Tag Archives: broadband
Help Out the FCC!!
I cannot live without broadband. I’d rather have no internet at all, than have no broadband. If my area were to suddenly have NO broadband connection to the internet I would either have to move or sell all my computers. The simple fact of the matter is that computers are incredibly limited in their functionality if they don’t have a good internet connection. And as online services continue to grow at the rate they are now, it won’t be long before ALL of our electronics follow the same path.
Already, people go nuts if their Xbox Live or Playstation Home service gets interrupted. Subscribers went ballistic when the Sidekick service went offline. If mobile broadband were suddenly gone from existence, outright riots would ensue!
So why is it then, that it’s so hard to get broadband in many places in the United States?
The simple answer is this: Money.
The big telecom companies don’t see much profit from going out and wiring remote areas with broadband. As they see it, the millions of dollars it takes to wire an area for internet can’t be recouped by the few subscribers who live out there. And from a business standpoint, they’re absolutely right. Thing is, internet access is becoming less of a “oh, nice toy” kind of service and more of a “life doesn’t carry on without it” one instead. For people who think I’m making too big a deal about it, let me point out that I’m not just talking about your Facebook access, or playing FarmVille. The world won’t end tomorrow if you can’t see YouTube. What I am talking about is general data access; phone services that travel over fiber instead of copper, television service that is sent by IP, monetary transactions that happen millions of times a day . . . all over the internet. In many cases, people’s internet connections are replacing their phone and tv connections.
Can you imagine a school that has no data connection to the outside world? Student records are sent by mail. Health notices are never received. Important district updates never get to your child because no one at the school knows they are even there.
Way back in the day, this same issue was faced with telephone service. Not everyone had a phone line in their home or sometimes even in their town. To fix this, Congress passed a bill that created a special government fund that was used specifically to wire the whole country with phone lines. Phone service was deemed something that no one should be without. Times have changed, and we have a new service we can’t do without.
With this in mind, the FCC is launching a new plan to get the United States fully wired for broadband internet. Without knowing the how’s or who’s or where’s, the basic idea is to get some kind of interconnected broadband service to every American population center for an affordable cost. Before everyone starts to get worried about the cost of such a project, let me point out that the same budget/fund the was used to wire us for telephone service is still around . . . and not being used! Probably hasn’t been for years!
Not everyone is happy with this idea of “broadband for everyone”. Namely, the big telecom companies that have already spent so much on their own systems. The reason you might pay $19 for your phone service but $49 for your internet is not because the internet is more expensive; it’s because your service provider is trying to make back the money they spent getting the high-speed data lines to your home. If the government does that for them instead, they can’t charge you those fees anymore!
To prove that broadband access and costs are really an issue, the FCC has launched a new speed test at Broadband.gov. They also have an iPhone app that is free to download for you to use if you’d like. Your results will be paired with your address and your ISP (which it pulls automatically) and compiled for a nationwide assessment. The FCC is presenting their plan to Congress soon (like, tomorrow) so be sure to send everyone you know there today!
It doesn’t matter which political party you side with or how you feel about government spending, this is something that this country needs. Letting things continue as they are now would be a great disservice to the American people.
I have the enthusiast’s remorse
I am an absolute technophile. I love seeing all the new gadgets that come out and what they can do for me. I love to think about how I can then modify those gadgets to do even more for me without me having to pay anything more. I’m a cheapskate, and an enthusiast.
The term “enthusiast” is not one I’ve used all that often to describe myself. If there were a scale to describe how much of an enthusiast a person could be, I’d imagine I’d be rather low on the scale. But the fact is, I’m still ON the scale. There is a very sad down side to being an enthusiast (well, there are probably a few); those same devices that you find you can’t live without aren’t usually everywhere you might need them.
Case in point (and most relatable example I can think of): you have standard, run of the mill broadband internet. It doesn’t need to be the fastest thing on the planet for this example to work, but it’s better than a 256k ISDN. You use it at home to browse, do email, read blogs, whatever. You then go over to your parents/friends house, and while there you try to show them something you found online (like our awesome website here) . . . only they are on dial-up. And slow dial-up at that.
That’s the downside I’m talking about here. To point back to Schmidty’s announcement of Chrome; it’s so fast and nice that it’s all I use . . . except at work where I have to use IE to work with Oracle and I nearly scream every time it takes 5 minutes to load a page simply because the browser is so bloated.
Well, there’s another device that’s in this category; the DVR. Call it a TiVo, an HTPC, a DVR, or whatever else you want, these little babies will change your life. Anyone who owns and regularly uses them will testify to you just how much they will change your life in regards to TV. I’m not trying to make them out to be like a religious experience or anything, but they really are that pivotal.
Your spouse wants to talk to you during the game? Just pause the show. Your show is only on at 1:00 AM? Set it to record! There’s an interesting documentary on squid that you know you’d be interested in but just don’t feel like watching it right now? Record it for later! Kids are killing each other? Dinner is on the table NOW? Don’t like commercials? Guests come over unannounced? You get the idea. Our favorite use is to record a whole bunch of shows the kids like and have them at our fingertips whenever we want to reward them.
Screenshot of Vista Media Center from MSDN blog
The down side is that not everything is hooked into a DVR. We don’t have one in our bedroom, so when I miss something important that was said I can’t jump back to hear it again. If there’s something interesting I want my wife to see, I can’t pause it and wait for her to get in the room. I find myself listening to the radio on my way to work in the morning and habitually reaching for a remote that doesn’t exist to jump back 15 seconds or so to re listen to something that was said! That’s how messed up I’ve become.
If your computer can barely run Windows XP SP2, I don’t want to touch it (sadly, that’s my computer at work). If you have a whole 5 channels on your TV, please don’t ask me if I want to watch anything (everything I’d want to watch is already recorded at home anyway). I know this makes me look like a snob, and to a degree I am one. But the secret fact of the matter is it’s just painful for myself and other enthusiasts at times.
Sure, we’re in a 1st world nation, with access to some of the best technology in the world (not counting cell phones where we seem to be permanently stuck in 2002), but I’m not interested in what technology could do for me five years ago; I’m interested in what it can do for me tomorrow.
