Slashdot Mirror
Broadband Envy: Fixing American Broadband
Ant writes "Broadband Reports has a story on broadband services among countries including United States falling behind: 'Bombarded with tales of South Koreans and Swedes watching high-definition soap-operas via 100Mbps connections, the media has apparently developed a nasty case of broadband envy. This Reuters article suggests the US has "missed the high speed revolution", while last week Business Week dubbed America a "broadband backwater".'"
First off, we already know that "we have a much larger infrastructure". That argument is tired. We're still behind - even accounting for this significant hurdle. Other countries have made it a priority and have put measures in place that allow the process to bypass red tape and move forward.
We haven't, and we need to.
dmiessler.com -- grep understanding knowledge
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.
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.
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 in the hole of the broadband donut.
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
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.
The land mass per capita of Sweden is almost twice that of the US. Or, in other words, Sweden is almost half as densely populated as the US.
So the cost per person of cabling out Sweden is probably more than the same exercise in the US. Frankly, this blows your argument out of the water.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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.
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 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.
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.]
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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
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.