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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (686034)11/25/2012 5:33:11 PM
From: i-node  Read Replies (1) of 1580033
 
“The average around the country is 4.5 megabits per second.” So average Internet speed in Chattanooga is 10 times the national average. That doesn’t just mean faster downloads. The fiber grid means 150,000 Chattanooga homes now have smart electric meters to track their energy consumption in real time. More important, said DePriest, on July 5, Chattanooga got hit with an unusual storm that knocked out power to 80,000 homes. Thanks to intelligent power switching on the fiber network, he said, “42,000 homes had their electricity restored in ... 2 seconds.” Old days: 17 hours. That network was fully completed thanks to $111 million in stimulus money. Imagine that we get a grand bargain in Washington that also includes a stimulus of just $20 billion to bring the

This is a crock. What some of us would refer to as "sales talk" -- not unlike what you get from a car salesman at your local GM dealer telling you how "this security system will reduce your insurance rates".

If you've got lines down outside your home or business, power isn't going to be restored a second faster by having faster Internet.

When the taxpayers money is spent in this fashion (rather than by having the phone companies who will profit from it spend the money) there is no return on that investment because instead of putting the money where it will be most efficiently used, you have end up with homes having 45 Mbps when they can't use a minuscule fraction of that (even Netflix, the highest demand item for home users, doesn't require a fraction of that bandwidth).

And it was stupid from the outset as I pointed out here. We [taxpayers] "invest" in this "infrastructure" only to find that these users could be getting 100 Mbps via cell networks within a few years with far greater flexibility and at the expense of the actual users rather than the taxpayers.

Whatever a "smart" electricity meter requires, it isn't measured in megabits per second.
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