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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.
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.
[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.
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 (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.
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make install -not war
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
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.
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.
...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.