If you are tired of your choices of internet providers and want something faster, you are probably tired of waiting for some huge telecom company to install something faster, since they are perfectly happy making money off their old, slow connections. But a group of rural farmers in England took matters into their own hands, and now they are getting 500 Mbps connections, for about the same amount of money as most Americans pay for their pokey internet that runs around 1/100th the speed.
But of course, instead large telecom companies here are spending their money bribing politicians so they can block such community internet systems.
6 Comments
Thanks for pointing out this important and often overlooked problem. When entities have enough money and power to kill all competition and innovation in order to protect their own interests at the expense of everyone else there is a very big problem. It also points to the need for government to step in where private enterprise cannot or will not.
and who says the gov’t isn’t against free markets? We’ll I guess the free markets actually do work because one market bought out the other by paying the regulators to squeeze out competition and keep the flow of money back into the media for campaign advertising. Its Brilliant, and endless loop, The Law of the jungle.
What’s really cool is that it costs our overlords only a FRACTION as much to buy U.S. politicians or time on Faux News as it would cost them to implement even such a two-bit improvement to benefit consumers.
So ask yourself – given that “bottom line” is all that counts to such folks, guess which option they’ll choose.
Now apply such thinking to healthcare and you know why America ranks 35th (near the bottom of the bottom) in the world’s industrialized societies on measures such as infant mortality rate and longevity. SURPRISE!
What’s new? Even municipal broadband has been under attack for over a decade.
Dan, what’s new is that people are doing something about it.
Are you saying this isn’t interesting if it isn’t new? Sometimes I think short attention spans are the enemy of good politics.
IK, no, just expressing my frustration. (badly)
Good story, and very glad some people are able to do something about it!