And from a logistics point of view you have to build out a fiber optic plant to deploy so much bandwidth to every square mile of coverage area. So a proper use of capital would be to deploy fiber to supply neighborhoods with GBytes of fibered coverage to homes and businesses AND deploy wireless for the nomadic usages. The incremental cost is small if done right AND it can create markets to implement all but the physical plant.

Note that I have been involved with the design and building out of various Internet infrastructures both wired and wireless from 1993 thru 2007. I’ve watched the telecommunications transformations from total monopoly to open and innovative (which I had worked to accelerate and maintain) to watch it slip back to an even worse oligopoly. If not stopped, there will no longer be an open Internet as the oligopolies of ATT/Verizon/Comcast combine with the RIAA/MPAA to make the US Internet even more controlled than the Chinese Internet. See Hollywood’s New War on Software Freedom and Internet Innovation

The article on Fascism had a very accurate diagnosis of the situation, but had no discussion on how it could be changed or what a positive environment should be. I believe that one of the big problems of today is that there is almost NO vision for a positive future. There is not even a language to describe how a world based on abundance would work.

One of the key issues is to come up with institutions that can properly balance public commons with private/market based mechanisms. The proposal that the physical plant of telecommunications should be treated as a public good and as substrate for private / market services is one such attempt for exploring those possibilities. It is clear that the total “private” ownership by the same entity that controls transport and content is a huge failure and must be disrupted if we have any hope for personal freedom let alone innovation.

Give me the name and capital investment of the company who is working on the 25MBps wireless, and the timeframe at which it will be available. Explain the strategy to accelerate that time to market by 25% and the extra capital required to pull it off. Address the extra costs for a 50% faster-to-market solution. How much longer will it take if we force the diversion of investment to something else? Who will gain, and who will lose in that trade-off? What moral proposition justifies imposing that choice on the losers? Spell out the dollar-value of the opportunity cost everyone is required to pay for you to have your dream solution. Explain the demographic makeup of the people who chose to go home for broadband vs. the people who want to be free to receive it anywhere anytime. Justify your rational for forcing one over the other based on verifiable data.

The problem with your theories here is that it requires the whole of society to value only what you value, and requires large sums of capital be only deployed to the investments your narrow mind can comprehend. To put you at ease, I’ll point out I am as narrow minded as you are. We are both plagued with the incapacity to see beyond what we can imagine.

If other narrow minded folks like us can handle the cognitive dissonance, they might want to expose themselves to some thoughts that stretch the imagination. Tim Hartford offers some ideas on solving problems that go beyond simplistic approach of (watch out!!) the Fascist state.

Ted Talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_harford.html

To really stretch one’s abilities and to see a definition of Fascism that applies to this context: http://mises.org/daily/5634

AT&T does not invest anywhere near what they need to invest in any of their infrastructure. And the amount of dropped calls or inability to make calls in so many places throughout Silicon Valley where I live (not in the farm in the middle of nowhere, so I wonder how bad it is on the farm in the middle of nowhere).

Wireless, particularly cellular wireless can not deliver anywhere near the amount of bandwidth to any form of dense usage patterns that even DSL can, let alone what Fiber can deliver. One cellular sector can deliver somewhere in the range of 2 – 10Mbps. That is SHARED bandwidth with everyone on that sector. DSL could deliver between 1MBps to 25MBps and more to as many people within a 3 mile radius of a central office or a VRAD. Fiber could deliver GIGABITS of bandwidth to as many people who are connected to it for miles around the distribution point.

What are you going to do once you view one or two HD video streams on your Verizon cellular service and you exceed your 5Gb usage cap? You going to pay thousands of dollars to use it for the rest of the month? (Thats the bill I got from ATT cellular when I tried to use cellular for my home connection and exceeded the 5Gb monthly usage in 3 days just because my GMAIL IMAP account was configured in such a way that it was pulling email a bit redundantly on a couple of computers in my house).

Of course now the duopolies of Telco and Cable are instituting monthly Bandwidth Caps of 250Gb but that is what Monopolies do and why we need to divest and/or regulate them. Whereas in wireless there are some significant physical limitations of how much bandwidth can be delivered around a cell tower, the costs and physical limitations of delivering Terabytes of bandwidth per month to everyone is totally artificial once the copper, coax or fiber are in place.

Its clear that you are the one ignorant about technology.

I just signed up with Verizon and now have internet access everywhere I go, in my car, at any store, on the beach, in the boat, and I don’t need Uncle Sam dictating who builds the infrastructure. They are doing it to meet the needs of real people in the real world.

I dread the day I have to live under the Borg mentality of your phylosophy.