Sender: •••@••.••• (Glen Raphael)
>Richard Moore wrote:
>And the alternative delivery systems are a long way from being competitive
>or widely affordable. Have you priced a cellular phone lately?
I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. A company here called Metricom now
provides wireless access to the net from anywhere in the Bay Area for about
$30/month unlimited use including rental of the radio modem. You can call
up an ISP at about 14.4k-equivalent speeds while sitting in a cafe in Palo
Alto. Or browse the web from your Newton. So who needs cellular?
How, you may ask, can Metricom be so cheap? Part of the reason is that they
use a batch of spectrum which is currently unregulated by the FCC.
The fact that cellular bandwidth is so expensive is actually a good
illustration of why we need MORE telecom reform. If television frequencies
were transferable property, the price of a cellular call in some major
metropolitan areas would drop about in half overnight. But because the FCC
effectively owns the airwaves, people who "own" bandwidth are prohibited
from putting it to the most valuable use. The end result of our current
ridiculous regulatory regime is that most of us find we have 40 or more
local UHF stations allocated to empty static, repetition of the VHF
stations, or shopping networks. And at the same time we have so little
cellular bandwidth that prices are extremely high and competition is
limited. It's time to open that up to more competition.
Here's a reference to an article about the costs of overregulation in spectrum:
ESTIMATING THE COSTS OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS REGULATION
By Peter W. Huber, Boban Mathew, and John Thorne
http://khht.com/huber/reports/telcomcosts.html
Glen Raphael
--
Glen Raphael, •••@••.••• NewtPaint - the Newton paint program!
President, Stanford/Palo Alto Macintosh User's Group (SMUG)
<A HREF="http://www.batnet.com/liberty/">Glen's World</A><BR>
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