Broadband St. Paul

I just posted my complaint about how bad the internet is in the US - and then I find out that just last week the city of St. Paul declared its goal to be “America’s Most Connected City” with fiber coming out of every mailbox. And they want it to be at least partially publicly owned. They did this in a report entitled, "The Broadband Advisort Committee Report on the Future of Broadband in Saint Paul." (PDF) It is a bit dense at 63 pages, so here is the Pioneer Press's piece on the proposal.

Of course Qwest and Comcast, the only two broadband providers avaliable in the city, oppose the idea. Monopolies are always opposed to the idea.

The Cities argument is that right now, Qwest and Comcast control the entire game. If you have Comcast cable you get them defacto as your service provider. With Qwest's DSL at least you get to chose your service provider, but they will always be the underlying pipe that data goes through. What St Paul wants to do is lay a fiber network that private service providers will then use to provide internet access. I am all for it. Fiber is a far better investment in infrastructure than wireless (sorry Minneapolis) and is something that will not be pushed out of date quickly. Fiber is coming through the private sector in the east cost through Verison, but I have not heard of any one talking about it here and why would they? Qwest has their DSL game going and get to charge $50 a month for it. So does Comcast. Why spend the time to lay fiber when you have customers who can't leave?

So I say go for it! Where business fails government should be prepared step in. Especially when it is a visionary proposal like this.

Net Neutrality example

Here is an article in the New York Times that highlights what is at stake in the Net Neutrality debate. Does a network provider have a right to control what is transmitted over that network? In this example, Verizon blocked abortion-rights group Naral from sending text messages to members over their network saying it had the right to block “controversial or unsavory” messages like this:

End Bush’s global gag rule against birth control for world’s poorest women! Call Congress. (202) 224-3121. Thnx! Naral Text4Choice.”

They have since backed down but the thing is, they could if they wanted to. They are saying that data is not neutral. This data is "bad data" and you can only see the "good data".

What if Qwest could decide what was good and bad data coming into our apartment? Say they made a deal with Amazon's video service. Thats good data while a competing service that didn't make Qwest a deal is bad data - so you don't get it unless you pay Qwest a 'roaming' fee for 'non-partner' content. You get the idea.

Net Nutrality

There has been lots of discussion on line at least about "Net Neutrality." Currently the internet is regulated by the government so that service providers must deliver any data from any point in the world to you just like any other bit of data. It is blind.

The big providers (ATT, Verizon, probably Qwest) don't like this. They argue that they should be able to provide "premium" web service to their content at the expense of their competitors. I think this is an awful idea and would do nothing to bring the US up to speed in world where we are falling far behind - something that really bugs me. The US down to 15th and get an average of 1.9 Megabits pr Second average. Japan and Korea get 60+ average. Given they are lots smaller and more dense but good luck finding a single 60 Megabit connection anywhere in the US.

Anyway, Net Neutrality can be a funny idea, but I found this photo that some one made showing the dystopia of an unregulated internet.


I think they just cut and paste a cable TV ad, but thats the idea. Say goodbye to the internet as we know it.

Of course, John Stewert describes it better than anyone. Here is a classic clip:

DSL monday

We are getting DSL on monday! Theoretically honking fast 7 megabit DSL too, thanks to the fact that we are just 2 blocks away from our routing station. Right now we are on "Multiband" for free thanks to their 60 day promo. They are the folks who wired (ie monopolized) this building so you can just plug right into the ethernet in the wall, no modem required. However, it says a lot how good their internet is when we are willing to end our contract with them before the freeness is over to get DSL. Yes, it is worse than free. I just ran a test and since it is the weekend and there are lots of people on, I got 38.8 KB a second down and 3.9 KB a second up! Is this 1997 or 2007? They want to charge us $32 a month for that too. So for just $10 more a month we are getting 20x the speed. Wohoo!
!