On 5/30/07, Harold <hmichels01@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> While at risk of straying far from the original topic I would like to
> add a comment regarding the penetration of broadband in the US.
>
> My observations are based on a report on PBS. It was probably a
> FrontLine program at least six months ago.
>
> They reported on a town in Louisiana that installed their own community
> based and financed broadband fiber-optic network to everyone in the
> town.


  Hi Harold,

   You are probably referring to Lafayette:
     http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/17/2128251


Two factors that were considered. The local telecommunications
> companies, as are all of the similar companies in the US have been
> collecting a tax (fee) on their telecommunications that was supposed to
> have been spent on upgrading the system. This tax has been in place for
> about twenty years. The companies have been putting the income from the
> tax/fee toward the bottom line on their revenue statement for all these
> years.



   The situation is somewhat of an 'emperor has no clothes' scenario.  Given
the proliferation of Fiber Optics in the 80s and the communications backbone
that was built circa 1990, the telcos were left with an identity crisis.  So
they hired Murphy Brown and began playing games with public[0].  I'm not
going to go much further into this here, as this is not a telecom forum.
What is becoming evident in this story is the role of american intelligence
agencies have in the telecom market... and I'll leave it at that.

   if you want more information, heres a good place to start:

   http://www.freedom-to-connect.net/

   -jmz


[0] A 'stupid network' is not a profitable network.  One of my favorite
papers on telecom: http://www.isen.com/stupid.html



The local companies were not upgrading the system and indicated they
> would not. The companies sued the town when they tried to implement
> their own system using a special tax the town levied on its citizens.
> The lawsuit was dismissed and work was proceeding at the time of the
> report. The installation was going in post Katrina
>
> Mention was made that the town was only one of several that were doing
> similar projects.
>
> Harold
>
>
>


-- 
.0000. communication.
.0001. development.
.0010. strategy.
.0100. appeal.

JOSHUA M. ZEIDNER
IT Consultant

( 602 ) 490 8006
jjzeidner@gmail.com