I was actually thinking of $1/watt/mile music tax.

Oh, and I've built decent car systems but I've never overbuilt a car system like most think they need to these days.

They need to charge a fee for loud car sound systems. About a dollar a watt would be about right.

Where will he live when he grows up?

Duh, on the next island that all the boys that grow up to be solders take over. You didn't describe socialism, that is the start of feudalism. So the perfect "socialists" become imperialists, at least until all the people of they "imperialised" start demanding social security and universal healthcare. They then become an imperfect socialist state. Then the bankers and Madison Avenue take over and really fuck things up. See UK for an example.

The only thing slowing down these technologies are companies that don't want to lose the massive profits they're getting from already deployed infrastructure; They employ a wide variety of legal and financial methods to ensure that competing/replacing technology as slowly as possible.

What is slowing it down is the massive cost of the infrastructure that needs to be amortized. Deployed 3G equipment is five years old. Building out literally tens of thousands of sites costs a lot of capitol and a whole lot of very skilled labor. The logistics of swapping out equipment on top of tall poles in remote locations is daunting. When working in the industry I recall several places in Florida were marked on the project management sheets as "Osprey sites." Meaning that you can't climb that pole until the Osprey chicks hatch and move out of the nest due to federal law. OK, we have to bond a bunch of T1s for two months until we can mount the microwave links because that's the best data circuit we can get a the site and the money people demand that it gets up NOW! Just all of the microgovernmental back and forth to get the permits to build out the system takes many man-weeks. Don't even ask about getting LECs to deliver circuits.

I contracted to Clearwire for six months during their last major build out. 26,000 RF sites, 21 regional data centers. By the time we were getting on the home stretch the engineering department was already specifying new equipment for the next upgrade. We thought that 20Gb/s was enough for a regional data center, but no, now we need to get 80Gb/s through it. It moves that fast. Our microwave supplier got slammed balls-to-the-wall for a year and then almost went bust when we stopped ordering for a few months while we were waiting for the next cash input. Other ISPish companies had to hold off on deployment plans because we had bought all the capacity of a TE layer 2 switch equipment supplier for the year.

There are so many things that have to happen before the first monopole gets planted in the ground that it still amazes me that we have the infrastructure we enjoy now. You need investors to fork over cash, local permits, state utilities commission approval, frequency coordination, FCC licenses, property leases, electrical power, maybe FAA sign-off if it's above 200', available construction equipment, all the parts to build the site delivered at the site, a crew scheduled to install it, data lines from the telco to talk to it, data center space to connect it to, suppliers for the data equipment ready to deliver, all the equipment for the data center delivered to the data center, installation crew for the data center, network engineers to design the network, network engineers to turn it up, billing coders to account for the data, accounting to pay the bills and to bill, sales to get the customers, handset vendors to build and brand phones for your system, help desks for the customers, and a PR department for people that think it's all so simple to do.

Getting all this to come together is freaking hard work. I think that your comment is disingenuous, at best.

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Party lines gave way to single user land lines,

No, party lines were only used in very rural areas where the cost of the wire (copper) wasn't worth the build out. They, at best, were only 5% of the market. More correct would be that private phones (we would call them intercoms) gave way to operated assisted calling, that gave way to the automated PSTN or Public Switched Telephone Network that we have enjoyed for the last 100ish years. The "cell phone" is still part of the PSTN, just using a very advanced radio modulation format. IMTS was part of the PSTN and brought on-line in 1964. The only difference is that the sets are much smaller and the RF bandwidth is much better utilized. Packet radio has been around since the 1970s for data transmission. We've just gotten better at it. Not that much new under the sun, just more users getting a tan.

So where would you put storing messages on paper tape like the old Telex days? Ah, so many ways to skin a cat.

Hi Bill:

E-format stuff is great until you're out in the field actually doing the work. Then there is nothing like a good clipboard with the day's jobs printed out. Gotta get them signed off anyway to scan back into the E-system anyway. A lot of the jobs want serial numbers and signatures on the work order faxed back before leaving the site.

I've got a nethead.org.uk address and if I wrote the email whilst pissed, you couldn't read it. But you may think it was Welsh.

Kinda off topic but you might like the story. Amazon has this data center in downtown Seattle (they call it SAS which I won't explain because that would give its exact location.) that originally was THE data center. It's in a basement of a nondescript office block. The storage/tech room has a sign that says "Welcome to Layer Zero." I passed this often back in 2001 when I was a network engineer for Amazon. Now I'm just a field tech because I can't stand working at a desk all day, I get a call to the same building to find a T1 that was delivered to this building. All that I was given was the address, no floor, just an address and a circuit ID. So I had to get the building management to give me access to each telco room on each floor. That sign is still there. The security guard that was opening doors for me didn't understand why I was taking a picture of it. I had to send it to some other Amazonians that I worked with back in the day.

Give us the name of the company. That's the type of enterprise we want to encourage in China.

I'm of Irish decent and I wouldn't find it at all racist if someone dropped off a bag of potatoes and a case of Bushmill's. (whois my domain for the shipping address.)

So does that make it a bear cave?

A peeved UK citizen in Scotland.

Isn't that statement redundant?

So you're saying, stay out of the AV club if you want a prom date.

Nothing like your games did just south of the boarder in Washington State. Recall that the state capitol is Olympia and we have the Olympic mountain range. I couldn't venture how many businesses have the name Olympic in the area. Lots of nasty legal letters flying around back then.