Leslie Cauley of USA Today has a cogent story today on something I've written about for ages, the Bells' continuing efforts to keep you from getting broadband. (The image is called Cracked Glass Bell. It's a 1998 digital print by artist Stephen Linhart.)
For a decade now the Bells have been using the promise of fiber to keep other competitors from serving an underserved market. As Cauley notes Americans pay more for less bandwidth than people in other industrial countries.
Cauley's story covers the entire struggle very quickly, making it a good primer for those who haven't heard my lecture. And Cauley helps readers understand the key to breaking the Bell bottleneck -- competition.
Let's look briefly at all the competitors the Bells have stopped (without delivering anything worthwhile) over the last several years:
And still we have no fiber. America has one of the lowest-fiber connection diets in the entire world, because the Bells continually promise, they spend all their money controlling the government, and then they always find other things to put their money in (like TV and wireless).
Their only competitors are cable, and the cable operators continually talk of "controlling" their subscribers and selling just private network service, not Internet service -- Internet service means access to the entire Internet. Besides, a duopoly is not competition, just a shared monopoly.
The real problem is that for a decade this has been a political struggle among elites, with no real good guys. Now that the Bells are trying to stop cities from installing fiber (as well as wireless) it's just possible this could become a true political struggle, one understood by the mass of people.
And since broadband is now a mass market, that day is coming ever-closer. And here is your slogan, ladies and gentlemen:
The Bells Must Die.
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