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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".'"
Rural communities don't get broadband because there's no profit in it. Suburbs don't get 100Mb connections because there's no profit in it. Maybe if we get rid of the profit we could get some comparable connection speeds. How? Community based fiber to the home. It's already worked in dozens of places, and has helped to keep declining communities from fading out of existence.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
I want some community owned fiber network to my house! :|
Sweeden: 173,732 square miles South Korea: 38,000 square miles USA: 3,537,441 square miles
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 currently have a 100 megabit connection hooked up to my home PC (I live in Japan). It's awesome for downloading from a server within the Japanese 'net infrastructure (the other day I downloaded an 8 megabyte file and it was finished before firefox had managed to open its download window). However once you start connecting to places a few more hops away (ie. outside the country) there generally tends to be a bottleneck somewhere (often at the server end if it's heavily loaded) so the benefit naturally diminishes.
Anyway, Americans count yourself lucky. In the UK (my former home) it's a pain in the butt to even get a 1 meg installed. If you think the US is lagging behind, the UK is still crawling out of the dark ages.
PS. Sorry for the 'coward' identity. I did register for a login about 3 days ago, but the email never came.
Canada being both geographically larger and far less densely populated then the US
But most of canada is a wasteland.
The US is just a lousy place to get broadband.
Perhaps. But you still must recognize that there is some truth to the idea of geographical differences playing a part in this mess.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
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...
[snip: phone and cable companies charging exorbitant setup and monthly fees] These companies don't want business.
Then take their business. Get a few T1s, some WiFi equipment, and some parabolic antennas. Then sell fixed wireless broadband to your neighborhood.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
"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.
Sweden's population density is far more uniform than the US's. The US has some extremely dense areas (major east coast cities) that probably have very high broadband adoption rates, and extremely empty areas (some states like Nevada have maybe 2 or 3 people per square mile, and it's only that high because a few large cities here and there drives up the average) where broadband is not economically feasible (or at least it won't be until large-scale wireless arrives).
I think the most useful piece of information in this article is that population per area is not a very useful metric when talking about networks.
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
So the average inhabitants per square km in the US is +-31, in sweden it's +-21, in Korea it's about What's your point? That denser populations are harder to serve? I would think it's exactly the opposite no? If I have 3 families living in my street, and I put a cable, the cable is a lot more expensive than if there would be 6 families living there no? Don't blame the size, blame the short-sightness and fear for doing large investments of your ISP's & phone companies.
So if you compare Sweden to California and Korea to Indiana, also compare them with the numbers of California plz...
For South-Korea I think the size is incorrect, since this would result in a stunning 494 inhabitants per square km...
Toll road are great!
Part of the reason we don't have safe transportation (as in electric busses, trains) stuff that doesn't cause lung failure - is that we pay the cost of using the road - whether we use ot or not.
Free at the point of use - is not free - its gawddammn expensive - because it is garenteed to be wasted.
If water was free in our homes - no one would even bother to turn off the tapp - "I like the sound the water makes - so I leave it on."
For most people, the cost of stopping to pay the toll is higher than the toll itself less the cost of the tolltaker.
- speedpasses solve that and should be made national.
I don't care if the risk is spread between a few rich people who speculate or a few rich people who pay taxes. In otherwords - private doesn't mean much - unless - private means the owner can advertise to drivers - that I abhorr.
AIK
No, but I know plenty of people who pump poisonous fumes out of their tailpipes because air is free. Obviously, I'm not suggesting that air not be free. I've seen Total Recall!
Besides, the grandparent post was obviously meant to be hyperbole, a "worst case" scenario meant to point out how things would be if we took our water as much for granted as we took our roads.
I wish that my inferiority complex were as good as yours.
-RenderHead
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"
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.
I think the point is that currently (the only time that matters in terms of technology) we are locked into older technology and Europe/Asia are serving their citizens with much higher speed connections than America.
Japan will have G4 cellphones with streaming high quality media soon, but by your logic when they finished their G3 network you would have been saying "Well, now they have a G3 network, but America will leave them behind soon, cause they're stuck with it." America is right now transitioning to a G2 network, which is just like our Internet service.
We are one step ahead of dial-up while the rest of the developed world is on fiber, and we're paying costs of double what they are all paying for less than half the service quality. The point is to always improve technology and that people will emerge who will be willing to pay for good connections at a reasonable price. Even the article says that Comcast only recently improved their connection speeds because DSL lines got cheaper. And what did Comcast do? They ran ads all day long on their TV networks hyping their "blazing fast download speeds" and "we just doubled the speed of our network". Companies like Comcast only respond to pressures that could take a huge percentage out of their user-base, and even when they do, it's only with a stop-gap solution.
My download speeds aren't any better, but they doubled my upload rate from a blazing fast 15kbp/s to 30kbp/s.
That would have been cool in 1994.
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
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.
I'm embarrassed by this, so I'm posting AC.
In my first appartment (back when I was a kid), I lived with 2 other guys and 3 girls. One of the girls crazy ex boyfriends tried to break into the place one day, and ripped the screen out of one of the windows before he was chased off. When we called the super to get the screen fixed, she told us she was docking our security deposit for the cost of the damages. Being a bunch of kids that didn't sit well with us (and we didn't know we weren't responsible for damage to the outside of the building) we decided to even the score by leaving the water running in the bathroom for a month - because the water was included in the rent. It would have been longer, but we all moved out after that.
Long story, but it goes to show you that people WILL use free resources irresponsibly
Actually, I'm on "standard" Bell DSL in Canada and I can tell you my speed is shit, shit, shit. I rarely get download speeds anything higher than 150 KB/s.
I don't know what state you are in but in my state, Colorado, we pay taxes for our interstates - they are far from free. And the reason that we havn't developed mass transit is becuase the country is just too fricken big! If there was profit to be made there a private company would have picked it up by now. Look at the US passenger rail system, Amtrak is 100% government run and operated, becuase there is no profit in it. There is no profit in it becuase it not effiecent. Germany is about the size of Oregon, we have dozens of states that large and larger.
Goods distrubution is another matter entirly. Trains are used in this role more than you might think, espiecally for heavy loads, coal for example. In this part of the country coal is mined in Wyoming and Montana then transported by train to power stations in Colorado, New Mexico, Oklahoma and maybe others. Each train is about 100 cars long and each car weighs about 100 tons. When I lived next to a rail line I saw 10 to 30 of these a day. There is no way that could be done with semi's. And there is a huge amount of money involed in that.
I do agree that the interstate highway system has increased urban sprawl, and that is a bad thing since it will make the inevitable transition to mass transit much more expensive. Not to mention the envirmental impact of suburbs. Thats one of the reason's I moved downtown.
...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.
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