[TriLUG] OT: URGENT: H.129 to be heard in Thursday's Finance Committee!

[Chris Merrill]

On 3/15/2011 12:02 PM, Bill Farrow wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 11:44 AM, Chris Merrill
> <chris at webperformance.com> wrote:
>> Think about the big infrastructures you mentioned - roads, water, gas, electric.
>> They are mature technologies whose requirements have not changed substantially
>> for decades (centuries in some cases).  Put in a water line and you can safely
>> assume it won't need to be upgraded for 50-100 years.
> 
> Not quite right: the roads are constantly being resurfaced, rebuilt,
> and expanded. Electricity distribution has gone through many upgrades
> over the years, from substation upgrades to street transformers, and
> even now smart grid tech is being rolled out to the endpoints.

I did not say these utilities do not need maintenance.  The road outside my
neighborhood has been there at least 35 years.  If they had run the latest
and greatest communications technology along that road, it would have been
obsolete many years ago.  It would would have required full-blown replacement,
not scheduled maintenance.  The same could easily happen with fiber.

My point here is that we are still in the midst of technological innovation
in this area.  Government doesn't do innovation particularly well.

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Chris Merrill                           |  Web Performance, Inc.
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