[TowerTalk] Re: Not exactly BPL

[Tod - MN]

In a recent business publication I read an article chiding the US for
dropping from number 3 to number 10 in the broadband available to the
population category. 

One of the interesting parts was a discussion of a housewife in Tokyo
getting her soap operas via broadband instead of cable or 'off the air'. It
seems that substantial parts of some countries have 100 Mbps connections
available for consumers at reasonable prices . One place, somewhere on the
Western side of the Pacific rim was said to be pricing at about $1 PER MONTH
PER MEGABIT/SEC. They said $26 per month for 25 megabit per second service.
I think most of us backward US types pay the cable or phone companies about
$40 per month for 1.3 megabit per second service.

The author of the article asserted that the reason that these countries had
better speeds at lower cost was competition between suppliers and that their
governments had sometimes intervened to assure that there would be real
competition. 

I remain skeptical that the US government and specifically the current FCC
is sufficiently devious to do this. Machiavellian perhaps (reward your
friends, punish harshly your enemies).

Anyway, this is not a TT subject and as such should never have been posted
here. Shame on me.

I apologize and agree not to do it again.

Tod, KØTO