Comments on: AeA report: False and Misleading

By: Sigivald

Sigivald — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 21:11:35 +0000

Max: I have 100mbs Ethernet, have for years.

Now, my connection to the outside world is a paltry 512k DSL line (because I’m too cheap and lazy to pay for a bigger pipe). So I guess this means I’m analogous to Sweden!

By: MnZ

MnZ — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 17:46:18 +0000

Robert McChesney appears to misuse statistics to get around uncomfortable facts. Specifically, population density and urbanization are tied to the speed and cost of broadband networks, despite his wish to the contrary.

Low density and low urbanization effects both DSL and FTTP:
1) DSL: The distance from the central office determines whether DSL can be offered and the speed at which it can be offered. In low density, suburban-rural areas, homes tend to be further from the central office, limiting the speed of DSL (or even precluding the availability of DSL).

2) FTTP: The cost of laying fiber to a single-family home versus an apartment building is basically the same. However, the potential revenue from an apartment building are much, much higher than a single-family home.

By: Richard

Richard — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 19:50:19 +0000

Net neutrality is a matter of regulating the behavior of Internet routers such that each packet has the opportunity to take any route, regardless of payment, subscription, or desired Class of Service. That’s pretty draconian, in my humble opinion.

No foreign government that I’m aware of has gone that far, but if you have information to the contrary, by all means share it.

And BTW, the story of Korea Telecom blocking VoIP got a lot of play here, because American servicemen were among the affected parties.

By: Mumon

Mumon — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 16:52:57 +0000

“Over-regulation” isn’t the issue, Richard, it’s the fact that the regulations are in one area made to benefit a few who happen to run companies versus regulations that are made to benefit all.

The fact is, Japan, Korea, and the other countries had national regulatory bodies that saw to it that there were single standards for things, not the hodge-podge nonsense we have in the US.

And by the way, my wife has no problem calling China via VoIP, and I hadn’t heard of anyone having problems calling Europe via Skype.

By: Richard

Richard — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 23:37:09 +0000

That report was written by Robert McChesney’s Free Press, and its not worth the paper it isn’t written on. A few other countries are ahead of the US in broadband because they privatized their phone companies at the right time for broadband, not because they over-regulate them.

And the foreign scenario isn’t actually as “neutral” as McChesney’s mouthpieces would have us believe; foreign ISPs routinely block VoIP so they can have the whole revenue stream for themselves.

This is the old “everything’s so much better in Sweden” trick that American pseudo-sophisticates have been playing on the yokels for 40 years. Things aren’t nearly as idyllic in Hong Kong as we might like to think, they’re just a lot more compact.