Forget Oil Prices, America Spending Fortunes on Data
This post was published 1 year 7 months 22 days ago which may make its actuality or expire date not be valid anymore. This site is not responsible for any misunderstanding.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.
This is an amazing notion. Think about how many of us are at work most of the time so those cable lines, phone lines and DSL lines are sitting unused while we are not there. Sure, you might record a show while you are away from home but how many hours out of each day does that happen?
On the other hand, can you imagine going back to dial-up ? What about accessing bank and utility records online ? Remember the days when you had to talk to a customer service rep. to do anything?
Yes, if you compare the prices we pay for our bandwidth to smaller countries, we pay considerably more. But how many countries are the same landmass? How many more miles of fiber do we have to lay in the States vs smaller countres. Take South Korea for example. Their internet iis way cheaper, but the country is the size of Indiana. Wiring a country like that is relatively simple compared to he daunting task of wiring the U.S. Unless people want to pay more taxes and have the government subsidize the cost of laying fiber, the “internet” companies have to recoup their losses incurred from somewhere. I think that eventually prices will drop, but we’re still a few years out from this happening.