  wifi sucks
@verizon.net
| reply to Matsayz Re: Damn Right!
said by "matsayz": thats cuz the whole country is fiber...unlike ourselves
And exactly WHY is that so? Because of COMPETITION!
But absent competition, if one has a monopoly over the service provided to a large geographic area - if there is no competition, then where is the motivation for upgrading the services provided? If the incumbent telcos and cable cos can charge $50/mo for broadband, no matter what the speed provided is - then why would they have any motivation to change/upgrade it?
The only places that you really hear about bandwidth upgrades are - that's right, wait for it - areas in which both cable and DSL service providers *actually compete* with each other for customers.
Once "full de-regulation" takes its toll, though, and all individual markets are eventually served by one and only one monopoly service provider, then you can be assured that the US consumer broadband market will STAGNATE like never before. We will be the joke of the worldwide internet, with dial-up like speeds compared to other countries. It will likely also have a knock-on effect on our overall economy as well. Just think - if we had better residential broadband in this country - on the order of 10Mbit/sec symmetrical service or better per household - then it would be a lot easier to tele-commute. In a country who's economy is literally greased by oil, and so much of it is used in the process of physically transporting workers to work every day, and the increasing prices for oil and gasoline will have a slowing effect on our economy - this is where broadband should matter, and could provide a means to reduce our oil dependency as a nation, if only slightly. But our greedy monopolistic short-sighted service providers, along with the gov't agencies supposedly regulating them, but instead eating out of their campaign-donation hands, aren't helping to deliver a real solution. |