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Blog 'mbb' » Has Broadband Finally Jumped The Shark In Politics?
Is our national broaband policy a political priority anymore? Does anyone care?
by Revcb
Thursday Feb 07 2008 06:08 EDT

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In a previous entries. I have argued about the lack of broadband in rural areas, and more recently touched on the fact that a national broadband policy is just not high on the priority list in this country or in this Presidential campaign.

Cruising around the Net in search of interesting bits of broadband news for you to ponder in the morning and evenings, I came across a couple of pieces that not only show that these issues are (barely) being noticed in the tech world, but no where else. Apparently because no one else cares, or nobody wants to deal with it.

People and politicians in this country are starting to treat - check that - are definitely treating the words "Digital Divide", "Duopoly", and "Net Neutrality" as a kind of joke... buzz terms that have now jumped the shark. You may be thinking this to yourself right now as you read this. "Net Neutrality? Duopoly? Digital Divide? How many times do I have to hear and read about that crap? Who cares now anyway? I got my broadband!" I wouldn't be surprised. Now if I mention the word "Throttle"... that's a different story, right? Yup... "Throttle" sure does piss a lot of people off. Who cares if the farmers have broadband, but don't you dare throttle MY connection!

Heck, I might just put the word "Throttle" as the title of this entry. I bet there woud be more views than if I put "Rural Broadband", "Net Neutrality", "Duopoly" or "Digital Divide".

Other countries.. some of which you don't think much of - from Denmark to Japan to Korea to Australia to Canada to Sweden to Iceland, and others - have realized just how important broadband is to the modern world and its economy and have made broadband a priority. Not just for personal use, but as an economical tool.

The first article comes from Farming UK. Yeah yeah... I can hear the snorts of derision already about the website name, but the message in the article is important:

Findings from rural economy experts, the CLA, portray a countryside where broadband is becoming increasingly unreliable at a time when rural-based businesses need it most. CLA President, Henry Aubrey-Fletcher, said that rural businesses could not survive without a competitive broadband service, and would either relocate to urban areas or cease to trade. The organization is now calling for high level talks to level the playing field between rural and urban enterprise.

CLA has found that:

• Businesses are having to pay for the full cost of broadband when sometimes only half - or less - of the advertised connection speed is available;

• Respondents felt that customer service is poor, particularly when the call centre fails to understand the problems involved;

• Communication between Internet Service Providers and their customers remains poor and in some cases, non-existent;

• There is, in practical terms, little genuine competition in the rural market.

• Rural businesses have not been able to piggy-back onto public sector broadband availability despite assurances that this would be the case.

The Net is being throttled by telecoms and cable companies with a record of spotty service quality, a broadband rollout that has left more than half the nation behind, and overpriced "high-speed" broadband services. Businesses should pressure the telecom/cable duopoly to make a competitively priced, nationwide infrastructure a priority.


This all reiterates what I have said before. Just because one is born in or lives in a rural area does not and should not make them a second class broadband citizen. More importantly, the article makes the point that broadband everywhere is economically imperative. Businesses are leaving rural areas to go where they can either just plain get broadband, have reliable broadband, or get the speeds they are paying for.
"There are still some rural areas that cannot access ADSL broadband – in 2008 that is wholly unacceptable. The digital divide is getting wider and it seems the promises from BT and others are proving as fickle as the technology itself."
The small rural town governments realize how important broadband is to their economic health, because they see the businesses moving away. You see these towns trying to get broadband delivered to their areas, and time and time again such endeavors are mired in red tape, or the company they select backs out, or there is some other brick wall.

In other cases, the providers nod and smile when begged for help in getting rural areas connected while getting free good Samaritan publicity then turn their backs as soon as the local/rural governments and agencies go away:

"While we kept the issue on the politician's screens and in the media, BT and others were only too happy to talk to us - and even benefited from our campaign. It seems that , now that the fuss has died down, they really have turned their back on rural Britain. They are letting their rural customers down and they must redress this imbalance."
This obviously is an example from the UK, but it applies to this country as well. You can see the FCC doing the same thing - big talk and workshops and no action.

Which brings me to the point I touched on in this entry and is mentioned at the end of this ZDNet blog entry. The piece talks about Miro.

"Miro, the open source video player, is on a roll. The company is planning a European tour (hope it goes better than the Spice Girls’ tour) following a co-branding announcement which drew immediate support, including Germany’s public broadcaster. The new version of the software has improved BitTorrent support based on libtorrent.

The authors of the entry would love to review it for you, but they seem to have run into a problem:

"I would love to offer a full review but I can’t. I get my broadband from Comcast, which has decided to throttle the protocol to protect its own monopoly on video. Could I switch ISPs? Yeah, to AT&T. No thanks. How long will it be before they do the same thing? Therein hangs the problem. Many countries, using a regulatory model based on our 1996 Telecommunications Act, have separated the delivery and transport of Internet services. The present Administration has reversed this, creating a duopoly in which many consumers just have two choices for broadband, and others have just one."

Uh-oh! There's one of those joy-killing shark jumping buzz words again! But it's really the last line of the entry that I'm most interested here:

Today is a Primary Day around most of the country. We the people have the power to change this policy. That’s not considered a high-profile political issue. But it should be.
Amen, brother. It should be... but it's not. And it is not going to be for a very long time. Why? Because this is America, and we are arrogant and selfish: "I got mine, why should I care about someone else?" And we have the best of everything, right? I guess so... if being #15 is what is considered 'best'. Besides, we have more important things to worry about than a sound national broadband policy, right? Broadband isn't that important in this day and age, is it?

Even more bothersome to me, in all my travels on the Net looking for your daily dose of broadband related linkage, I can only remember seeing the tech sites I frequent mention the current candidates technology agendas once or twice. If the major tech sites aren't even covering this or taking notice, who will?

I'm sure other countries have problems of their own, but if all these other countries are aware of the importance of broadband everywhere and consider it important enough to have it near the top of their political and economic agendas, why don't we? Have you been watching the campaigning? Has anyone heard a mention about broadband for everyone or net neutrality? I haven't. At least Dubya made some sort of promise... which, of course, was not kept - even though a recent report makes it seem like he came close by using false stats and dubious counting methods. Hmm... "NO NEW TAXES!!" "BROADBAND FOR EVERYONE BY 2007!!" Like father, like son I guess. No new taxes and broadband for everyone sure would have made a lot of people happy.

The politicians obviously don't care about the need for a major overhaul of this nations broadband policy, judging by the overwhelming lack of decisive action, or even so much as a passing mention in the current campaign - much less about rural broadband, even as rural businesses are starting to move away from those areas because they know they need a good solid affordable selection of broadband connections and services to survive today, leaving the areas to suffer economically. They don't even know how wired we really are.

The providers sure don't care. All they want is the prime broadband real estate to make money and to control as much of the nations infrastructure as they can. They definitely don't want to spend the money to connect rural areas, leaving states to take action on their own, like ConnectKentucky, Utopia, and various other larger and smaller scale state and local FTTH, WiFi, etc. projects.

The FCC is an ineffectual joke when it comes to broadband policy these days as they let the providers run roughshod over them. Oh, but we'll all have digital TV soon! Yay! I can only hold my breath and tremble at the thought of how smoothly that transition will go. The only seemingly redeeming thing here is that the spectrum auction met and triggered an open access wireless policy. Then again, infallible do-gooder Google, who pushed for the open access policy, lost the auction on purpose to further its agenda for its Android platform. And guess who (probably) won the auction? Verizon. Oh yes... a victory for all!

What, exactly, is the broadband agenda for America? Does one even exist anymore? The providers fight amongst themselves as net neutrality moves further from being realized while duopoly gets stronger. We're watching ourselves fall farther and farther behind more countries with smarter broadband policies and better infrastructure while the promises of total coverage ring emptier and emptier - or don't ring at all. Parity for rural areas looks more and more like a never-will-be. Ubiquity is looking more and more like a never-will-be. Is fast, reliable, affordable, and economically important broadband for all really just becoming just another pipe dream in this country? Has the recognition for a new broadband policy on a national level itself finally jumped the shark in this country?

You tell me.

"It is in the interests of this CorporateNet to rigidly control what you do online, and probably in the interests of police agencies to control you as well. But it’s not in the interests of technology. It’s not in the interests of users. And it’s not in the nation’s best interest, since the speed of your commerce is increasingly determined by the speed of your network, and your ability to use it."
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Has Broadband Finally Jumped The Shark In Politics?

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Ann Treacy
@eircom.net

Ann Treacy

Anon

2008-Feb-7 6:55 am

Not even techies think broadband is an issue

The EETimes just ran a survey where readers prioritized election topics. Economy got 56% of the vote; broadband got 1%.

The survey sample was small and self-selected. I don't know much about the methodology but I have to assume that EETimes has a pretty techie readership and not even they seem concerned.

I wrote about it here: »blandinonbroadband.wordp ··· -voters/

I'm afraid you might be right.

Ann
2008-Feb-7 6:55 am: · hey mods ·

JamieW
@ky.gov

JamieW

Anon

2008-Feb-8 10:49 am

Thank You For Your Attention

As someone who lives in Rural USA, paying 4 times more for less than par satellite internet, I am frustrated with the lack of attention as well. Here in Kentucky, our ConnectKentucky alliance brags about 97% percent broadband coverage (it was supposed to be 100 by end of '07), yet I don't have it, my neighbors don't have it, heck my entire town doesn't have it. Right next to our phone exchange building is someone dependant on Wildblue for their internet. They make these false, or at least very broad assumptions that everyone has it, because those that fought for it, and now have it themselves, no longer speak for those that still need it.

The idea the people roll their eyes about farmers is so upsetting to me. We no longer farm, but those that do provide our cities with the ammenities needed to survive. Rural folks are just as tech savvie as the average joe living within city limits. They have to be to keep their business going. After all, farming is a business like any other. Farms need to stay modern to keep pace with the growing needs of the world population. Otherwise, they would still be laying down plots with a plow and mule.

I get my news about "Rural Broadband" via Google News Search and I get several emails related to it daily, but the articles derive primarily from the UK, Australia and India. U.S. articles are exceptions to the rule and usually come from this site or small local papers found in states like Vermont. Nothing really on a mainstream national level.

I appreciated your article here and I hope others making the search find it and give their feedback as well.
2008-Feb-8 10:49 am: · hey mods ·

Mike Ashton
@demon.co.uk

Mike Ashton

Anon

2008-Feb-19 7:53 am

Broadbanding Rural Britain - our lessons....

It’s interesting to see you quoting our effort to get broadband to rural communities here in the UK, and from what you say, there are a lot of similarities. If you can pick up a few pointers from our years of campaigning, that has to be a good thing all round.

We really had to put pressure on the ISPs and in our case BT, who basically have the monopoly on the telephone lines and the ADSL technology. To increase the pressure we also had to bring in the politicians, who could identify with issues like minority disadvantage, barriers to enterprise and disgruntled voters.

I can’t stress too much the importance of getting evidence of thi sminority disadvantage, some hard luck stories and stifling of enterprise then using that to lobby the politicians. What hits home with the media – who are an essential part of any campaign – is the problems caused to real people, in their circulation area.

If you can get a business orgainisation to represent all interested parties and co-ordinate the action so much the better. The CLA (Country Land and Business Association) got everyone round a table right from the start and basically coordinated the whole thing from an apolitical stance.

Our campaign was successful in that it increased rollout of broadband to rural areas, and probably made more difference than anything else, but as we’ve learned the hard way you MUST keep the pressure on and don't stop until you've hit home base.
2008-Feb-19 7:53 am: · hey mods ·