Larry Lessig interviews FCC Chairman Michael Powell on our nation’s poor broadband penetration:

Lessig: The latest statistics say that we?re number thirteen. So what?s happened in the last four years that this place where the internet really started and took off seems to be falling behind so quickly?
Powell: I think this situation should be unacceptable to us. Fortunately, I think we?re beginning to have some success in making our national leadership understand that this is something they should care about. This is something that will impact and control the economic prosperity of our society in the Information Age. It should be debated in the halls of Congress. It’s that critical.

Telecoms giants oppose cities on web access. Once again, the SBC’s of the world would rather play politics than provide true high speed connectivity. 100mbps (100x faster than my home dsl line) is available in Japan and Korea for 35/month….. I wonder what the implications are for Madison and Dane County’s wireless plans?

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From the “obviously” department: David Isenberg notes that Auburn, Indiana stepped up to provide fiber service to a local business and preserve 75 jobs. The city did it because no private firm would.
Hong Kong broadband network now available (100mbps!!!!) for $35.00/month.

Customer choice, in small steps, gets a win with SBC’s announcement that they will begin selling VOIP services to DSL only clients in 2005. Up to this point, many telco’s have required a conventional POTS (Plain Old Telephone System or land line for local calls) be part of a dsl agreement. Some consumers get around this by paying more for DSL only service (like me; in this case, I can upload files at the same speed I download them) and using a VOIP provider such as vonage or packet8.net (which I use and has provided generally good service).

From “the Empire Strikes Back” department, Tuesday’s tri-cities referendum on a municipal fiber to the home plan for three Illinois cities (Batavia, Geneva and St. Charles) was defeated, largely, according to Northwestern Business Professor James Carlini by a massive misinformation campaign, funded by the incumbent telco’s:

?According to SBC and Comcast, virtually 100 percent of the region can sign up for DSL and access the Internet via cable modems. In addition, T-1 service is available to businesses throughout the Tri-Cities over existing telephone lines and wireless service is available from several dealers.?
T-1 service has been around for years. To be accurate, the first T-1 circuit was put into service for Illinois Bell in 1963 in Skokie, Ill. We?re not talking about what could be available today. People aren?t looking for 1.544-megabit service if 10-gigabit service is available.
Bast?s small knowledge of network technology seems to have been spoon fed to him by SBC and Comcast. His arguments lack depth of knowledge and it?s very clear from his position paper that he doesn?t know much about fiber-optic capabilities once they are in place.

Carlini also notes that local journalists ran with the wrong message… Read the article here. James Carlini links. Working on the road recently, a group adjacent to me was discussing Verizon’s larger than expected subscription success of their fiber to the home initiative….. Our politicians need to push the SBC’s of the world, or more practically, truly open the networks we all paid for.

Still lagging Japan & Korea (price & performanc), Verizon is starting to offer fiber internet access to the home. Speeds range from 5MB to 30MB down and 2 to 5MB up (the difference makes no sense, it should be identical). Once again, Wisconsin lags significantly behind…

Wisconsin Telco Monopoly SBC launches an inexpensive, bundled WiFi option for their DSL subscribers:

SBC officially announces $1.99 per month unlimited hot spot services: If you subscribe to SBC’s DSL service at a rate as low as $26.95 per month for their cheapest service, you are entitled to unlimited Wi-Fi hot spot service for $1.99 a month with a one-year commitment — after receiving free service until April 2005.
This gives SBC a giant sledgehammer to wield against the cable vendors trying to encourage people to sign up for ever-slower cable service. I’ll confess that I’m biased against cable because of the pooled bandwidth/pooled network approach. Cable modem providers initially had no protection against entire neighborhoods seeing each other’s networks. Then they restricted upload speeds to 128 Kbps on most links to defeat “servers.” Because bandwidth is pooled, it means that each neighborhood on a cable head end has a finite amount of bandwidth–the more subscribers, the more frustration.

WiFi News
Keep in mind that US broadband service significantly lags systems in Asia in terms of speed and price/performance. Korea and Japan citizens have access to broadband at speeds up to 20X faster than services we can purchase.

Matt Smith:

As San Francisco boondoggles go, this $300,000 study — and
who-knows-how-many-million-dollar fiber-laying project — is a mere whisper in the wind. Yet it becomes more of a screaming fit in the library when one considers that Ammiano and his fellow supervisors are proposing we throw a tax fortune at the idea of providing better local telecom
options for consumers, when for the past six years they’ve advocated policies that ensure the grip of local monopolists SBC and Comcast on our digital information systems.
For reasons I’ll explain, Ammiano’s advocacy on behalf of small groups of neighborhood activists who believe, without evidence, that new cell-phone antennae harm their children’s brains may have helped preserve SBC and Comcast control over San Francisco data and voice networks. Widespread
substitution of cell phones for local home lines represents one of the greatest threats to SBC’s monopoly. New wireless broadband technology being implemented this year could threaten the dominance of Comcast and SBC over fast Internet access.
Yet Ammiano’s anti-antenna campaign has made San Francisco cell service some of the worst in the world.
“If they would spend the same energy on encouraging new entrants into the local telecom market” as they have on city fiber optics, notes Daluvoy, the city Telecommunications Commission VP, “the economic benefit to the city would be tenfold.”

Smith’s article highlights the politics of true broadband. SBC is similarily entrenched in Wisconsin, both physically and politically. Our politicians need to move on from this legacy telco thinking and open up the publicly financed networks to true competition AND encourage FTTP (fiber to the premise or home).