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

Complete BS

[Bruha]

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?

Garbage?

[DrKyle]

From TFA:

Canada, in third place, falls into the second category. Nearly everyone chooses to live close to cities like Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Ottawa along the not-quite-as-cold southern border. A Canadian province bordering Greenland called Nunavut is larger than Alaska, but its entire population would fit in a football stadium with room to spare.

Is this guy as dumb as his reasoning makes him sound? There are MILLIONS of Canadians who live 3+ hours away from the US border. How come those people have access to high speed internet if they want it? How come I've had high speed in my house for 5 years and I live in a town of 15k people about 6 hours from the border driving 130km/h? And what the hell is the point of his last little rant about Nunavut? (1) It's a territory, not a province. (2) He doesn't mention anything about their internet usage which makes it completely irrelevent to TFA! I think that yes, it might be hard to get Ma and Pa DSL at Green Acres, but do they even want it? It sounds to me that the whole "we've got so many rural people it's impossible to get good service" is just an excuse put out by those marketing geniuses who also make claims like "They don't want/need it anyways."

Re:It's not a right

[tanguyr]

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).

Re:It's not a right

[Xabraxas]

The government decided a few years ago that Internet access was important and that appropriate funding should be provided to remote municipalities with low population densities. Since private companies did not find it attractive to build high-speed connections to remote places, the government and municipalities agreed to cover part of the cost.

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.