FCC Proposes Groundbreaking Free Public Wi-Fi Throughout United States; Mobile Companies Protest
Last edited Mon Feb 4, 2013, 06:58 PM - Edit history (1)
by james321
Imagine telling AT&T you're done with dropped calls, or telling T-Mobile you're done with slow data. Yes, elections matter, and the FCC is proposing something spectacular for Americans...assuming that shitting-their-pants mobile phone operators don't kill the mammoth proposal:
The federal government wants to create super WiFi networks across the nation, so powerful and broad in reach that consumers could use them to make calls or surf the Internet without paying a cellphone bill every month.
The proposal from the Federal Communications Commission has rattled the $178 billion wireless industry, which has launched a fierce lobbying effort to persuade policymakers to reconsider the idea, analysts say. That has been countered by an equally intense campaign from Google, Microsoft and other tech giants who say a free-for-all WiFi service would spark an explosion of innovations and devices that would benefit most Americans, especially the poor.
The airwaves that FCC officials want to hand over to the public would be much more powerful than existing WiFi networks that have become common in households. They could penetrate thick concrete walls and travel over hills and around trees. If all goes as planned, free access to the Web would be available in just about every metropolitan area and in many rural areas.
Think about it -- how often do you actually use your smartphone to make phone calls or texts now anyway? For many folks, particularly the younger set, smartphones are about data, data, and data. They use Skype to make calls, Whatsapp to send texts, and Facebook to stay in touch -- all on data. This is why the likes of AT&T now force Americans to purchase unlimited texts and phone minutes -- or otherwise face outrageous per-text or per-minute fees -- because the wireless companies realize that Americans are really carrying around small computers in this day and age -- the 'phone' is only an inconsequential 'app' at the bottom of your screen.
This is a Big Ducking Deal, folks:
The new WiFi networks would also have much farther reach, allowing for a driverless car to communicate with another vehicle a mile away or a patient’s heart monitor to connect to a hospital on the other side of town.
If approved by the FCC, the free networks would still take several years to set up. And, with no one actively managing them, connections could easily become jammed in major cities. But public WiFi could allow many consumers to make free calls from their mobile phones via the Internet. The frugal-minded could even use the service in their homes, allowing them to cut off expensive Internet bills.
“For a casual user of the Web, perhaps this could replace carrier service,” said Jeffrey Silva, an analyst at the Medley Global Advisors research firm. “Because it is more plentiful and there is no price tag, it could have a real appeal to some people.”
Unsurprisingly, this is a policy move that would benefit both the wealthiest Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs and the poorest individuals in America's cities and rural areas:
Designed by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, the plan would be a global first. When the U.S. government made a limited amount of unlicensed airwaves available in 1985, an unexpected explosion in innovation followed. Baby monitors, garage door openers and wireless stage microphones were created. Millions of homes now run their own wireless networks, connecting tablets, game consoles, kitchen appliances and security systems to the Internet.
“Freeing up unlicensed spectrum is a vibrantly free-market approach that offers low barriers to entry to innovators developing the technologies of the future and benefits consumers,” Genachowski said in a an e-mailed statement.
Some companies and cities are already moving in this direction. Google is providing free WiFi to the public in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan and parts of Silicon Valley.
Cities support the idea because the networks would lower costs for schools and businesses or help vacationers easily find tourist spots. Consumer advocates note the benefits to the poor, who often cannot afford high cellphone and Internet bills.
This is a policy that could transform American competitiveness and create thousands of new jobs, as well as diminishing the burden of outrageous wireless phone bills on poor Americans. Waiting for the GOP to cry 'socialism' in 3,2,1...
11:07 AM PT: Email the Commissioners to Express Support for the Proposal:
Chairman Julius Genachowski: Julius.Genachowski@fcc.gov
Commissioner Robert McDowell: Robert.McDowell@fcc.gov
Commissioner Mignon Clyburn: Mignon.Clyburn@fcc.gov
Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel: Jessica.Rosenworcel@fcc.gov
Commissioner Ajit Pai: Ajit.Pai@fcc.gov
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/02/04/1184523/-FCC-Proposes-Groundbreaking-Free-Public-Wi-Fi-Throughout-United-States-Mobile-Companies-Protest
Original updated with e-mail addresses
Note:
= new reply since forum marked as read
And yes damn-it, these airwaves do belong to US!!
http://signon.org/sign/restore-the-airwaves
?w=402
Broadcast stations and communications companies are renters, not owners. And it's time to re-write the terms of the lease.
rocktivity
you hit the nail on the head!
That goes perfectly with my analogy comparing this to the Interstate System of the 1950's. I'm stealing it 
If public broadband is too much for their little brains to handle, I'd imagine a dial-up connection would be just their speed
.. but destined to fail the cost of infrastructure alone would be massive I imagine.
End double billing on Cellular Networks ASAP it's a total piss take paying to receive incoming calls US-US and worse if the same State i.e. say NY to NY.
Governments make a tidy sum from Cellular Network Licence fees (as you know measured in Billions $$/££) for basically doing zilch if they then offered free data then Network Operators would not renew - they would expire. Although for me it would be a BOOM as I'm a Telecommunications Engineer so I'd have a Green Card ready to go 
I'm from the UK you guys pay way too much Telco Services. When I think back maybe 20+ years the US had one of the best and least expensive Telco Networks in the world.
I wish you guys luck but 'it aint gonna happen anytime soon in my lifetime!'
Sometimes I just have to step back and look at the words themselves and wonder why they are used.
Last edited Tue Feb 5, 2013, 05:18 PM - Edit history (1)
books yet!
It was "New Deal" SOCIALISTS. It was the president whom the !% called a "dictator." It was the man who said, "Organized money hates me--and I welcome their hatred."
The late great Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his cabal of commie pinko egghead democrats with a small d, whom the American people four times elected to take this country back from the rich assholes who crashed it nearly into oblivion. The New Dealers who put this country back together, fought World War II and left us a legacy of progressive ideas and programs that the 1% have yet to entirely extinguish and that we may yet restore along with our democratic heritage.
But surely you're kidding ("whoever it was" .
-------------------------------
At the time the Rural Electrification Act was passed, electricity was commonplace in cities but largely unavailable in farms, ranches, and other rural places. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 7037 on May 11, 1935, establishing the Rural Electrification Administration.[1] ...
In the 1930s, the provision of power to remote areas was not thought to be economically feasible. A 2300 volt distribution system was then used in cities. This relatively low voltage could only be carried about 4 miles before the voltage drop became unacceptable.
REA cooperatives used a 6900 volt distribution network, which could support much longer runs (up to about 40 miles). Despite requiring more expensive transformers at each home, the overall system cost was manageable.
REA crews travelled through the American countryside, bringing teams of electricians along with them. The electricians added wiring to houses and barns to utilize the newly available power provided by the line crews.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Electrification_Act
(my emphasis)
--
And here's an interesting item in that much too short wiki article: "1949 - extended the (REA) to allow loans to telephone companies wishing to extend their connections to unconnected rural areas."
Indeed, the modern infrastructure of the United States--roads, bridges, ports, electrification/power, telephone system, public buildings (city halls, libraries, schools, hospitals), etc.--was almost all created by GOVERNMENT WORKERS and OUR TAX DOLLARS, almost all during the New Deal, and some of it (such as freeways and international airports) in later expansions of the "New Deal" notion of "the Commons." U.S. corporations used all of this taxpayer-subsidized infrastructure, and all of its maintenance and expansions costs borne by you and me, to create the transglobal corporate monsters of today, who have loyalty to no country or people, and who are robbing and exploiting us without mercy, including trying to DISMANTLE any remaining elements of the "New Deal" that benefit "the people," such as Social Security, and trying to smash the idea of "the Commons" forever. FDR must be rolling over in his grave at the horrors of "privatization," job outsourcing, the Enron-ization of energy, the decimation of communities, rural areas and small farms, the requirement of possessing a million dollars to even think of running for Congress, oil corporation price-gouging and price-fixing, corporate monopoly of the public airwaves now used for non-stop corporate propaganda, and all the multiple and massive evils of out-of-control transglobal corporations.
We've got our work cut out for us, for sure, to reclaim our country and our democracy--which needs to start, in my opinion, with a REAL "Boston Tea Party" to eject corporate-run, 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines from our election system. But before we can even do that, we need to start REMEMBERING how this country became great during and because of the New Deal. Rural Electrification CO-OPS, taxpayer-funded infrastructure and a belief in "the Commons."
...but it greatly alarms me how the "New Deal" has been unraveled in recent decades, and, due to corporatization of the public airwaves and of virtually all news, information, opinion and entertainment, and the triumphs of nutballs and loss of history education in our schools, so many people DON'T EVEN KNOW what the "New Deal" was and what it did.
Point to many and probably to most good things in our country, and you will find their origin in the "New Deal"--whether it is labor rights and protections, civil rights, the public education and library systems, all the basic infrastructure of modern life, any notions we still have of "the Commons," of the "common good," of majority rule, of the equality of persons whether rich or poor, of the fair treatment of military veterans, of government's obligation to protect the poor majority from the rich assholes who would rob them blind, and much more--those four terms of the "New Deal" were THE seminal era in the creation of the U.S. as a modern, progressive country. The rich and the corporate have been trying to destroy that great legacy ever since Reagan--including obliterating any memory of it.
So I felt a bit touchy about a failure to attribute the Rural Electrification project to FDR and the "New Deal"--as if to say, anybody might have done it. It WOULDN'T have happened without them, and things would be even worse in our rural areas, and, as a consequence, in our urban areas, than they are now. They also did it right, hooking up everybody for free, and using co-operatives and government-paid workers to get it done. This is true of so many "New Deal" projects--that they not only did the impossible but they did it right--that it's impossible to name them all. Think, for instance, of the local and state histories that would not have been written, and all the documentation of those histories that would have been lost forever, but for "New Deal" jobs programs, which employed unemployed and starving writers to write those histories, as well artists and other talented specialists, in addition to manual laborers for roads, bridges, public buildings and other infrastructure. The "New Deal" saved our soul as a nation, as well as developing it physically and restoring it economically.
I really hate all this Ayn Rand "Wall Street" propaganda, that glorifies the individual rich bastard and tries to make us forget that we are A COMMUNITY and that we are happiest and more prosperous when we build things TOGETHER for the common good, pooling our talents and using our COMMUNAL money--our FAIR taxes--in the way it should be used, "of, by and for" the People.
Sorry for the rant. Sorry for the sarcasm. Yes, I agree with you (except for the "whoever it was" .
Hot dang, something to get excited about!
I know the tech companies will be doing their own lobbying, but this is still supposed to be a country of, by, and for the people. So, do we need to form a foundation just to have that high-dollar lobbying influence, too?
Thank you!
Now to figure out how to best word my emails...
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Apology accepted. Hey here's a quick reference guide to argument. It'll come in handy for the next time you'd care to elaborate your position, or not...
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