christ0ph

I don't think that the FCC has been doing a good job in a long time. Basically, the government looks at spectrum as a cash cow now. They pick corporate monopolistic solutions over intelligent ones because the politicians all get kickbacks. Often millions of dollars apiece.

We can achieve nationwide broadband without monopolies right now using open hardware by using cognitive radio or ad-hoc mesh networking, (In ad-hoc mesh networks, every node becomes both an access node and a relay station for other messages, which are encrypted) This kind of system, modeled after the fault tolerance designed into the Internet, allows an infinte number of channels to exist, (the more nodes, the more bandwidth) and is designed to stay up and usable under the harshest of conditions (there is no central network, and each client can help extend the net farther up a canyon, helping push further and faster bandwidth into a rural area.) CR typically uses spread spectrum - it jumps around adaptively to interference conditions, it works similarly to the way wi-fi works, which means it degrades gracefully.

Compare open to centralized networking systems - Open systems are designed to keep people connected even during emergencies, leveraging the nodes to also extend the network. That gives them independence from being cut off by income, or government fiat. Thats why ad-hoc mesh networking was used for the One laptop per child project..

The other is basically a "walled garden" primarily designed to extract rent from the populace, via an unnecessary, arbitrary insertion of a corporation into an interaction that technology has rendered no longer necessary.

Corporations typically try to buy off the constituencies that would be the most victimized by their monopoly with crumbs, but the price of embracing their monoculture is obscene cost increases with no light at the end of the tunnel. Eventually we'll end up back where we began, widespread debt slavery.

Haven't we learned that with the automobile/oil destroying the trolleys and commuter trains, and especially health insurance, half of the healthcare dollar now is dead weight, waste, the cost of the caste system, money down the drain. But we keep making the same mistakes, mistakes we cannot afford.

Thats what we get for embracing a private monopoly instead of a public, independent health care system. No cost control. It will be the same situation with this rural broadband monopoly.

Like the rest of today's government, increasingly, the FCC is "owned" by the corporate contributors. Both "parties" are guilty. They dont act in the public interest. Most Americans dont realize (because they buy cable TV) that 75% of the country can't get TV of any kind any more without cable or pay-TV satellite. The digital signals end at the first hill.

If jobs keep vanishing a lot of people are going to be unable to afford both broadband Internet and cable - which will mean no TV. None..

Maybe thats a good thing, I am sure many will say, but if you add that to the privatization of public education, it adds up to a marginalized underclass very quickly.