Every time I visit China, Japan or
South Korea, I am always stunned when I return to the United States. There,
aside from the preserved older buildings, their central cities are modern. The
bridges were built with the latest technology. Potholes are rare. Mass transit
is ubiquitous and running well. Infrastructure gleams. Buildings are new and
architecturally are cutting-edge. And their internet speeds, from downloads to
latency, are staggeringly fast. Government spending on tech research and
improving the quality of public education at all levels is exploding.
Here, not so much. OK, China’s
hinterlands cannot make the same boasts, but South Korea and Japan put us to
shame everywhere. We give billionaires massive tax cuts as major school
districts around the United States face rolling teacher strikes, with class
sizes in many public schools hitting averages of over 40, even 50, kids in a
classroom… with antiquated or unavailable modern computers and laboratories.
Our infrastructure is a joke, and the push for “austerity” in order to make the
rich richer has dropped our public schools from first to nineteenth globally
and falling fast. We’re rapidly becoming uncompetitive with the rest of the
world.
Hard to understand from the country
that invented the Internet and mobile telecommunications, designed the software
that enabled most of it, invented social media and smart phone technology and has
until recently led the world in digital entertainment, from gaming/VR/AR to
audio-visual content of all shapes sized and formats. We speak in terms of
megabits, 100 is a marketing hook; they speak of gigabits as their new normal –
1000 times a megabit. We brag of our upcoming 5G telecommunications, scheduled
to be spreading online next year – 20 to 100 times faster than 4G with almost
no latency (the time from ask to receive). South Koreans laugh.
“Although she’s an expert in
telecommunications policy, [Harvard Law Professor Susan] Crawford was stunned
at what she witnessed in South Korea [at the last Winter Olympics], which she
describes as ‘the most wired nation on the planet’ — flawless cellphone
coverage even in rural areas, real-time data transmission, driverless buses
using the latest communications technology to smoothly avoid pedestrians and
evade obstructions.
“‘I’ve never been embarrassed to be
American before,’ Crawford [said] recently. ‘But when Korean people tell you
that going to America is like taking a rural vacation, it really makes you stop
and worry about what we’re up to.’… [America’s] global leadership in internet
technology was being frittered away by placing tech policy in the hands of
profit-seeking companies with no incentive to keep the U.S. on the leading edge…
“[Her latest book,] ‘Fiber’ describes
how that trend has intensified. The risk is even greater today, Crawford
writes, because the data-carrying capacity of the next generation of fiber
optics, known as ‘5G’ (the fifth generation of wireless telecommunications
technology), will give countries that invest in those advanced networks a huge
advantage over those that don’t. It’s 100 times faster than the existing 4G
technology and far more capacious, allowing simultaneous connections of
billions of devices.
“Which countries are investing in the
technology? For one, China, which is planning to cover 80% of its residences
and businesses with 5G connectivity by 2025. ‘While the leaders of the USA and
China rant and rave at one another, Western companies continue to work closely
with those in China, aware that 5G will be a global platform,’ observed tech
analysts at ReThink Research last month . ‘In the run-up to 5G, it has been
China’s operators, especially China Mobile, which have been a driving force.’
“As Crawford reports, America’s
experience with trying to bring fiber to its homes and businesses isn’t
auspicious. Only about 10% of the nation’s 119 million households subscribe to
high-speed fiber services, and 75% of census blocks have no access to
residential fiber at all. Households with fiber connections tend to be located
in the most densely developed and richest parts of the country — America’s ‘digital
divide’ has turned into a chasm.
“This has happened, Crawford writes,
because the U.S. hasn’t turned the building of its optical fiber infrastructure
into a national imperative — that is, government-supervised — as it did its
highways, airports, dams and bridges. She draws comparisons to the government
initiative to bring electrification to rural communities in the 1920s and
1930s.
“Electrification, she writes, ‘followed
a set pattern: municipal buildings and businesses first, wealthy urban dwellers
next, then poorer urban dwellers, and last of all, rural homes and farms.’ That
commercial model resulted in 90% of farmers in the 1930s lacking electric power
and even poorer sections of thriving cities lacking appliances we take for
granted — refrigerators, electric cooking and heating. One result was the rise
of public power systems, just as one result of the spotty rollout of fiber
connectivity today is the emergence of municipal broadband.
“By ceding telecommunications
infrastructure to big, monopolistic carriers such as Comcast, Verizon and
AT&T, the U.S. government has effectively given up its role in information
technology policy, Crawford says. The Federal Communications Commission — under
President Obama as well as President Trump — allowed the companies to develop
vertically integrated systems in which they own the distribution systems as
well as the content moving over those systems; Comcast owns NBC Universal,
AT&T owns CNN and Warner Bros., and Verizon owns Huffington Post, Yahoo and
other former AOL properties.
“‘These guys’ plans will be to have
islands of exclusive content,’ Crawford told me. ‘You will join the Comcast
world when you’re born, or the AT&T world.’… That control removes the
incentive for the internet carriers to spend much to upgrade their distribution
networks to fiber, she argues. ‘They’re looking for ways to make more money out
of the same physical infrastructure, not for ways to expand that infrastructure.
They feel they’ve reached the number of people they want to serve, and now
they’re just looking for how to make more money from them.’
“That’s a critical problem, because
although 5G networks serve wireless devices, they still need extensive land-based
fiber systems — in fact, much more extensive systems than the existing 4G
technology. ‘It may sound paradoxical,’ Crawford writes, ‘but the future of
advanced wireless services depends completely on how much fiber is in place.’
“At the moment, there’s not enough of
it in the U.S. to meet the needs of 5G, and the big private companies will not
and cannot raise the private capital needed to build more, at least not from
investors looking for a quick return on their money. Basic infrastructure ‘requires
patient capital,’ Crawford observes.
“The answer is to bring in the only
entities willing to make long-term, patient investments: cities, states and the
federal government, the same entities that built dams, roads and bridges —
indeed, the internet itself — before it was clear how any of that
infrastructure could be exploited by private companies for profit.” Michael
Hiltzik for the Los Angeles Times, 1-17-19.
As we are learning in a complex
society, private industry can only so far. As insurance carriers go broke from
massive natural disasters, as the gig economy seems to undercut the notion of
employer benefits – from healthcare to retirement – as specialized research and
pure research are not being actively pursued in a profit-driven industrial world,
we are learning that government has to step in sometimes to solve problems that
cannot solved in any other way.
I’m Peter Dekom, and sometimes too many
cooks, especially the undercapitalized and unmotivated kind, do spoil the
broth.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment