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Book details
  • Genre:BUSINESS & ECONOMICS
  • SubGenre:Infrastructure
  • Language:English
  • Pages:80
  • eBook ISBN:9781483558424

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America’s Telecommunications Infrastructure Crisis

by Frederick L. Pilot

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Overview

The United States has reached a crisis of deficient telecommunications infrastructure while lacking a comprehensive plan to address it as Americans increasingly rely on Internet-based telecommunications services. This book describes the factors that led to the crisis, how the nation is being adversely affected and offers a plan to resolve the crisis and move the nation forward.

Description

A decade and a half into the twenty-first century, the United States is more than 20 years behind where it should be relative to constructing fiber optic telecommunications infrastructure to deliver advanced, Internet-based telecommunications services. Moreover, the nation has no credible, comprehensive plan to build this critical infrastructure to ensure it adequately serves all American homes, businesses and public institutions. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, it became apparent that all telecommunications – voice, data and video – would soon be delivered by the Internet. But instead of an orderly transition to fiber infrastructure to fully support these advanced telecommunications services, a generation was wasted. Had the nation engaged in the proper policymaking, planning and budgeting, it would now be benefitting from ubiquitous fiber infrastructure and reaping the full promise and value of the Internet and its benefits for the economy, education, health care and overall quality of life. Instead, the U.S. struggles with a balkanized patchwork of incomplete, disparate Internet infrastructure the forces many Americans to connect to the Internet using dial up service that was state of the art when Bill Clinton was serving his first term as president. This book discusses the causes of the crisis including misplaced and excessive reliance on market forces, incremental and wishful thinking and public policies designed to protect the business models of legacy telephone and cable companies. It concludes with a plan for the financing and construction of this infrastructure that is as essential to the twenty-first century as roads and highways were to the twentieth.

About the author

Frederick Pilot has closely observed and participated in the evolution of Internet-based telecommunications from a consumer perspective. He has written extensively on advanced telecommunications infrastructure and its challenges and opportunities since 2006 at his blog eldotelecom.blogspot.com.