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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."
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...