Everyone hates President Bush for their own reason, but now us techies have a reason of our own: he refuses to endorse the FCC’s plan for free national Wi-Fi. Instead, Bush says that a government-mandated Wi-Fi scheme is a bad idea, and it’s one that goes against our “free market” thingamabob.
Unfortunately, as Fast Company points out, there’s a reason why the “free market” has left so much of America’s citizenry without access to broadband: they can’t make any money off it. So, instead of relying upon the “market,” the government says, “Hey, company who won all that white space, you need to set aside a certain percentage of that for public Wi-Fi. Remember, the spectrum you just won is publicly owned; you do as we say or we’ll give it to someone else.” And so on.
Kevin Martin, the head of the FCC, will be part of a hearing on December 18 that decides whether or not the proposal for free Wi-Fi goes through.
Fingers crossed!
President who?
First, a free market does not exist in the US…not even close…only in rhetoric.
I find it very hard to believe that entrepreneurs cannot make money providing broadband.
But let’s say that it’s true…
What does that tell you about demand? Obviously resources are in higher demand elsewhere, so entrepreneurs are acting rationally by allocating resources to where they are demanded most.
Government does the opposite. It coercively allocates resources to areas of low demand…The term “government waste” wasn’t coined by accident.
Entrepreneurs would provide broadband the most efficiently were there a free market…But like I said in the first sentence, a free market is yet to exist (outside of lip service).
Yes, off course, there is nothing at all detestable about forcing private individuals to do something for free…
Is this guy serious? He sits by while the economy goes to hell and then has something to say about this?
I agree 100% with the article though. The free market has done nothing to provide broadband access to the entire country. That’s why I have to live in town as opposed to having 20 acres in the country. Job depends on high speed.
Plus, it’d be nice to be able to drive around with my laptop in the car knowing I could get a connection without paying an additional fee every month.
There’s an inherent assumption here – that the profits the winning bidder will earn on the unencumbered 75% will be high enough that they will be able to eat the costs of the “free” service and still earn a satisfactory return on the whole thing. After all, the spectrum itself is only one part of the overall cost of the service. On the flip side, there’s an assumption that the benefit of extending broadband service to underserved areas outweighs the costs of (1) the reduced revenue to the government from an auction of encumbered spectrum versus unencumbered plus (2) reduced private sector revenue as some portion of paying customers flee to “free” service. That’s a more complicated analysis than “Bush is teh suck!”
Not everyone hates Bush, just as not everyone loves Obama.
Honestly, you want the government managing the internets. I pay for internets for my household why should I pay for the lazy person down the street who wont get a job to pay for their own internets? Let’s also get the government to pay for cell phone and text messaging.
Free market is right. If it is to expensive, don’t pay for it. If you don’t like the service, don’t pay for it.
The internet is not a necessity it is a luxury.
Why do you guys think that national program would work much better then city-wide attempts. Big cities with a lot of tech-savvy proponents for “free” stuff tried Wi-Fi programs. Pretty much all of them went belly up and cost city taxpayers a lot of money. Do you really thing that now is the best time to throw away more money? If Wi-Fi was profitable we wold have people trying to make money. If is not then you are asking for subsidies. I would rather keep the money then have gov types spending them for me.
Why on Earth does crunchgear allow this moron to write for them? He’s nothing but a shill for the rotten liberals.
The idea of free broadband for all seems very inciting at first, but it’s not realistic in this proposal and it would never work. it was a horrible idea that has been totally misscharacterized.
The AWS-3 chunk of spectrum represents 20 Mhz. The area which they wanted to use for free broadband was 5 Mhz. How much you could fit into that depends largely on signal to noise ratio and a few other factors, but using standard modulation methods it would most likely be something around 20-40 Mbps. However, due to the nature of these frequencies the area covered is necessarily relatively small and thus wide area coverage is done through a cell-like system. At least that’s the proposal for AWS-3 and that cuts the bandwidth quite a bit since interferance from adjacent cells is going to be a factor.
This bandwidth is SHARED by everyone in the region who is using the broadband connection. You’ll find that it dries up very fast when you have many users, especially with stuff like video sites and so on.
If you were to allow free access to this, even with filters, there’d be a huge incentive for everyone to use it to the maximum extent. People would be downloading youtube stuff, video confrencing and making voip calls on it constantly.
The point is that there is simply not enough bandwidth there.
Also considering the needed infrastructure this would really be a massive undertaking – without paying customers it would basically have to be funded by the government.
You’re talking about building an entirely new infrastructure on par with the current wireless phone network that took 20 years and billions upon billions of dollars to build.
I’m all for more avaliable broadband, especially to outlying communities but there are better ways to do it: microwave relay is one way. Also, don’t be so fast to dismiss wired methods of getting the data out to outlying areas – wired networks always have big advantages over wireless in that they have more bandwidth. There’s only so much spectrum out there and we all have to share it – this is the limitation of wireless technology. However, fiber, or even simple and cheap coax can push many gigabits without encountering such problems.