I wasn't very impressed. Comparing bandwidth to oil seems like a silly way to start (hint: bandwidth isn't something that you have to pump out of the ground in faraway lands), even if the rest of it actually contains some good points before returning to the contrived comparison in the conclusion: "Americans are as addicted to bandwidth as they are to oil. The first step is facing the problem."
It's easy to find holes in the analogy. But part of his point is that this is an easier problem to fix, because the scarcity is artificial. If we could legislate more oil into existence, that would be an easy problem to solve, too.
I'm not sure how serious an issue bandwidth really is, though. It doesn't seem to be the limiting factor in many activities.
That's the sign of a bad analogy. He should have just made his point (a sensible one) and got on with it, without what to me looks like attention-grabbing hand waving.
That's exactly right: the scarcity is artificial and will hurt any country that implements measures to limit bandwidth.
I'm wondering if we could find a study or report that measures online commerce output in relation to a country's commercially available maximum bandwidth. That could be a pretty graph to look at.
I disagree - he used the initial analogy to show why the wired-bandwidth monopolies are bad, then shows how we can avoid being bandwidth-subservient like we are already oil-subservient. It's not supposed to go through the whole article.
I don't think that its that easy to actually "legislate" more bandwidth. Bandwidth will be much scarcer in the future as most communication will go over IP. The reason technologies like IPTV are not wide-spread is because there is not enough bandwidth to scale such bandwidth hogging technologies. So the bandwidth issue is a bigger problem which cannot be solved with just legislation. You need legislation combined with infrastructure to expand bandwidth.
Perhaps not bandwidth per se, but how much of your income you spend on it, taking your money away from spending it on other things.
Add up your cable, cell, internet bills. Do you make choices to not do or buy other things in order to pay those? Sounds similar to the "hard choices" that get talked about on the evening news due to increasing gas prices.
> I'm not sure how serious an issue bandwidth really is, though.
He keeps going on about consumer telecom. Does anyone seriously believe that household consumption of cable TV, web surfing, and cell phones is an economic driver? Seems kinda ridiculous to me. They're just consumer amenities.
I think its a good analogy. Oil and bandwidth are intrinsically very similar with regards to the risk / regulation dynamic in a commercial enterprise that builds private infrastructure to the masses. Oil companies had to make large investments and take huge risks to explore, drill for oil, build a distribution system, etc. Similarly, ATT, Comcast and Vodafone had to take risks to lay down the pipes for a robust communication infrastructure. Bandwidth is not as scarce as, say, Oil, but still at any given time there is a limited amount, and an incremental cost associated with building infrastructure for more.
The problem in both scenarios is that there is an inherent conflict of interest when these bets pay off. At the point where every single member of a society relies on a particular infrastructure to maintain quality of life, it suddenly becomes more important to make certain this infrastructure is available than for the company to make a large profit.
I thought this context was implicit in the article. I think what the author is saying is, because of this dynamic, we the consumers need to be aware and take measures to protect our own self-interest as this dynamic plays out once again (so ATT does not become the cash machine that Exxon is.. at our expense). The "oil addiction" analogy sort of dumbs this down, but that's cool with me because as a result the author is reaching a larger audience that more cerebral arguments could not touch.
I don't think they're as similar as you paint them:
- Bandwidth, pre-wifi, was likely to be a local monopoly or at best, duopoly. Oil has OPEC, but that's a cartel at a different level.
- Tons of industries require large up-front investments.
- Oil and bandwidth are regulated in very different ways.
- Wifi/wireless, as he points out, really changes the picture in some important ways.
So, while you can draw a few comparisons, many others are invalid, and I'd have preferred his article had he stuck to the central point, rather than attempt a comparison that strikes me as a bit opportunistic in its grab for attention.
Good points, I am also with you that I personally would have enjoyed the article more without the attention grabbers.
At the same time, I think good analogies beckon more questions and push for further clarification. I got that from this article, and explored a few thoughts that never occurred to me before.
I likewise wasn't impressed. The analogy was tenuous at best, and the author made it painfully clear he didn't have a clue what he was talking about when he said:
> "A future possibility is to buy your own fiber, the way you might buy a solar panel for your home."
... and connect it to what?
I mean, what the hell was the guy thinking? A solar panel is something that sits on your house, like a TV antenna. The effect that buying your own fiber would have is about the same as buying your own natural gas lines. You can't exactly switch natural gas providers on a whim either.
Maybe I should go into business selling reporters their own fiber. I'm sure they'd go for it if I said the magic words 'Net Neutrality'. Then this author could have a nice new spool of fiber sitting in his basement, to go with the solar panel on his roof.
Perhaps he envisions local communities forming groups like Home Owners' Associations and pooling their resources to create MANs, for fast, off-the-grid resource sharing. Once a few of these spring up in the same general area--say, a few neighborhoods in the bay area--it'd take a gross failure of imagination to avoid interconnecting them.
