Linda Foley, Washington DC, is the President of The Newspaper Guild/CWA, and is a Vice President of the Communications Workers of America. She was the first woman in the 60-plus year history of the 34,000-member Guild to hold the office. She is Secretary-Treasurer of the AFL-CIO’s Department for Professional Employees and is on the Executive Board of the American Arbitration Association. She is also Vice President of the International Federation of Journalists. Before joining the union’s staff in 1984, Foley was a copy editor and reporter at the Lexington, KY, Herald-Leader. She is a member of the Board of Advisors for the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, her alma mater.
Let the market drive broadband.
Internet2 is humming away at 19gig on the backbone. I expect that we will see 24mbs on landlines in the urban markets in the next 5 years. I do not know enough about leading edge wireless to make a meaningful prediction, but you can get 700kbs right now in the metro markets.
Again, I really wonder about these studies as they make no real sense to me. I still say it is a combination of trying to portray the bush administration as some sort of retrograde force for the nation, and a desire to sock the taxpayer for some bucks.
In the early part of the Clinton Administration they tried this with the "information highway" nonsense.
The truth is that the private investor got bilked into paying for this, and a great many investors lost their shirts over this one.
Liberals cannot seem to put forth any idea without first trying to create a crisis and/or finding a "villain" or too.
Right now we are seeing the socialist in the EU really pushing GRID Computing. They think that competeively they "missed" the internet the last time around. They want to actually pay companies to use publiclly contrcuted GRID. The science genuises at Brussels have decided that this is "the next big thing." How are these con clusions reached? What if they are wrong? (Comically,it is american tech firms that are getting all the bucks and reaping the rewards of all the research.)
Look a the fiasco g3 was to the European telecoms (and new wireless tech like EVO is making that obsolete.
You know, the state of Iowa spent million hoking up all their public libraries a while ago, now of course there is cheap DSL all over the place.
Government planning rarely works.
It is particularly comic when we are talking about the Internet, for no one ever omagined that it would take off like it has (well ohre than a few visionaries like Alan Kay.)
It would certainly be dishonest of government types to claim otherwise.
You know, DARPA and Co. is undertaking a complete redesign of TCP/IP to accommodate mobile "self-organizing" networks.
I would not be surprised to see the whole concept of the Internet as we know it to be obsolete in another 15 years.