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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".'"
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.
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 think you have pretty clearly shown his point, easter1916. The US has a lot fewer people per acre than either of these two countries.
Having said that, though, shouldn't there be pockets of good internet service in big cities?
It would be worth it to me to move to a heavily populated area if I got 100MB/s internet access in return without paying $1000 a month. However, I have not heard of any heavily populated area in which any service provider offers such a thing, which makes me think that the US really doesn't have any excuse.
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...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...
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