Slashdot Mirror
Broadband Envy: Fixing American Broadband
Ant writes "Broadband Reports has a story on broadband services among countries including United States falling behind: 'Bombarded with tales of South Koreans and Swedes watching high-definition soap-operas via 100Mbps connections, the media has apparently developed a nasty case of broadband envy. This Reuters article suggests the US has "missed the high speed revolution", while last week Business Week dubbed America a "broadband backwater".'"
First off, we already know that "we have a much larger infrastructure". That argument is tired. We're still behind - even accounting for this significant hurdle. Other countries have made it a priority and have put measures in place that allow the process to bypass red tape and move forward.
We haven't, and we need to.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
His 10-megabit-per-second service from telecommunications company Bredbandsbolaget is up to 20 times faster than conventional cable modems, enabling a user to download a two-hour movie in a matter of minutes rather than hours.
His 10mbit cable modem is a little over 3x as fast as standard Comcast, 2.5x as fast as standard Cox in GA, about 2.5x as fast as Roadrunner in Western OH, and about 6.7x faster than the rest of the Cable modems I know of (I have heard rumors of Optimum Online being 10mbit). It's about 5x as fast as my Frontier/Visi DSL here in MN, about 6.7x faster than my parent's Epix DSL in PA... The only service I have heard of under 1mbit in recent memory is Qwest DSL here in Minnesota that is only 640k.
We are also comparing Sweeden to the United States... I don't need to rehash the fact that the US is quite a bit larger than Sweeden and the population dense areas are quite a distance apart. You just have to love that they mention sharing a DVD over the Net with a friend, WTF?! Give me a break, why did they even bring that shit up? They know that's illegal here...
Yeah, the US sucks for broadband. It's slow in comparison, it's expensive in comparison (although near here in Chaska, MN they have 1mbit (uncapped so it can go as high as 3mbit bi-directional) mesh-wireless for $17/mo), and it's controlled by single providers. In free markets supply and demand run the system. People are willing to pay $40+/mo for the broadband offered and the companies have no reason to upgrade when people do.
This is very true. The US is behind, and for good reason. While other countries develop cutting-edge infrastructures that are government-subsidized, we are stuck here in the US paying money to monopolies (read: Comcast, et al) for relatively substandard services. Sure, it might be more than enough for people now, but there is no reason that a nation as advanced as ours should be so backwards in this area.
The problem is the size of our country. In South Korea and Switzerland it's easy to string fiber everywhere for cheap, because the whole country is developed. In the U.S. there are miles and miles of wasteland that make it difficult to bring fiber to the curb.
Population density. ;))
Not so much Sweeden, but certainly South Korea and Japan the population density in the cities is much greater - so it's a lot more cost-effective to roll out high-speed broadband in those areas, and there is less of a problem with factors such as distance.
Also, all of those countries have had some form of government funding/grants (correct me if I'm wrong), especially South Korea which has had a huge amount of money spent on infrastructure. The main lesson we can learn from South Korea is that "if you provide it (highspeed broadband), the customers will come" (not least because of the lure of 'adult' sites
I want some community owned fiber network to my house! :|
Sounds great... let's upgrade here! :)
Agile Artisans
What the people who compare the US to these tiny little countries fail to see is the vast differences in terms of scale we're talking about to make a comparable system in the US.
There is absolutely no comparison to networking a country the size of one of our smaller states and a country as physically vast and populated as the US. The prices for materials ends up being much higher, and the logistics problems grow in order of magnitudes.
When China or Russia or India run gigabit to every home, then I'll start worrying.
Two years or so ago I visited Tami Nadu, a poor state in the south of India... Even in the smallest towns (say, 20 inhabitants which is nothing in India), you would find a place offering dirst-cheap internet acces (typically 2 or 3 computers sharing a 33.6k line). People there had taken to using that instead of phone because it was much, much cheaper! It allowed for exemple parents who had a son or daughter studying or working in an other city to contact him at a fraction of the cost of a phone call. It also allowed farmers to have up-to-date information on market price for their product or to ask for the delivery of fertiliser or spare parts for those who had a truck, or to know when one of their relative living in a city had an opening for a temporary job (at a building site, for exemple). It was amazingly useful - and it was not designed for tourists. Though we were happy to use the places, we were often the only foreigners the guy in charge of the place had had for clients this year. And while it was slow, for text emails a 33.6 line is more than enough. You really wanted to kill spammers there though - downloading 50 spam emails using broadband is annoying, but on a shared 33.6k line it's a real pain ;-)
People who reacts to article like that by saying that internet is a luxury are missing the fact that basic internet services like emails or simple websites are in practice often the cheapest way to communicate - you get far more information out of your phone line. And even poor farmers in third-world countries need to communicate, if only to the nearest city. Internet is more than just a greater provider of pr0n and pirated music...
--
We are the collective Slashbot HiveMind
Sweeden: 173,732 square miles South Korea: 38,000 square miles USA: 3,537,441 square miles
The High Speed Revolution will televised in the US ONLY.
In all other countries, it will be streamed in HD over 100Mbps connections.On one hand I want to say "just relax the telecom/cable regulation so there are far lower barriers to entry." But you can't have every company with a couple wires digging up every street to spur competition. Then to make it even worse the existing telecom grid was put in place by private companies using MASSIVE government subsidies.
I am about as hardcore capitalist as one could get but I think in the case of wired communication you have a natural monopoly that should be owned by the government so that a level playing field for all can be developed and create an enviroment with much lower barriers to entry. Of course to do that the current owners of the telecom grid would get F'd in the A so it's not as simple as that.
Sigh...
In other words, it's the Baby Bells and the FCC who make it hard for communities to roll their own broadband, not distance or regulations or profit.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
I just upgraded to 3Mbit/512k (in reality it's about 4/640) DSL for less than I was paying for 512k SDSL service. I pay around $45/mo. This is pretty good, and I can certainly understand the lack of 100mbit connections in a country as large as the US. I can download a couple Linux ISOs in a half an hour or so... I'm happy with it. :) Within 5 years or so we'll all look back on this and laugh... when everyone has gigabit ethernet or some other insanely fast fiber connection. Or maybe wireless!
Try living in the UK. Sure we got broadband, sure we got pretty good coverage. But the price? ARRRGH!!!
£20 a month for 512/256 ADSL? Nice. Or not?
... only they call it their beltsize.
.. the UK has just figured out how to string two plastic cups together for 9600bps.
If you bomb the place,
you too destroy their broadband.
Nothing left to steal.
--- Pikine's Haiku
I once had a signature.
Almost every other country we hear about doing this has one distinct advantage over the US. That advantage is that they have WAY less land mass to cover.
For example... If you took all the wiring and fiber placed in Sweden to get the infrastructure they have and used it in the US you could probably only outfit New York and Chicago before running out of material.
We suffer from the fact that as a nation we are a LARGE area to cover. Cell providers have figured this out. In iceland they can easily cover the whole country with a modest number of towers. Here in Michigan we have to have the same number of towers to cover the lower peninsula. Getting fiber between major cities in Sweden you are talking 150-250 miles while in the US you are talking 400-900 miles for the same setup.
Tech scales well... but money doesn't and we are a large country to scale to. When we hear about China or Russia beating us on broadband availability then we seriously have to wonder what is going on.
Telcos have alot of dark fibre in the States. Most people assume that's optical fibre...but it's actually moral fibre.
I hear a lot of grumbling over US broadband and my question is; What can we do? Are we stuck with what we have? Is there someone we can complain to who will both listen and also be able to make a difference?
For the most part it seems like a lot of the complaining done is pretty much futile since we have no control over the situation.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
TimeWarner in Minneapolis offer 6M down, 768k up (I think.) That's the best I've seen apart from SDSL, but it runs $85/mo.
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
I propose that the reason broadband isn't more widely used in the US is simply because the demand for it isn't there. Most people aren't going to derive 2x the benefit from paying 2x (or in some cases as much as 5x) more for broadband over dialup.
In other countries broadband, and telecom in general, are run as a monopoly by the government, which uses tax money to heavily subsidize the costs. Basically, people don't know what they're paying for it. So naturally it'll appear a good choice to pay a few bucks more for government internet access than 3rd-party, unsubsidized dial-up.
Frankly, I'm glad we have the situation that we do here in the States. There are plenty of venues for people to obtain broadband if they want it. Cable/DSL in most cities, or satellite and other esoteric forms for the rest.
Freedom is the freedom to say that 2 + 2 = 4
Our postal service can't meet their targets and we are beholden to BT for all our telecommunications. At the very least in America there is a sembalance of competition.
I'm mildly annoyed because a 72hr outage was caused by a cow (supercow powers) munching through some BT cable. Don't they bury these things?
"The number of Unix installations has grown to ten, with more expected." (Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd ed.; june 1972)
Funny, I've never known Comcast to offer 3 megabit upload on their cable modems.
I'll give the example of my mother and father. They live 7,000' from the phone company, within the city limits, in a city of 80,000 people. The phone company placed something they called a compressor on the line to my dad's house (apparently to run more than one phone line over the wires into his neighborhood), which makes DSL impossible. The phone company wants $1,200 to fix it. Monthly rates after that are $60.
/required/ to buy their $500 cable modem, and commit to a three year contract. Montly rates are around $80.
The cable company offers cable access, but you are
Horseshit. These companies don't want business.
I'm very happy to be living in within a structure of a decentralized broadband access where each individual state dictates the best method of communication
So, you'd be QUITE HAPPY to have the means of communication DICTATED BY THE STATE eh comrade? Why, you COMMUNIST!
Nah, seriously, the reasons why the US has somewhat slower broadband probably relate to how much higher the actual demand for it is in SK and Sweden. You don't have to start raging against the monster of socialism every time the US isn't #1.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
12 comments, and most of them are already saying "its different because the US is so big!"
Bullshit. Look at #2 on the actual report, sitting beside South Korea: Canada. Canada being both geographically larger and far less densely populated then the US, the size argument is blown up right there.
The US is just a lousy place to get broadband.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
The comcast network, for example, is so poorly structured and administrated that the vast majority of the bandwidth is monopolized by virii and spammers. Judging by the attack sources on my firewall and mailservers, roadrunner, verizon and cox are in the boat.
Since the broadband providers usually have geographical monopolies, they do not have to respond to competitive forces (thank you corporate republicrat drones in high office!) and thus have no incentive to hire the (expensive) people who could easily crush the virus problem, which in turn would castrate the spammers (since nearly all of the operate from cracked cable victims these days).
COMPETENT computer scientists could knock every_known_virus off comcast.com in two weeks or less USING EXISTING EQUIPMENT AND FOSS. Why don't they do so? Because Comcast is too GREEDY to hire COMPETENT people, bottom line. As the comedienne used to say in the days of Ma Bell: "we're the phone company. We don't care - because we don't have to".
Introducing true competition for broadband would solve the problem eventually, but the "invisible hand of capitalism", like the "great wheel of karma", moves exceedingly slowly when there are existing infrastructure monopolies.
South Koreans and Swedes watching high-definition soap-operas via 100Mbps connections
And here I am, watching high-definition popup advertisements via 32 Kbps aol dialup. Like a sucker.
SBC SW Bell in St. Louis offers 6Mb down, 512k up for $45/month. It's awesome.
At least we own the majority of the IP addresses! :)
Use Minidisc? Join the Minidisc.org forums.
Maybe you should all stop complaining about how you don't all have ten megabit connections?
Over here in Australia, we are almost all on 56k. I can count the number of people I know who have broadband on one hand.
In the USA, you recently got to 50% of households with broadband. Care to guess how many people in Australia have access to high-speed internet? One million as of June 2004. Out of more than 20 million. THAT'S FIVE PERCENT!!!
Just because some countries have faster internet, that doesn't mean you're falling behind.
I'd kill people to get a 512k ADSL line, but I'm just not able to. Be happy with what you already have.
My brothers Optimum Online broadband connection speed tests show it to be a 5Mbit down, and 512Kbit up... that is for Norwalk in CT. I don't know if the speeds vary region to region, but that is for the standard residential service... I think the business service goes up to 10Mbit.
Most of this is AFAIK, because I'm posting this from a standard 512/256 broadband connection in the UK... if you think the USA is a broadband backwater, think what it is like over here!
Are you local? There's nothing for you here!
Canada is larger than the US and we have implemented many high speed fiber loops in each province.
You just need to realize as long as you willing to pay $20-$30 a month for a crap connection that is all you will ever get.
We Americans have always had to contend with the fact that our country is friggin' HUGE. Korea and Sweden by comparison are quite small. To get the Power and Phone infrastructure we implemented regulated monopolies. Would we do that for broadband? Probably not with the current state of the politicos on privatization and such. Companies are no longer interested in last mile as it is not profitable. So nationwide 100Mb, probably not for some time.
-Runz
I pay $30 Canadian a month for 3 mbit down and something close to 1 mbit up. I can also share music, so I have a use for the upload speed ;)
You do know that USA is quite a bit more densely populated than Sweden, don't you? As a matter of fact the population density in USA is 45% greater than Sweden!
Btw.. What you are describing is a monopoly (which is the case in usa) and not a free market. In a truly free market we would have prices that are no higher than the actual cost of providing the service, anything else is reflective of monopoly power.
So ironically we have a fundamentally socialist country here providing a more economically sensible alternative than the home of capitalism can..
Dear Anonymous Coward,
Since your intention is to write unbiased material, I'd like to refer you to WikiPedia's Neutral Point of View article. Notice that NPOV doesn't mean you can't say your opinion, but you must say so ("my opinion is that ...") and possibly present other people's opinion. In your writing, there is a mixed personal opinion and small number of facts. It might have been better to highlight both of them separately.
I once had a signature.
A wireless grid infrastructure may be the answer, but personally I'd hate that because of the military vulnerabilities it would introduce. Wired is slightly safer for national defense, and as long as the fedguv continues to pick fights in the Third World we're going to need a strong national defnese.
Slashdotters, is anyone out there finding that the Reuters site is darn sloooow? I am using Mandrake 10.0 with KDE 3.2. Those using IE or Mozilla are telling me that it is not the case. Is Reuters involved in "Browser Arpetheid"?
if we weren't busy waging war.
Well, I believe Finland is a far worse broadband backwater than the USA.
You know, one of the largest ISPs, Elisa, just doubled the speed of their most common connection - to AMAZING 1024/512!
Finland was once among the most advanced when it comes to internet technology. But thanks to greedy ISPs like Sonera and Elisa, people here believe a 2Mbit connection to be amazingly fast and the companies of course have no intention to do anything about it. After all, they can slowly bring up the speeds as the people complain - and get huge profit. I think the situation's quite a bit worse in here than in the USA, though we sure as hell have the capability to build a system comparable to Sweden. And in fact my connection now never works at 1Mbit, it's more like 800-900k or something.
Sweden's far more advanced, though our beloved neighbour is actually slightly larger. I'm amazed that it's so damn impossible for us to build a network of at least a bit higher speed connections. At best you can get a 8/1Mbit connection for about 60 euros (that's 80 dollars or something?), and that's only at some of the largest cities.
Thank god we have started to get smaller ISPs giving a bit better connections. Competition begins to force the large companies to start rising speeds too.
But that's not the problem at all. During the telecom/dot boom, companies were laying fiber left and right. The last reports I read suggested that something like only 10% of it was "lit", while the rest was "dark", not being actively used.
The cross-country spanning fiber is laid. There's plenty of fiber going in to most communities. The problem is the "last mile" of getting it to the home. What's holding us up is companies figuring out how to profit from installing it that last mile from the central distribution point to your home. Will you be willing to pay more for your cable service for all the new features that a fiber-optic pipe to your house will offer? I doubt it. Will you pay more for your dsl or cable-modem connection for 10 or 100 times the speed, or will you decide that your current speed is preferable to an extra $20 or $50 per month?
I have bredbandsbolaget as my ISP. Let me clear up some facts in your post:
His 10mbit cable modem is a little over 3x as fast as...
The article is a bit unclear here, so it's understandable that you think he has a cable modem. In fact bredbandsbolaget delivers 10mbit ethernet to apartment houses, connected to an optical fiber connection. This means that they deliver 10mbit in both directions, which is significantly different from what any high-speed DSL/cable modems are capable of delivering.
We are also comparing Sweeden to the United States... I don't need to rehash the fact that the US is quite a bit larger than Sweeden and the population dense areas are quite a distance apart.
Population density, Sweden: 20 citizens/square kilometer.
Population density, USA: 33 citizens/square kilometer. (CIA Factbook)
As for population dense areas in US being quite a distance apart, you are probably right.
I ran across this the other day. http://www.digital-rapids.com/News_PressRelease.ht ml/ third story down. Its interesting because its really a cable over IP deployment using WM9. Korea can do this because the government has made it the highest priority to move education, telecommunications, and television to an all IP based infrastructure. Seems like Korea took those dot-com promises of hundreds of channels of television delivered over broadband seriously.
It's significantly easier to roll out fiber and fat pipes to folks who live a maximum of 500 miles from the CO than it is to run those same cables out to the rural ass areas of middle America.
Fat pipes from city to city are also more costly than in the often-time-pickled Korea, or the lightly-dusted-with-population Sweden.
Don't Crease the Weasel!
Funny I didn't see the Reuters article mention anything about 10mbit/10mbit. They just mentioned 10mbit being 20x faster than "traditional cable modems".
If they are talking about 10/10 then it's only 6x faster than Comcast, not 20x. Your point?
One thing I noticed when looking at the graph from the OECD website is that cable modems seem to falling behind as the broadband connection of choice except in the US and a few other countries. Canada is about half and hald and the rest of the world is mostly using DSL...
Tell your Dad that he will consider fronting the money to fix it, but needs to meet someone at the location of the compressor to see what's involved and where his money is going.
Then, after the meeting, where he says he'll call them back, your Dad gets one of his buddy's with a backhoe and some beer...
Hey, if it ain't broke, how are they ever going to fix it right?
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
...behind such countries as Belgium.
What's he got against Belgium?!?
A Confused Belgian
The US a broadband backwater? Hah! The UK has only just started getting broadband in the last couple of years, and 512kbit is still considered 'high speed'. A 128kbit connection is considered broadband by the definition of the government (for the purposes of being able to say "We've made sure that over 90% of the population has broadband available to them.")
... UPGRADE!! LOL." I wish for a shotgun...
I'm pretty tired of hearing people from the US complain about their >1Mbit connections being slow.
In other news, every time I hear a web developer say "My page loads fast enough on my 4Mbit connection. If you're on dialup
Take a look at places such as England or Australia. Broadband is slower, more expensive, and in Australia often sold with a monthly data transfer limit.
The fact is that most of the things that sold the early adopters on broadband years ago still haven't come to fruition. Granted, broadband is more adopted than dial-up now, but its more for convenience (not having to dial in all the time), cost-effectiveness (not having to pay for an extra phone line and internet service), and speed (anything is better than AOL). But whatever happened to internet television? How about widely-accessible VoIP that integrates with your home's internet phone network? Devices that employ the internet for practical purposes, making your life easier? If anything I'm just using broadband to get porn at the speed of light.
*We are also comparing Sweeden to the United States... I don't need to rehash the fact that the US is quite a bit larger than Sweeden and the population dense areas are quite a distance apart.*
sweden has smaller population density than usa, with smaller towns/cities. same thing with finland. the "oh we're so damn big" argument is a stupid one, since there's also more people living more dense so it should be easier to make it more profitable to arrange broadband to them(and less problems with the last leg being too long for dsl).
the "usa is bigger" argument makes sense when you compare to something like tokio sure, but then again you should compare to a similar metropolitan area in the states.
*In free markets supply and demand run the system. People are willing to pay $40+/mo for the broadband offered and the companies have no reason to upgrade when people do.* yeah but is the market free, do they have a choice really?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
At least in the USA you don't have an oligopoly to deal with, where you pay through both nostrils for bandwidth-limited/capped services.
:)
So quit your whining, yanks!
I've been very impressed by UK broadband - highly competetive, cheap and relatively unrestricted usage. Nerd heaven.
For even a moderate connection in Tokyo I would pay around $50USD, after a fairly expensive line install cost ($300), but then would have sustained upload capability of 700kB/s (One megabyte in less than 2 seconds) and downloads easily twice that. Within Canada and the US it's a very very good day if I can download at 300kB/s from either cable or ADSL and upload a third of that speed. But guess what, the telco's/cableco's in North America have no reason whatsoever to upgrade because people don't know what they're missing nor is there a reasonably priced alternative.
The government used tax dollars to subsidize the building of the railroads and roads that made wiring the nation possible, then used tax manipulation to subsidize the creation of telephone monopolies, and now the boradband providers OWN the government and manipulate the law to preserve the monopolies tax dollars built.
Get real. A free market results in competition, which results in better service to customers, which is WHAT WE AIN'T GOT.
The media content and channel providers bought the US government lock, stock and barrel before I was born.
martinalderson@gmail.com is sad that the parent was moderated "Troll". Why did you have to upset martinalderson@gmail.com you nasty moderator?
20 pounds a month for 512/256? Aren't you guys lucky. Down in Australia here, we get 512/128 for $80 AUD per month, and that's with bandwidth caps.
And pfft, coverage-wise, Australia is far bigger and less dense than both.
Don't complain.
Founder of Mirror Moon - Tsukihime Game Trans
If you consisted of say around 50 largely autonomous regions it should be easy to emulate Sweden right?
Sure, we have more land in the USA, but we have a ton more money too. I would argue that especially in cities, it's just too profitable to offer "high speed cable modem" access for $50 per month... if someone were to start offering 10mb for that price, all the big cable companies would have to switch to that as well...but until then, it's first come, first serve, highest price that people are willing to pay wins.
stuff |
I know some cities Internet connections are subsidised, but Bredbandsbolaget is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) ISP in sweden and are a privately-held company.
You keep talking about your geography. Well yes, your country is quite large. But you still have 30 times the population of Sweden, and your country isn't 30 times larger than Sweden. Also, you don't have to pull fibre to every part of every single desert: the least densely populated areas in Sweden still have pretty crappy connections.
The difference between your countries is that Sweden and South Korea have used lots of government money and/or support to build their internet infrastructure. This is of course close to criminal in the US, but it has worked for them.
A free market is usually good at using infrastructure, but not always good at building it. I think it's time for the US to consider either paying or co-operating with corporations (like South Korea). You don't need to really use taxpayer money either - just strategic backing of infrastructure loans is a good start. After that, you just have to let the companies roam the new wires, because even I agree that stuff like AT&T back in the day isn't good. -Anon Coward, Finland
TFA says that Canada ranks with South Korea in broadband penetration, and it has similar geography to the US.
Yeah, but in Canada, 95% of the population is less than 5 degrees north of the 49th, and that population tend to clump near the cities. And given that there still are people who are on partyline phones (I think they've only recently got individual phones when a microwave link was established)...
In addition, Canada has a very high percentage of the population that subscribes to cable TV, so the infrastructure to actually do broadband is there. We may have similar geography to the US (larger country, actually), but when you have a population distribution as whacked as it is here (we love to hug the border), as well as infrastructure penetration, it makes broadband access easy. (In urban areas, there are only two types of TV - cable, and satellite. OTA is very rare. In the sticks, they tend to have satellite (C-Band or DSS), since pretty much the only OTA channels is CBC and a couple of others.
No, Canada is not geographically similar to the US. They're both big, they both are in the northern hemisphere, but that's about it.
I dont see the big advantage is just handing out download speeds. If you want true sharing be it running a server of some sort (web, game, etc), P2P, etc these companies really need to stop trying to placate us with higher download speeds and give up matching upload speeds.
Many broadband providers are handing out multi-megabit connections but with 128k or sometimes 256k up. When I hear about matching upload speeds available in other countries it just drives me crazy that I'm paying Comcast 60 dollars a month for 3 down and 256k up.
Face it: broadband users tend to do a lot more than just "consume online web ads." They use all sorts of P2P, be it eMule, bittorrent, kazaa. They want to be able to send friends and family large photos and media clips via email or ftp without waiting all day.
On top of it, a lot of these foreign countries get their infrastructure subsidized by tax dollars, while here in the states the baby bells sit on DSL roll outs until they can get long distance sales rights or whatever they need that month. The cable people are just plain expensive. I think the US market still needs to grow up a bit, address customer concerns, and stop playing the favor system and start selling product.
I live in Sweden - and whilst I have got 10mb/sec broadband in my current appartment, I'm actually in the process of moving appartments - and one of the criteria I have is - does the appartment have high speed broadband?
I would say about 80% of appartments that I have seen do not in my town - and it is not available without your appartment building paying quite a hefty premium for installation into the building.
So the lines maybe laid - but not so many are using it - in my opinion. I'm not so sure we're ahead with broadband - but as for 3G networks- we practically have a transmitting antenna on every other rooftop!
Most of it is empty. The rest of the population is crammed almost as tight as the other countries. "Neighbors to the North" is right; over half of their population lives fairly close to their southern border.
Shamelessly stolen reference link from someone else: Canada's Population Density Reading the caption reveals that 60% of their population lives in a tiny fraction of their land -- "a thin belt of land representing 2.2% of the land between Windsor, Ontario and Quebec City."
Never confuse volume with power.
A number of people have mentioned that in South Korea and in Sweden, the State has taken a leading role in funding and pushing the deployment of broadband, *and that this is a good thing*.
Be quite clear: this is *not* a good thing, and the South Koreans and Swedes have suffered thereby.
"Suffered, " I hear you ask, "how on earth have they suffered? they all have uber-fast broadband, which is massively useful both privately and to the economy."
It is indeed correct to say that universal broadband access is beneficial, both privately and publically.
But it is *incorrect* to say that it is better than the other uses that money would have been put to, had it not, by the intevention of the State, been forced to be spend on broadband infrastructure and services.
For the State to fund broadband, taxation rises, or tax revenues are redirected from other uses.
This is to say, that every person in the country pays that much more each year, so that those who do use broadband, can use broadband.
This is wrong on two counts;
1. on what basis do *you* get to take *my* money so *you* can have broadband?
2. that money would have been spent more efficiently otherwise; either the person spending it would have something more vital or profitable to spend it upon, or, at worse, they could themselves have chosen to spend it on buying broadband for themselves.
It is entirely *inefficient* for the State to dictate where people should spend their money. It is a violation of personal liberity and is, *at best*, exactly as efficient as would have happened naturally, but of course usually is less, and often far less, efficient.
--
Toby
I think they've only recently got individual phones when a microwave link was established
And do you have any idea the bandwidth you can get over those links? Even those 5% north of the 49th get better broadband penetration than rural US.
Let's pretend for a moment that people somehow didn't get to the second line of the article which mentions how Canada has faster Broadband while being larger and less populated than the US ...
... you're better off living somewhere in-beteen the two. When I lived in the DC metro area (until early 2003), both Comcast and Cox oversold their networks, badly managed them, and the service was horrible - multi-hour outages and 15 - 20% packet loss on a regular basis were the norm. Flash-forward to today where I live in Dover, DE. Comcast rocks here. Fast, reliable ... because less people use it (less population, lower mean income, etc). Same bad management to be sure, just not enough users to cripple the network on a regular basis.
*Urban Areas* in the US don't have the kind of Broadband these other countries enjoy. If size/density was the problem, we'd see densly populated, urban areas with 10Mbit service, while our sparsly populated, rural areas would fall behind.
Instead, we have lousy service in the urban areas, and non-existant service in the rurals.
What's funny is
- Brian Roach
I agree that we don't have widespread super-broadband because there's no profit in it in many places. And in some places, a government-run community based fiber system has worked - for now. But government intervention has the tendency of freezing the marketplace and ending the competition for new technologies.
Your cable modem rate would be much higher or may never have come about were it not for the phone companies offering DSL (and vice versa). Both competitors in that situation were willing to absorb large capital costs in order to make sure the other guy didn't get a jump on them.
Right now, there is a lot of competition to find new ways to set up high-speed connections. The cable companies, the phone companies, the electricity companies, cell phone and other wireless provider companies -- all these guys are hard at work looking for new technical solutions. If suddenly everybody has a government subsidized, decent speed pipe going into the home, all that competition will slow down or end and we may miss out on even better technologies that might come down the pipe later.
Look how long the phone service monopoly kept us stuck on 1920s-era technology services. Then France leap-frogged us by setting up Minitel service, but their adoption of Minitel by a government monopoly kept them out of the early stages of BBS and internet growth.
The amazing thing about broadband in America that the lousy service and high costs are forcing the more creative among us to develop alternative data infrastructures that are less expensive and more robust. Community-based wireless or fiber, creative use of the ISM bands, house-to-house infrared, etc. All become the testbeds for tommorrow's commercializations.
It also ensures that know-how about alternatives to centralized data infrastucture become (relatively) common knowledge.
Forgive my paranoia, but is this accidental or intentional?
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
Complaining about connection in the USA? Come to Spain... we have the more expensive and slower connection in the EU. We pay 45 euros (taxes included) for a humble 256/128 kbps ADSL line... now they promise to double the download speed for free, so you get 512/128 for the same price. Then you look at the prices of other EU countries... and you start crying. Internet connection in this country is a f*cking shame.
That in Canada, they actually meter the bandwidth? That is, sure, you get this 3mb/s, but only allowed 1G/month or something ridiculous.
I get 3mb down with comcast, and I'm allowed at least 60 times that amount. I routinely download 1G/day, sometimes 5 or 6 G in a day.
Can't touch that in Canada!
The article is a bit unclear here, so it's understandable that you think he has a cable modem. In fact bredbandsbolaget delivers 10mbit ethernet to apartment houses, connected to an optical fiber connection. This means that they deliver 10mbit in both directions, which is significantly different from what any high-speed DSL/cable modems are capable of delivering.
The article still isn't correct then when it states that it is 20x faster than traditional cable modems. Traditional cable modems are all over 1mbit these days.
For those who may not remember, here's alink to a story on a community based fiber project in Palo Alto .
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
Simply put, the two reasons the US ranks behind is twofold:
Education: As a percentage of population the US, has a smaller "educated" class.
Government Funding: There is a large segment of the popluation that is opposed to taxpayers funding anything that isn't intended on blowing something up.
Because of this, initiatives that aren't purley profit driven are very slow to catch on.
It's easy to "wire up" a country who has millions of people crammed into one little geographic area. The US is too spread out for the costs and infrastructure to be comparable.
I would love to have a nice 100Mb fiber connection to the house, but realistically, what would I gain over the 3 Mb cable connection I already have?? For new residential areas or or high density cities, it might make sense to put in fiber to the home, but it just does not make sense to rip and replace the infrastructure every few years. Technologies will change and having multiple providers as we do in the US is a better idea than letting any single provider have a monopoly (I realize some areas are already facing this, but with govt control it would be near universal with no hope of change.) When budgets are tight do you really think the govt. will want to buy new routers, provide adequate service (this is already a problem in some locations) or do other necessary infrastructure upgrades? The solution to our problems is to structure the market so more companies offer broadband preferably with many different technologies (DSL, CABLE, FIBRE, WIRELESS).
From the cia world factbook:
That's heaven, man.
In Buenos Aires we got 512k down / 128k up for about 100 argentine pesos (around 33 dollars.) p/mo.
And they even manage to call it 'broadband' with a straight face..
check this out: If you buy the 'fiber 512' service, it costs you around $100 (argentine pesos) per month. That's a standard cablemodem connection, coaxial to modem, ethernet from modem to nic.
If you buy the 'fiber 512 wifi' service, it costs around $130 per month... and all they do is give you a wifi cablemodem instead of an ethernet one!
And those are the prices IF you are a cable TV customer of the same company. Otherwise you'd have to pay about 50% extra.
"Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad." -- Terry Pratchett
Canada also has 1/10th the population. America has some odd 293 million people vs. 31 million canadians. Mostly located along their southern border mind you.
peace,
-Grokent
There's a few cable companies out there - I'm on NTL, my brother's on BlueYonder, and work is on Telewest... All at different rates, but all cheaper than BT...
Not to mention that BT may be the common carrier for most of the gazillion xDSL services, but there's still a lot of competition for prices/services, and at least the services are relatively unrestricted in terms of bandwidth use and what you do with the connection...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Here's one you have heard of now, then:
Just across from Stillwater in Wisconsin the *only* broadband I can get is DSL from the local telco... which is capped at 256 kilobits/second.
Yee-haw.
Being out in the middle of nowhere does hurt for geeks. You either have dial up or nothing most of the time. Time Warner has fibre run past my house, but hasn't activated it, and from what I understand, has no plans to. Local telco has no plans to put in another CO or repeater station to get DSL out here. Only other alternative? Satellite. And with 6 second latency too.
The population in Sweden is 22 people per square mile.
South Korea has 1223 people per square mile.
The United States has 80 people per square mile.
Sweden has much less than both South Korea and United States, yet high speed broadband is very common. Hell, I live in a village that's about 200-300 people and I have 100mbit, up in the northen part of the country where the population per square mile is very, very low. The government payed a bit of it and gave us a tax relief while it cost every household about 2200-2000 dollars. I don't have IP telephony or internet video, but I know one of the major reasons we got it was because people wanted to download movies off of the internet (I'm serious). They even said when I asked about our bandwidth limit that "it's enough per day for you to download a movie or two". It's great to have really fast internet, but I think that the main reason why we got it is kind of shady... Even the Swedish guy from Eskilstuna in the Reuters-article is talking about downloading movies.
Got to go... Planning to download a movie! j/k
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
_America_ thinks it's got a tough time with broadband?! You guys are sitting there with your 3-8Meg ADSL/Cable for a pitiful amount of cash per month, and we're sitting on our wonderful 512k/sec 'broadband' connections for the equivalent of around $35 a month... Makes you wonder really :-(
Simply put, the two reasons the US ranks behind is twofold:
Speaking of education, I should learn to proofread.
My experience with any form of social or technological infrastructure here is that it takes much longer to be adopted or upgraded. London, Tokyo, Paris, Sydney all update their public transport systems much more frequently that the states. They seem to have newer airports too.
Online banking services, online bill payment, etc are much broader with British and Australian banks (haven't got any accounts in Japan so not sure how they fare).
Taxi technology (particularly with telephony and GPS services) is lacking here too.
GSM and other mobile telecommunications improvements are also years behind.
Is it that the systems here are so large that there's major financial barriers to change? Is there a mentality of "it aint broke so don't fix it" too?
Here's some envy for some people: I got 26 mbit right now, but soon I'll join the pack of 100 mbit users... Very soon, and, there's no max transfer limits. :D I love this place
What I am really unsure about is whether these "10 Mbps connections" really provide 10 Mbps Internet connectivity. I am sittign on top of multiple OC3s, and the best actual Internet speeds I get is around 7 Mbps.
Although most of our population lives close to the U.S. border, our population density over that area is still approximately the same (depending on how you judge) as that of the U.S. in its entirity.
Furthermore, your argument falls apart when you consider that small towns in Canada, such as Fort McMurray in Alberta (and many towns even smaller than that) have had broadband for years now (since 1997, in Fort McMurray's case) while many major cities in the U.S. still don't have half-decent broadband penetration.
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
Broadband has been available in the UK for a lot longer than "the last couple of years", the first service was available six years ago, and there are a range of service providers to choose from. With my own provider, Telewest Blueyonder, I have a range of options from 768kbit/s to 3Mbit/s, with no download limits whatsoever.
Also, as best as I can remember, there's only one ISP that attempted to call its 128kbit/s connections "broadband", and that was NTL. Other ISPs complained about it to the ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) but the complaint wasn't upheld because there wasn't a clearly defined definition of what constituted "broadband", so the ASA was unable to rule against NTL on that basis.
In terms of broadband coverage, I'll say just this: if there's a town or city on the UK mainland without broadband then it's news to me. Even the telephone exchanges that serve most larger villages are starting to be converted and it's only a matter of time until all but the most unprofitable exchanges (serving two men and a dog) become capable of delivering broadband services.
I think you forget that delivering broadband isn't as easy as flicking a switch. There's infrastructure, etc to worry about, so it's only to be expected that things take a little time.
Also, bare in mind this is consumer broadband we're talking about. It you wanted a 4 or 40Mbit/sec connection for your business then you could get it: many businesses already do. You might not like the price, but you could get it.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I had a hell of a time getting my in-laws to switch to DSL. They were paying $23/month for AOL which would tie up their only phone line. When SBC came out with a $29/month ADSL offer they conceded and like it since it doesn't tie up the line. On the other hand, I still see many coworkers bitching about not being able to find a dialup ISP cheaper than $9.95/month in the area. Some people just don't need Internet access for anything but checking mail every few days, sorting through and deleting the hundreds of spam messages and maybe seeing a couple of joke e-mail messages or pictures of the grandkids.
Ok, I've read a fair number of replies claiming the USA has too much area compared to some of the more "wired" countries. That is a poor excuse. I live less than 2 wire miles (that's less than 10560 ft) from my phone companies central office. I can't get DSL. It is not available due to incompatible equipment at the CO. They don't know if/when they will upgrade the equipment. I could understand this when I lived in Toledo, Ohio - but I don't live there any more. I live in Fairfax county Virginia (just outside the Alexandria city limits, about 9 miles from the US Capitol building in Washington, D.C.).
I don't live in some far out, low population density, backwater farm land. Then again, I'd never woke up to a rooster crowing, goats in the neighbor's yard, or stories of a cow blocking a highway until I moved here from Ohio.....
Yes, I could get a cable modem through COX. They want $56 US per month for the lowest level of service. I don't want broadband bad enough to give up a weeks worth (or more) of lunches each month.
. there used to be a sig here.....
In France people with an excellent line in big towns can get up to 8M/768k IP (10M/1M ATM) and the provider is currently installing ADSL2+ equipment (25M/3M max).
I live in rural France in a VERY small town in the middle of crop fields (100 inhabitants !) and I only have 1024K/128K ADSL access (2048K/128K within one month).
The demand that will be supplied in a free market is the demand for control over the market itself.
It would seem to me that the argument that the US is spread out is a pretty weak one unless you are talking about the most remote areas where the backbone doesn't reach. Any major city that is already hooked into the backbone should have similar hurdles networking the city as any other city. I don't see why New York City's sardine packed population is any less dense than South Korea's major cities. So, we have no excuse for why our major cities are not networked better than they are.
As far as rural areas go, yes, that is a problem. However, with the amount of bandwidth that a single fiber can carry, it just doesn't make sense that it's taking us this long to get networked. Telephone networks required quite a bit more work to set up, and they managed to do it.
My observation is that it's a matter of lack of initiative and capital expendetures by companies that are too busy investing overseas and offshoring workers to be bothered with America. That explains the difference in dense areas like NY.
Verizon is deploying fiber lines for FTTP uses, they offer 30/5 for $200 which is still a lot more than you would pay in Japan for less, but really that the fastest a residential can get right now with out shelling $1000s for a 100/100 line. It's probably cheaper for it though if you live next to the railroad tracks since usually the fiber runs along them, but still it's a few thousand there. The 15/2 from Verizon seems pretty good for $50. They are already deploying fiber in my town of Yardley, PA in Bucks county, Keller TX has it, by next year there should be 8 million homes with it.
"The only service I have heard of under 1mbit in recent memory is Qwest DSL here in Minnesota that is only 640k."
Basic service from Comcast in MN now is only 128k up and down. Anything faster requires more money than its worth. Comparable DSL speeds are much cheaper than what comcast charges. I myself probably wouldnt have a broadband connection except for the reason that my employer pays for it.
"I wouldn't trade better broadband... ...For communism, sorry."
;)
Ignorant redneck, but patriotic, eh?
You know, contrary to what Hollywood movies may tell you, there _is_ a world outside your borders, and it does _not_ all consist of naked tribesmen with stone spears, oppressed by some tribal warlord with a bigger stone spear.
Pick a geography book sometimes. Fascinating read. You may well find that other countries are just as democratic... if not more, considering that they don't have the "waah!! Terrorists everywhere!!" lame excuse to take away even more civil liberties.
"It's interesting how the author fails to mention that there are restrictions on websites that users can visit in the aforementioned country, but I digress. I guess that's a convenient oversight."
Sorry to dawn some reality on your self-righteous redneck rant, but: I don't think Sweden, Germany, UK, or any other EU countries have any more censorship than you already have in the USA too. Yes, the government does say stuff like "thou shalt not watch child porn", but guess what? So does yours.
We're not talking China. Noone will arrest you in Sweden for having a site about how much the government sucks.
So again: get that head out of your ass. Learn a bit about the world outside your borders. Or just learn anything, for that matter. Might actually do you some good.
"I don't want my broadband to be a beurocracy, and I can put up with a few hiccups here and there because down the road, we're going to catch up and feel at ease."
There's nothing especially bureaucratic about broadband anywhere in the EU.
"I'm very happy to be living in within a structure of a decentralized broadband access where each individual state dictates the best method of communication, rather than a country tell me that only DSL or CABLE is available."
Ah, the standard display of talking out of the ass. So you're that great and free because state governments decide for you? Well, gee. Funny how the rest of us thought that freedom had something to do with the government _not_ deciding stuff for you.
So basically, son, there are plenty of arguments about liberty or economics that might apply to this situation. But you don't even understand either. You don't understand that prized freedom you wave around as a flag, and you don't understand the economics either.
Your idea of more liberty is merely being a faithful doggie to a lower state government, instead of a centralized government. But a faithful doggie nevertheless. Well, gee. You would have had a great time during feudalism. You'd only have your baron bossing you around, while the higher levels (counts, dukes, the king, etc) don't even give a damn that you exist. Yep, great liberty there.
So lemme ammend what I was saying: learn some history too.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
...would be that we had far more broadband years before most (all?) of these other countries, and the ISP portion was even built without the luxury of huge government subsidies. These other countries finally decided to invest in some broadband technology a few years ago, and the years-newer installation is faster. Duh.
Ours will need to be upgraded at some point - and it will - and the leapfrogging will continue. We're also probably not going to see an incremental 2x or 4x improvement to keep up with the Joneses, but a 10x leap - but it probably won't happen for a few years.
I wonder if their news services will publish "OMG! We aer teh technakal bak watar!11!" articles, or if they had done so several years ago when the US was pretty much the only place you could get affordable broadband for personal use?
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
Here's a map:
o ci ety/population/density
http://atlas.gc.ca/site/english/maps/peopleands
According to the wikipedia the population densitiy in Sweden is 20 people/km^2 vs the USA with 32 people/km^2.
So the population density argument doesn't hold water.
Some things are more important than an animated rat
I pay $80 / Month for 512/128 ADSL.
It makes me sick to see Americans and Europeans Complaining about this when Australians are still stuck with crap connections. They still have 56k deals for over $30 / month!
For the record, in terms of value, AUD and USD are very close.
The problem with saying that is that, in the places where the population is densest, we still have broadband that is no better than the places where it is less dense.
I moved to Georgia (112 psm) from New Jersey (1030 psm) and had exactly the same speed internet in both locations. The capability for better exists in both places, but they feel no need to provide it.
Our telecom regulations suck. We protect companies that provide inferior service.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Partial regulation is to blame. Either De-Regulate completely, or Re-Regulate and demand performance.
Personally, I am for complete deregulation of Telecom. Regulation isn't helping at all. Government regulation isn't going to help in the fast changing world of Hi-tech. It is way too slow to respond adequately.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Let's face it folks.
The sheer size of the USA makes it difficult for everyone to have broadband Internet access, especially if you have to hard wire the so-called last mile connection to your home. The last mile connection is already there in larger metropolitan areas using cable TV lines and phone lines upgraded for DSL, but that doesn't quite work for the whole country, especially in mountainous areas, rural areas, and new housing developments.
To solve the last mile connection issue, the USA has only one way to go: wireless. Fortunately, the arrival of 802.16 WiMax standard and its related 802.20 standard for mobile operation will finally allow large-scale adoption of broadband Internet in the USA, since we eliminate the expensive last mile hardwired connection issue.
We can do the initial 802.16/802.20 setups by using the same cellphone antenna towers already in place; it's relatively cheap to add extra antennas to extend the 802.16/802.20 range.
Even in those countries, it must not be the case that every nook and cranny of them is getting broadband at 100Mbps, probably many of the rural areas are still working on the low speed ones. Considering that our cities have a very high population density, what is stopping us from getting the 100Mbps broadband?
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/klee/misc/slash dot.html
Down here in Australia we are enjoying our bandwidth caps, along with high web host prices - living off the scraps off the American table as our local telecommunications monopoly keeps control on what's available. As I understand it, we (Australia) have to pay the bill for all data passing between Australia and the US - but I could be mistaken on this.
When I was in NYC I had an 8.1Mbit/980Kbit ADSL. The CO was across the street. It was $200/mo.
BUT SHIT IT WAS FAST. And I had all sorts of fun stuff like NO blocked ports, my own router with a 32 IP address subnet, etc. There was no distinction between "home" and "Business" users with the service I used - it was just fast or slow.
DSL can be terribly cool, but truely fast DSL is nearly non-existant except for the huge cities. I live in a very densly populated area in Rhode Island and you can't even get DSL in 80% of the area because the CO's are so far apart. I'm something like 14,000 ft from mine.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
The news articles referenced dance around the problem while studiously refraining from saying it, but the issue in the US isn't geography, it's monopoly. I'll go out on a limb and make a prediction: 10mb/s+ links in the US will never -ever- achieve the market penetration rates that more advanced countries enjoy today. It's not in the Bell's economic interests for it to do so and they own the majority of the links to US homes. For a variety of reasons, Comcast is more of a contributor to the problem, not a solution. For the vast majority of us, broadband will get more expensive, not less, and what you can do with it once you have it will be increasingly restricted.
Current trends indicate that the major driving force behind widespread adoption of high-speed access is connecting with one's friends, family, and social peers. Much of that communication involves what may euphamistically be categorized as "restricted" (from the point of view of copyrights,) material. Given the current lock that monopolies of various types have on US legislative processes, I don't really see that changing, or much scope for effective, economical use of emerging communication technologies. That's why I conclude that the US is now and will remain for the forseeable future, a technological backwater.
It's also why Al Queda et. al. are already obsolete -- the US may have enjoyed the shortest run as the dominating global imperialist on record. We've been fading toward irrelevance in world affairs for a generation; the fall of the Berlin Wall destroyed both protagonists, it just took a little longer for us than for our Soviet cold war opponents. Of course, by the time it becomes obvious it will also be old history, but that's something the winners get to write. I hope someone writes it in my lifetime; I'd enjoy reading about it in my old age.
Back to the point: the US won't get all these fun toys because to most of my fellow citizens, broadband internet access isn't obviously helpful to their lives. Many technology-oriented careers, not just IT, are fading from this landscape in a gradual but inexorable migration toward the east, and while college enrollments are up in general (that is, more kids are going to college,) enrollment in technical and scientific fields of study is falling. Interior design and English may be worthy fields of study but I'm not optimistic that a healthy economy can be based on them. And the education kids are getting these days is not particularly helpful.
...and I don't have any sub $100/mo options.
I can SEE people that have had cable access for 20 years, but I can't get it. (literally, they're just one hill over). My sister gets 14.4k tops, and she's 1 mile away from her inlaws that get 48k. My phone line supports a flakey 26.4k max connection. The only thing that I get that says "DSL" is advertizing. Many people in the area and surrounding areas are in a state where the "bad line" just gets passed around from someone that complains to someone that doesn't. They're out of good lines. The problem?
NOONE WANTS TO SPEND MONEY.
Upgrading the infrastructure costs money, and in an area that isn't currently being changed from an open field to high density subdivision who cares? The profit just isn't there. Let the lines corrode. Whenever it rains, my connection gets worse. The cover to the splice box at the top of the pole outside our house fell off two months ago. Last I checked the terminals are still open to the weather. That's how much they care.
If we talked to the phone company could we convince them to do something? My dad tried when he was a systems tech FOR the phone company. Didn't work.
Cheap broadband comes with a $300,000+ setup fee. The cost of buying a two bedroom house near a central office or in an area with cable.
Who would've thought that California would be a third world country?
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Cox Communications just increased their standard service to 5Mbit/512kbit. It's 45 a month. They have a 6Mbit/768kbit package but it's a lot more expensive - something like $80/mo.
But cox still sucks anyways because they block ports 21, 25, 80, 53 (udp too), 443, and a bunch of others.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Basic service from Comcast in MN now is only 128k up and down.
Excuse me? I just switched from Comcast to Frontier/Visi DSL. It was 3000/256 for their basic cable modem service.
QWest DSL is 256k/256k for their lowest service rate AFAIK. I have no idea where you got that 128/128 crap.
1996, when everything about the internet suddenly "boomed" and became popular, you went from 14.4 to 28.8 modems. Double the speed.
Then a year later, you had 33.6, and a year after THAT, 56k. Shortly after 56k was the emergence of broadband. I don't even recall the speeds back then, but if I recall correctly, it was 1.5Mbps down.
So in 4 years, we increased our connection speeds nearly 100 fold.
What do we have today? 4Mbps. Wow. That's actually pretty lame. It's been 4 years since 1.5Mbps broadband emerged. We should be at 100Mbps speeds about now.
Shit, I mean, even if we had 20Mbps, that would STILL be behind... and we aren't even a 1/5th of that!!
Now THAT is sad.
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
My (TimeWarner/RoadRunner) cablemodem came with 1.5Mbps (down). About a year ago, it jumped to 3Mbps (down), then this Summer it appears to have jumped to 4Mbps (down). No price hikes, no advertising, no sign except that my rate meter clocks higher. I expected the highly horizontal network architecture in my neighborhood to *decrease* my bandwidth over time, but it is rising. Combine that with my DSL connection (unchanged at 1.5Mbps), pooled but segregated per connection, and I've got about 6.5Mbps (down, + about 1Mbps up = 7.5Mbps). True, I'm paying about $125:mo (excluding the discount for bundled cable TV). But I'm also getting 99.9% "+" 99.9% uptime (really "*", for 99.9999%), which is about 30s downtime per year. That's about par (in the other direction) for managed datacenters with fibers, on a $:GB:mo rate, and I'm in my home. If I could get my home WAN(s) to work at that rate bidirectionally, and dropped the extra TV signal from the cable, I might even compete with the datacenter hosting.
--
make install -not war
This is an excellent point to be brought up. My hometown in Newfoundland with a population of about 8000 has had DSL service since around 1999, and its not located near anything remotely close to what I would call a population dense area. Its not the blazing fast DSL they have in Asia (standard 1.5M down, 768K up), but it sure beats the hell out of dialup.
If that backwater town can get DSL coverage, there should be no excuse for any other rural area to not be covered.
I'll agree that there isn't much mainstream demand for faster service. Most people I know, in fact, hardly use the service they currently have to its fullest.
I wonder, however, how large a part the incumbent carriers have to play in this. For instance, most people don't realize that, hey, you could actually get everything over the internet provided that it's fast enough (latency included) and only pay one bill per month rather than shelling out a big chunk of money to Comcast for tv and internet and then another big chunk to Verizon for phone service. Or that you could actually watch TV across the 'net. Clearly, the people providing the service wouldn't want it to start cannibalizing their core businesses, so who's goint to get out there and tell people that these capabilities exist?
Further, the services in the states are being pushed as "consumer only" -- that is, most people are missing out on one of the main reasons the 'Net took off and exists to begin with: users providing value to the network, instead of the network owner. Upload speeds will suffer until people demand the ability to cheaply serve up their own stuff from servers located in their own homes, but how do you even convince people that this capability is worthwhile (whereas we who have been here longest understand that it's fundamental)?
Y'know, I'm actually very happy that Comcast started eating Verizon's lunch (via VoIP). Now there's talk of fiber to the house offering TV and internet (VoIP, naturally, included) -- who'da thunk?
Plus, yesterday I finally got a reason to possibly be pleased about living in Philly :)
C
The Sun is proof that we can't even do fire properly.
The phone companies go out of their way to stifle competition. Then to top it off they side with anyone who wants CABLE companies to share those lines.
Force the phone companies to open their lines at competitive rates and PAY the cable companies for their investment of the lines so that making them share is fair.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Ok, sure these countries are leaps and bounds ahead of us. But come on, for one our telecom system is definitely a much more immense system to replace. Secondly, and correct me if I am wrong, but don't these countries have a ban on encryption? So if we were not allowed to encrypt anything, then we could focus on building the faster networks, instead of the more secure networks.
I don't beleive the problem is size of the country. Fiber already links all major cities. The bottle necks are the lines running to the homes. Until the FCC or the consumers really push that won't be changed and it would require a large chunk of government funding(ugh). It would break the Bell in our area just replacing all the copper in this city with fiber if they had to do it on their own. I think wireless broadband will take hold much faster than 10Mbit wired links just because of cost.
Sure average population density is higher in the US, but what about median population density. In the US we have densly populated coasts, and sparcely populated middle of the country. I'd assume that Sweeden has a densly populated southern half and then almost no one in the northern half.
Networks are all driven by houses per mile. In the US a significant portion of the population lives in areas with 1-25 houses per mile (networks are uneconomic) while I'd be surprised if any of the broadband leaders has much of their population in areas under 50 households/mile (or 30 households/km). Part of this is driven by the large amount of habitable space in the flyover states, part is driven by tremendous subsidies given to people in the US to own their own home and the cultural perception that it is very important to have your own bit of land.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
True, the state doesn't have a monopoly on telecom. However, the state by definition has a monopoly on "pay or we'll kill you." Unlike with the private sector, where a fellow can choose to pay or not to pay a given company, everybody must pay tax to the government or face a prison sentence, and those who try to escape from prison run the risk of being shot.
The problem is not broadband penetration, it is what the FCC says we can and cannot do. DSL has been available throughout Vermont which is a one of the most rural parts of the U.S. since the middle of 1997 which is when I got my first taste.
Here in Arizona I moved from one part of the valley 20 miles north and I still can get cable without a problem. DSL isn't a problem either, nor is a T1 or faster. The entire Phoenix metro area has wireless T1 service and MTI is developing BPL in the area which is rated at 300megabit today.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that all the states and the FCC need to either lift or ease regulations which prevent this kind of development. In VT they didn't create a government owned monopoly. They merely gave Adelphia and Verizon massive tax incentives to build in areas that would otherwise be less profitable. Of course the state of VT connects cities such as NY/Boston/Montreal. So Verizon probably had a few other motivations to build as well.
"the media" doesn't have ANY SORT of Internet Envy, though I'll agree that they do have Broadband Envy. If "the media" knew how to truly define and differentiate the Internet, they'd do everything in their power to shut it down. Oops, they already are.
Make no mistake, what "the media" wants out of the Internet is an on-demand distribution channel, and NOTHING more. A little trickle, upstream, and a firehose downstream. Anything else enables NASTY stuff like peer-to-peer and other "uncontrolled publication." Isn't the phrase "uncontrolled publication" what the ??AA problems are really all about?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Slow in comparison? In other countries, 1.5Mb/s is amazingly fast, and 4Mb/s is just....whoa....shit.
When I see 10Mb/s my reaction is "This is a joke, right?"
Most large cities in the US can easily compete with the speeds that the countries mentioned get. The problem is that if, lets say comcast, offered a 12MB line to basic cable subscribers in Denver, but they havn't yet made enough money to upgrade their 3MB line in Dallas, it wouldn't be fair to have them paying the same price for 1/4th the service. They have to cater to the lowest common denominator.
The lowest common denominator is lower than most of the other countries for many of the reasons already posted:
The land area in the US is far, far larger than the countries we're being compared to. So not only does it take much longer to get it done, but it also costs a hell of a lot more. It has taken Comcast over 18 months to upgrade their basic cable subscriber 1.5MB lines to 3MB across all of their operating areas in the US.
Our population isn't concentrated anywhere near as much as any of those countries. I can't remember exactly, but something crazy like 50% of the entire population of South Korea lives in Seoul.
Because we're not a socialist country, such as Sweden, it isn't our tax dollars that are paying for the upgrades in infrastructure that the private sector can pay for and profit off of.
Japan also has a very concentrated population. I would bet that nothing out of Tokyo gets the highspeed broadband mentioned.
The free market controls everything in the US. Once it's profitable to have 200MB lines in the suburbs, they will exist. There's no question about that.
The point, dink, is when is the last time you had a download speed of 3Mbps? It doesn't matter what your cable modem is capable of, its what it actually gets. My cable modem is capable of 5Mbps, but I have never seen anything over 750kbps down speed, which I would bet is far faster than anything you have ever seen on your Comcast rig. If it was fibre, I would probably see something a lot more like 5Mbps.
Stop waving the flag, and just accept it, your high speed internet services suck compared to the rest of the civilized world. We have better penetration, better speed, and cheaper access. Chant "USA USA" all you want, look to whatever excuses you need regarding land mass, population density, percentage of users, etc. The fact remains, it is faster, cheaper, and more widely available in most other developed countries on earth.
Maybe scrap a single B2 bomber, and give the whole country fibre broadband instead. Nah, better keep the stealth bombers in case some third world country acts up a needs an ass kicking.
All these broadband capacity numbers are relevant only to the data transacted over the networks. We've heard for several years how telcos "overbuilt" a "glut" of backbone capacity, which bankers blamed for the collapse of so many network ventures. But in 1999, most consumers surfed a web of JPG-filled 400KB pages every few seconds. In 2004 we're streaming audio at 256Kbps, downloading 4GB movies, and moving to sharing steady streams of 3Mbps multimedia for each of over 100M un/wired Americans. That "glut" will evaporate very quickly, and we'll be faced with constrained supplies of bandwidth again. Creating more profits for telcos, and obstructing innovation in American network development.
These telcos are to blame for mismanagement. Their Q1234 boom/bust cycles are the hallmark of equity management that always promotes the long term merely as a series of short terms. The only solution is for a real diversity of suppliers, with interests that compete, rather than interlock in collusion that always boils down to a conflict of interest of supplier vs. consumer, in which the telcos always win.
--
make install -not war
>You just have to love that they mention sharing a DVD over the Net with a friend, WTF?! Give me a break, why did they even bring that shit up? They know that’s illegal here…
So the only DVDs than can be shared are illegal? Where did you get that idea?
If I author a DVD and want to share it with my friends, there is NO law that can prevent it.
Let's not automatically lump everything together, shall we?
With arguments like that, the RIAA could be justified in forcing all homes back down to 300 baud modems under the pretext that people only need that kind of throughput for pirating.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Name a major US city that doesn't have at least one broadband option in atleast 90% of its area? That isn't including options like DirectPC/Net which ANYONE can use from Mexico to fairly far in the north of Canada...I mean WIRED broadband.
the media has apparently developed a nasty case of broadband envy.
So we spend the past 6 or 7 years creating laws that make running an ISP a legal and regulatory minefield, other laws that reduce the consumer value of having broadband, and create an environment in which incumbent telecoms are encouraged to kill competition and cook the books, then we scratch our heads and wonder why we don't have a better information infrastructure. Well, gee, I just can't figure it out.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
We're a American Band,
We're a American Band,
We're comin' to your town we'll help you party it down.
We're a American Band.
Oh Broadband. Nevermind.
The parent post said "community" fiber to the home. Sometimes the impetus came from schools needing faster conenctions. But it could easily be ordinary citizens. The government, of course, needs to be involved if for no other reason than they have the authority to grant or deny the right of way. Imagine, though, if the town gave its people right of way along certain paths, and left it up to us to lay the fiber. I'm sure there are volunteer groups that would jump at the chance to have super high speed to the home. The motivating force to upgrade would be our own innate technolust, not some bottom-line economic motivation, or some political motivations.
I say, find out where the incentives and motivations are, and harness that. In this case, the motivated people are the users themselves. I anticipate someone will argue that if people really wanted it, they would pay for it. My counterargument is that, right now, the market does not offer that option. The current North American experience demonstrates clearly that when there are a handful of players, and the ability to compete depends on a heavily regulated access to right of way, then the corporations will NOT cater to the desires of consumers, but rather strategically limit the options of users to maximize returns. In Canada, the two main broadband ISP's (Rogers and Bell), are either charging people extra for high bandwidth usage, or cutting off service to people who go above a secret, unstated, quota. The profit motive is not causing them to upgrade their service in any serious way. It's only causing them to squeeze the consumer harder.
You're willing to live with byte caps, which are intolerable.
I have heard rumors of Optimum Online being 10mbit
I'll confirm that. The fastest sustained speed I've seen is 1.6 MB/sec, which I don't get too often, but I routinely get speeds in the 1 MB/sec range
I live on Long Island in NY
There are several "logistical" problems to this which all stem from our countries backwards way of approaching anything. "How will it be profitable, and if its not on paper then why do it?"
We are loosing jobs to oversees companies and we can't rollout new services he because our infrastructure is horrible. Politicians, people on forums like this one always tell you what's wrong or give some broad notion of how to make things better. They never give how they would solve the problem.
Example: "Reduce the cost of oil per barrel to stabilize the cost of gas." Well if anyone would lookup info (Detnews.com) on the matter instead of trusting any other media outlets they would find that the cost of a barrel of oil really doesn't matter as much as the number of refineries and the number of different gases we use. Build new refineries and/or reduce the number of gases the U.S. needs and you will see gas prices around 10 cents a gallon. You will never here this from out candidates because they don't really give a damn.
Anyway, here is one solution I think might work to benefit everyone.
Commission a new public works project to rollout fiber and new power lines simultaneously. More jobs, if we found $70 billion laying around to rebuild someone else's country we should be able to do the same for ourselves.
This would kill two birds with one stone and allow any premises with power, access to a fiber speed connection. Service providers could focus on their services and the lines and infrastructure would be the ownership of the "people."
The mere grandiosity of this is mind-boggling but its time this country gets back on track and does something big for itself. That's just my two cents.
Deal?
ok fuckwad, then by your arguments at least the huge highly populated areas shouldnt be a problem right ? Oops, dosnt apply there either ?
Idiot.
"Yeah, but in Canada, 95% of the population is less than 5 degrees north of the 49th, and that population tend to clump near the cities. "
That statement is accurate but now irrelevant. The Alberta supernet is a government infrastructure project designed to provide high-speed, broadband access to public facilities (and through service providers, to businesses and residences) in Alberta communities, Alberta SuperNet is a partnership involving the government and private enterprise.
Alberta is a rather large place, 660,000 sq. kilomters. Sweden is about 410,000 Sq. Km. Alberta also has roughly one fifth the population of Sweden. If left only to the service providers broadband would never get to rural communities.
It will take government intervention to lessen US broadband Envy.
3000/256 should equal about 375kB/s (give or take). With Comcast, "dink", I was routinely about 408 to 415kB/s.
Dink, do you see how you are wrong, dink? Now, dink, please go ahead and apologize to me for claiming I was a "flag waver" as I am no such thing, dink.
Dink, crawl under your International rock and enjoy your shitty 5mbit connection that never reaches that, dink.
Average population density is quite possibly the most retarded statistic to be using here. I'm not a stats person, but I know enough about the techs involved and stats to know that's stupid.
You aren't trying to cover 90% of the land, you're trying to cover 90% of the people. If you're somewhere that's built a lot denser than the US (which most of Europe is, having lived/visited there for 2 years (England)), you can cover 90% of the people in a smaller geographic area. This is important since it effects how many distribution points ("central office") you need. That's probably where the real cost comes in -- buying equipment etc.
The other point worth noting in a discussion like this: who looses if we get good high speed broadband into the homes? Probably the media companies -- If you can trade DVDs effectivly or perhaps even broadcast your own shows easily (for independant media groups), wouldn't that be something they probably don't want? Now ask yourself who controls a lot of the pipes distribution? Yeah...
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
I have seen many arguments (some here, some elsewhere) against a broadband to the home innitiative. These include:
This one seems logical- we are a big country after all, with a population density much less than countries in Europe and Asia. Stringing all that wire to less people will end up costing more. This would be a good argument were it not for the presence of a rather large industrial,democratic republic immediately to our north that enjoys broadband penetration rivaling that of Europe, Korea and Japan. Are they not big? Do they not have a low population density? Perhaps it has more to do with their lack of entrenched monopolies.
This is true- but why is a bad thing? Your taxes pay for the FCC, even if you never listen to the radio or watch TV. Your taxes pay for highways, even if you dont own a car. And your property taxes pay for schools even if you havent got a kid. The only argument that suffices when it comes to the question of spending tax dollars is cost vs benefits. Considering that opening up a broadband market may just be the shot in the arm our economy needs (think of all the goods and services that could be provided if everyone has access to 100MB connections), and the fact that other nations with more developed infrastructures and lower standards of living will be aptly suited as the destination of our outsourced jobs, I think the benefits to our nation as a whole far outweigh the burden of the taxes necessary to pay for it.
No. A well designed public works project fits neatly into the free market- it merely recognizes the fact that sometimes, the entire people of a nation can be a consumer. You know what really messes with a free market? Entrenched monopolies backed by government control. Build fiber to the home. Make the cost of a "broadband service license" low. Watch as hundreds of companies open shop to compete for your business. Giving companies monopoly rights in exchange for the infrastructure engineering would be a mistake- pay for it with tax dollars and license it out at cost to small companies. In effect, we would be using public monies to build a new market place.
We should note, however, that Canada has a serious problem with respect to "bandwidth caps". Within the past few years, the ISPs have taken to setting caps that they won't tell us about. Despite advertising "unlimited broadband", if you go over a certain amount (which they will not tell you), they will cut off your internet access for one week, then two weeks, then a month, all the while charging your credit card. So, despite any glowing "penetration" statistics, there are some serious problems lurking just below the surface.
I work in an office of 5 of people.. our whole business is pretty much based online.. another thing to take into consideration, the office is in a business park with many other businesses and is right down the street from a farely large residential community..
DSL and Cable started becoming standard in surrounding areas of my office location.. but for some reason, i'm in a small black hole apparently..
i've phoned the president of Verizon Delaware, as well as Mediacomm and Comcast about putting some type of broadband out here for the past 3 years! no progress has been shown since..
the extremely sad thing is, i can seriously see houses on the other side of the street that get cable and DSL access with no problem.. and there is a FIBER fed PG box no more than 300 yards of the location.. but i'm seriously about a half mile too far from the 3 mile distance from the CO..
so basically i'm screwed atleast for the next 2-3 years verizon and comcast told me..
my business really does loose profits and a substantial decreased percentage in productivity because all 5 of us share ONE dialup internet connection.. yes of course i've considered the alternatives, but its just not worth it.. i'm not going to pay for an additional phone line, crappy satelite internet connections, or anything else of the sort when I can seriously see people right across the street that can get the access that I want..
sad...sad...
- Hi I'm Linus Torvalds and I pronounce Linux, Lih-nix..
It's easy to wire a small country like sweaden, with a very small population. It is a little bit different for a country that is 20-30 times bigger than sweaden. Much like everything else, it's just the media hoping for a story where there really isn't one. Second of all, we would be able to watch HD Media over our current broadband if networks like NBC would get off of their arss and stop limiting the growth like they did with the Olympics.
The problem with america is the corporate behimoths that run the internet don't realize the social implications of the internet - in both computing and comminications respects.
Comcast doesn't want me to get 100mbit because i could then choose who i want to get my HD services from.
Verizon doesn't want to sell me 100mbit because i could choose who i want to get my voip/long distance from.
They both cap my outbound services so if i WANT the above stated services i have to pay for there premium "content" services and get crap i don't or will not use.
Corporate giants FEAR loosing control thus they limit technology until government laws and limits are set - these limits are usually artificial based upon corporate numbers thrown around and the ineptness to deliver anything based upon current technology.
In america the econmy is supported by "profits" and only "profits". Its not based upon the society needs of communications. In corporate america "networking" is still a verbal skill. Corporate americas has yet to understand the value or freedom of "network is the computer" scenerious of desktop sharing, application sharing, open storage systems, grid computing and freedom of information"
Corporate america wants me to pay for everything as a utility service instead of al-a-carte "facility" type service.
Utility is monopolistic in practice and design and the internet can't function or grow in markets where the utility is controlled by corporate vision instead of consumer demand.
'Bredbandsbolaget', which is what they are talking about, deliver full duplex ethernet, whether it is 10 or 100 Mbit.
Not true, in all cases. I can't speak for the whole country, or all providers, but not with Rogers. They were talking about a cap, and decided not to. I get 5M down, no cap, for about 45 cnd, taxes in, for Rogers cable. Think about that, its 40% faster, for about 30bucks a month US, unlimited up/down. Sounds like I can touch that up here, in fact I can kick its ass up and down the block 40% further, for less money.
Nothing funnier than ignorance, and you REALLY make me laugh.
>bomb them, then steal their broadband? It works for everything else..
Nuke the Swedes and take their gold! Yeah!
Wait, what? It's the SWISS that have the gold? Oh...
Nevermind.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
True but if you drive half an hour out of Ottawa (~1Million people) to Lanark there was no option until just recently which is wireless but it has a huge startup fee
Where does the money come from to build it? I'm all in favor of diverting money they're already taking from me for other purposes, but please don't seriously propose another new tax to accomplish yet another pet project with pie-in-the-sky return on investment.
Simply saying "get rid of the profit" doesn't magically create the real money it takes to pull of any project. I want a swimming pool in my back yard, can't I just say "maybe if we got rid of the profit" it'd suddenly make free swimming pools viable?
What I would think would be a GREAT way to implement universal broadband access is to have the government encourage the creation of wireless mesh networks.
The government wouldn't even have to connect the wireless mesh network to the Internet, at first. This could kinda be like an Internet3, (where Internet1 is the network we use everyday, and Internet2 is the network that is being developed with big fiber pipes between Universities).
This could be implemented fairly easily at the local level, where the government would set up servers on the wireless mesh Internet3 network, encouraging local businesses to do the same.
For the lower class, the government would subsidize the price of the routers, and for them and the upper classes could even provide their citizens with custom firmware that would mesh their routers together into a cohesive network.
As more cities follow the first cities example the larger the project grows until eventually Internet3 grows to be as big as Internet1. With the costs now of Internet connection merely being the initial cost of the router + the electricity to keep it running.
This to me seems a lot more economically feasible than the government subsidizing FTTC or FTTH, even if they own the network and lease it out to private business. With Internet3, the people DIRECTLY own part of the infrastructure. Those who can afford the equipment can buy it themselves, those who can not, can get it through government subsidy, which would also benefit the ones who payed for the equipment outright, cause the more routers there are the more redundancy is built into the actual Internet3 network.
>in Canada, 95% of the population is less than 5 degrees north of the 49th, and that population tend to clump near the cities
Unlike in the United States, where most of the population lives on family farms in the midwest. Actually, the urban/rural population figures for the US and Canada are both about 75% urban according to the US Census Bureau. Somehow the US managed rural elctrification and rural telephone service, anyway.Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
In the UK your hard pushed to find anything above 512Kb/s down, a large percentage of people who have 'broadband' have 150Kb/s down, and pay £15.99 ($25) per month for it.
(from Canadian Bacon)
You know there is a direct correlation between the size of your pipe and the size of your penis, which means the Japanese and the Koreans have penises 33 times the size of ours! Even the women!
To quote that great moder philosopher Andrew Dice Clay:
Clay: "Say Moby? Why yo always holding your D***."
Moby (aka. Clay): "Well it woldn't be right gentlemanly to have it dragging on the ground behind me now would it?!?"
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
It depends on what you mean by traditional. The current state of the art cable modem is DOCSIS 1.1 or something like that, and its peak theoretical limits are 45Mbps down and 11Mbps up. In the real world on shall we say average wiring I used to get 6Mbps downstream back when I had @home and I was leeching their news server, so let's say you might see 8 or 10Mbps downstream at best. The upstream is shared, but even if you're alone on your segment I'd be very surprised to see more than 3 Mbps upstream in a real-world situation.
So to us, traditional means the cable modems that came before, and they were often 512kbps. DOCSIS cable modems are modern, not traditional.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Actually I would say Korea is more densely populated then USA.
48 million Koreans in a country that would fit in lake Michigan (more then once I would guess).
We're in danger of becoming a technology backwater, not because of slower broadband, but because we're not investing in technology infrastructure, technology and science eductation and we're shipping intellectual capital in the form of tech jobs overseas to save that precious shareholder value.
Unlikely we'll ever face up to being second in anything. For some reason we've developed a national concensous that our crap doesn't stink and if we're doing it, then that's the best thing to be doing. Even suggesting that we're not number one in damn all everything will likely get me mod'ed down because disagreement these days is tantamount to treason.
Most of us grew up with notion that the US was the greatest country on the planet. It's not going to go down easy or well that such a notion might not be true anymore, in any capactity. Whether it's something litlle like broadband, or something bigger like health care, education, privacy or quality of life.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Here Britain, the situation is just as bad. A 512K ADSL connection will probably cost you about $28 a month. There is a bloodsucking monopoly that has been dragging its heels on broadband implementation for years to preserve its lucrative leased line business, rural areas are only just getting connections, and I live in an area of the island's capital city and I can't get cable.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
...try living in Australia. Telstra (the all-mighty telco) not only price fixes and provides what one could at best describe as shitty service, but they are actively installing lines that can never support broadband.
I am in particular peeved off because it appears that instead of installing my line on the local exchange, they installed it in the middle of the city, thus precluding me from getting broadband.
Oh well. That's bureaucracy for you...
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back to surfing on my 56K line...
We're geeks... We're the sorcerers of the modern-day world. --
That's 5 degrees in one plane only. It's approximately 90 degrees in the other dimension. That is still a huge landmass to cover -- particularily when you consider there are major centres strung out through that area.
Canada is a big place. Quite a bit bigger than the US. The difference in population density may help wiring the major centres themselves, but makes it much more expensive to inter-connect those centres.
Canada has always been an innovator in the area of telecommunications. When you have a country that covers 90 degrees of the globe at the 49th parallel you have to be good at telecommunications.
Statements like this have always bugged me, because with only two exceptions, the reason why the highest population density is close to the border has nothing to do with the assumption most Americans make that Canada's population is this way because it wants to be close to the US.
We don't particularily "love to hug the border" -- it's more that the border is placed along areas where it makes sense for higher population density. If you were to look at a map of Canada showing population density, the highest density areas are along the corridor following the St. Lawrence Seaway/Great Lakes. This makes sense if you think of how the continent was originally colonized, and how important water was to travel and commerce. Historically large population centres grew in areas with maritime access.
It's also the area where the best land for growing crops is. You don't farm in the tundra, and the original settlers of Canada relied heavily upon farming (and fishing) for their food.
The two exceptions I mentioned above were:
As such, it's not so much that we love to hug the border because of the sake of the border. Indeed, these areas were heavily settled even before there was a border, and the border cuts through regions condusive to commerce and travel. If the border were 1000km further south, I'm willing to bet you'd see the same population density as already exists between our two countries.
Yaz.
You forget how much of Canada's population lies in the south 5% of the country. Therefore, population density-wise, it is very much different than the US.
It's probably what they got rate limited to after being an "abusive" downloader, which at least in my area (but maybe anywhere) is any comcast subscriber who downloads more than 90GB/mo. :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm tired of hearing that we are missing the boat, other countries have TV coming out their toilets and Cell phones and other crap. American Net Culture is not interested in such things, We want stability, reliability, access, I don't care if I miss the next episode of General Hospital. I don't watch TV anyways, I don't SMS I dont send pictures or videos over Cell phones , I really dont see a need in my lifestyle. All I want to do is IRC AIM SSH a browse the web. Newspaper writers are trying to bunch all of us geek's around the world as if we want the same things, NO we are different we want different things than the swedes. Not All Geeks like the same crap !!!
"Wireless means not having to say AFK when going to the restroom"
Yes, but you get it CHEAP
TWC in Western Ohio has fiber lines going to their distribution nodes. These fiber lines are set to support DS3 speeds (45mbps/45mbps) and there is a max of 10 users per node which would give everyone a 4.5mbps/4.5mbps bi-directional link. However, the cable modems are programmed to only go 3mbps/384kbps. Where does the upstream go? Nowhere, it sits there unused. Furthermore that 45mbps can be increased to 1000mbps and easily provide 10mbps/10mbps.
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
We are all Tec people or enthusiasts here. If you're in the city/town/village setup your own high speed networks and create your own companies. Get the University's and Library's involved and get this up and running.
Even without them the cost of equipment is cheap enough for a few people to chip in and set up not a Telco but a giant LAN/MAN the more people join the more you can charge and this way you can set up your own Tech Savvy network.
There are a few of us here in the UK that, have just done this, only a small 20-mile radius but its blisteringly quick. (No more phone calls Just VoIP/Videos)
And in some places, a government-run community based fiber system has worked - for now.
Government has some success at building, maintaining, and regulating infrastructure in a way that has been exceedingly profitable for corporations. Just take a look at the transportation system with freeways, highways, airports, etc., and look at the regulation of radio broadcast standards and frequencies.
Although I'm not one for having the government dinking around with everything, there are times when it makes sense to have the government pushing infrastructure that will benefit all.
Now from what I've seen in my area the service companies are very slow to roll out infrastructure because they are too busy mulling over ROI numbers and putting together plans that will take 100 years to get a decent infrastructure together. It appears to me that they see no incentive to dump capital into a monopoly that already guarantees them big margins.
And when the government has started looking at building infrastructure that everyone would benefit from the owners of these monopolies lobby the projects to death to ensure they maintain their monopoly.
IMO the government needs to ignore the lobbiest and kick these slow buggers in the butt with some nice fiber optic lines where ever their roads may roam.
burnin
I have no idea where you got that 128/128 crap.
Maybe because it's different speeds in different areas, jackass.
You've just described the kind of connection that Free, the ISP described by grand-parent, is now offering where it can unbundle the local loop. No limits, static IP, reverse DNS if you want, servers: your problem, etc.
Except that it's not $200/mo, it's EUR29.90/mo (your former ISP might have lowered its prices, too).
Maybe because he's talking about Minneapolis, jackass, and it's the same all over the metro-area (in which I reside) it's the same.
Plus, jackass, it's the same everywhere in all of Comcast's markets, jackass.
in Winnipeg, Canada, the telephone company competes with the cable and satellite companies by providing television over DSL.
Its kinda like 3g cell technology. The US lags behind the stalwarts (Korea, Japan) when it comes to deploying 3G cell technology. We come up with things like "Well, no one can cover the whole US!" or "If we were more densely populated it would be different!" Then why, when I read howardforums, are people so pissed about coverage/dropped calls in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, DC, LA, New York, Phillie or San Fran some of our largest cities? If its because most of the US live in the suburbs then why aren't we seeing penetration of either higher speed internet access to the home or excellent 3G coverage in our most densely populated areas (the five burroughs in NY for instance). These excuses hardly seem to apply then.
When reading /. submissions like this, I can only shake my head in disbelief. We would love to have USA's "broadband backwater" here!
SA's telecommunications monopoly, Telkom (which happens to be partially owned by SBC Communications) has a tight fisted grip on voice and Internet connectivity here.
ADSL @ 512k is available at $150 PER MONTH! Capped at 3Gb. If you exceed the cap, traffic shaping kicks in and your connection gets routed through slower international links.
64k Diginet at $895 per month.
128k wireless broadband at $103 per month.
As a result, the vast majority of our 44 million population cannot afford to own a landline, let alone Internet connectivity. 56k dial-up is the most common method of accessing the Net, and even then the bill averages $35 - $100 for the typical net user because we don't get free local calls like you do in the States.
Ugh. A pox on SBC Communications and Telkom! See http://www.hellkom.co.za/ to see how we're getting royally shafted by Telkom!
I would be exteremly surprised if anyone actually still has a party line phone, or has even had one for a long time. Got any references? If anyone actually did, it would be limited to extremities of the Yukon, Northwest and Nunavut territories. Of course, microwave and satellite service is readily available there.
Also, OTA is far better than you suggest (and what's the deal with "a couple [of channels]"? That is all one can expect on American OTA, too.. the networks, and an independant or two..).. Anyone within 100-200km of the border should be able to recieve CBC, CTV, Global, an independant or two and all the American networks with a good antenna. Further north you should be able to receive at least CBC, CTV, and Global. Only in the northernmost extremities are you limited to CBC.
In the US, the Telecom companies keep looking at broadband as the product, instead of the means to provide the product. As a result, it's not "profitable" to do the rollouts like they have in Korea and Sweden (and Canada, and...). The profit isn't in moving bits about. It's in the manner in which the bits are generated and collected. If you've got a fat enough pipe, you can do clever things like video on demand (Don't think just movies- think being able to watch any show on TV when you want to after the first timeslot for showing...), VoIP, digital conferencing, etc. All from the same pipe- billed in the manner that the mobile services are now. That's profitable indeed- but the phone and cable companies are too mired in the past (this is the way we've always made money...) to wise up.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
What is your ISP's policy towards running servers? The lack of high upload speeds is part of what has pushed the internet toward being another broadcast medium like TV, not to mention pissing me off when someone thinks their crappy 128kb/s upload speed can host 32 people in a game.
As for population dense areas in US being quite a distance apart, you are probably right.
But we have high-speed backbones for connecting the high-density areas. Yet we don't even have our high-density areas covered. Why doesn't LA or New York have this kind of tech? What's the excuse? Eight million people isn't a big enough market?
Yes, the size and population distribution of the U.S. means that rural areas and many smaller town or suburbs are going to be tough to feed with high speed internet. That doesn't explain why we don't have better everywhere else.
The enemies of Democracy are
The only difference is that in a government monopoly, you MUST pay for it regardless of whether or not you actually use the service. But then that's always been the fundamental difference between freedom and socialism.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Where would the US be today if Gore were president rather than Bush? Gore would have much preferred to concentrate on broadband than on terrorism.
First, in the US broadband passed modems last month. The trend is steady and that number should pass 80% within two years.
Second, because the US has free local calling, good line quality, and plenty of telco switch capacity, dialup works well in the US. In many countries, dialup involves per-minute costs, and you can't stay on all day. It the US, it's been flat-rate monthly for years. And dial-up is really cheap.
Third, more people in the US have Internet access than buy books or subscribe to newspapers. The literate fraction of the population is already on line. If you can't read, even AOL isn't useful.
What's the problem?
I pay $40 per month + $5 for the modem rental.
The price has remained constant for the past 3 years or so, although last year they did double the our speed.
I'd love nothing more than to see some serious uncapping. Imagine downloading those huge pr0n^H^H^H^HLinux ISOs at lighting speed.
^^vv<><>BA
Politically the tradeoff has been you have to wire the uneconomic areas to wire the economic ones, this was true for both phone and cable. Blame your local utility commission for making that tradeoff if you want. Because our hugely populated areas pay for the service to all the sparse areas (the FCC's USF) they haven't invested in the infastructure for the densly populated areas. The only reason NYC doesn't have fiber to everyone's door is that the phone company generally offers the same set of services across the state of NY to stay out of regulatory hot water.
If anyone wants the numbers. You can wire 6.3% of Sweeden and reach 80% of the poulation. In the US you would have to wire about 15% of the counties (I couldn't find pop/km data for the US) to reach the same 80% of the population. Wiring 6.3% of the most populated counties only raches about 65% of the US population. The density map of Sweden is here. For the US I grabbed the county stats list from the census bureau and removed the states and then sorted.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
I am sorry but the Broadband heaven in Canada is absolute BS. Maybe Canada was great about 4 years ago, but not these days. I live in Switzerland and can get better broadband then living in the sticks of Canada. We have a house in Canada, that is 15 clicks away from a DSL node. For the past 5 years NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING has changed! I can get neither Cable, nor DSL, and just recently could get Satellite, but with the restrictive policies on usage it is not even close to worth its money.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
Oh get off it. I have Comcast, with 4Mbps/384kbps. Using Usenetserver.com, I can EASILY max out my cable at 495KB/s of actual data throughput, while DU meter reports actual usage at around 520KB/s (accounting for packet overhead.)
I can't remember the last time I had a download speed of 3Mbps with Comcast... Mostly because I download at 4.
I am a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar.
Ok all, I have been reading the posts on this topic and have reached my limit of /. patience!! What does it matter WHERE the majority of the Canadian populations lives. You seem to forget that while it is true the vast majority is near the border, that does not mean that the spaces in between are empty!! A good case in point would be Saskatchewan. Very large by US State standards, and broadband is available to any community with a school..and I know first hand that that includes communities with as little as 400 people, 60 miles from any other center, large or of similar size. I also believe that standard high speed is available even to individual farms(which is still far faster than most us cities), and the major centers have a 5Mb connection for $50 C$(say 40 US$) So take a look at the map of Saskatchewan, cover the top half, consider the rest populated, and you have highspeed anywhere in that area for the same price. This is the difference to the US. I cannot even speculate as to what the problem is with our friends in the south, but they need to start looking elsewhere and really realize they are being left behind. As an aside, Take a look at Alberta cell coverage, and comare it to the avg US state, and you can see another area that seems out of whack to the rest of the world. This is just a reality check guys. Canada may rank 2nd in this report, but it does not tell you that the majority of those in the rural areas also have access to cheap high speed, and its growing everyday. I hope our American cousins find a way to pull themselves back to the top, they need it, and deserve it.
why I wouldn't want the US to get superbig and superfast pipes is because they already produce more than 50% of the world's spam. Imagine if they had a much faster access.... :(
...you are correct. And a major part of the reason is the more or less fairly imminent global oil production decline. China along with a number of other countries are stockpiling oil in anticipation of higher prices and lack of availability. They had something like a 300% increase in just registered cars last year, their demand is going outta site, along with indias and some other developing nations. The PTB are really pulling out all the stops in trying to keep prices at the pump down in this critical election period, but watch it skyrocket after the elections. I mean, we are seeing the same prices at the pump we saw before it galloped to 45-50$ a barrel. It *should* have hit at the pumps by now, but it hasn't, hence I think it's being manipulated for political purposes.
If they-back to china- were actually releasing the oil to their population they wouldn't have as much unemployment, but stuck between a rock and a hard place they are stockpiling. Oil makes the world go round, that's about it. Transportation, manufacturing,agriculture, other energy production-all of the above and more goes back to the slick black stuff.
There are plenty. Check Broadband Reports and search by speed range. Last I heard, many of the regional Bell companies peg DSL at ~750k; if you want something faster, you have to use cable or buy DSL through another company.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
It's not profitable to lay cable in the countryside, generally, so that's out for a lot of bumpkins^Wpeople like me.
From what I gather from the summary (of course I haven't RTFA), various IT journalists are comparing broadband in the US to various countries in Western Europe and Asia, and coming to the conclusion that American connections are nowhere near those elsewhere. And team GB is behind the States so...
"The number of Unix installations has grown to ten, with more expected." (Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd ed.; june 1972)
Any time you have a centralized government which taxes and then uses that money to provide a free service to everyone, that is, abstractly speaking, socialist. (Some people like to call it "Liberal". Feh.) This includes road building and law enforcement, two things I'm STRONGLY IN FAVOR of. So, socialism isn't always wrong.
However, I suspect one of the reasons so many "poorer" countries are getting universal broadband is that the governments want to look good to the rest of the world (and to their people), so they tax their already poor people and then give them useless broadband when really, they need things like better food and shelter. They're like, "Aren't we the best country in the world! Everyone has broadband!". They just don't tell you that the people who have broadband are starving to death or can't get basic education (and have no way of actually USING the broadband).
More interestingly, while their broadband may be more widely available, there are no incentives to make it GOOD.
With capitalistic competition, in the US (and many other countries), while not everyone has broadband, those who have it get better service. When broadband first appeared, companies struggled to find a way to roll out cheap broadband. It was a mess. For years, no sane person would have gone near DSL because telephone companies have such low profit margins that they can't afford to actually provide support and solve problems. Even now, at least in Orlando, cable modem is 3 times as fast as DSL for the same price. I keep telling Sprint to stop calling me until they can compete with Brighthouse. However, it has improved steadily since the beginning, and it will continue to improve and vastly surpass the mediocre offerings of socialized broadband.
If you want to see where broadband will be in the future, consider the state of healthcare right now. In countries with socialized medicine, no one wants to become a doctor, and people who need any kind of health care (basic or emergency) wind up on long waiting lists. It's a horrible mess, and anyone who thinks socialized medicine will improve things in the US is a moron. When you compare socialized countries to the US, we have more medicine, better medicine, and no waiting lists. That's because doctors and individuals and private companies (including insurance companies) control medicine, not the government. (Oh, I know it's far from perfect.) If you want health care, you have to PAY for it (unless you're destitute and need emergency care, and any hospital emergency room will help you for free). Rather than a sense of entitlement on the part of the people, they have an expectation that the money they pay to doctors and insurance will yield results, and it DOES. Furthermore, while many insurance programs set rate limits for doctors, doctors can choose which rate programs they are part of, and this doesn't stop them from feeling that hard work will yield a greater reward (which is vitally important).
The basic reason why medicine in the US is so much better is because it's based on CAPITALISM. Capitalism thrives because it capitalizes, as it were, on human greed (which is pervasive). If working harder gets you more, you'll work harder and do a better job.
(Note that insurance companies are a form of VOLUNTARY socialism which gets rid of the moral issues associated with socialism. You can choose to abstain and still be alright. My primary doctor has 1/3 of his patients without insurance and he has special rates for them which are affordable. It's like private charities and scholarships which are all voluntary. This gives people MORE choice which is a GOOD thing.)
[As a side note, I would love to be a Libertarian, were it not for the fact that none of the candidates would lift a finger, militarily, to defend the country unless a foreign invasion were already underway. I would love to be a Republican were it not for the bigotry and the whole "morality police" thing. I would love to be a Democrat were it not for the fact that they're as wimpy militarily as the Libertarians, and they want to tax away all of my money and give it to people who refuse to work. I don't know anything about the Green party.]
We may have similar geography to the US (larger country, actually)
Just to clarify for those who are interested:
1. Russia (17,075,200 sq. km)
2. Canada (9,976,140 sq. km)
3. USA (9,629,091 sq. km)
4. China (9,596,960 sq. km)
So the difference is small, but Canada is still the larger nation. But since the US has never acknowledged our sovereignty over the northern archipeligo, by official US numbers it may be different.
Nope. It's not "quite a bit". It's a little bit.
e earth94_usda_big.gif there's a good chunk of nothingness in both countries, but certainly a greater PERCENTAGE of nothingness in Sweden.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_density 20:31 Sweden:USA.
Looking at a map of population density http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0303/peopl
While the population dense areas may be farther apart in the US, the fiber is already in place between all of the major US cities, and in many smaller towns to boot. The problems with our speeds have very little to do with how spread out we are. We could still have 10mb apartment buildings, but we don't. Why is that? Not because there are not enough people in those buildings. Maybe because the Cable/RBOC companies have no incentive to get to that point. Of couse it is expensive to put the fiber in, but if they were willing to put it in and charge a resonable price, they would easly get their ROI from the number of people that would sign up.
I'd be happy just to not have to reset my DSL modem twice a week. 1.5mbps is all the bandwidth anyone would ever need.
You've just described the Chicago suburbs.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Government provided broadband isn't the answer. There are plenty of tiny little communities in Southern Oregon that have great broadband for about $20 per household. They have formed little Co-ops to buy the necessary switching equipment (about $5000 I think) and then one or two members oversee it. Anyone can do this and the phone company has to let you tie in (Federal comepetition rules). These people get much faster download/upload speeds for the cost of dial up.
The government could encourage this by giving a small tax incentive to anyone willing to run one of these Co-op networks (would have to be non-profit only or the for profits would squash this, maybe make sure the tax benefit is minimal).
The Co-ops could also buy a cheap Linux box to run a VOIP box (there's a company doing these for under $10,000 US, much less than $40k +) and eliminate the cost of phone service as well.
Okay, so the thought of 100mbps to my home PC sounds exciting, but do I really need to watch TV over the Internet? I've already got hundreds of channels available at my fingertips...all without (for the most part) connection problems. No 400/500 error messages. No packet loss, jitter, lag, or other quality issues. If you sum up the data rates of digital cable TV, I bet we'd exceed 100mbps easily.
Yes, our telecomms companies are mired in the past, and don't understand that there is more money to be made from content than content delivery.
Yes, we have a ridiculous regulatory structure that virtually guarantees the eventual extinction of DSL -- I know I, for one, won't shed a tear about this. The telephone companies of this nation have a decades-long legacy of sloth and profiteering; trying to starve and harass third-party DSL providers out of existence is just a continuation of their legacy. The sweet irony of it is: their aging copper is virtually useless in the face of newer broadband technologies, and while they were busy crushing their "partners," they missed the narrow window of opportunity for any profit whatsoever. Now, they are forced to sit on the sidelines and provide POTS to Grandma while licking their chops and gazing dolefully at the cash cows of the broadband revolution. </rant>
Yes, the use of the Internet in the US has been almost solely reserved for the technological and educational "haves" in this country, leaving the "have nots" by the wayside -- though this is changing.
The single biggest reason we lag behind other nations in broadband deployment, however, is sheer scale.
The United States has 93 TIMES (9300%) the surface area of South Korea, and 22 times the surface area of Sweden. As the third most populous nation on earth, we have almost 300,000,000 people living within our borders. Our national POTS telecomms infrastructure is the oldest and most complex on Earth.
Broadband penetration to US households in 2001 was around 7%. I am frankly amazed at the progress we've made in the past three years. The nation's major population centers -- the west and east coasts, and the Great Lakes region -- are entirely wired for both DSL and cable modem, and we're working on deploying those technologies (and more exciting, newer alternatives) to the less populous interior of our nation.
All things considered, I'd say we're doing a good job.
I'm sorry, but the problem is tne States is not "red tape." The problem in the US is capitalism run amok. It has been stated over and over in the business press that US telecos and cable companies DO NOT WANT low paying customers. It's not that bandwidth is expensive, it's that customers who pay less actually cost more. This is pure politics of profits. The problem with low paying customers is that demographically they tend to be more trouble and service is a cost.
So, to maximize shareholder profits, the answer is simple, don't lower prices. This has shit to do with red tape and everything to do with capitalism creating monopolies that the current government refuses to check.
In 4 simple steps!
1. Determine how to reduce profit.
2. Sell companies on the 'no profit' scheme.
3. ????
4. MAKE PROFIT!!!!!
My brother and his wife (who's Japanese) are moving back to the states from Tokyo. He was asking just the other day what kind of pipe I have. I told him it's a 1.5/384. He wasn't impressed as they were looking to upgrade they're 25mb to 100mb before they decided to move. Er, welcome home...
We are truely seeing what happens when big media get's in bed with the FCC. While I believe that we will see higher speeds (Speakeasy is offering 6mb/768mb connections in some areas as well as DSL w/out a phone line - which I have), they will be nothing compared to some otehr countries. And I'm the first to agree this is dampening innovation. The pipe is now becoming a necessity in some areas, but don't expect the current administration to see that any time soon.
Take this example. I'm actually developing a video conferencing app for a company. While some players like Apple, M$, and even Yahoo (altho, their offering isn't much to talk about) their own vconf apps (Apple's, obviously, being the best), they all have high bandwidth demands. Apple's Tiger nextegn Mpeg 4 codec promises to lower these requirements, but for all pratical purposes, that isn't the reality now.
So for me, working on a new technology with a limited budget, I'm screwed. Unless I wanna fork out big bucks for a hige pipe, my 'innovation' is kinda dead in the water. And even if I did have a big connection, our business clients might not either. All because of artifical costs that the big providers complain about.
Another issue. In San Francisco, as well as other cities, you have to go thru quite a few hoops - STILL - to get a connection up. The latest was with my Speakeasy Onelink service - which is basically a data-only circuit that doesn't require phone service from SBC. However, it still requires SBC to come out; as part of this requirement I waited all day only to find my line 'tagged' by SBC some time in the past few days. I then called the Speakeasy guys, who said that SBC isn't required to notify anyone during this step. Great. Now Speakeasy/Covad has to wait for SBC to notify them that they've finished. So far that hasn't happend. Gee. In other words, this whole process, after years of availibility, is still crap. Still inefficient. Still a joke.
While I use Speakeasy exclusively - as a developer - since they're one of the only independent providers left - this whole process is still crap. The Bell's still have no intention of letting go of any control of the copper that we, the government, basically game them in the 40's/50's/60's. So while all these corporate interests still hold the keys, we'll be given little slices while other countries in the world will be given the whole pie thusly, enabling their little guys to 'innovate' a hell of a lot faster than ours. Of course, our adminstration and biz climate here is pretty stacked against the little guy, so no new news there.
Argh, this whole thing pisses me off..
"Hey, we know its an unfair criticism, compared to small densly populated countries like Japan and Korea...Still, articles like this may light a fire under some suceptables asses, and get us better broadband."
Great! So we'll have bigger pipes to abuse. Now why would anyone want to facilitate that? That would be like the music industry coming out with a better form of music reproduction.
The US is falling being, or screwing themselves for many reasons. The country is only #1 any more in making money. However, we continue to think we are so great, and then make excuses when someone else does well at something. Take this excerpt from the article:
As most will note, there's a big difference between wiring a compact South Korean urban sprawl, and draping fiber across the Rocky Mountains and into the rural communities of the plain states. A more just comparison would likely be Canada, but wait: they're not only offering faster speeds than American providers, but consumers pay less, and Canada rivals South Korea when it comes to broadband penetration.
A lot of simplistic thinkers will rationalize and compare South Korea to the US and make excuses. However, they will fail to notice someone like Canada who is doing nearly as well as Korea.
People take the same tack with gun violence in the US. We make excuses and comparisons with other countries, and then we miss the countries who provide better examples. For example, many countries in Europe have pretty strict gun control and very few gun related deaths, far fewer per capita than the US. We'd come up with excuses for that, but an even better logician would point out canada, who's laws aren't as strict, and who have a lot of guns as well. However they too have very few gun related deaths. Why? There's another reason, but that's not my point.
The point is that people will see one comparison and rationalize it. I've found for Pro-US were #1 chanters, I find making multiple comparisons often shuts them up.
And I am an american citizen, and I'm not satisfied with the state of broadband or guns or a whole lot of other shit in this country.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Just read this article yesterday:
Philadelphia to become 'Wi-fi for all' city.
IMHO, It's a wonderful effort. The whole idea behind this effort is that Internet access should be treated as a public resource. And apparently Philadelphia isn't alone... plans like these are being researched in other locations as well.
Airlines and broadband are no longer businesses, they are commodities that are necessary for the public good. Guess what that makes them?
You guessed it: Utilities.
Airlines and broadband need to be regulated utilites much like the telephone, gas, and electric utilities. The government could dictate minimum quality of service and regulate rates.
As it stands now, both industries have poor performance, and very poor business models. It may be the time to just give up on the airline and broadband "businesses".
-ted
...here's the problem. By your own reference,they spent bundles to upgrade folks who ALREADY HAD DECENT BROADBAND. They didn't "roll out" cable further into the suburban and rural areas too much. They didn't use their money they already made to expand their market, they just consolidated what they had. That's the problem, they have decided where ANY broadband is going to go and that's it. I mean, you are complaining about 1.5 meg connection, which to me would be an amazing thing, when millions and millions of people can't even get a reliable dialup connection with any decent speed to it. I'm lucky to get a 28.8 on a good day with no bad weather, yet the town over next to me about 15 miles away has a variety of dsl and also cable,and I know this isn't isolated, it's pervasive across the nation. And this isn't even all that rural, there's folks up and down the street, a subdivision at one end. It's not like it's bushplane accessibleonly or something, it's just plain old rural (meaning non major urban) USA. I bet at least 3/4ths of the land mass of the US is in the same boat, just not urban "enough" for them to bother with.
I think that's the point of the article, it's not that we can't get it, it's that they are never going to even try to offer it beyond a certain population density point, and usually wherever it already exists. And what gets me is I know from talking to the local phone guys when they were installing my meager copper they have fiber all the way to the nearest box, so I asked them when they will bring it to the curb, they said NEVER unless they are ordered to by the government. That's just a scosh over two miles from me. Probably a couple dozen houses between here and there, then a big subdivision past me on down the street, with more construction going on. How hard would it be to string the remaining fiber? AFAIK, they have never even asked the local folks if any of us would be interested in decent broadband. It's like they reluctantly provide THE cheapest copper line phone service they can get away with, that's their mindset. I doubt they would even do that if they weren't ordered to way back when as part of their monopoly.
I'm GLAD I have some inet connection, and that's it. I don't expect big business to ever give a crap about the rural areas as long as their food and water and other stuff gets shipped into the cities where the rich fatcats live and rule over the nation. Allegedly there might be wifi or some other wireless action at some point, but I've been hearing about it but not seeing it for years now. You can get satellite inet, but at close to a grand up front costs for hardware and installation and 70$ - 100$ a month recurring, it just isn't happening any time soon for most people.
However, this is completely irrelevant. Where I used to live five years ago, I was 550 km (around 400 miles?) from the nearest big city as the crow flies. It was a good 15 hours of driving to the nearest city with more than half a million people. Yet I had broadband -- 1.3 Mbit/s down for $25 canadian a month.
Now I'm living in another small city of 41,000 people, a good 600 km north of the US border, and 4 hours driving away from the nearest big city -- and I still have the same broadband speeds. I could get 4.5 Mbit if I wanted. I could get a T3 at home if I wanted (or could afford it).
And those are free market prices -- there are other providers in each town. Yes, Canada does have a few major urban centres, but broadband penetration is very real. It's everywhere.
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
What you also may want to know "why?: to is
-- why are Japanese cell phones are fairly superior to the units we get shipped
-- why can you tell time by their Shinkansen and other bullet trains
-- why is mass transit more viable there (tho/while cars crawl at a rate of 1/2 k every 30 minutes)
-- why are consumer electronics just better
-- why the average Japanese consumer is more fickle and induces manufacturer acquiescence better than we do here
A LOT of "whys". I think it has to do with the fact that often we here are complacent and lazy, taking what industry throws us. For example, US washing machines tore up or wore out my friend's expensive clothes he brought here with him from Japan. They have washer/dryer units that have ONE hopper: soiled articles go in dry, get wet, get washed, get dried, and finished in one device, not two. I imagine Maytag would be hopping/spinning mad, claiming "DUMPING"/"UNFAIR TRADE" if the Japanese unloaded loads of their best stuff. But, they don't, most likely because of a lack of appreciation on our part, and maybe a certain amount of "we don't deserve it" attitude. I envy what can be had there.
That South Korea has blazingly-fast speeds in Internet cafes is nice, but here in some cities you can get fast connectivity, such as for playing SOF/CS/HL and other RPGs.
However, I think that the crap (slow speeds in less populated areas/increased prices for electrons, 1s & 0s) we get doled out to us is not a function of what goes on in other countries, but a matter of profits and holding back, sort of like treating the goods and services as drugs: the more we want it, the more we have to ante up in dollars. Except, with goods, the less interest, the less likely we are to get stuff improved "for the hell of it".
Really, it's cost of goods, cost of manufacture and more...but their cost of delivery are based on some weiredness that tries to factor in ever-increasing profits which are coupled to defections or low conversion rates. Rather than catch customers and keep them for the long haul, they jade then torture them and cause defections, bad stories, and loss of potential customers.
Maybe their asses will wake up one day and realize "a buck" is not ALL there is to being in business.
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
So, you'd be QUITE HAPPY to have the means of communication DICTATED BY THE STATE eh comrade? Why, you COMMUNIST!
I, for one, welcome our new broadband overlords.
I have 2 cable companies and about 50 phone companies all competing to offer me faster and cheaper broadband than everyone else. Monopoly isn't a problem here in Tampa. Also, aren't we going to have broadband over power lines soon? What ever happened to that?
I currently get 4Mbps down and $20/mo (for 3 months). That's a pretty darn good deal. Plus, since there are 2 competing cable companies, I have been switching back and forth for over 2 years and haven't had to pay full price ($40/mo) yet. I even tell them every time that I switch that I have been a customer before but switched to the other for the promo and I'd like to switch back for the promo. Works like a charm.
Full-Featured GPL Web Hosting Control Panel
The facts are not quite exact but usually in reality America IS behind in most of the technology fields. America just hypes and boasts its ego more. The others are just happy and dont make noise about natural things.
I was not aware that they were 1.5Mb down. That makes me happy, if this is the case for me too.
Linux: The world's best text-adventure game.
yep, and that service covers 95% of the territory.
As a bonus you get unlimited free national VoIP phone calls and 50+ TV channels from a Linux-based DSL modem/settop box called the Freebox. And the ping to the provider's router is only 5ms.
The guys are about to completely unlimit the bandwidth at 8m/640k for those that are real close to the DSLAM. See http://adsl.free.fr for info. This ISP is completely Linux-based, included their custom made settops.
Oh, and the Freebox can act as a wifi router if you purchase a 27 EUR pcmcia card.
If something is infrastructure (i.e. drives or supports the operation of the economy) then the government should subsidize it. It is like a road -- we generally don't expect a road to make money on its own (although I guess we could put tolls on every street).
If US government does not treat Internet access as a fundamental intrastructure, they will continue to lag behind other countries.
The partyline phone thing is bunk in any "community" with over 10 people.
.ca... Cable, Digital Cable, Sat, LookTV, plus good old network TV for those too cheap to pay for anything else.
And, two types of TV? Do you live in Canada, or are you talking out of your ass? Because I can count more than two where I'm at in
Some other facts about Nunavut:
Kilometers of highway: 20
Cost of 2 Litres of milk: $5.75 (CND)
Largest city: Iqaluit, pop. 6,000
And it wants it arguments back!
Oil is already falling from the peak price levels, and the people who know what they are doing (the traders) anticipate the price to be around $36 in two years.
Oil is just another commodity, and is subject to swings as speculators throw money around.
If you honestly believe that China is stockpiling the amounts of petroleum that they would need to weather a period of oil shortages, you really need to get informed.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
hehehhe what about Space Balls? ;-)
"She's gone from suck to blow!"
-M-
"Life is all about strategy, mathematics and psychological perceptiveness."
One word beyatch,
Starcraft,
That one game was caused a nation of asians to throw their parents to the curb for the sake of fibre, and they havent looked back since. What can the Western world say to that besides:-
oooorrrr, Zerg rush, kekekekke ^_^
I'm very happy to be living in within a structure of a decentralized broadband access where each individual state dictates the best method of communication, rather than a country tell me that only DSL or CABLE is available.
You must not get out much right? You do know that most nations in Europe are about the size of States in the US? It would take me about 4-5 hours to drive across my new home, England and it took me about 7-10 hours to drive accross my old State, New York.
This has nothing to do with providing a luxury item, this is no longer the industrial age. In order for a nation to remain competitive in this new information age the glacial speeds imposed by companies seeking to maximize profits must end. The individuals of the nation can not organize to collectively to this outside of the government, which is the organization of all individuals of the nation. This will be mandated by the collective of the government or the nation will no longer be a major economic power. The health of the nation is at stake here, if this is not done the US will become the new sick man of the world-do you know what entity was the last "sick man"? The Ottoman Empire. Think past the immediate or you will fail to understand the majority of things.
Corporations are sentient beings that make their own decisions. I'll let you in on a little secret. Corporations don't pay taxes but people pay taxes through Corporations.
You do know that USA is quite a bit more densely populated than Sweden, don't you? As a matter of fact the population density in USA is 45% greater than Sweden!
I love averages. Of course, like all northern scandanavian countries, the top half of Sweden basically empty. People are few and far between north of Gavle (~62 North). Not to mention the fact that Sweden has only 8 992 217 people total. (To be fair, big tracks of the American west are likewise empty.)
To make the comparison useful, what you do is start in the densest part of each country and count citizens, moving to progressively less dense sections. When you get down into the thin parts, say less than 10 people/sq km, stop. Now look at how many people were in the dense parts and how much area you had to cover to get them. That will give you a sense of how easy it is to achieve an "broadband penetration percentage" that looks good.
That said, the U.S. should get its butt in gear.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
The ISP in question is not cable modem based, it's an ethernet jack on the wall and 10M/10M full duplex. They'll even crank it up to 100Mbit/s for $30 extra per month. I guess that would make it..uh..60x faster then.. :)
We may have similar geography to the US (larger country, actually)
/mo. $32-ish US. Most of the country is like this. We have only 2 real 'major' players in any given market here - the cable company vs the phone company. In Ontario, Rogers vs Bell. BC: Shaw vs Telus.
First off - no. Back to geography class with you.
Service in urban and rural Ontario right now, provided mostly by Rogers, has reached 5mbit/s for a mere $45 CAN
The insane level of competition has brought us rock-bottom prices, and both sides fighting for the "fastest" title. This has also brought us cell phone plans for $30 CAN / mo which include things like 500 minutes w/free evenings and weekends. On my trips stateside, I just don't see the same level of competition and convergence. You've got enough cell phone companies to sink a ship.
In short, we've got it all for cheap using the business model - not the government-forced model. Because that's worked out so well in the States for DTV...
I think you are talking about 3web? or Goldnet.Net?
I use dialup not because broadband isn't available, but because of the limited ways to get it. I recoil at the idea of writing Time Warner a monthly check for US$80+ for basic cable and internet. The lax FCC rules for media and telecom ownership have, in 20 years since the breakup of AT&T, transformed the industry into a sleezy oligopoly of no choices and high prices. Some broadband future! Screw'em. I'll stick to my PPP and modem!
an ill wind that blows no good
Nope , 9 000 000 people now. News from last week.
And it gives terrorists a foothold in threatening our freedoms, too!
As if Americans aren't ADD/ADHD, stupid, and lazy enough, 100 Mbs to each home will only make us worser.
As a matter of fact the population density in USA is 45% greater than Sweden!
Well, the AVERAGE population density is. In New York city, the density might be much higher than Sweden's average... but in Montana, much lower.
When laying fiber, distance generally incurs more cost than density. A mile of cable is a mile of cable, whether it serves 100 people or 10,000,000.
here ya go
0 9- 1240069,00.html
china stockpiling
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,82
http://www.aseansec.org/16144.htm
peak oil
http://www.peakoil.net/
--I stay informed, thankew. Prices can be manipulated temporarily for business and political purposes, but there's nothing they can do about rapidly diminishing supply in conjunction with rapidly developing demand. They haven't even found a single mega field for a coupla years now (longer I think really), and several large oil concerns have had to re-assess severely downward what they previously claimed as recoverable reserves. Maybe you missed that little news fact, it's somewhat of what they call a "scandal" lately. It's in the news, not even hard to find. North sea-past peak. Mexico-past peak. Venezuela-past peak. Indonesia-past peak. Lower 48 USA-way past peak. North slope-past peak. Last good stash that is rapidly approaching peak is in the little area of iraq/iran/arabian peninsula. Some dribs and drabs here and there left to develop, west africa, some offshorte areas, etc, but that's it for the good and still easy to get at stuff. I was just reading last night some wells in sauid are pumping at 55% water now from the water they force in to extract it. They used to *gush* pure crude out of the ground, now they have to force it out.
Naw, maybe the dittoheads still believe that smoke and mirrors razzle dazzle that there's unlimited near free black gold energy, but pure geology proves it otherwise. People who actually do the research and don't fall for snakeoil salesmens spiels know what's up.
Text only speed - modems
Streaming music and occassional background downloads - current broadband
Streaming video - 100Mbps
Here's hoping somebody starts pouring the orange juice soon.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
bredbandsbolaget delivers 10mbit ethernet to apartment houses, connected to an optical fiber connection. This means that they deliver 10mbit in both directions
Actually, if I remember my Ethernet correctly, that means that the TOTAL bandwidth on the segment between the desktop and the fiber switch is 10mb, regardless of which end the packets originate on. So a desktop used as a client might average 8 down/2 up, and a server might average 1 down/9 up, but the total wouldn't exceed 10.
(Disabled my Karma bonus because I'm not sure of my facts...)
And you are right--we have a hard time admitting we are 2nd rate in anything. And there is a reason for that: we Americans have been subjected to decades of well-funded media propaganda, which has caused the vast majority of AMericans to suffer from this peculiar disease, which I cannot put a name to, but one symptom of it is the eternal calls to patriotism, and endless rhetoric about "the United States of America." We have manipulated for decades to think that America is so great, and thus we have given our consent to all sorts of foreign wars and foreign policy skullduggery.
This kind of manipulation still goes on here: most Americans are convinced America has the world's greatest medical case. Umm...no, it does not. Not for the average person.
And we do not have the world's greatest broadband. Here in Houston, the country's 5th largest city, you can get 1M down, 250K up for the grand sum of $32/month.
The reason why we have substandard broadband and substandard medical care is that our governmental structure was set up 200 years ago to reflect and maintain a SLAVE SOCIETY. They ran on slaves and indentured servants, and they built a Constitution to exploit the underclass. And they are still exploiting us.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
The US doesn't get that broadband is an enabler for so much else, yet. It's considered an unnecessary luxury, and possibly something vaguely suspicious and associated with software and media piracy.
To illustrate, I live in Sweden. My parents have a summer resort; a cottage on an island. They have no running water, an outhouse, and recently had a telephone installed.
But they do have broadband, even if a measly one megabit per second, which we use to chat in the evenings using simple videoconferencing tools.
Read that again. Broadband is more important than running water to other people. Now do you see while the US is lagging behind?
Also, please stop confusing "cable/DSL" with the flavor of broadband that generally exists in Sweden, Japan, and South Korea. Most homes are simply wired; they have RJ45 jacks next to the TV antenna jack and the phone jack. Direct connection to the local router (serviced by some company) using at least 10 megabit full duplex, often 100. Not some piggyback "over-television" or "over-telephone" technology.
The US ceased to be the home of capitalism long ago.
Ah! My bad. That'll teach me to use 3 month old data.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
His 10-megabit-per-second service ... enabling a user to download a two-hour movie in a matter of minutes rather than hours.
You don't suppose that we don't have highspeed broadband in the US because the MPAA doesn't want us to, do ya?
Nah, must be some other reason.
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
Having lived in South Korea, and having lived here in the US. (Yeah I'm home again Yippee!) The reason for the difference is this. Attitude. I worked for a company for a long time that sold real time video feeds (Not p0rn ok!) for simulcasting events. When we had to deal with Korean bandwidth sellers they saw it and said "OOO this uses lot's of badwidth... we can sell more!" When we talked with US Bandwidth sellers they would say. "No this uses too much bandwidth we'll have to buy more." Canada which is a lot more spread out than the US (in terms of population) has better bandwidth penetration than the US. I live in the Silly Con valley and let me tell you it is one of the worst places in the world to ensure having good bandwidth. I've a friend who lives literally across the street from his DCO, yet can't get DSL because "The lines on his street are too old" and SBC refuses to upgrade. He'd get cable... as soon as his neighborhood is wired (Funny thing is he can get cable TV but the local provider doesn't do the net.) The solution turns out to be connecting to the house behind him which can get DSL and sharing the line via a really long wire. (BTW they are trying to figure out a secure, and reliable, wireless connection. The word secure being the key word.)
It really comes down to attitude. In the US they want to sell you bandwidth but don't want you to use it. If you use it they will send out a tech to cap your line. In Korea they want to sell you bandwidth and if you use it, they will send out a salesman to sell you a bigger pipe.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
Well, if you fake out the cable company and get free TV
I wasn't talking about stealing services. You can lawfully choose to pay the cable company, or you can lawfully choose to watch free-to-air TV in geographic areas that don't have a BBC style TV license fee, or you can lawfully choose not to watch TV at all. You can't lawfully choose to unsubscribe from services that big businesses have sweet-talked the state into forcing on you, such as the DEA (allegedly a creation of du Pont and other synthetic chemical companies who didn't want scientists to discover the energy potential of hemp).
I see lots and lots of posts about population density vs land mass vs corporate greed, yada yada yada.
You are all missing the most fundamental point. In order for businesses to thrive, there has to be good infrastructure to support it. Take the US Highway system, for example. It was built with massive government subsidy and public money. It was expensive to build hundreds of miles of smooth highways that pass through middle-of-the-desert Neveda. Population density there is about zero. But once it's finished, the value it adds to the overall economy is probably worth many more times than the outlay.
These other governments who push broadband saw the highway analogy early on, and realized that in order to support the future information economy or virtual society or whatever, they needed good infrastructure. And in terms of capital outlay, it's relatively cheap infrastructure. Laying a mile of fiber is definately cheaper than laying a mile of highway. US will eventually realize this, I just hope it happens sooner than later.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
This is typical of these big isp companies (telco, cable) and their busness models (and chip companies somewhat too) which are short sighted and very greedy. The business climate now-a-days is to not invest in research (or at least keep it to a small minimum) and to coast on existing technologies and to wait for small companies and other countries (like Korea and Japan) to invent the next great thing. Innovation,ideas (and most important, failiure (failiure can bring new, better ideas)) are not rewarded in most of corporate north america, after all, who wants to invest in basic research unless the universities and goverments and military pay for it, no wonder we fall behind so quickly. Look at the chip campanies, for years they developed (through their research consortium, in other words, they paid for the cool new stuff to be developed, but chose not to use it (they probably got good tax writ-offs on the new technogy development too!) new, better chip tehcnologies, but were quite happy to not use them to make better chips, because they were making too much money using the existing chip technology (why use the new technology if your making so much money with the old technology, just say the old tech. is realy high-tech and the goof-ball general public will nerver notice), now, there is more comptetion world-wide (and people notice this) companies do then have to innovate more often when this happens, so this can only be a good thing for everybody.
I'm surprised no one has brought up this article, considering it was mentioned on Slashdot yesterday. Much cheaper to go WiFi than running fibre to every home, and easier to upgrade. Probably not the best solution for rural areas, but that's a tiny fraction of the US population.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Optimum is (can be) that fast. I've seen around 9 MBps (no, not Mbps).
You can get washing machines like that from some European vendors too. I suppose it would make sense if you had very limited space and didn't mind washing a small load of clothes every day. I on the other hand, like doing them all at once on the weekend and the ability to have one batch being washed while another is being dried. If you are concerned about your clothes getting abused, get a front loading washer. They have been available for quite a long time.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
I know Canadians don't feel this way, but I wish they were a part of the US or vice versa. That would be awsome. I'm going to Whistler this winter to ride and was wondering if any Canadians know of "cool" non-touristy places to party in the area. Ohhhhh Canadaaaaaaa!
"Patience is not a virtue, it's a waste of time."
In Canada they spent the money long ago to build the infrastructure. Back when the crown (government) owned companies where making hundreds of millions of dollars a year they spent money on the infrastructure just as a way to spend money. They needed to spend money on something - so they build the infrastructure up. That was before the internet even came onto the public stage. Now we have American company coming in wanted all the profit to pay there executives $100 million dollar bonus so they do no bail on the failing company. In some ways it is nice to have governement controlled industry. As a mononply they can make tons of money (keeping the taxes low) and spend money on what appears to be silly things - like building up the infrastucture. Sure it takes time but the American (for profit only) companies would never spend a single cent on building up the quality of life just because they can. That is the problem with for strictly for profit companies. They just suck the life out what ever they touch. With out giving back to the community and building it will eventually die and your market place along with it.
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
For some more info look atthe broadband map of Canada It's a little out of date (2001 census) but it should give you an idea of the penetration in Canada.
It's probably similar to the US. If you took a 5 degree slice across the US and population density of those 5 degrees of canada, you'll find pretty much the same thing: Lots of people in the east, not so many in the midwest, and a lot of people in the west. It's similar in that respect. Maybe they don't have the north-south runs that we do, but they have the east-west runs, as well as the suburbs, major cities, and large rural areas.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Bredbandsbolaget doesn't care as long as you don't generate "huge amounts of traffic". I run DC quite a bit and people dowload several GB/day from me. Their 100 Mbit connection is limited to 300 GB/month though. They only provide dynamic IP-addresses and port 25 is disabled, so running a server is a bit limited. The dynamic addressing scheme is probably about to change though.
Actually I can transmit a DVD I made in less than a second, sure it only has 0.05 seconds of 160x160 video w/no soundtrack but hey it's a DVD right?
^^vv<><>BA
Mod parent up - absolutely correct. I'm in a Canadian rural community of about 5K people. 4 years ago I was on 56K dialup. 3 years ago I was on 1mb high speed wireless. This year I went to 3mb DSL for about $25US per month. *and* I have the option of bringing fibre right to the house. Expensive as crap ($600Cdn/month) - and a too large installation fee - but it's available to me if I want it. So what's the excuse of the US for leaving half the folks on dialup and charging outrageous prices? Gotta be the regulations of the baby bells and the like. Up here the phone companies are legislated that they have to install DSL hardward and allow other's to lease their lines. So I have my choice of providers. Yes, there's a hard bottom limit to the prices (based on what the ISP leases the line for from the telco), but the fact that anyone can lease the lines provides a ton of competition and keeps prices razor sharp. The Canadian govt has also made substantial investments on wiring the country. You can visit just about any public library - including those in extremely remote locations - and they'll likely have highspeed. In fact, when I go on vacation up in bear country I can enjoy the wilderness and as long as I'm in driving distance to a library (they're everywhere right?), I've got high speed web access. In short, the US can follow our lead by changing the regulatory structure to allow for intense regional competition, as well as investing in some larger infrastructure which will help foster this longerterm.
Life Insurance in Canada
"It's the Koreans doc. They scare me!"
:/
Seriously, you could look at any one of my proxy logs from last year and you'd see that our Korean students are BY FAR the heaviest bandwidth users. The top 10-15 users every day are usually Korean, and they only represent less than 10% of our student body of 130!!!
They try and watch 100 Mbit soap opera feeds from KTV (with no success), and they get a bit upset about not being able to do that.
I guess it's all a matter of perspective. We just got a 3 Mbit DSL upgrade last year and I thought it was pretty spiffy. I know schools our size that are lucky to get a frac T1. About a month after the upgrade, a Korean student asked me, "Hey! Why is Internet so SLOOOWWW?!"
That sort of thing just ruins my day...
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
If you're talking about interstate speeds in major cities during rush hour. Frankly, the interstate highway system within cities is a good example of the inefficencies of government action. Any European will tell you that one reason the U.S. has not developed good mass transit is because our government has chosen to subsidize cars, not busses and subways (except in a few major metropolitan areas). Every free interstate road is a subsidy to car owners, which makes it cheaper for them to commute to work by car rather than by bus or train. It also encourages urban sprawl rather than consolidation of neighborhoods.
The free interstate system has also helped make 18-wheelers more profitable to distribute goods across country than trains or boats. Do you really think that's a good thing?
I'm not saying I'm against the interstate system or that every road should be a toll road. I'm just pointing out that the interstate highway system may not be the best poster boy in favor of government intervention in the marketplace.
It seems the US business are not investing in their mother country. Who cares if people in outer suburbs and rural areas have high speed access. They care more about hiring people in other countries because they are a few cents cheaper. This is why we are behind. Americans are cheapos when it comes to investing and giving back to the community.
With no price markup over the cost, there's no profit, and hence no reason to be in business.
United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales, N. Ireland): 94,248 square miles
South Korea: 38,320 Square Miles (about the size of Indiana)
Sweden: 173,732 square miles
USA: 3,537,438 square miles, 79.6 persons per square mile (in the year 2000)
China: 3.7 million square miles
China's Tiger Beach, the largest aviary in the world: 6,950 square miles
Northern Ireland: 5,467 square miles
For the low low price of:
Price:
$69.95 if you have cable television (standard service or higher)
$84.95 alone
That's utterly insane! I'm happy with my measly 3 Mbps thank you.
^^vv<><>BA
"Free markets supply and demand" may run the system, but in Chaska $17/mo mesh wireless is offered through the city (read government) and not a free market enterprise.
There's a whole slew of issues, not the least of which is population density. It is wonderful that those TINY little nations have ass-bleeding net access. And I'm not harshing them in any way, I'm just saying we have hela more land area. If you take the total population and divide that by square kilometres, it works out like this:
United States at 32/km
South Korea at 491/km
Belgium at 338/km
America is better off trying to wire everyone with digital satellite connections, than laying fibre or coax. Fibre works in the large cities, just like it works in those smaller nations.
Yea, I bet it's cheaper then it used to be. I was in NYC in the later part of 2001, so this is likely. But I doubt it's $29.90, that's very cheap.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
If the border were 1000km further south Canada's declaring war! Get 'em boys!
It's scary being a Flash and Flex developer on Slashdot. You guys are unnaturally rabid.
Bell sympatico which is the largest DSL provider in Canada put on 5G/month caps and then lost almost a third of it's customers to the cable companies who didn't have it. Then they took off the limits. Some of the smaller providers meter, but they can't compete with a better known better product. So they are getting rid of it too.
According to the state of California, the majority of Americans live within 50 miles of the coasts. The U.S. Dept. of State echoes this, although with less detail. In fact, you'll find that most of the world follows similar patterns. There are desirable regions and undesirable regions, and the majority of the population ends up crowding into the desirable regions, resulting in significant clustering of population. It's actually rare to find a country that doesn't look like that. The U.S. is no exception.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Furthermore, your argument falls apart when you consider that small towns in Canada, such as Fort McMurray in Alberta (and many towns even smaller than that) have had broadband for years now (since 1997, in Fort McMurray's case) while many major cities in the U.S. still don't have half-decent broadband penetration.
Some of that though is because of oil companies and other large natural resource dependant corporations that have offices or 'outposts' in the more rural areas where they do business. They slug fiber across the country and then resell to the little towns that pop up around the mines and what not - look at Elliot Lake in Northern Ontario for example.
Kerry tried to make it one. But America acted like it didn't care. So the plan was not mentioned again (this talk of 30 year old wars definitely helps push away current issues). If nerds would make this a campaign issue, then we might get our better broadband. Say the military needs it: thats how we got our interstate highway system!
Open Source Sushi
There is a significant population mass on the east and west coast, which, when connected via a major trunk, say through Chicago or KC, would allow for much higher speed access in those areas.
There are several other problems. One is the current government deregulation, which has pretty much forced out all local competition except for cable providers and telcos. While deregulation is good in some respects, it's awful in others, because there weren't enough competitors to begin with, they've consolidated what is left, and there is currently a monopoly between a few major providers, with cable beginning to win out due to their generally better speeds. With no providers offering faster speeds at lower prices, the cable companies can sit on their 3Mb/s speeds while telcos try to keep up with their lame DSL speeds. In my area, the ONLY high speed internet provider offering higher than 1Mb speeds at relatively low prices is Time Warner. They are thus a monopoly, and there is no need for them to improve their service because there isn't anyone else.
If the telcos caught up, or other providers, this might change. But as there are no other providers due to consolidation, there is only the telcos. And thus far they aren't proving very competitive.
The other problem, which no one has pointed out, is the media consolidation and piracy issue. Time Warner not only provides broadband access, but produces content which would much more easily be pirated if they jacked their speeds up to 100Mb/s. Face it, they are the RIAA and the MPAA combined. Why would they want to allow a pipe where people could quickly download music and movies?
Not to mention, streaming TV or radio stations could broadcast which could challenge the production capabilities of the media giants. Get a domain like therealnews.tv and start streaming your own broadcast news show, or stream movies, who knows, it might start to impinge on their TV ratings. And as their business model is in the dark ages, they have to keep broadband in the dark ages. It's more political than you think.
The pipe could become available. There's all this dark fibre apparently all over the place which sits unused.
Break up the vertical integration, and I bet you'd see a real shift.
Just my two cents.
When my grandmother wants to download movies of her grandkids (and a few of them are actually still young enough for that to make sense, alas I'm not one of them), it would be nice for that to be practical. But to do that, my aunt and uncle would need colossal upstream bandwidth. As it is, they end up paying for somebody else's service and upload it once to some server like ".Mac" or whatever. Thus, instead of efficiently distributing the load across the network, a few major servers get hammered and the rest of the infrastructure is largely wasted.
As it stands, most tasks that you'd do over broadband fall into one of two categories: those that are so small that they don't use a significant amount of bandwidth and those that are so large that they aren't practical (at least at current broadband performance).
When it starts to become practical to do high-bandwidth tasks over broadband, you'll see greater and greater amounts of use proportional to the amount of bandwidth available. As it continues to grow beyond that magic transition point, the percentage of use will diminish until bandwidth begins to approach the next transition point for an even larger potential use of bandwidth, and so on.
Just my $0.02.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I think the hug the border comment is kind of a joke. You do have humor up there, right?
Anyone with half a brain knows that you all live near the border because most of your country is a cold frozen wasteland. Fuck, I think half of the US is a cold frozen wasteland.
Yeah except that I don't want to pay the taxes that you poor bastards in Sweden in Canada are paying to accomplish your glorious high speed broadband.
I know some of you people have facilities with T3. But most of us that work with small and medium businesses have fractional T1's or maybe T1 equivalents. ,far distant future I would have to worry about monitoring traffic on a T3 equivalent, but hell your talking twice that volume. I don't think my current firewalls could keep up with that kind of traffic capability.
I thought maybe one day in the far
What do these people in Canada, Japan, and Korea use for firewalls and gateway monitors?
That's what I would like to know.
As for (1) and (2), these are things that can't really be changed; which is OK, because they aren't nearly as large an impediment to progress as (3).
If you own a business of any size, and you provide any service to the public, your pricing and ROI calculations must include the cost of inevitable legislation. And those costs are just for defending against largely frivolous claims. If, gods forbid, you are actually liable for anything -- even through an honest mistake -- there's a good chance your business won't make it out of litigation alive.
So, everyone waits until someone enters the market (usually either small businesses or huge businesses taking a rare risk) and survives for a while. Then, everyone else will jump in the pool, but have to be careful not to compete too well lest they get sued (even illegitimate lawsuits cost money to defend).
Until we make the barrier of entry much lower by fixing the civil law system, the US will continue to lag behind on anything even mildly "risky".
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
Why do Canadians seem to have such an attitude about heavens forbid anyone think we might like the US.
Frankly I thought the reason people in Canada hugged the border was because the rest of Canada was frozen. Also you comments about the width of Canada being so long well it is no wider the US.
Frankly I love Canada. I went to Victoria for my honeymoon. The people where great and it was a great place. I even found a great computer book store. Yes my wife is a techie as well so it was alright.
Canada is a great country and most of the people I know from there are very nice. Get over it not all the people in the US want to cut you down at every chance. Most people in the US tend to not think much about Canada at all which is a shame. Canada is a good friend to the US. I am afraid that we then to take Canada for granted.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Would *South Korea* exist period?
We have boadband for years and years!.. I get it for $35 CND per month wich is about $14 american dollars.. lol
I wrote:
And there is a reason for that: we Americans have been subjected to decades of well-funded media propaganda, which has caused the vast majority of AMericans to suffer from this peculiar disease
You wrote:
This argument is generally only used when one has a fringe belief, and refuses to accept that they are in the minority.
I know full well that I am in the minority with respect to believing that wealthy entities fund media propaganda efforts. This fact does not deter me from stating my beliefs.
When I read of such theories in the early 90s, I dismissed them as paranoia. But they are not. I know that now. The Iraq war taught me that, beyond a doubt.
And there are well respected academicians who have written voluminously on the subject of media propaganda in America funded by corporations and rich people. Most people would disagree with these academicians. I happen to agree with them. Maybe you disagree with them and with me.
Either you are wrong or I am wrong. Why not conduct an overview of the evidence? Do me a favor: type into google some words such as "chomsky" and "propaganda" and "media."
I am in the minority with respect to other Americans and Brits in many other areas: I am in the minority with respect to education, to the number of books I have read, and the standardized test scores I have made, and my religious beliefs or lack of them. The fact that I am in the minority does not make me wrong.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
You should check out the UK.
There is plenty of market for fast connections, but there are mainly between 512Kbit and 3Mbit connections available (the faster ones being rarer) and whats more this shitty slow connection costs more than one of 4 or 5 times the speed over in America.
Stop whining, bitches.
... then the UK should shift over to private healthcare like America?
m e= 7646
/.?)
You sure seem to have an opinion on this subject. It seems you think the American system is much better than the NHS in England. I wonder how your fellow Brits feel about that? Here we go, an article about how Brits feel about their NHS compared to the AMerican system, which as we know is the very best in the world!
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;
http://www.iofc.net/gowealthy/story.asp?storyna
71% Of UK Taxpayers Would Pay More For Improved NHS
17 March 2002
71% Would Pay More Tax For Better NHS Ananova Sunday March 17, 2002 4:02 AM Nearly three-quarters of the public would be prepared to pay more taxes to get better health care, a survey has revealed. People would prefer to see a new "ring-fenced" additional income tax for the NHS instead of US-style private health insurance, the poll showed. The results come amid speculation that Chancellor Gordon Brown's Budget next month will include fundamental changes to the way the service is funded. The ICM poll to be published in the News of the World showed 55% believe the NHS is in bad condition and only 30% think it is in good condition. Almost a third of people think it has got worse under Labour, over half believe it has stayed the same while only 14% say it has got better. In all, 84% agree that more money needs to be spent on health and 93% think reform must be linked to investment.
Opinion differs on how the money should be raised, with 53% saying taxation and national insurance is a good way and only 13% saying it is bad.
Just 18% of the 1,000 people questioned believe the American healthcare system of private health insurance is good, and 53% say it is poor.
But there is broad agreement that the NHS services should continue to be readily available to all. A total of 94% believe it must be free when needed. In addition, 71% say it is bad to charge for access to a GP or hospital bed and only 9% say it is a good idea.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
Well, another propagandist shown the door! I wonder if he was a paid lobbyist of the healthcare/pharma industry (they pay PR firms millions each year to influence public opinion. Why not here on
eat shiat and bark at the moon
What I find interesting about those frontloaders is one a friend has. I think it's a Neptune or something from Maytag.
It is very quiet, I mean verry quiet. If you push on and grab to tilt the "basket", it tips and bounces in a cushy silent manner.
Being an ex-sailor (but not a submariner (suhb-mare-in-ur, but some say it like "sub-muh-reenur") and being interested in subs since I was maybe 8 or 9, and knowing a little about the engine room "rafts" the entire plant sits on in some of the stealthier boats, I began wondering if this wasther is really based on declassified (or partially classified) submarine stealth technology. After all, though it is reported you could drop a hammer or fire a pistol inside an SSN-688/later class and not be detected even within some 5 or 15 nautical miles, I doubt washers would be run regularly like the old-style crap most people continue to buy. Most machines agitators/baskets spin like hell, churn and plunge to and fro, and have a distinctive metallic POP or brake snap sound when they change cycles or go from wash to rinse, etc.
I then wondered, "Well, hell, if this washer is based on tax-paid military technology, and if the military PAID someone to design it, I wonder who really owns this technology."
But, that was just one other piece of interesting technology/mechanics...
david syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
It is foolish to stop with such a shallow analysis of effects. Increased broadband to residences opens many business opportunities-new fields of on demand purchases of media or increases in the efficiency of current businesses. Where do you believe a corporation will build a branch office, where it can make an amount of money or where it can make more than that amount of money? Advantage in economics encourages construction in the nation providing that advantage by business-any advantage. What is the government interested in? What have a great number of industrial nation-states done to gain this advantage, and what has the US not done? Do you understand now?
DARPA.
Defense. Advanced. Research. Projects. Agency.
^---- DEFENSE. Get it?!
Thus the DMCA backed by the sclerotic RIAA and MPAA begin stifling innovation in the U.S.
The U.S. will continue to trail as long as copyright is wielded as weapon to maintain perpetual status quo.
...although it would never be the best.
1. Obtain connection into large pipe via inter-connect agreement
2. Connect via router(s) to ethernet media
3. String ethernet media throughout town, basically crating on giant lan. Line length can be delt with somewhat by having a hub/switch at each maximum extention.
It will never be fast for the long haul initial connections but once you are connected it should work out well..
disclaimer...I'm not serious...this would never actually work in any practical way.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
I think one of the problems is that the larger metropolises subsidize the cost of bring broadband to the rural areas. That takes away money that could/would be used to upgrade the population dense areas.
Underloved Movies and Pub Quiz: donotquestionme.org
It just so happens that talkshow host Clark Howard hit on this topic today (maybe he peruses /.). We pretty much agree that the problem is the government supported monopolies of telecom companies (phone, cable), and that the solution is good ol free-market competition. But, since the FCC is pretty much propping up telecom monopolies with a myriad of crushing regulations, competition is almost impossible.
Then comes the geurilla solution which has been covered here on slashdot and was talked about by Howard - free municipal wireless mesh networks. The city of Philadelphia estimates complete coverage of Philadelphia with mesh networks will only cost $10 million USD. Now since its government, you can double that figure, but it'll still be far less than what a telecom would expend on traditional buried cable methods.
Just another example of how open source is a tremendous economic foundation.
Not everyone in Sweden has 100Mbit/s connections.
I only have 8 Mbit/s down and 1 Mbit/s up.
Two static IP:s though, that's nice =)
I really have another userid as well
Even though it seems like the US is making some meaningful headway to catching up in terms of homes with broadband, the problem is that almost no-one in the US has REAL broadband - as in broadband without horribe caps on upload speed.
I have a Comcast cable modem and for uploading I'd be almost as well off with a modem. DSL cannot even reach me, and I live near the heart of Denver.
The problem is that the real usefulness of a network is in interconnectedness - Americans are being set up with a system wher ethey can hear, but not speak. So the other countries (pretty much most of them) that provide not just 10MBs down but also UP, are going to have a far greater advantage than it would seem even from the higher percentage of adoption!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
These guys seriouly think the USA is a "broadband backwater"?
I live 50 miles of cornfields away from the nearest medium size town... and I've got all the broadband I can handle.
What's wrong with you city slickers? Too dumb to make the phone call it takes to buy a connection?
"A Buck" is all they go into business for. A business cannot be trusted to do anything except make a buck. We have been trusting them to take care of us and make us happy and provide us with things. They're not supposed to do that. We are. We're also responsible for making sure they provide use with what we want, and keeping them from destroying our lives in the process of doing business. How do we do this? REGULATION!
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
...the original settlers of Canada relied heavily upon farming (and fishing) for their food.
Now all food is grown at the supermarket, of course.
Yeah, I can't wait to move to Chaska in a couple of months to take advantage of the $17 wireless. I saw an article that Philladelphia is planning on installing a wireless system to cover the entire city, and they may provide it for free. Now that is a step in the right direction.
I thought there was supposed to be a huge stash near the N pole?
Anyway, It's been bound to run out for a long time now. As prices go up, people and nations will adjust. New sources of energy will have to used, life goes on.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
I would be exteremly surprised if anyone actually still has a party line phone, or has even had one for a long time. Got any references? If anyone actually did, it would be limited to extremities of the Yukon, Northwest and Nunavut territories.
I'm just outside London, Ontario and I know there are people in this area who had party lines until about 5 years ago. This was partly by choice because having a party line was cheaper. If they'd really wanted, they could have had their own line.
Demand is higher... and why might this be?
It's the same reason that some great programmers come out of the cold north. When it's snowing for most of the year what else are you going to do?
Sure, two countries are ahead of the pack, Sweden and South Korea, but how many others? Norway for instance is still in the gutter with ISDN and losy ADSL speeds unless you pay bussiness prices.
;-)
But what I read out of this is:
Hey, "everybody" else have much better broadband access than WE do!
It's not "everybody" else. Just a few countries that have subsidized this via taxes. I just can't understand a mindset where you have to be First and Best in Everything, or else your ego is crushed. But maybe you like it that way.. *shrug* It seems like a lot of agony and stress to me..
Btw, I have Bredbandsbolaget in Norway. It helps to check a little before moving
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Typically road wear is estimated as proportional to mass^4. So that 40 ton semi truck is causing about 500K times the wear as your 3000 pound car. Automobile traffic (even SUV traffic) has an essentially negligible effect on highway wear.
Just for fun take a look at the pavement around bus stops in your town (if you have buses) and notice the amount of wear.
-- Too lazy to get a lower UID.
Also you comments about the width of Canada being so long well it is no wider the US.
Ummm, only if you include Alaska and Hawaii, me thinks. The US uses 4 time zones: Pacific, Mountain, Central, and Eastern. Canada has 1 and a half more: Altantic and Newfoundland. They do have maps with more on it than the U.S... Look at one some time, the Atlantic provinces hang off the east side of the continent by quite a long distance.
Yup, optonline is 10mbit.
I got it in 1997-1998 or so and it was 10/10 with mutliple IPs for $24.95 a month. Then they forced everyone to move to DOCSIS by turning off support for the other modems and put everyone on 1 up 10 down with 1 IP for $34.95 a month. Then in 2002 or so they decided anyone who "abuses the network" i.e. uploads for more than a hundred megs at a time or so gets capped to 150kbps up and 10m down, permanently. Oh and now it's $49.95 a month I think, or is it moving to $59.95? If not it probably will soon.
On the DSL side, you have Verizon, which is a total nightmare from what I hear. 90k up 640k down PPPOE connections that drop you and force you to redial (REDIAL!?!?) every few hours. My ex had it for awhile, then dropped it for Roadrunner, which is almost reasonable. RCN was talking about these 850mbit non-oversubscribed pipes flowing through the city, but where'd they go?
The problem in the US is twofold. One, the telcos have semi-monopolies and are terrified that people will start running servers on "consumer grade" broadband connections and not want to pay them $600/month for a T-1 slower than most DSL these days. Optonline for example gives you no difference between their base connection and their "business class" OOL. You still have port 80 and 8080 blocked, you're still not legally allowed to run any kind of server, etc. If you call them and bitch they send you over to Lightpath which wants to charge you 4-5 digits a month for some fiber connection.
The second half of the problem is the people are ignorant. Nobody wants a 100M line to watch HDTV because they don't know more than "HDTV GOOD!" and so they go out to the mall and buy a HDTV. Wait, did I say an HDTV? I mean an HDTV READY TV. You know, in case we ever actually GET HDTV. Which is unlikely because people go "Look I've got an HDTV LOOK HOW GREAT IT IS!" while watching a standard DVD or sattelite feed and not knowing there's supposed to be better quality than that. The prosumer and videophile market who know what they're buying get to pay $100+/month to cable and sattelite for a few HDTV channels that actually work sometimes.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
Ya'll can move to Provo Utah where provo city has started its all fiber MAN. Inter comunity the connection is as fast as you can drink from the firehose. A 5Mbs symetric www connection runs about us$40. We might not have beer here but we do have one Helluva Broadband network. The rest of Utah will be getting fiber as well as part of the Utopia project!!
I'm pretty lucky, living in Sweden with my 100 Mbps connection :)
I thought there was supposed to be a huge stash near the N pole?
There actually is a lot more oil in the world than the grandparent let on, however the problem is it's not CHEAP oil. One of the reasons that mid east oil is so attractive is that it is very easy to get from the ground, thus can be sold cheaply. It's a lot harder, and thus a lot more expensive to get oil from the North Pole. Oil has yet to reach a price where drilling would be a profitable venture. Oil has to go up a lot more before someone begins to try to get a lot of that oil, and by that time most of the world would have hopefully moved on to better sources.
Monstar L
Where's the profit in it? Seriously, that's why the US is behind. The public isn't willing to pay for faster access. Oh they say they want faster access, but their actions demonstrate they really want inexpensive crappy service.
Thanks to a decade's worth a AOL CDs, the US public has it firmly planted in its mind that internet access is worth $24.99, and no more! I'm paying $50 for a high quality connection and my SBC-using friends think I'm nuts. I'm thinking of switching to another company without restrictions on servers, and they shake their heads in amazement.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I somewhere read and wholeheartedly ascribe to this:
"It is not the duty of a consumer to keep a business alive; it is the duty of the consumer to consumer ONLY what they need."
If more people believed in this, we'd have less redundancy, tho at the risk of predatory pricing. However, those who stick to this principle will drive out the predators and drive out the inferior-quality knockoff shit-makers whose knockoffs don't "deserve" to be on a shelf. Those with good knockoffs of reasonable quality and durability would served to make it possible for predators to be kept in check.
I also read/heard, and wholly ascribe to this:
"Businessess don't have a RIGHT or a GUARANTEE to PROFIT; they have an OPPORTUNITY to TRY to make a profit."
Once people understand that, they might ideally make reasonable, worthwhile, upgradable but durable products for a GOOD price, even if conventional "wisdom" claims good quality and good price to be virtually mutually exclusive.
Unfortuntely, my position is not in congruence with reality.
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
we need to "liberate" sweden from such govermnent which allows citizens access to a possible weapon of mass destruction terrorism tool
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
It is the PR firms and the media that are used to a frenzy of nationalism, which then creates a bogus consent for spending our tax dollars on schemes to expand market share for corporations, and to replace progressive taxes with regressive taxes.
Call it what you want: I call it propaganda.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
oh, yeah.. here
That would be true if you are using any half duplex equipment (switch, firewall etc). I'm using this ISP and I know for a fact that the switch in the basement is a full duplex 10/100, and ever since I switched to a firewall with full duplex ethernet ports, I can run full speed in both directions. Atleast according to DC++.
...and there's two completyely different ways to measure cheap/expensive. One way, the way most folks think of it, is in terms of money. It costs such and such to explore, find,drill the wells, build the infrastructure, pump it via pipeline to a terminal, then to a refinery, then on to the end consumers. The other way-and the most important way-to consider what a barrel of oil costs is to measure it against itself using pure energy terms. Say back in the 30s and 40's, it took a barrel of energy to get back 20 barrels. Now it might be one for three or 4. It's not only more expensive with dollars, but with the energy needed.
A graph would show how this works, the energy in to get energy out is a rapid drop off once you have reached peak production. Once it hits stasis, an eqwual balance, you could have a trillion barrels sitting underground and it wouldn't do you any good at all, you wouldn't get any energy beyond what it would take to get it, a catch 22, and one that the planet is rapidly approaching.
along with fresh water crises that are getting closer - here's a link to just one story, the oil situation is the one that will determine current humans survival this century. From everything I have read and the best analysis out there I can find, there's only one conclusion--these are "the good old days" of decent employment, cheap consumer goods, being able to drive hither and yon, affordable air transport, and so on..
The future is going to be a series of wars over the remaining exploitable natural resources.
In other words, barring some revolutionary technology that will be easily adaptable all over the planet, something that can actually replace oil for both transportation and for also manufacturing, we gonna be *screwed*. Manufacturing in particular is highly dependent on oil now. Stuff is still cheap because we still can get oil, later on....governments are gonna make a decision, keep themselves in war materiel, or let their populations have cheap trinkets. I'll let the odds makers make the call on that one, but it seems a no brainer.
I'm a proponent of alternative energy. I think folks should be jumping for joy and snapping up what they can still purchase now at these cheap prices. I'm also a realist, currently we have no alternatives for oil, and it's running out. And fast. There's a slashdot story up now about china going big time into the pebble bed reactors. It's because they know the oil is running out and can do the math. Even then it won't be enough, IMO. It took a buhzillion years to get all the oil, and in roughly one century we have used up most of it. That's the real bottom line.
You read far too much into my message. It wasn't intended to be anti-American, only anti the idea that most Canadians live with a few hundred kilometres of the border because they feel some compelling need to be close to the US. This is completely untrue. Indeed, it's worth noting that these places were also amongst the most heavily settled regions even long before there was a border.
And if you look at a globe, you'll see that Canada is indeed wider than the US. But regardless, the more important point is that the land surface area if the bottom 5 degrees of Canada is still larger than most countries in the world. It's easy to trivialize the size by saying "most people live within 5 degrees of the border", but the reality is this is still a huge surface area.
Yaz.
Here in Alberta Canada the government has actually put massive funding towards ensuring that every town, city, village, community in the province has access to high speed internet (the Alberta Supernet). The population of this provice is maybe 3.5 million people and covers an incredible area. This project is fairly close to completion and offers a massive advantage to its citizens already regardless if they are cable subscribers or not. In Saskatchewan Canada, most communities are hooked up to a provincially owned DSL line and this province doesn't even have a million citizens (and roughly half of those don't pay any taxes either). This was primarily done to help facilitate the lack of teachers available to instruct classes in remote communities, but it't another fine example of high speed internet being offered to various communities regardless if they are 100, 1000 or 100,000+ people living there. An intersting side note is that companies up here in Canada are also already toying with the idea of shooting Digital TV and VoIP through these lines. Many of them already have broadcast liscenses to do this. So the proof is there that it can be done if government gets off its butt and makes it a priority.
"Canada is a big place. Quite a bit bigger than the US."
Ummm, no. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but simple geography disproves your statement.
The listed total size for Canda is 9,981,670 sq kilomters.
The listed total size for the United States (50 states + District of Columbia) is 9,631,418 sq. kilometers.
Now before you get your knickers in a twist and say "I told you so" you need to understand that those figures include WATER.
If you remove WATER from the figures, since fish really don't have any use for broadband, it turns out that that the United State is LARGER.
Here are the numbers:
Canada Land Only size = 9,093,507 sq. kilomters
US Land land only size = 9,161,923 sq. kilometers.
Ooops. In landmass the US is LARGER then Canada, and even giving you the watersize is it STILL not "quite a bit" bigger.
Not a flame, but it irritates me when people don't check their facts before spouting off. I hope you have a pleasant day.
Even US conservative types aren't happy with the level of market influence in the US. Health insurance isn't insurance, it's really a tax-free cash benefit, started to get around wage controls decades ago. Any third party payer system is not going to be economially (or fiscally, just look at that billing overhead) as optimal as a first party system. Insurance should be exactly that, insurance with deductables and low percentage copays. The problem is even the US has a highly distorted market w.r.t. healthcare.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
nt
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
would have a complete fit if large numbers of people in the US had 100 Mbit connections. Rest assured they will fight the idea with all the politicians they can buy.
If they had their way, everyone would still be on dialup, so it would take hours to download their planted, looped copy of some song off Kazaa. On my 5 Mbit connection, I just download as many copies as it takes to get a good one, and it does not take long.
The fact broadband exists at all in the US is reason enough for them to try their damnedest to cripple it.
I don't mind having only 1.5Mbps download speeds. Hell, I don't do much that needs more than that. However, I hate the guts of the bastards who castrated upstream speeds. I can pull down hundreds of megabytes of updates in minutes, but as a "consumer" I SURELY don't have ANY need to *upload* anything. No, why would I do that? I'm just another sheep using what the media wants to be a glorified TV system... NOT.
On the other hand, I do find it very interesting that I can connect on my private home LAN at 100 megabits per second. Now... It's $40 a month for 1.5 meg down, upload-castrated ADSL. Now, think about it: You can (if you're loaded) buy a 45meg sychronous T3 starting at $2000 a month source, and that's just the first thing Google returned. That's enough to give *60 people* uninterrupted service that gaurantees 750KBps if *everyone* is using the system at once, and 5.6MegaBYTEs per second if no one else is. Dividing the sizable monthly bill among 60 users results in about $35 a month for something that would most of the time give any USA broadband user penis envy.
As for setting up the network hardware, you could probably DIY for less than the first monthly payment. Get a screaming-fast Linux box to act as gateway to about 16 others, which in turn serve the end users (I think the link is for a T3 with 16 static IPs and 20 E-Mail boxes). So you get 16 web pages, 20 e-mail boxes, and the works. Heck... for another $5 a month, buy a web domain and set up your own e-mail server!
Ah, one can dream... Then again, (under NO duress from ISPs or big media companies), the government would probably tag you as an ISP and accordingly asshole rape you with red tape.
And in Australia, where our fastest residential access is 1.5 mbps....
-Meeper
It's not that simple.
As oil shifts from a buyer's market to a seller's market, prices won't just creep up, they will skyrocket.
There AREN'T any "new sources of energy" with anywhere close to the Energy Profit, abundancy, or ease of transport as oil. Hydrogen is a net energy loser. Biofuel barely breaks even. Solar is still too expensive. Wind is promising but you can't fertilize crops or drive your car with it.
The fact is, we need ***cheap*** oil to power a transition to alternative energy. As oil becomes way more expensive, economic growth will catastrophically reverse. Oil is central to everything in modern civilization, and there is no magic bullet solution waiting in the wings once oil shifts from an abundant to a scarce resource.
Do you have any idea how oil-dependant modern agriculture is, thanks to the "Green Revolution"? Do you realize that most of the world's 6 billion people could not be fed without cheap oil being used for fertilizers, pesticides, farm equipment, transportation, etc?
Yes, of course we will adjust. But that adjustment is quite likely to be mass starvation and the collapse of industrial civilization as we know it. I hope I'm wrong... but I've been researching this stuff for months and there's very little silver lining on this particular cloud.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
I don't think any of the peak oil crowd are really claiming that we are going to run out of oil anytime soon. They are saying that once demand outstrips supply price will rise very rapidly. It's just basic economics. There will still be plenty of oil for those willing to pay for it (fight to control it). It will just become out of reach for many who now take it for granted.
Be glad for what you have.
:)
I'm in Quito, Ecuador and pay a bit over $80/month for 128k down/64k up. Fortunately there's competition, with ADSL (though it's currently more expensive) and some type of wireless deal. The speed has already gone up twice in the last year or so -- when my roommate first signed up it was 64k/32k for the same price.
Apparently there is fiber from the States to somewhere in Colombia. It is transferred by microwave from there to northern Ecuador, and by more fiber to Quito. Anyone have any predictions as to how rapidly such a system can/will be expanded? I'm looking forward to the day of affordable >1Mb broadband to the home.
Now, I'm not going to argue that Comcast service doesn't suck liquid monkey ass, because, well, it does.
:)
I hate big bad corporations as much as the next guy, but I've had comcast cable internet for around 3 years now and am very satisfied with the service. This is in Oregon, maybe in different areas of the country they're a lot worse. I've never had a "real" outage, eg where I had to call tech support to get things going again. Simply power cycling the cable modem and/or computer has always solved my problems. And 3 Mbps is plenty fast for me, and I download a lot of stuff.
My only complaint is how much they've jacked up the price since they bought it from AT&T. But all thigns considered, 55 dollars a month isnt too expensive for what I get. Although $26/month for 25Mbps in Japan certainly makes me envious.
Joseph?
You, Sir, are an idiot. The reason canucks are amassed at the southern border is because there is a long term plot to invade the United States. Everyone knows that Canadians want to come take all our women because they shave their armpits and don't stink like bacon and beer.
The fact is, we need ***cheap*** oil to power a transition to alternative energy.
If the oil's cheap, efforts to transition away from it will be marginalized. The 2nd biggest field in the world went from control by a west-hating madman to direct control by the US yet prices still shoot up. And those SUVs keep selling.
What is it, 95% of the Canadian population is squeezed to within 25 miles of the Continental USA. That's a nice narrow high-density grouping. Perfect for deploying broadband.
"You might as well get your son a ticket to hell as give him a five string banjo." -unknown minister
What is really funny, is these incumbents provide the same line of BS no matter where in the world they are whilst doing every thing they can to prevent Governments from promoting FTTH in order to preserve the value and profits in their copper. What is really sad, is their profits are now coming at the expence of the technological future of those countries. Corporate greed mixed with a complete lack of morals (on the part of the directors and majority shareholders, traitors to their own countries futures) ain't it glorious.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Many posts in this thread note that sucky US broadband is due to monopoly by a few megacorps with no profit motive to upgrade wired infrastructure. I agree. But, amazingly, nobody has mentioned why those corporations don't really matter...
w ireless.com/
News Flash: you can get 10Mbps+ over 1-30 mile links using cheap ($200 per node) 802.11 gear and high-gain directional antennas. Instead of complaining, go contact your friends, climb a roof, and set up your own private wireless network. Learn RIP/OSPF, IPSec, etc. You will not be harassed by the RIAA/MPAA over a wireless network, there is no SMTP spam or worms (unless your friends are asshats), the price per byte is essentially zero, and the performance beats everything except local ethernet (though multihop latency may be a bit high for gaming).
Anyway, quit bitching about DSL and go heat up the airwaves (short of violating FCC rules). WiFi can be the solution to, and the end of, America's backwards telco industry.
References
http://www.seattlewireless.net/
http://www.pac
Wanna build out WiFi in the Los Angeles/SFV area? E-mail me: brane at sdf dot lonestar dot org
I would think a really good reason why we lag behind is because of the huge area we would have to cover to lay fat pipes to everyone in the U.S. South Korea and the other countries mentioned are much smaller in area than the U.S.
"Trying is only the first step towards failure." - Homer
I don't know how Iowa compares with other states, but rural Iowa is definately not left behind.
When the telephone was a new technolgy they ignored Iowa which caused many small phone companies to be created in Iowa.
A few years ago Iowa also had the foresight to invest in fiber optic cable, to be used by schools and state institutions. I think almost all Iowa schools now have access to broadband, if not all.
Now the percentages of rural and urban areas that have access to broadband connections are very close, and I think it is upwards of 60%.
For more information you should watch
Market to Market ( created here in Iowa ).
Use the search on the left for "broadband".
Here is a preview
"Manning already had municipal gas and power services which generated cash flow for community improvements. After getting overwhelming community support through a local ballot referendum, the Light and Gas utility boards in Manning worked with the area Rural Electrical Cooperative to gather up the necessary $3.2 million to create a telephone company. Manning now provides residents and businesses with-state-of-the-art phone, cable television and high-speed Internet connections by purchasing telecommunications services through a local Midwest-based telecommunications company. As a result, E-C-I relocated the technical support center along with other customer services to Manning, a move that has cut overhead for the company and created jobs with good wages for Manning residents."
So I say thank you to short sided corporations, for not having the time for rural america.
"Bombarded with tales of South Koreans and Swedes watching high-definition soap-operas via 100Mbps connections"
It would be nice if it was more then just tales..
Sure about 2% of the population probably have the ability to get 100Mbit but capped either in total trafic or limited trafic from/to other countries. Bredbandsbolaget got 100Mbit for ~$80/month capped for 300GB, but thus that does need a such connection anyway is warez sites and then 300GB is to little =) Most does better with 10Mbit for ~$45/month. They will begin with set top-boxes for broadband-TV (SDTV) this year.
But those connections can only a pretty small number of people that live in appartment buildings get anyway. The general can get pretty high speed ADSL or ADSL2+ though.
I have 8/0.8Mbit ADSL for ~$60/month wich is fine and that is the highest i can get in this small town 110km (by train) from the capital city and there are no HDTV in Sweden except for maybe 2 testchannels over the old analog groundbased tv-transmissions.
I think out main problem is a major lack of Govt invovlement. Something liek broad band is somethign that should almost be like the US postal service and none cable TV. It is something that has become extremely important for communications and buissness. Many buisnesses and colleges consider e-mail to be just as necessery to be checked every day as it is to check your mailbox at your house. The US Govt should either make start makeing a fiber network of their own through out the US or begin a mass public funding effort aswell as providing subsidies. Also they shoudl relax some censorship. I think the idea is also great to make fully wireless cities like Philidelphia is thinking of and cleveland has done quite a good job at so far with their cleveland one network.
It is quite amusing to see the expressions on both sides when American IT professionals come over here to talk about setting up systems over WANs. The costs for what most Americans consider minimum requirments are astronomical.
Our friends Telstra here in Australia have successfully screwed over any chance of us being near the top of 'Broadband Per Person' lists in the next 5 years. With such marvels as introducing the 3gb cap, and only installing ADSL in exchanges where they can make the most money quickly, we've been successfully fucked over. Royally. Don't even get me started on the craptacular cable networks (Telstra and Optus each have one... Ask the government why). -neolithic-AU
Whoops, screwed the formatting.
;).
Sorry
-neolithic
Everyone here knows that all the money the government spends must derive from taxes. Until the government can take a job and earn its keep stocking shelves at Safeway [Attention! Joke!], it will continue to tax the public for its revenue. This is normal. This neither needs to be restated nor debated. So clearly the roads are not truly "free" whether they're funded by the government or by tolls.
The point of the ancestor posts on this topic (in my estimation) is to explore the difficult question: Should roads be publicly funded (paid for and owned, in theory, by each American) or should they be funded by those who use the roads. As a non-driver, I think I'd probably prefer the roads to be funded by those who use them, since that would probably save me a lot of money. However, I also understand the economies of scale of certain things, and I'd hate to have to pay $10 to go to the grocery store if I lived somewhere with no access to mass transit. Therefore, I'm not actually saying that we should suddenly make all roads turnpikes. Just that the funding of roads is something to consider as we run out of oil and wonder where to go from there.
When peak oil production has really passed, the prices will go up. Obviously the commodity market-makers know something that you and the doom and gloom crowd don't.
The same exact arguments and cases were made in 1978. Peak oil had hit and we'd run out around 2001 or so.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
---uhhh, the prices have gone up. This summer I finally used up the last of my long term gas storage I bought bulk in 99. I paid IIRC around 80 cents a gallon for it. That's more than a doubling in at the pump prices in 5 years. I'd call that a significant price increase. And current crude is still in the mid 40s/barrel. What was it last year again?
If you want to know, I use PRI-G for gas stabiliser, and -D for diesel. Good stuff. I keep a smaller stash now, just a barrel of it at a time, before where I lived there was a commercial bulk tank we had the tanker come and fill up. When I moved I filled my around 80 gallons in the dual tanks in my RV, then I siphoned it back out to use here with my small engines in my work. It still burned fine, albeit it was a scosh stale compared to brand new fresh.
As to "doom and gloom", I mean really, I provided links to some very credible places. There have been very large and well attended international conferences with leading economists and geologists and energy bigwigs. They are all concerned about it. If you follow links around you can find any number of sites that have detailed analysis of reported and proven reserves, and some good projections on demand. I don't know what you would call severely diminishing supplies coupled with near exponential growth demand, but I'd say it's a cause for concern, considering just how much the worlds total economy depends on oil. And google is your friend, merely searching on peak oil will keep you going for quite awhile.
It seems bandwidth is totally expensive over there, hardly a day goes by without some net denizen bitches about how expensive his bandwith is - and moans about "bandwith theft" - get another host damn it!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
But your forget Florida. Even though you have more time zones you are farther north so each zone is much smaller. Heck I could take a one meter patch of ice at the pole and claim it is bigger than Canada is since it spans more time zones.
It would be interesting sometime to do the math and see how wide the US is at North Carolina VS Canada is at the Altantic provances in meters.
Someone with a string and a globe could do a quick check. I bet it would be pretty close.
"Altantic and Newfoundland. They do have maps with more on it than the U.S... Look at one some time, the Atlantic provinces hang off the east side of the continent by quite a long distance."
I suggest that before getting snotty you learn a little about math. If you take a sphere and try and project it on a plane you will get large distortions in the area near the poles. Look at Greenland on a projection then look at it on a globe. It looks a lot biger on a map than it really is.
Yes Canada is bigger by degrees and timezones it may be bigger in meteres but not as much as you think. It is bigger in hectars as well. So Canada is a big, mostly empty, and freaking cold.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.