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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.
I live just south of the border so I get to see how two different countries do it on a regular basis. In Canada internet access seems to be treated like any other public utility, broadband is easy to access, and it is priced affordably.
Compare to this part of the US where companies charge around $50 per month for broadband and act like they are doing us a major favor by only charging double what I pay for phone service or water and sewage on a monthly basis.
Are you dumb or just ignorant? Canada has 1/10th the population of the USA, but it is a huge country with an equal or better quality of life. As for where the people live, how does it matter if Canada's population is close to the US border or not? We don't get our high speed access from American companies, we get it from Canadian ones.
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.
Let's seriously compare the two countries here. Canadia has a population of about 32,805,041 (July 2005 estimations). The US has a population of about 295,734,134. The US population is over nine times larger than that of Canadia. So even 100% of Canadia's population had broadband access, it's still only be 11% of the US's population.
You're just dealing with much, much smaller populations here. Granted it is harder to wire Canadia than it is Japan even though Japan has a larger population.
Is there really that little money left over for society once the corporations have had their fill? Do they really have that much power that they can shut down municipal WiFi like I've read in previous slashdot articles? I'd hate to be a commie, but maybe corporations should be taxed more so that some of the money goes back to society. Not all redistribution of wealth by the government is evil.
In fact what's so bad about governments reigning in corporations anyways? What was really bad about communism/socialism was the rights violations. Freedom is important, and a fundamental American value. It's important to me too. But you guys need to get to a point where freedom is restrained when it affects other people's rights. For example, large corporations making it difficult for you guys to get broadband internet.
Canada has a population of 32,507,874. The United States has a population of 293,027,571. South Korea has a population of 48,598,175. (All according to Google.) Anything that compares by percentage of population is going to be biased towards small populations.
According to the article, 73% of South Korea has broadband at home. That comes out to 36,448,631 people.
12% of the population of the United States (that 37 million) with broadband access is still more than the 73% of South Korea that has broadband, put into perspective.
"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell.
The US has more people? You're kidding, right? /end sarcasm
This is by percentage. What it means is that for some reason the US is adopting broadband SLOWER than other nations.
All it means is that there is something that is preventing the adoption. It may be something as simple as the price is too high. Or it could be more complex, such as a societal attitude among those who don't adopt that the internet is just hype.
The point the GP was making is that the US has a higher percentage of it's population living in sparsely populated regions. It's relatively easy for Canada to bring a higher percentage of it's population broadband because a higher percentage of those folks live (relatively speaking) right next door to each other.
If 5 million Canadians moved out into the prairies, the population density of Canada would not change. But it be a lot tougher to bring them broadband.
Many of the large population centers in the U.S. have had residential broadband access since 1995 too.
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.
That's the problem. Everything ends up being relative, because of it. In the U.S. a large percentage of metropolitian areas have suburbs that extend hundreds of miles from the nearest city that fill up these wastelands. In other words, you have to wire millions of homes outwards from the city for hundreds of miles. This ends up not being cost effective even when there are literally thousands of customers who want broadband. The places that are easiest to wire with higher ability to pay are wired first, because that is cost effective. This means that millions of people don't have broadband.
Just for perspective, central New Jersey is directly in between New York City and and Philadelphia, two of the most populous areas in the U.S. New Jersey has a population of 10,000 people per square mile. However, there is still no broadband access to much of central, NJ. Why? Because it simply isn't cost effective to wire up a "small" subscriber base of 100,000 people.
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
I don't see how their could be a lower per capita cost for connecting people that are farther apart and less densely populated. Perhaps I'm missing something obvious, but it seems to me that smaller communities make for less money to be made by hooking them up to broadband. Running more cable costs more. Period.
The truth of the matter is that the Canadian government created the network infrastructure in Canada, rather than the corporations, who now use it to sell us our broadband and that's why it's cheaper to connect people here.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
You've really opened a can of worms. In essence, you've just asked "What's wrong with the US?" and you'll get a million different answers. :)
At any rate, my own personal spin is that we've managed to break our federal model of government. For example...
"Is there really that little money left over for society once the corporations have had their fill? Do they really have that much power that they can shut down municipal WiFi like I've read in previous slashdot articles?"
The problem maybe isn't so much that the corporations have so much power in state government, but that local governments and municipalities have so little. Even if the people in a city or a county were so in agreement with each other as to form a big enough chunk of the population to sway state policy, often they're gerrymandered into different districts and into obscurity in the name of creating single-party districts. Ultimately, the places that set up MuniWiFi are stuck with working through their own bunch of lobbyists. Even if the private interests don't have as much weight, they are better organized.
The same can be said about state-national relations. State policies can be trumped by the FCC for any reason whatsoever, but the states are rarely given a real voice to defend themselves. States can try to lobby Congress one way or the other, but there's only so much money they can spend on lobbying efforts without raising the ire of state taxpayers (though now I'm curious about what would happen if a state actually hired some big-name Washington lobbyist...).
The lack of communication between layers also means a lack of coordination in policies, which also helps to explain why municipalities are pushing one way while states are pushing in the opposite direction. It's not just voters watching those "Save Texas Broadband!" commercials on TV but also state legislators. And there's little reason for the state governments to listen a little more closely to municipalities when they all claim to represent the same people.
At any rate, that's my biased $0.02.
I watched a work crew dig a trench a couple miles down a local highway headed in my direction (w00t) and then I watched as they laid a pipe that was obviously a fiber conduit. The trench and conduit go a few miles down the highway and then stop. (not w00t) That was several years ago and they haven't done anything since.
I live in an area that is considered rural because it is isolated by terrain rather than distance from town. Hell, at night I can lights from houses on the ridge about a mile away and who live in "town" and who probably have all the broadband they can possible use.
My area is not even an option for any carrier of cable or DSL because there aren't enough people out there to justify the expense. I'm sure the minute one of the neighbors sells out to a subdivision there will be telco and cable trucks everywhere. Until then, I get 56k on a good day.
Opportunities multiply as they are seized. --Sun-Tzu
Every time one of these "US sucks at broadband" threads comes along there's the tired old argument that the United States is big and the people are spread all over... We just can't reach them all.
:
Pish-posh. In the months coming up to every war US'ians are heard saying, "yeah, we'll kick all their asses! Glass parking lot! We got teh tech!" But given a crack at wide broadband distribution the techies all cry, "wah, it's just too hard!"
Finally, after five years of rural broadband drought someone comes up with the simplistic idea of an antenna on a blimp. Whoa, geniuses they were. But wait... It was the Aussies that "invented" that. And as simple as the idea is and the area that it covers, five years after the idea WE STILL DON'T HAVE IT!
It could be done TOMORROW. You can make up your own excuses why it won't be.
I'll give you a start
Regulation
Capital distribution
Personally, I live 10 minutes from the 11th larges city in the US and couldn't get broadband (aside from that high-latency high-dollar satellite crap) until 2003. If the people in this country keep giving our turds to every other country on earth hoping that they'll polish it to our expectations... well, once again, make up your own excuses.
I don't think per-capita costs have anything to do with it. I live in a major US city that was once in the top 5 most connected cities in the world (according to some 199X survey). My current broadband options are Cable (>$40/mo), the baby bell offering (cheaper, but 384k/128k...strange definition of broad) or thrid-party DSL (Speakeasy, Earthlink, AOL, etc...more expensive).
By all accounts, I live in one of the most densly populated parts of the country...millions of people in only a few hundred square miles. Yet I would kill for the GP's DSL option. The fact is that the monopolies in the US (bells and cable providers) have prevented us from having the kind of internet access that the rest of the world enjoys. There are exceptions...in a smaller city about 80 miles from here, a friend of mine gets a full 100 base-T fiber connection, unmetered for roughly what I pay for 1.5m/384k. But overall, even Americans in densly populated areas are still getting screwed.
http://broadband.ic.gc.ca/pub/index.html?iin.la
Canadians believe in trying to smooth things out
a bit so that people are on as level a playing field
as possible, giving everybody a chance to succeed,
and for development to be spread out across
the country.
Americans (not all, probably not even most of the ones
on slashdot, but such a large number that it is a real problem) have a myopic fanaticism about cutting their taxes (to the point where their government can no longer provide even
basic services) and that awful neighbourhoods
are somehow natural. The leading cause
of personal bankrupcy in the US is getting sick.
Bad neighbourhoods happen because society
doesnt give a shit. Canada doesnt have any real slums
because we try to take care of everybody. Not
to the extreme point of communism but trying
to make sure people have a chance: free health care,
low cost education, low cost broadband, reasonable
social safety net.
The only people we do a pretty poor job with are
aboriginal peoples, because they live so far out
in the boonies that it is really hard to bring them
a reasonable standard of living, when it takes a 12-hour
plane ride to get them to the nearest hospital.
We try to level things out, were not fanatics about it,
but we do our level best.
Lower standard of living? Interesting assertion.
What's your prime metric? Percentage of encarcerated adults? Deaths due to firearms? Bankruptcy due to medical expenses?
It over simplifies it a lot, and actually makes it wrong. There's only 30 Million people in Canada, if we packed them the way Americans did, we'd all be in one state called california. With most of that being in Los Angeles. The fact that we have only 30 million people, allows our popluation to sit within 100km of the US border and still be sparsely populated. However, we do have less land to cover with wires and such, but there's also less of us to do the work.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
It's that simple.
Here's the big issue: the USA has so much old legacy communications infrastructure that the cost of upgrading it to support broadband Internet is exorbitantly expensive, especially in the older large metropolitan areas in the USA. And of course, because of the large rural population, most of them are out of the reach of DSL or cable broadband. It's essentially the so-called Last Mile Problem, something that's less of an issue in densely-populated Europe, Japan, and South Korea, where there are enough people per square kilometer to justify the exorbitant cost of setting up land-line broadband connections for everyone locally.
So how do we get around this problem? The answer is wide-scale wireless Internet access using 802.16/802.20 WiMax technologies, which will start rolling out in the USA in 2006. Unlike 802.11x WiFi technologies, WiMax can handle thousands of users per antenna array at essentially light of sight range at 2-4 Mbps data transfer speeds. It's vastly cheaper to put up an array of WiMax antennas than to hardware every business or residence to support DSL or cable broadband; this will also allow many rural communities to get broadband for the first time. I think WiMax will roll out by using the same antenna arrays used by cellphones, so already we'll have pretty substantial national coverage anyway.
I live in a major metropolitan area. Trying to get a reliable broadband connection to my house was hellish.
I wouldn't be quite so bitter if Verizon (formerly Bell Atlantic) hadn't gotten billions from the state of PA to be able to deliver 45Mbps upstream and downstream broadband to the door of a majority of the state. Ten years later, the Pennsylvania Utilities Commission let them off the hook on that agreement, and I still can't get a clean DSL connection to my damn house.
If a large company that was paid to deliver such services can't manage to do so to someone who lives in a nice area of a major metropolitan area, especially when given ten years to do so, then the problem isn't the size of the country. The problem is the lack of accountability and the ability to charge for services without delivering.
I should also add that to this day, Verizon keeps sending me ads saying I can get DSL to my house. They're more than happy to try and sign me up again. They just can't be bothered to actually deliver the service.
How about this, don't live in the suburbs. I live in NYC, and I can get broadband for about $30/month, and it's relatively fast (1.5 M/bit each way, roughly, for pretty much any of the options), available everywhere, and has very low latency.
Live in the suburbs, die by the suburbs. The real problem with the US is that we subsidize soccer moms paving over the forests to ahve their white picket fences. Then people bitch because they can't get superfast internet access 1000 miles from nowhere, and they complain that gas costs too much money. Isn't it the responsibility of the city folk to pay for their 100 mile long power lines, phone lines, roads, and the cheap gas to run their SUVs?
Move somewhere decent, and you'll have excellent broadband. Many of the apartment buildings in NYC (like the one I'm in right now) just buy their own DS3, and merge their signal onto the cable going to every apartment. Works quite well, it's the new trend I think. Even if that doesn't work for you, we have at least two providers of DSL, and probably two more of cable. $30 will get you quite a lot of bandwidth around here, even though everything else is quite expensive.
Also, NYC is expensive, but the wages are huge. Travel anywhere, and even when they charge you the ripoff tourist rates, it'll be cheap by comparison. Make 4 times the pay, pay 4 times the bills, save 4 times the money, and get vacations for the same price, not a bad deal.