Broadband rant

October 18, 2005 Posted by mitch | internet | 0 Comments

I've been upset at the current state of my broadband options for a while, not sure how much I've expressed that here. Which is mostly why I bought a house in a Utopia member city. I hate Qwest, and while I have Comcast cable internet, I just find them the lesser of the two evils for broadband options... Currently I'm still looking at not getting Utopia untill 2007! Which I don't particularly like, but you can bet I'm going to be on it as soon as its availible. What brought this post about however, was an article linked up on Slashdot which links up an article about the state of broadband in America. Which we currently rank 16th!!! Now I'm not going to do any comparisons with other countries, however I must say that *this* is what you get with monopolies. We used to be 4th, and the current powers that be, think we don't want or need faster connections. The truth to the matter is, they're comfortable making $$$ and don't want to *invest* in upgrading their infastructures to continue passing along bandwidth to us lowly consumers. Why spend more money upgrading when you can spread the FUD around that customers don't want more? FUD is cheaper right? This is the exact reason why I support UTOPIA, and any other project like it. Move the infastructure into a non partial third party controlled by the citizens using it! Think of UTOPIA as virtual road ways. You wouldn't want a private company owning roads would you? They just might neglect roads to competing businesses, which is exactly the type of stuff that happens around here with Qwest. They're always going to give you the lowest price for DSL, because they own the lines, and get the right to charge fees to anyone else that wants to use them. Removing that and giving it to a non-profit, non-partial entity controlled by the users of the network means more fair competition. Giving the *users* what we want. Why? because we'll pay for what we want, and not what we dont... with Qwest you don't have the luxury.