Forget Oil Prices, America Spending Fortunes on Data
The New York Times has posted an opinion article that really shocked me, considering I never thought about it before. Americans are paying more and more to send and transmit data – sometimes more then the total of their utility bills.
Think about it. Your cellphone bill is somewhere inbetween $75 – $120 a month, your “triple play” cable bill is an additional $100 a month (If you are lucky enough to have a triple play in your area) not to mention any other data related charges you may have – such as a beeper, separate fax line, etc.
Like energy, bandwidth is an essential economic input. You can’t run an engine without gas, or a cellphone without bandwidth. Both are also resources controlled by a tight group of producers, whether oil companies and Middle Eastern nations or communications companies like AT&T, Comcast and Vodafone. That’s why, as with energy, we need to develop alternative sources of bandwidth.
Wired connections to the home — cable and telephone lines — are the major way that Americans move information. In the United States and in most of the world, a monopoly or duopoly controls the pipes that supply homes with information. These companies, primarily phone and cable companies, have a natural interest in controlling supply to maintain price levels and extract maximum profit from their investments — similar to how OPEC sets production quotas to guarantee high prices.
