The internet revolution changed the whole face of the media, but as Al Gore said in 2000, the Internet needs a major upgrade.
Speed. Upload speed especially, = freedom.
The more upload speed each of us has, the more freedom we have to communicate with the rest of the world.
If we each had a fast enough speed, for example, we wouldn't have to worry about counting on somebody like let's say youtube to host our videos, because we would have enough ability all by ourselves, from our own computers, to allow millions to watch anything we made.
A site like DailyKos would be easily able to run on a home server and bandwidth would not be an extra cost at all.
The paltry 100 Megabit per second speed that the FCC says it wants to see the country achieve in TEN YEARS from now, is so slow that there are already other countries with millions of users at those speeds today. We can do so so much better.
How disappointing to see the FCC set such a low low low goal for our internet speeds in 10 years.
Even today, we could already have TERABIT per user speeds using a purely optical fiber network. I look fondly at the new 322 Terabit Cisco router and can imagine how much of a speed increase just that piece of equipment could give us in certain aspects of the internet.
We already have much of the fiber necessary.
I'm just sad that they have set the bar so very low. so low, indeed, that the 100mbit speed is already something many other countries have TODAY... and to hope to have that in TEN YEARS? seriously? come on guys. think BIGGER... we should IMMEDIATELY do at least the GIGABIT UP/DOWN that Google wants to offer, and move rapidly faster from there.
Where is the challenge to good old American Ingenuity? When JFK Set a goal of landing on the moon and safely returning by 1969, we had to invent whole entire new technologies, that never existed before that. We had to figure out how to get a computer that was the size of a minivan down to under the size of a basketball. We got the microprocessor out of that by the way.
When George Whitesides set out to get medical diagnostic test costs down from hundreds or thousands of dollars per test, to pennies per hundred tests, he invented whole new technologies. See his video. He calls his system "zero cost diagnostics."
When we try to deploy a multi-terabit national internet, we will have to invent some new technologies, and we will love doing it, too.
But we cannot count on the phone and cable companies to bring us there. they never wanted this network in the first place. they dragged their feet for years. they didn't like people even using modems in the 90's, but the internet was practically forced upon them. if you expect them to put their own lucrative content businesses in jeopardy just so individuals can have more freedom to communicate, i have a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.
We cannot ever get faster if we allow the phone and cable companies to keep using their proprietary protocols because those protocols limit end users on what devices they connect to the network. how are we ever going to have speed innovation, if we are locked into using cable boxes designed 15 years ago, which are "just fine" for the monopolistic giants?
The call to action here is to write your representative, and senator, and to the fcc on their open internet website and call for OPEN STANDARDS for our NEUTRAL internet. what that means is we should BAN (or force OPEN) proprietary protocols such as DOCSIS, which is, for example, what the cable companies use for "their section" of the internet. there shouldn't be any "their section." the problem with them using a proprietary protocol, is you and I cannot go to the store, or a website, and purchase a faster network interface card for a pc whenever we want. we cannot innovate, without waiting for the cable and phone companies. They control the whole system through their proprietary protocol. that's the worst kind of violation of net neutrality out there, and it must be stopped. can you help?
PS: I posted this on OPENINTERNET.GOV and could really use your vote-up, so the FCC takes notice. Please participate over there!
PPS: Please vote up my other progressive posts on openinternet.gov as well. there recently has been a rash of right wing trolls on there, voting down people's progressive ideas, and we need to fight back.