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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?
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make install -not war
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.
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.
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.