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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.'"
Synchronous? I'm not sure fibre/ethernet is, actually - and more to the point, I suspect the fact that it's symmetric is more important.
I'm in Australia, and I must say - you folks are lucky by comparison to us, though it *is* getting better here. We have an agency called the ACCC - Australian Competition and Consumer Commission - that's been slowly beating the incumbent telco into shape.
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.
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
You're right....South Korea has the US beat in corporate ownership of the government hands down. Ever been there? Hyundai, KIA, Samsung, and L.G. pretty much run the whole country.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
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).
...United States, a large country with more vast, unpopulated areas than any other industrial nation.
Oh c'mon, can you really be so ignorant as to think that is true? You don't even have to look very far, just a little bit north, that country called Canada. The country American's have a tendancy to forget exists.
I've compared the broadband rates/pricing between Canada and the US, we have a much better deal. For $38USD/month one can get in Canada from Rogers 6.0Mb/sec over DOCSIS 2.0 (in practice meaning that you get atleast 95% of your theoretical bandwidth at all times). From BellSouth $43USD/month only gets your 3.0Mb/sec, $5/month more, for half the speed. That is comparatively a horrible deal.
The country with a more spread out population has cheaper, faster broadband! It also has higher broadband penetration rates, ~20% ahead! http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0506/.
The point of all this being, you can't blame the US broadband rates on your geography, it really is your political climate. As for the FCC, Republican governments generally favour business, so this isn't entirely surprising.
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.
.. 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.
It does have a French accent, in French that particular character is used when we want a soft c sound (ss as opposed to k)when the next letter is an 'a', 'o', or 'u' (by default, when the next letter is one of those, the sound is hard)
Without it, it would be said 'fakade' instead of 'fassade'
FYI, if the letter following the c is an 'i' or 'e', the default action is a soft c sound, so the 'tail' (officially called a cédille) would not be necessary
The Hobo, your friendly neighbourhood French-Canadian
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
"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."
s /HighSpeedInternetForHome.asp
Bullshit.
http://www22.verizon.com/FiosForHome/channels/Fio
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.
......The U.S. doesn't have gasoline riots and it won't have broadband riots .....
Another reason that many people are not clamoring for broadband is the fact that the main internet application -- still e-mail-- doesn't really require extraordinarily high speed for most people. Even ordering an occasional book from Amazon or looking at stuff on e-bay works fairly well over a dial up. Even the best, fanciest broadband video streaming doesn't come close to a satellite TV broadcast and most people would not watch programs on their computers anyway. If we rent a DVD, it gets watched in the living room, not in the den where the computers are.
Outside of rural areas, most people can get faster that dial access if they have enough use thereof to justify its higher cost. Spending $400/year or more is not cost effective for the type of use many people have for the internet. Dial-up at half or less than the cost of broadband is good enough. Also, malware prone windows boxes are much less susceptiple on an intermittent dial connection that an always connected PC on a fast path to the wilds of the internet.
As for cell phones, the US has a very well developed landline phone infrastructure, much better than places like S. Korea and most other countries. When our daughters, who only have cell phones, call us, their calls are often dropped and they have to re-dial. This seldom if ever happens for those who call us on their POTS phones. Cell phones, even in a home environment are STILL much less reliable, although extremely convenient. Just because a technology appears to be the latest and greatest, it is not always the best suited for many people, especially if the extra cost cannot be justified.
All theory is gray
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.
It's apparent that ADSL access causes extreme stupidy for the OP. If I was OP, i'd worry about the blanket of radiation fron the local cell towers, commercial radio/tv and service radio.
Having performed RF radiation studies, I can assure that the wildlife are less threatened by rf radiation than those morons that insist in living in rat nest like dwellings in the big city.
Defining what competition is? I thought everyone agreed that is was multiple providers trying to sell you the same good or service - Am I wrong? If the government doesn't enforce competition in an industry, the nearly inevitable end result is a monopoly or oligopoly that locks out competition and provides bad service to customers. See America at the start of the 20th century, Microsoft, or (more relevant to this article) the TelCo monopolies for ample examples.
Since the free market is driven by greed and self-interest, one or a few people/companies who are better at being greedy and self-interested (Which is not necissarily a bad thing) will naturally rise to the top and keep themselves there by outcompeting everyone else. But once they're on top, they lock others out and with no further incentive to do things well, settle for between mediocre and downright bad. Competition is what keeps the quality of service up for everyone. Since it's something that everyone wants and that private companies loathe (their purpose is to get as much marketshare as possible, right?), we need the government to create/enforce it.
If the government doesn't impose competition, your friendly local broadband monopoly will rape you without lubrication for crummy DSL or cable service. If the government makes providers compete, Comcast, Speakeasy, Verizon, and SBC will be all be tripping over themselves trying to provide the services and features you want at the price you want.
Economics is about properly mixing and balancing opposing forces: Neither pure communism nor pure capitalism works. Too little or too much government regulation is bad. Prices naturally equalize to where the producer gets enough profit and the consumer gets a good enough deal. The job of the government, and one of the major choices of a society, is how to handle these mixes.
100Mbit/s in Sweden can not be had "for just few dozen kroner a month".
For instance, bredbandsbolaget.se offers 100Mbit/s up/down with 300GB/month for 595 SEK/month (about 80USD/month). However, this is not available everywhere - most ISPs offer at most 24Mbit/s.
For most Swedish households, 1Mbit/s is probably the limit.
The broadband availability in Sweden is not all that fantastic (the 8 MBit/s ADSL is most common), but the infrastructure is at this point great. 90% of the population are reached by the fiber backbones at this point, it is mostly the ISP that have not really gotten things rolled out beyond ADSL in non-urban areas. On the other hand lots of villages just set up a "company", rent backbone access and run ethernet between the houses. Thanks to good infrastructure this is in fact a very cheap approach if you get going.
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
$199 is a little high for internet service. Their lower speed 15Mbit is more resonable in pricing but still not in the same category as 100Mbit access.
The biggest problem with FIOS is that it's not available. They keep making a big deal about it, and I get information packets in my mailbox about it, but not one address in my town, or any of the neighboring towns can get it. And I live in a very densly populated area between Providence and Boston.
While I'm sure some people can get FIOS somewhere in my state, the number is so insignificant. You can't even get it in almost all of NYC.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
LA is atypical for a large city. In fact, London has over three times as many skyscrapers (1773) as LA (512), despite being about 70% of its size. This contibutes in a major way to the urban sprawl of LA. Seattle, the GP's city, is similarly, geograpically large.
Put identity in the browser.
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.).