Slashdot Mirror
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."
Some experts said growth was disappointing, far behind countries that include South Korea, Taiwan and Canada. The report also identified troubling figures for use or availability of high-speed Internet services among blacks, Hispanics and people in rural areas.
"It shows we continue to have a significant divide between urban and rural America in the infrastructure for the economy of the 21st century," said Gregory L. Rohde, who was top telecommunications adviser under President Clinton.
What it shows is that competition rarely exists when it comes to broadband and when it does the price/speed ratio isn't even close to what we see in foreign countries.
Significant numbers of rural Americans said they couldn't subscribe to high-speed services because none was available. Most Americans who did not use fast connections said service was either too expensive or they did not need it.
3000/256 in a neighboring area for Comcast at 45.95 (with cable) or 63.95 (without).
3000/256 in my area for Charter (with all it's port blocking glory) at 39.95
2048/256 in my area for Frontier (line) at $51.95 (not including the required telephone service which is ~$30)
We hear these great stories of inexpensive HIGH SPEED service in the countries listed in the article all the time here on Slashdot yet here in the States we have all this "competition" yet we are stuck w/slow speeds, sometimes unreliable service, and high costs (comparatively).
Once the prices drop to a reasonable level a larger percentage of people will likely switch. Right now you usually have to pay the same for dialup service that other countries pay for high-speed (and you need to have a phone line to boot).
"This is lousy," said Harris Miller, head of the Information Technology Association of America, a leading industry trade group in Washington. "We're just not keeping up with our competitors. We're not even keeping up with countries we don't consider competitors. It's not acceptable."
Yet the government continues to allow monopolies like Comcast and the local phone companies to take over areas and hog the available broadband transmission mediums. How are we supposed to compete with other countries when individual businesses don't have to compete with themselves because of government sponsored monopolies?
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
Americans tend to be more fix cost centric vs. Total Cost or Value centric. They will look at dialup lines and see that they can have internet service for $10-$20 threw dialup vs. $30-$40 for Broadband. They are paying twice as much then dial up. So they will stay with it. It is the same reason why a lot of people buy crappy cheapo PCs that will break and improperly run software vs. spending the extra money and buy something that is more reliable. Because Americans have a hard time quantifying Value for a product vs. the Cost of the product. When people do put the money in buying a higher priced product is usually isn't for the fact that it was the best value but they feel the need to impress someone else. This is the reason why WalMart is a Huge retail store because it gives loads of stuff at a very cheap price, it may not be the best quality or even the best overall value but it is cheap and people can get it now.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Because in Spain is very far from that percentage... Maybe in 20 years more we'll be on a level with you...
Wait 'till anything faster than 56k is banned. Those poor artists in their million dollar mansions are starving, you know.
For a basic "high speed" connection, you're pretty much looking at spending $50+ dollars a month in the US (In the northeast anyway, where I'm from). That's a lot of dough.
-Jesse
Nothing says "unprofessional job" like wrinkles in your duct tape.
[i]Some experts said growth was disappointing, far behind countries that include South Korea, Taiwan and Canada.[/i]
I, for one, am not disappointed. To me it means that many Americans have decided that they have priorities other than the Internet. Good for them!
Maybe someday I can have a life, too!
2001 * 2 = 4002
Pathetic humur I know, but it might make someone laugh
And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour Isaiah 3:5
...but another 20% are logging into open wireless access points.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
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.
Significant numbers of rural Americans said they couldn't subscribe to high-speed services because none was available. Most Americans who did not use fast connections said service was either too expensive or they did not need it.
1)Not Available
Many areas are not populated enough to get Cable or close enough to an exchange get DSL. Try getting either of these in Kansas, Ohio, West Virginia, Virginia, Alaska and many other states in the more rural areas. At least until the phone companies all go fibre like Verizon is.
2)Too Expensive
As soon as the phone companies start competing with the cable companis the prices will go down. Until you have both options available in your area you are stuck with high prices.
3)Not Needed
This is the most overlooked. Who needs broadband when all they do is ocationaly send and recieve email and do light web surfing for at most an hour a day? I'll agree that this isn't most slashdoters, but most of our parents are probably like this and probably our grandparents as well. Assuming that they even have internet much less a computer.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
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.
We've got a LOT of ground to cover.
Exactly. The Asian countries listed are about the size of one US state, but with much higher population density. So high-speed lines run through a town there will reach far more people per mile of cabling. (Not to mention the labor force to roll out such lines is much cheaper.)
As for Canada... Last time I checked, the population density of about 85% of the land mass was between 0 and 1 person per square kilometer. Put up some high speed networks in the southeast of Canada, stretch them west along the US border, and you've pretty much hit your entire population.
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.
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.
http://publicvoidlife.blogspot.com
Articles like this wondering why people in the US haven't switched to broadband really piss me off. I have a simple reason for not switching. There is nothing remotely close to broadband available where I live. My choices are dialup, and getting hosed by a satellite company. So I pay the cash to the satellite company, but its far from broadband.
"In urban areas, 40.4 percent of households used fast connections; only 24.7 percent of rural users did."
And urbanites voted for Kerry, while rural residents voted for Bush. Maybe the Red voters just didn't get the email?
--
make install -not war
"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."
Not only that, but the quality of the broadband in the US lags way behind the rest of the world. Cable here is 3mb/256kb for $50, while in korea you can get 20mb down for about the same price.
And it has nothing to do with the population density either. Here in iowa it's apparently not worth while for comcast, qwest, et al., to provide service. So the people took matters into their own hands and started broadband co-ops. The result? Rural iowans are better connected than their urban counterparts.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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
Sadly, our being behind is fuelled by corporate interests who seem to like the status quo solely for profits.
I urge Americans to visit Sweden, Norway or Denmark in order to see how a "near perfect" system works.
No wonder, trends on technology are now being "dictated" on us by foreigners, who seem to be way ahead of us on a number of fronts including the all important Mathematics.
Cb..
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.
We've got a LOT of ground to cover.
That's only part of it. The other is price. For those who just use it for getting the news and checking E-mail, $50 + per month is a little steep. The cable company has the trick of calling a extra fee a discount if you also have cable TV.
We have lots of ground to cover as you mentioned, but most of the population lives in cities. There are not that many people in the woods in Montana, in the deserts of Nevada and Utah, and in the plains of Oklahoma and Wyoming. Even in those states most of the population in clustered in cities that have broadband. Having a large country does not mean it's population is away from population centers.
All it really amounts to is if you are not subscribing to pay TV, they charge an extra chunk of change to provide broadband. Not everyone is buying it.
The phone company tries to do the same thing in many areas with DSL to combat the consumers fleeing all the tack on charges on POTS. It used to be cell phones were expensive. All the tack on fees on a landline have leveled the playing field. Now many people don't have a reason to keep a landline and landline subscriptions are down. (I think I heard about 20% of US households no longer have a landline, but use cell service as the primary phone.)
Between the two jacking up the price with all the fees for not also getting other services, I simply am priced out of broadband. I use broadband at work to get my latest distro and use dial-up at home simply because a year of broadband is about the same price as a new PC. One option many take to beat the high cost is wardriving. I'll deal with the e-mail speed and get the new PC or laser printer instead.
Slashdot works fine on dial-up. I load a page ahead of time in a new tab and continue reading in my current tab. Dial-up is fast enough. I can't read any faster.
Many countries have affordable broadband. In some cities the city can provide the entire city with broadband for almost an order of magnitude less per household than a connection here. Here the rollout is slowed by the desire to please the shareholders. Too many markets have too few choices permitting the monopoly pricing of broadband to replace income lost to Satelite TV and Cell Phones. These markets have slow growth.
Broadband is not priced for mass use in the USA yet. The providers are trying to cherry pick profitable consumers. Those willing to pay the price are those who tend to be heavy downloaders. The price keeps low bandwidth profitable users from signing up. Now the ISP's are trying to figure out how to make a high bandwidth user not be such an expensive user. I'm still waiting for them to price it for the low bandwidth users.
The truth shall set you free!
Good but age of country != age of comunications infrastructure. If the telephone had been invented 1000 years ago you would be right, but I'm afriad you are not.
The issue is commonly referred to as the "last mile" problem. Yes, there are backbones that reach coast to coast, border to border.
When we speak of population density, it's not so much at a macroscopic level, but block-by-block. Getting a connection to each living unit is expensive. The Bell System got there with subsidy dollars. The Cable Companies got there with subsidies, but also operating at a loss. (Many now-bankrupt cable MSOs can testify to this)
Our hunger for better net connections hasn't (yet) pushed us to the point of approving government subsidies for 100Mb connections to each house, and there isn't a business model that will justify private dollars paying for the infrastructure.
Yes, most major Japanese cities can get 100Mb net access for US$100 or less, but the cost of connecting to the living unit is spread out over the hundreds of apartments in that living unit, and the cost of reaching that building is only a small step up from the cost of reaching that block of buildings.
--
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.
Sometimes early technology adoption can stiffle a country's development. For example France promoted a custom national network (minitel) which fell behind the more open and dynamic general InterNet. On the other hand the expense of land lines in China forced it into cell phones earlier than the states.
Then explain to me why my brother, who lives almost 8 hours north of the US border, 1.5 hours away from the nearest "city" (city of 5,000 people) in a town of less than 1,000 people can get broadband access, and how all these centres in the US cannot? Hell, the largest city in our province is about 200,000 people, and that's about 4 hours away!
Brad
As it is, the cheap local calls serve as a disincentive for US households to switch whereas the expensive local calls elsewhere make broadband an economic solution for more than sporadic use.
Americans tend to be more fix cost centric vs. Total Cost or Value centric. They will look at dialup lines and see that they can have internet service for $10-$20 threw dialup vs. $30-$40 for Broadband
You're right. But Americans are no different from others.
In France, for instance, people are massively switching to DSL services not because they value Broadband more than their american counterparts, but because for several reasons the DSL market is terribly competitive : legacy operator France Telecom is forced by law to open its network to every broadband operators (and there are now more than a dozen of them, at least).
The competition is fierce and you can have 8 Mbps ADSL service for as low as 15 euros per month (http://www.neuftelecom.fr/). An other company (http://adsl.free.fr/) offers ADSL 2+ service (up to 15 Mbps download / 1 Mbps upload) for 30 Euros per month and that includes TV via DSL and Phone via DSL (unlimited local abd national calls). And you can even opt out from the legacy operator and you won't have to pay a fee to France Telecom to use their line (they own the last mile of copper) : the DSL company will have to pay a small fee to France Telecom to use the line, and most of the time they won't charge it back to you. So you have unlimited phone, high speed internet and Television via DSL, all for 30 euros per month, which is dirt cheap.
This have nothing to do with french infrastructure being more modern or anything : It's just the direct effect of fierce competition. I mean : even AOL offers 1 Mbps DSL service for 17 Euros per month (5 Mbps for 23 euros) !!!
It was the same a few years ago when 3 mobile companies battled over the emerging mobile market : prices went down and equipment rate sky rocketed.
Well, folks, it's your choice. Do you want big government to spend $40 billion for the recently launched f-ww jet fighter (designed to go to war agains the mighty Soviet empire) and another $200 billion for occupying Iraq (unnecessarily)? Or do you want big government to spend money on things that will build a more productive, prosperous society?
You can't have both.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
Just a little debunking of the Canadian communications infrastructure myth.
:)
We advanced technologically *with* the Americans. We installed telephone systems along side the Americans. We upgraded to digital telephone systems as well as the Americans. We Implemented our cellphone networks on the same types of systems as the Americans.
From every little hamlet, to every major city, there is telephone connectivity. We had an infrastructure that dates back to *shortly after* the invention of the telephone.
At each major technological evolution, our infrastructures were replaced - just like the Americans. Of course there were always some hold-outs - I think that rotary service was still available as recently as 8 years ago (still available as special service where required, at added expense).
The argument of "it's costly to roll over new..." doesn't wash, as Canada has a lower population density for areas that it delivers signal to, and yet still manages to introduce the technology / replace the outdated gear, and provide the new services. Sure, there are still areas where ISDN is the highest speed available, but we have a large landmass, and a small population. We'll get to them when we can.
The *real* reason that high speed connectivity isn't as available in the US? Corporations aren't interested in spending money to replace an infrastructure that the bulk of it's customers aren't willing to pay extra for. Perhaps it's time to use the enormous power of your population to force the mega-corporations to offer the services that you want.
As an aside, our towns are not *mostly* restricted to the American border, as we have communities dotting our countryside - similar to the United States. And, while it is true that we have a major trunk that runs coast to coast connecting the larger cities, we have major branches running north/south into each province (and subsequently, the territories) to provide coverage for as many of these communities as possible.
Your infrastructure will only improve when you demand it. We did.