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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.