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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).
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.