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US Ranking for Broadband Falls
Ant writes "Broadband Reports mentions Declan McCullagh's CNET editorial where he believes everything is a-ok in the world of broadband, and people concerned with falling global rankings are over-reacting. 'FCC figures released last month show that 94.3 percent of U.S. ZIP codes have high-speed lines available to them,' he writes; though as we've pointed out, the FCC considers one home in a zip code with broadband to mean that entire zip code is 'serviced.'"
Posting anonymously to avoid allegations of karma whoring... :-P
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U.S. broadband A-OK
January 10, 2005, 4:00 AM PT
By Declan McCullagh
IT'S BECOME FASHIONABLE TO FRET about the purported need for a "national broadband policy," a concern typically accompanied by laments that the United States lags other nations in adopting speedy Internet connections.
Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Michael Copps, a Democrat, recently complained that "the United States is ranked 11th in the world in broadband penetration!...When we find ourselves 11th in the world, something has gone dreadfully wrong. When Congress tells us to take immediate action to accelerate deployment, we have an obligation to do it."
One commentary piece published on CNET News.com last week worried that the United States is "falling behind" other countries in broadband connectivity. Another from last year offered "several recommendations that could help form a national broadband agenda" and touted South Korea as a "success" story.
[Image: High-speed providers by ZIP code]
But is the United States truly faring so poorly? A careful look at the numbers gives reason to be skeptical.
The now-traditional source of dismay about U.S. broadband adoption is a set of figures compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a kind of governmental think tank. The June 2004 figures say the United States has 11.2 broadband subscribers for every 100 inhabitants, in 11th place and far behind South Korea's 24.4-people-per-100 top ranking.
Those figures are misleading. South Korea is roughly 100,000 square kilometers, about the size of the state of Indiana, with a population clustered around large cities like Seoul. In those cities, Koreans tend to live in high-rise apartment buildings. Population density makes it relatively easy to provide high-speed connections--it's perfect for speedy VDSL lines--and boosts the nation in the OECD's rankings.
By contrast, the United States sprawls over nearly 10 million square kilometers--100 times the size of South Korea--with a population more evenly distributed between rural areas, towns and cities and far more likely to live in single-family homes. Geography and demographics explain why broadband will take longer to become available in the United States. Copps might as well complain that the more spread-out United States has fewer subway lines per capita and less smog too.
[Image: Global broadband subscribers
To be sure, complaints about U.S. lagging refer both to slow adoption of broadband and the slower broadband speeds available. It's true that South Korea and Japan may offer connections measured in the tens of megabits, but fiber connections are finally happening in the United States. By the way, if you've got complaints about the rollout speed, the best way to accelerate it would be to eliminate wacky go
This is nothing to fret about. The United States is losing to the countries with high population density and smaller footprint, where wiring a city of size of Seoul or Amsterdam suddenly wires up 10-15% of country's population. If you take California or New York City and treat them as a separate country, the rate of broadband access would be quite competitive with the others. US of A is just a pretty big country to have anything decent in terms of % numbers.
Note, however, that on the same page it says US is leading the world in the total number of broadband connections with 31.7 million cable/DSL/other lines. The nearest competitor - China - only has 22.2 million broadband hook-ups.
I cant believe for a minute that that many zip codes are covered.. and yes one in that zip counts the entire zip.
How about breaking it down by zip+4 and that number would drop dramatically.
And what about Bush fixing the digital divide?
As horrible as that would be, I don't think it'll happen anytime soon. As long as the internet is functional, people will want a connection thta doesn't take half an hour to download files, whether they be MP3s, windows updates, .deb, .rpm, etc.
Do they mean 'serviced', as in 'our cow was serviced by the bull'?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
They should use a much bigger number. Like two.
I've been all over the U.S. and can understand the reluctance of the phone companies to provide service to some areas. There just isn't enough population in some areas to seriously consider putting in the wires to bring high speed internet to these areas.
Most of the U.S. is farmland. Very little of it is what you call "Blue States". And as anyone who studies these things can tell you, farmland doesn't have the population density of even relatively small cities. So you wonder why you don't get broadband out in the sticks? It's because you don't have enough neighbors.
It's one of the prices you pay for peace and quiet.
Just because it's easier for Seoul to get its citizens on broadband doesn't make it any less a competitive threat. The US, with its huge coastlines, competes easily with landlocked countries like those throughout central Europe, central Asia, and central Africa, but that competitive advantage means we rule the seas. S. Korea and the Netherlands are disproportionately represented on the broadband Net per capita, which is how individuals experience the status. Don't we want to keep American predominance on the Net, by using our advantages in brains, capital and momentum to overcome momentary disadvantages in geography?
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make install -not war
Where they live, there is no broadband. They have DSL.
Y'all that there government said we could have ourselves ay free 'broad band' co-nection for arh trailor!
Them 'engyneers' betta get the hell off ma land!
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
At least in America there is /CHOICE/ in the affordable broadband market sector.
.au, we have ONE carrier providing something in the order of 90% of the broadband connections' layer 1/2 infrastructure (with some smaller DSLAM operators and two other cable cos, one of whom is regional only).
In
Additionally, nobody LIKES this one carrier, who up until just recently were actually charging their wholesale customers (ISPs who lease DSLAM ports via PPPoA/L2TP) more per connection than their retail customers. This ended when the ACCC (.au equivalent of the US FTC) served them with a competition notice, which they are now currently trying to work their way out of.
Yes, America has it good, comparatively. And, unlike Korea, they're not responsible for ~5/6 of all reported open proxy hosts.
You're doing it wrong.
Has Michael Powell really become this useless?
Nunavit (as mentioned in the FA) is a territory, not a province. S'like calling Puerto Rico a state. What else did author get wrong?
rewriting history since 2109
31.7 million hookups in a country of 300 million people is just pathetic.
Canada has 5.7 million for 28 million people. Canada is bigger, less densely settled, has less money, and it's far colder, which makes running lines more difficult. There's no *way* that the U.S. should be behind Canada.
Then, what, there are 6 people in Nevada with broadband?
Seriously, it's so expensive for what I need internet for I can't justify it. Further, I'm concerned with paying for services I don't want and having some type of service rammed down my throat which I don't want at all.
SBC/Yahoo talk like everything is rosy and wonderful, but I don't see it in my future and it's probably going to be more and more packaged in time to come, rather than a-la-carte, like Cable TV will eventually be.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Canada is bigger, less densely settled
The latter is not true, I read that somewhere between 70 and 90 % of the population lives within miles to US border. Not sure what the source was on that. Plus, it's the number of households, not people that matters, as the family of 10 somewhere in Utah will apparently not need more than 1 broadband connection.
For about the same price, in Korea they give you 10mb/s both ways. Orders of magnitudes faster.
See subject for comment.
But Canada is actually very densely populated in a few areas, and very empty in most of the landmass. I wish I had the numbers, but a huge percentage of the Canadian population is in the belt connecting Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec City and more.
In some states, like Montana or North Dakota - there are zip codes that no one lives in. The various Big Foots in those areas get some fan mail from time to time, but they have no use for the internet, nor could they pay for it. This could easily account for the 5.6% that is not covered.
Two points:
1. Canada has 32 million people:
http://www.statcan.ca/start.html
2. Many of the high speed connections in Canada are much higher speed and cheaper than American ones.
Well up until very recently my street was not serviced by cable or dsl even though people just a few hundred feet away could get it. In my case it was a matter of there being too few people on my street to justify running the wiring (or that's my guess.)
So up until last week I fell into that category of my zip code has service but it's not available for us.
I don't even need a wire for broadband...
Wireless. I don't know how many other places have access to it, but I have microwave through michwave. Only requirement is LoS to the tower. Seems like rural areas with lots of farmland could really benefit from microwave.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
Declan sure does have that corporate line down pat, don't he?
Declan, your wallet gonna be gettin' mmmmmiiiiighty fat, dude!
The telcos and entertainment industry won't forget you when it comes time for payback. Or has that part already gone?
You sly dog!
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Some real news would be great, rather than complaining about providers who won't run 30 miles of fiber and associated equipment to service 3 $55/month customers.
And what about Bush fixing the digital divide?
.... hey, don't dis me, hand, or I'll disappear you to Gitmo!".
He can barely the handling digital subtract:
"Lemme see, the Dickmeister said to use my fingers. Hmmm, three fingers take away 2 fingers is
Oh wait. That wouldn't sound as good. Never mind.
It's debatable what is considered to be Broadband - with most surveys falling back on "always-on" service. But average American speeds (oh, and what ARE those) compared to South Korean speeds - should that be taken into account?
Then the survey refers to zip codes that have service "available" - which does not seem to take into full account what might be available on the edges, efforts to drive service outside of the normal methods (friend a mile away with a Pringle's can), etc.
And what are we really trying to prove here anyway? That we do (or don't) need government investment in making Broadband more available? Something else?
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See more probing questions here
I am thinking of moving to AU and the idea of dealing with the AU ISP just makes me cringe.
I'd rather have 128kbp/sec with Unlimited monthly download limits, than a 1Mb connection with a per month GB cap.
Since getting DSL, I live off of Internet radio and other things that while trivial in instantaneous bandwidth, add up to one Hell of a large monthly bandwidth rate. Also, as someone that telecommutes, I am constantly sending 3MB emails back and forth to work.
Plus, I am morally opposed to being charged twice (per second and per month) for bandwidth. Pick one metric or the other but not both.
Less densely settled?
"The majority of the Canadian population, about 60% is concentrated within a thin belt of land representing 2.2% of the land between Windsor, Ontario and Quebec City."
They count satellite as a broadband option, so that covers everyone in the 48 contiguous states. Alaska and Hawaii have to fend for themselves.
But lets talk about speed, what does broadband mean to them? (Pedants aside, since we all know broadband doesn't technically mean fast internet)
Koreans and Japanese have these crazy fat 100mbit pipes and whatnot I'm always reading about.
We're far behind when I'm actually getting excited because Comcast bumped my service up to 3mbits.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
C'mon... I live in Saskabush and I had 1.5Mbit broadband in early 1996! Yes, there is a high density in (what we here call) eastern Canada, but sparsely populated Saskatchewan also has great coverage of broadband. For example: The town of Kenaston (pop. less than 300, 50 miles from major center) has broadband. [Flamebait]We have our socialist government and crown corporations to thank for it.[/Flamebait]
just because it's technically boradband and available does not mean that it is fast or cheap by most standards.
Get your torrents...
This article is just an indeological blurb recycling for the millionth time Americans' usual excuse for their telecom backwardness -- their land mass -- and adding some free-markedroid mantra to boot (the part about "wacky govt regulations").
About govt regulations : European countries _regulate_ their former monopoly telcos into offering to host their competitors' routers into their own last-mile hubs for _regulated_ fees, allowing customers to subscribe directly to a competitor's DSL offering bypassing the telco completely. So in this case gvt regulations _enable_ competition and the effect on prices and qos is dramatic. I will leave the most ideologically blindsided anti-gvt drones think about the paradoxical situation.
As for landmass, well, it brings obvious benefits to US residents, here are the drawbacks. You don't here from Japan that they are the #1 nation in agriculture because they make do with their small space. They just say ok, we depend on imports to eat, let's make up to that on smthg else.
Korea is more connected than the US, and that's a fact. The same way that Finland will nevercompte with spain for the tourism euros of the Germans seeking sun during their vacation, the US will have to cope with a huge overhead to keep up in the world of connected societies.
Maybe they should throw a little bit of gvt regulation into it.
The phone company doesn't provide it here. And what reason do they have to? Not the FCC.
They don't care a bit about service.
I'm here sitting with my damn 1.5 Mbits asymetrical connection, if I upload any faster than 10kb/s then it cuts my download to 20kb/s. It is totally useless for the picture site I run (images are 700kb to 2 megs each and updated constantly).
I'm not shocked either, given that some parts of the world get over 10Mb/s for less than what we pay for sometimes less than 1Mb/s, due to population density & gov't involvement, among other factors.
Ok, I live in Pleasant Hill, CA. Look on a map - it's East of San Francisco by about 20 miles. The average income in the area is $60,000+ - over 20% of the population makes over $100,000.
I cannot get DSL in my apartment complex. I can get a cable modem from Comcast, but that's it. Astound Broadband has tried to service this area but was shut out by Comcast.
My friend down the street is in the Walnut Creek city limits. We're all on the same SBC fiber ring. Her DSL line cannot carry data reliably if it's set to 1.5mbit. Speakeasy has backed her down to 768kbps, but is still charging the same. She called Comcast and Astound - *neither* can service her with a cable modem.
We're *not* in the boonies out here. So why the hell can't we get decent service? It doesn't make any sense to me, and when asked, the SBC & Comcast sales drones just say "planning on servicing that area soon..." (repeat every 6 months)
1 person in ZIP 94523 sure as hell doesn't mean that everyone is happy - or can even get decent service at all.
Stupid FCC.
Heh, I wans't saying that there wasn't broadband outside of eastern canada... my point was that a huge majority of Canada is not populated.
In my part of Los Angeles, I have a choice of hard-capped 384/128 ADSL or Adelphia's Maybe-up-to-2M-shared-but-only works-one-hour-per-week service.
My choice, for $50 / month.
'FCC figures released last month show that 94.3 percent of U.S. ZIP codes have high-speed lines available to them,' he writes; though as we've pointed out, the FCC considers one home in a zip code with broadband to mean that entire zip code is 'serviced.'
. . . IT IS SERVICED! You can't have broadband unless broadband service is available there, thus your area must be serviced for your one lonely home to have broadband. The FCC is tallying zipcodes with broadband lines "available" to them, not in use.
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I live three miles (15,000 feet )from BellSouth's corporate headquarters in Nashville Tennessee and am not in their DSL coverage area. I live in an older section of town and they have no plans to upgrade the tangled mass of wire that they call a phone system. I do have access to Comcast 24/7 service: 24 hours a month out of 7 months guaranteed.
doing a survey by zip code is totally the wrong way. A better way to measure broadband service is by area code + exchange. That's how the phone company does it. For cable it depends which parts of their network is hooked up for broadband. I guess when the leader of the FCC is an idiot, you can't expect much.
Radio 5 Live (http://www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive, or 909 and 693 AM if you are in the UK) are going to be interviewing this person in about 3 minutes...
This 2.2% of the land bit comes from owning all the land up to the north pole. You can't let those giant swathes of tundra throw off your calculation.
Population density of North America.
Almost the entire US population is in the densely populated East. You can hardly tell where the US/Canada border is, except that you see fewer of the absolute darkest purples. As you can see, the canadian population density is very slightly less than that of the U.S.
If your telcos can't wire that solid block of pruple in the east even as well as Canada has wired its solid blocks of purple despite having an economy that dwarfs Canada's by orders of magnitude, you have an economic/legislative problem you need to fix.
If one guy goes out and gets an expensive satellite connection, then his county would qualify as "serviced" if I'm understanding this right. There's a big difference between your neighbor (who lives 10 miles down the road) having a satellite broadband connection vs. you being able to call up SBC and get a DSL line for $27 a month.
Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
...why should I care?
I'm not trying to troll, but I'm really asking how this will effect the US instead of just bragging rights.
No county can make excuses when this county with 2600 square miles will soon be fully lit of over 50,000 miles of fiber.
The "the U.S. has lower broadband coverage because so many people live waaay out in the country" argument doesn't really cut it. In 1990 over three quarters of Americans lived in cities. And the numbers have definitely not gone down since. So yes, it might be hard to cover 99% of the US, but getting to 75% should be fairly easy. At least I don't know of a town of any size that doesn't have some cables running into it.
Everywhere in the US has a phone line and from that line you can get Internet service. I question the utility of mandidating and paying for higher speed access with public funds. Broadband is nice, don't get me wrong. I love my DSL and I pay for fast, professional grade service. However I have used dialup in the past, and have reverted to dial up in outages and when I've moved. It limits what you can do, but not severrly.
Dialup is perfectly functional at this point for information access. The web works fine on a 28.8k modem, you just have to be a little relaxed and accept it can take 5-10 seconds for a page to load. It's not the excellent quality, always on, instentanious broadband that I love, but it's perfectly usable for my information needs.
So that's the thing, I don't see it as a good use of our tax dollars. I think the free market is handling it fine, for now. Perhaps later the size of content will increase to teh point that I believe BB to be a necessity for useful Internet access, but for now it is most certianly not.
in this time of number portability, any # can be at any location.. better is zip+4
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
For example, take mobile phones, where the Europeans -- and especially the Scandinavians -- are far ahead; the U.S. is still stuck with various incompatible networks, and texting ("SMS") is still in its infancy. South Korea is far ahead in broadband usage and Japan has all the cool electronic gadgets (remember the discussion in "Back to the Future"?). There are, of course, various exceptions to this rule, starting with the iPod, online shopping, and the spread of public WiFi, where the U.S. does in fact lead hands down. The point is, though, that large parts of the American public just assume the U.S. is number one in everything and then are baffled when they are told that some Europeans or Asians are ahead. But, but, but we're Americans! they cry. We almost made the guy who invented the Internet president! How can this be?
This is actually the normal, pre-WWII state of affairs, and no cause for panic; the U.S. was never the leader in everything except for a very short period where everybody else had been bombed to the bedrocks. Parts of the U.S. (those in the middle, mainly) are still today rural to a point inconceivable to Europeans, who only really grasp the significance of this in election years. The U.S. has been shouldering an enormous military budget ever since WWII, and while enjoying U.S. protection, countries like (West) Germany, Japan and South Korea have been free to skimp on defense and invest in infrastructure and public education.
Now, finally, and for all the wrong reasons, the U.S. is getting its troops out of countries rich enough to defend themselves. Still, it is important to realize that other countries have clever engineers, too, and with populations more inclinded to take interest in toys not directly related to hog feeding, there will simply never be that form of 50's domination again. This is a Good Thing, because it means that the rest of the world is not scrambling through ruins or starving.
look at the individual states, IL has over a million high speed lines..it's the highest state for one I would not have thought of as a GIMMIE for how #'s.. but I guess chicago clinched it for them
it's really ooky to see the breakdown by state..
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Why are people worrying about broadband? There are still several million people in the USA that do not even have phone lines. And I am not talking about places like Alaska here. All this nothing new and nothing to worry about.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
the FCC considers one home in a zip code with broadband to mean that entire zip code is 'serviced.'
/. joke about.
Wait a minute, lemme get this straight. The FCC goes by Zip code to determine a percentage of the broadband service. In fact, one home in that zone means the rest of the zip area is serviced. Gees... Sounds like they're actually encouraging wireless routers to be setup and range extenders for the entire neighborhood. Or else I don't understand how all the people in that zip code could access the broadband internet.
Still, I think that the real issue at hand is not the people that can have internet access with a decent speed, what matters is the percentage of people who have access to the web and their phone line at the same time. Because in their definition of broadband, I wonder if they don't include ISDN phone lines (remember, those can "speed up" to 128Kbps).
Statistics don't mean much anyway, what they should look at are how many people actually want broadband these days.
A good deal of people that don't have it yet might think twice about it, because even on the no-call list, having your phone available means phone spamming. Another reason to have dialup is that you're less likely to interest a hacker, and viruses can't do all that much damage if you're offline most of the time, at least not to other computers.
Remember the Blaster worm (oh yes, it's still around, nasty little thing) would only crash your computer when it's hooked up to the web, and many of its sequels might be exactly the same thing. Not to mention that being on dialup rules you out of those huge windows botnets that we on
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
When you've got 1/4 of the population basically living in poverty, they aren't going to fork out $50 a month to surf the web.
---Technology will liberate us if it doesn't enslave us first.
So Nunavut has 28,000 in 2,000,000 km2? He must be pleased that all 21 Nunavut communities will have wireless broadband by the end of this month!
DSL is not POTS. Placing a remote dslam in every pedistal in the country would cost billions. Imagine how expensive DSL (and regular phone service) would be if the telco's were required to spend that kind of cash for network upgrades? Bellsouth charged a surcharge for touch tone for over 20 years to "recover costs for equipment upgrades" -- for NC alone, that's a total of well over $100mil, and there were few real upgrades across the network (installing a $10,000 DTMF decoder doesn't count... replacing a rotary relay switch, which were still in operation back then, that counts.)
:-(, etc.
[They're doing the same damned thing for local number portability, too. At least the NCPUC was smart enough to remember the touch-tone BS and limit the surcharge to 5 years. BTW, LNP is a software (key) enabled option, assuming the switch isn't running decade old code. Think X2 and V.90 modem upgrades...]
Cable modem service is, by comparision, free. All they have to do is run cables (most hung from utility poles), hang boosters, and install additional headend(s) to support additional runs. It's a lot cheaper and easier than installing RDSLAMs in messy, cramped peds that get rained in, sometimes hit by cars
Explain this than, Canada's larger then the US, has 1/10 the population and has a much larger broadband coverage? uhuh
> to mean that entire zip code is 'serviced.'"
...if ya know what I mean...
Technically, no one with broadband at home gets "serviced". "Servicing" requires a second person...
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Most of the noise about the "broadband penetration problem" comes from telcos who want a monopoly over the local loop. There really is no "broadband penetration problem." So quit worrying about this.
There are millions of people out there satisfied with their 56K modems. Since the US has flat-rate local calls, and the dial-up infrastructure in place is quite good, many of them see no reason to upgrade. It's amusing that 5-7% of US Internet users are still on 14.4Kb/s modems, and that's been roughly constant for five years.
You lost me at ".au".
I think there might be a few cables pulled in your central office...
"Canada has 5.7 million for 28 million people"
...
... whe let you say "where #1" , whe call ourself #0 ;-)
On broadband , Canada as about 10 - 12 million people on the internet , not everyone can afford broadband, probably the US numbers would go up too.
"has less money"
No , Thats what whe like to make you think but take any #1 in any sector of activity and analyze there sharolders and you see a big percentage of Canadians , the #2 #3 #4 are usualy Canadian owned company.
"and it's far colder, which makes running lines more difficult."
Thats why where expert in satelites
"There's no *way* that the U.S. should be behind Canada. "
You have been behind Canada since Canada whas the first country on the continent
I am a REAL American from Canada , not a wanna-be from the country , self called "last remaining superpower" "of America
Comcast is now in the process of upgradeing all 3Mbit customers to 4Mbit prepare to get excited ;-)
First of all, you provided nothing to back up your assertion that access to communications should be a human right.
Second of all, it's all well and good to say that in your opinion, all humans should be entitled to communications access, but it's much harder to say just how far this access should extend.
Do all humans, in your opinion, have the right to free telephone access? Free dialup access in public libraries and schools? Free dialup access in the home? Free broadband access in every school? Free broadband access in every home? Free broadband lines for every individual in every home? Free OC3 lines? Free OC256 lines? Free satellite telephones that work anywhere in the world? Free 20 megawatt communications lasers and relay satellites so they can communicate with the international space station on their own time?
Please - there's much more important things the government should be doing than raising the status of a commercial service to that of an entitlement program.
If people don't want broadband in the US, that doesn't mean they're behind. They're not subsidized, unlike in Europe and Asia. If the US loses the edge in designing broadband equipment, however, then we should be worried.
Well, AC, the disconnect on the info superhighway that leaves little Jane unable to google for video when she graduates high school will certainly put a damper on her earning power. Or do you even need an excuse for your ad-hominem attack, AC?
--
make install -not war
You seem to have clicked on the wrong "reply" link, attaching your post to the wrong parent.
Is there a battle that we need to win? Does broadband save lives? Are kids getting better grades in school because of broadband?
Just last week, weren't the newspapers discussing a study about kids not learning like they should because of the internet?
It might make my life easier because I access another network from home, but 90% of the people I know don't have broadband, and don't want to pay for it, and rarely need a lot of bandwidth. Is it making my life easier? Sure. But most people I know get away with a dialup account. They check the weather, do a little online shopping, and read the news, that's it. Dialup works for those people. $10 a month isn't bad either. $50 a month to Comcast is a waste of money for most people. If they're going to throw $50 at Comcast, they better get some TV out of the deal.
-- No sig for you!
I'm responsible for about a dozen unique ZIP codes in there, sorry. My company does high-speed wireless Internet, and we put up a few new towers last spring. (Those numbers are based on the June FCC filings, so they're already six months out of date.) There are a few dot-on-the-map "towns" that have a population of like three people, but they're within five miles of a tower, and we somehow managed to get broadband to them. If there's even one customer, we're required to report it.
The FCC form (Form 477) doesn't actually ask for any kind of correlation between "ZIP codes" and "number of people per ZIP code". One page asks about how many broadband customers we have, and another page asks for a shopping list of all our broadband customers' ZIPs. We offer broadband in about thirty different ZIP codes, even though most of them only have one or two customers.
(Since a T1 qualifies as broadband, natch, they think we have coverage thirty miles from our nearest tower -- one customer out there wanted a hookup badly enough that they were willing to pay through the nose, so we did it.)
I live less than a mile (0.2 as the crow flys) from the MCI, et al. backbones running through Silicon Valley and I can only get 128K SDSL! Utterly pathetic! Comcast doesn't service our neighborhood and SBC can't get a faster line because of the "manhattan" wiring in the streets puts me ~1.5 miles from the CO. Is the US behind? H*ll yes!
No county can make excuses when this county with 2600 square miles will soon be fully lit.
Here is what the local cable TV provider does not provide.. Value.. Look at what you get for $40/month..
Grant County residents pay $40 per month (plus a small installation fee) for 5 Mbps of dedicated bandwidth delivering cable TV, telephone, Internet, and automatic meter reading services.
If I could get that level of service for that price, I'd sign up tonight!
Considering I'd drop my POTS in a heartbeat, the price would be free...
The truth shall set you free!
This is getting pretty pathetic. I'm paying $60 a month for broadband 3Mbps and those guyz in India is paying $2 a month for 2Mbps DSL
here's the link to the $2/month for 2Mbps DSL
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/58886
Next you'll be saying that people are dying because they don't have broadband!
We've got kids graduating from high school that can't READ! Broadband isn't going to change their lives. We've got cocaine, gang wars, and people that can't pay for health insurance while businesses that are dropping health plans are the only ones able to get the tax breaks for paying the premiums. And you're trying to tell me that the US needs to fight the broadband race so that kids can learn how to use Distributed Media? Oh..and telemedicine. Gee, there's one that I completely put my faith behind. Wait until John Edwards gets his hands on a malpractice case involving telemedicine. That'll QUICKLY end telemedicince. The malpractice insurance premiums will forbid telemedicine due to the risk of lawsuits... whether or not it makes any sense or not!
How long do you think it takes the average kid to learn how to use broadband? A couple minutes? We have parents who simply don't see the need. A dialup line works for them. Do you need to pound broadband up and down the pavement, telling them they're falling further and further behind? They can't pay their fucking health insurance premiums! There are a lot of people who have broadband and use it for all the wrong things.
Feel free to point out what I'm missing. Otherwise, I just smell fish.
There are just 600,000 people in Amsterdam, which is pretty low compared to the total population of 16,000,000 in the Netherlands. That's only 3.75% - and Amsterdam is our biggest city...
Didn't our very right-wing Republican adminstration just crow about their drug benefit? A subsidy? A socialist program?
I think you're very naive about politics. Republicans aren't all that against socialism, as long as there's enough money in it for them.
If Halliburton made Wi-Fi or DSL equipment you can bet your ass the Republicans would be all over extending network access to people in rural areas on the government's (our) dime.
Many here forget that American cities were electrified more than 20 years before Congress created the National Rural Electrification Act in the 20s after agreeing that electricity was a basic need instead of just a luxury.
The same will happen for broadband within 20 years.
IOW, your kids will have broadband then we will be fighting the next great 'human right' ie access to local transporters and anti-grav.
Get over it.
Sweden has a lower population density than USA (20 vs 30 per km^2) and at the same time the broadband penetration is higher. I would say that the US is lagging behind.
:)
Here is more information on international broadband penetration:
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0402/
Many users have 10/10 or better via fiber in the cities. Although on the whole, most broadband is delivered by ADSL and cable, with all operators offering a maximum speed of 8/1.
I guess one explanation is that the Swedish government has invested a lot of money on broadband/fiber/IT-infrastructure projects which has resulted in "city-networks" in all cities. However, these investments has only cost a fraction of what the military cost, while providing lots of more benefits for us, so it was definitely not a waste.
South Korea:
defense spending as a share of GDP 3.5 %
defense share of gov't spending: 21.8 %
USA:
defense spending share of GDP: 3.1%
defense share of gov't spending: 15.9%
From the Declan article: "Cultural differences might explain [the low broadband penetration]. Perhaps Americans prefer to read books instead of staring at a PC? Or they'd rather watch television?"
Yeah, sure.
Or how about this: maybe they just can't afford it? What is a poor family with two (or three -- or four, if they're working double) low incomes going to prioritize away to get $20-40/month extra for that broadband? Do they even have a computer?
I've been using dial-up here for about 6 years, and it only took 1 year for me to want to recieve high-speed internet. During those years, more and more DSL and cable providers were available, but none of them extended over to our house. I'd say we were 1-2 miles away from broadband.
...Yep. Uh. For $1000 $50/month thereafter to set everything up for 3 computers running on a network, we have always-on (lie - one cloud and our system is down) "high-speed" (FAP - download 170mb and the system shuts you down to dialup speed, and worse) internet.
:(
So, we went to Direcway.
Fastest I've ever got was at a steady rate of 80 kilobyte/s. No connections for TCP allowed, either (on P2P networks, that is). Customer support is one to stay away from - I have to fix all the problems myself.
Also nice to know that I found this website AFTER I got Direcway: http://direcwayreallysucks.net/
But after all, anything is better then dialup.
That's an awfully optimistic view of things here. I use a cellular phone for my telephone needs, so my choices are: Comcast: $59/mo. Legendarily bad customer service. Only cable internet choice. Verizon: $30/mo. + $40/mo. for a phone line I won't use, just 'cause they demand you have one. Lengendarily bad customer service. Not the only DSL internet choice, but the only phone choice, so that extra buying-nothing $40 charge will be there no matter what.
Choice is beautiful.
This is the nation's capital, by the way. Yet another way in which DC is a shameful blight on our nation.
I can see it now, some red-faced congressman speaking in support fo his bill:
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
I can see it now: R. Caley washing dishes while his boss, Wu Chun, collaborates with a global network of Internet friends. Skills that seem magical to Caley, whose discretionary spending affords only a dialup connection.
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make install -not war
So like... I guess the FCC doesn't consider the widely available 2 way satellite as broadband or something? I mean Alaska/Hawaii can't be that 6% without BB right?
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
I'd say it's the same as maybe the difference between having to take the bus or other mass transit and having the luxury of owning your own car. You do realise that the government doesn't buy you a car, right?
I have used dialup quite receantly and my conclusion stands: It is adiquate for access to the Internet. This may change in the future, but right now broad band is a luxury, not a necessity. I love my high speed DSL line and the easy with which it provides me, however I don't kid myself for a second into thinking it's essential to me, even though I work in IT. I have gotten along with a modem just fine during outages and when I've been waiting for service, I can do so again should I need to.
We are not, at this point, a socialism or communism, it is not the government's responsibility to provide everything to all people. We do need to ensure essential service availibility, but I hardly think you can put broadband in that category. I know a great many people to whom broadband is available that elect not to get it because they see no compelling reason.
Forget that red herring argument that compares us to Asian countries, and blames our inferiority on our lower population density. The fact is, we look just as backward next to Canada and Scandinavia, with their even lower densities. And I am talking about price and quality of service, not just its mere existence. [Anyone care to compare the US with Australia & New Zealand?] Those are the countries to compare with.
So forget about population density in Korea & Taiwan. As long as incompetence and overpricing still mean money in the pocket for American corporations, that is exactly what we will get from our beloved system.
While you are talking about the author's silliness with respect to Nunavut, I would like to add a third point:
:-)
How can anything border Greenland?
I think I smell geographic incompetence, technical details aside.
So, before broadband into the home, everyone in the world was employed washing dishes?
It will coem as a suprise to you kiddies, but most of the people who developed the fundamentals of the tools you are talking about did it without a computer at home at all.
This kind of argument used to come up about use of computers in schools. People claiming to be from the real world arguing that the important thing was to teach kids to do trivial things with this week's version of Word and Excel, rather than to educate them about IT and the issues it would raise for them in their adult life. The result has been even more time wasted in schools on things which could be picekd up in the first day on the job by anyone worth employing in the first place.
These novelty applications (Word, Web chatting, I'm sure there is a drive to teach iPod operation in schools now, whatever) are not imporant. What underlies them is. If you have the choice of where to spend limited money on a kid between broadband and education, pick education. They will find porn some other way. Same priorities need to be applied with public money.
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
When I learned assembly language in 1981 on an Apple ][+, the only alternative was BASIC, and none of us kiddies had a PC at home yet. But that was the state of the art, as lofty and exotic as typing hexadecimal into a command line might have seemed in comparison to the entertainment mainstay, the 8-track cassette. But those of us who got to hack out our own version of Pac-Man, or just load "Apple Panic" from cassette as our way of learning the ropes on this new device, got a head start on careers featuring computers, either in tech, or just power users in business. While the mere 8-track jockeys have placed less highly. Many of the successful people I've met in the last 10 years got "computer literacy" exposure like mine, while many of the less successful, but no less bright, got only slide rule and scientific calculator "literacy" at that time. Getting kids to create their own identities as "cutting edge" tech users sets them on that course for life, demanding access and exercising power with comfort. Whether it's 8-bit PCs, or broadband. Today broadband experience increases earning power, and tomorrow some even more exotic technology will be required to introduce kids to themselves as future experts - maybe virtual reality, maybe artificial intelligence, whatever today's "computer kids" come up with when they are driving the world in 10-20 years. This is not a choice between broadband and education, especially as broadband enhances and makes less expensive a quality education. Broadband enables an unprecedented level of access to education (and to educators, and to students) with which these kids will have to compete, now that many kids are getting it elsewhere. Broadband *is* education for kids, and those who don't get broadband experience are getting an inferior education. Since we aging fogeys depend on them for our engine of growth, therefore survival, we're obligated to ensure they get enough to allow them, and us, to compete and survive.
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make install -not war