Internet Plumbing - Some thoughts

I was reading a Scientific American article on how the United States has fallen behind on Internet adoption and speeds:

Why Broadband Service in the U.S. Is So Awful

There's a similar, older article:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/16/AR2010041601316.html

but along the same theme, that we need high-speed internet or broadband in the U.S., and in many instances is unavailable or too slow or too expensive, and the FCC and our regulatory system are to blame.  I guess I agree in part, but I see it as more nuanced.

I have broadband, it's through Time Warner Cable, mostly it "works", but it can get kind of slow (and yesterday at least, even the HD TV channel I was trying to watch was having problems), so even the 1MbPS I might normally see can grind down to something a fraction of that.  It is a characteristic of the implementation, cable channel bandwidth used to carry the IP traffic for a neighborhood kind of gets saturated, things can kind of slow down. I should note in fairness to Time Warner, at times the speeds are very good, so it's kind of a supply and demand thing. Generally Netlflix (IP Video on demand) viewing can be problematical, and often the resolution, particularly for anything with a lot of action, can be less than optimal, especially in HD (Blu-ray has nothing to worry about, at least for now).  DSL is offered, but doesn't seem to work in our neighborhood, too far from the central station or something marginal in the local phone network, next-door neighbor basically gave up.  And Verizon FIOS ends about 500 meters from my house, where the lines would need to go underground, and I've been waiting for years to have them as an alternative, but they just have not gotten around to it, and it appears they're winding down their new deployments, at least for now.  So for better, or worse, I'm stuck with Time Warner.  My experience, in general, is about the same set of problems as described in the article, and other places, of a typical U.S. based cable internet customer.

This all got me to thinking (yes, dangerous doing that sometimes).  I'm not sure I'm going to blame the FCC, oh they don't get totally off the hook either as they haven't been doing a very good job, but the problem is not really caused by them, and we are all feeling our way on how best to adopt to the new technologies.  To me, this is a problem where we have not in the U.S. found a model or a set of regulations that encourage the fast and cheap delivery of internet.  The technology is pretty clearly there, I run a 1GbPS internal house network in my house (1000x faster than the nominal speed coming in), it's not Asymmetric at all, and the 16 port switch it's on cost lest than $100 (that's less than 2 months of my internet bill).  High speed, cheap, ethernet is available for maybe $25 a port, total.  I'm not running a managed switch, but it's not bottom of the line, either.  But actually, the incentives for the cable company are to not provide cheap and unlimited high speed internet, when you think about it.  First, if you're a monopoly, you charge what the market will bear, not a penny less.  Second, if there was uncapped, net neutral type internet connection were available, customers would switch away from TWC's own offerings for video on demand, etc..  So how do we  fix this?  What do we look for by the FCC or at least the U.S. government?  We have to come up with the right regulations or laws to put the incentives back into providing the fast internet, something along these lines:

1. Don't allow Internet Caps (maxes per month, so long as the usage is legitimate or protected)
2. Require Net-Neutrality (or specify that it's made available for a nominal extra charge)
3. Standardized offerings (let the industry work out and specify the grades, but something like:)
• Basic Broadband:  Minimum of 1MbPS download, 100kbPS upload, 98% of the time
• Enhanced Broadband:  Minimum of 2MbPS down/200kbPS up
• Fast Broadband:  10MbPS up and down (Fast Ethernet)
• Very Fast Broadband:  1GbPS up and down (Gb Ethernet)
• Business Class Broadband:  10GbPS up and down (Ethernet)
4. The company could make non-standard offerings, but it must offer at least a subset of the above standard offerings, and it must either provide either a standard ethernet connection, or a box to convert to that, as part of its pricing.  All advertisements that show or discuss the non-standard offerings must show the standard ones and pricing in a legible (10 pt or higher) table, or a URL directly to the same.
5. Don't allow localities to add charges or prevent internet connections via taxes, local laws, or rules, including right of way, at least for Standardized offerings (interstate commerce based laws, since the internet is used frequently for interstate, national, international communications and commerce) 
6. In areas where there was no competition in Broadband, from at least 3 providers, prices and offerings would have regulated maximums, set by the FCC, based on housing density.  
7. As an incentive, the U.S. government would subsidize the installation of high speed internet to Schools and rural or semi-rural areas, or other connections that would not be financially feasible otherwise, companies or individuals could apply for a grant to connect to internet hubs, but any subsidized connections would be open after a recovery period to other providers. 

It's probably the last three that are the key to real competition.  We have to come up with a system of incentives and a set of rules eliminating barriers to higher speed internet.  If people can pay more and get more, they'll do that.  It's pretty clear that the internet connections will become over time (and for competitiveness, perhaps already have) more important to consumers than telephones (which were highly regulated) and TVs (moderately regulated), as the internet can provide both.  We need to find a way in the U.S. that anyone can get an internet connection, at steadily higher infrastructure speeds and feeds, reasonable latencies.  To that extent, it becomes a little like the Finnish model:

CNN: Fast Internet access becomes a legal right in Finland

This is really where we, in the U.S., also need to end up.  I think we in the U.S. are sometimes too complacent, assuming that a U.S. invention will be something we're always ahead on.  The world doesn't work that way, you have to keep working and innovating to stay ahead.  The trick is to find the right set of incentives so that our capitalist system manages to get there quickly and efficiently.