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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.'"
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
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
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.
.. 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
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.
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.
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.
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.