Frank:
I believe the issues are plain and simple: bandwidth, availability and price. All can be legislated with as much leverage as needed to assure they happen, at least in theory. The real problem is they are together part of a big economic equation that either closes or doesn't. We can really only control two of the three variables, if we want a "guaranteed" solution.
My suggestions are:
1) Legislate (minimum) bandwidth and (minimum) availability,
2) Let (forced) competition control price.
Pretty much everything else is fair game.
That is what '96 was supposed to do, but the camps broke into cable with content, and DSL with data for business, and they stayed pretty much in their own camps.
We need to get these guys head to head to force competition at the local drop. Think about it! We already have two local drops into 90% plus of the nation: cable and telephone. They overlap 90%, but they do not compete.
So, for all future installations:
We can get them to compete by requiring the telephone guys to provide a minimum of 1.5 Mbps of downstream bandwidth, to enable (1 channel) MPEG video, and 100Kbps up. And require the cable guys to provide data services of at least the same. Finally, we continue to require that if phone service is offered, it has to meet the "reliability" requirements (99.999% up time). We also require them to provide both data and phone services, bundled and un-bundled.
Then we require that 50% of existing installations meet this requirement within five years, and so on.
The penalty for not meeting this would be forfeit of sizable percentages of stock to government for auction: i.e. equity dilution, rather than fines. That would hit where it hurts, so it would get done, and not simply taken as an operating expense.
-Own |
