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U.S. Broadband Access Falling Behind
EpochVII writes "FreePress recently released a report(PDF) detailing the woeful situation of U.S. broadband access. From the press release: 'By overstating broadband availability and portraying anti-competitive policies as good for consumers, the FCC is trying to erect a façade of success. But if the president's goal of universal, affordable high-speed Internet access by 2007 is to be achieved, policymakers in Washington must change course.'"
Ohh I see, I thought there was something on my monitor
Unpretentious Sydney reviews by unqualified Sydney reviewers
Yup - still looking for Wally - oops, WMD's
He said 'erect'.
Have the U.S. beat . . .
Where are our leaders? Oh, yeah...
Bought and paid for.
Australian Broadband is much worse...
I live 50 km from a major capital city and I cannot get broadband due to cost saving due to RIMs. It sucks royally.
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
comcast disease.. constant pingtime outs on irc and connection reset by peer, with random outages.
FW: WHITEHOUSE.GOV FROM TEXASPLAYSCHOOLRANCH.TX
Now listen here you com@#$@S=-ASDmies^h^h^h^h^h^hliberal media puppets, everything is just fine, on schedule, an@$#JJJ@#$J&_d we're even ahead of schedule on most points. Why even the white@#$((___house network, where I am communicating from now, is wired to mindblowing speeds. Have fa&@*(&(ith, America.
Yours,
G.
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
Why is it the role of the federal government to ensure cheap broadband by 2007? I'm much more comfortable with an array of choice from private sources. That's much less likely to lead to bad things like censorship and limits on free expression.
Hasn't this been known a long time now? And by long time I mean around seven years??? The US has pretty infrastructure, yet we aren't doing anything with it, and broadband remains ridiculously overpriced compared to the likes of Sweden, where synchronous 100Mbit/sec connections can be had for just few dozen kroner a month.
The real challenge is rural areas. Unless something spectacularly revolutionary happens, like somone launching a bunch of solar-powered autonomous blimps with WiMax transceivers onboard, anyone outside city areas is going to be left behind. I blame our government's lack of involvement in progressing the telecom industry here, such as a series of bad decisions by the FCC, and letting Verizon and Friends® hold the sword instead.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
The article takes issue with the FCC calling anything over 200 Kbps broadband.
/. readers) that's a pretty typical usage ratio.
Maybe I'm just alone in this, but I've always thought of pretty much anything faster than 56K dial-up as broadband.
Sure, 200 Kbps isn't super-fast, but it's certainly not dial-up.
Another issue they have is that a lot of "broadband" is upstream limited to as little as 128 Kbps and thus they don't think it should count.
While I decry providers who don't give people much upstream bandwidth, it's a bit much to claim something "isn't broadband" if it's say, 1.5 Meg down and 128 K up. For a lot of people (the less techy amongst us, not
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
*yawn* it's like america has ADD.
It also doesn't say that the government should build an interstate highway system, subsidize oil companies, or deliver the mail. Yet, here we are.
Actually Ben Franklin took care of the mail problem.
It was implied he'd live forever.
i'm an optimist. the market will grow to hit this goal. i think the only thing that can get that kind of market penetration (not government sponsored) would be over the only wire that goes to every damn home. broadband over power lines.
wow, wouldn't Google put themselves in a pretty little position if they were the company that could hit that goal, *and* could get the feds to throw in the cash to hit that 07 deadline?
heh heh. =)
And of course if not for the need to have a military infastructure, the highways would not be here.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
These countries were once behind the US in terms of broadband adoption, speed, availibility. That gap has almost disappeared - having worked in the industry for some time on both sides of the Atlantic, it is obvious that the US is falling behind. Take the price of a 6 MB DSL line with VOIP included in France - you can get the whole thing for $30 (~20 euro). In the US you are lucky to see $30 for the VOIP alone, and my total bill with a 4MB cable connection is over $70.
While they push on with triple-play products in Europe to include Video and bump speeds up to the 20MB range with ADSL 2+ Verizon are bumping people to 2MB.......
South Korea is a world leader in broadband penetration and they started from zero just s few years ago. They're government made it a vital policy to get broadband to everyone, and it worked. The US Government needs to wake up, something needs to be done - and quickly before the US becoes a comsumer digital backwater.....
https://comerford.net
You can't trick me into opening an acrobat file, what with the patch for 7.0.3 barely out, I know they must have more holes in there.
ISPs are addicted to their tight fisted, stingy ass pricing models
why the hell would they let go of that control ? bastards
when a cheaper, higher speed wireless or BoPL service starts causing lost customers,
then maybe we will see real competition
In combination with the recent deregulation of DSL , the less than feasable idea to track wifi phones what is a person supposed to think?
Pirate wireless anyone?
Remember the new talking points word for the day is "process" or at least it was yesterday to describe the Iraqui constitution... OK, I admmit, I just watched yesterdays' Daily Show on my DVR...
Residential and commercial access appear to be slowly but steadily improving. Despite the progress that the US has made, the future looks somewhat mixed.
I'm worried about College and University connections. Usage limits and even outright censorship are the norm on High School networks. I'd like to change this, but for now, it's just a fact of life. University networks, on the other hand, have been the most unrestricted and fast ways of getting online since the birth of the Internet. My old High School class is starting college right now, and I've talked to a few friends about their school's network access. The bandwidth is usually good, but a lot of connections are filtered, firewalled, or otherwise limited. All of them so far have been behind an IP masquerading device. End-to-end connectivity has been a core principle of the Internet, supported, for example, by the Internet Architecture Board. NAT is a detriment to the Public Internet. Is your school even providing "Internet" service if hosts on the Internet cannot initiate TCP connections with you? Asemetric data rates and private IP addresses could make the Internet just another TV network, a medium where passive users consume content that only big rich corporations can provide. Hopefully the demand for p2p will keep upload rates up, and more users will become technically competent enough to host other services. Let's keep the Internet democratic and egalitarian!
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
It's our fault for making the post faster.
Just remember the policy: If at first success is not obtained, redifine success.
As long as corporations dictate our governmental policy to dis-benefit the populace, you can see this trend continuing for sure. I don't always agree with Dvorak (maybe 25%, or slightly more, but disagree with his details and examples), but he's DEAD ON on this one. Check out the new PC world article he wrote about Philly's municipal broadband shut down.s p
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1843330,00.a
Our entire government should have been up against the wall and shot about 20 years ago. The fact it hasn't happened yet proves the negative effects of current medicine on the human mind. rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
"Process", as in (Latin) "towards the end". Marching to armageddon.
I thought today's new talking point was that Hastert is Qaeda.
--
make install -not war
It also doesn't say that the government should build an interstate highway system...or deliver the mail. Yet, here we are.
US Constitution
Article 1, Section 8
"Section 8. The Congress shall have power to...establish post offices and post roads;"
Research first, post later.
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
"I'm also waiting private libraries to replace those provided by the government."
When was the last time you hooked your PC up to a library, and gotten infected, spied upon, spammed, phised, commercialized, porned, and just general rudeness?
When the Internet actually lives up to it's promise? Then a society can justify taxing everyone (rich and poor) to pay for it. Presently it's mostly for a bunch of spoiled, staying at home, "we don't pay for our entertainment", "we're bored. society should fund our pipeline to slashdot" geeks, who are presently waiting for their outsourced jobs to come back.
The fact that Australia is only a couple of percentage points behind given that it has a far lower population density AND has a monopolostic telecomunications carrier should be a worry. Most of Australia does not have access to cable television (only in upper middle class suburbs or better), hence most Aussies only have ADSL if Telstra has bothered to make it available.
Da ZombieEngineer
50Mbps/3Mbps ADSL .... $35/month ... $55/month
100Mbps FTTH
Compression of text is great, but it's really not the majority of data flowing over the net. Most of the data transfer lies movies, audio, binaries, and other such "real file" sources. Things like executables, distros, and data backups don't compress real well.
On the audio and movies, if you don't care about quality, sure, compress it to a small lump. I had that kind of experience at dialup, and is one of the reasons I made the jump to DSL.
I'm not trolling. These are fair and honest questions. The Net is a great informational tool, but are that many people unhappy with their bandwidth? Is broadband *that* important for enough people that this should be considered a crisis?
Where's the next revolution here? Is there one? Content delivery? Whoopee. How's that improve my day to day life? How does that make the mundane drudgery of existence smoother.
Someone compared us to South Korea. If you can't see the problem with that comparison, I mean, geez... (hint: population density) But still, are the Koreans experiencing some sort of magical Vinge singularity?
Or is it just more fucking plastic gadgets?
It *still* doesn't say that the government should build an interstate highway or deliver the mail.
It says they *can* open post offices.. which half answers the second half. Nowhere does it say they *should*. (I'd also dispute that the government opening post offices is the same as them delivering the mail.. in fact I'd rather they didn't, as I wouldn't trust them not to be reading it).
You can compress html pages.. Try reading about the apache module mod_deflate. Gzip works fine.h tml
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_deflate.
If you viewed the source of google and their css files you will see that they even remove the whitespace and rename javascript variables to be shorter.
I would also argue that most bandwidth usage is not on text (html, css, xml or whatever). But most bandwidth is used for images, archives, video and audio. JPEG, GZ, DIVX, MP3 are all efficient.
CSS will streamline webpages much more by sending formating instruction ONE TIME, and by allowing the resulting HTML to be far leaner (one tag replaces dozens of or s used for formatting).
Hmmmm. Let's see. The Internet was designed for binaries.
Wrong.
It was designed for 7-bit data. ASCII.
Movies? Not designed for it. MP3's? Not designed for it. Security? Not designed for it.
It's nice to download distros, blobs of all kinds, etc. No argument there. But how much of that distro do you really use? Hardly any of it. You get it all because you think you need it. You can get easy downloads of Knoppix and tight Gentoos that aren't the same ISO burn blob represented by the fat ones.
I have a great TV for movies. A fine stereo and an iPod. Mucho gigs of iTunes hanging on my local media server.
When you drag these bowling balls through the garden hose of the Internet, it makes you dream. And jealous of those with fat pipes. The economics of the last mile sucks, and it always has, and it always will. My mother and my aunts have no need for the Internet in any way, let alone a fat pipe. They still use pen and paper mail. Once in a while, they'll come over and check their email, but they don't have to live, sucked into Internet time. They don't make a living from the 'Net. I do, and it suits me to buy a fat pipe. Others need it, too. Move where the pipes are, if you simply must have them. Otherwise don't be deluded by a perceived lack of quality of life because I still say that the control messaging infrastructure, and most of this page, is superfluous, uncompressed nonsense.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
It's called mod_gzip. Maybe you've heard of it.
- Dynamic HTML is fatter still, including the page you're reading
Slashdot? Dynamic HTML? Umm.... You really have no clue what dynamic HTML is, do you? Here's a tip: Dynamic HTML is not forms, or server-side-generated pages. It usually involves a little JavaScript and something called the Document Object Model.
- CSS simply adds to the problem by oversending code/data
So instead of loading style.css once per site, and keeping it in cache, and defining per-tag styles and, when that's not enough, using neat short little class="" attributes... we should instead use big ugly tags on everything? And tables and images for layout, I suppose?
- XML is another bucket of overkill; every page sends a new schema, and a bunch of unneeded, duplicate info
Umm, I'm not about to call XML a 'compact' file format (until you pipe it through gzip or something) but do you really have any idea how XML is typically used in Internet applications? I'm interested to know how you think the XML page sends a schema in a neat little HTTP attachment or something.
The idea of using more compression in more places isn't a terribly bad idea, you just don't seem to have a particularly good grasp on the reality. It's in decently widespread use already.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Fewer machines on faster connections -> fewer idiots clogging up the network with zombies.
I always wondered if W3C or someone could release a set of "standard" CSS files, and people could code to that standard set which would be on the user's machine.
Sure, these data formats may be inefficient (although HTML and XML compress nicely, and good use of CSS can dramatically slim down pages). But efficiency costs. The solutions to your problems will therefore act as a barrier to access to those who can't afford it, among both content producers and software developers.
Take RSS and Atom. Anyone can install open source blogging software and produce a syndication feed. If we replace that with a more sophisticated protocol (which is often proposed) then folks with low-end web hosting won't be able to syndicate. Your friendly neighborhood open source developers might find the new spec too complex and simply not implement it in their (often PHP) apps; once they do get it working, the complex code is harder to maintain and improve.
Put another way: expensive broadband creates a digital divide in the audience. Fancy code creates a digital among producers. As with the impact of expensive production values on video games and movies, it would likely serve to squeeze out the creatives. It's the accessibility of the Web that keeps it from being just another mass medium.
You're right that some basic steps would help tremendously. I just read that less than 10% of feeds use gzip compression. The Apache guys put it in and no one else needs to know. But efficiency shouldn't rule. Optimization should come last, just as in programming.
s/page/comment/
I agree with the nonsense part, but I think Slashdot has mod_gzip running.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I recently moved from Tempe, AZ to Downtown Chandler, AZ, because I graduated college and now work at Intel (which is in Chandler). For those who haven't been to Phoenix, downtown Chandler is in the boonies. The area has only been seeing intense development over the past year or so (some roads are still two-lane farm roads, and they're only starting to widen them). I had a 1.5M down, 896k up DSL line when I used to live by ASU in Tempe. I get my service from Qwest. Ever since I moved here, I've been having connection issues with my Cisco dropping train and then refusing the retrain. They say that line attenuation is too high. It got better over the months, but it still does it again. I only found out about the attenuation when I tried to bump my speed up to 3Mbps. Distance from the central office has a lot to do with it as well. Apparently, it may become better over the next year as we get more subscribers to the service from this area of chandler. But it still sucks though.
So I guess how far you are away (for DSL, anyway) seems to matter, as does how many people subscribe (which will give them incentive to put in more optical fiber or whatever). But if prices aren't attractive, how many are going to subscribe?
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
The Web was designed for ASCII. The Internet was designed for nothing more specific than individual, arbitrarily sized bits and bytes. That includes blobs of stuff.
If all you care about is ASCII, then there is no bandwidth issue. So why bother turning on HTML source compression? It's a solution to a non-existent problem.
As you previously stated, the problem lies in trying to shove huge chunks of data through a small pipe. However, those huge chunks are essentially uncompressible.
If these huge chunks are desirable (clearly to you they are not) then a bigger pipe is the only solution.
At the same time, don't get me wrong: I don't agree with the article. Where should this bigger pipe come from? IMHO, let the market provide it. Bandwidth does cost money, and subsidizing it can't change that. It's not a fundamental right to have high speed. It's a luxury.
The Pres was working with information you are only now become aware of... Broadband was never *for your use*, like the highways and roads, it was for commerce (and military).
When gasoline hits $5.00/gallon and your heating bill goes through the roof, urban dweller or otherwise, your newspaper subscriptions, trips to the movie rental, delivery of paper by the postal service, movement of goods and services, trips to the parts store, or other movement will become extremely unbearable. Until we reinvent our country and work and transportation systems, once again, the US will need something, anything, to prop up the U.S. GDP. Bits on a wire, whatever product or service it is (say movie rentals, music, distance workers, whatever, can be taxable.
And, we have the Boomers to tax the hell out of until then - they are the ones with the money they want - the rest of us will suffocate.
Yes, it's well within the powers of the federal government to create and administer such programs at the national level. This may not jive with your utopian ideals, but there you have it.
If you've done any amount of coast-to-coast travel, then you know that coverage is spotty at best.
C|N>K
All retarded bureaucracies overstate their achievements - don't you read Dilbert?
More BS to inflate the numbers -- see above. Personally, I don't view anything slower than 768/256 as broadband.
Seeing as Japan's land is all densely populated, it won't cost much to run fiber, copper, or WiFi to everyone. The US has a much more dispersed population to reach.
People with little money to spare don't spend it on faster internet access, and companies are more willing to run broadband where it's economical. No duh - next?
Mmmm... don't even want to go there. As usual, Washington whores itself out to the biggest campaign donator. This will happen as long as money is considered a form of speech.
There is nothing anyone can do about having to cover a large expanse of rural areas. The only thing we can do is force corruption out of government and reign in the monopolies, allowing competition to benefit everyone. Until then, we will see broadband access intentionally mismanaged to benefit monopolies.
Exactly. Since I started using CSS my sites have become much smaller. One css file to cache for the pages, and a lot less html. A lot of the redundant data is pushed into your CSS file so you are not duplicating it in the html.
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
What is the problem?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Until there's even high speed (20+Mbit) Internet available in the big cities *at all*, for less then $5,000 a month, you can't say we're limited by land mass.
Right now, it doesn't matter where you live in the US. You can't get it. So until you can get these speeds in the highly populated areas you can't use the last mile arguement.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Though broadband is commonly misused as "high bandwidth", this is not what the term means.
;)
For example, most LAN switches are 10BaseT/100BaseTX -- not broadband technologies at all. Hence the term "10BaseT": 10 Mbps, baseband, twisted-pair.
So the article would be correct in taking issue with the FCC calling anything over 200 Kbps broadband, as that's simply not true.
Dynamic HTML is fatter still, including the page you're reading
/. in 'Light Mode'. The source looks pretty stripped down to me...
I'm reading
deus does not exist but if he does
Personally, I blame fat incompetent bastards at Verizon.
Try to get, for example, a Synchronous DSL line with throughput higher than 768Kbit/sec in New York, Verizon's core market. Impossible. DSL is still a "new technology" to them.
In New York, there no way to get a decent (1.5+ Mbit/sec, up and down) line for less than $300 per month.
This really sucks and no solution is in sight. Hopeless.
.. about who supplies you with your broadband access. In South Africa we have a single telecoms provider, Telkom, who is the sole international bandwidth provider for the entire country, and (what a surprise) they're also an ISP.
It's a government enforced monopoly busy making money hand-over-fist on the backs of an emerging economy. http://www.mybroadband.co.za/ reports that the average adsl bill is 110% of the average salary in South Africa, meaning it's a service that's only available to a select few who can afford it. The sick part is that goverment is the majority shareholder, and so does not have the people's interests at heart when it comes to accessable (meaning cheap) telephony and broadband.
So, at least you have choices and wide deployment.
But our country is a LOT less efficient than any european nation I've been to. With a few exceptions, everything is within walking distance in europe (for example stores, libraries, etc).
... "petrol", when I lived in europe referred to CRUDE oil, not gasoline.
Up here, if you decide to walk somewhere, you'll return just in time to be late for work the next day, unless you're in the city, then you'll probably get mugged or raped unless you look like you can take care of yourself...
The other downside is that the quality of gas, and the metering at stations here in the states is no longer properly regulated. I've gotten less than 1 gallon for the stated "price" of 1 gallon at quite a few gas stations.
So for the current price of $2.75/gallon (and I'm talking about EAST coast, not california here) you may not even be getting 1 entire gallon of gas for your $2.75 My car used to fill up on 14 gallons of gas (official ratings for the tank, and it has NO leaks) and the receipts I got from it back in 99 before bush and the oil crisis show this. Now, in the post bush world, the car's gas tank has been getting progressively bigger. I can pump nearly 16 gallons when it nears empty. Quite amazing feat on behalf of my car, to increase its storage capacity... someone must've replaced my gas tank in between my commutes to work with a larger one. (Or maybe we're all just getting cheated and don't know it.)
Couple that with the fact that the USA was designed by people who assumed that driving would always be practical and not too expensive... and you got your current situation, with Dubbyah and his crew wanting to probably reduce the human race to serfs again. Make moving around hard, and requiring black gold (oil) and you got your new feudal-christian system back in place. Served with a healthy dose of talking heads and 4 star general talking heads to help you feel better about giving it all up to "the man" (C).
I know I'm answering a troll, but gas/petrol is much the same as bandwidth... those who need it, often don't have alternatives, and must pay for shitty service and a shitty/neutered/braindamaged product... otherwise they're stuck in dialup hell.
I don't pirate files, but I do stream bittorent gentoo images off my server, relatively nonstop. I've had to throttle it so it won't cause too much interference with one of the IP phones in the house, which leaves us at about 12kbytes up out of the 37kbytes upstream max cap. I don't know WHERE you 128 kbytes guys are... but neither Cox nor Comcast in VA or MD offered it to me when I was there.
WHERE THE HELL are you
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
Cool. What section of the constitution covers the subsidization of giant corporations?
Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. -- H. L. Mencken
But if the president's goal of universal, affordable high-speed Internet access by 2007 is to be achieved, policymakers in Washington must change course.
Nah, just redefine "universal".
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Actually, if you think about it Borders and Barnes & Nobel almost serve the same needs libraries do - you can go in and read books all you like in comfy chairs with a Starbucks. You just can't take them home... there are also quite a few more bookstores than libraries.
Not to mention that libraries are slowly turning into Blockbusters anyway. If it reaches a point where the majority of what a library does is rent videos, do you really want your taxes paying for that when they could go to something more meaningful?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
With all these "U.S. [education|technology|economy|blah] falling behind" stories, you'd think the US should be a third world country in 5 years. Really, is everything all that bad here in the US? Or are people just making mountains out of molehills?
Forgive me if I do not think a nation's progress stands on broadband internet access, or any other single marker.
(props to gnaa)
It's not, but their policies mandating monopoly telco services are why things are so fucked up.
I'm much more comfortable with an array of choice from private sources.
Gee, that's the point of the article, if you bothered to read it. They are complaining about the federal government granting monopoly service to the surviving incumbents - giving a small number of companies ownership of the public networks you paid for instead of granting equal access to all comers.
That's much less likely to lead to bad things like censorship and limits on free expression.
Exactly. By limiting the number of providers, the Federal government is in a position to sit down on the internet the way they did broadcast TV. Welcome to the future, it looks exactly like corporate controlled broadcasts of yesterday.
I'd be happy if government, federal, state and local got out of the way of people who want to string wires between houses or offer service over the airwaves. Fat chance. GWB is so stupid he's worried about .xxx, without realizing that's the best way to censor porn and is a puppet of your new fascist overlords. The Democrats are fucking communists who want to own the network directly like China. There is a good example of how sucky two bad choices can be.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
As someone who lives in Canada and frequently travels to the US, this data is no surprise. Broadband coverage in the US is awful, as compared to Canada, but also as compared to places that I have traveled to and would not have expected to
be better - Israel, UK, even major (and not so major) Chinese cities.
The authors are clearly biased however, and do not acknowledge the problem of low population density.
For example, here in Canada, even though the country is huge and the population small, cities are relatively younger and much more dense than US cities. Americans like to live in very large houses, in very distant suburbs, and terrible bandwidth is an unsurprising outcome.
In the city where I live, and where both DSL and cable have been available at every address for years, a 50' x 120' single house lot is considered huge, and more common are apartments, townhouses, and 35' x 80' lots.
I guess it just boils down to: If you must live far apart from your neighbours, then you must pay the price in gasoline, traffic time, poor bandwidth, etc. I can't imagine a magic wand that government could wave to make these costs go away.
"So the consumer is screwed and there's no way out except an educated electorate that actually demands real elections and real government by real policy makers that don't take huge sums of money from AT&T, AOL, COX, VERIZON, SBC ETC.."
Gee. All those words just to say "I will not be buying your product".
The word "NO!" is all the power that's needed...unless you're unable to utter it. Like "Just say NO to drugs!" Lotsa willpower we demonstrated there.
"The writing is on the wall. We are all slaves to the system already, and it won't quit without real change being made in our anti-competitive pro-corporate-monopoly system. I don't see it happening without blood at this point."
Funny how this crowd suddenly grows big ones, when it comes to bloodshed (Yeah! We're man enough to throw our modems at you). But had boy balls when it came time to shut off the TV/Radio. Stopped buying the StarBucks coffee. And went out and did the civic duty their founders told them to.
So please spare us all your agonizing about how unfair life is, when you didn't lift a finger when you had a chance to make it otherwise.
--
Oh yeah! Todays word is gleans.
That's because the FCC once called broadband something that would allow customers to stream high quality video both ways. That takes an order of magnitude more than that.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
We shouldn't divide the services into just "dialup" and "broadband". There are a whole range of mediocre products in the 128kbit-1mbit range which are a massive improvement over dialup but don't qualify as "broadband" in my opinion, despite what the carriers may claim.
Not to mention "M$". This is probably all their fault.
While not really considered "broadband" I am testing my "National Access" via my verizon cell phone service. On the average I get 16.3kB/sec, not too shabby, about 3X the speed of dial up. A friend of mine has EVDO service, while not the be all end all it's still better than nothing.
The biggest thing I hate with US phone and cable service providers is that they try to make you think they are doing you a favor by giving you sub-standard service. I won't be truly happy till I get 100M/bit full duplex access to the Internet via fiber, cable or some sort of UW-band data service.
Since I live in a real rural area (no cable Internet or ADSL) dial up or cell phones are my only choice. I know there is satellite but low latency is a must. So in the meantime I am posting this via my cell phone service...
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Not only are you seeing more flash, animated images, and other "heavy" items on web pages, but you are seeing sites move away from keeping seperate "light" versions of the same page. Many also don't take the time to make sure a page degrades well (remember back in the day when most pages would still load acceptably in a text-only browser?).
I recently had the singular joy of web browsing on a high-latency (1600ms average), high packet loss (usually about 60-70%), low bandwidth (128kbps or less) connection. Most web sites were downright unbrowsable unless you had a LOT of time on your hands. But some, such as those with text-only versions or which at least degraded well with images and such turned off, were still fine.
Chinese broadband... great as long as you don't want to visit websites on the blacklist
I live in a small town in North Carolina. Around 45 minutes away from me is the capital of Raleigh, probably one of the most tech saavy / heavy places in the United States. They have xDSL / FTTC / Cable / Wireless solutions etc.
Being that I live in a small rural town ( like the rest of the state ) I am very limited on the whole broadband thing. We have cable in our county, but its a locally owned monopoly called Johnston County cable ran by a bunch of aging rednecks. None of their equipment can carry a cable signal nor do they care. Scratch cable as a solution
Satellite is out of the question. The lag is so immense that I can forget about online gaming. And the caps on downloading keep me very far away from even thinking about it.
Wireless is non existant.
The last solution is the local telephone monopoly.
Sprint.
I pay 59.99USD a month for 512k / 128 DSL from Sprint. Why so high? No competition. The reason? No other broadband solutions are available because I live in a rural town.
Nevermind the fact that Sprint has interleaving on my line, equating to 60ms to my first hop.
Dont expect one country to be exactly like the other. Apples and oranges people. Plus the whole thing of states and counties having laws which might affect how / when / you get broadband.
apartheid now
Amen brother. Broadband should only be found in places where there are enough people with enough money and demand to make it wortwhile for suppliers to provide it. Nobody should "force" suppliers to provide broadband to rural areas or low income areas. That's not freedom, that's coercion. Similarly, I don't want to pay for broadband to be provided to rural and low income areas. I pay for it to be provided to my house. I don't want my money to be used to subsidize it for others. If other countries want to do these things, who cares? Not me. I don't want to be involved in a pissing for distance contest over broadband penetration, especially since it would be my tax dollars that would have to pay for it.
I can't come up with any joke that includes 'erect' and 'facade'. Can somoene help out?
Before the deadline, just declare "Mission Accomplished" and then everything will be okay, right?
Heh. The chinamen are not the only game although they have a lot of it sewed up.
... Standards and Practices !
PenGun
Do What Now ???
No shit? We're falling behind?
Where have I heard this before...I'm guessing either this site, or one like it, about 2 years ago!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
The majority of the PSTN was written off long ago as capital expense. It was bought and paid for through the tax policies designed to encourage investment, and the invenstment has long ago paid back the shareholders. Just look at the dividends and salaries that have been paid out. I'd argue that the general public paid for the R&D for current comm technologies through the same mechanism.
Perhaps it's time to require the "shareholders" give something back to the commons under the same rationale that allows land to be grabbed. We could "publicize" the PSTN lines and provide univeral phone and reasonable internet access via 256K DSL. This would allow univerdal educational use and basic fixed point voice service. No one would miss the copper.
The private companies could use their compensation to build out the fiber network and compete for the High on Speed, VOD entertainment/porno-freak customes while every household in the U.S. could have basic phone and DSL provided by at cost. At least that way the general public would get something in return for their "investment" in subsidizing whorporate amerika cha-cha-cha.
What BushCo will actually do is redefine "universal" to be the people who have benefited from Dubya's economic policies. Remember how they keep telling you they are supposed to benefit everyone, right? By 2007, that group of "universal" beneficiaries will be limited to the people who are rich enough to have their own fiber optic cables run between their various houses. Presto, "universal" access!
Just because the truth is ugly, that doesn't make this post a troll--or lower the price of petrol (gasoline) for you moderators.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
It's not about "forcing" suppliers, it's about creating alternate reality. It isn't possible in some areas and it is in others. These problems are best solved with progressive national policy and local action to actually bulid the networks. If the national policy was for the wires to be managed by either cooperatives, non-profits, or government and the services to be provided by the private sector, then the game plan would be totally different. These huge worthless monopolies with their horrible service would get serious challenges.
Same argument applies though for someone that never leaves their small town, why should they pay for roads with their tax dollars?
Not Free SF Reader
And libraries new release section sucks. I sometimes have to wait a few months for a hot book.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I am Ubuntu, Queen of the Universe. I provide all hallucinators deep access to my broadband, wideband, sideband, and various other bands, including The Band. I rest my magnificant jewels atop American Bandstand. Worship me now or forever hold your piece.
Now I can't speek for everyone, I know that most connections are slow (like dsl in my area). However I'm hitting 9Mbps downstreem and 933kbps upstreem on my cable modem. I might still be paying more than in other countries at $45 a month, but it just goes to show that we are starting to see better speeds here. Verizon even introduced a fiberoptic service that is competitive with simular speed and price as the current service I'm reciving.
I'm also waiting private libraries to replace those provided by the government. Those public libraries are for losers and eggheads.
Andrew Carnegie founded over 1,689 public libraries in the US, and hundreds more in other English-speaking nations. Of course, funding from state, local, and federal government is essential for their continued operation. But many of these communities would not have been able to build a library without him.
This kind of philanthropy of the rich is often much more effective than a government bureaucracy would be. But on the other hand, I certainly don't expect the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to be funding broadband for the typical American.
Most Americans without broadband could easily afford it if they wanted to. When big bucks are spent to improve society -- whether from the government or from philanthropic tycoons -- they ought to be spent where the payoff is greater.
Public education, disease prevention and treatment, college scholarships, famine relief... this is where more money should be spent, and much of it should be spent in the third world countries where it is needed most, and where the payoff for the human race will be greatest.
What the article fails to realiza is that in other countries people pay WAY too much for telephone hence they are hard pressed to opt for broadband access where you have a flat monthly fee. Plus broadband at arround 200kbps is hardly considered broadband by most people in America...
And you would trust a private company "not to be reading" your mail? Like that credit card transaction processing company that recently resulted in many compromised card numbers because they were keeping card numbers of file when they were technically not supposed to be doing this. (For "research purposes" - yeah, whatever.)
Let me guess, you're a right-wingnut? This "me me me" outlook on things is very revealing. Your idea of freedom seems to be that of exploitation, or do you not realise that the poorer areas are actually paying MORE for an INFERIOR service in order to subsidize *your* cheaper connection?
Please do a little research before letting anti-social vitriol dribble...
Starting annual base pay for fresh graduates in Accounting is PhP176,976.00, while graduates from the Computer Science program can expect an average annual salary of PhP195,971.00. A philippines peso is worth ~1.8 US CENTS. So: Conp Sci starting is about 3500 bucks a year! that's 10 US a day. Of course, Good rum is a dollar a fifth. and the worlds best weed is almost free.
http://www.free.fr/ (and the other half-dozen except Wanadoo) are privately-owned companies, working off privately-funded capital.
So?
United States: 30/km (143rd)
Sweden: 20/km (155th)
Yes, you can get broadband in rural areas in Sweden.
Next.
It says they *can* open post offices.. which half answers the second half. Nowhere does it say they *should*
Given they were given the power to open post offices, I think it is assumed that they should. If they shouldn't open up post offices and post roads then they wouldn't have been given the the power and authority to do so. Yes they should open post offices esp in the 18th century because if they didn't who else will? QED.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
"Section 8. The Congress shall have power to...establish post offices and post roads;"
Research first, post later.
So where are the research offices and research roads?
Seeing as Japan's land is all densely populated, it won't cost much to run fiber, copper, or WiFi to everyone. The US has a much more dispersed population to reach.
10mbit lines are common in Sweden in apartments, with up to 2mbit connections available even in rural areas.
Let's look at the numbers.
United States: 30/km (143rd)
Sweden: 20/km (155th)
Next.
...and that it was possible to mod you up to +6. You hit the nail on the head, when everyone else here seems to be thinking along the "government gives people stuff"/"government keeps out of everything" axis.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Every other story on ./ recently seems to be about Australia. Why should this one be any different?
"I don't want to pay for broadband to be provided to rural and low income areas." Actually, those of us who live in rural areas are more than happy to pay for it our damn selves. Only golly gee, we don't even have that chance.
"Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind." Albert Einstein
Then why can my brother, who lives almost 8 hours north of the US border, 1.5 hours away from the nearest "city" (city of 5,000 people) in a farming/logging town of less than 1,000 people can get broadband access, and how all these centres in the US cannot? Hell, the largest city in our province is about 200,000 people, and that's about 3.5 hours away!
You tell us. Why can you brother, in such a seemingly remote, small market, get broadband? Is he using satellite where no local infrastructure is necessary? Is id subsidized by the government? Perhaps the local logging company does it as a way to appease the locals in exchange for destroying the trees?
Perhaps if we identify that, we can see if there's a reason that same tactic doesn't work in remote U.S. areas. Or, we midn find it does, but that its a rare case.
They "misspelled" it? :)
- This is all seven bit stuff, every single line of it, yet we use no basic compression on the Internet to send pages, because somehow, that would be evil.
As the other poster pointed out; mod_gzip. As I will point out: 7-bit?? Are you mad? There are people out here who speak languages that have such subtleties as accented letters! Or even entirely different scripts, like Arabic. Use UTF-8 by default.
Most codecs produce lousy compression and very lossy, too
Then use H.264. Go on. You'll need to buy a new CPU, or a new graphics card. But it's small!
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
This is one of those posts that's going to end up sounding like a troll, but that's not my intent.
When you get deep down to it, what's the purpose of really high speed Internet? The bulk of the features for the public in the Internet can be experienced with low-speed (dialup) Text for information, forum discussions for local issues, or simple things like access to online shopping are all pretty low bandwidth intensive services.
The types of things that actually require high bandwidth for the average citizen are either commercial (companies offering a large amount of content where high speed is needed, like movie previews and the like) or questionable (such as music and movie downloads).
In other words, it's difficult to make the case that broadband Internet is a necessary part of the nation's infrastructure, since every aspect of the Internet that's in the public interest can be handled quite well with dialup.
This is for the home user, of course. Corporate needs might be higher (like being able to send large spreadsheets over the Internet, or lossless video conferencing to meet the needs of business meetings). But for your average Joe sitting at home broadband is a luxury item, not a necessity. As such, it's difficult to justify large (publicly funded) outlays for improving high speed Internet for the masses.
Of course, it's a luxury I'm willing to pay for, because I'm impatient and like having information come to me that much faster. But I'd rather it is me who pays for it, not some poor working slob whose only experience with the Internet is helping his daughter download a text file from her school explaining her homework for the week, which he could accomplish just as easily with dialup.
This is, of course, an opinion. Don't take it any further then that.
The Internet is generally stupid
Why is this a Big Deal (tm)?
Around these parts, this might be debatable, but broadband Internet is NOT a necessity. It is a luxury. People don't NEED it. Why the hell is this "news" every few months on Slashdot?? Why is boradband access considered as some kind of poverty measurement?
There's plenty of people here (in the U.S.) who can't afford to pay for necessities like rent, utilities, food, and medicine. Let's fix that before we take on the plight of people who are forced to download pr0n at 56K.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
This puts the United States near the average for the OECD, and far behind countries such as the England and France, which have made rapid progress in broadband adoption.
I'm moving to the England.
Waiiii!!!!!! I have bad karma!
Your sig:
"The Internet is generally stupid"
My reply:
Your stupid!
My sig:
"A dial-up user."
Are you thinking of the Core CSS Styles?
It is impossible to enjoy idling thoroughly unless one has plenty of work to do.
- Jerome Klapka Jerome
Full roll out to all NTL and telewest customers - that's pretty much all cablemodem users.
the U.S. can easily lead in any field - it chooses
(in Britain)
Why should we try to give everyone broadband access when
1. They won't make any real use of it (most people fall into this category)
2. They're generally so lax about security that broadband would only make them more useful zombies.
3. Wired broadband is obsolete, and wi-max (or some version of wireless broadband) will solve the problem.
You mean they are substituting lies and distortion for facts? Gee, I never would have expected that from this administration... [/sarcasm]
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
That one is almost laughable. For example, we all subsidized telephone service in those areas. Granted, it started as party lines and then moved to private lines.
But we still subsidize much of rural America to this day. Yet they continue to get squat. I don't have to wonder where all the money is going.
While it would be all well and good for the FCC to really examine its own rules and procedures, a more fundamental shift has to happen. Sadly, it is a shift that might have to come at the point of a gun.
The biggest error ever made in the U.S. was giving a corporate entity a voice and essentially making it equivalent to a person. Until fairly recently, once you were incorporated you were pretty much shielded behind that corporate fiction. But what is being done now is simply lip service. For example, the recent energy bill is nothing but a gift to energy producers and transporters.
If you consider that Japanese got themselves a new government some 60 years ago, while ours sat and festered you can see what I'm getting at.
Sometimes wholesale regime change is a good thing. It keeps politicians honest.
The original subject suggested the President wasn't going to meet his stated goal of broadband availability. Might I suggest he follow the excellent idea of Tony Blair and his New Labour govt who made the same promise? Once you realise you haven't got a cat's chance in hell of delivering what you promised, re-define the word broadband to include ISDN.
Problem solved!
Mike
Being in the tech industry for a while, I've seen quite a few instances of the same reason why broadband might be lagging behind in the U.S. From my perspective (non-management) I've seen committee after committee of manager-type people arguing over how to handle this or that, never actually agreeing on anything. Most of this comes from a university setting, where the region to cover is rather spread out, with multiple units (colleges, etc) having to participate. Each person wants to do it their own way, and thinks that their way is best. The result is months and months of discussion/debate over which is better, and years later, we still do not have campus-wide wireless access to the students. What we do have is several buildings that are wireless (mostly because the people responsible for those buildings didn't feel like waiting for the debate to conclude, and just did it themselves) but several others that are not.
It doesn't help matters much in my opinion that this is a state (non-profit) institution, and money is sometimes limited.
And they said zombies weren't real!
The problem has nothing to do with the size of the U.S. It has to do with policies that allow monopolies to persist. There is no real competition between carriers providing broadband access in most communities. I live in one of the few where there is some modest competition, the city's cable vs. Comcast. As a result, we pay 10% less than nearby communities that have not competition and out cable is up to 3x as fast.
In many communities, if there is a choice in broadband providers, it's between DSL and Cable. While DSL has made some great strides forward with regard to speed, I doubt those changes are available everywhere. Even with that situation, you'd only have 2 competitors. You need five or more to have real competition.
All this is just a symptom of the underlying problem. Our elected representatives no longer hesitate to sell their votes. They can always point to someone higher up the political ladder for justification. Hell, in a nation where the President openly lies to the country in order to start a war in the middle east, what's a vote selling?
If we want these situations to change, voters have to pay attention to what is going on and vote accordingly. Broadband access isn't about recreation or something cool for nerds, its about having a competitive business infrastructure so that our businesses have some kind of a chance against all their competitors.
It used to be that we could afford to see some jobs go overseas because we had the technological edge. We could outperform countries that had cheaper labor because of that technological edge. Now, instead of pushing hard to make sure those technologies are available to all American businesses, our leaders are protecting virtual monopolies to funnel money into the hands of their favorite giant corporations.
If this keeps up, we'll wind up in a situation where we are competing against countries that not only have cheaper labor, but also have much better technology to work with.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
I live in a rapidly growing Virginia county outside Washington DC, 60+ miles or a 2 hr rush hour commute into DC, and neither cable nor DSL is gonna happen in my neighborhood.
Is it a rule, that there's an exception to every rule?
A lot of people are perplexed at why broadband sucks in the US. They blame the government. They blame the size of our country. They blame the market. But look who's primarily behind broadband over here: Phone companies and cable companies.
Let's start with phone companies. Does it really benefit phone companies to have great and cheap bandwidth? Not when everyone switches over to VoIP killing their high profit long distance service. Not to mention that businesses pay for EVERY call they make. If broadband was great and cheap, the phone companies would disappear.
Let's move on to cable companies. Pretty soon you'll be able to watch movies via broadband. E.g., Netflix is about to offer movies. In a few years you'll probably be able to watch any movie and any TV you want with a simple clicks. Does this benefit cable companies? Nope. Because they make tons of money, nearly all their money, selling premium movie channels and content via pay-per-view. In other words, if broadband was great and cheap, they'd also be out of business.
Thus, the ONLY way we're going to get real broadband in the US is by wrestling control of it from the current status quo. That's why I'm really excited about broadband over power lines. The power companies have nothing to lose with broadband.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Bush Jr sez "Read my lips: Universal internet access!"
Bush Sr sez "Read my lips: No new taxes!"
I am scientifically inaccurate.
What about the Amish? How can we have universal internet access with them around?
My solution: ship them to Canada.
I am scientifically inaccurate.
Also, monopoly power isn't an all or nothing proposition. A monopoly's power is really a function of two things, the ability to make economic profits (above normal, given the level of risk) and the ability to sustain these profits over time. The larger the profits and the longer the time period, the stronger the monopoly.
Given the differnt nature of each monopoly, the approach the government takes to each one should be a little bit different.
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
Do we really want affordable second-rate technology or do we want to to catch up with the rest of the world in communications technology?
You can't blame the FCC for being against competition when this competition has been responsible for the stagnation of communications tech in America. I mean, why should a telco upgrade tech when they have to share it with other companies who don't help pay for it?
Isn't it possible that by ending unfair local competition you increase both competition between different types of media and international competition. And new tech will lower the cost of communications in the long run?
No, this complaint against not having universal low-cost broadband is nothing more than ignorant consumer greed. They are right in that they shouldn't have to pay a lot for broadband, but stifling progress is not the answer. People don't use it because they don't see the benefit of it. And they don't see the benefit of it because it hasn't matured. Just look at horse buggies vs the automobile. Sure, you don't need the automobile, but how many horse buggies do you see anymore?
What is fat are images in Flash or whatever. Flash in itself is a very compact framework. I could build an hour long video in Flash in around an MB of storage.
Most HTML editors also produce fat codeMost of recent HTML you see is generated by a program, not an HTML editor.
Most codecs produce lousy compression and very lossy, tooWhat codecs ?. Divx ? .. It's more of a mathematical problem.
Dynamic HTML is fatter still, including the page you're readingDHTML is less fat than others because it is designed to reduce round-trips around to the server.
CSS simply adds to the problem by oversending code/dataWhy ?. Because you load the css file from the cache instead of downloading the huge HTML with all those color tags ?.
XML is another bucket of overkill; every page sends a new schema, and a bunch of unneeded, duplicate infoAlmost all web access is cached, so what are you talking about ?. XML schema verification is very rarely done and mostly used as a documentation rather than downloaded for every hit to a file.
Poor local/user cache mgmt causes too many page reloadsPeople browsing dynamic content cause page reloads. Not cache management. HTTP 1.1 was very well designed with caches in mind.
RSS/Atom feeds send tons of duplicate new hits, and is a waste of good bandwidthRSS can easily be cached with a reverse proxy, look at how my.yahoo.com does it. Atom is harder to cache thanks to the POST method.
This is all seven bit stuff, every single line of it, yet we use no basic compression on the Internet to send pages, because somehow, that would be evil. I say, use source compression with understandable decoders that have security built into them on the client, then compress the hell out of the entire Internet!Content-Encoding: deflate, gzip
couldn't easily have our favorite pcap file filters find credit cards.It's there in any decent browser out there. Use mod_deflate or mod_gzip on server side.
If People are so stupid, what can we do. That's why I use TLS on my mail servers and SSL on my webservers and SSH on to my work boxes.
The broadband we use to day are like the 1960 Pontiacs-- muscle cars designed to burn rubber, when all we wanted to do was to get from here to there quickly and nicely and safely.One single answer - pr0n. It's a fast pr0n delivery mechanism and that's why it came up so fast. I think that's why Japan and Korea have come up so quickly with it - due to lack of availabilit y of the real stuff :)
Internet is not controlled by a single person. It has evolved into it's current form. For that to have happened, all developments that survived on the internet should have favoured the development of a better and faster internet. Basic evolution theory says that internet will not step back and de-evolve, even if it is to work better that way. The only sustainable change would have been faster pipes and I don't see the end of it (Mp3s in 1999, Divx in 2005Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
anti-competitive policies as good for consumers
If we didn't have laws that break up the most successful communication companies into small, startup companies, we might have a better system in place.
Here are the choices:
DSL: 2-3 providers offering rates as low as $20/month
Cable: 1 provider, $40/month (5M/368K)
Fiber: 1 provider $40/month for 5M/2M and $50 for 15M/2M.
High Speed Wireless: 2 providers about $60/month
Medium speed wireless: 2-4 providers as cheap as $30/month
Satellite provider: 1 (?) about $60/month
Dial-Up: Too many to list as cheap as $8/month
Please note that U.S. provider do not have download limits. That is, the price you pay is the price you pay. Many non-US systems have crazy limits like 500M bytes a day. I blow through 500M in roughly 10 minutes with my fiber connection.
Now if you live in the middle of nowhere (which is common in a way that most europeans can't understand), then you get far few choices.
But I agree with one of the other posters that WiMax will ultimately be one of the best option. Oh, and fiber. Verzion has told me they can support 100Mb/S with no equipment change. They'll rachet that up as competition forces them to.
Yes gzip can compress. Count the number of pages that use this. Not enough. Sadly, quite few. Could more apps do this? Sure. But we don't. Could we compress non-English fonts? You bet. Just because there's an extra 'bit' used to do things causes little compression pain. Extend that to the tough or tokenized characters sets and you still buy lots of bandwidth back. But we add in useless Google ads boxes (ok, you make a few dimes and you sacrifice your page code and genuflect to Google or another add revenue source), little Flash doodads, and lots of nice arty things that usually have little to do with content. JPeg has compression capabilities, but with Pegasus' software you can do selective zoned compression and cut binaries from several megs down to several k with no loss of contextual content. This is important-- most of what you see in a single frame is noise and not content. When we get into MPEG codecs, you can get pretty lossy without pixelation, but again, it's not a zoned compression (zoned meaning that content like a face receives no compression while the pretty hillside in the background gets pounded by it, but your eyes focus on the human face where discernablity is needed). CPUs are cheap today. Operating systems are bloated. They now have everything including the kitchen sink in them-- no wonder they're not good at adding in tough stuff, like native/kernel-based decompression tricks. The graphics cards are getting very cool, but they're for GIS and gaming. In GIS, there's another possibility for delightful compression/decompression algos that can make high use of the relationship between CPU and graphics engine and memory movements. But the numbers say keep the gamers happy. Sigh. To answer your main question, yes I am mad, in both senses of the word. Source compression standards aren't being used, even the few we have.. And we need more.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
The most spread out and least densely populated Western country is Finland. Now guess who's doing better in this broadband survey, Finland or the US? Of course, it *does* matter somewhat and you can see it in this (ie. Finland, which traditionally declares national emergency when it's not number 1 in IT and telecom charts, does not do very well on the list - but still, the embarassement of being behind in very high speed connections is getting a lot of discussion here), but the US is still behind, even when accounting for that effect. (It hurts Finland more than the US and we're still ahead!) Besides, RTFA! "...controlling for both income and population density, we find eight nations performing better than the United States. They are Korea, Netherlands, Denmark, Iceland, Canada, Finland, Norway and Sweden."
"*Why* do you have huge cities. "
Because its a BIG country.
Dude, England is like a state to us. In the U.S. you can get in your car and literally driver for 3 days without stopping (except around cities in rush hour).
I live in the North East and I've had friends come in from London and they said "Can we just pop down to Disneyworld for a day". I have to get out a map and a ruler and explain that driving non-stop at 70-80MPH it will take them 24 hours.
Yes, but with the sheets installed locally so they don't have to be downloaded.
test.c
[code]
#include "nation.h"
int main(void)
{
MeaningfulValue measureOfNation;
measureOfNation= getBroadbandUserCount();
}
[/code]
compiling the above results in the following error:
[code]
$ gcc test.c -o test
test.c: In function `int main()':
test.c:13: incompatible types in assignment of 'MeaninglessValue' to 'MeaningfulValue'
[/code]
What am I doing wrong? Can anyone tell me how to convert MeaninglessValue to MeaningfulValue??
These articles talk about quantity not quality. I'd like to see other countries provide the level of quality in broadband we experience in the US.
I lived in Taiwan over two years. They have broadband use comparable to South Korea. I was paying $10 a month for the service, but compared to what I get in the US it was garbage. I initially had cable modem, one which required me to dial in anytime I wanted to log on. If I was even lucky enough to get through I was then hit with terrible performance. I was barely able to comfortably browse the web, let alone download anything. The service improved over time, but it was still substandard.
Then, when I moved, I got ADSL. It was a significant improvement, but performance still was far from ideal.
One problem is likely population density, but the main problem is that they just don't care. They constantly cut corners, getting the cheapest equipment they could find, they slap things together and do just enough to keep the servers running. Calling customer support was pointless because all they'd do is apologize and claim they couldn't do anything about it.
Compare that to the cable modem service I have now. Sure, I pay close to $50 a month, but I'm also getting performance comparable to a T3 connection. And, even if I went with one of the cheaper competitors I'm sure I'd still get great performance.
I'm not saying the US doesn't have it's problems, because it's got some serious ones. What companies are charging in the US is getting ridiculous, not only for broadband, but mobile phones and a ton of other services.
However, what I'd really like to see a survey that compares the quality of broadband connections around the world.
So I move out in the boonies on a big (gigantic to you city fellers) piece of land. My wife is a telecommuter, so we MUST have something better than dialup access. I find out we can get ISDN. O.k. - not the best option, but 128K is better that the 26K or so we could manage over our crap analog lines. Well, it turns out the switches are so OLD, they can handle only 64K ISDN - but I'm still charged the full ISDN price, and we lose connectivity ALL THE TIME.
So anyway, I've got some money to burn, and I figure I can get a T1 line run in and then get some neighbors to go in on a wireless co-op. I CAN'T EVEN GET BELLSOUTH to respond to my inquiries. So I request quotes from a bunch of T1 brokers/resellers. The absolute cheapest I've found is $1000 a month for full T1. It turns out we are 41 miles from the CO, and the cost is higher than usual because they would have to upgrade a lot of switching just to get a line to me. I could afford it, but it pisses me off to no end that mega-corps like BellSouth refuse to dip into their coffers to upgrade their rural equipment up to that used in cities for what, 20 to 30 years?
Rural broadband ideas? I'm fresh out.
And for the love of God and all that is Holy and pure in this world, please do not mention satelite.
The full study (pdf file) is objective and does a nice job of quoting sources, but that press release reeks of yellow journalism - quoting inside sources (consumer union, CFA and freepress, which are essentially the same, as far as I can tell), giving a biased opinion, and sensationalizing the problem.
Still, I can understand a press release bulleting facts from the study, but quoting (exclusively) inside sources? Did the writer of that thing have even one high school journalism course?
"The problem is that broadband (and cable) flat out isn't available our street and Time Warner expects us to foot the $23,000 bill to have it installed."
As opposed to taxpayers "footing the bill". Nice to see it isn't just corporations that want to pass the buck.
"Even if I did have 20k laying around, the minute I paid to have cable run up the street, they would turn around and sell service to my neighbors."
Guess now you know how it feels when the FCC forces them to share there lines with others.
What, broadband internet is about access to information, and therefore should be provided to the maximum number of people and not considered a luxury item? Last I checked streaming video isn't a necessity, the same info can be accessed via dial-up if you can't afford, or don't have access to broadband. Don't have broadband in you area? Well if it means that much to you, move, or wait for it to get there like we had to do 5 years ago. You'll get over it I assure you.
Furthermore, why hasn't this argument been brought with Cable TV? Cable TV is information and entertainment, same as the internet, yet it's still costs more for cable television than broadband internet. What gives?
gmuller
IEEE-USA has two statements on this matter. The first is a position statement posted at http://www.ieeeusa.org/policy/positions/broadband. asp and the second is a recently issued white paper at http://www.ieeeusa.org/volunteers/committees/ccip/ docs/Gigabit-WP.pdf
In summary, real broadband (gigaband) starts at 100 Mbps. Cable modem and DSL are legacy speed technologies, and even BPL is a brand new technology at legacy speed.
The key to making real broadband work is separating the provision of bandwidth from provision of content, applications, and services.
If the US can't get the vested interests out of the way, we will become a third world telecommunications country. That's where we are headed now.
Point is that even when close to the backbone, our "free enterprise" monopolies of the phone company and cable company aren't doing the job.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
Fricking Canukistan
"It's a fair point, but I suspect you've not used dialup for a while."
This post deliviered via McLeodUSA.
"Webpages are increasingly designed for broadband, with heaps of flash adverts, DHTML menus etc. They're painfully slow with dialup."
One can filter out most of that stuff, and "just say no!" to the rest. There's diaup ISP's that will even do that for you.
"Windows and software patches, updated drivers etc are huge these days, ranging from 20MB to 250MB. Downloading these on dialup is not really practical any more."
I run windows. You're exaggerating the problem.
"Email attachments are the other big files. The amount of times I've seen documents or photos cripple a dialup download. Even spam can be very frustrating with slow connection speeds."
Don't get many attachments, and I use IMAP (with spam protect) properly.
"Dialup is fast becoming completely obsolete for the modern internet."
And small cars are becoming obsolete in a nation dedicated to McDonalds.
Sorry but all your reasons are basically "we're lazy. accomodate us". You want to pay more to accomodete them? Be my guest, but don't pretend that it's necessary to do so.
The TXCABLE webpage promotes another absurd look on how competition will hurt consumers.
"When I want your opinion, I'll give it to you." --leonstryker
Well, speaking for myself, I am an IT professional who still uses dial-up.
I have not, and will not get a higher speed connection until I can do so for under $30 a month.
I think you have to consider the following factors:
1. Population density makes it far easier to justify the cost of running the Last Mile hardwired xDSL or cable modem connection to your home or business with a broadband connection. That's why you have a lot of broadband in South Korea, France, Germany, much of the UK, and Japan, mostly because the population density per square kilometer means there are enough potentials to justify the exorbitant expense installing those connections.
2. I think people are forgetting how all those broadband Last Mile connections are funded. I can almost say that the xDSL and/or cable modem setups in France, Germany, South Korea and Japan are heavily subsidized by government-owned and/or very recently privatized former government owned national PTT entities such as France Telecom, Deutsche Telecom, NTT, etc. Here in the USA, most of the Last Mile connections are funded by the Baby Bells and the cable companies, which have to justify the cost of setting up such connections to their shareholders. You wonder if the broadband setups in the countries I mentioned are paid for by steep taxes of various forms on the local population (VAT, motor fuel taxes, etc.).
1. Explain Canada.
2. Again, explain Canada. Last Mile Delivery is done either through Cable TV providers (admittedly previously established) or through Baby bells such as you describe, like Telus, Bell, and Allstream.
Germany's Deutsche Telekom has been privatized long before the advent of DSL. Also, they receive no subsidies, and, as the still-monopoly-holder, are subject to a number of additional requirements, e.g. they have to supply everybody in Germany with a land line who asks for one, for the same price, no matter whether it makes economic sense or not. The competitors don't have to do that. What they got in exchange for these requirements is all the copper that the Bundespost (the state-owned predecessor of Deutsche Telekom and Deutsche Post) had buried into Germany's soil. But the same was true of the Baby Bells.
The point here is that Deutsche Telekom does not get subsidies any more, broadband has to pay for the cost of installing the DSLAMs in the exchanges and running the data cables. It, generally, does.
That being said, your point of population density is a valid one. Again, Deutsche Telekom as an example: While they have to supply phone service even to rural areas, the same is not true of broadband. And, surprise: They don't.
Oh dear god, please say it ain't true! Please don't tell me that big corporations don't care deeply about me and my family. My dreams, my world view, my whole life has just come crashing down like a house of cards.
(Sobbing quietly, if not sarcastically, to myself.)
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Cool. What section of the constitution covers the subsidization of giant corporations?
Check out the documentary "The Corporation" sometime; it's out on DVD. After the 14th Amendment passed, which banned slavery by granting the right for all citizens to own property, a Supreme Court decision determined that corporations were in fact "persons" and could therefore exist perpetually and own property. Before this, corporations could only exist through legislative acts (for the public good), they usually had a finite lifetime, and what happened to excess profits was spelled out in the legislation.
It's pretty twisted that an Amendment designed to ban slavery ends up being used to justify the perpetual accumulation of wealth by a non-physical entity.
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High DSL and cable modem prices just give an extra incentive to investors to roll out power-line access (like www.current.net in Cincinnati) and other undiscovered alternative technologies. Prices that are forced artificially low drive out investment from potentially competing technolgies since it is harder to compete against thin margins. (Plus an investor would not want to to push much of his capital in a heavily regulated industry since the government could usurp it away on a whim.) Indeed, the current oil situation, if it persists, is perhaps the catalyst that will produce new feats of engineering for fuel efficient cars, more advanced hybrid engines, and alternative fuel sources. So unless you want the technology to stagnate, you should not be bothered by the current temporary high prices. They will only last until alternative (and superior) technologies are invented by a profit motive of sticking it to the DSL companies. Let's not destroy that motive.
"The State is that great fiction by which everyone lives at the expense of everyone else." -Frederic Bastiat.
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actually every student in the yukon has high speed internet access, even if they don't have running water.. some government initative
if the US could get something like that together, they might be able to do likewise
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Moderation -2
100% Offtopic
The topic is how the FCC is lying about broadband goals, in order to meet them. I point out that those "revised expectations" tactics are the general policy of the government. That's not "Offtopic": that's the topic, writ large - and just one level larger.
TrollMods might want to lie about how Bush's government lies to us about everything, but they can't even muster an argument. They just lie about the topic. Well, the facts are obviously biased against the Bush administration, and they're not going away.
--
make install -not war
"Amazing how they're all priced within a dollar or two of each other, isn't it?"
Not really. Competition forces prices downward until they are even.
If we are both selling gas on the corner, and I'm selling my gas for $2, and you're selling it for $3, one of two things will happen:
1) I will run out of gas
2) You will run out of customers
Assuming there is enough supply, #2 will be true.
Assuming there isn't enough supply, #1 will be true.
If #1 is true then I will either (a) accept that I run out gas all the time or (b) raise my price to limit demand
if #2 is true, then the other station will either stop selling gas or drop its prices.
But the net effect of this will be for both gas stations to eventually have a similar price.
Here in South Dakota, every school - yes, every school - is tied into a state-run network
Really? Both schools?
-Valiss
Cuz it's be embarassing if you went around saying "fake aid" or "fah cod" or something.
.NET language intended for use only in France and Quebec. It isn't as edgy (or "sharp"?) as another well known language--it is more laid back, probably because it got a little tail.
I think ç is also an upcoming
I think I'd fit in pretty well. I mean, I'm not an ignorant American. I take maple syrup on my Canadian Bacon... I love the moose... I wouldn't even mind joining the Mounties. I've seen Due South... Having super-cool Mounty powers would kick ass.
...if you are not American, anyways. Less competition... so go ahead and hamstring yourself all you Bush lovers. Cash in on your future! :-)
The rest of the world benefits when the US administration (or it's policies) do not actively improve the technology knowledge of the population.
* This is after all an administration that OPPOSES municipal broadband. Why should any region provide nonprofit broadband when everyone benefits from the jobs created by paying extra funds to monopoly providers?
* This is after all an administration that OPPOSED equal access by non-baby bells to the nationwide DSL network. Why should we have anything except 1 DSL provider per region? Anyone who wants to compete in DSL should string up their own lines, dammit!
We also benefit from the US 'hands off' approach to education, which has poor cities footing the education costs, and 'standardized tests' that will keep marginal students in the 7th grade for 3 years in a row (at least until they drop out and enter the low wage job market).
With the push for 'Creation Science' in schools now, the fanatics are guaranteeing a further slide in the US standing in the academic world. The shift for R&D has already happened.
The US is in a self induced decline, so sure their way is right even as they fall further behind in economic and academic might. If only India and China and Malaysia played fair, and ensured college is only for those who can afford to borrow...
The irony is, many of these 'capitalists' and 'free traders' are themselves foreign capitalists, pushing for policies and tax codes in the US that they would never DREAM of inflicting on their own beloved country.
America was right... capital should roam. All the short term profit takers are providing enough incentive for it to roam elsewhere...
I think the worse Americans make it for themselves, the more they'll reason like a Kansas firebrand preacher.
If you want access to the internet you can go with FIOS, DSL, Cable, Satellite, broadband over power lines, WiFi, dialup.
I'm interested to hear your definition of Monopoly.
What if Digg added local news and a Slashdot inspired comment karma system? ---
http://houndwire.com
Perfectly on target assessment I think.
rêtard!
If there were enough of you that were willing to pay enough then somebody would supply it because they would make money supplying it to you. So if nobody is supplying it to you, then should we conclude A.) They're evil companies who would rather screw over rural America than make money or B.) There is not enough demand in rural America to make it profitable for them to sell there? Maybe you think Option A is correct, but if it is Option B, then don't ask for my tax dollars to fix the problem.
If you don't think that the service you receive is worth what you are paying for it, then why are you paying it? If it's not worth it, then don't pay for it. Of course if it was the government that was providing this service and you were paying for it with your tax dollars, then you would have no choice.
However I would say that the inferior service you receive is worth the higher price because you are paying for it. It's just frustrating to you that better service might be available in a larger city at a lower price. Well that is one of the tradeoffs you make when you live somewhere rural. Here's a news flash for you, a small house in a city costs a lot more than a big house in a rural area. So should people living in small houses in cities demand that the government do something about this? After all they are paying more for an inferior product.
Hello,
I'm the lead author of this report. We did acknowledge population density, and carried out an econometric study to exammine it's effects. As you can see on page seven of the report, after controlling for population density and median household income, the US is still being out performed by 8 other OECD nations. Population density does have an effect, but its magnitude is very small. Later on in the report we discuss an econometric analysis of 30 OECD nations that demonstrated open access policies have a large, statistically significant effect on penetration levels.
The bottom line is, the US doesn't have a national broadband policy, and this is a major reason why we are falling behind.
- The government forces me out of business by selling the same product I am selling, but by giving people no choice about by charging them through their taxes.
- The government forces me out of business by forcing me to sell to places where I will lose money.
- The government forces me to sell to places where I will lose money, but they subsidize me so that I can stay in business. They do this by forcing all taxpayers to pay for my subsidies.
Maybe you're not bothered by the first two choices because you dehumanize anybody who is in business to make a profit. You have no problems using force against "fat cat corporations."Maybe you're not bothered by the last choice. It's the government doing what's best for the people right? Maybe you think the government can make this decision, that all people should pay a tax to allow all people to have broadband access.
In either case, think about this consequence. Imagine two years later there is some new technology that allows for better, cheaper broadband access. In any of the three cases listed above, the government will have to support this new technology or otherwise it will not have a chance. In all the three cases above, there will be powerful vested interests in keeping the status quo.
In a free market, such a superior technology will surely win out. In a "progressive" market like you want, it might win out, but it might not. One can simply look at the history of telecom in the US and Europe and see many cases where such a technology either did not win out, or it took decades longer than it should have for it to win out because of government regulated markets.
..and I have TWO choices, cable or DSL, same as about everybody else, and they both cost about $50 a month. That's not choice, it's price gouging. Don't bring up satellite, unless you believe paying more for worse performance is a legitimate choice. Cringely has a pretty good column on this: www.pbs.org/cringely
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Yes gzip can compress. Count the number of pages that use this. Not enough. Sadly, quite few. Could more apps do this? Sure. But we don't.
.ttf files, are they. (Actually, UTF-8 is a kind of compression-code to begin with, seeing as how non-common codepoints require more bytes than common ones - though if your page is in Chinese another encoding will be more benificial, size-wise; still I'd say go with one of the UTFs). Please do not ever again suggest using 7-bit or 8-bit encodings exclusively, in order to save on size. That's like saying 2 digits will suffice to encode the year. If you're going to go and say things like that, please invent a timemachine and go back to 1975.
Sadly, netcraft doesn't keep stats on this. They should. Mod_gzip/mod__deflate and "http compression" aren't on by default in apache and IIS, which is a shame. Also, gzip support in the squid proxy is an add-on.
Could we compress non-English fonts? You bet. Just because there's an extra 'bit' used to do things causes little compression pain. Extend that to the tough or tokenized characters sets and you still buy lots of bandwidth back.
Unicode isn't (primarily) about fonts. Browsers aren't fetching
When we get into MPEG codecs, you can get pretty lossy without pixelation, but again, it's not a zoned compression (zoned meaning that content like a face receives no compression while the pretty hillside in the background gets pounded by it, but your eyes focus on the human face where discernablity is needed).
MPEG already compresses out-of-focus backgrounds better than in-focus-foregrounds, because out-of-focus images leave less information in the discrete cosine transform. Also, the foreground is more likely to change, which motion detection will pick up on, so static content won't get as many bits of the stream to update its content. Still, go ahead and use H.264 if you want. The bleeding edge GPUs from ATI have it built-in.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
This view is so wrong that I don't even know how to start explaining it, although it's superficially correct. You should probably look at Shannon's theorem for details.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
For example, here in Canada, even though the country is huge and the population small, cities are relatively younger and much more dense than US cities.
Younger than US cities? Toronto maybe, but moving eastward, no.
Because access is "free" at the library, there are tremendous waits for a turn (up to 1 hour or more in my Southern California city), and strict restrictions on time you can use the computer and what you can download or print. For large files like that, if you can't view them at home, you can't view them at all.
They have been trying to open up the broadband market for years. Bills in congress have been flying back and forth and this type of press release is fodder for the lobby groups.
:p and send out flyers like this to get people politician into opening up cable access to AT&T or Verizon.In fact Verizon is doing a test pilot of fiberoptic internet here in this area to compete with cable.
:p
Notice that the penetration is 'per capita' Most other industrialized countries are not as large or as rural as the U.S. is. Farms in nebraska are not big broadband consumers I guess.
Its funny because most of the debate about competition in the broadband communtity is being fought by the telephone company against the cable company. The telephone companies set up front groups like 'people for more broadband access'
I think the big reason y the telephone companies are in such a tizzy is because of the limitations of DSL in heavly rural america (the length of the dsl line) which is y they are hot on getting into the cable bizz.
Anywho save the press releases for the lobbyists.
"You trying to say capiche?"
"Yes"
"Don't do it, it hurts my ears when you do it."
You are a troll, since you obviously don't know what you are typing about. But as I just returned from Sweden, I'll feed the troll in order to enlighten others about your pathetic rant.
/. still takes 4 seconds to start loading, no matter what your bandwidth is.
The term is symetric, not synchronous. When brodbandsgolet.se offers 100 Mbps symetric, its delivered on fibre to the household. It is not a DSL or cable technology. It is expensive, and only available in bigger cities in Sweden.
10Gig interconnects are quite common in the data centres where the xDSL and cable and fibre headends terminate. A broadband provider may oversubscribe 10:1 or 15:1, but the traffic only starts to get congested in the evenings when you get all the home subscribers firing up their shiny powerful macintoshes and PCs. You really need to have a dozen or more PCs on your home 100Mbps line before you can really start to achieve those levels of constant traffic. There are problems with TCP windows, and round trip delay which keep a PC from using too much bandwidth. Pulling content from the US is always slow, but within the nordic counties and northern Europe, web browsing is fantastically fast.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
...substantiate your claim. The government is the source of monopoly. If a company is in an industry with economies of scale, then one company is more competitive (i.e. sells cheaper to the consumer) than a bunch of small companies could. Think about it, if a small company could enter (absent gov't restrictions which is the argument I'm making), the large firm would have to sell at a price cheaper than the small firms could offer at to restrict entry. I could go on for hours, but in summary: absent government assistance, there has NEVER been a documented event of a monopoly harming the consumer. They just plain CAN'T. Without a gun (the government) pointed to your head, you (the consumer) will do what's in your best interest to do. Even advertising isn't an unfair barrier to entry. You can always spend the money. The barrier is convincing the consumers of the quality (or whatever) of your product, which is a fair barrier by any standard. There has been hundreds of papers written on this subject (Stigler, McNulty, Hayek, Clark, Harberger, Armentano, Demsetz, McGee). Please think a few seconds longer before posting a fallacious theory. Also, there is no "clear" definition of competition. In case you question my credentials, I happen to be an Economics Grad Student.
Really, I'm not trying to be clever with my signature.
Tonnage isn't a good meausurement for this purpose. It generally takes far fewer US citizens to make a ton.
Look, I'm not trying to dehumanize anyone trying to make a profit. In fact, I am an owner of a privately owned and funded Internet provider. Your idea that I am not bothered by government interference is incorrect.
The fact of the matter is that the free market is a failure for any utility. Internet is a utility today. The fact of the matter is that in EVERY other utility, the government national policy is to separate the infrastructure from the service provider where necessary. The FACT is that the government allows local counties and states to develop their own tax districts where it is necessary to fund a utility to reach rural people, such as water, sewer, and electricity. The FACT is that Internet is much the same way, and in FACT many rural tax districts exist TODAY for the SOLE PURPOSE of bringing in broadband access where the FREE MARKET DOES NOT FIND IT ECONOMICAL.
Internet is the ONLY utility where the government does not take the same stance, and this is largely because the Internet is being co-opted by large telecoms who would like to have enough time to own it completely, on their own.
As an independent provider, I am literally being forced out of business, slowly, by changing government policy that erodes the regulations which forced the telcom monopolies to open up their networks. The Bell networks were paid for with public investments, and the monthly bills were paid for the by the public. For the Bush FCC to remove access from ISPs to buy unbundled service and force us to buy at whatever outrageous rate the telecom wants is absurd. The FACT is that the telecoms are literally pricing their raw loops to ISPs at higher prices than they sell loops+bandwidth at direct to customers. The FACT is that as they drive competitiors out of business, they are raising their own prices. It's called BAIT AND SWITCH. And the GOVERNMENT IS NOT ONLY ALLOWING THIS BUT IS ENCOURAGING IT. The laws that prevent this activity (Such as the Computer II act) are being IGNORED and MISINTREPRETED for the benefit of the Bells who, don't forget, WERE FOUNDED ON PUBLIC SUBSIDIES.
So, as a business owner, I feel the "free market" has failed, just like it has for virtually every other utility that doesn't exist in a dense urban market. And, look at how many Enron-owned utilties that were serving dense, urban markets are now going bankrupt and being bought back by the public, often through their own cities or county utility tax districts?
This isn't a matter of the free market. It is basic public economics. The "Free Market" is not the answer to everything. It's time to stop watching Fox News and stop listening to Rush Limbaugh. It's time to tune in to reality.
Notice how I encouraged government taxation and regulation? Damn, I must be a communist. Or a rural US citizen who is underserved. Take your pick.
That's great for North Jersey folks, but the point holds - people say we don't have fast broadband because of land mass, yet even the most populated places have no access to it.
Not even DSL is available to a lot of the houses in my city - the Northeast is very heavily populated yet there's an absurd amount of people with no broadband options. Rhode Island is the second most densely populated state in the US (in back of Jersey) and all we have is limited DSL and cable modems. As much as I don't like Cox, if it weren't for them we'd be screwed. Then again, if it weren't for them keeping the competiton out, maybe we would have better options..
A lot of these other countries are subsidizing the cost of laying out the fiber and cables to help promote very high speed internet. They get tax breaks and other goodies. They're promoting competition. In the US, a small handful of companies run the show, and they make sure everyone else is kept out.
It's not land mass that's the issue, it's the companies running the services. While I do agree that it's very expensive to expand and upgrade communications equipment, our government could easily step in a foster some growth in this area if they want to keep the US competitive so all our jobs don't end up overseas.
ps. Verizon's FIOS service is supposedly available here, too, but I've not found one address in the state that has it availablle. I guess you have to live next door to the CO so they can run you a cable. I mean, if Verizon can't even upgrade a few old voice coils to open up DSL to thousands of potential subscribers, can I believe that they're going to run fiber?
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
It's called mod_gzip. Maybe you've heard of it.
Looking other places than the Web, Usenet still lacks standard compressed connection support. This is sad.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
I know plenty of people who choose to live without water and/or electricity. Some of them even produce their own water and/or electricity rather than buy it from someone else. Either way, they're "off the grid." But, most people don't choose to live that way. Increasingly, most people don't choose to live without bandwidth, either. This is the fact today. It is growing much like the phone did. Unfortunately, you can't just "produce your own."
You think I'm a fascist because I want the government to enforce open access, in spite of the large telecoms??? The national policy for the past 9 years has been fascist, then. I've never heard of open access as being "Fascist," that's a very interesting choice in terminology.
Actually, what I want is the opposite of what you describe as "Fascist." I want the government to move TELECOMMUNICAITONS INFRASTRUCTURE into its own category outside of the way of SERVICE, much as has been done for EVERY OTHER UTILITY. Imagine. actually having a choice of providers at different service levels over the same infrastructure. It would not make it easier for me or anyone else to monopolize the market, in fact it would do quite the opposite, it would slash monopolization that exists today.
You say you're a democrat who supports telecommunications deregulation? You sound like a troll to me. Try and explain with any level of intelligence how "The government does not have the right to help your company at the expense of another" when we are talking about public funding? The government has never opened up a private network to the public. Cable has always been private, long-haul fiber has always been private. Only publically funded networks have been regulated, and for good reason.
By offering broadband, you are taking away the choice of dialup? This is circular logic. What are you talking about?