Proposed Bill Would Have Fiber Conduit Built Into Every New Road
Proposed Bill Would Have Fiber Conduit Built Into Every New Road
Posted 05/24/2009 at 10:05am
| by Justin Kerr
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Depending on where you check your stats, the US ranks anywhere from 15th to 22nd in broadband speeds, falling way behind other countries such as Iceland, Denmark, and even Canada. The broadband problem in the US gets even worse as you move out further into the rural areas where some communities have the choice of dial up, or if they have a ton of money to burn, super high latency satellite. This is a problem that won’t be solved overnight, but a new bill proposed in Congress last week by Democratic Representative Anna Eshoo, might just be the long term solution everyone is looking for.
The new bill would force governments to build fiber conduit into the sides of all new road projects allowing high-speed connections to flow naturally throughout the country. The costs are expected to be relatively low, since the bulk of the cost associated with laying new fiber is digging up and burying the cables.
Eshoo is the representative pushing the proposal forward in Congress, but doesn’t deserve full credit for the idea. The concept was initially proposed last year in the New America Foundation’s playbook, a guide published by Ben Lennett and Sascha Meinrath who were advisors to the Obama campaign on tech issues. The cost of the fiber optic cables will still be paid by private companies, but it will make for a much more compelling return on investment for fiber deployments in the future.
With all the new roads the Obama administration is proposing to stimulate the economy, this certainly seems like an idea they should implement sooner, rather than later. What do you think?
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Zazubovich
May 26, 2009 at 4:59pm
The federal government pays for most road projects, even for residential streets in some cases. Some local buy-ins are less than 3% of the project cost, with the feds picking up 97 percent. Fiber optics? Why not!
Mighty BOB!
May 26, 2009 at 3:48pm
This idea is awesome on paper. We can only hope that if implmented it would be as awesome in practice.
Phated1
May 26, 2009 at 9:18am
This isn't going to improve speeds greatly, This is just going to raise the cost of road maintenance.
Assuming the bill requires all road Repaves to install Fiber lines, its going to skyrocket the price of road repavement. Which will in turn cause local goverments already pressed for money to NOT replace that road thats falling apart.
Its a good idea in theory, but I'm sure in practice its going to fall through.
ahenkel
May 25, 2009 at 2:45am
Oh no Obama wants faster internets so he can bring us socialism quicker. On a more serious note. I live in a rural area and we've had the same non upgraded hdsl connection. I would kick a small child to get the cable or phone companies to upgrade the infrastructure out here but honestly I think they could care less. Its way too much investment for too little pay off. I'm pretty sure out of the 5 closest people to me I'm the only one on broad band.
water_man3
May 24, 2009 at 1:19pm
Hmmm, I guess our representatives CAN come up with good ideas for our collective benefit that won't cost an arm and a leg! I believe I will support this bill.
steraes
May 26, 2009 at 11:19am
I didn't and don't ever intend to offend people. It's just that I thought the US was all "HIGH AND MIGHTY", and that nobody can beat the US. Obviously that is wrong. The US isn't the greatest. We need to do more than what we already do, to stay on top. If Korea can be #1 at the fastest broadband speed, then why can't the US be #1. Probably because the government is to dumb to keep up with changing times. More and more people have internet now than they did 10yrs ago. We need to stay on top of technology.
konata
May 24, 2009 at 3:23pm
What's wrong with Korea having the most broadband penetration?
It's quite logical if you think about it:Korea has a huge IT-driven economy.
Korea is densely populated due to the small amount of land.
Due to the previous note, less optic cable is needed to provide access to more people.
I dont think you meant to offend people, but do read what you type before commenting.
compro01
May 24, 2009 at 7:49pm
I can point to many US cities (New York, San Francisco, Patterson, Jersy City, etc.) that have very comparable population density (New York and Patterson are <b>denser<b> than Seoul, which is the largest and most dense city in SK.), yet their broadband still lags far behind.
Vegan
May 24, 2009 at 9:24pm
It costs a lot of money and disturbance to tear up those places. People throw a fit when they try to widen freeways or whatever and want to relocate people for a larger good, just as one example.
Balgaroo
May 24, 2009 at 12:10pm
I thought this was way too good of an idea for a republican to have/present.
Nuxes
May 24, 2009 at 7:53pm
From Speedtest.net
Top Countries by Download Speed (Average)
- 1. 17.83 Mb/s Korea, Republic of
- 2. 16.07 Mb/s Japan
- 3. 11.55 Mb/s Sweden
- 4. 11.28 Mb/s Lithuania
- 5. 10.33 Mb/s Romania
- 6. 10.11 Mb/s Latvia
- 7. 9.40 Mb/s Bulgaria
- 8. 8.97 Mb/s Netherlands
- 9. 7.59 Mb/s Germany
- 10. 7.39 Mb/s Russian Federation
- 11. 7.26 Mb/s Moldova
- 12. 7.23 Mb/s Slovakia
- 13. 7.15 Mb/s Switzerland
- 14. 7.04 Mb/s Finland
- ...
- 22. 6.22 Mb/s United States
For a lot of the contries at the top of the list, the government funded and has some degree of contol over the internet infrastructure. Now, before anyone cries "socialism!", just think about this:
corporate competition > government run > corporate monopoly
In most places of the US there is only one high speed internet provider, so the growth is stagnant. The government needs to either brake up these monopolies and let capitalism do its thing, or give the existing companies incentives to upgrade their networks.
JohnnyCNote
May 25, 2009 at 4:34pm
. . . such as Romania and Moldova, per the statistics posted above. Moldova is, or at least was, the poorest former USSR republic . . .
strykyr
May 24, 2009 at 10:58am
This is from a politician??? OMG. Must be some kind of joke...April has already passed...
I Jedi
May 24, 2009 at 12:09pm
Hey, hey, just hold on there a second, pal! Politicains can have some wonderful ideas from time to time to help out the U.S. Usually, though, most of them just end up fucking us even more in the arse!
Cache
May 24, 2009 at 2:27pm
Well, I suppose even a blind man is going to hit the side of a barn sometimes.
I Jedi
May 24, 2009 at 10:26am
The U.S. is a really, really huge country... That's a no brainer. However, for a country that practically has everything, but is falling to a sad, solid 20th position, we need to seriously beef it up on broadband upgrading. I sincerely hope Congress chooses to approve this, as news, shopping, and communication become more and more mainstream on the Internet. Of course, hoping for Congress to make the right move is like asking a company to care about its customers more than its profits.
teknomagik
May 24, 2009 at 10:55am
We canucks are not the backwater lumberjacks and Eskimos you 'mericans think we are. Another stunning example of Canuck technological awesome-ness is one of our ISP has the highest top end speeds in the world, second only to a Japanese ISP iirc.
Now I realize that top end speeds are just there for marketing and are rarely ever achieved, but that’s not the point.
Good to see the US gov't bringing fiber to the masses however, hopefully everybody will be able to take advantage of docsis 3.0 soon :)
JohnnyCNote
May 25, 2009 at 8:59am
We canucks are not the backwater lumberjacks and Eskimos you 'mericans think we are.
I reccall the UN listing Canada as the best country to live in, based on standard of living, crime, access to health care, among other indicators.
If only my family wasn't insistent upon living in Florida . . .
I Jedi
May 24, 2009 at 12:08pm
Well, I'm glad to know that your country is doing great. Then you guys don't mind providing aid to the U.S. after Congress finishes with us and we become a third world country because of all our debt, do you?
konata
May 24, 2009 at 3:26pm
How does one apply for Canadian citizenship?
I planned on reapplying to Korean citizenship... but I would have to serve for 2 years in the military... (I was born a Korean citizen.)
Morete
May 25, 2009 at 5:28am
I have to bring into question whether an internet speed above 12 Mbps will really help the average PC download, upload and browse faster. I think that when the average PC bought off the shelf at a local retail store or online is hooked up to a 12 Mbps connection, anything above that would be pointless. In the state where I live in the U.S. we have available 20 Mbps and below. I have used the 12 Mbps for a few years, then I decided to upgrade to the 20 Mbps speed when it first became available, for a period of six months and went back to 12 because there was absolutely no difference in performance. Yes, my clock speeds were higher using the internet speed test programs, but in reality...how much data can a PC handle at once? Every byte of data has to be processed and there are many internal components in a PC that has a process it follows. Motherboards, CPUs, GPUs, Memory, Chipsets, Antivirus/Firewall software, Internet Browser, all play a part in how fast this data can be processed. Many people don't have high performance PCs yet, and PCs that are bought off the shelf, frankly are not capable of processing that much data at once. I admit that it's kind of nice to have the bragging rights with a higher speed connection, but I'd rather save the money until I own a high performance PC.
compro01
May 26, 2009 at 8:05am
Provided you're just browsing plain old websites, yes, there is a point of overkill where you will not notice any difference, especially when the connection latency is longer than the transfer time.
Though your arquement on the computer's limits, you're about an order of magtitude off.
according to HDTach's sequential write test, my drive (500GB seagate 7200.10, which isn't an uncommon drive) gives an average write speed of 52MB/s, which would allow an internet speed of up to 416Mb/s to be taken advantage of in terms of downloading (provided the source can keep up, which is quite possible on a well-populated torrent).
also, streaming HD video. to stream bluray-quality video, you would need a minimum of 40Mb/s.
Furthermore, don't forget about multiple users. this is the same reason why i think transfer caps are BS. 250GB seems like a lot for one person (and don't even get me started on time warner's crap), but divide that by 5 or 6 people and it gets pretty tight.
almax
May 25, 2009 at 6:25am
We can therefore assume the USB 2.0 rate of 480 Mbit/s (60 MB/s) from back in 2001, is way beyond today’s average off the shelf computers ability to handle?
And, due to the last decade and a half of only moderate improvements in computing power, apparently the ability to process the data rate of 100 Mbit/s Ethernet, introduced back in 1995, is not yet achievable.
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