Didnt they try this before and ISPs just ate the money and didnt finish laying cables?
Did they start?
They did enough for some election campaign photo ops.
Dems pitch $100B broadband plan
41–50 of 96 posts
Re: Dems pitch $100B broadband plan
#42> providing a $50 monthly discount on plans for low-income consumers This only serves to support the inflated pricing of the monopolists.
Exactly. Offering to "help pay" for housing, education or whatever, is how prices rise stratospherically.
Re: Dems pitch $100B broadband plan
#43I prefer Sanders’ proposal https://berniesanders.com/issues/high-speed-internet-all/
Sanders' proposals in general have no chance of actually passing in Congress, so I'll trust the Dems' one.
No democratic plans are going to get to the floor of the Senate, so you might as well put forward the one you actually want.
Re: Dems pitch $100B broadband plan
#44We already paid for nationwide broadband installation several times by now. How many more funds do we need to siphon to major corporations that still don’t build anything?
Agreed. If they do pass something like this it had better include net neutrality provisions for any ISP taking the money, too.
Re: Dems pitch $100B broadband plan
#45We already paid for nationwide broadband installation several times by now. How many more funds do we need to siphon to major corporations that still don’t build anything?
This is simply not true. Federal money wasn't used to build broadband until Obama's second term, and that amounted to a couple of billion a year since 2012. (Of the tens of billions invested in broadband networks annually.)
Re: Dems pitch $100B broadband plan
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like it or not, certain parts of the US are too rural/poor to justify even monopolists expanding internet service there. This will incentivize them to build in those areas.
I don't get why we want to build stuff in rural areas. From a cost perspective, we have to subsidize the infrastructure including medical and utilities. From economic standpoint, the jobs are in the cities. Labor participation rates in cities is much higher than rural areas. Investing in housing cost reductions in urban areas seems like a better investment than wiring rural areas with high speed internet.
You could say the same thing about any government subsidy. Why subsidize the poor when the wealthy generate most of the tax revenue, why should single people subsidize children, etc.
Re: Dems pitch $100B broadband plan
#47We already paid for nationwide broadband installation several times by now. How many more funds do we need to siphon to major corporations that still don’t build anything?
I definitely think we shouldn't give another dime in tax credits to broadband providers - a signed contract with aggressive enforcement provisions would be in order, and if the current major ISPs don't want to build the infrastructure we should find someone else who will.
> current major ISPs don't want to build the infrastructure we should find someone else who will.
There are no such people. Both Baltimore and Los Angeles put out bids asking for companies willing to build fiber networks on certain terms. Nobody volunteered. E.g. https://la.curbed.com/2018/1/9/16863352/free-internet-los-an...
> Los Angeles officials planned to build up a network through a public-private partnership, passing off the costs of the ambitious infrastructure project to an outside provider. Blumenfield announced last year that the city never received a workable proposal from a private company to build out the network.
Re: Dems pitch $100B broadband plan
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really hope Starlink will have a turnkey small-community ISP “solution”.
> I really hope Starlink will have a turnkey small-community ISP “solution”. I mean, an ISP could get a receiver and use Starlink as backhaul, but IMO, that just doesn't make much sense. The cost of infrastructure is almost certainly more than the cost of a receiver per consumer.
Depends how much the Starlink user terminal ends up costing. it might make sense for some communities to buy one terminal and then distribute the data via relatively cheap long haul wifi. Trailerparknet.
Re: Dems pitch $100B broadband plan
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like it or not, certain parts of the US are too rural/poor to justify even monopolists expanding internet service there. This will incentivize them to build in those areas.
Why doesn’t the government just build it? They do it with sewer lines, power lines, gas lines, water lines, but a little fiber is too much?
The government doesn't build water, sewer, or gas in many parts of the country! Where I live, less than an hour from DC and maybe 5 minutes from a Whole Foods, we don't have gas lines at all, we use propane and fuel oil. We got public water and sewer only in 2015, and each house is paying off a $30,000 assessment for that. Most of the areas around us are reliant on wells and septic systems. Ironically, we have had fiber since 2008 or so. As to electric--most of that was built back when labor was relatively very cheap and tons of people were unemployed. We couldn't build the national electric grid today, for the same reason we couldn't build the New York subway today.
Re: Dems pitch $100B broadband plan
#50We already paid for nationwide broadband installation several times by now. How many more funds do we need to siphon to major corporations that still don’t build anything?
I think it was Ars that ran an article a couple years back that showed how much money AT&T has gotten for broadband access they never completed. It was $Billions.