I don’t know telecom analyst Bruce Kushnick, but I’m definitely interested in the subject of a new book he has written (and is selling himself using the Internet). In a nutshell, the topic of his book is a scam that the major U.S. telecoms pulled on the American government — and the American people — by effectively promising high-speed, fibre-optic Internet in return for concessions on licensing requirements and other regulations set by U.S. telecom regulators. Then they reneged on their end of the bargain.
Steve Stroh, who has been covering the telecom and networking industry as an independent consultant for some time, has written about Kushnick’s book on his blog, and so has veteran telecom consultant Gordon Cook, and Richard Stastny of the VOIP and Enum blog, and David Isenberg, a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, on his blog.
Given that kind of support, I’m prepared to believe Kushnick’s version of events has some truth to it, since several of the people mentioned above have said that he has documentation backing up his claims. Beyond that, it certainly sounds like something the telecom companies would do — they may even have believed it when they said it. But the U.S. certainly doesn’t have anything like the 45-megabit-per-second connections that the telcos promised.
And it definitely sheds a different kind of light on their repeated claims that Internet content companies should be paying more for access to their pipes (something my friend Rob Hyndman has written about many times). It sounds to me like U.S. consumers have already paid for it several times over.
