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Report: Broadband In US Homes Nearly 20 Percent
jangobongo writes "A Commerce Department report, prepared in September, shows that the number of Americans using fast internet connections doubled from 2001 to late 2003. Experts are disappointed though, because even though 12 million households switched to broadband, the total amounts to about 19.9 percent of all U.S. households, lagging far behind countries that include South Korea, Taiwan and Canada."
My Cablevision/OptimumOnline cable modem does about 8M/1M, whereas plenty of people have DSL that's 512k/96k.
It's a little sad to see it all get lumped together.
500GB of disk, 5TB of transfer, $5.95/mo
Look at what other countries (like South Korea, as mentioned above) offer.
I remember reading a while back that once they hit speeds of about 20Mbps, they started focusing on services, as speed was no longer such a big issue. I hear many stories of video on demand for cheaper than it costs to rent a DVD in the US, online gaming flowing everywhere, and even basic education getting supplemented by this connnectivity.
Most importantly, its CHEAP.
Forget just smaller in inhabitable size - the populations are much smaller (from CIA fact book):
South Korea - 49M
Taiwan - 23M
Canada - 33M
US - 293M
20% of the US is a greater population than any of those countries.
My parents live in northern Michigan and they don't even have access to dial-up without paying long distance charges!
The US is very large and its population is spread much more thin than in Asia.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
And we've also got a lot of people, money and technology to cover it. The country's landmass is already crisscrossed with fiber. The obstacle is marketing, the problem is no competition. Broadband doesn't cost the equivalent of $40 in S. Korea and Canada and other countries, but it delivers >10Mbps in many of them. And the salespeople know how to market it, unlike the US, where there's little marketing beyond the occasional lifeless RoadRunner ad. In countries with no telecom competition, their governments have required broadband deployment for international competitiveness, or they have achieved American rates of adoption. Welcome to North Mexico! Can I get you a DVD?
--
make install -not war
Some experts said growth was disappointing, far behind countries that include South Korea, Taiwan and Canada.
Which experts would that be? The "expert" consultants who negotiate sales of user access solutions for Time Warner, Comcast, and OptOnline?
Personally, I'm happy that the number only doubled instead of tripled or quadrupled and saturated the already oversold local lines.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
You can get high-speed Internet in some very remote places in Canada.
While it has taken time to become available I personally know a few people who love several miles from the nearest town that now have DSL. (and I mean small town).
The companies installing Cable or DSL broadband are getting incentives to do so, but so what, companies in Canada and the U.S. get tax breaks for more useless reasons.
Queue comments on relative population density of Canada and the U.S., and how Canadians actually tend to live in cities more than Americans, yadda, yadda, yadda... blah, blah, blah...
It all boils down to lower cost of installation - Americans have their brick homes and concrete sidewalks, and all Canadians have to do is fish cable through the snow walls of their igloos.
In addition to decent infrastructire, don't forget that Canada already has the lowest telecommunications pricing in the world - essentially at the same $ price as in the US, less the current 20% exchange rate (which was a lot more significant when the dollar was at $0.64). This has gone a long way to speeding the adoption of broadband.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
I used to live in Rapid City South Dakota and you were quite lucky if you could get 56K connection typically it was only 28.8K due to the archaic POTS equipment and patchwork of new digital equipment. The typical answer to when are we going to get broad band was "next year" (Never). Then the power company looking to expand it's business took advantage of the fact that they owned the right of way (the power poles) to eveyone's home in North Dakota, South Dakota, Eastern Montana, Nebraska, and Minasota. For $100 a month they offer VOIP based phone, all calls on the network were local (really pissed off the local bells and the state (no fees/taxes for local and regular long distance), cable, and broad band. When the phone company tried to cut them off by refusing to sell them any more bandwidth, they just simply expanded their network beyond the reach of the telco and found someone in a different region who would.
Well suddenly "next year" became "now" since the cable company, the phone company, and the local crappy ISP didn't want to get shut out of their respective markets. The cable company and phone company tried to sue to stop them, but got nowhere so they were forced to put up or get out. Now Rapidy City locals have quite the collection of choices for their cable, phone, and ISP service.
The same occurred in my current town of California City (why do I keep moving to shithole USA towns?) DSL came in and then proved to be less profitable then they liked so they began to pull service with plans to cancel it completely. That is up until a retired IT guy signed up for a few T1 lines and set up a wireless network here in town and quickly took over this town and two more nearby and began to add more bandwidth. Well the phone company did an about face and expanded DSL service. Too little too late the local guy offers twice the bandwidth for half the price, doesn't require a phone line, and if you have a problem you just drive to the office and talk to him.
Competition is a wonderful thing. They need to shake up things by deregulating the cell, cable, and phone services even more.
Although one may be suprised to find out that in Canada (at least alberta) Broadband penetration seems alot higher then in the US. Every little craphole town seems to have DSL.
<Snipped> excuses why the US didn't do better than the other countries listed </Snipped>
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but the US has a much larger, older, and more complicated communications network in place than just about any other country in the world. It takes time to roll over to new technologies without disturbing the existing infrastructure.
Wrong. Unless you are comparing the US to countries like Israel, Taiwan and Kuwait, but you weren't, you where comparing the US to just about any other country in the world. The US is a very young country when compared with just about every country in the world. Come back in 500 to 1000 years, then we can talk.
M0571y H@rml355.
Maybe so, but their wired communications network has been in place longer than just about anywhere else in the world, so I fail to see your point
Then try Bulldog. I've just signed up unlimited 4Mb with unlimited free UK landline calling for one monthly fee. UKonline.net is rolling out 8Mb for 50% of the country and promises phone services in the future (not mentioned on their site, might have been on the Beeb). HomeChoice does 2/4Mb with all the (40+?) Freeview TV channels on demand (and it's not cable) and a phone service. There's plenty of others.
But anyway, you can always go for Internet phone system for about £5-00 a month making and receiving calls from any phone anywhere, eg: redtelecom.co.uk, sipgate.co.uk etc.etc. Calls are usually free to co-operating providers. Sipgate is free to about 10 others: FWD, Freenet, IAXnet etc.
Did he inhale?
Its easy to pull out the "ooh look, we're a big country" card and play it, but it completely ignores the reality of the situation. In Tokyo, you can get 100Mbps to your apartment for about as much as I pay for 1.5M/256K DSL. Is anyone even offering 100Mbps for $150/mo in New York, NY? 10Mbps?
So yeah, our coverage is shitty because of our rural areas (which is really a lie too, another post mentioned that someplace in Iowa formed a co-op and brought broadband to their homes in the middle of nowhere.) but the service provided at any given cost is shitty across the country too, and your "too big" card has no play here.
As long as companies and government worship the holy dollar its not going to get fixed, and companies will continue to petition state governments to hassle co-op developments, even in areas their sorry brand of broadband will never reach.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Agreed, I live several kilometers outside of a small city in northern Canada on an acreage, no cable and it cost me several thousand dollars to get power run out to my property.
I was able to get DSL with excellent transfer rates considering how far I am out of town.
Population in Canada is actually much more concentrated in cities than US. They are all squeezed along the southern border where its warmer.
p opvil2.html just under 80 percent of Canadians live in urban centres....which is nearly the SAME as the US. The only difference is that in the US the population is coastal and around the great lakes instead of along the border. Despite that, broadband use is double in Canada. The difference isn't because of population density at all. It is because despite media content being somewhat over-regulated, internet access was never mired in government/monopoly regulation to the degree it was in the US. Furthermore, broadband in Canada for the longest time was 30% to 50% cheaper than in the US so it was more accessible to its residents.
That is actually false. According to census data http://www.studentsoftheworld.info/infopays/rank/
In regards to the latitude of settlement, one of the four biggest population centres of Canada--the Calgary-Edmonton corridor with over 2 million people--does not border the US and in fact runs perpendicular from the border. Despite Edmonton being one of the most northern major cities (pop. over 500,000) in the world its residents could get boradbant internet before pretty much everyone in the US. Another interesting factoid: The first commercial use of long-distance fibre-optic cable in the world was in Canada, and the longest functioning fibre optic cable in the world in around 1980 was in the Calgary area. The population might be "concentrated" but it is only compressed north-south in most places--it is still very long east-west, so communication technology in Canada became advanced out of necessity.
The US, on the other hand, has metropolitan areas (ranging in size/density of course) dotted across much of its land mass, with vast spaces of land in between. And not nearly as much of that land is as sparsely populated as Canada's northern wilderness. It will take a lot more work to reach as much of a majority of homes.
I live in the US, in the downtown area of a metropolis of a quarter-million people. I have exactly one option for broadband: 3Mbps residential cable. If I lived in a slightly different location in the city, I might have a second option: a 768kbps T1 line. And if I lived in one of the newest or oldest parts of the city, and was very lucky, I might get a third option: 768kbps residential ADSL.
That's it. Three options, only one of which is available throughout the city. There's no option for commercial high-speed. Most of the city has no access to low-cost 256kbps ADSL. Heck, much of the city has no access to 56kbps dialup -- the best you can get is 33.6. And this is in a city of a quarter-million!
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.