Coalition says broadband means new jobs: SPRINGFIELD — Investments in broadband technology created more than 13,000 jobs in Illinois in 2010 and 2011, according to a study funded by AT&T.
The study also reported that in 2012, Illinois had almost 20,000 jobs related to mobile applications.
The study was released Thursday by a new coalition of 12 Illinois groups representing business and job creation proponents, taxpayer advocates and communications companies.
The new coalition — the Illinois Partnership for the New Economy & Jobs — formed to urge Illinois to modernize its telecommunications law.
“Illinois’ law mandates investment in the 100-year-old technology of wired telephones to your home,” said coalition chair David Vite, who is also president of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association. “Those dollars would be better used for private investment in broadband networks that are currently creating new jobs.”
The stated implication of this study is fallacious. It assumes but for government regulations requiring telcos to maintain obsolete copper cable wireline infrastructure to provide required telephone services, incumbent telcos would be able to replace it with fiber optic plant delivering Internet Protocol (IP)-based services. The outdated laws and regulations appropriately remain on the books because the outdated publicly switched copper POTS infrastructure remains the dominant infrastructure in most of the nation, much of it incapable of delivering any IP-based services.
3 comments:
Monopolies have been lying for nearly 100 years. We are 318 days away from the 100 year anniversary of the farcical and fraudulent Kingsbury Commitment. Here's to all the competitive apologists that couldn't learn from the digital WAN, data and mobile waves of the 1980s and 1990s!
This is a joke right? Don't you know that AT&T's current U-Verse service is based on the PSTN-- those old copper wires that they claim are too old to do IP.
And yet AT&T's broadband service is a PSTN-based-copper-to-the-home service.
So what if AT&T collected billions per state to do the upgrades and didn't do it. -- a bait & Switch.
This is all a play to get rid of telecom regulations-- it has nothing to do with IP.
AT&T is currently offering IP over U-Verse --the transition is happening -- but in this case AT&T is charging customers for a cable and information service -- using the monies allocated for upgrading the PSTN plant to privatizing the utility plant.
Bruce-what should be the remedy? Was there any contractual obligation or other legally binding promise to make the upgrades? If so, there well may be legal remedies via private and/or state AG action.
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