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America's Not So Up to Speed
indiejade writes "According to The Broadband Life, the U.S. has quite a way to go before catching up to countries such as South Korea, Japan and even Canada when it comes to percentage of the population enjoying high-speed internet access. 'In 2000, the U.S. ranked third in Net users connecting at high-speed among the top-30 world economies. The next year it fell to fourth. Now it's 11th,' the article said." Commentary on this is also available at Foreign Affairs and The New York Times.
While much of Canada's population does lie within 100 miles of the US border, that says nothing about why Canada's broadband infrastructure has been ahead of the States in recent years.
Where I'm from (Halifax, Nova Scotia), we've had residential broadband access in some form or another since as far back as 1995 or 1996. Much of rural Nova Scotia and PEI have broadband access. The greatest thing about it all is that the prices are relatively reasonable, around $40CAN per month, with varying degrees of speed/accessibility
On the other hand, there isn't a whole lot of "wasteland" to fill between towns, meaning that setting up so many additional connections will always yield a decent increase in subscriber base.
This kind of article shows up every now and then, doesn't it? Oh well. It's not Canada's fault that there's just SO MUCH MORE UNITED STATES to cover.
the majority of Canadia's population is settled within 100 miles or so of the US border
Every time the topic of poor broadband availability in the US comes up, this fallacy is repeated. Yes, the majority of the Canadian population is near the US border, but broadband penetration goes much further. I live roughly 500 miles north of the US border, and a 5 hour drive from the nearest city of over 50,000 people -- yet I have my choice of broadband internet providers -- and at competitive prices. For $20/month Canadian (about $15 US), I get 170 KB down and 60 KB up (bytes not bits). The whole argument is bullocks.
Be relentless!
Uh, Japan and Canada consistantly both have a higher standard of living than the United States of America: Read all about it.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
"In Canada internet access seems to be treated like any other public utility, broadband is easy to access, and it is priced affordably."
Bollocks. I paid 72% of my gross in taxes last fiscal year. That is why we have $20 broadband and 'free' healthcare. It is not magic and fairies.
It's actually the great distances that are between major Canadian cities that causes Canada to be a leader in communications globally. One of the major things that we've had to do as a country is to enable communication and cultural solidarity across sparsely populated areas. Innovation in the communication sector is something that has always been an important issue to Canadians, and to the Canadian Government. The mandate of Industry Canada is to help make Canadians more productive and competitive in the knowledge-based economy. Broadband being cheap and everywhere is a bit part of that, and has been for a decade.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
Aye, but the government in Canada paid for the backbone to be put across the country. Different from the states where such things are done by corporate interests. A consortium of business, educational, and governmental interests worked on the project which brought about the world's first national optical Internet research and education network. This has blossomed into CA*net4, which is our current backbone.
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Government interest in broadening communications abilities in Canada has always been viewed as culturally and economically important. A country laid out as we are couldn't possibly survive or thrive without such an interest. Canada paid a lot of attention to the establishment of the national telephone network, a great deal of funding is pumped into the cbc to guarantee that every community has access to it, and now
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
It's that simple. The cheapest I can get DSL in my area is roughly $45, and that's slow stuff that I wouldn't even want to try to game on. Cable is no better costing $50+ through comca$t, whom I don't trust. In many areas the choice is limited, so they charge like crazy.
What makes me the angriest is that our wonderful Pennsylvania state house voted against townships operating wireless networks. The telecoms even tried to get public support for it, bundling it with bills that would give stuff to schools, then having the audacity to make commercials urging them to call their representives to support it. They also gave verizon 6 billion to bring high speed more places. Verizon being true to their ma' bell heritage promply took the money and did nothing. So it's no wonder that Pa is 50th on the list (last time I saw it) for broadband. Our elected state leaders are so bad, they jam their voting buttons (no roll call) so they can take the day off and still get their wage, plus food and transportation costs.
Pennsylvania: First to vote with electric buttons (supposedly) yet still hasn't made it to the 21st century.
good grief
John 3:16 - The easiest way to a BETTER YOU.
This story seems to be nearly a dupe of yesterays. So I'll dupe the facts I looked up for that one:
t m
E / 2004002/tables/pdf/44_01.pdf
- d ist.html
_ 2_ sense_of_broadband.pdf
Canada, the US, and Korea are all about equally urbanized.
US, 2000 census: 79.2% urban population
Canada 2001: 79.6% (statistics canada)
Korea, 2000: 77% urban
Even better, the McKinsey quarterly uses telco stats to compute the "reach" of broadband, that is to say, the percentage of total households that can be equipped with broadband if they choose to pay for it:
Korea: 95%
US: 89%
Canada: 87%
The houses that actually purchase broadband:
Korea: 54%
US: 13%
Canada: 25%
In short, it isn't for lack of ability to provide the broadband. It's the price offered to the consumer. It's cheaper in Canada and much cheaper in Korea.
NB: Disposable income is lower in Canada and much lower in Korea. But the prices for broadband are that much lower again.
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/planning/census/cps2k.h
http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/82-221-XI
www.paulnoll.com/Korea/History/South-Korean-pop
http://www.dalfarra.ch/nds/zusatzdokumente/2003
Yeah. If I recall correctly, Saskatchewan is (or at least used to be) the province with the highest percentage of the population with high-speed, and is one of the provinces with the lowest population density. I mean, the population of Toronto is several times that of the entirety of Saskatchewan.
Dark Nexus
"Sanity is calming, but madness is more interesting."
You say that you're 5 hours away from a city with over 50,000 people in it. OK, how many towns of 5000 people are within 2.5 hours of you?
I'm not the person you were replying to but I know many small towns (Villages if you want to call them) that are wired. I can name 15 small towns with populations under 1000 that have broadband access up north (sitting hundreds of kilometers outside of the 401 corridor.)
The US has 80.3 percent urban population
Canada has 79.6 percent urban
People clump around cities, it's an industrialized nation thing.
As another note, here in Canada almost everyone has cable or satalite TV. We don't have the population density to get more then a couple of channels.
US stats - see p32
Canadian stats
Um... no.
You could get highspeed internet in a large number of rural communities throughout central BC for quite a while. even my mother-in-law can get it and she lives in a town with a population of 300 and is 30km from another town in either direction. Not exactly dense population there.
here in Holland it is in fact considered as such. We've already reached the point where broadband internet is named in the same breath as electricity, gas, water, cable-tv and telephone. And since pretty much every household has cable and a telephone line, they can pick between cable internet or some sort of DSL. Benefits of a small country I suppose(or us sitting right on top of the trans-atlantic link perhaps :P)
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
Yes, some do. For instance the former soviet republic Estonia has wifi everywhere.
t m
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3603943.s
(My Internet connection is a bit slow right now. I'm downloading a movie)
I tried to search for urbanization levels and found the following numbers on this UN report
except China & India, all the other listed countries have a better broadband penetration than USA (see here)
It seems that population density isn't the sole factor, as it is stated in the article.
#include "coucou.h"
You're lucky. In the U.S. they usually have to replace all the wire to the street. Sometimes they have to rewire an entire community of thousands of people that may be separated by more than a few kilometers. Furthermore, the phone company usually has to build one or more new CO's because the distance from these communities to the current CO are usually more than 6000m. Even at fifty bucks a month per subscriber, it still costs more to upgrade the infrastructure than would be provided by the few customers that would get broadband.
As TFAs point out, the problem isn't that providing broadband is unprofitable; but that it will eat into the profits of the phone companies (by allowing IP telephony) and cable companies (by allowing downloading or streaming of video content).
Phone and cable companies in the U.S. offer IP telephony packages, so the fear of VOIP eating into their profits is a myth. If anyone should be worried it's the VOIP providers.
So they're delaying installing broadband as long as they can get away with it, while doing everything to block other providers using their circuits.
The phone companies in the U.S. have been blocking CLECs using their circuits since before broadband. It's nothing new. They don't want to allow anyone else to use their infrastructure, simply because they spent millions of dollars to build that infrastructure.
The real problem is that the pricing war between the ILECs and RBOCs has lowered rates so much that the phone companies can't afford to build any more infrastructure. The last-mile infrastructure in the U.S. is in much need of improvement, but the cost of fixing it far outweighs what the phone companies are willing to pay for the meager revenue it would generate.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
The reason the article included Canada was to refute the claims of people like you.
"all these countries with a lower standard of living"
As others here have pointed out, that's just wrong.
"with far higher population density"
Have you been to Canada? Can you even find it on a map?
U.S.: 32.0 people/sq km
Canada: 3.6 people/sq km
And before you complain about it being in "sq km", I used population and areas stats from the CIA factbook which quoted area in "km".
"and enormous federal pork to build their broadband connections"
The federal government didn't kick in money to build our broadband services. It was done through regulation, existing infrastructure tax breaks and forced competition.
I'm glad most Americans aren't like you.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
USA is a technological backwater compared to all these countries with a lower standard of living
80% of Canadians have a higher standard of living than 80% of Americans. Only when you factor in the Bill Gateses do you end up with the misleading conclusion that the average American is somehow better off.
with far higher population density
This statement is misleading in the opposite way, as Canada has 1/9th the population in a larger area. However, Canada is more highly urbanized and the population centers are laid out in a linear fashion rather than a sprawling 2-D grid, so Canada is less expensive to interconnect.
Ok, well now it's dissection of the arguement by counterexample. I live in Alberta (Canada). It's a fairly big place (96% of the size of Texas, or 255,000 square miles or 660447 square kilometres, or 1 1/5 times as large as France). Not all of the population is within 100 miles. In fact, hardly any of the population (3.5 million) is within 100 miles of the U.S. Yet the Supernet Project (http://www.albertasupernet.ca/The+Project/) provides every town over 5000 people --there are 429 of them-- with fibre optic connected (155 Mb/s) internet. The U.S. has a much faster network in internet2 than the Canarie project here, but Supernet provides more 'small community' broadband than anywhere else (in the world). 'Even Canada' indeed!