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:It's all percentage versus real numbers

[Qzukk]

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.

Show me the website of someone offering 24MB/1MB DSL in New York. This guy gets that in Tokyo. Show me the website of a company providing VDSL to a New York apartment for $50 a month like you can get in South Korea.

I'm sure its nothing to fret about, after all 11th place is respectable for a country that didn't even bother to show up.

Re:It's all percentage versus real numbers

[Rakishi]

You need to keep something in mind about Japan: they are only ahead now because they started late. They didn't have to deal with incremental technologies and just put in the newest best thing. The US however invested heavily in slower broadband technologies so that they had more broadband for longer. As such any differences between Japan and the US are bound to even out soon as the US upgrades its internet access (fiber for example) and as Japan starts to no longer have the "best" technology.

Re:It's all percentage versus real numbers

[ivan256]

This is nothing to fret about. ... US of A is just a pretty big country to have anything decent in terms of % numbers.

Since when does something being hard give you an excuse to do a crappy job at it?

Plus, as others have pointed out in this thread, they percentage of Americans how live in Urban areas is about the same as that of Canada, yet the Canadians managed the #3 spot... Not only that, but in Seoul, people have tens of megabits of throughut. I don't know about you, but I live in a fairly urban part of the US, and I'm stuck with the same 768k upstream I had back in '96. It costs me $100 too. It's time we start asking the companies that we give publically granted monopolies to why they should be allowed to have such insane profit margins when they're not keeping us on the cutting edge of technology. They have the funds to build with, and they have that money because we give it to them. Either they should choose to do something with the monopolies the public has so gratiously granted them, or we should take them away and give them to companies that will.

Re:It's all percentage versus real numbers

[niXcamiC]

The United States is losing to the countries with high population density

Yep, good old Canada, weve got a real high pop density here...

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?

Re:Complete BS

[coopaq]

And what about Bush fixing the digital divide?

Depends on your definition of "fix":

Fix, as in give everyone broadband or fix, as in create disparity.

fix: v. fixed, fixing, fixes

1.) To place securely; make stable or firm.

2.) To influence the outcome or actions of by improper or unlawful means.

Re:Complete BS

[ugmoe]

And what about Bush fixing the digital divide?

He's being held back by Al Gore patent on the internet.

FCC

[Detritus]

Do they mean 'serviced', as in 'our cow was serviced by the bull'?

Re:FCC

[temojen]

They do if they're talking about Telus.

It's not a right

[Dancin_Santa]

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.

Re:It's not a right

[overbom]

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.

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

[remahl]

If it isn't a right, then it at least should be.

Parts of Sweden are very sparsely populated, and yet broadband access is widely available. 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.

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.

Re:It's not a right

[YrWrstNtmr]

If it isn't a right, then it at least should be.

Bah. Pretty much every home has an internet pipe. The phone line. Where is the compelling need for govt mandated (and taxpayer funded) broadband?

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.

Unless this is a different planet, the Swedish government makes just as much money as every other government. Exactly zero. They get it from taxes. So the only way for the 'government to cover the cost' is to have the taxpayers pay for it. Citizens in the US have not come to the point of a) requirng the government to fund this, and b) providing those funds.

Access to communications _should_ be a human right,

This is just faster access to communication(Internet), not the complete lack of it.
If the argument was 'most homes in the US have zero access to the Internet', I'd look at this differently. But that is not the case.

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.

Re:It's not a right

[tsotha]

If it isn't a right, then it at least should be

Why? Dialup is available throughout the entire country. While it's more convenient to surf the web at broadband speeds, this isn't a food/shelter issue.

The reality is you choose where you want to live in the US if you're a citizen. If you live somewhere without broadband, and it's important to you, then move. There are lots of reasons to live in "the country" - infrastructure isn't one of them.

If broadband is a right for country people, when do I get my cheap land in the San Francisco bay area. Shouldn't that be a right too? How about crystal-clear air and "peace and quiet"?

Bah.

Re:It's not a right

[Doug Dante]

"Access to communications _should_ be a human right, just like the right to education (article 26, Universal Declaration of Human Rights)"

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!?

Re:It's not a right

[Mad Marlin]

If it isn't a right, then it at least should be.

There are two entirely different things, and people often get them confused: rights and entitlements. Rights are things like the right to bear arms, the right to practice any (or no) religion, and so forth. Entitlements are things that the government should give somebody, such as cheese to poor people.

Access to communications _should_ be a human right, just like the right to education (article 26, Universal Declaration of Human Rights).

The freedom to communicate is a God-given human right, not the freedom to have cheap or easy access to all possible communications methods. I only have access to a high-speed connection when I am at the university, and only a modem connection at home, but I don't believe my rights are being violated by this. And as for the UDHR, it routinely tries to pass off entitlements as if they were rights just like this, and the worst part of it all is found in Article 29 Section 3:

These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

My translation of what the U.N. is really saying here: "You should have all of these freedoms, and all of this stuff we list, unless it becomes inconvienent for us, in which case you can all suck our dicks and pretend to like it." The PATRIOT Act is nothing compared to that one line. It is equivalent to replacing Amendment IX of the U.S. Constitution, which currently says:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

with

The rights and freedoms enumerated in the Constitution may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United States.

USA #1

[Doc Ruby]

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?

Re:USA #1

[Dun Malg]

Just because it's easier for Seoul to get its citizens on broadband doesn't make it any less a competitive threat.

I'm not sure getting broadband to every Bubba in the woods, Jebediah on his farm, and Kaczynski in his mountain shack is relevant to competition. The fact that the US has vast swathes of nearly empty countryside means that they'll have a greater percentage of "disconnected" areas. The fact that there's no great competitive loss as a result is overlooked. A proper comparison would be per-capita broadband connections sub-divided into categories based on population density.

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.

Re:USA #1

[Marxist Hacker 42]

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.

Re:USA #1

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"2.) American predominance? Don't look now, but English will be surpassed as the most widely used language on the net in less than two years - or sooner."

By what? According to whose statistics? The #2 language used by Google users is German, and it's not going to be overtaking English anytime soon.

"I lived in Seoul for the last 4 years, and enjoyed it when they upgraded me from ADSL to VDSL, no charge, just to free up space in the lower speed catagories."

You want to know why that doesn't happen in the US?

No one knows what the hell VDSL is. No one knows what bandwidth is. Americans pride themselves in being poorly informed. We spend $50 on T-Shirts. We spend $20,000 on POS GM vehicles and don't demand better quality.

That's the difference. Americans want something that is "good enough". That's why you're never going to see the same kind of high-tech gadgets here that you see in Asia. There's simply no market for them.

The technology is there. DOCSIS 2.0 is 45mbit. We could have that bandwidth *tomorrow* if the cable company would reflash our modems. Why don't we? Because customers don't demand more bandwidth. They don't demand more because 3mbps is fast enough for most activities. Most people aren't downloading ISOs on a regular basis. Most people aren't downloading movies, despite what the MPAA would have you believe.

That's why dial-up is so popular. Millions of people see little reason to switch to broadband. Hell, if we can't get them to switch away from AOL, what makes you think that they would switch to broadband.

Right now, the US is at a critical stage: complacency. We're fat, dumb, and happy. We want to keep it that way, so we don't rock the boat. We resist change.

Unfortunately, that will be our downfall.

Re:USA #1

[WebCrapper]

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?

Re:USA #1

[Doc Ruby]

Predominance isn't "king"; there is not "king of the Internet", except maybe Kibo. If eBay doesn't change their page to Chinese, Chinese people won't buy the most junk off eBay. With 1-2B Chinese people, they only have to be able to buy 15% the junk Americans do, per capita, to get eBay to change. More likely, though, is a Chinese auction site that eclipses eBay's transactions and profit - unless eBay changes.

Re:USA #1

[Paua Fritter]

Regarding the US dollar and English, I take your point, which is only natural.

But I assure you that when the US dollar crashes and the Euro becomes the major online currency :-) 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.

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 ... 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 :-)

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.

Eh, some areas you'll never manage to cover..

[t_allardyce]

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!

Broadband

[Michael Hunt]

At least in America there is /CHOICE/ in the affordable broadband market sector.

In .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).

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.

Michael Powell

[killermookie]

Michael Powell isn't terribly concerned. "Better data is needed," Powell admits. "But the data we have is still valuable." Who most benefits from the "value" of that data is the billion dollar question.

Has Michael Powell really become this useless?

Most "broadband" in USA isn't really that broad

[Spy Handler]

I pay $30 a month for SBC Yahoo! DSL that gives me 320 kb/s both ways. That means I get 40 kbytes/sec max on downloads. It's kind of a stretch to call that BROADband.

For about the same price, in Korea they give you 10mb/s both ways. Orders of magnitudes faster.

Re:Most "broadband" in USA isn't really that broad

[Cramer]

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)

Bah...

[FroMan]

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.

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:Garbage?

[PitaBred]

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'

Re:Garbage?

[DrKyle]

In 2000, 79% of the US population lived in urban areas, the 2001 Canadian census lists 79.7% there is hardly any difference there and yet claims about "Oh, but Canada lives closer to the border" still persist. Urban vs Rural is NOT the big issue. The big issue is GREED by companies and COMPLACENCY of the population to bend over on issues such as this.

Re:Sure, but the percentage difference is staggeri

[YrWrstNtmr]

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."

Well duh

[stratjakt]

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.

Re:"Companies relucant to run business at a loss"

[JustOK]

Heaven forbid they use some of their "profits" from high density areas

Re:Sure, but the percentage difference is staggeri

[srw]

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]

Shallow article

[El Cabri]

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.

Coverage in the US is kinda crazy..

[EvilStein]

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.

DSl Coverage

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Landmass myth

[lelitsch]

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.

However, with extremely few excpetions

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Agreed AU ISP is a pain.

[Michael Hunt]

I'll add my $A0.02 worth of support for Westnet; I have been a customer of theirs since June 04 and have not had a single minute of downtime that has been caused by anything other than my screwups (and the shit power in our rental place.)

I pay $A109.95 a month for 512/512 DSL with 30GB of included data, and $A10/GB additional to that (although the 30GB is only for transit data, not data received via a second tier IX such as Pipe or VIX, so it's very hard to move 30GB in a month on a 512K line in any event).

I helped skew the numbers

[David E. Smith]

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.)