Ivy shared this Mark Cuban post in Google Reader. It’s a radical proposition (as you might expect, given the source), but it actually makes quite a bit of sense:

If we want to truly change the course of broadband in this country, the solution is simple. Just as we had an analog shutdown date for over the air TV signals, we need the same resolution for analog delivered cable networks.

Transition basic cable networks from analog to digital over the next 3 years and all of the sudden there will be hundreds of megabits available on the smallest cable systems and more than a gigabit of bandwidth available on the largest.

I have to say, I’ve grumbled about the here-and-there erosion of basic cable to free up digital bandwidth — losing individual channels, one or two at a time. But I didn’t really understand the numbers as Cuban explains them. If this were done the way that Cuban suggests, doing away with analog in one fell swoop and making some form of digital package the new “basic” cable, and if the pricing could be kept competitive, it might be a major step forward.