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

It's more than just area and cost

[YllabianBitPipe]

Another reason for the lack of mass broadband acceptance in America is frankly, a lack of a market. There's a lot of average-joe-computer-users who don't see an every-day benefit of broadband. They don't do anything on the web other than IM, Email, check a few websites. These are the people for whom the concept of uploading a digital photo to a web site is mind blowing. Forget about Warcraft III or video on demand. I don't see any of these people interested in broadband, and frankly, I can't blame them. Why spend money on something you *think* you won't use?

People in this boat might be technophobes, maybe they got burned on Yahoo! stock and are pissed off, maybe they're afraid of viruses, maybe they are just cheap bastards. But ultimately it all comes down to a classic chicken and egg problem. People aren't going to sign up in droves until there's the content, and because of the .com implosion there aren't any companies doing wild and crazy stuff on the web that's attracting people. It's probably going to take a massive investment by the tech / telecom companies to decide this is worth it, to subsidize the cost of broadband for a while and bring it down to the 10-25 bucks a month making it competitive or cheaper than dial up. And unfortunately in today's shitty tech economy, it's going to be a few years before this happens...

Hi adoption AND hi speed

[jmichaelg]

I have a friend who spent last year in South Korea. He was hurting for cash so he could only afford the low-end service - 22 mbps.

And I thought T1 was fast...

Re:It's not entirely population density

[mindstrm]

Yes, but still nowhere NEAR what it is in the UK.

IT's not like canada is one big city coast to cast along the US border you know.

We are talking about the population density of the populized areas.. NOT calculated over teh entire landmass of Canada...

This argument doens't hold up, sorry.. the population density of canada just in teh strip north of hte US is still much lower than the US, or the UK, or most other places.

Re:Broadband in Japan

[Sycraft-fu]

Transfer rates are actually a major setback I've noticed for many foriegn broadband providers. With the broadband I get in the US the rate I get is the rate I get. I assume (correcty) that my provider has sufficient upstream to give me that rate to anywhere.

Well this is NOT the case with many other providers around the world. A big one is a service with the initals BBB (don't know the full name) in Sweden (and other countries). they'll sell you huge connections (like 10MB) for cheap. Well I was at work trying to transfer files to someone on it one day, transfer was slow, like 20 kbytes/second. He started whining that I had a slow connection. Well I work for Network Operations for a large university, we have several OC-3c lines to different providers. I check network usage stats and they were low, did a quick transfer to another server at 4 mbytes/sec. Problem was NOT on my end.

A little digging turns out that that BBB has great speeds, provided you are going to other BBB customers or people they peer with. You want to go to the US, you get a low rate. It is kinda like a large 100mbit lan with a DSL line going out to the net. You get awesome transfers to all the LAN people but not so much to the world.

Well this is certianly cheaper. Bandwidth starts to get real expensive when you are talking big links to big backbones. If you cut down on that, you can afford to offer much cheaper service. This isn't necessarly a bad way of doing it, but it does need to be kept in mind. I pay about $100USD for a 1.5/786 DSL connection which sounds expensive, but I get that 24/7 to anywhere (well, anywhere that has sufficient bandwidth, 8 static IPs, the ability to host servers, etc. That all counts for something.

Re:Lazy Cheapskates

[evilviper]

I am a DSL salesman, and I have called thousands of americans and talked to them about DSL

So what you are saying, is that you are a son-of-a-bitch telemarketer.

The main reason adoption rates of broadband are so low is a combination of two things.

I'd say the main reasons you get the answers you get, is because people hate to be annoyed by you, and usually give any excuse to shut a telemarketer up.

Also, it could very well just be that they have been screwed-over by lying telemarketers before, and just don't believe a word that comes out of your mouth.

But why should you do that when you can get dialup for $9 a month now?

Frankly, that's a VERY good arguement. If people aren't tying up their dial-up line for very long, why should they care that something faster is available? Not like they are going to notice the difference in how fast their e-mail is downloaded. Saying that they should just for the sake of progress or other such crap is moronic.

(I have a broadband connection BTW, so I'm not playing the part of the defensive dial-up user)