Is a nationwide WIMAX a way to preserve Net Neutrality?

[Narkos]

Been trying to rack my head how consumers can bypass the big cable giants

[CFLDem]

1. Yes

The only reason we don't have that now is corruption.

[Philly Cowboy]

2. Yes, but....

I had WiMax (Clear 4G) as my Internet service provider when I lived in Philadelphia. I found it better than Comcast at the time, but then I did not stream video or audio either. Thanks to Sprint buying out Clear, that is no longer an option.

The problem with setting up an open nationwide WiMax would be finding the radio wave bandwidth capable to carrying all the traffic. Thanks to the FCC auctioning off most of the available frequencies to current wireless operators, there isn't wide enough open band to use. Yes, what use to be the public, yours and mine, airwaves, that the government allowed companies and people to use, are now privately owned, and there will be hell to pay if we try to take it back.

In my humble opinion, what the FCC did would be like the National Park Service selling off the parks to the highest bidder. Welcome to the Koch Brother's Yellowstone Geothermal Complex.

[Igel]

3. Probably not.

Unless they build the backbones necessary to connect cities and different areas of the country and world and don't use pre-existing backbones.

There are two parts to getting the packets to your computer: How they get from the trunklines to your house; how they get from wherever in the country to your local provider.

Most of the big anti-net-neutrality companies own a lot of the major trunkline infrastructure.

Take where I work. We have intranet on intranet on intranet. My part of the building is one intranet; it's routed locally. But the building has two parts, built years apart, with their two intranets connected to form a larger net. My school district has its own server; that's another intranet, but it's composed of a lot of intranets so it's like a small-scale "Internet"--with a district-internal cloud and web resources. If the connection to the Internet goes down some of us wouldn't notice it all day if we just look for local resources and email. Been there, done that.

I live near Houston. Email to someplace in Houston is routed locally. That's a sort of intranet--a given subset of intranets. What connects *them* is probably entirely owned by ATT or Comcast. This is where Big Data starts getting moved and where Netflix really starts to move lots of data. To avoid that, my district's intranet blocks Netflix and Hulu and all kinds of other big-data providers.

And when you get outside of Houston and want something from Oregon or Maine or Thailand you have a whole new set of "owners" where dataflow is in terabytes if not petabytes.

Piddle all you want at the twigs and buds of the tree, the really important parts are the big branches and the trunk.

[okaawhatever]

4. Obama talked about building infrastructure to provide national wireless and internet. The corps

freaked out in ways previously unimaginable. He didn't mention it too much after that. I agree, whatever it would cost us in building infrastructure would be worth it. I'm completely for it. There's no reason to pay these companies 100 per month for wireless service.