Broadband Politics

Jon Stewart, the hypocrite girly-man who blasted Crossfire for being too entertaining and Sen. Ted Stevens for being too accurate in his description of the Internet, has been called out:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Mocked by comedian Jon Stewart for calling the Internet a bunch of tubes, U.S. Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Stevens said on Thursday [...]

According to our Vint Cerf, broadband access to the Internet is “at best a duopoly.” Reality, however, disagrees with Google’s chief evangelist. See the latest FCC report on broadband competition summarized by Scott Cleland::

The other very powerful piece of evidence was in Table 15 “Percentage of Zip Codes with High Speed Lines in Service.”
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Ken Camp is an interesting guy. He recognizes that net neutrality is a “fabricated issue” but he still wants to advise “netheads” to make more influential contributions to the political process:

That isn’t the only place the Bellheads win. Look to political process. I’ve oveen wondered about our own ranks. Jeff Pulver. David Isenberg. Tom Evslin. [...]

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so:

With almost 1 million VoIP connections tested through its Web site, Brix said that about 20 percent of all calls had unacceptable quality. This is up from about 15 percent of calls made about a year ago.

Let me make this as simple as [...]

Just FYI, here’s a bit of optical fiber cable for telecom applications like, you know, the Internet. It’s a tube:

Loose Tube Optical Fiber Cable
WLC’s loose tube cable consists of acrylate coated fibers placed loosely in a gel-filled thermoplastic tube 12 fibers are respectively colored. Required number of loose tube and fibers are stranded around a [...]

T.J. Rodgers is probably the smartest CEO in Silicon Valley. So what does he think about net neutrality?

Rodgers: This is where basically the Net is not allowed to discriminate? I think it’s an obscenity. I think people that have paid for the wires and cables should able to charge whatever they want for their product. [...]

Prominent network engineers Jon Stewart and Alyssa Milano have bashed Sen. Ted Stevens for his description of the Internet, but it was actually pretty accurate. See Prof. Ed Felton’s explanation:

I’ll grant that Stevens sounds pretty confused on the recording. But’s let’s give the guy a break. He was speaking off the cuff in a meeting, [...]

Here they go again. The Neutralists are claiming that Comcast censored an ABC news segment on the sleeping Comcast technician, so we need heavy regulations for the Internet.
But like the last five such claims they’ve made, this one is also nothing but hot air:

UPDATE: ABC said they confim it was an editing error on [...]

Orlowski’s review of the Grand Old Geezer smackdown is spot-on:

Comment The rolling net “neutrality” debate brought two of the internet’s most distinguished elder statesmen together in mortal combat this week. The two gentlemen, Vint Cerf and Dave Farber, said they agreed on most things. But where they didn’t, they tried to pull the chair [...]