And in a lot of cases the rural areas aren’t rural any more. I border on a former rural area which has become filled with urban sprawl McMansions for people who don’t want to have neighbors. However the heavily subsidized by us rural electric company is still there helping out the “farmers”.
We have a similar situation with misuse of the telephone USF (the fee collected from telephone users to pay for “Universal Service”. Friend lives in an area about 15 miles from here that is heavily built up. And was rural maybe 50 years ago. I told him how we had ported out home numbers to a VoIP carrier and he asked for help. I checked and found there was no competition of any sort in his area. I thought maybe the database was wrong so I checked with the carrier we use and found that since my friends phone service was from a rural electric carrier no one was allowed to compete. We checked and also found out that the telco gets a cut of the USF to help the “farmers”. From: Maglinger, Paul [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, March 16, 2010 3:35 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: National broadband We are paying for it. The government subsidizes telco and electric services for rural areas, otherwise they’d still be doing homework by kerosene lamps. From: Murray Freeman [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, March 16, 2010 2:19 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: National broadband Well, it seems to me that the Internet being a great tool which is available to be used as needed, WITHOUT government interference, it should be made available to everyone. HOWEVER, the great majority of people today have a telephone line in their home or a wireless cell phone, or BOTH! Why not internet access as well? I'd like to think that I/we are not paying for the telephones wired or wireless that poorer people have, but I suspect that one way or the other we are paying for it. We just aren't aware of that. Frankly, the biggest use of the internet according to the "experts" is porn, not to mention spXXm and virii! So as to the wonderful reasons mentioned, I sincerely doubt that internet access for the masses is going to have much of an beneficial impact. But everyone should have internet access.And we're going to pay for it whether we want to or not! Murray _____ From: Micheal Espinola Jr [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, March 16, 2010 1:55 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Re: National broadband I dont think that my tax dollars should go to giving everyone Internet access. -- ME2 On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 11:39 AM, David Lum <[email protected]> wrote: Thoughts, comments? http://www.broadband.gov/ David Lum // SYSTEMS ENGINEER NORTHWEST EVALUATION ASSOCIATION (Desk) 971.222.1025 // (Cell) 503.267.9764 ---- Content & Policy Scan by M+ Guardian ---- Millions of safe & clean messages delivered daily ---AV & Spam Filtering by M+Guardian - Risk Free Email (TM)--- ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
