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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.'"
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'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
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."
Typical FCC lawyerspeak bullshit. Not unlike the FCC's fiction of how many households can get over-the-air DTV.
And what about Bush fixing the digital divide?
Yup. He'll take care of that, just like he's taken care of the environment, education, security and the economy...
Heaven forbid they use some of their "profits" from high density areas
rewriting history since 2109
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]
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.
Because you live in a TOWN of 15k. That's non-trivial, and it'd be worth stringing a data line out to. However, we're talking about RURAL US. Many people in the rural areas of the US live in the middle of nowhere relatively, miles from their nearest neighbor, and it's not worth it to string out expensive fiber to where it'll serve less than 100 or so people. Even some suburbs are barely worth putting in the infrastructure necessary to support them.
His logic is spot on. You don't seem to understand 'rural'
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
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.
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.
And what about Bush fixing the digital divide?
Aparently you did not take any econ classes let me show you why this is DUMB. It sounds nice and fuzzy and awsome. But guess what MOST gov progs do not run very well. Look no further than one of the longest running ones social security. It all but bankrupt, some would say it is. BTW the most logical place this 'program' you propose would end up...
Poof everyone has a internet connection. OH and poof everyone has a computer. OH AND POOF their electricity is paid for the computer. So for about 20-50 a month the goverment is paying each 'deserving' household. OH AND POOF new gov agency to take care of all this.
Lets just say 2 million households qualify for this nifty deal. 20*2mil is 40million dollars. I can think a few better places in the goverment to spend that money... OH and thats PER month. so 40*12 is 480 million a year.
Now here is the neat bit. You would end up raising internet prices. Yes RAISING THEM. As demand would go up so would prices simple econ 101. So what was 20 last year is now 22 this year and 25 the next. See the pattern?
This is the land of opportunity not the land of free handouts... The people who do not have it may not WANT it. But that never occured to you did it? Or perhaps they are a TAD more worried about where the next meal is coming from than if they can surf slashdot...
Prove to me that this is a good thing and I will sell it. But so far all I see are negitives. Other than a nice warm and fuzzy giving people the ability to surf porno at home...
And my next prediction of your bitch about bush is that he has a 'deficet' CRAP like this MAKES a deficet a reality.
Because broadband applications and business, like e-teaching, or anything with video, CANNOT assume that most people have Internet. Just like it is common to assume everyone has (access to) phone, in heavily broadband countries, it will be common to assume everyone as broadband ("Support: hmm... you have a problem with the application? Ok, I'll give you the URL to download the content of the last DVD"). VOD could also become the norm.
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.
Well, it contains the letters D-S-L, so it must be broadband. *shakes head* Bellsouth even lists ISDN as DSL -- that's the only place I can find any mention of ISDN anymore, and even then, the pages are about a decade old.
IDSL (144k) is not broadband; even bonded IDSL (max 576k) isn't broadband. ADSL/SDSL is not always broadband either -- ranging from 160k to around 7M. (down anyway)
For the modern world (read: the world we live in right now), dialup is just too damned slow to get anything done. I've had ISDN (64k and 128k) since 1997, but switched to cable over a year ago because ISDN was just too slow. (and DSL wasn't available this far away from the CO)