{"id":195713,"date":"2008-06-19T23:03:00","date_gmt":"2008-06-20T04:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/06\/19\/public-ownership-of-our-communications-infrastructure-it-just-works-better\/"},"modified":"2008-06-19T23:03:00","modified_gmt":"2008-06-20T04:03:00","slug":"public-ownership-of-our-communications-infrastructure-it-just-works-better","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/06\/19\/public-ownership-of-our-communications-infrastructure-it-just-works-better\/","title":{"rendered":"Public Ownership of Our Communications Infrastructure:  It Just Works Better."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Harold Feld, a specialist in telco and spectrum issues with an eye toward public access, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wetmachine.com\/item\/1228\">points me to an interesting bit of information<\/a>, that while the UK, with its largely free market (by Europe&#8217;s standards) broadband market place lags behind the rest of Europe, the town of Nuenen, population 7500, <a href=\"http:\/\/technology.timesonline.co.uk\/tol\/news\/tech_and_web\/the_web\/article4115007.ece\">provides its residents with 100mbs connectivity<\/a>, with triple play access (internet, phone, TV) for \u20ac39\/month (about $60), on a <span style=\"font-weight: bold;\">municipally owned<\/span> network.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s more:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>If a community-funded ISP sounds like a wacky European socialist plot, consider this: OnsNet generated an operating profit of about \u20ac1 million on revenues of \u20ac4 million in the past financial year \u2013 and that\u2019s after a massive upgrade in which it wired the entire community with dual-fibre capability. What has your ISP done for you lately?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Faster, better, and cheaper than what you can get in the UK, where they require that the last mile wiring and internet service must be separate, which in turn is faster, better and cheaper than what you can get in the US, where the only rule is maximize the next quarter&#8217;s profits.<\/p>\n<p>The idea that an unregulated market in broadband to the home creates innovation is simply wrong.  We have had nearly 20 years of this policy now, starting with ISDN, and the US has the worst broadband service in the industrialized world.<\/p>\n<p>The goal of a company is to make a profit, and the easiest way for incumbents  to make profit is to create barriers to entry, not by providing better of cheaper service.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Harold Feld, a specialist in telco and spectrum issues with an eye toward public access, points me to an interesting bit of information, that while the UK, with its largely free market (by Europe&#8217;s standards) broadband market place lags behind the rest of Europe, the town of Nuenen, population 7500, provides its residents with 100mbs &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1067,997,985],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-195713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communications","category-internet","category-regulation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195713"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=195713"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/195713\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=195713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=195713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=195713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}