Marsha Blackburn: On Municipal Broadband

Ms. Blackburn issued this press release recently. I'd like to ask the Congresswoman to clarify something. You are defending the states' rights, yes. But which rights, specifically? The rights to override the will of the people of a city or town? You claim to be in favor of small, local government. Yet the policies you are defending seem inconsistent with this. You are, in fact, defending the power of central government over local, and using the power of an even more remote government to do it.

I'd like to better understand how this is consistent. Why is it acceptable for the states to dictate terms to the people of their cities? I understand the legal structures are different, but that's a technicality and a cop-out. As a matter of principle, why should a remote central government be able to override the will of a local government in this one case, but not in others?

Please understand, I'm neither Republican nor Democrat, neither conservative nor liberal. Others may put me in such boxes, but when it comes to politics, I'm simply an engineer. I want things to work, I want to fix broken things. And like any observer, I can tell you that our broadband market is broken. Internet speeds in Tennessee are slow, service is abusive, and there is no market of competition to drive innovation. This map shows that the majority of the state doesn't even have two broadband options; you need far more than that to drive a free market! Further, Comcast is a clear example of regulatory capture and the continuous legalized bribery of our elected officials. We live in a government-sponsored monopoly, not a free market.

So if we live in a government-sponsored monopoly, what's so wrong with admitting that, and doing it right? It's what we do with every other utility, and they operate quite well. Several municipalities in Tennessee built local fiber networks before 2008, when the state legislature was 'lobbied' into making building such networks much harder. All these networks provide vastly better speeds than the state or national average. Some are among the fastest in the country, literally a hundred times faster than the rest of the state, and remain a point of technological pride for our state.

In short, municipal broadband works. Or at least it has some hope of working. It's perfectly clear that our current corporate ISPs don't, and never will.

So I have to ask, Ms. Blackburn, why are you fighting so hard to maintain the status quo? Right now, most of our state is locked into an unresponsive, dysfunctional monopoly, with no hope of competition to improve our lot. Those cities that have acted to improve the situation have succeeded; their citizens have better lives and more options. Yet your actions work to lock us into the same dysfunctional system. Why? What matter of principle could possibly justify such a hurtful act towards the people you were elected to serve? It's clearly not about central government vs. local government, we've established that already.

So what is it? Even if your constituents don't deserve modern utilities, they at least deserve an answer from you on this.

TV streaming boxes

I enjoy my television setup. I ripped all my DVDs to a pair of USB hard disks, one WD Elements for TV shows, another Seagate Backup Plus for movies. Both are connected to a low-power server, which has a gigabit wired connection to jacks throughout the house. Each TV in the house has a streaming box attached, including two older WD TV Live, one newer WD TV Live, and one Apple TV.

The Apple TV requires an iTunes server, which only supports limited file types. The WD TV boxes are far more flexible and easy to set up; they read files of almost any type, directly off a Windows file share. I especially recommend the newer model, which has a vastly improved user interface.

Neither seems to support any sort of randomized playlist or video shuffle, so it's impossible to set up a sort of "channel-surfing" background noise channel. If anyone knows of a player which supports such a thing, let me know!

So here's the weird part. Whatever show I'm watching will intermittently freeze. The show will stop for between thirty seconds and three minutes. After that time, the video will skip ahead by that length of time, forcing me to rewind.

Imagine, watching the latest episode of Suits. You get to the juicy part (which, let's face it, is the entire episode), and then the show freezes. And worse, when it recovers, you get a lovely fast-forward spoiler of the next three minutes.

Unacceptable!

What's weird is that it's not the network. While the video is frozen, I can VNC into the server, no problem. But the server can't read the USB hard disk! If I try to open it, explorer freezes until the video resumes.This implies that the problem is between the server and the drive.

I've had multiple WD Elements drives behave this way. The Seagate drive, however,doesn't seem to have any such problems; watching movies, I'm fine. I'm seriously considering abandoning the WD Elemenets drives except as backups.

I also had an interesting issue with the server. All three Live boxes, at the same time, stopped seeing the server shares. Any PC could access the shares, and the network cabling all remained functional. The problem turned out to be my newly-reformatted Windows 7 desktop PC. It had assumed the duty of telling everyone where all the network shares were. The server was running XP. Windows 7 doesn't speak the same language as Windows XP in this regard, so suddenly all the streaming boxes couldn't see anything. Turned my desktop off long enough for the XP server to re-establish control, and all was well. One frustrating hour, I tell you!