QOTD: "When was the last time you thought to yourself: “My cellphone and/or Internet provider really provides great service for an affordable price?”. Odds are, unless you are a lobbyist for AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, etc… the answer is “never, what are you kidding?”. The reason behind this is that most telecoms, because of the infrastructure investment necessary to support a network, often operate as semi-monopolies with a tremendous barrier to entry relative to competitors. Oh and they give gobs and gobs of money to politicians, and studies show that this has a tremendous positive effect on policy for them.
This helpful policy, as well as an apparent complete lack of political will to break up and/or regulate these industries, is the reason you still have to pay to send text messages–even though these single-digit kilobyte messages cost telecoms barely any money at all. It is also the reason the US falls behind virtually every other first world nation in terms of average broadband speed, and also why even that limited service is so expensive, and telecoms are able to flat-out lie about the speeds they offer. While this may seem like a middling critique about the speed at which we send cute cat pictures and watch porn, keep in mind that the 90s, also known as the only period of really substantial growth in the past 40 years, was fueled by higher speed and expanded access to the Internet." --BusinessPundit
"Larwyn's Linx: Awaken a sleeping giant..."
1 Comment -
http://www.rwonline.com/article/cole-questions-fccs-math/24747
5:33 PM