France to invest €20B in high-speed broadband for the entire country

Actually you can. Regardless of legality, it is still stealing.

I'm just really sick of people condoning this crap just because the motivation is to maximize shareholder value. There's a thing called ethics.

"Since the mid-2000s, Roper polls commissioned by PBS have consistently placed the service as America's most-trusted national institution."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PBS

That sounds like Tucson, where I used to live. Now I'm in New York and getting 50 Mbs down and 5 up for $20 – $30 less than I used to get 12 down and 2 up.

Not really. Having really fast broadband completely changes what is possible, and if we want to secure future economic growth for the internet, it's a great area to invest in. I have 120 megabits and easily saturate that on a regular basis. This in turn makes it possible to watch movies in the highest of defs on-demand, or purchase and download them to keep forever in less time than it takes to walk to the shops. We can download increasingly huge video games in less time than it would take to install from discs.

We have so many online businesses making huge amounts of money off entertainment while traditional platforms are dying, but if internet speed stagnates, or the fraction of the population that has very fast internet stops growing, that will limit the potential market for online media.

Another consideration is that 1mbit up. People are finding more and more awesome uses for larger upstreams. Yes, you wouldn't need a huge increase in your upstream to have great Skype video quality, but if you want to upload videos you make to YouTube in HD, or stream your gaming session in HD, you are going to feel the pain on the vast majority of broadband plans available today. We need to move away from the old online distribution model of "people consume, servers create".

Far more often I'm sitting there going "No-one else is home, and my pipe is barely being used - why is this download so slow?". A server giving you content at 300KB/sec isn't going to go faster because you upgrade from 12Mb to 100Mb.

More speed is always nice, but seriously, the change from 2Mb to 12Mb was far less noticable than the change from dial-up to 2Mb. I guess an increased bandwidth would give more opportunity to stream hi-def video, but that's icing-on-the-cake territory, not basic-civil-right stuff.

It reminds me of a friend of mine who grew up around poor people and was aware of how they struggle with money. Her family wasn't in poverty, but they weren't flush with money either. At around age 30, she made her way into the finance industry and started pulling down six figures. She mentioned that she got a raise recently, but had been infected by the finance mindset that any raise is tainted by the marginal tax rate, and was bitching that 'half of it went to the government' (for values where .37 = half, it seems).

Anyway, her version of the story went 'the government taxes so much money out that I can't give as much to my single-mother sister who is scraping by on welfare - they should lower taxes [for this reason]'. I asked what about all the other single mothers our there that don't have sisters in high finance - reducing the tax yield would mean they get less. My friend changed her tune pretty fast and realised that hey, she was actually in a good position and should be positive about it instead of negative.

The thing is, my friend wasn't someone who grew up amongst wealth, she knew what it was like to be poor, and she herself had worked the same shitty jobs as poor people everywhere. She was smart, and knew deeply about social opportunity (she dated a fiery, forthright anarchist for many years). People just tend to have short memories and short forethought and tend to think that what concerns them in the present is the most important thing always.

1)know what the project is

2)favor it over alternatives

3)have judged the the disadvantages and are prepared for them

4)support it because they believe their party supports it

5)have faith in the political system

This isn't about the wording per se. Context matters.

To take a recent example: polls shows that Americans favor Obama over congressional republicans on economic issues. However, they still are (generally and marginally)opposed to his handling of economic issues and a strong minority of those who oppose the republicans do so out of a belief that they aren't cutting government enough. In other words, disillusioned republicans don't favor either party but aren't likely to support obama under any circumstances. You can look at the same polls with regard to china and democracy. Chinese both are satisfied with the direction of their country and want more democracy. If you aren't willing to consider context you can choose either poll to support your position.

I'm not an expert in physics but if cell phones use radio waves and radio waves travel at the speed of light it seems like at some point technology will allow for very fast over the air data transfers without breaking any laws of physics.

I have LTE on my AT&T phone and it seems pretty good, but I am definitely apprehensive about switching all my data to it in my house. I'll probably wait a few years, but if Comcast does anything to really infuriate me, I am likely to switch.

[Added] I got a few downvotes on this one, while I don't care about the karma, I do want to say that I didn't mean to say "I'm not an expert" in a sarcastic way. My intention was to point out that I don't know what I am talking about.

What that meant is we had a for profit company, Telstra, owning both the entire phone network and the biggest cable network, with big stakes in PayTV and joined at the hip through that to the biggest media organisation in the country, Murdoch's. The only competition worth speaking of is another HFC rollout by a competitor that Telstra overbuilt at every turn and made much less viable and DSLAMs by other providers in a minority of local exchanges that still require payments to Telstra including ULL fees. Telstra was also privatised without any vertical separation worth speaking of.

The NBN, evil as government run business may be, represents the most viable and sensible solution to the problem of Telstra. The people putting it together and the ACCC have made sure that it wouldn't be like Telstra at all. What it represents is, like water or electricity infrastructure, a single path to the premise at the lowest possible cost, a mandate of falling prices in real and nominal terms and restrictions by the ACCC being planned out until 2040 already.

How do we know it will be good for competition? Because every telco in the country, Telstra included, is unhappy wih particular details, but they are on board, and Telstra included, happy enough to be there.

Also, the NBN is fairly dumb as a network. A lot of things are handled by the provider, the FTTH deployment of the NBN goes up to layer 2 only. We've tried your proposal of letting private enterprise do the lot, and all it has led to is an increasingly decaying copper network and no HFC rollout of any major note since about 1997.

If broadband becomes a right, not a privilege, especially in a country of suburban sprawl, then you need to treat it like water or electricity. Dumb wholesale network at the bottom, vibrant conpetitive market at the top.

It was published the 20/09/2012.