No alley-oop for the maverick
Sent to me by a reader; an entry here on Mark Cuban’s blog titled How to Make US Broadband Competitive – Quickly and Cheaply, which discusses current problems with US broadband infrastructure and how that relates to Net Neutrality. Okay – let’s dispense with the obvious first – Mark Cuban has a lot more money than I do, and he’s got his fingers in several different businesses which would tend to make his views more than a little biased towards his own interests, but I don’t think that automatically makes him any smarter than the rest of us. However, he completely misses the point of what the Net Neutrality issue is all about and he makes a connection between the two – broadband infrastructure and net neutrality — which really doesn’t exist.
Yes – I know this isn’t a sexy topic, but I feel it’s an important one. 
Cuban makes the argument that the reason US broadband penetration has fallen to 3rd place worldwide is because of the delivery mechanism; analog signals transmitted over copper wires. On this point he’s partially correct.
Comparatively among developed nations, broadband infrastructure in the United States is abysmal. It’s very much like the interstate highway system which is clogged with more traffic than the designers envisioned – the same thing is true for the broadband highway.
The main providers of broadband access in the US are cable and telephone companies which use an antiquated copper wire based network to deliver the following: high speed internet, analog video and audio (cable television), telephony, VoIP and other internet based apps, and now HD content – all on a copper wire infrastructure which was never designed to handle that kind of traffic, and the only way these companies are even able to deliver this much data is thru signal conversions and compression algorithms.
Each portion of the signal which travels along that copper wire into your home exists at a specific frequency and bandwidth – but in order to manage that kind of a datastream, cable companies are forced to compress the signal (squish it) down to a point where it fits into the pipe. This results in poor quality, network congestion, and slower data speeds. The only other option for television content is satellite – and as Cuban points out indirectly; there are still problems there because many cable networks still deliver the original signal in an analog format. Satellite currently isn’t practical for internet traffic, and most people basically want one stop shopping for all their services.
The answer is of course fiber.
Much of the internet backbone in the US is handled on a fiber network – tho with many of these companies being involved in corporate scandals or takeovers in the last few years, it’s hard to follow the trail of just who is supposed to maintain and manage this backbone. AT&T has become the default player simply because they had more money and were able to gobble up all these companies and they’ve basically reconstituted the monopoly Reagan broke up in the early 80’s except in a different form – but the signal must leave the digital backbone at some point and enter the world of analog copper wire to get into your home.
What we need here is Japan’s model – where virtually every home has a point to point fiber connection, and in areas not currently wired, Japan has placed a satellite in orbit which blankets Southeast Asia with gigabit speed internet access.
Verizon has attempted to do this with their FIOS product – but I don’t know enough about how that’s deployed to really comment on how good it is. I’ve heard good things, but I wonder if this is more of a band aid than a real solution.
What we need is a complete overhaul of our nationwide network infrastructure mandated on the federal level, paid for with a mix of public and private funds (much like how the original Arpanet, Milnet and Internet were built) if we’re to remain competitive in the future. Tho this comes down to supply and demand, and most people are content with what they have – but if they’d ever experienced a real internet connection like what’s available in Japan – they’d look at their cable modems as if they were still on dial-up. But with the economic and political climate being what it is — I doubt the political will exists to make this happen, but it needs to happen, and it would create jobs too.
Tho what’s most glaring about Cuban’s post is the connection he makes to net neutrality – and one would think that the guy who developed HD Net and who hired Dan Rather would get this. Net Neutrality is about what happens once we’re on the network, not about the network itself. Net Neutrality is about fair and unrestricted access to content and content providers without discrimination – and as evidenced by what’s going on with Comcast and AT&T and their restrictive and punitive network management practices with respect to bit torrent technology and in AT&T’s case, outright censorship, we must understand that Net Neutrality is ultimately an issue about freedom.
That often overlooked core principle of what it means to be an American.
or human.