Golly, CEO’s say the darndest things! Qwest CEO Ed Mueller is quoted as responding to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s call for upgrading the US broradband infrastructure to 100Mbits to the home in the next decade saying: “100 meg is just a dream, we couldn’t afford it.” He went on to add ”First, we don’t think the customer wants that. Secondly, if (Google has) invented some technology, we’d love to partner with them.”
Wow.
I mean, just WOW – where do you even begin to try to get inside the head of such a stellar intellect?
Given the US is 19th in broadband deployment and speed, lagging behind South Korea and Japan where nominal network speeds to the home start at around 20Mbits/sec, Muellers’s assertion is either tragically naive or criminally negligent, or both.
The problem with people like Mueller, and in fact most CEOs is that they are disconnected from the day to day reality of what’s happening in the world. The modern world and all of the things we do in it revolves around access to data. It’s highly unlikely he has any experience developing the kinds of tools and services that would make use of such a high speed network: Movies on demand, games, online books/libraries, ecommerce, e-learning, medical and scientific visualizations and simulation – you name it, it uses the Internet and it demands high-speed networks. The higher speed, the better. The online economy is nolonger a speculative future facing possibility – it represents over 1/2 trillion dollars/year in the US economy alone – and growing by double digits every year.
The idea that consumers don’t want 100Mbit (bi-directional) broadband is absurd: the applications people want to use today range from games and video on demand to simulations and tele-presense services like VPNs and video chats. And, you know what? They want to do them all at once:
The Time: Today, 2:30 PM; the Place: Chicago, IL – Mom, a consulting surgeon, is connected to her hospital’s VPN reviewing MRI imagery and moving 50 gigabyte files back and forth across the net making life and death decisions while kid #2 is talking via video conference with kid#1 who is away at college. Kid #3 is streaming HD movies while Dad is collaborating and running real-time interactive simulations for a new system he’s building with his company’s development partners and engineers in 8 cities around the world.Does 100mbit/sec still seem far fetched? Hardly. Come to think of it, 100mbit/sec to the home should be the bare minimum speed that’s acceptible – 1Gbit/sec would be better, 10Gbit better still.
These kinds of applications are not some part of some far off future – these are things people do now: Today. Right. This. Very. Minute. They just have to do them a smaller scale or kick the rest of the family off of the paltry 5-10Mbit/sec cable-modems and DSL lines we all suffer with(*) — and pay premium prices for — today.
The notion that we “can’t afford” to build out such an infrastructure and provide these high-quality services thst will drive our economy is as close to a bald-faced lie as one can get without physically having your nose grow longer with each syllable you utter. The US consumer pays among the highest telecom fees and taxes in the world and get the fewest and slowest services of any industrilaized nation in return.
Verizon, AT&T, and the other major telecom companies demanded and were granted rate increases, tax credits and were the beneficiaries of infrastructure development fees under the Telecommunications Act of 1996 that has netted them billions of dollars. They were supposed to be building fiber to the curb to the majority of American homes to enable exactly the kinds of capabilities I described above. The Results? Nada. Zilch. Bupkis. They took the money and ran. They paid it out in bonuses to the likes of Ed Whitacre and Ivan Siedenberg while their infrastructures languished. And, to secure their markets, they got the George W. Bush administration to allow them to cut off potential competitors at the knees by reversing the Clinton era colo equal access provisions that spurred the first broadband boom in the late 1990s.
Make no mistake, 100Mbit and faster speeds (and unfettered, uncensored access to the Internet) are not a “nice to have” luxury – they are critical to our national survival. If Ed Mueller isn’t creative or insightful enough to see this, he needs to be fired. Gone. buh-bye. Ditto for any other telecom exec who would sacrifice our future on the alter of their own arrogance and lack of vision. Seriously, we have no more time to waste in this country with idiots like this …unless of course the idea of being the first “post-modern agrarian society” is an appealing one.
*
There are exceptions to this dismal picture: CableVision on Long Island, NY has a 101Mbit/sec network called OptimumOnline Ultra and Verizon has been rolling out its 20Mbit/sec FIOS system in very small and selected areas around the country — but these are exceptions that service maybe 10-15 MM people out of a country of over 350MM.
Source:
http://www.zeitgeist.com/
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