Daily Archives: October 7, 2004

Publicly financed Stadiums: Dallas says no to a giveaway

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Gary Cartwright:

THE POSSIBLE RETURN OF THE DALLAS COWBOYS to their 1960 birthplace at Fair Park seemed so right that you just knew it was going to go wrong. Until the Cowboys moved to an Irving freeway intersection in 1971, they were Dallas’s team?all of Dallas, not just the rich suburbs?and certainly not America’s team. But with the announcement in August that the team’s new home would be Arlington, which isn’t even in Dallas County, the dream died, doomed by the laws of physics: the collision of an irresistible force like Cowboys owner Jerry Jones with an immovable object like Dallas mayor Laura Miller and the political inertia that resulted.

I applaud UW Grad and current Dallas Mayor Laura Miller’s realistic position on this. Quite different than the local Miller Park fiasco….. Background links: Alltheweb | Clusty | Google | Teoma | Yahoo

Japan: one Gigabit/sec for $40 a month

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Norie Kuboyama and Tomomi Sekioka:

Softbank, the second-largest provider of high-speed Internet access in Japan, said Monday that Yahoo Japan and Softbank BB would start offering a new optical fiber-based broadband service. Softbank will provide the service at speeds of up to one gigabyte per second and charge users ?4,200, or $38, a month, the company said in a statement.
(Surely this is a typo — the word here has to be Gigabit.)
Softbank and NTT, the nation’s former state monopoly for domestic telephone services, are competing to become Japan’s largest provider of high-speed Internet access . . . NTT last week said that it would cut its basic monthly fee by ?50 in order to compete with Softbank and KDDI, Japan’s second-largest mobile phone company.

Via David Isenberg

Cisco CEO Chambers calls for education reform & broadband push

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Chambers did not get specific with respect to education reform, but did mention some problematic data:

  • Fewer than 6 percent of master’s degrees issued in the U.S. in 2001-02 were in engineering, and fewer than 1 percent were in math, Chambers noted.
  • The U.S. is also lagging behind most industrialized nations in broadband adoption, Chambers said. Japanese consumers have access to broadband speeds 400 percent to 500 percent faster than in the U.S., he said. “We’ve got to move faster,” Chambers added.

David Isenberg summarizes Japan’s successful broadband approach here. He also notes that the US has fallen to thirteenth vis a vis other nation’s broadband adoption rate.