Telco’s and Cable firms ensure “Thinband” future

Telcos like SBC/ATT, Bellsouth, and Verizon and cable companies like Comcast are holding the United States back, we are falling rapidly behind the industrialized world when it comes to internet access in terms of speed and costs. Most likely you are paying more than someone in Tokyo for 1/10th the connection speed, and your connection is not as reliable as theirs.
All of them practice what is in my opinion a level of malfeasance that is usually reserved for Congressmen. You should take the time to read Comcast Watch because it is truly sad how they are “supporting” politicians to assist them in ensuring a lack of competition while promising that small communities will be unable to start providing wireless net acccess as a public utility. *
Add in this mix the fact that Bellsouth, Verizon and Comcast have been lobbying around trying to make sites like Google and MSN pay to be connectable at a decent speed. So you pay much more than other 1st world nations for net access and in addition they want to charge sites for letting you connect to them at a reasonable speed. Imagine being forced to use the far inferior MSN search because your telephone company has a sweetheart deal with them. Or imagine that you cannot go to USAToday.com because your cable provider has an exclusive deal with The Christian Science Monitor. That is what they want, I encourage you all to ACT to make sure it cannot happen.
Check out this quote from Slate Magazine;
“As a result, telco-cable has been lobbying Congress to rewrite the Telecommunications Act of 1996. A draft of the new bill would codify “network neutrality” (which to this point has been voluntary) and forbid network service providers from blocking or otherwise sabotaging content. Usually fierce competitors, these gatekeepers can agree on one thing: They want to strike the network neutrality clause. Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and eBay want to keep it. If telco-cable wins, it will be able to set up separate tiers, forcing Google to pay up or ride in the slow lane.”
Log off your computer, and grab a piece of paper (try looking in your printer if you cannot find one) grab a pen or a pencil (they are those cylindrical things that we used to use for correspondence, you may remember them from grade school if 30 or older heh) and then WRITE A LETTER to your congressional representatives and let them know clearly that we want them to not only deny such a thing but INSIST on them examining why we are falling behind other nations in the areas of net cost and speed. Make it short simple and easy to read because most of our politicians think Al Gore actually created the internet and the remainder only care who gave them their last bribe. But letters MEAN something, they can ignore emails and phone calls in a way they do not avoid letters. People that take the time to write them are the people that vote (If you do not vote, then you are a fool and I hope you burn in whichever hell your religion provides) and they pay attention to those letters much more so than they pay attention to emails. You can find out who your Senator is by going to http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm and you can go to http://www.house.gov/ to find out the address for your representative. If you are really smart go to your states website and track down your state legislative politicians and do the same. Write the letters, encourage others to do the same!
Now,as of this moment, Google has informed the “Broadband” providers that they are out of luck, but that could change unless we speak up loudly enough to be heard over the paid lobbies supporting anticonsumer laws.
Read the article, partly quoted below from The Gadsden Times. It is the most succinct I have seen on the issue.
“Slow broadband seems to be our cursed lot. Until we get an upgrade – or rather an upgrade to an upgrade – the only Americans who will enjoy truly fast and inexpensive service will be those who leave the country. In California, Comcast cable broadband provides top download speeds of 6 megabits a second for a little more than $50 a month. That falls well short, however, of Verizon's 15-megabit fiber-based service offered on the East Coast at about the same price. But what about the 100-megabit service in Japan for $25 month? And better, much better: Stockholm's one-gigabit service – that is, 1,000 megabits, or more than 1,300 times faster than Verizon's entry-level DSL service – for less than 100 euros, or $120, a month.”
I wish I could get ANY of these options where I live, but Comcast cannot actually deliver 6MB/S so they promise “up to” and they only offer a trickle upload speed, which promises that no one can afford to provide content to significant numbers without paying corporate costs. So those podcasts remain small or have to advertise, and new sites offer less than more. We could host this very blog from home, but the providers in the US do not want anyone able to do so, and they do not want to give us the unlimited access they pretend to provide. Make sure you go to Google News and read more about it, before you are unable to do so.
* In the interest of full disclosure I work for a municipality, that is “serviced” poorly by Comcast, but this is not an axe to grind, because short of the second coming of Christ my community could never pull off the tech required to make wi-fi as a utility happen. The citizens here still have not figured out why GM left.