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

[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.

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?

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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

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?

[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.