Under the radar there’s an ongoing battle between local governance and state governance, where Red states are fighting the Blue cities for control of legislation and initiatives. According to the Atlantic mag, the state legislatures, and the governors, have sway over the cities when it comes to authority as defined by the courts.
This greatly impacts efforts to support affordable access, as cities want to promote net neutrality and ubiquitous access as that best supports economic innovation and access to services online such as education and healthcare. Among other community services. Whereas Red state legislatures generally support the gigantic nationwide telecom monopolies and try to suppress city sponsored and supported access for mom and pop entities.
Perhaps needless to say PSA comes down strongly behind affordable and ubiquitous access, that enables mom and pop cloud services. An optimal system might feature very large backbone entities that didn’t prejudice local and regional cloud components. Lets have that, get the Red states and Blue cities together somehow, and get some competition into local access possibilities.
In Las Cruces at the moment, if one wants high bandwidth, there’s Comcast, and then there’s Comcast. They’ve steadily increased their “internet only” access charges…which now, in some cases, exceed what “Cable TV” used to cost by itself. True their internet access speeds have greatly increased along with the charges…but we pay a LOT more than areas with multiple high bandwidth options. Which is what you get with no competition.
Perhaps technology advances will make cable access obsolete, much as cable made skinny little copper cables to the home obsolete, more or less. POS superseded by cell access, and VOIP. In some areas, FTTH actually exists, but the platform of tomorrow is unclear today.
However, as FCC under present administration shows, support for ubiquitous access and net neutrality can be absent, regardless of the underlying technology employed.
[gview file=”https://publicservicesalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/County-urges-General-Assembly-to-pass-Tennessee-Broadband-Access-Act-Local-News-crossville-chronicle.com_.pdf”]