MBCook writes "Ars Technica is reporting that the Broadband Data Improvement Act has left committee with a unanimous vote. Among the changes proposed are requiring the definition of 'second generation broadband' (enough to carry HDTV) instead of the current definition of broadband as 200Kbps, and aggregating the data by ZIP+4 instead of just the full ZIP code. The act can now move to the full Senate."
Free Press policy director Ben Scott said, "For too long, policymakers have been forced to operate in the dark, relying on misleading and sometimes inaccurate information about the U.S. broadband market. By providing detailed information about the deployment, availability and use of broadband services in this country, the Broadband Data Improvement Act promises to bring us one step closer to our shared goal of universal, affordable broadband."
Isn't this par for the course in almost all fields, not just broadband market? In almost every thing the Congress does there is an interest group that funds studies, think tanks, policy white papers all designed to muddy the waters. Everywhere, ODF adoption, credit report freeze, bankruptcy reform, S-Chip, ID vs Evolution... There is this huge industry whose sole purpose is to force the lawmakers and the public to act in the dark and providing inaccurate and misleading information. Why single out broadband alone?
Well, you have to start somewhere. I doubt this will get anywhere, but if it does, maybe other sectors will be encouraged to do the Right Thing. Again, not likely...
ZIP+4 is one of the best changes in the bill. My ZIP code (20180) "has" cable, but it's only available in the town 3 miles away from me. Geographically, 95% of my ZIP code (and probably 60-70% population-wise) have no broadband, yet we're listed as having access to broadband. This bill is designed to stop the cable/phone Companies from telling the government and media that they've fulfilled their promise to bring "broadband to the masses" by redefining broadband to 2 Mb/s of theoretical speed (not even actual speed) and making them show penetration with better granularity.
This bill was written solely to upset the current relatively free market of broadband. Because the government will set "standards" of speed, this leaves smaller providers -- who may still be able to provide acceptable speeds -- out of the market. If you won't be able to give the minimum, get out of the market.
Here's why I am against Net Neutrality -- instead of providing for a truly "neutral" pipe, regulations like these will be written by the strongest elements in a market, designed to kill the smaller competitors. It is unfortunate if geeks and techies support these kinds of bills, especially without reading them fully. There is no Constitutional power allocated to the Senate to REQUIRE levels of service. The interstate commerce clause was written so that the Federal government can restrain the individual States from harming commerce -- the word "regulate" in the Constitution did not mean what we think it means today.
This bill was written solely to upset the current relatively free market of broadband.
Where do you live where you have more than two choices of providers? I'm sure in NYC or San Francisco it's a 'relatively free market,' but not where I live. I can choose between Verizon (BOO!) or Comcast (boo). Where's my free market? Where are my smaller providers? Hell, Verizon's not even planning on rolling FiOS out to me for another two years, even though I live in a densely populated area with housing values near thos
I can choose between Verizon (BOO!) or Comcast (boo). Where's my free market? Where are my smaller providers? Hell, Verizon's not even planning on rolling FiOS out to me for another two years, even though I live in a densely populated area with housing values near those of my parent's suburban neighborhood.
No one is stopping anyone else from competing. Oh, waitaminute, someone is stopping them -- check with your local village/city, county and State laws. They might be preventing your community from gettin
No one is stopping anyone else from competing. Oh, waitaminute, someone is stopping them -- check with your local village/city, county and State laws. They might be preventing your community from getting more than 2 providers. They likely are.
And yet you oppose this bill for its supposedly anti-competitive effect. This bill expressly forbids states and municipalities from limiting broadband providers, which addresses that concern.
RTFBill (or even an executive summary) before you try to make comments on it
"This bill was written solely to upset the current relatively free market of broadband. "
Because we have an aggressively pro-competition regulating agency in France, you have a dozen way to get broadband in most cities. And you basically can't get anything below ADSL2+ those days.
At the moment I pay 29 euros a month for 24/1Mbps, HDTV service, and free international phone (analog and voip). They also provide [adsl.free.fr] me with a free router, Wifi AP, HDTV PVR set top box and analog telephone adaptor.
No cap on data, no filtering whatsoever, no shaping. Quality of service is good, and has been improving steadily. You have the occasional day long outage (two last years, none this year so far), but other than that downloading speeds are stable and pretty much max out my line 24/7.
And the reason for this is that ARCEPT [art-telecom.fr] has been given a lot of power to enforce competition in the broadcast market. None of those services are subsidised. They haven't been so successful with cellphone, OTOH. But they're working on it.
This bill was written solely to upset the current relatively free market of broadband
What? Where do you get that idea from? Or is this more unfounded anti-regulatory claptrap?
Because the government will set "standards" of speed, this leaves smaller providers -- who may still be able to provide acceptable speeds -- out of the market.
Hogwash. Smaller providers can still be in the market, but if they don't meet the threshold for second generation broadband, they can't call themselves broadband. This is tr
What? Where do you get that idea from? Or is this more unfounded anti-regulatory claptrap?
I read the bill. Did you?
Hogwash. Smaller providers can still be in the market, but if they don't meet the threshold for second generation broadband, they can't call themselves broadband. This is true of large providers as well. This leads to better information for consumers.
In a free market, there are no consumers or producers. There are two parties who negotiate a deal both hoping to get the most for themselves by
No, he didnt read it. I'm willing to bet this is another cut and paste from some conservative think-tank or presidential candidate. Its called astroturfing.
It works becaue right now, being a conservative contrarian defending the status quo is pretty hip. See the millions who voted for Bush and now get their politics from South park and Ron Paul.
This bill was written solely to upset the current relatively free market of broadband.
A little more "relatively," and a little less "free," in my experience. In my current location (Madison, WI - not a major metropolitan area, but not the sticks, either), I have two choices for broadband: cable or DSL. If I go with cable, I go with Charter. If I go with DSL, I go with AT&T. "Tha's it an' tha's all," as they say. I fail to see how anything can squeeze "smaller providers" out of the system more than not b
Tha's it an' tha's all," as they say. I fail to see how anything can squeeze "smaller providers" out of the system more than not being in the system at all.
That's the fault of Madison residents for allowing their local government to protect the interests of two parties. It sounds to me like you should pull a few T1 lines into Madison, rent some commercial closets, and start up a decent WiFi provider like http://jimmywireless.com/ [jimmywireless.com] by me. They do a great job for a great rate. They even provide free WiFi se
Because the government will set "standards" of speed, this leaves smaller providers -- who may still be able to provide acceptable speeds -- out of the market. If you won't be able to give the minimum, get out of the market.
Not at all. More accurately, if you can't provide acceptable speeds, you're not allowed to pretend that you can. To my understanding, small providers can still provide smaller access for the same prices; they just can't pretend that it's "broadband." Do you shed tears because small farm
This bill was written solely to upset the current relatively free market of broadband.
So, I just gotta ask -- does the cable industry pay you by the word, or do you get some sort of flat rate for your shilling?
You sound like one of those horrific industry ads that they're running every ten minutes on Comcast; the one with the not-really-a-doctor-but-I'm-wearing-a-white-coat guy mumbling about how cable internet fixed the healthcare system, or the one with the old woman who seems to be confusing high-speed
First off, regulations like these are seen all over Europe and they have better broadband choices. Secondly, there's no shrotage of free market zealots who have no problem with companies selling broadband for full price and delivering 160-300kbps. Thats not broadband, thats crap. If anything this is consumer protection. A dsl line this slow should not be called broadband. They can name it "slowband."
The bullshit subsidiaries that Congress hands out is the core of this problem. Local bells and cable companie
smaller providers -- who may still be able to provide acceptable speeds -- out of the market. If you won't be able to give the minimum, get out of the market.
Cool your jets!
I don't know of any smaller provider(s) who run their own cable/wire to your household. They piggyback on the big monopoly telcos and cable providers. As such, they have the same available line speed options available as the monopoly providers. If they can't meet new minimum broadband requirements using the same delivery infrastru
I doubt anyone is going to cry about inadequate service providers being forced to stop describing their service as "broadband" or even going belly up. Not that there is much danger of that probably... For goodness' sake, this is 2007 -- 2Mbps minimum in order to call it "broadband" is perfectly reasonable...
I disagree. When I first had "broadband" it was a 128k/128k IDSL connection. Guess what? It was excellent -- my latency was very low, and the speed was respectable for everything we needed to do at
Look, you're lucky enough that you have choices. Good for you. The overwhelming majority of the US does not. We're not going to all try to fix things on a local level when the majority has a problem all over the US. If this means you get screwed, then so be it; it's for the greater good.
Don't like it? Well... argue about it, by all means. But your words are falling on deaf ears, at best. I'm sorry this upsets you, but overall, frankly, I don't give a fuck.
I use the internet for much of my work -- downloading and uploading large documents and having to view multimedia presentations in various formats. Why should I have to buy and pay for a service before discovering whether or not it is suitable?
I've been a Speakeasy customer since they opened -- they were one of the first IDSL providers in Illinois.
That being said, you use the Internet for WORK. If you're not willing to pay the price for the service your work needs, don't rely on what the broadband provide
Internet News [internetnews.com] has more details and analysis of the act, including comments from Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), who voted for the bill but expressed reservations:
"I worry that the provisions addressing broadband speeds and smaller geographic areas in this bill could inadvertently paint a picture of an America without broadband that is not accurate," he said in a statement... I am not sure that Congress, rather than the FCC, should be getting into this level of detail, particularly given technological changes, such as compression technologies that could make these standards a moving target."
I'm not sure I agree with him that the "America with broadband" picture is inaccurate. By most other modern countries' standards, we are far behind.
People keep saying this. It's not usually true, and do not understand why. Having a large Internet connection doesn't mean everything comes to you at higher speeds. I have a gigabit connection right to my desktop at work and speeds vary from 20KBps to 10MB/s and I might have both download windows side by side. Never seen anything higher than that unless I was looking for a specific network path that I knew could deliver it.
If you don't know something, it's best not to misinform others.
It's rated for 24Mbps. I usually get around 1-2 Mbyte/s on a single download TCP stream. I can basically max out the bandwidth with multiple simultaneous downloads anytime.
Ted Stevens lost the ability to intelligently comment on the Internet when he called it a series of tubes. And I'm sure that, compared to Alaska, the rest of the US looks like the year 3000.
Honestly, what qualifications does this guy have other than "I've taken lots of money from AT&T and Verizon?"
..where it was promptly shot down by senators who listened to the lobbyists who went on and on about how it would bankrupt their companies, when in reality, they would just pass the cost directly to the consumer.
"Oh, BTW, we're increaseing your rates by $100 a month, starting three months ago. Congress is forcing us to do this, we'll call it the broadband tax."
aggregating the data by ZIP+4 instead of just the full ZIP code.
If they aggregate by Zip+4, then I'm my own little broadband kingdom of one household. This means the original idea that as long as one household in the measured area has broadband, the whole area is considered to have broadband, becomes a binary truism.
For years, geeks have criticized the way that the agency collects broadband information, focusing especially on the fact that the bar for "broadband" is set laughably low (200Kbps)
Really? I'd think "geeks" like myself would criticize the fact that "broadband" is a term that describes how the signal is carried, and has nothing at all to do with speed in any way, shape or form.
Turns out my baseband Ethernet connection has been "broadband" for all these years. All those books, and all my teachers, have been
You are moving too fast, Politicians are not concerned with the details. They have been advised that broadband sucks. The details of making broadband suck less are left to the providers and they will pass that cost on to us........
It's ok, you don't know who you're talking to. If it takes "giving away" HD content - Yes, they most certainly will.
Perhaps. 20 years from now, at earliest. The ad revenue today cannot pay for video at drastically lower frame rates and with low quality audio. The video sites have been scrambling to stay online with no imminent hope of profitability (for the video divisions, at least). You make a highly uninformed statement, here.
You mean, like the rest of the 1st world (other than the US) has?
Props to the low UID (and I probably would have withheld
the sarcasm had I noticed), but I disagreed with your
original statement, and still do.
Historically, content has grown to fill the pipes available
to it. 300bps modems, we had text-only forums. 14.4kbps,
image-light web-based content. 56k, image-heavy content.
1.5Mbps, YouTube. 12MBps, and we've just started seeing
standard-def VOD.
I see no reason for that trend to continue - If we all have
100
Note they aren't mandating 2nd-generation broadband that is a DEFINITION. And it's good they did that, because oftentimes I see advertisements for "broadband" internet that is just a few touches better than a 56k. That's why House Democrats called for a higher definition, right now, that definition includes any connection over 200Kbps, which Markey wants to boost more than 10 times. [arstechnica.com] I doubt anyone on/. would consider 200kbps as "broadband."
Note they aren't mandating 2nd-generation broadband that is a DEFINITION. And it's good they did that, because oftentimes I see advertisements for "broadband" internet that is just a few touches better than a 56k.
It's not necessarily a good thing having a Government committee specify these things rather than leaving it to the public's common understanding of that term (which can evolve over time) and having BBB or advertising watchdogs consider each complaint on a case by case basis.
Ed Markey is my rep. and he is really pissing me off lately. I tend to agree with him on the issues, but he doesn't give a damn about his constituents. In our district an organized crime figure has been buying up large houses and turning them into flop houses, exploiting some state loophole for "rehab" facilities. They are not properly regulated or registered, but for somereason, the municipalities are unable to shut them down. In my neighborhood the guy converted a beautiful $900,000 greek revival. Now the
...I'm not sure I follow your logic. Let's say that, suddenly, all home internet connections were magically transformed into Gbps pipes (I'm assuming that's enough for HDTV; I don't actually know that, but it's irrelevant to my point, anyway).
How would that force slashdot to stop providing free (or at least, ad-supported) content? Or, if we don't consider slashdot to be a content producer, how would that force the hojillion bloggers out there to stop providing free (and you get what you pay for) content?
The content that is expensive is video. If customers have huge Internet connections that are capable of HDTV, they will want to use them. With the current layout and cost of Internet transit (and for the foreseeable future for that matter), delivering free HDTV content is a non-starter.
Personally, I'd be surprised if delivering paid HDTV content anytime soon is a profit well.
I disagree, this is a case where the market will adjust because of competition with the end result being overall faster connections for everyone for probably the same prices. This bill does nothing to force improvements or upgrades. What it does do is actually put a realistic definition on the word broadband. So you'll no longer get all those adverts in the mail from verizon dsl or comcast cable telling you how you can have high speed broadband for $19/mo when in reality it is a 750/128 connection. Although I'm still a little bit grey on whether this applies to the current broadband or this broadband 2 or whatever the word was.
In the cut throat isp business eventually one of the big players will push the envelope and actually offer a true broadband for a decent price, and everyone else will have to scramble to adjust, starting a price war.
Sure, initially people who want a faster connection will pay a bit more, but this is a case where the market will adjust for it pretty quick. Competition is just too fierce for it not to. And a price war between two 800lb gorillas (cable vs phone) can be nothing but good for consumers.
Yeah, yeah, competition drives prices down. Unfortunately, broadband markets tend towards duopoly (or worse) -- not free competition. A price war would be great, but telecom companies tend to prefer using FUD and lock-in to maintain their customer base.
In the cut throat isp business eventually one of the big players will push the envelope and actually offer a true broadband for a decent price, and everyone else will have to scramble to adjust, starting a price war.
Why do you think that? I'm more inclined to think that the ISPs will act as a cartel.
29.99 [adsl.free.fr], ADSL2+, includes TV and free international calls (VoIP). Free modem and HDTV PVR set top box provided.
All that in socialist France. The only gov't improvement is in aggressively enforcing competition. You know, the real free market thing, not that corrupt semi-fascist oligarchy you have in the US.
Par for the course. (Score:4, Informative)
Isn't this par for the course in almost all fields, not just broadband market? In almost every thing the Congress does there is an interest group that funds studies, think tanks, policy white papers all designed to muddy the waters. Everywhere, ODF adoption, credit report freeze, bankruptcy reform, S-Chip, ID vs Evolution ... There is this huge industry whose sole purpose is to force the lawmakers and the public to act in the dark and providing inaccurate and misleading information. Why single out broadband alone?
Well... (Score:2)
Well, you have to start somewhere. I doubt this will get anywhere, but if it does, maybe other sectors will be encouraged to do the Right Thing. Again, not likely...
ZIP+4 (Score:3, Funny)
Re:ZIP+4 (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
This is a monopoly provision bill (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's why I am against Net Neutrality -- instead of providing for a truly "neutral" pipe, regulations like these will be written by the strongest elements in a market, designed to kill the smaller competitors. It is unfortunate if geeks and techies support these kinds of bills, especially without reading them fully. There is no Constitutional power allocated to the Senate to REQUIRE levels of service. The interstate commerce clause was written so that the Federal government can restrain the individual States from harming commerce -- the word "regulate" in the Constitution did not mean what we think it means today.
Very, very unfortunate.
Re: (Score:2)
Where do you live where you have more than two choices of providers? I'm sure in NYC or San Francisco it's a 'relatively free market,' but not where I live. I can choose between Verizon (BOO!) or Comcast (boo). Where's my free market? Where are my smaller providers? Hell, Verizon's not even planning on rolling FiOS out to me for another two years, even though I live in a densely populated area with housing values near thos
Re: (Score:2)
No one is stopping anyone else from competing. Oh, waitaminute, someone is stopping them -- check with your local village/city, county and State laws. They might be preventing your community from gettin
Re: (Score:2)
And yet you oppose this bill for its supposedly anti-competitive effect. This bill expressly forbids states and municipalities from limiting broadband providers, which addresses that concern.
RTFBill (or even an executive summary) before you try to make comments on it
There is NO free market in the US (Score:5, Informative)
Because we have an aggressively pro-competition regulating agency in France, you have a dozen way to get broadband in most cities. And you basically can't get anything below ADSL2+ those days.
At the moment I pay 29 euros a month for 24/1Mbps, HDTV service, and free international phone (analog and voip). They also provide [adsl.free.fr] me with a free router, Wifi AP, HDTV PVR set top box and analog telephone adaptor.
No cap on data, no filtering whatsoever, no shaping. Quality of service is good, and has been improving steadily. You have the occasional day long outage (two last years, none this year so far), but other than that downloading speeds are stable and pretty much max out my line 24/7.
And the reason for this is that ARCEPT [art-telecom.fr] has been given a lot of power to enforce competition in the broadcast market. None of those services are subsidised. They haven't been so successful with cellphone, OTOH. But they're working on it.
Parent
Sometimes the gov't can improve things (Score:4, Funny)
Even though we were born of your enlightenment, we hate you. Frenchy.
Besides, we don't even like the Statue of Liberty.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
What? Where do you get that idea from? Or is this more unfounded anti-regulatory claptrap?
Hogwash. Smaller providers can still be in the market, but if they don't meet the threshold for second generation broadband, they can't call themselves broadband. This is tr
Re: (Score:2)
I read the bill. Did you?
Hogwash. Smaller providers can still be in the market, but if they don't meet the threshold for second generation broadband, they can't call themselves broadband. This is true of large providers as well. This leads to better information for consumers.
In a free market, there are no consumers or producers. There are two parties who negotiate a deal both hoping to get the most for themselves by
Re: (Score:2)
That's like saying that serving contaminated food is okay because the definition of food differs between people.
Re: (Score:2)
It works becaue right now, being a conservative contrarian defending the status quo is pretty hip. See the millions who voted for Bush and now get their politics from South park and Ron Paul.
Re: (Score:2)
A little more "relatively," and a little less "free," in my experience. In my current location (Madison, WI - not a major metropolitan area, but not the sticks, either), I have two choices for broadband: cable or DSL. If I go with cable, I go with Charter. If I go with DSL, I go with AT&T. "Tha's it an' tha's all," as they say. I fail to see how anything can squeeze "smaller providers" out of the system more than not b
Re: (Score:2)
That's the fault of Madison residents for allowing their local government to protect the interests of two parties. It sounds to me like you should pull a few T1 lines into Madison, rent some commercial closets, and start up a decent WiFi provider like http://jimmywireless.com/ [jimmywireless.com] by me. They do a great job for a great rate. They even provide free WiFi se
Re: (Score:2)
Not at all. More accurately, if you can't provide acceptable speeds, you're not allowed to pretend that you can. To my understanding, small providers can still provide smaller access for the same prices; they just can't pretend that it's "broadband." Do you shed tears because small farm
Re: (Score:2)
So, I just gotta ask -- does the cable industry pay you by the word, or do you get some sort of flat rate for your shilling?
You sound like one of those horrific industry ads that they're running every ten minutes on Comcast; the one with the not-really-a-doctor-but-I'm-wearing-a-white-coat guy mumbling about how cable internet fixed the healthcare system, or the one with the old woman who seems to be confusing high-speed
Re: (Score:2)
Secondly, there's no shrotage of free market zealots who have no problem with companies selling broadband for full price and delivering 160-300kbps. Thats not broadband, thats crap. If anything this is consumer protection. A dsl line this slow should not be called broadband. They can name it "slowband."
The bullshit subsidiaries that Congress hands out is the core of this problem. Local bells and cable companie
Re:This is a monopoly provision bill-Cool Yer Jets (Score:2)
Cool your jets!
I don't know of any smaller provider(s) who run their own cable/wire to your household. They piggyback on the big monopoly telcos and cable providers. As such, they have the same available line speed options available as the monopoly providers. If they can't meet new minimum broadband requirements using the same delivery infrastru
Re: (Score:2)
I disagree. When I first had "broadband" it was a 128k/128k IDSL connection. Guess what? It was excellent -- my latency was very low, and the speed was respectable for everything we needed to do at
Re: (Score:2)
Don't like it? Well... argue about it, by all means. But your words are falling on deaf ears, at best. I'm sorry this upsets you, but overall, frankly, I don't give a fuck.
Re: (Score:2)
I've been a Speakeasy customer since they opened -- they were one of the first IDSL providers in Illinois.
That being said, you use the Internet for WORK. If you're not willing to pay the price for the service your work needs, don't rely on what the broadband provide
"An America without broadband..." (Score:3, Interesting)
"I worry that the provisions addressing broadband speeds and smaller geographic areas in this bill could inadvertently paint a picture of an America without broadband that is not accurate," he said in a statement... I am not sure that Congress, rather than the FCC, should be getting into this level of detail, particularly given technological changes, such as compression technologies that could make these standards a moving target."
I'm not sure I agree with him that the "America with broadband" picture is inaccurate. By most other modern countries' standards, we are far behind.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
If you don't know something, it's best not to misinform others.
ADSL2+ here (Score:2)
And I pay 29 euro a month.
Re: (Score:2)
Ted Stevens lost the ability to intelligently comment on the Internet when he called it a series of tubes. And I'm sure that, compared to Alaska, the rest of the US looks like the year 3000.
Honestly, what qualifications does this guy have other than "I've taken lots of money from AT&T and Verizon?"
Made it to the senate. (Score:3, Interesting)
"Oh, BTW, we're increaseing your rates by $100 a month, starting three months ago. Congress is forcing us to do this, we'll call it the broadband tax."
Good news for plumbers (Score:2)
Re:Good news for plumbers-BOLD REPLY (Score:2)
THEY WILL, AND HATE YOU FOR IT!
My Own Kingdom (Score:2)
If they aggregate by Zip+4, then I'm my own little broadband kingdom of one household. This means the original idea that as long as one household in the measured area has broadband, the whole area is considered to have broadband, becomes a binary truism.
Many mistakes... (Score:2)
Really? I'd think "geeks" like myself would criticize the fact that "broadband" is a term that describes how the signal is carried, and has nothing at all to do with speed in any way, shape or form.
Turns out my baseband Ethernet connection has been "broadband" for all these years. All those books, and all my teachers, have been
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
They produce that content so people will boost their ad revenue.
If it takes "giving away" HD content - Yes, they most certainly will.
And best of luck actually switching that many packets per second at the NOCs.
You mean, like the rest of the 1st world (other than the US) has?
Yeah, totally untenable.
Re: (Score:2)
If it takes "giving away" HD content - Yes, they most certainly will.
Perhaps. 20 years from now, at earliest. The ad revenue today cannot pay for video at drastically lower frame rates and with low quality audio. The video sites have been scrambling to stay online with no imminent hope of profitability (for the video divisions, at least). You make a highly uninformed statement, here.
You mean, like the rest of the 1st world (other than the US) has?
And anothe
Re: (Score:2)
Props to the low UID (and I probably would have withheld the sarcasm had I noticed), but I disagreed with your original statement, and still do.
Historically, content has grown to fill the pipes available to it. 300bps modems, we had text-only forums. 14.4kbps, image-light web-based content. 56k, image-heavy content. 1.5Mbps, YouTube. 12MBps, and we've just started seeing standard-def VOD.
I see no reason for that trend to continue - If we all have 100
RTFA (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
It's not necessarily a good thing having a Government committee specify these things rather than leaving it to the public's common understanding of that term (which can evolve over time) and having BBB or advertising watchdogs consider each complaint on a case by case basis.
In New Zealand, the
Re:RTFA OT: but worth knowing (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Also, is there a definition... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Let's say that, suddenly, all home internet connections were magically transformed into Gbps pipes (I'm assuming that's enough for HDTV; I don't actually know that, but it's irrelevant to my point, anyway).
How would that force slashdot to stop providing free (or at least, ad-supported) content? Or, if we don't consider slashdot to be a content producer, how would that force the hojillion bloggers out there to stop providing free (and you get what you pay for) content?
I do
Re: (Score:2)
Personally, I'd be surprised if delivering paid HDTV content anytime soon is a profit well.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:any forced improvements = higher bills for us (Score:5, Interesting)
I disagree, this is a case where the market will adjust because of competition with the end result being overall faster connections for everyone for probably the same prices. This bill does nothing to force improvements or upgrades. What it does do is actually put a realistic definition on the word broadband. So you'll no longer get all those adverts in the mail from verizon dsl or comcast cable telling you how you can have high speed broadband for $19/mo when in reality it is a 750/128 connection. Although I'm still a little bit grey on whether this applies to the current broadband or this broadband 2 or whatever the word was.
In the cut throat isp business eventually one of the big players will push the envelope and actually offer a true broadband for a decent price, and everyone else will have to scramble to adjust, starting a price war.
Sure, initially people who want a faster connection will pay a bit more, but this is a case where the market will adjust for it pretty quick. Competition is just too fierce for it not to. And a price war between two 800lb gorillas (cable vs phone) can be nothing but good for consumers.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
24Mbps down/1Mbps up in Socialist France (Score:2, Informative)
All that in socialist France. The only gov't improvement is in aggressively enforcing competition. You know, the real free market thing, not that corrupt semi-fascist oligarchy you have in the US.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)