North American Network Operators Group
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Re: So why don't US citizens get this?

  • From: Scott McGrath
  • Date: Mon Jul 28 10:37:22 2008
Actually ubiquitous power came from a government mandate and funding known as the Rural Electrification Act. The former Bell system left many areas of the country without telephone service and the same act set up the "Rural Telco's" to this day I am served by "Kearsarge Telephone Co" at home which serves a large chunk of Central NH.

Ultimately the 'Market' always fails in corner cases and Government in the form of regulation and sometimes funding needs to step in as human nature never changes and greed still dominates in the end not so much that these areas are unprofitable to service it's just that with the same investment more money can be made elsewhere. From a accounting standpoint this is rational behavior from a societal standpoint this behavior is counterproductive. Government is not 'The Answer" as many people feel but it does have a valuable role in balancing financial and societal needs.

One of the societal needs today is reasonably priced high speed internet otherwise the US will fall behind in developing next generation network services as low speed DSL simply does not get the job done reasonably priced does not mean $100US for a 384/768 "Business DSL" which is the only thing I can run VPN over. This infrastructure is important today as electricity was in the 20's and 30's





Laird Popkin wrote:

On Jul 28, 2008, at 9:54 AM, John Levine wrote:

In article <[email protected]> you write: 
Sort of makes one wonder how the US came to have ubiquitous roads, or
power, or water distribution...

Oh, but that's different. They were important.

Or, to be more specific, people everywhere need power and water and were willing to pay for them, so other people started companies to provide them everywhere. Roads are a little more complicated - the basic roads were there due to demand, but the highways got built because the Army argued that without highways they couldn't move troops and supplies to defend the country in case of an invasion. The same trick got science funded for a while... :-)