As a suburban American I have a right to cheap productive rural land with a house built on it to use for vacations and to bug out in case of collapse. The Federales should buy one for me for $100,000 and your taxes should pay for it
BTW if your fellow rural dwellers get their cooperative act together you can probably bring in a high speed wireless internet system to serve 10-20 families. Might even be Gov't grants for that.
Broadband has become as much about basic infrastructure in 2011, as dial phones were in the 1960s. It is needed before commercial growth can take place. It is as fundamental to growth as having roads and bridges.
You may not remember the “Bell System” which had a policy of universal service. But they understood that having a phone in every house was more important to the growth and strength of the entire nation, than just having phones in the profitable suburbs and cities. They lost money on the rural phone lines but they made it up on other business lines. It all worked out because it made nationwide opportunities and made us number one in world communications capability at that time.
The government rewarded them and their success by busting them up. They sent Bell Labs to France and millions of US manufacturing jobs to Asia and pushed the USA from leader in communications to its current second tier capability. S Korea and many others have better communications now than the USA.
We need to assure that basic infrastructure, the building block of opportunity and strengthening the nation (not arts museums, Statue of Liberty, and good restaurants) are available nationwide. Broadband has become basic infrastructure just as phone lines were 30 years ago. You cannot start and run a business without it.
Improving and rebuilding our national infrastructure is what should have been done with the stimulus money instead of giving it to politicians in states to get reelected.
I agree that the nationwide upgrade to broadband needs to be a priority, but prudently with common sense because we are not the same fiscally strong nation we were 30-40 years ago.
What ever happened to co-ops?? Back in the 50’s we lived in a very rural community with no phone service. The community got together and started a phone company for basicly cost.
On the idea of locally owned/municipal WISPs:
There are many around the country seeing various types of success. The local wimax guy is caught in red tape hell because our township can’t figure out how to zone a tower for commercial use rather than personal. And there’s another nasty flynin the ointment. It works like this:
1) Town X has around 2000 people. The council, mayor, etc. have heard from their citizens they want broadband access at home, schools, local businesses and so on.
2) Town X’s officials contact major ISP’s like Cox, Comcast, Verizon and so on but they’re given the same answer by all: it would cost too much money to deploy for such a small population. Town X appeals again but gets nowhere.
3) the Citizens then decide to create their own network using local dollars. They have the plans drawn up, contracts are negotiated, costs are determined and the residents are thrilled...and it all comes to a screeching halt.
4) One of the big ISP’s files a lawsuit, alleging that a governmental entity is acting in place of an existing corporation and using tax dollars to fund it. That they weren’t interested before doesn’t matter — they can afford the lawyers to keep deployment tied up for years.
It’s a mess that shouldn’t exist, but there it is.