America's failure to deliver broadband -- a failure that has become absolute due to the Bell-cable duopoly -- also means the end of America's capability to innovate.
This was made clear to me recently by Ronald Baron Yokubaitis, who has been fighting (unsuccessfully) on behalf of competition for a decade.
Innovation lost or gone abroad, is one of our talking points when we make the rounds in Austin or Washington. Name one innovative new Internet business started by a Bell or Cable Co.? Skype? Fon? Correro.de? NIH (not invented here).
The kids now growing up in Asia and the EU on 20-100Mbps,
and even some on Gig-E, WILL interact in this broadband frontier and create
the new applications that we Americans will be using, not NIH. While our
1-4 Mbps asymmetrical leftovers from IPTV's 16-18 Mbps will look like
dial up in three years.
We need our wide open "Wild West" of open Internet to get back in the game, rather than the "Back East" regime foisted on us that we fled. Internet Application Providers are global and stateless and might as well start acting that way. Which State (s) environment provides the better platform to operate? U.S? Netherlands? Hong Kong? You can't ignore the US, but it is losing in importance. Innovation driven off shore.
My context is the current rush of the Bells to get into the cable television business on the one hand and the tiering of service on the broadband infrastructure through charging extra for transport for any layer above IP now termed "content".
This is why I have worked for the last 5 years
trying to get legislation passed regarding what is nw called Net Neutrality.
However, I think a better slogan is: "Net Neutrality through Customer
Choice".
This is not what we encounter in the EU where the INTERNET is openly peered and circuit bandwidth is in many places, Scandanavia and the Netherlands, much higher than in the US. WE see these higher connection speeds attaching to our Usenet Newsgroups server clusters located in Amsterdam. The edge of the Internet is in these higher bandwidth countries, including, Korea, Japan, Hongkong and Singapore.
We will be playing their NextGen games, not ours. They will have seen the future well before us. They already see over the broadband horizon, while we in the US wait and wait on broadband promises never fulfilled.
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