I dont normally visit this site but saw a link to this small but interesting article.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/372888_bandwidth31.htmlIn the United States and in most of the world, a monopoly or duopoly controls the pipes that supply homes with information. These companies, primarily phone and cable companies, have a natural interest in controlling supply to maintain price levels and extract maximum profit from their investments – similar to how OPEC sets production quotas to guarantee high prices.
But just as with oil, there are alternatives. Amsterdam and some cities in Utah have deployed their own fiber to carry bandwidth as a public utility. A future possibility is to buy your own fiber, the way you might buy a solar panel for your home.
Our current approach is a command and control system dating from the 1920s. The federal government dictates exactly what licensees of the airwaves may do with their part of the spectrum. These Soviet-style rules create waste that is worthy of Brezhnev.
Many "owners" of spectrum either hardly use the stuff or use it in highly inefficient ways. At any given moment, more than 90 percent of the nation's airwaves are empty.
The solution is to relax the overregulation of the airwaves and allow use of the wasted spaces. Anyone, so long as he or she complies with a few basic rules to avoid interference, could try to build a better Wi-Fi and become a broadband billionaire. These wireless entrepreneurs could one day liberate us from wires, cables and rising prices.
All of the real hurdles dont rely on the government to give a free lunch (all though that can help grease the wheels), and its not just the lack of venture capital to back challenges to the existing framework of information and its distribution via the internet where alternative ideas are usually ignored or purchased to avoid a challenge to what is an incumbent monopoly, it's all of us watching this happen and doing nothing.
The real problem with this style of old infrastructurual thinking is we all lose, from the child who's parents cannot afford to buy extra school books to stimulate increased comprehension and learning, to the older guy who cannot move on from doing a health breaking manual labour job because he has no access to information on his rights and alternatives, or take the case of the handicapped person who as well as being looked down on by seemingly fair minded folks is never even introduced to a computer let alone allowed to use one to choose what knowledge they wish to gather, there are thousands of examples of how society as a whole can benefit from increased education and cheaper learning resources, the bottle neck of the price of access is where the problem usually lies, an oasis of knowledge is out there it seems, but only for those with hard cash.
For those who have missed the underlying theme here of my commentary I,ll put it into a few words, empower each other, share your resources where possible and help others to help themselves, waiting on others to take the lead or build a new "network" is usually a good route to doing nothing and becoming a part of the selfish-society we all rally against.
