[Tfug] Sprint wireless broadband

[johngalt1]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "eric christian" <ericdanc>
To: <tfug at tfug.org>
Sent: Saturday, June 07, 2008 11:10 PM
Subject: [Tfug] Sprint wireless broadband


> Don`t you guys have something like
>
> http://www.verivox.de/
>
>
> There are several sites like this. This is how I switched
> electricity -
> from e.on (a giant) to "e-wie-einfach".
> Eric

Not to my knowledge

In the case of competitive electrical power
production/distribution, where it has been implemented in
the US, people have had poor experiences. Instead of
customers bills going down or being the same, their costs
have increased at times. There have been cases of predatory
energy resellers . http://consumerist.com/tag/idt-energy/
Arizona has delayed competitive electricity implementation
largely based on the disastrous experience that California
had in implementing "competition" to reduce costs for the
consumer.


for internet service, you can choose an ISP other than the
telecom company for DSL, but ultimately, whoever your
telecom provider is locally, is who you get.
For cable TV internet modem, the local government entity
grants an exclusive franchise to a cable TV company so there
is no competition there.
There are fixed wireless providers, such as the simply bits
and Sprint broadband, which is evolving into using another
technology currently. (the topic of this thread)
Implementation of this technology is localized.
You can get mobile phone PCcards for internet service, but
many carriers have put caps on bandwidth usage.
In other parts of the US there has been talk of ethernet
over electrical power lines, but use of this technology is
not widespread.
In other parts of the US they have FIOS, or fiber speed
internet to the home, but the telecom here in Arizona is
only in the preliminary implementation stages of a faster
internet service than DSL.

For cellphones, the US has not adopted GSM as a standard
like Europe has. Instead, we have incompatible standards,
GSM and CDMA which has devolved into a dis-synergy. However,
for 3G phones, WCDMA has been more widely adopted.

We in the US do not use DVB for terrestrial over the air
televsion like Europe and the rest of the world has, but
have made an incompatible standard, ATSC.

For geostationary satellite pay TV, again there are two
primary providers with incompatible technology standards.
This is just like the ATSC vs DVB thing. At the root, they
are some form of MPEG streaming, but they implement the
audio or video formats in an incompatible way.

There is no competition for other utilities.

So then in the US, there is little purpose for a website
like that with the exception of cell phone services.

====================================================
Seems like I have written a post on this sub-topic 
previously. I gather this is my bi-yearly update.





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