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A Look at Anti-Municipal-Broadband Marketing

posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday September 02 2014, @05:29AM   Printer-friendly
from the trust-us dept.

prospectacle writes:

The "Center for Public Integrity" has collected some examples of the robocalls, direct-mail brochures and newspapers ads that are being used by telcos and lobby groups to encourage people to vote against municipal broadband initiatives in their area.

They emphasise the "government takeover of telecommunications" and "risking taxpayers money" aspects of these proposed municipal networks. I didn't see any mention of the far greater risk, which is that these networks might work out exactly as intended and therefore take revenue away from the companies who are sponsoring these "no" campaigns. But then again, the examples posted are not the complete brochures, so I can't say for certain this wasn't mentioned.

Does anyone have real life experience with municipal broadband that they can share? Should we be thanking these companies for spending their hard-earned money warning us of the dangers?

 
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  • (Score: 2) by evilviper on Tuesday September 02 2014, @10:46AM

    by evilviper (1760) on Tuesday September 02 2014, @10:46AM (#88443) Homepage Journal

    but the actual strand of fibre can support hundreds of gigabits/sec today.

    It can support 100Gbps to a reasonable distance, but probably not much more beyond that. Baring a breakthrough in optical communications, that's about where the fiber is going to have to be ripped out, and replaced with new and improved fiber. Then we'll get into the optical version of the CAT-5, CAT-6, CAT-7 cabling upgrade cycle.

    But carriers are not going to start out by running dedicated fiber optic cables directly from the main office to your house, with plenty of extras for your future neighbors and such, so you'll be limited to a tiny fraction of that speed in the near future, and the carrier will probably need to replace much of the network they built out to get up to those speeds.

    And you'll be happy for a few years after they do, but then it'll time to rip it up and start over once again. Sure, 100Gbps sounds like a hell of a lot, now, but it won't sound remotely as astronomical in 20-30 years, when you're bitching about your old and slow telco that doesn't want to invest in upgrading their network.

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