National Broadband. Can we afford it? Can we afford not to?
May 12, 2010
Talking with Bill the other day, I was reminded of my old rotary dial phone, and the hand-cranked phone that my Uncle had at his farm before the more modern touch-tone phone appeared which has since been replaced by cell phones and VoIP phones. Those were in the days when the big carrier services promoted universal service with a phone in every home. Now those same service providers are promoting Broadband for every home so you could switch from your landline phone to a cell phone or a VoIP phone through your computer.
We have seen access change from old fashion dial-up which merely streamed minute amounts of bandwidth, and would sometimes be busy because too many people were trying to use it at the same time. With Broadband you are continually connected, and can network your computer, phone, television, music system, or other compatible items together. Bandwidth would depend on your carrier service connection through cooper, fiber or coax cable from 20 Mbps to 100Mbps. Are only problem is that not everyone has access to these services, or can afford this technology.
In a recent newsletter article Bill and I read that the FCC was trying to develop a National Broadband Plan to ensure that all Americans have access to broadband capabilities. This plan was recently delivered to Congress with an ambitious broadband vision for the county to connect 100 million households to broadband service of 100 Mbps (at least 20 times faster than most current home connections) by 2020.
An ambitious and visionary plan but how realistic is it and with a price tag of $350 billion is it worth doing?
If we want our future generations to have more capability of working from home, their children to have access to the internet for homework assignments and classroom lessons via video conferencing for higher learning, or merely to have the advantage of networking our phone, computer, and other systems all together, then perhaps this broadband service of 100 Mbps seems like a great idea. Broadband is probably the technology that will take us further into the future, so that one day we may stand in a room and have a video chat with someone while on the split screen we watch a movie and at the desk our children search the internet for their homework lessons. This is a far cry from when we only had hand-crank or rotary dial phones and no computers.
Mary Couch’s latest conversation with Bill Taylor
