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.'"

Comments

It's all percentage versus real numbers

[prostoalex]

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.

Re:USA #1

[Doc Ruby]

I just came from a City Council hearing in Brooklyn. People testified how the remaining industrial areas in Red Hook and the Navy Yard, full of entrepreneurs and 20th Century infrastructure in downtown Brooklyn, can't get broadband (DSL, cablemodem, fiber) because Verizon's monopoly keeps them lazily fat on just the lowhanging fruit elsewhere in NYC. They have made the investments themselves, forgoing economies of scale in pulling their own fiber, and bringing years of political pressure to bear in producing a single fiber for 4,000 small businesses to finally buy T1s. As a result, all those communities are now customers for broadband services, able to afford the bills after the resulting economic growth. The surrounding residential communities will see even bigger effects years later, as children raised there now can grow up with broadband experience that increases their earning power (and takes them to richer neighborhoods without those problems).

Universal service gaps don't refer just to "dead weight". The threshold for ROI by monopoly telcos is too high to serve even many urban neighborhoods with otherwise very high productivity and consumer potential. None of the excuses about density or infrastructure are the truth, as belied by the experience in NYC. If it's true here, the media capital of the world, it's certainly true in other aggregated communities which could potentially rival it if they were properly connected.