Worldwide State of Broadband - S Korea, Japan Lead

Geek of the Week writes "No surprise here, a report by the International Telecommunications Union shows the US lagging in broadband adoption. S Korea and Japan lead with between 60 and 70% of S Korean households wired for speed, with Japan catching up quickly. The U.S. ranks 11th. Story here and the full press release can be found on the ITU website. Having traveled through Asia for business I can't say I'm surprised, but it is disappointing that the availability and price are in such sorry states here in the U.S."

Comments

Obvious

[Breakfast Pants]

These countries have concentrated areas of high population density.

Rural Area

[rabbit994]

Did they take into account that we are much larger then either of those countries with a large amount of rural area where broadband is expensive to run and with no ROI? It's easy to make everyone broadband when they don't have the amount of land to cover. Why don't they look at broadband saturation in suburbian and urban areas and compare us to Korea?

Re:Rural Area

[puppetman]

Umm... Canada was 3rd. Kind of blows your theory. With 6 million fewer people that California, and the second largest country (in square kilometers/miles), we're alot more rural that the US.

The problem in the States is a fragmented industry (too many small players), the inability of one company to deliver the service all the way to the doorstep of the consumer (most broadband offerings are offered by a consortium of companies, complicating delivery and support), a lack of interest and/or vision by these companies, and (I believe) a strong desire by the larger corporations to screw the consumer.

All of this means the average online American is a high-ping bastard, being schooled by your friends to the north :D (just kidding, of course).

Re:Rural Area

[sys$manager]

Keep in mind that here in Canada something like 90% of the population lives within a small strip along the southern border too, it's not like we're running DSL links to Tuktoyaktuk.

Not too hard to get that level of penetration...

[ewombatnet]

With a highly centralised and urbanised population, as well as a telco infrastructure that wasn't originally laid in the 1920s (as with most of the western world).

Now if they could just do something about the price barrier for UK, US, and AU we might get some penetration...

It's not entirely population density

[Peter Cooper]

So does the United Kingdom, although I doubt the UK is even in the top 20 of their list (it's not in the article), thanks to having one of the worst deployed broadband systems in Europe.

Countries like Canada, however, fare a lot better than the UK, yet their population density is a mere fraction of that in the UK.

Re:It's not entirely population density

[Hadlock]

If you only counted the population of canada w/in 50 miles of the US border, you'd get a much higher population density figure. the UK and Canada both had (Fairly) cheap phone lines previous to broadband, unlike s.korea, which caused a very slow changeover rate to broadband in the UK and canada. s. korea has fairly expensive land lines, causing people to adopt broadband when they never had landlines previously, alowing them to leapfrog the changeover from a previous technology.

Re:It's not entirely population density

[Zocalo]

Actually, I think the UK's problem is more marketing and pricing, rather than technically orientated, and suspect many other countries have the same problem. Sure, the coverage by area in the UK is pretty poor, but in terms of population reach it's not too bad - BT claims 80% (pinch of salt). So, for a population of 60m (to keep the numbers easy) we have 80% of that elegable for broadband, which is 48m. Great! Despite this, BT's own figures just released by Oftel show only 1,263,000 BT wholesale customers, which is just 2.6% of those capable of getting broadband via DSL. That doesn't include cable and other non-BT provisioned circuits though, but that can't add more than a couple of percentage points.

People can *get* broadband in the UK, they are either just choosing not to, don't understand the benefits, or plain do not think they require it. A survey of SMEs on broadband take up gives a few more pointers in this direction too. Those that have broadband, would recommend it and have come to rely on it heavily in 90% of cases. Yet 80% of SMEs have no plans to upgrade from dial-up access in the next 12 months, citing "lack of business case". What? When I worked at an SME (~300 computers) using ISDN access our phone costs were astronomical; we got a 256kb/s leased line for less.

The only way I can think of that explains this discrepency is that it all comes back to marketing. J.Q. Public sees the flashy ads by BT, AoL, NTL and others and thinks "Huh? Why do I want/need that?". The corporate types see these ads and see happy families around the computer and cartoon characters on the street and class it as a consumer product, and therefore irrelevent.

But then again, why complain? It's not like we need *another* huge bunch of noobs jumping on the 'net, is it? (Only half joking)

In other news

[Hadlock]

Small, countries on the eastern Pacific Ocean have a population of at least 60-70% people with darker skin than Americans.

Or somthing

Comon people, this is OBVIOUS; Smaller land mass + higher population denisty + late to the technology party = High rate of adoption. If local phone lines were as cheap there as they are here, they'd probably still be adopting dialup, not broadband. Instead, they skipped that phase, which is why that brings us to this point in time. Same deal with cell phones, for the most part.

Population density??

[jimlintott]

Yeah. That would explain why Canada was third, eh.

Broadband Slowdown

[Bruha]

Better would be to focus on the slowdown of American broadband. When it was first rolled out there were no caps whatsoever and it was generally allowed to run at the speed that the equipment could handle. So the average DSL user ran over 3mbit in some cases if they had good lines. Uncapped both directions.

Then came the abusers and greed of the communications companies and today you see the extreme chokehold on the broadband today. SBC's base package for DSL is 384/128k dn/up compared to Verizon's 768k-1.544M/128k and the cable companies provide service comparable to Verizon.

New trends are starting to take hold in some areas with Verizon Wireless rolling out EvDO 3G which can run upwards of 2.3M and Verizon Landline (Seperate companies) is testing 2M+ speeds in certain (Lucky) markets with future plans to turn up the dial on broadband.

While those trends are nice to see you still have many who still have dialup due to cost and some worse off areas still cannot get a better connection than 26600kbps!

Interestingly people have pointed out monopolies. There is basically 1 telepone company in South Korea. Korean Telecom and a handfull of offshots after other companies were allowed to spring up but I'd say 90% of that country is serviced by KT and TMK there is only one cable company there. So it's questionable if more competition really is the answer (Korea may regulate, the us de-regulates)

I'm not sure what goes on in Japan but I would suspect nearly the same situation there also but you'll have to understand both countries until very recently had complete conglomerates (Sp?) of many things from electronics to communications systems. Now there is free market competition but not in the manner of how the US Govt mandated AT&T split up those companies were just forced to allow competition to "try" to work their way into a established system. Which probably will work becuase the exec's of those companies realize given choice people will pick the better company that provides them value.

In Australia

[pythonisman]

In Australia, where a huge proportion of our population live in major cities, and "within 100 miles / 160 kilometres" of a major city / regional centre, and the broadband situation is appaling.

There are a few decent providers out there, (a very few) the majority do nothing but deliberately trick people into long contracts at hopelessly slow plans)

In australia, $70 a month would be lucky to buy you 256/64 ADSL on a 3Gb plan, $90 a month for 512/128 with 5Gb, $150 a month for 1.5 / 256 with 8 / 9 Gb...

I have not seen any advirtisements for residential ADSL with speeds higher than these, and I don't imagine if they existed they would be 'affordable'.

Sure, there are cheap providers. if you don't mind being stuck in a pipe with too many people getting timeouts and incomprehensibly slow speeds.

Then there's the cable.
With so many people now sharing the cable, at peak times, the speed just drops. And drops. The Australian Personal Computer magazine reviewed broadband and the Cable service "at peak times, you would be better off with dial up".

Not to mention it costs $90 a month for 3Gb .

I wish you 'poor americans' would stop crying.
I pity those in the same situation as me, over there, but the fact is, when I thought 33.6 was pretty cool, relatives in the US had cable for hardly much more cost.

Dialup Isn't a bad thing. If you don't need broadband, you shouldn't have to pay for it, but I would sooner see a range of cheaper, slowed DSL like products adopted as opposed to the majority of dialup, because it is a far better technology.

Wireless internet is interesting, and being trialled, but the security problems are a concern.

Please, US, please, stop crying about "The state of broadband". I give it to you that you don't have a high %age of broadband uptake with the population, but that also comes with a high %age of people who don't want it, or don't need it.