What's Holding Up Broadband in the U.S.?

ProfBooty writes "A recent opinion piece in the Washington Post discloses that the broadband could potentially aid in the economy's recovery (and that Canadians are 2x as likely to have it, South Koreans 4x), but it's not regulation that is the hold up, it's *surprise* content holders' fears of 'piracy' as well as unwillingness to adapt to new markets. Also discusses the governments of Canada and South Korea and how they were involved in bringing broadband to the people. In additon discusses how in the past, Congress would pass laws as to protect innovators as well as the old guard." The article's by Lawrence Lessig.

Comments

Reasons for broadband slowdown

[satsuke]

Lets see ..

1. The Drought of VC money of late.
2. ILEC's / MSO cable operators not opening access lines easily
3. Cost - for smaller operators, the mantra of "stick new headends on either end of the fiber" is true, except those digipeaters are $$$$.
4. Incremental need, People are not making quantum shifts in usage, it grows over time .. that is unless some person finds usenet / IRC for software / MP3s / video / anime / P2P usage.
5. Virus threats are contained quickly anymore by most people, so the network crawling to a halt because of traffic is a temporal thing.

Here in Kansas city we actually have a company called everest-kc.com that has done a full overbuild of some of the cable infrastructure in the area. phone, Long distance, cable modem & television on a competing / seperate wire. Imagine that. .

Re:Reasons for broadband slowdown

[bricriu]

You know what the killer apps for broadband are? They're what are prohibited by my TOS.

I want to LAN my home, I want to use a VPN, I want to run an FTP server and a ShoutCast server and have a firewall and do my Morpheus thing and maybe a little httpd. But you know what? I'm not allowed.

A killer app is something that you're going to use. But broadband providers don't WANT us to use all our bandwidth. That's how they make their dough: promise 1500 kbps for each & every subscriber -- I'm talking cable here, folks -- and then damn you if you use it, because, surprise, there's not enough for us all.

If people found out how easy it is to run those apps named above, then maybe we WOULD have a quantum shift.

Canada and the US

[puppetman]

I've been thinking about broadband (here in Canada - I'm Canadian). What most Americans don't know is that Canada's Confederation (in 1867) was based on the promise of a coast to coast railroad (that is, the Atlantic and Pacific coast).

In a country as large, unpopulated, and diverse (geographically, lingusitically, and culturally) that connection is very important. Recently, the Canadian government started rolling out a very fast fibre optic network that was put in the ground along the (surprise surprise) railroad.

Broadband is a tool to further our national identity.

In addition, thanks to near monopolies in telephone and cable, we have homogenous suppliers of DSL and Cable broadband. And, despite what most people think about monopolies, my DSL costs $25 US a month for 1.5 megabits, and my phone line costs $30 US a month for basic access and voice mail.

It almost seems that the extra competition in the US has ultimately led to the failure of broadband.

Re:It blow my mind...

[ksheff]

$40 may be a lot of cash to some people, but they also need to examine the costs of dialup. In most areas a decent ISP is going to run about $20. If you don't want people griping that your phone is busy while you are on the internet, a 2nd phone line is needed. In my locality, this is about $12, but once all the taxes and other fees are tacked on, it runs about $20 or more. So we have about $40 for broadband and about the same for dialup. Other than being potentially less reliabile, if broadband costs the person about the same as dialup but is much faster, why wouldn't they choose it?

Personally, I don't care about entertainment content via the web. I just like not having to wait for sites with a lot of html and/or images per page (like slashdot). It makes downloading email and software nice too.