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US Broadband is slow because that's the state of the infrastructure -- the infrastructure is very expensive to build out, and most of the country can't support a broadband build out.

It may surprise some, but the majority of the United States is not serviced by a cable television or internet system: http://www.fcc.gov/maps/connec...

What happens if you scale that map so that regions are sized according to the population within the region rather than the geographical area of the region?

Or, to put it another way, is the majority of the US population serviced by a broadband Internet service provider? the FCC's "Eighth Broadband Progress Report", from August 2012, says that the percentage of the US population "without access to fixed broadband meeting the speed benchmark", said benchmark being 4Mb/s down and 1Mb/s up, is 6% (5.9% of households), with the figure for rural areas being 23.7% and for non-rural areas being 1.8%. So the majority of the US population is serviced by a broadband ISP (by the FCC's 4Mb/s down/1Mb/s up definition of "broadband") - and even the majority of the rural US population is.

Why is an area not serviced?

By "serviced" you presumably mean "serviced by broadband Internet access above some speed threshold"; what is your threshold? Presumably it's better than 4Mb/s down/1Mb/s up, as most area that actually has people in it is serviced by services that's at least 4Mb/s down and 1Mb/s up.

So how about municipal broadband? Take the private company out of the picture and make internet a government service and it must get really cheap, right? Well, Bristol, Virginia is considered the most successful implementation of Municipal Broadband right now. This village of 17,000 people offers fiber optic connections to its residents for....roughly the same price as TWC or Comcast (for comparable speeds) and far far more expensive for 1GBps service ($320/mo) than Google offers.

And Google's service is a little under twice as expensive as the 1 GB/s service Bredbands Bolaget offers - 899 SEK/mo (the rate after the first year) is USD 137.73/mo at the current exchange rate. That, in turn, appears to suck relative to, say, HelloVision's $31.47 (at the exchange rate at the time for the South Korean Won) for 1Gb/s up and down, according to table 2 in the New America Foundation's "The Cost Of Connectivity 2013", but I don't know whether that's a first-year teaser rate or not (Bredbands Bolaget's first-year rate is, at the current exchange rate, $73.31).

The facts are this:

1. Huge portions of the country cannot be cost effectively serviced by high speed internet access.

How high is "high speed"?

3. Most large population centers do not have enough potential 1Gbps residential customers to make it cost effective to upgrade the equipment in those locations to support 1Gbps connection speeds -- businesses can already get those speeds and more but it is not inexpensive.

[Citation needed] What statistics do you have for the number of potential 1Gb/s residential customers in those large population centers?

4. New entrants with deep pockets don't have to deal with replacing equipment that is still being used to pay for the debt taken out to install it in the first place, but they will.

They do, however, have to deal with installing equipment in the first place.

5. More options for internet service in a community mean lower market shares for the participants, which mean

So? In Sweden you can get 60-100/8-10 Mbps for $33.7 per month. Including phone and 10GB online backup.

100/10 Fiber in Sweden, under $45/month: http://www.bredbandsbolaget.se/portal/PRIVAT_BREDB AND_LAN_BREDBAND%2B100

24/1 ADSL in Sweden, under $30/month: http://www.glocalnet.se/tjanster/bredband/product_ 24.jsp

The two services above includes a modem either for free or very cheap, and these are services you get to your home. Bandwidth in Sweden isnt that expensive. I can add that for the 100/10 service there are much cheaper choice's, I've seen some "citynet's" offer it for less than $20/month.

I don't think they are making much money with the $6.50 pricetag, but I do believe they are making some (btw, all exhange rates I used are estimates and counted high

They have a contract with Labs2 (run by the former ceo and founder of bredbandsbolaget) so bandwidth shouldn't be a problem.

Of course, the ISP:s aren't refusing to identify customers because they're a bunch of swell guys. They make a bunch of money selling fast broadband connections, where the faster ones are primarily used by file sharers. Forwarding warning letters would also be a bunch of extra work, and they have nothing to gain - they'll just lose customers.

The only solution is legal download services. TV shows, which make up a large part of the traffic, are distributed in an antiquated fashion, and the technology is here to change that.

Imagine if music was distributed the same way that TV shows are. The new song of your favourite artist would only play on radio stations in the US, where it's interrupted by commercials halfway through. After a couple of months it'd start to play on radio stations in the rest of the world. Only after a year would you be able to buy the CD in a store, but it would be protected by DRM so you couldn't pick it up a few months early on your visit abroad. Bizarre, isn't it?

Let's hope iTunes TV download service turns out well, so we can finally get fast, legal downloads at a decent price.

Also worth pointing out is that Bredbandsbolget (www.bredbandsbolaget.se) has started to deploy 1000 Mbit installations, the first (and only?) is available in Lund (south Sweden)

Well i have a 100Mbit connection, with full duplex mind you. It's great i can transfer stuff from my friends with about 10 Mb per second, a DVD wont take long hehe. I have had it for two years now and it works like a charm, so we in Sweden were first to roll out 100 Mbit fullscale in the network and did I say that my ISP Bredbands bolaget ROCKS!!!
(http://www.bredbandsbolaget.se/

100 Mbps (Swedish) - 495 kronor (about US$73) in connection fee and 595 kronor (about US$88) per month.

Interesting you should say that, My ISP (I live in Sweden) sends BBC for free down the broadband connection, using "PC-TV".

The 26 Mbit (up and down!) see bostream

Bredbandsbolaget offer 10mbit or 24mbit vdsl, 100mbit or 1 Gigbit to appartment buildings, and free BBC feed.

I don't know how the cost compares but for >10mbit *dsl costs about $52.72 a month.

Forgive me for not backing up my claim. Here's a link to one of the Swedish ISP's, providing 100 Mbit internet for 895 SEK ~ 100 euro ~ 120 USD a month, which I would say is a quite alright price.

Sweden, for some very strage reason, has three providers offering symmetrical, 10 Mbps or bigger connections for less than 65 USD a month. I'm not a swede, and don't have information in English, but you should be able to decipher what matters here. The yellow box below the headline has the speeds and prices. One Swedish krona is roughly 13.5 US cents, prices are per month and anslutningsavgift is the one-time hookup fee.

As you can see in the Aftonbladet article, Telia has just entered the fray. They were literally forced to do so, by competition from Bredbandsbolaget and Bostream.

Bredbandsbolaget, apparently not content with losing their edge (their connections are generally considered better than Bostream's, dispite the bandwidth advertised), are preparing to roll out a 100 Mbps service next year, with a 300GB/mo traffic limit, rumored to cost in the neighbourhood of 120 USD/mo; I wonder how people will survive such terribly restrictive limits, heh.

In most urban scenarios, there isn't any divide and conquer going on. Having many providers competing in the same areas has its advantages.

I've never even been to Sweden, but happen to know a lot of Swedish netizens. Most of those are hard-core gamers, the most demanding users you'll find; anything short of 1MB/sec downloads and 10ms latency domestically, and they'll be screaming.

If you live in a major city in Sweden (ie Stockholm) you can 10Mb/s for aproximately 35 EURO/month (320 SEK/month).

http://www.bredbandsbolaget.se/

Well, Europe is not very homogenous, there are more and there are less advanced areas. Imho Sweden is the most developed country of this planet, technology-wise.

You have mentioned Bredbandsbolaget which is prolly the best ISP in the world. I am (unfortunately) not from Sweden, but I wished I was. 10 mbit to your home, for the price of 30$ per month. No traffic limit, and the line not only delivers those 10 mbit on paper, but also in reality, I've seen it with my own eyes more than once.

Together with a friend from Sweden I am running a webserver on one of those lines, and we're now at some 400 gigs of traffic per month and this line just works like a charm.

Wonder if we could handle the /. effect?

On a somewhat related topic: One of Sweden's bigger and first broadband companies, Bredbandsbolaget (translates to "the broadband company") are scanning all their traffic for pirated software, music and movies. The funny thing is that they are offering 10Mb in both directions, when most around here only offer 0.5 - 2.5Mb, and that is incoming traffic only... so you can guess which connection all warez dudez are running if they have the possibility...

One of my friends have been heavily into trading stuff since he had a 33.6 and a P100 machine - and was the coolest kid in town with that. Now he has shut down his ftp server and probably sits at home shaking from withdrawal. Thankfully, I never was much into warez, I have a few mp3's on my conscience, but that is pretty much about it. And I have another provider, if the urge should set in. :)

I think this is something we will see more of in the future, although so far I don't think any of the other companies have followed.

Scanning for warez may be more in line though, considering the terms of use, but on what level should the companies control what we do with the access? Forbidding several computers on one connection just to charge more money is just plain cheap, although many do already have clauses about not allowing servers on your home connection.