Stay OUT of my Broadband!

As a libertarian programmer with experience running an ISP, I've been following the Obama administration's quest for 100% broadband coverage across the nation with rabid interest. It's an easy idea to sell - after all, what patriotic American would begrudge her fellow citizens their (ahem) *right* to fast, affordable broadband?

Let's look at the options presented so far:

"Higher education IT consortium EDUCAUSE suggests $100 billion be spent on fat fiber optic links to homes, while FreePress, a net neutrality advocacy group, has a $44 billion plan. For its part, the FCC has a pending proposal to open a swath of the airwaves dedicated to free, but filtered, wireless internet.” -Wired

Is this a joke?? I'm already bailing out the bankers, the automakers, and gosh-knows who else, and now I either have to pay for a doomed government-sponsored nationwide broadband deployment or I can witness the death of my online rights with broad-based censorship? What kind of a choice is that?

To make matters worse, we're making these multi-billion dollar decisions without reliable data to paint a clear picture of what our current infrastructure actually looks like, while failing to acknowledge the government's oft-demonstrated ineptitude and less-than-stellar track record when it comes to technology.

The whole thing is ludicrous, and it's making me crazy. Sure - it's a complex issue. There's no magic bullet that's going to instantly fix the whole system. But guess what? There is something the powers-that-be can do that actually WILL help:

Encourage more participation by lowering barriers to entry and clearing the path for last-mile providers to provide their services. To illustrate, I offer one of many experiences as a last-mile provider, doing everything in my power to broaden the reach of our broadband network whilst being consistently thwarted by governmental bureaucracy and red tape.

A few years ago, I operated an ISP in a vastly underserved rural area, using a combination of fiber and 900mHz wireless to provide broadband service. Profit margins were tight for a number of reasons - low population density, tall trees, water reflecting our signal all over the place, meandering country roads - but mostly, it was the excruciating 400% premium we paid for our source bandwidth.

In 2000, we found a much less expensive bandwidth provider with a PoP within two miles of our headend. Unfortunately, to get there we would have to run our lines under a bridge, an activity requiring a permit from the State. Not anticipating much of a struggle, we submitted the application... and waited. Every time we called for an update on our status, there was a new story - staff had turned over, paperwork had been misfiled, someone wanted us to show up in person to repeat our presentation, etc. This continued for eight years, until the permit was finally approved.

I've since moved on to a new project breakthematrix.com, but they tell me they are now waiting for a permit to hang the fiber on existing utility poles that cross a 25 foot patch of marsh designated as 'wetlands' on the other side of the bridge. Eight years and hundreds of thousands of wasted dollars later, they continue to pay the 400% premium instead of investing the money in additional infrastructure, simply because the State's permitting process is stunningly archaic and cumbersome.

This was a pretty mind-blowing experience for me, and as I see the Obama Administration pushing the glamorous ideal of ubiquitous broadband while they merrily contemplate more regulation, censorship, and billions more tax dollars, I wonder how many more mistakes We-the-People will accept before we're angry enough to demand solutions that will actually work.

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