The Truth About Broadband

I'm really getting tired of the simple facts being ignored as all these meaningless disagreements persist, like the Comcast-BitTorrent riff, the struggle over vacant "white space" broadcast wavelengths, 3G, HSDPA, and so on...

The Truth: South Koreans have been watching satellite televison on their cellphones for at least 5 years.

The Truth: Speeds of even DSL in Europe surpass by more than quadruple the access speeds we are receiving from so-called "high-speed broadband cable internet."

The Truth: The FCC, the United States Government, is who's responsible for your slow downloads, not an overabundance of traffic that Comcast or some other pipe provider complains of. Even DSL can crank at a huge throughput rate if only the "regulators" would allow it.

The Truth: The United States is a technological backwater in practice, while all of our innovation goes out the door and flourishes in countries where governments cooperate and facilitate the adoption of a new communication infrastructure rather than the U.S., which is controlled politically by a small, obsolete group of old-money special interests who are afraid to open up the pipe thinking they will lose their stronghold on our wallets.

So, it's a bunch of keep-busy, idle, useless talk discussing bandwidth when it's all there but for Daddy Warbucks sticking his finger in the socket. Pressure your legislators and governors if you want fast, everywhere connectivity, as this is where the bottleneck exists; this country is its own worst enemy and any other is overemphasized to obscure this fact for the benefit of the few.

Meanwhile capable Americans sit helplessly as our innovation and its economic benefits float out to sea and drift to other continents, God love them. Americans have sold out Americans and America. We have no one to blame but our own. This isn't a statement about outsourced labor, which I do believe is positive if you look far enough ahead; this is something else.

You want to see the country return to its great potential and position? Or do you want to see it bled dry by greedy self interests who are draining our battery with the travesty in the Middle East while filling their bank accounts and leaving us with disease, outdated infrastructure and a culture of emptiness?

What next? Well, civil unrest would fit the scenario quite nicely, and with present immigration policy, fear-mongering over all the "terrorists" and drug commercials flashed every 10 seconds, they're doing their number on us and few want to wake to this horror so they live in denial of it.

Free the Broadband: Free America. We are not free, we just think so because the wool has been pulled over our eyes and we don't get the true picture of what's happening elsewhere as we are too busy patting ourselves on the back for being so "great" when in reality we aren't. You just don't want to face this fact and deal with it. Fear? Contentment? Arrogance? Ignorance as in "not knowing"? Satisfaction because of comparison to worse conditions in Africa? So, my migraine headache is supposed to all of a sudden not exist just because someone, somewhere else had their whole head taken off?