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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".'"
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.
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
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...
If you really meant "miles and miles of wasteland" instead of "purple mountains majesty and amber waves of grain", take a trip across country sometime, and learn to appreciate the natural beauty. There's more out there than what you see on your screen. ;)
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!
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.
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)
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
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.
When he said "miles and miles of wasteland" I just assumed he was talking about New Jersey...
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.
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..
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.
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!
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?
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
[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 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.
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.
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.
For me, a particular memory comes to mind. I was in Vienna, talking to a girl from Bosnia, and she asked, "St. Louis is close to Washington D.C., right?"
I sat and thought for a second, "It depends on what you mean by close, I guess." I had to explain to her that, in most places in the United States, it takes more than a few hours to get out of the country. You could be in the US, ride on a train in a strait line for a full day, and never leave the country. We found a map, and I showed her where NYC and D.C. are, and informed her, that's a four hour trip by train. She just didn't believe me. I then tried to explain Alaska. Don't ask. Most Americans don't understand how big and open Alaska is.
My point? Just that you're right. The scale of open land between the US and European countries is generally so large that people living there don't even understand how large it is. A lot of people in the US, unless they've travelled some, don't understand how big a country it is. What works for a small country isn't guaranteed to work for a huge one.
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.
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.
RTFA:
A more just comparison would likely be Canada; but wait: they're not only offering faster speeds than their southern neighbors, but consumers pay less, and Canada is close to South Korea when it comes to broadband penetration.
You smug Canadians with your low crime, affordable healthcare, decent isp prices, good beer, hockey teams that aren't owned by shady AOL jerks, ...
Where do I sign up?
[This sig left intentionally blank.]
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.
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?
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.
Erm
If just ONCE the tax dollar lottery went my way, I'd be a pretty happy camper.
- Roach
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.
The article is comparing the US to Canada... *poof* goes your argument ;)
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.....
"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
Since French is an official language in Belgium, it's politically correct in the US to dislike all things Belgian. That and the fact that you neither joined the "coalition of the bullied" and insist on speaking your minds. As an Irishman, all I can say is "Three cheers for Belgium!"
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.
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?
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
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.
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
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.
"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.
The pine barrens in Southern New Jersey are beautiful.
shock the monkey
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'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
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.
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
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?
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.
...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.
You've just described the Chicago suburbs.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
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.
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..
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"
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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
ou could be in the US, ride on a train in a strait line for a full day, and never leave the country
Thats because your trains are so slow...
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
It's not about uses we know about, it's for uses that haven't been invented yet. The highway system was designed for troop transport and shipping, but one major benefit is all the economic growth from roadside motels and tourist traps and such (well, economic benefit if not aesthetic benefit) which weren't predicted.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Without the United States? I think not. Korea was an independent state for 1300 (!!) years before the United States agreed with the Soviet Union to split it up in two. Your point being?
...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
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.