Showing posts with label National Broadband Map. Show all posts
Showing posts with label National Broadband Map. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

New Homeowner Has To Sell House Because Of Comcast’s Incompetence, Lack Of Competition – Consumerist

New Homeowner Has To Sell House Because Of Comcast’s Incompetence, Lack Of Competition – Consumerist

A sad tale of a consumer jerked around by incumbents and misled by the U.S. government's "broadband map" -- a major and useless component of the Federal Communications Commission's 2010 "National Broadband Plan."

And the consumer might find it hard to sell his home since not having an Internet connection is increasingly becoming like living off the grid.

Let's hope the FCC's recent policy deeming Internet as a common carrier telecommunications service requiring providers to universally serve all premises can help avoid these kinds of unfortunate circumstances that leave consumers high and dry.

Friday, May 13, 2011

Battling over accuracy of broadband maps plays into hands of legacy providers

Readers of this blog know that I've long regarded so-called "broadband mapping" as well as as focusing on "broadband adoption" as strategies cooked up by the PR shops of the big legacy telco and cable companies to divert attention away from the lack of advanced telecom infrastructure. As long as people are battling over the accuracy of "broadband maps," they aren't taking matters into their own hands and money isn't being invested to construct fiber to the premises telecom infrastructure to fill in the availability gaps the mappers are attempting to document.

The Associated Press reports Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin is steamed that existing "broadband maps" -- probably including the useless National Broadband Map paid for by our federal tax dollars -- show his home near Putney, Vermont has DSL service. Not true, the guv says. So he's countered with his own state-run mapping program, BroadbandVT.org

Instead of trying to see who can most accurately map broadband black holes -- an exercise about as useful as mapping the celestial variety -- Vermonters should call upon their independent New England spirit and create cooperatives to build fiber to their homes and businesses. That spirit is apparently alive and well in western Massachusetts, where the Wired West announced this week that several towns voted in favor of moving forward to formalize creation of a municipal telecommunications cooperative to build sorely needed fiber to the premises telecom infrastructure.