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America's Broadband Dream Is Alive-- In Korea
An anonymous reader writes "America's Broadband Dream Is Alive in Korea thanks to government encouragement, according to the NY times (free reg, etc...). But profits are elusive." The U.S. is a lot more spread out than Korea, though -- some American cities are pretty well connected.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/05/business/worldbu siness/05BROA.html?ex=1052712000&en=5906ece0642a35 44&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE
-- free as in swatantryam - not soujanyam.
Last time I was in S. Korea (December, 2001) someone quoted me a statistic that one out of every two people (that includes everybody- babies, homeless guys, old people) have a hand phone. (cell phone for those US-centric.)
I was being made fun of by old people because my state-of-the-art US cell phone at the time was a "brick".
Obviously, broadband is just as widespread. My 80-year old grandmother doesen't even have a washing machine, but she has DSL, for crying out loud.
From the article, here is a list showing the broadband penetration as a percentage of Internet households:
-- "At Microsoft, quality is job 1.1" -- PC Magazine, Nov. 1994
Funny you should mention Canada.
... prior to Baby Powell's mismanagement of the FCC (and the local telco monopolies), and prior to that agency's willful unwillingness to enforce federal laws mandating fair and equitable access of competitors to local monopoly last-mile wire, Spring offered an 8 Mbit download/1 MBit upload ADSL service which, for the two months I had it before SBC drove them out of the marketplace with Baby Powell's blessing, Downtown Chicago actually surpassed rural canada in available bandwidth.
With Timothy's typically unenlightened, American Apologist addendum to the original post, and I quote:
The U.S. is a lot more spread out than Korea, though -- some American cities are pretty well connected.
one would expect Canada, which is even larger than the US, less densly populated even in its populated areas, and much so in its rural areas, to have even less broadband availability than the United States. However, surprising as it is to many of my countrymen, broadband is both more widely availabe and less expensive in Canada, indeed, in rural Canada, than it is in downtown Chicago.
This wasn't always the case
No longer.
Although I live in the heart of the city, a mere 10 minute walk from the dense, commercial portion of the city commonly referred to as the "loop," I am unable to get affordable DSL at anything greater than 1 Mbit. This, in contrast to the very inexepensive, 2 Mbit and better offerings available to rural residents of Alberta.
The dichotomy between the United States and Korea (South) isn't one of geography, it is one far more closely related to the dichotomy between Korea (South) and Korea (North), i.e. the difference between a nation with a well managed telecommunications industry and one with a poorly managed telecommunications industry, and while America (The US) bears little resemblence to the deprivations of North Korea, we probably owe that more to a history of decent management which has only, since about the 1980s, become an ongoing condition of zero and even negative-sum gameplaying by our leaders, in contrast to North Korea's fifty odd year of starkly negative-sum policies.[1]
However, if those of us living here do not get off our butts and insist on good governance, for the good of the many and not just the few, we may find ourselves, in not so many generations at all, bearing a striking resemblence to the third world we so like to disparage. Indeed, arguably, in terms of health care and telecommunications, we already do. Let's hope the greed of the ruling class and their political pawns doesn't extend that to our home or, worse, our food supply.
[1]Negative-sum games are scenerios in which a player's strategy is to win in such a way that the overall wealth is decreased, but their sum total increases. Imagine starting out with three pies, throwing one in the face of your opponent, and then running off with the other two. Only two pies remain, but 2 pies are better for you than merely 1 1/2. Or imagine an intellectual property regime that impoverishes the culture of billions, but makes a few thousand people filthy rich, and a few million able to make ends-meet, if just barely.
Zero sum is where you compete for portions of a pool of wealth which neither grows nor shrinks. Assuming a fair outcome, you both end up with 1.5 pies. Assuming an unfair, but nevertheless non-destructive, zero-sum scenerio, the three pies remain in existence and are divvied up in some fashion favoring one party or the other.
Positive sum scenerios are of course the best, and in terms of physical goods (and limited supply), capitalism generally excels here (except in situations of monopolies, be they 'natural', such as roads and telephone wire, or through economic or political force, such as the East India Tea company in days of yore, or Microsoft today). In this scenerio a strategem is employed that results in the creation of additional pies, which may or may not be shared freel
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy