right to me is a powerful thing. It is something that the government or others cannot take from you, no matter what. Eg, free speech - no person or government can compel you to not express your opinion. Or, freedom of religion - no person or government can compel to believe in a certain deity.
Consider this, things are relatively good in the western world right now in a grand historic sense. So governments have the ability to bestow "rights" like access to broadband. But what if things get really bad financially and the government and telcos of the nation can no longer afford to maintain broadband access to all citizens? Suddenly the government is forced to revoke a right because it is broke. I contend that if that can happen, it probably wasn't a right in the first place. Now, free speech on the other hand is something that will never have to be revoked no matter the financial status of a nation. That to me is truly a right. It is the difference between promising a person a printing press and promising a person that he may print whatever he wants on his own printing press.
Well, it should. Either that, or access to one.
Because else, people have the right to free speech, but no way to be heard, whereas a tiny minority controls the media, and their's is the only speech that matters.
Giving actual resources and physical dimensions to a right doesn't cheapen it, it makes it more concrete.
What some people don't understand is that the "right to free speech" wasn't about idly talking in your house, it was about the right to make political statements on the issues of the day AND be heard by your community. That was far easier when the concept was established of course, where communities and cities were far smaller and knit together.
Free speech between friends or in your house is BS, even the worst dictatorships had that.
It's all true but you're missing the point. Parents to my post seem to have been implying that no one's rights are being restricted because ISPs should not have any rights.
But that's not the whole picture. You're restricting rights of real, physical, natural born people to freely dispose of their property. It's not just property, it's real human autonomy.
It's no different from digging a trench through your backyard. We may agree (or not, libertarians often don't) that your neighbour's right to have running water trumps your right to undisturbed backyard but it's your rights that are being restricted, not your backyard's rights (it probably doesn't have any).
Do you think that the consequences of two entities cooperation is limited to those two entities?
Further, and I'm sure you'll vehemently disagree with me, I don't think people or corporations are islands. I don't resent owing society some cooperation, and I have no problem with corporations being in the same boat - more so, in fact, because as concentrators of power such regulation becomes more necessary.
Society defines the rights that corporations have. It's in its very nature to be able to take away rights.
I don't particularly have any opinion on the article in question, but I don't view property rights as always being important over all else.
Apart from that, there is no such thing as "society entity". Society is only a group of acting individuals.
"The Government is to keep the hundred megabit objective to be achieved by 2015, which was set during the election period. By 2015, high-speed 100 Mbit/s broadband connections will be available at no more than two kilometres from all permanent places of residence."
http://www.lvm.fi/web/en/pressreleases/-/view/4109122
In this news item, the Finnish Minister of Communications suggests that 10Mb would become the new minimum standard before end of election term in 2015.
http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Legally+mandated+broadband+...
Making such promises shouldn't be hard considering the size of the population and the area you're dealing with in terms of having to lay fibre.
If you bunch everyone up, it's cheaper per head.
But if you spread everyone out, it's more expensive per head, because on average you're laying more fiber per person.
Finland has vast, vast areas with no one. Texas has people thinly spread throughout.
You can cover only parts of Finland, because people only live in parts of Finland. You have to cover pretty much all of Texas.
So, once again, the size of Texas is a negative factor.
The so-called "average density" is not the key factor here, the amount of fiber you have to lay to reach everyone is.
Miles of roads in Texas: 152,054 miles Miles of roads in Finland: 65,617 miles ()
Population of Texas: 25,674,681 Population of Finland: 5,375,276
Linear population density of Texas: ~169 persons per miles of road Linear population density of Finland: ~82 persons per miles of road
Ergo, it is cheaper per head to provide wireline telecommunications services in Texas than in Finland, when building out to the whole population, as the linear population density is higher in Texas and most, if not all, permanent residences and business are accessible by road.
Sources: http://www.aaroads.com/texas/ http://www.stat.fi/tup/suomi90/lokakuu_en.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Finland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas
() This road mileage does not include private roads in Finland. Including these roads would further lower the linear population density of Finland, but these roads were excluded from the calculation as the majority of the private roads are access roads to non-permanent recidency second homes and timer or agriculture roads.
But beside that, the public road mileage for Texas is off by a factor of two. This DOT document lists 303,176 miles of public road in Texas. http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/ohim/hs04/htm/hm10.htm
Please be so good as explaining you point better, I do not understand it. If you are going to wire up every lot in the state, you will have to traverse all roads in the state to do a cable drop to every lot in order to do so. What does road density have to do with it?
When building wireline communication networks, the deciding factor costwise, is the number of linear cable sheet miles. As such miles of road is a good proxy for comparing deployment costs between locations.
Please note that I am discussing wireline broadband. If you have you heart set on wireless coverage, then we have to talk different measures, and even there population density is not the tell all metric.
> But beside that, the public road mileage for Texas is off by a factor of two. This DOT document lists 303,176 miles of public road in Texas. http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policy/ohim/hs04/htm/hm10.htm
My bad. However that does not still make it cheaper to build in Finland, it merely brings up Texas and Finland to par on miles of road per population. Several things still favour Texas in the cost per capita, such as: economics of scale, ability to perform construction year around and no need to put utilities under the frostline.
There are no technical or cost reasons for Texas to be unable to offer the same level of broadband service as Finland. It all comes down to other reasons, perhaps such as lack of political will in Texas.
Imagine a layout where cables do not have to follow roads.
Imagine a layout where one cable can serve buildings on two roads. Certainly much, much easier when the buildings are dense.
Imagine a thousand people living in one building in the center of a thousand square miles, served by one cable. Imagine a thousand people living one per square mile in a thousand square miles. The population densities are the same. The cabling costs are not.
> Imagine a layout where cables do not have to follow roads. Imagine a layout where one cable can serve buildings on two roads. Certainly much, much easier when the buildings are dense.
Not very likely in the real world. Easements and rights of way are not available or not readily available among arbitrary paths. In any case, even if you were to cut through peoples back yards, you would still most of the time just be following a parallellish path to the roads.
> Imagine a thousand people living in one building in the center of a thousand square miles, served by one cable. Imagine a thousand people living one per square mile in a thousand square miles. The population densities are the same. The cabling costs are not.
These are real places we are talking about. Have a look at a map.
If enough people legally have access to a broadband internet, its easier to make laws to offering certain services through the internet (certain information delivery, services like taxes and maybe voting in the future).
Example: In Norway we do our tax returns, apply for school, read up on information about your properties, etc. You basically have to have access to Internet.
Well, we had expensive television network while Sweden spent the same money for better Internet connections.