Inalienable Rights

Money. We mostly do things to make money. If a few people can make more money by screwing over some subsection of the population, that's how we do it.

Tom

 

Actually, Canadian firms have invented more than their fair share of Internet and data related products. The now-defunct Nortel had a wide range of leading-edge Internet access products

The Canadian company Research In Motion has the BlackBerry

So, you would think that every square foot of Canada would be Broadband access, right? WRONG. Various Crown Corporations just loved giving billions of dollars away to foreign countries to set up phone and internet access (Industry Canada, Export Development Agency, Canadian International Development Agency, etc), but mostly ignoring such access in their home country

Once you get outside of major population areas of Canada, you're lucky to even have a cell phone signal, let alone Internet access

 

The U.S. domestic cell phone market was initially hampered by very stiff competition from an extremely high quality, universal coverage, low cost land line system. And our cell service continues to be hampered by a huge geography, with many mountainous areas of low population density that still cannot be economically served.

In contrast, there are many markets on other continents with compact geography, high population density throughout, and that entered the cell era with land line systems of low quality, high cost, and/or incomplete coverage. Pent-up demand in many of these markets caused cell service to explode, very quickly surpassing the adoption rates and feature availability of our own market.

Having been part of the cellular industry until the Internet and Telecomm meltdowns of 2000-2001, I must challenge the 'we invent all this stuff' comment. Japan and Europe were just as prolific in the inventions and developments as we were.

 

As Fuzzy mentioned, in the EU market most of it is highly concentrated, which makes providing cell service (3G, 4G, etc) very easy. When you have a geospatially distributed customer base, the incremental cost to provide service quickly becomes astronomically expensive, with little hope of ROI

Now, in the case of do-gooder Canadian Crown Corps legally exempt from audit and investigation, I'm all in favor of closing those do-gooder Crown Corps and putting the money (Tens of billions of dollars a year) into Canadian infrastructure

Of course, we'd have to find alternative employment for those hordes of pencil-pushing Crown Corp unionized employees. I'm thinking we could send them into sewer pipes to scrub all the poopies out

 

I travel many places in the U.S. that lack cell service. NIMBY has nothing to do with it, and the only regs that prevent service are National Parks and Wilderness restrictions. The rest is simple economics.

If the marketing projections had been accurate, mobile broadband service trials would have been rolled out here before the Dot Com bubble fully deflated, and within months of the Japanese trials. I kept wondering how that could happen before our test equipment was developed.

It didn't take long to get the answer. The Marketing folks, with their estimates of the market size, their confidence of what the customers would pay, and their development schedules, were guilty of Irrational Exuberence. Many of the rest of us were visiting the unemployment office.

 

Ok, for example, rural access to broadband internet. People still think of using phone lines, wireless, whatever. But in rural areas, almost everybody has electricity. Why not provide broadband over power lines?

FCC gives Broadband Over Power Line a second chance - Ars Technica

Never mind amateur radio. Teleco's also whine they have exclusive right to market such service, along with cable co's, even in areas where they will never in a zillion years think of offering such services

BPL would be ideal for rural areas that currently have dial-up, or nothing at all

 

Perhaps troposcatter: "Honey, are there any sun spots? I want to use the Internet."

Tom

 

Duh, of COURSE! Troposcatter!

They could have reused all that White ALICE equipment. Who wouldn't like a giant "picket fence" antenna in their back yard, complete with a transmitter shack full of humming vacuum tubes?

 

Not bad. I've heard $10/foot elsewhere much more recently. Good thing my dad's house, long ago, was covered by the REA legislation.