Avoiding A $300 Million Broadband Mapping Boondoggle

Given the Federal Government spent the last decade pretending broadband competitive and coverage issues didn't exist, you can imagine the dangers Connected Nation poses to real reform should they truly go national with a huge budget of freshly-procured taxpayer printed dollars.

There, fixed it for you.

consumer advocates, left leaning pinko commies, hippies at al. If you cannot advance your agenda and stop bullshit astroturfing groups like Connected Nation in today's political climate full of populist sentiment and a very sympathetic administration and congress...it will never happen.

All hands on deck. It's now, or never.

Ok a year ago I would have agreed. ConenctTn maping was atrotious and very wrong. Checked it lately and very accurate. At least in my area. And yes I'm anal about this and I KNOW where broadband begins and ends in almost every corner in my county( kind of a hobby of sorts I suppose ). They even differentiate between cable/dsl and wireless and they don't count satellite. Which they shouldn't because it sucks and shouldn't count. So far I have yet to find an area that says it a carrier provides broadband in which the reality is they don't. So unless someone has bothered to do the legwork like me I think their opinions should be taken with HUGE grain of salt.

Pretty much that, and the fact that the government just bought Generous Motors.

quote:

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Kentucky residents and local ISPs generally laugh hysterically at the 95% coverage claim, and insist that Connected Nation is simply putting on a very well-produced dog and pony show.

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I suspect that they are doing the 'following':
95% (of those in cities of +100k residents),
not 95% of the land

Lies, lies, and .... statistics!

Well if an area is totally unihhabited is it REALLY necessary to have broadband there? Kentucky is very rual outside the "big" cities. In areas where there aren't any people I don't think ISPs should have to put in broadband to make a map look fuller.

For $300 million dollars the data should belong to the government and not AT&T!

Fixed for you....

I believe they have the right mix of expertise and resources to get the job done in an unbiased manner.

The data belongs to everyone.

Where do you go to check it?

Any broadband mapping would have to include a reasonable definition of minimum population density such as XX/square mile.

Where do I go to check what specfically

»Avoiding A $300 Million Broadband Mapping Boondoggle [44] commentsThat phrase is not necessarily true. Non-industry organizations are no more objective by definition than industry organizations. They have their own agendas as well and those agendas aren't necessarily any more in the public interest than industry ones.

Is this detailed enough for you?

»ftp://ftp.connectedtn.org/CTPu ··· sity.jpg

You were saying that you the availability noted on connected nations site was fairly accurate, I wanted to check a few places myself.

Easy solution: WiMAX. Before you tune me out, it'll cover long distances with the right antennas, and it'll fill all those peksy coverage holes. If a WiMAX tower gets overloaded due to lots of subscribers, you've found a place that might be economical to wire. Simple as that

The census bureau? When was the last time the federal government had the expertise to get any job done well?

99% of the time, I would agree with that statement but I think the census bureau is alright.

well I can only speak for ConenctedTn and only for my area. Well ConenctedTn has pretty detailed maps. So I get uplcose and then use Google maps to try to get addresses in the area in questions. I also use reverse look-up in whitepages.com to get all the addresses on a particular road and also phone numbers if they have them. And if I happen to be in an area I'm interested in make mental notes of addresses. I then go to the 2 ISPs in my area at&t and Charter and check to see if those addresses and phone numbers are in areas that have service.

Charter is a bit easier since you can check by both address and phone number. I also have a 3rd check by looking up channel listing for Charter by address. If you can't get Charter services at an address you won't get a channel list. Also if I enter an address/phone number that actually has service it will say there is already service at that address. You can't get any better conformation than that.

I feel I should be getting some of that $300 mil

I'm not against WiMax it's just like BPL all I heard for year is how it's the next big thing then nothing ever happens. I remember reading in 2000 how by 2010 BPL was going to be a major player in broadband and how you were going to be able to get super cheap and fast interent from your electric company even if you lived in the boonies

industry data would be excellent if:

a) it was transparent and could be verified by anyone

b) they didn't insist nobody else could do anything with it without their permission

the problem right now is they claim "it's proprietary, so we can't let you see the raw data" and they insist on complete control of the use, even if govt $$ paid for "collecting" it.

It's a solution but it's not necessarily easy. There seems to be the mistaken belief that WiMAX was developed for rural areas. It was originally developed (just like LTE) for metro areas. It has been found that it (Revision E) works reasonably well in some rural areas but those towers, equipment and radio spectrum are not inexpensive. Once those towers are both in place and paid for it becomes a relatively inexpensive "last mile" solution.

Or you could put up another radio. This would create a self-healing mesh, with overlapping coverage. No overload..
It would just roll over to the next available, less busy radio. They have built a system like this in Palm Desert, California. Works VERY well.!

Either way it goes, mapping I understand is a start to an understanding of where HSI is NOT. I am just disappointed that the majority of this countries attitude towards high speed internet is that it is a luxury. I understand that it isn't a requirement for residential but they also have to understand that dial up is horrible in these rural areas where you are lucky to obtain a 28.8 kbps connection.

Am I happy with what I got (Alltel Axess), I'm happy I got something better than dialup but where I live this is far from true broadband. Considering my latency, upload times, and the lack to hardly do anything at all with really low caps (5GB) probably pretty soon considering the merger.

I made a choice to live in the country and I understand that there are certain sacrifices that people make to live away from the city. So don't say "Move and everything will be fine" but living on a fixed income of disability and my wife's income it's hard to "consider" the costs of living in the city considering we would have already lost our house if we did live in the city.

I dunno, just disappointed that we have taken this long to recognize how far behind we are in technology. Considering some of Japan already has 1Gbps broadband and other countries are getting large deployments of Wireless broadband considering they don't have alot of the red tape that we do. (I know it's there to protect us, but some get's out of hand thanks to lobbyist).

Start bashing... NOW

What tehcnology are they using? How big of an area are they covering? Most rural wireless has to have antennas pointed at subscribers and vice versa, to the nondirectional nature of a mesh doesnt make as much sense.