Are America’s Big Telecom Companies Suppressing Fiber?

Salon just published a new interview with Susan Crawford, the author of “Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution — And Why America Might Miss It.”
Crawford has spent years studying the business of these underground fiber optic cables that make fast internet possible. As it turns out, the internet infrastructure situation in the United States is almost hopelessly compromised by the oligopolistic telecom industry, which, due to lack of competition and deregulation, is hesitant to invest in their aging infrastructure… This is going to pose a huge problem for the future, Crawford warns, noting that politicians as well as the telecom industry are largely inept when it comes to prepping us for a well-connected future… “The decay started in 2004 when — maybe out of gullibility, maybe out of naivety, maybe out of calculation — then-chairman of the FCC, Michael Powell, now the head of cable association — was persuaded that the telcos would battle it out with the cable companies, that their cable modem services would battle it out with wireless, and all of that competition would do a much better job than any regulatory structure could at ensuring that every American had a cheap and fantastic connection of the internet. That’s just turned out that’s just not true. Since then, he deregulated the entire sector — and as a result, we got this very stagnant status quo where in most urban areas — usually the local cable monopoly has a lock in the market and can charge whatever it wants for whatever type of quality services they’re providing, leaving a lot of people out.” “Because Americans don’t travel,” she adds, “you don’t get the sense of what a third-world country the U.S. is becoming when it comes to communications.”