Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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?
My hope is for something like wireless mesh networks on top of grain elevators for the rural farming areas... you can see them for miles.
wide area wimax networks offer a lot of hope for connecting rural areas. A department (think county) in France has already started rolling it out (sorry, in French).
#!/usr/bin/english
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!!!!
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.
Why hasn't anybody jumped into the area with mesh-based WiFi? Seems to me given the relatively short distance to areas of the city that DO have broadband, it would be a natural.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
That will never happen in the US as long as a republican is in office. You can't offer up that kind of idea in the US without being called a socialist. The odd thing about this is that the very people that this kind of thing would help (the red staters) support bush and the republicans.
Access to communications _should_ be a human right, just like the right to education (article 26, Universal Declaration of Human Rights). Private enterprise cannot be trusted or expected to cover human rights -- infrastructure in particular should be provided by public organisations.
I totally agree. In fact I once expressed the idea that people should have a right to the internet and that the government should support initiatives to broaden access, and I was shouted down and called a communist. I still don't understand why people in this country fight against themselves.
Time makes more converts than reason
In the province of BC, you can be in a community of 2.6 million or 2.6 thousand and chances are you can get broadband access. Communities which are located over a vast strait are able to get wireless access despite the largest communities only made up of a few hundred people.
That map of Canada is very misleading. It implies that many Canadians live in Alberta and Sasketchewan. Alberta only has 10% of the total population of Canada. Sasketchewan is worse. The map implies that BC hardly has anyone at all, despite having more people than Alberta and Sasketchewan combined.
I can agree with this. Most people just don't care about bandwidth (ok, outside of Slashdot). I'm in Germany and my parents have 4 times as much bandwidth as I do and don't use 1/8th of it.
Not to change subjects - in Europe, there are cars that have 27 horsepower, but they can go several hundred miles on about 8 gallons of fuel. In the US, we have 500 horsepower cars that can travel gas station to gas station. With all the crying over gas prices, people also don't understand that Diesel is the way to go as well... Its something that isn't well known (other than people that think its only for trucks), but its better.
Back to bandwidth, unless you're around a large group that demands higher bandwidth, you're not going to get it. Think about the way business works. The same product sold over and over, costs less in the long run. Upgrading costs money and you reinvent the wheel, creating a new environment you'll need to upgrade (think Microsoft here...). If people are mainly paying for the same thing, day after day, why should these companies update their systems for a few screamers mixed into the masses of idiots?
South Carolina's voters recently refused to change the segrationist language in their state constitution specifically because it might create a right to a public education.
If they're that concerned that they don't want to pay for kids to get a good education, what makes you think that they're going to pay for them to get broadband!?
The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people.
Regarding the US dollar and English, I take your point, which is only natural.
:-) the conversion will not be a big issue for American consumers (though actually being able to afford to buy stuff may be a different matter of course). I have often bought things over the web in US dollars, using a New Zealand credit card, and it was transparently converted to NZ dollars at a reasonable exchange rate ... no problem at all.
... it seems to me that more foreign news would be a big step up, even if it were all of it lies. At least it would be different, and as you suggest, even reports on the US would provide you with a different perspective. You can learn a lot even from lies. If you only see US lies you will know a lot less than if you see foreign lies too :-)
But I assure you that when the US dollar crashes and the Euro becomes the major online currency
Also, I wouldn't worry about English dying out on the web. There's a lot of material in Chinese on the web today, and it's increasiny very rapidly, but does it get in your way? No of course not. I don't think many website publishers will be thinking "I'm not going to publish this website in English any more, it's going to have to be all in Chinese instead". If there's more Chinese content online that doesn't mean that English speakers will be served any less well.
But news on the other hand
I spent a couple of months in the US a few years ago and was amazed and appalled at the mass media's lack of coverage of the rest of the world, and on the pro-US-business bias, and even worse, the sheer narrow parochialism of the TV networks who seemed interested in events in the rest of the world only to the extent that they affect the US.
Don't take this as a personal criticism, but as a criticism of the US media/establishment. I think American citizens actually have a lot to gain from "their" media being pushed into second or third place.