The Digital Divide Will Ensure a Broadband Ghetto

[Commentary] If you live in New York City or in any of the heavily populated and wealthy areas of the Northeast, you likely have access to some of the fastest broadband speeds available in the country. If you live in a suburb of Austin, Texas, however, you're offered speeds some six times slower for about half the price. And as the technologies race ahead for network access, ISPs with fiber to the home and cable-provided Docsis 3.0 service are going to surpass the speeds that providers using old-school copper and even wireless can offer. Which means that while some people will be living in the 21st century, great chunks of the country will be subsisting on the 2010 version of dial-up. Don't believe me? Verizon has tested a tech that requires software upgrades to deliver a 10 Gbps connection that's shared among 32 homes. Meanwhile, technologies such as the next generation from AT&T are going to require swapping out gear at the node and inside your home so the companies still using copper can squeak up to speeds that most analysts doubt will even reach 100 Mbps. That means a hundred-fold disparity in connection speeds. Holy cow.