Interesting People mailing list archives
Re: Obama's FCC team & Wired/Wireless
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sat, 15 Nov 2008 16:11:05 -0500
Begin forwarded message: From: Brett Glass <brett () lariat net> Date: November 15, 2008 2:43:59 PM EST To: David Lassner <david () hawaii edu>, dave () farber net Cc: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com> Subject: Re: [IP] Obama's FCC team & Wired/Wireless At 11:07 AM 11/15/2008, David Lassner wrote:
As a regular reader of IP, I see the pleas from Brett Glass that we take WISPs more seriously.
Mr. Lassner: Please do not characterize me or other WISPs as "pleading" with anyone. To do so would be to deprecate us and our livelihood. We are very proud of what we've been able to do under adverse conditions: Not a shred of spectrum dedicated to wireless broadband; no antitrust enforcement despite blatant anticompetitive tactics; government subsidization of our competitors (but not of our own operations); regulations that put more constraints than us than on the large corporations with which we compete. We believe that it is a disservice to the country when we are ignored or dismissed by lobbyists who favor policies which would prevent us from continuing in business. Our customers already do take WISPs very seriously. We cover hundreds of square miles that are not served by cable or DSL, and we make it possible for those customers to live where they do comfortably andproductively. The only barriers to our growth are capital, anticompetitive
tactics by other carriers, and inappropriate government regulation.
I agree that pure WISPs, 4G and even 3G can be competitive with many of today's DSL/Cable offerings and shouldn't be discounted by those who are focused on objective #1. But it also seems clear that the deployment of advanced broadband services by world leaders (e.g.KDDI's recent rollout of 1Gbps symmetric consumer service for under US $60/mo) is based on a different approach to public policy and sharedinfrastructure than our current U.S. non-policy. We need people at the FCC who understand this as well.
Do you have 56 HDTVs in your home? It would take this many, all playing 1080p streams simultaneously, to exhaust 1 Gbps of bandwidth (not that you'd want to foot the bill for that much bandwidth, which would cost more than $6,000 per month -- not $60 per month -- at wholesale at a major hub of the Internet). To deprecate wireless because we do not currently provide the absolute highest speeds available in the world (though we could, with current technology, if we had the spectrum) is akin to saying that no one should drive because supersonic airplanes exist.
While some propose wireless as the alternative, the Task Force believes that wired or wireless? is the wrong question to ask.
On this we agree.
Fiber optic cable provides the greatest capability with nearly-unlimited expandability to fixed locations,
On this we do not agree. The cost of running fiber is too often prohibitive,
limiting its expandability. And cutting into fiber to provide service to a single location can be prohibitively expensive. Wireless is far more cost-effective not only in rural settings but in urban ones, where many WISPs (including our own) compete gamely with the telephone and cable companies. And, again, the capacity of our links to our customers islimited not by the technology but by regulatory barriers. As an electrical
engineer, I can say with assurance that if I had about 2 GHz of clean millimeter wave spectrum (3 or 4 would be ideal but we want to have room for multiple providers), I could engineer -- with existing technology -- equipment that would blow FTTH away in terms of cost/performance. --Brett Glass ------------------------------------------- Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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- Re: Obama's FCC team & Wired/Wireless David Farber (Nov 15)
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