It didn’t take Steven Hawking to figure that one out. The problem, as I can see it from my vantage point, is that what is happening is that we have a poorly performing government bureaucracy pointing fingers instead of acting.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do better – but it misses the point that many don’t really care to do better. Though hard to explain to the many that read this blog, there really are people that don’t use the internet, and for whatever arcane reason, see no need to do so.
These people will always skew the results of any surveys, and when many people get into that “we must have smaller government” mindset, there is no convincing them that allocating money for broadband stimulus is a good idea. (Heck, here in Riverside County, we have a congressperson – that has been in office since I was a teen – stating that we should send back millions in stimulus dollars. When you have “forward” thinking like that, it’s going to be hard to distinguish many followers from recently converted Luddites.)
Though the value of broadband to a family over a year is $7700, there is no convincing some people of that fact.
Chairman Genachowski gave some reasons why he believes the U.S. needs more and better broadband –
A recent study ranked 40 industrialized countries in terms of their international competitiveness and capacity to innovate, according to a variety of criteria, including broadband adoption and availability, said Genachowski, who didn’t provide details about the study.
The U.S. ranked sixth overall, but last in terms of the rate of improvement in these criteria in the coming years, he said. "That scares me," he said.
The U.S. has a chance "to lead the world in mobile broadband" and it has gotten a good start on the road to 4G. However, Genachowski worries about the intense demands that increasingly powerful devices like smartphones tablets will put on the available spectrum.
He hailed an ongoing effort at the FCC to transform the $8 billion Universal Service Fund from being focused on propagating phone service access to promoting broadband.
Genachowski has most of it right, but thinking that every person must have a telephonic device capable of accessing the internet at all times is simply a silly idea taken to the extreme. What is needed is speedy broadband to residences, made so ultimately affordable that no one will question its necessity. Wireless access to the internet will remain an important thing for the business traveler, but for others it is a luxury that should not be indulged to the limitation of wired access, or any more reductions in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
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