This is an interesting read and makes for some damming evidence of corporate greed and less focus on providing US folks with a decent web infrastructure.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/02/case-closed-why-most-of-usa-lacks-100mbps-net-connections.ars in 2000 the big carriers asked for, and got, yearly reductions in price cap levels based on agreed-upon percentages: three percent in 2000, and 6.5 percent for the next three years. Four incumbents—AT&T, BellSouth, QWest, and Verizon—received full price deregulation in over 100 major metropolitan areas. One of those companies, BellSouth, is now part of AT&T.
But five years later, the Government Accountability Office did an audit of 16 metropolitan areas and found very few signs of growth in facilities-based competition, signs of its shrinkage, and higher special access prices in various cities. And the GAO concluded that the FCC "does not regularly monitor and measure the development of competition, which will affect how FCC responds to emerging trends, and the actions it takes to encourage and foster such competition."
Fast forward to now, and Sprint told us the company pays something like seven times for one of the thousands of special access lines it needs than what consumers pay for a single, much faster residential broadband account. Meanwhile, a report issued last year concluded that special access charges now represent a huge chunk of incumbent telco business. The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners found that in 1996, interstate special access represented less than five percent of Qwest's, Verizon's, and AT&T's total revenue. In 2007 they represented almost 30 percent of Qwest's, nearly 25 percent of Verizon's, and close to a fifth of AT&T's.
In my opinioncommercial greed is to blame for the ailing infrastructure that the US is coming to own, lack of serious investment and lack of intention to provide coverage in less densely populated areas leaves many out in the cold and existing customers on a shoddy service. It seems the only winners in this rigged game are big citys and places of mass population, others places are hard pressed to even get the net let alone be able to use it in any useful form for todays fast growing technologies.
