Going through my mail tonight, I receive a flyer from the group Broadband for America. On the cover of the flyer is a picture of Harold Ford, Jr. (the former Representative from Tennessee). Their mission is “to make broadband access to the Internet available to every household in the nation; to provide data transfer speeds to make that broadband experience valuable to users; and to provide the bandwidth necessary for content providers to continue to make the Internet a cultural, societal, and economic engine for growth.” That is a fairly decent goal, and one-day it will happen. But how?
I recall waiting for the cable providers in my area to provide broadband service to my development. Friends and coworkers in neighboring develops were receiving broadband coverage for years before it ever reached me, and the delay was simply a confusion over which hub served our area. (You would think that the hub that provided our cable television was also the hub supplying the internet service.) Since those frustrating times, I have enjoyed 10 years of relatively reliable broadband coverage.
However, there are still some areas in the U.S. that doesn’t have coverage. Many of these locations are in rural areas where it would be just too expensive to lay cable to supply just a handful of potential users. One alternative that the Broadband for America group should consider is broadband delivered via satellite. Satellite internet service providerssuch as Wild Blue, HughesNet, and DirectTV can transmit their service to remote locations with ease the same way as cell phones such as the iPhone can connect to the net through their wireless signal.
I feel that this is the way our internet access will evolve in the near future. Ford should understand this, as Tennessee has many rural towns, which might be why he is an honorary board member. Is it cheaper to transmit signals via satellite than to lay cable all over the United States? I would have to think so, as well as being more environmentally friendly.
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I do not think the government should be involved in anyway in this type of decision. This is a matter for the private sector to deal with and not for the government to interfere in. Mandating that everyone should have something, and the same something is socialism and that is not what makes this country unique and great. If there are enough people who want and desire a service, and they have the ability to pay for such service then sooner or later someone in the private sector will figure out a way to provide that service. Besides like you said in your article there already exists alternatives to cable access via the 3G wireless networks and the satellite providers.
I am against any government mandated program.
I agree that it should be a mandated program. I was trying to identify who was behind Broadband for America, and it looks like it is a large lobbying group of service providers hoping to have Congress mandate the service on their behalf (more contracts/customers). In most cases, broadband is “relatively” inexpensive, so I wonder how much more expensive such a mandate would make the service. Most likely, the end user wouldn't see a bump in their monthly bill as much as they would see a bump in the national debt.
I can't remember which country it is (Denmark, the Neatherlands, etc), but one of the European nations recently made internet access a right. I'd be interest to see how that has impacted service reliability as well as cost.