"RE: "The point of this aside is that if *I* can survive a 48K dial up"
"Mabye time has more value with each generation. Maybe the drive for speed is no longer driven by analytical minds (like it used to be), but by creative minds and communications. (Our marcom manager can bring her machine down to its knees, to say the least.) The way people communicate is different. "
My point was that even a dial-up line is enough for some folks (me, for example) to do plenty of things on the Net. It's far, far faster than I can type...this is important as it speaks to the issue of _content generation_, whether that content is in the form of letters or essays or scientific papers.
Sure, I can't easily send very large photos, or receive them easily. And I sure can't transmit DV or DCD/MPEG stuff.
(Many of the main bandwidth users on college campuses now are those trading bootlegged DVDs. A 2-hour movie can be napstered over a wideband net in a few minutes. Anecdotal aside: is _this_ why we need to tax people to build more wideband infrastructure? I don't want to pay for someone else's downloaded movies.)
"A co-founder of a large network company once told me he had a T1 going into his house. This was several years ago, so I pretty much had the same reaction you did. It sounded like a luxury. But, he was actually way ahead on the usability curve. "
Yeah, I knew several people who had T1s to their house. Didn't make a whit of difference about their effectiveness. Do the math. Essentially nothing a _person_ (one) needs to do needs a T1. A T1 is needed when N downstream users are sharing it, but 99.8% of every thing a _person_ needs is handled by much slower lines. .....unless, as above, he is shipping DV or DVD back and forth.
"It actually sounds like it has "
You know not whereof you speak.
RE: "So what will happen is that the corporations will get their subsidies...and these are precisely the folks able to justify laying their own lines...as indeed they have been!"
"That's a good point. Maybe they should only give a tax break for doing the rural areas. "
How about we get government out of the business of taking money from _me_ to give to corporations?
I won't say more about this point here, as my article covered the point in detail.
"How come Palo Alto can't get fiber, even though some high-tech communication innovators are scratching their heads on this? "
I've seen lots of articles about this. For starters, a NIMBY council and NIMBY committees. My guess is that they want kickbacks before vendors are allowed in to tear up the roads and deploy fiber. But bureaucracy is a powerful factor, too. And remember my "leapfrog" point: often the richer communities get some advances later, because they deployed another solution (and roads, and such) earlier. Thus we see more cellphones per capita in poorer countries than here.
"Meanwhile, other countries leapfrog the USA in communications? "
So? Not my problem. Not the function of a limited government, as the U.S.G. is supposed to be, to "keep up with the Joneses."
And even if government tries to "keep up," it makes mistakes. Recall the example I gave of Minitel in France. Or the various European communications and chip inititiatives, like ESPRIT.
I will not support a massive government program to lay fiber to every house (which it won't actually do, pace my earlier comments) just so that CBS and VH1 can benefit by selling me programming.
--Tim May |
