Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Cringely tells us why we have crappy Broadband

I, Cringely of PBS fame, made me sigh today with;
The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen.
I will let you suffer the same by reading it, because you need
to know how your Telephone company ripped you off and
why my girlfriend's home in Japan has 100MB fiber broadband at home.

But I like this part best;
"The FCC was (and probably still is) managed for the benefit of the companies and their lobbyists, not for you and me. And the upshot is that I could move to Japan and pay $14 per month for 100-megabit-per-second Internet service but I can't do that here and will probably never be able to.

Despite this, the FCC says America has the highest broadband deployment rate in the world and President Bush has set a goal of having broadband available to every U.S. home by the end of this year. What have these guys been smoking? Nothing, actually, they simply redefined "broadband" as any Internet service with a download speed of 200 kilobits per second or better. That's less than one percent the target speed set in 1994 that we were supposed to have achieved by 2000 under regulations that still remain in place."

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