For those of you who have missed the very informative show on PBS by Bill Moyers' "The Net @ Risk", I strongly recommend watching it. For years, we have payed the telephone companies extra money each month to keep up with technology and to provide us with state of the art telephone cables. Instead, I feel that I live in a third world country when I look out of my Brooklyn home and see the wires everywhere.
According to Moyers: "America lags so far behind the rest of the industrialized world in broadband access to the Internet. Industry watchdogs say it is a history of broken promises to bring the "information superhighway" to every U.S. home and business. Once a technology leader in the Internet revolution, the United States has fallen into the teens in the world rankings of Internet access for its citizens. In some places-among them Japan, Iceland, Korea, and the former Yugoslav republic of Slovenia-consumers get Internet connections that are significantly more powerful than what is available in the U.S. for the same price most Americans pay. Why? For one, they're using fiber-optic technology-the future of communications-while America is stuck with the same copper wires that connected Samuel Morse's telegraph and Alexander Graham Bell's telephone in the 19th century. Critics say that the telecom industry promised consumers just such a wireless system in the 1990s…but never delivered"
"America's screwed," says Bruce Kushnick, a telecom analyst. "I mean, we basically are becoming technologically deficient. We're close to the dinosaurs compared to what these other countries are going to be developing in the next couple years."
