Monday, June 14, 2010

Uncle Same wants YOU!

to let him know who you access and what you send.

Together, the FCC and Samknows are setting out to provide US consumers with reliable and accurate statistics of their broadband connections. If you are interested in using one of our units to measure your home broadband connection, then please sign up below. You will get to play a part in changing the face of the American broadband industry and you also get a free high-speed wireless router!

It's worth taking the time to read through the requirements before applying. We like to think that we're a pretty welcoming bunch, but we currently have only 10,000 routers to give away, so please note that not everyone who registers here will necessarily receive a unit - we do however thank all of you for helping to make American broadband better - and if we can't send you a router this time, we'll make sure you're at the top of the list for the next round.

Link

Laying aside the paranoid thoughts of Big Brother snooping around, this is a clossal waste of money.

First, if the FCC wants to know the performance of the ISP they need to go to the server(s) of the ISP and measure the various parameters.....bit rate, errors, etc.

Why?

Because measurements at the users end, home or business, can be useless. That is, if you use AOL, for example, AOL can be performing fine but the cable between your house and the nearest SA-1 cross connect can be bad and you will have problems... or the DSL installed by the local telephone company can be bad... or... well, you get the idea. Your connection to the wide wide world of the Internet is not one huge seamless mass controlled by a single entity.

Now the folks sponsoring this know the above. So the real question is, why are they doing it? And the answer has to be that someone in government has a program they want to implement and they need the information to prove that they must spend a billion dollars of our money to solve a problem.

And if the FCC is going to set regulations and control who can do what when... well, you get the point.

And the government is just so up to date. Remember that some of those taxes on your phone bill were enancted to pay for a war... The Spainish American war... over a hundred years ago.

They can keep their routers and recording of problems that are being solved right now at no cost to the tax payer.


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