Could a switch to 5G be a disaster for rural areas because of lack of coverage? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / rf-microwave

author: cdev
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 12, 2018, 01:17:01 am
content: I've been reading that the push to switch cell networks to 5G could end up being a major disaster for people who live in rural areas because the higher frequencies dont have the penetrating power and it would be impossible to do what they do in cities, increase the number of cells. The result could be worse service to rural areas than they have today.. (this was my experience with the switch to GSM too, much less coverage when you get out of major urban areas too.. while the old TDMA phone I used to have could often find coverage as much as 20 miles from a town.)Anyway, my areas experience with the switch to digital TV was similar, because the digital TV signals are much more line of sight than analog signals were - my area went from having >20 strong TV channels to almost nothing. Not such a big issue for me because I rarely watch broadcast TV but other people were complaining.So the switch to commercial ownership of everything may mean a lot of people fall through the cracks as far as net connectivity.This could also become a problem in places like Australia.The point I am getting at is, in their rush to grab as muchpolicy spaceas they possibly can grab for corporate ownership, now, they may be putting their own land grab first, and creating a system thats not only going to be more costly, it wont work. Especially in a major disaster.Engineering considerations and practicality and sorry to say also cost, are likely at the bottom of their priority list.

author: denverpilot
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 12, 2018, 02:07:41 am
content: The carriers will continue to nickel and dime rural areas just as they always have. The densificarion and fiber optics everywhere that are needed, won’t be done, it’ll just be spotty or they’ll still maintain older networks in backward compatibility just like today.I still see my phone switch to 1xRTT on CDMA in two locations on my drive home to a rural area just outside of a major city. And a whopping one “bar” of signal strength which essentially means you’d be lucky to receive a text only SMS for the next few miles, a phone call inbound would go to voice mail, outbound call would fail, and data? Forget about it.Won’t be any worse than eye have out here today. The only thing really covered in rural areas are the major highways for travelers.Some of us get even more “fun”. We live across the old A and B side borders from the city dwellers into areas served by rural mom and pop carriers the big three don’t like to pay for coverage via roaming. So even though A and B mean nothing anymore network-wise, other than as scorekeeping for who got spectrum for free back in the day... and who didn’t... it also is a business boundary as contentious about who’s paying whom, as the network/cable/sporting league blackouts and wars.So called “competition” they tell us. Which means essentially that there’s no one seamless network between home and work for us. Not one. On GSM networks it’s “we’ll give you UNLIMITED” in the city, but 100 Mb/Mo (domestic roaming) near home for data, and on CDMA it means fake LTE coverage that isn’t channel-aggregated, and the tower is fed with a string and a couple of guys yelling into tin cans for data, but the phone will happily display five “bars” of “LTE”! LOL. Isn’t that just special?Total crock of crap. Adding another mode won’t make it any better, or probably any worse, since it doesn’t work out here anyway.Your best bet is to pay the old school carrier with the highest prices since they literally have ONE more tower on the commute home, and know where the call drops happen so you can time your calls in between towers. Hahahahaha.But we do thank you for your thoughtfulness in thinking of us and wondering if 5G will screw us even harder. Enjoy that “Rural Broadband Tax”... nobody knows where that money is going, but it sure isn’t here.

author: denverpilot
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 12, 2018, 02:09:47 am
content: P.S. I might be just a tad jaded and sarcastic. Fair warning.Oh and if you want real fun, let’s talk home internet... best we can do is Motorola Canopy gear on the roof pointed at the neighbors up the road and back hauled many miles to some tower where fiber is available.10 Mb/s. Whooooooooo hoooooooo!

author: cdev
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 12, 2018, 04:40:35 am
content: You're being very optimistic.Maybe a community mesh network would serve you better?https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/34623859/2018-01-10-Pricing.final.pdfCould you ever get your neighbors to join you in making one?Quote from: denverpilot on January 12, 2018, 02:07:41 am

author: denverpilot
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 12, 2018, 05:30:14 am
content: Quote from: cdev on January 12, 2018, 04:40:35 amLOL. :-)Having designed and maintained a number of RF engineering projects for use by “the public”, I want nothing to do with the cat herding needed to place multiple sites on private property nor the 24/7 on call that heading up such a project would entail.Done plenty of that in life. And got paid to do it. (My nickname is my second job. Telecom, data, and RF is my profitable job. Haha.)“Little Bobby can’t get online to play his video games, come FIIIIIIIX it!!!” No way I’d go into willingly supporting that crap for free. Hahaha.Plus, the real problem is lack of access to fiber out here. If you can’t feed back to town at low cost, you’re sunk. Unlicensed or even licensed microwave only gets you so much bandwidth.The commercially operated Motorola Canopy System I’ve already got service from at $45.95/Mo, essentially is a mesh network already. One that I don’t have to climb towers in snow to repair. I shoot to a neighbor, they shoot to another, and one more before it reaches the heavily oversubscribed backhaul at a commercial tower site about seven miles to my south.And there’s three competing commercial providers doing that out here.I’m just as the far edge of nowhere to get back to their feed points for all three of them. To my east, I can see 50-100 miles of empty prairie and that’s just to the next rise. None can reach here faster than 10Mb/s.Rumor has it that the actual wireline telecom has fiber into the neighborhood at their DSLAM which they refuse to upgrade because they’re using up old stock of late 90s DSLAM spare parts, per one of their employees who lives next door. (Lived, I guess. He moved to rural Kansas a month ago. They haven’t spent any real money upgrading the outside plant in decades out here. He retired after they sent him out of state to work on other stuff.)Therefore, even though the wireline carrier could do better speeds with nothing more than a DSLAM swapout, the price wars IN the city have made rural upgrades untenable. Much easier to just say they can’t go any faster than pay three guys in trucks to build a new hut out here and splice it into fiber. They’d never make back the costs.Oh I forgot. Their speed limit? 1.5 Mb/sec ADSL. Asymmetric, even. Hahahahahaha. They’re a joke. Laughable.So, the wireless unlicensed stuff from any of their three competitors is screaming good, compared to what you can get delivered over copper out here.I laugh when friends say they’ve got fiber to the curb in town, only 20 minutes away. We will see that, exactly never. The recoup costs would not pay back for at least a decade or more when the houses are many acres apart.My real point was, on e cellular side of the telecom house, why worry about 5G densification problems, when US carriers never even completed LTE densification or even 3G densification in rural areas? They can’t buy wireline backhaul to feed their wireless towers out here, and have the same microwave backhaul problems the unlicensed wireless folks do. Oversubscription. Not enough subscribers to justify upgrades. Technically they do run faster than their competitors, but they all have monthly caps. I exceed the standard US cellular monthly data caps by 10x each month.Plus, look at it this way, they know you want whatever cell service you can get. They’re plenty happy to collect over $100/Mo for multiple drops to 1xRTT out here.It’s not like their Rootmetrics scores will go down for it or anything, and certainly no mandates shall be made of any sort of equal coverage or making them give back any of their spectrum out here to someone who’d actually build something. Hell. By saying they give 1xRTT useless levels of service out here, their marketers can say they “have the biggest nationwide network”. LOL. Note, they don’t say it actually WORKS in all of that blob on the map. They just say it exists. Hahahaha.There’s no money to be made in building out “the last mile” out here at $50/Mo for an average user. There’s also no money in densifying the cellular sites to provide services to the cows on the small 200 acre ranches to our west and south. Can’t pay the staff, let alone the capital costs.

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 12, 2018, 06:58:58 am
content: Connect 50m of overhead phone wiring to a tallish tower, and keep it away from your house, and let the next storm do the upgrade of the DSLAM for you. That occurs kind of often here, and the answer from the telco incumbent is to abandon the copper remains, put in a tower at the DSLAM with decent lightning arrestors, and use a carrier locked LTE modem with POTS voice at each customer in the less dense areas. For this they charge the same as for voice, though the data rate is slightly higher, with a soft cap as well on the data side. They do the same in areas with high incidence of copper theft and low density of paying customers as well, mostly more rural areas. You get a big upgrade from the 2M DSL as well, a shared 17M connection per sector antenna.

author: cdev
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 12, 2018, 01:16:27 pm
content: Quote from: denverpilot on January 12, 2018, 05:30:14 amThat's why I said you might want to consider a (autoconfiguring-self-adjusting) nonprofit mesh system, in the future.

author: denverpilot
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 12, 2018, 03:01:51 pm
content: Quote from: cdev on January 12, 2018, 01:16:27 pmAhhh. And I was saying I’ve never seen anything “autoconfiguring” and “self adjusting” that actually works all the time and doesn’t turn into someone’s nightmare / cough... “labor of love” (since it’s a non-profit after all).Mesh still doesn’t fix the speed problem when the houses are many acres apart, and mesh probably doesn’t work on omnidirectional antennas out here, not close enough.Plus getting country folks to even do mesh would require significant charisma and nearly a guarantee that it would work.If you want to come be the salesman / guy who shows people how to install things / network monitor / on call person who everyone has their number, in the modern world where people don’t even know what an IP address is... be my guest.I get paid to do that stuff, so when some user says their printer won’t work for the ten thousandth time in my career, I still get paid whether I’m finishing the design on a million dollar a month server farm, or the boss tells me to go plug their USB cable back in for them. And I get paid the server engineer rate. LOL.Security is also a significant concern of any network and there’s no way I’d be the talking head leading the charge of hooking a bunch of normal clueless internet users to a mesh network. No thanks.By the way, I think we’d all like to thank Intel for weeks or even months of work and job security by screwing up their hardware clear back in 1995. Free money! Hahahaha.Come on out if you want to be the guy in the suit who goes to the (poorly attended) HOA meeting and tries to get a bunch of folks to build a mesh... I doubt you’ll get very far, but it’ll be fun to watch you try to explain it to some of the neighbors. Can I put the video on YouTube? ;-)

author: cdev
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 12, 2018, 04:32:04 pm
content: There are mesh networks all around the world that work pretty well. Typically all the nodes are peers to each other. People have to do it because governments are prohibited from creating any new pubic services by the WTO "GATS"("General Agreement on Trade in Services" which has a very wide scope. Basically "everything you cannot drop on your foot".)For the same reason, many jobs will be lost to overseas multinational corporations. Who get to do an end run around our national wage laws.So, with the privatizations, (which are going to be across the board and go down to the state and perhaps even the municipal level, eventually) and loss of any universal service obligations, its likely going to be a challenge keeping rural areas on the Internet as incomes go south.That is, unless you like the "surveillance business model".

author: Mr. Scram
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 12, 2018, 05:08:43 pm
content: After the moratorium thread we're now playing the "bad service" card? Progress!Currently, you see providers looking at the shorter range frequences and technologies in urban areas, and longer range ones in the rural areas. You'll have lower speed, but more reliable connections.

author: Cyberdragon
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 12, 2018, 07:09:05 pm
content: QuotePffffft!That's space age technology compared to the real boonies! Try broken, redneck operated ASDL! Parallel two 56K modems and that's about the shit we get...not exagerating either. We tried faster, and it just cut out all the time! Their solution? Sell us a new "fancy" modem and then tell us their shit can't handle that speed anyway so they just dropped it back down instead of getting off their cheap lazy asses and actually fixing it! Then they charged us for a service call later when the hardline acted up!Fuck you Verizon!

author: Nusa
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 12, 2018, 07:16:02 pm
content: You've made the assumption that most rural areas have coverage now, which in my experience they mostly do not. You can't declare something a disaster because they aren't getting something they never had in the first place.

author: Cyberdragon
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 12, 2018, 07:39:16 pm
content: Quote from: Nusa on January 12, 2018, 07:16:02 pmBut that's still not progress. 5G is supposed to be progress, but how is it progress if nothing improves?

author: Nusa
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 12, 2018, 07:56:13 pm
content: Quote from: Cyberdragon on January 12, 2018, 07:39:16 pmThat's a valid point. However the question was could this be a disaster. I contend the answer to THAT question is no.

author: metrologist
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 12, 2018, 07:56:52 pm
content: Quote from: cdev on January 12, 2018, 04:32:04 pmWhat is your basis for the subject argument?

author: cdev
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 12, 2018, 11:14:11 pm
content: Well, because getting on the Internet at high speed is essential for business development, similar to electricity, the entire countryassumedthat despite the general global deindustrialization that at least rural areas would gradually get Internet access, despite the big companies not wanting to do it because they lose money.But, while they slept, the plutocrats were busy night and day making all the things that we assumed we could do FTA illegal. Triggering huge bailouts if we attempt them (energy too.. even if the climate goes berserk, we're going to have to export the natural gas to the highest bidder using the cheapest possible workforce to do it, even if people are freezing to death in large numbers. They did their homework and made a trap for us we wont be able to escape.They're so smart..How? Why?A trade agreement ("GATS") in 1995 basically froze new public everything, unless it was in a service area that was completely noncommercial on the date it came into existence, (Jan 1, 1995) which the country intended to stay noncommercial, so the door shut then to new community wireless, along with anything else poor communities needed, like public health care, expansions of public education, public water, public works, at least on paper. (although that didn't stop 3 out of 4 of the candidates in 2016 from running on platforms based on things that violated it. They were lying. Telling Americans what we wanted to hear to lull us into a state of false security.)Here is the wording, which defines the scope of this agreement, scope that is extremely wide."For the purposes of this Agreement...(b) 'services' includes any service in any sector except services supplied in the exercise ofgovernmental authority;(c) 'a service supplied in the exercise of governmental authority' means any service which is supplied neither on a commercial basis, nor in competition with one or more service suppliers.Its supposed to stop all progress in a great many areas. The argument goes that public services are depriving the poor corporations (but again the logic doesnt really make much sense) of those jobs.Quote from: Nusa on January 12, 2018, 07:16:02 pmI disagree with you on that. Given that jobs are going away in the coming years, sentencing rural areas to non-connectivity when they are basically going to be where poor people - a group thats going to be a LOT larger than it is today, because both automation and liberalisation, are expected to live, is tantamount to - well, lets not go there.Okay, suppose we lose 40% of our jobs to liberalization and another 40% to automation over the next 20 years. (This is likely a realistic estimate, IMHO)Also remember that there wont be any way that governments could help them if it reduced the profits of multinational corporations such as banks.Glass-Stegall was 'reformed' (Causing the 2008 crash's devastation for millions of Americans ) The taxpayers were liable because of GATS, after all.Not a single US paper said a peep about this despite the proof being unambiguous, a single line on the last page of the third supplement to the specific commitments page 31- a document filed in Geneva on February 26, 1998.Tell me, has the British press told you that the WTO-GATS is at the root of the NHS's problems?We're being walked into a trap.Nor could they prosecute foreign banks in the future for their widespread mortgage fraud if they did not prosecute US banks in 2008. that would be discrimination. Thats how the GATS works.How could we do that after we invited them in such a welcoming manner?Basically, GATS is a war on the very concept of a middle class. By the plutocracy. Because here isnt going to be a need for people to be paid more than they are worth when machines do everything. Whats the point when tens of thousands of starving people want that job?Supply and demand, Economics 101. To allow governments to help people would cheat the plutocracy of the windfall they are entitled to by Economics 101. Profit, preferably huge profits, is the essence of capitalism.What then? That means millions of people will lose their futures and their equity, and a mass exodus from cities and exurbs because people wont be able to afford to live there anymore. Those houses will be snapped up by wealthy people from around the globe.So where will the poor live? Well, they will likely all be in debt so children born will be off the grid as well and so, like those in Africa and Asia who are being pushed off the map now, they wont exist."Off the grid"

author: cdev
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 12, 2018, 11:37:15 pm
content: I think we will see prepay hot spots. Sort of like prepay water meters. So right here big chunks of the population will be excluded.THE FOLLOWING IS SATIRICAL AND IS UNTRUE AT THE CURRENT MOMENTSimilarly to "Cashless Cities" they will be able to exclude a very large chunk of the population from the Internet, those who will have bad credit and are buried in healthcare and school debt. Mortgages foreclosed or many likely literally "underwater". Driverless cars will not be able to stop for those without credit. What a brilliant scheme, huh?Maybe they are also hoping for a solar storm... scary thought, huh?Well there is only a one in eight chance per decade. So its less likely than not there wont be one within ten years.But what about the incident in 2012, that Earth just missed, doesn't that mean the probability might be higher?"What do the people at NASA know? they are just alarmists. But soon they'll all be headed to Mars".Quote from: metrologist on January 12, 2018, 07:56:52 pmAll the effort they have put into keeping us in the dark makes me pretty sure they intend to make all these "Yuuuuge" changes.. ones that wont be pretty for people in places like the USA (and to a lesser extent Western Europe).To do that they have made up a whole rationale "helping the poor countries" but thats not at all sincere. They just need the poor countries help to do what legitimize what is really a huge theft of the future and democracy, from all of us.Without these sneaky deals, the victims could just vote things back to the way they were in the 1980s, undoing all their changes.And prosecute the crooks for fraud. Undoing the biggest theft n the history of humanity just like that.

author: denverpilot
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 13, 2018, 12:16:45 am
content: So to summarize, my cell phone not having 5G Service is a future threat to democracy. LOL.Mmmm-Kay.That escalated to stupid really quickly.

author: Nusa
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 13, 2018, 12:30:48 am
content: TLDR for most of what you said, cdev. All I got was that you seem to have confused 5G access with access to the internet. Also that only poor people live in rural areas. Which is not the same question at all, so you're derailing your own topic.My sisters place in the boondocks of Missouri doesn't have cell coverage in any flavor, but they have a decent WIRED internet connection and can even make use their phones within sight of the house via wi-fi. And on the wealth side of things, she's richer than I am, and I'm not poor.

author: cdev
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 13, 2018, 12:36:50 am
content: No, we lost democracy in 1995, thats what the WTO does.They couldnt tell people because they would just vote to reverse it.People want to live a nice life, right? So it would never fly. We wouldn't have liked the idea of not being able to vote to fix anything unless the fix made corporations more money, not less. So, the ratchet, standstill, and progressive liberalisation would be eliminated. The grand bargain would go too. people would want to keep their jobs and their decent pay. the super rich would have to put up with rising levels of taxation so that the rest of the world wouldn't starve. Defeating the whole agenda of neoliberalism.. the world would become like Europe in the 1980s or 1990s. A social democracy.The concentration of wealth would stop, and be replaced by a generally higher standard of living. Poor countries would compete with rich, instead of exporting their skilled people, and having their wages plummet. No race to the bottom.In short, it would ruin everything for the plutocrats. That is why everything has to be deregulation, or at least framed as if it is, because GATS's 'ratchet' captures all deregulation for MNCs. All the GOP's changes here in the US lock in, and cannot be reversed.As far as the network, its all about capacity. A cashless society constantly needs to be checking everybodys balances and deducting payments. Think smart grid. People may eventually have to pay for every joule every watt, and maybe eventually, literally every breath. Also, how do you keep track of people without capacity? People wont have jobs so they wont need to travel. Instead they may eventually live in a rich virtual world where every meal is a sumptuous one. If they have the virtual money to pay for it.They are going to need to employ a lot of people in a secret way, because eventually under progressive liberalisation, they become basically the only jobs that don't require an advanced education that will be exempt from globalization.Not just surveillance. Other things that determine who is naughty and who is nice. Read up onsocial credit. Its behavior modification. Buy or die. not just buy or be irrelevant or buy or be dull.The "Free Market" isn't free.It doesn't want to waste resources on people who wont spend enough. Like advertisers, they see them as dead weight.A lot of data needs to be spit around, for example, health insurance. They absolutely need to know who is healthy and who is unhealthy. To have that fine granularity of information they need to be able to pull lots more data from people phones and homes than they did in the past. You want to save hundreds or perhaps even thousands if you're over 50 - of bucks on your health insurance every month, don't you?Its all about the winners and losers. The winners and losers of neoliberalism. This is a huge subject, there is no way you haven't heard about it. You likely just thought they were talking about somebody else, right? Not us.Quote from: denverpilot on January 13, 2018, 12:16:45 am

author: cdev
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 13, 2018, 12:45:25 am
content: Missouri has a lot more population density than the parts of the US which will be really inexpensive. Its also flatter and perhaps even warmer. (The US isnt well situated to become a poor country because its not tropical, so thats also likely to cause big problems.)Quote from: Nusa on January 13, 2018, 12:30:48 amIt depends, some areas will become insanely wealthy. Places that already are will likely get more so. People will be fleeing other parts of the world and will bid up prices.Okay, you know about the "Cashless Cities" proposals? These are proposals to eliminate cash in large areas, "to keep things going smoothly". All those cash-bearing people are like speed bumps on the information stupor-highway.India is like the future. There will be extreme differences in people's intelligence too. because living your life with no money will not be good for peoples health, or brains.You know how black women are 27 times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. Well, poor is the new black. That will be a lot more than black and brown people soon. Read up on allostatic load.Money is everything for preventing stress when there are no jobs. Corticosteroids (stress hormones) are neurotoxic.Cashless areas will also eliminate people who are in debt!Its a way of excluding a very large chunk of the population in the future, from cities, especially. And putting them in a separate world out of sight and out of mind.now while they still might swallow it. (before almost everybody is poor!) Now you see the grand plan.GATS was merely foresight by the super-rich. A second enclosure.But I am getting off track,Okay, you likely followed me this far- suddenly the grid becomes essential to buying and selling everything. The essence of life itself, under the GATS model. No more discrimination against one persons money. No corporation left behind.People who have no incomes, they wont be able to barter with this.The biggest profits imaginable will come after large scale environmental disasters. Thats whats predicted for the coming years because of climate changes and human stupidity with the environment, but that is immensely profitable if you're rich and you control food, water, the network, lans, travel, (it wont be like today where they let people just drive around) and so on.After a really nasty solar storm causes all sorts of meltdowns, drinking untreated water or breathing untreated air could even possibly become toxic, everywhere, so people will need to have money to take a breath of clean air or drink a glass of safe water. If they want to ever have children, a child is going to have to be provided with extremely expensive clean everything from birth.Thats a big problem, to wired networks, solar storms.Eventually, just a few people will be alive, but they will be fabulously wealthy.

author: Nusa
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 13, 2018, 01:10:10 am
content: So what about 5G? That's the topic, right? If not, then you need to start a different thread.

author: cdev
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 13, 2018, 01:19:32 am
content: Quote from: Nusa on January 13, 2018, 01:10:10 amWell, I have a personal interest in bandwidth, I would like to see a different model used. One which was based on peer to peer which MNCs could not monopolize. Based on the way sound waves travel, for example, so sending extremely bandwidth intensive information long distances might become more expensive than it is today, but the surveillance state they want, would also become impossible. Also putting entire cities up to staff companies on the other side of the world, people working in the middle of the night, gaming the wage gradient would also become prohibitively expensive.We need our inefficiency to have economic diversity.We need to build resilience into society and that means progressive taxation, too. Not writing off 3/4 of us or more.We can build a system that would be impervious to solar storms. But one thats not 5G, either. It would be have to be based on spread spectrum and mesh networks.They are racing against the clock hoping people can be kept in the dark just a few years longer.

author: denverpilot
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 13, 2018, 02:46:23 am
content: Quote from: cdev on January 13, 2018, 12:36:50 amThe US is not, and never was, a Democracy. Problem solved. Lucky you. Now you don’t have to worry about it anymore.Definitely sounds like 5G technology will destroy democracy though. Right on point and on topic. Excellent job. So glad you brought a little cray-cray to the thread.Hey let me know if you’re coming out to put up some more cell towers on the ranch near my house to save my Democracy I never had.I kinda want to see the look on the rancher’s face when you show up with a fiber optic trencher and some sections of Roan 45G on a flatbed. I’ll get out the binoculars.

author: cdev
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 13, 2018, 03:02:50 am
content: It certainly wouldn't be me!The danger here is presented by a number of things, one is the fact that the higher frequencies dont penetrate as far, for example, are stopped by foliage, hills... etc.Another issue is presented by the so called "ratchet clauses" which are inherent to any area that is covered by a trade agreement the US signs now.(We are identified with these clauses now.) But, because of the "capture" - they basically want to lock down the service, once its committed to and turned into international trade, then we can never do anything that hurts its profitability, include allow anything else to get around it.That is the definition of insanity to me. Plus, we cant talk about it because the media wont talk about it. If you are not a fan of regulation, you'll be happy to hear that these "deregulation-hyped" regulations are actually the most Byzantine and obscure regulations that I know of - and intentionally so.So we wont get a shred of compassion from others when our own rules bit us too. It could be a real disaster because they're giving a LOT of jobs away."progressive liberalisation" is represented as being mostly in our favor but thats just because it hasn't started really in earnest yet here in the US, the negotiations have been going on every two years for almost 20 years, (Doha Development Agenda and now TiSA and the Indian TFS) and haven't concluded.All those green jobs and energy jobs that many people seem to want, poof.. bye bye. There is no way that US workers can compete with the huge subcontracting companies from the Middle East. Even here.So what that will mean is that everything will become crapified because the money just wont be there. Quality of life issues will be a low priority as people struggle to have some way of going to the hospital (and paying for it) or of getting essential communications, like phone calls from relatives. If its not profitable for the big companies the rich people out in the country will probably end up having to rely on satellite phones.Even areas currently well connected may lose it. It all depends on whether a community's wealth increases or decreases from the changes. In the beginning some areas may rise but remember, a lot of people - especially well paid people - may end up out of work, displaced by competition. Some market sectors may be decimated by cheap subcontracting.We can be sure of one thing, we wont see any more New Deals where the government hires out of work Americans to rebuild infrastructure. Thats illegal now. Thanks to us. Buy American is all a big act, a made for TV photo-novella.Who are the winners and losers of liberalisation? Its a complicated question.

author: denverpilot
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 14, 2018, 05:15:44 pm
content: Please stop. I’m laughing too hard.The fleet of “Allah’s Solar Roadways and Tower Erection” trucks was putting up a cell tower on the Ranch to the east this morning though.And people were clamoring for another New Deal with 3% unemployment and the US equities market having its best year for investors in 40 years.

author: cdev
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 14, 2018, 05:37:58 pm
content: You're very knowledgeable, aren't you?The services which we have committed to open up are basically the middle class's jobs.The GPA is just the newest one. There is also the GATS."unlimited market access for qualified firms".See the Indian TFS proposal which attempts to force countries into a mold which is inconsistent with democracy.Read up a bit on the "multilateral trading system", specifically the principles behind so called "services liberalisation", and the WTO GATS and GPA agreements treatment of national sovereignty in areas like transnational subcontracting.In particular look at the scope of such agreements and their ability to hijack domestic policy and undermine >100 years of progress in workplaces.People want to create a race to the bottom on wages, and use the pretext of international treaties to do it.

author: denverpilot
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 14, 2018, 07:53:15 pm
content: Quote from: cdev on January 14, 2018, 05:37:58 pmYes.I’m pretty sure the septic tank guy and the propane guy don’t give a **** about your trade agreements, nor anyone else out here...So, if an Indian contractor actually does take over driving a Propane truck on the dirt roads out here, or pumping poo out of septic tanks...I’m definitely buying a better video camera and making some money filming that for a new YouTube channel. I mean, a LOT of money. More views than Dave. Hahaha.Unfortunately with spotty 3G or worse cellular service, I might have to hike to the top of a hill to call the volunteer fire department if they hurt themselves. That lack of 5G should probably scare them, more than me... although I might have a heart attack from laughing too hard to hike up the hill.If they knock over a barbed wire fence crashing the propane truck, and don’t hurt themselves, but let some curious cows out of the pasture to come comfort them while they wait for the FD and Sheriff, even better.I’ll have to record calling their emergency number handled by a call center in India too, while I’m at the top of the hill...“Hello, my name is Joe... you say there is a truck lying on its side in the ditch? This is not a problem, Mister Nate, we shall take care of everything. I will open a ticket and we have experts for this sort of thing. Will you make sure to give me a good rating on the customer service review you shall be receiving in email in a few moments? Oh, no I do not know when the tow truck will be there, but trust me, we have experts who will take good care of you.”Yeah... I surely hope you’re right. I need a good belly laugh. And then I’ll film the rancher putting the Indian propane truck back on its wheels with his tractor and a strap.I might even have to drive into town to upload the video. No problem there... it’s only half an hour or so.Please. Think.You really must believe rural dwellers are morons, if you think not having 5G cellular or fast internet is a real problem out here, or some trade agreement so idiot bureaucrats somewhere wrote, means they’ll be getting services from some “Middle Eastern” or “Indian” conglomerate for the sorts of services needed in rural areas.LOL LOL LOL.This is way better than even Dave’s Solar Roadways BS videos. Keep this coming. I want to link this thread to some rural friends. They’re going to die laughing.Like I said, you need to get out more. Want to come drive the tractor? If you can grade an 800’ driveway, I’ll let you do it for free just to get you out of wherever it is that people think we need 5G out here, live. Is it like a tiny apartment or something? Is your internet connection feeding you way too much useless information? Haha.The tractor is a stick shift. Apologies if you’re not good with those. It’s a 1981 from Japan with a Ford badge on it. Also if you’d help change the hydraulic fluid and rebuild the seals on the bucket controls, you won’t get any on your city shoes. Otherwise, it kinda marks its territory on your right cowboy boot.Cowboy boots recommended, because that’s also your throttle foot. Flat shoes covered in small amounts of hydraulic fluid, tend to slide off the metal throttle button on the end of a bent piece of steel.We’ll save “using the three point tools” for lesson number two on the tractor. The handle snapped off and was replaced with a rusty pair of channel locks. It can be a little touchy.I’ll keep an eye out for those “Middle Eastern” and “Indian” contractors. Maybe they’ll grade my dirt driveway for cheap. Are they any good at digging holes and placing rebar in them? I’d like to get the ham radio tower up this coming summer. If they know a good concrete guy, I also need a driveway pad on a slope. Maybe even a new pole barn.

author: cdev
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 14, 2018, 08:27:54 pm
content: You are completely misreading everything I am telling youas well as why I am telling you what I did say.India filed a case with the WTO dispute resolution body in 2016. Why don't you read it?India was founded as a democracy, as was the US.Neoliberalism was founded on the principle of non-democracy. Its an international cult, whose goal is to roll back the progress of the recent past, capturing the future and its policy for a tiny oligarchy and the corporate special interests they own, at the expense of everybody else. It uses an exceptionally contrived and amoral ideology to do this. .So my argument really has little to do with India, except as far as their suit in the WTO to force us to modify or end our quotas on Mode Four "non-immigrant" visas.This is about the situation with GATS and Mode Four.http://www.fpif.org/pdf/papers/0511table.pdfIts not any one country that has been targeted by the GATS, its the very concepts of public services and a public sphere, and public ownership of the planet.. And by extension, the very concept of a middle class, of people who are paid decently, (and not the absolute minimums possible)The GATS is the core services agreement, but that connection is being hidden by other more recent laws and policies whose function seems to be to conceal it as the source of all this bad policy.For example, in the EU the Bolkestein directive or Services Directive on the common european market seems to serve that function in some respects. In the US frustration of national needs is explained away by a almost facically disfunctional "two party system" that is largely based on contrived wedge issues. And a President who occupies precious news space with noise has the function of wasting time while policy space is locked away with trade agreements, irreversibly.The entire "multilateral trading system" is illegitimate as it attempts to remove people from the governance of the planet, in part by keeping them in a state of stress and poverty, or confusion.The fact is, nation-states are portrayed by the plutocrats as an anachronism they just keep around for convenience in dividing up their territories. One thing that should give us all pause is the fact that to the new corporate state, all nation-states are equal. The entire concept of right and wrong has been disposed of silently by the web of supranational trade agreements. Thanks to the powers in technology, this is going to have the effect of making democratic changes in any of those countries impossible.You should know that democracy everywhere is grievously threatened by these private agreements to set aside democracy.--------Also, I would like to state for the record that I like Indian people a lot, and I also like Muslims (the ones that I have met) too. Generally. They are very warm people. There is no country or people one could generalize as being bad (or good) all have their good and bad people.Also I think (legal) immigration is an extremely good thing for your and my country, generally.In fact its at the core of what I believe our country stands for. "Out of many, one".We need flexibility in immigration which is what these trade deals take away.Which is in a sense why I think these secretive trade deals are so badly thought out, because they try to capture the future and meld it to the policy wishes of multinational corporations, at the expense of everybody except them. So that jobs (and patients in health care) can be traded like poker chips.GATS is also a huge global voter nullification. They want to replace communities and their core - working people, with other people who are deliberately placed at such an extreme disadvantage that they are powerless.They are starting (in the US) with high skill professions but their eventual goal is to use these programs to decimate wages. Big mega corporations are behind this agenda, previously, some of them were in trouble for attempting to fix wages in certain fields. That shows what their goal is.The #1 losers will be good people from all parts of the world. Many of them will be legal immigrants, many others will be citizens of the affected countries. Its mostly about money, getting people to work for a fraction of what they are worth, coercively. And hiding that under a convluted mess of new regulations (which only make sense if you recognize it for what it is, a huge global coup to end democracy except in name only, and replace it with a corporatocracy) Which is what the experts have been telling us is happening, if we would only listen.But the US media at least, wont, because its in on the scheme.Its complicated but you can tell something big is going on by the exceptional efforts which are being put into diverting attention from this scheme.the WTO-GATS is at the heart of the mess, it is a laundry list of bad - very ill advised ideas that all people would rejectif given a chance to vote on them.We should not eliminate public higher education or help for our own students to go to college. Wages dont need to fall here, wages in the poor countries should come up. We should not fall into the race to the bottom trap they are laying for us. Also we should recognize that there are many public goods which need to be subsidized- like internet access at a decent speed to most - if not all, of the entire country..We have to be on the alert for so called control fraud.The GATS agreement is a good example of one. One that has already caused the largest financial mess in most peoples lifetimes, in 2008, costing US taxpayers an estimated $23 trillion dollars, a link they are so eager to conceal that they have not discussed this at all.A huge number of Americans also have been deprived of health care needlessly because of GATS's really evil ideology.We have to stand up for the public interest, corporations interests are often diametrically opposed to the public interest.

author: denverpilot
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: January 15, 2018, 05:37:14 pm
content: @cdev took it upon himself to contact me via PM.I have notified him that if he does it again, I’ll report him to the board’s moderators.I’m placing this warning in the public record of this thread for posterity.It’s his thread, and he can have at it.I’ll refrain from any further remarks in it, but I will not tolerate PMs from a delusional paranoid individual.Thank you also to the individual who warned me about this repetitive behavior of his in PM. MYou, of course, and anyone else, are welcome to PM anytime. I want no personal or private contact with CDev at any time.Enjoy the thread, all. I’m out.

author: cdev
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: January 16, 2018, 01:56:19 am
content: I have no problem with posting what I sent denverpilot, if anybody wants to see it. I was not harassing him.We need universal service obligations for rural areas for Internet connectivity, or we're going to have problems that will create areas of extreme poverty.