We did focus on making the services accessible and affordable. Then phone providers and ISPs took the goverment funds and went "nah". As late as 2005 I was paying AT&T ~$9/minute to call my family abroad and up to $1 per text. If it weren't for tech companies like Skype/WhatsApp/Facebook/Google I have no doubt that would still be the case today.
>We did focus on making the services accessible and affordable. Then phone providers and ISPs took the goverment funds and went "nah"
1. I hear this narrative a lot. is there more to this? I find it hard to believe that the government gave phone providers/ISPs $$$ no strings attached.
2. giving $$$ to companies to expand their infrastructure make sense to increase accessibility, but doesn't to make it more affordable. they'll charge what the market can bear, and a few hundred million in government funding isn't going to change that, unless there are strings attached (see above). otherwise we'll end up getting better coverage/speeds, but it will still cost roughly the same.
> Ars Technica has a lot of reports about this, if you wish to learn more about it:
with all due respect, your links don't seem to be relevant. I skimmed the first few and none of them look related to the question of "did the government give phone providers/ISPs money with no strings attached?"
appears to mainly talk about unbundling rather than whether strings are attached to government grants/subsidies. at the end there's discussion about them wanting to receive grants similar to south korea, but doesn't say anything about the actual terms of the money that was given.
Comes close but seems to be isolated to a single entity, whereas everybody seems to think all the major players are doing it. Is AT&T taking the money and not spending it on broadband, in contravention of the terms of the grant? If so, was there an investigation substantiating this? Or was it simply a case of people expecting them to spend it on gigabit fiber but instead they spent it on copper lines for rural residents?
I don't know why you are so hung up on the "strings attached" part. It doesn't matter how many conditions the government imposes if no one is held accountable for actually achieving them.
>It doesn't matter how many conditions the government imposes if no one is held accountable for actually achieving them.
Is that what's happening though? Are there a bunch of strings attached but the FCC isn't bothering enforcing them? If so, can you substantiate this? At least from the batch of links from the parent post, the only requirement seems to be "needs to be spent on building infrastructure", not that we get gigabit fiber or whatever.
The major providers are notorious for not upgrading their infrastructure. The bizarre decision to "punish" centurylink by giving them $91 million is par for the course.
The absurd definition of broadband used by government means centurylink got $91 million and all they had to do was keep up with dsl capabilities. You'd hope that much money would get fiber to the home to a few communities, but nah.
>all they had to do was keep up with dsl capabilities
The terms of the settlement are bizarre, but there does appear to be strings attached to the money, contrary to what you claimed.
>CenturyLink will receive more than $91 million over the next six years to deploy 10 megabit-per-second download and 1 megabit-per-second upload broadband to 33,000 high-cost rural locations in Montana.
DSL is capable of the specs in the requirements. Centurylink has done basically nothing but maintain status quo and upgraded minimal copper and dsl connections. Wibaux montana can get satellite or dsl. Centurylink pocketed the cash and called it good.
Wolf Point has a similar situation. Montana is about to see about 300 million in federal funding and big ISPs are lobbying to slurp it up, and guess what they'll do with it? Probably bonuses for regional execs, and some marketing to make the local yokels think something has been accomplished.
>DSL is capable of the specs in the requirements. Centurylink has done basically nothing but maintain status quo and upgraded minimal copper and dsl connections.
right, because the terms of the funding seems to be that they bring access to new homes, not upgrade existing lines to faster connections. is this just a disconnect between what the public was expecting (ie. "dsl gets upgraded to fiber!") versus what was actually required (ie. "more people get dsl!")?
