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.'"

Comments

façade?

[zegebbers]

Ohh I see, I thought there was something on my monitor

Re:façade?

[cujo_1111]

That sir, is what is called a cunning C...

Re:façade?

[The Hobo]

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

Re:façade?

[TheRaven64]

I think the shocking thing is that Slashcode managed to handle a non-ASCII character. Even more impressive would be if it handled proper unicode and didn't replace every trademark symbol I type with (tm). I'm sure it will manage this Real Soon Now(TM).

The S. Koreans

[grolaw]

Have the U.S. beat . . .

Where are our leaders? Oh, yeah...

Bought and paid for.

Re:The S. Koreans

[xlv]

Where are our leaders? Oh, yeah...

Vacationing yet again in Crawford?

Re:The S. Koreans

[JanneM]

If that was the reason, you'd have the same excellent communication infrastructure at least in your major cities and associated suburbs and satellite communities.

Re:The S. Koreans

[Forbman]

As far as optical fiber goes, how much "dark" fiber is already in the ground in the US from the 90's?

So your argument was kind of a red herring.

The observation in the US is that Comcast, RoadRunner, Verizon/Qwest/SBC basically control broadband deployment in the US, not the FCC. These companies, when they're not trying to slit each other's throats (wrong kind of competition), are more than happy to keep padding congressional pockets and keep the FCC under control. Oh, and a few local and state buyoffs help too, to quell any minor uprisings by the untermenschen locals who have gotten tired of eating cake.

There are other "broadband" options besides cable or telco DSL, but they're in the minority. I'm using wireless broadband supplied by MacOnline (www.maconline.com), which is for me just ends up being what I wish I could get from cable or telco DSL: Broadband internet service with no buy-in to the network provider's lowest-common-denominator bundled bullshit and their bullshit TOS agreements.

768Kbps SDSL. Static IP. Works for me.

Now, my birth mother in Lance Creek, WY, well, they'd probably have to use satellite-based service. If you know where Lance Creek, WY, is, you'll understand why cable, telco DSL, 3G, et al., will NEVER reach a good third of the US physically (i.e., between the front range of the Rocky Mts and the Mississippi River, not withstanding major metropolitan areas like Denver or Kansas City.

Re:The S. Koreans

[JohnTheFisherman]

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.

Re:The S. Koreans

[grolaw]

Hmm,

The U.S. has highly-dense population centers that are not as developed as S. Korea.

In terms of sheer wealth - the U.S. outstrips the vast majority of countries and there simply is no reason why the U.S. should ever take a back seat to technology - unless the moneyed interests demand otherwise.

The reason that the U.S. hasn't kept up with cell technology and broadband is that the last buck hasn't been wrung out of the populace.

Given the current oil price at $70.00/bbl - coupled with the ready availability of oil at that price - the U.S. ought to have people up in arms over the $2.60+ / gal. price of gasoline. The U.S. doesn't have gasoline riots and it won't have broadband riots despite overpriced monopoly limits on broadband development in the U.S.

Neither apples nor oranges....the U.S. can easily lead in any field - it chooses.

Re:The S. Koreans

[uberdave]

compared to the United States, a large country with more vast, unpopulated areas than any other industrial nation.

Again this idiotic notion buried in the American psyche that they are first at everything. Canada has far more vast, unpopulated regions than the US could ever possibly hope to have.

Re:The S. Koreans

[p2sam]

90% of the Canadian population live on the edge of the Canadian/US border. :) So we're actually pretty dense. And no, our broadband penetration rate in northern Canada, is nothing that high either :)

Re:The S. Koreans

[Anonymous Coward]

...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.

Re:The S. Koreans

[mi]

Where are our leaders?

Why are you expecting "your leaders" to provide you with Internet access? Is there anything wrong with you, that you must depend on the government?

Must they supply you with food and toilet paper too?

Re:The S. Koreans

[MtViewGuy]

Now, my birth mother in Lance Creek, WY, well, they'd probably have to use satellite-based service. If you know where Lance Creek, WY, is, you'll understand why cable, telco DSL, 3G, et al., will NEVER reach a good third of the US physically (i.e., between the front range of the Rocky Mts and the Mississippi River, not withstanding major metropolitan areas like Denver or Kansas City.

That's because the population density in the areas you mentioned can't justify the exorbitant expensive of implementing the Last Mile solution for getting xDSL or cable modem broadband access into your home or business. This is where 802.16/802.20 WiMAX technologies will become very useful, since out in rural areas you can put up WiMAX antenna arrays on top of hills, up the sides of mountains, on top of grain silos, etc. so you can cover a large swath of area with a single antenna array. This will allow for isolated mountain communities and small rural towns to finally get broadband Internet access.

Re:The S. Koreans

[bryce1012]

Not every state.

Here in South Dakota, every school - yes, every school - is tied into a state-run network, and every school has been wired internally so that every room, yes every room, has access to that network. Sure, it cost quite a bit to implement, but that was the Governor's pet project for years.

Re:The S. Koreans

[arminw]

......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.

Re:The S. Koreans

[warkda rrior]

the United States, a large country with more vast, unpopulated areas than any other industrial nation

I might be nitpicking, but unpopulated areas do not require broadband access.

Re:The S. Koreans

[Capitalist1]

He did say industrial nations. I don't know if Maple Syrup and moose porn count as "industries".

Re:The S. Koreans

[BMazurek]

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!

My mother, who lives on a farm several miles outside that town cannot currently get broadband, but it's supposed to be available soon.

You're right, the vast majority of the Canadian populace is concentrated along the US border, but that by no means implies that broadband isn't available in a very high percentage of the country. There are very remote areas that don't have good access (ie, the territories), but the country is pretty well covered considering the population density.

Re:The S. Koreans

[Mortlath]

I might be nitpicking, but unpopulated areas do not require broadband access.

I think the "vast, unpopulated areas" surround the sparsely populated areas.

Re:The S. Koreans

[grolaw]

I'd agree with you that email is the main Internet app. However, as we move more and more to Internet-based laws and regulations (the paper copies are being phased out) we will all have to have access at higher bandwidth than dialup to register our vehicles, file our taxes, register for school (yes, even primary and secondary school) etc.

Streaming video is good enough today to demonstrate simple tasks (where to put the sticker on your license plate - how to fill out the tax form). POTS lines have limits - though I've lived through many "limits" from sub 300 Baud through 56kbit - and spent quite a bit on modems over the years.

I had an ISDN line for years - but true Broadband has made a great difference in my business life - I use the bandwith to file documents with government agencies. It couldn't be done any other way today...

As soon as the majority of personal business transactions and government-citizen transactions are moved to the Internet then a citizen's access to Broadband will define the digital divide.

Re:The S. Koreans

[Goth Biker Babe]

You're explaining the symtoms but not the cause. *Why* do you have huge cities. *Why* do people drive miles to work. I live in a city of a million in the UK. I live four miles from its centre right on the end of suburbia and there are green hills and villages beyond me. I have a choice of two cable companies and ADSL. I have 2Mb ADSL (because I wanted a fixed IP and unrestricted usage). I drive ten miles to work across the country side and it takes me half an hour from door to door. I can go for a walk along a nice canal at lunch time to get some air.

When I worked in LA for a short time it took the same time to drive to work. Most of that was on soul destroying freeways. I couldn't walk anywhere and I had crappy broadband and smog. The nearest countryside was many miles away. Why do you put yourselves through it?

Re:The S. Koreans

[Bimo_Dude]

It makes no difference whether he's vacationing in Crawford or Washington. The end result is the same.

Re:The S. Koreans

[YrWrstNtmr]

Why? Because we can. The space is there, and absent a strict (illegal?) government ban on using it, people will build on that space.

I've lived in Britain, and it's quite easy to see why the cities are built differently.

LA is not really representative of the US. I live near the edge of a 1.5 million metro area, and have a 15 minute drive to work, 20 minutes to the beach, 40 minutes to the next state. It's not all like LA.

Re:The S. Koreans

[CaptDeuce]

Why are you expecting "your leaders" to provide you with Internet access? Is there anything wrong with you, that you must depend on the government?

Whether there's anything wrong with me is strictly between myself and the voices in my head, thank you very much.

As for relying on the government ("of the people, by the people, for the people" ... hey, maybe that's where the voices in my head come from ...), yes, I do expect that. Our government -- local state and federal -- set policies that dictate how companies provide internet service to our homes.

The state I live in has a Public Service Commission that represents the interests of consumers with regards to utilities including telecommunications and cable. I don't have exact figures but out local phone company petitions the for rate increases three or seven times a year. They argue that each of them are necessary, yet, they somehow manage to remain profitable even though only one out of seven or nine actually get approved.

Everybody knows it's a game. But, who should we depend on if not the government to protect us from companies that will gleefully take the shirts off our backs if they thought we're willing (to extend the metaphor) procure an new shirt every month?

So let's say I abandon my commie pinko ways and join the rugged individualist Libertarians and do it without no stinkin' lousy guvmint ...

Ah! I'll use the free market! I'll take advantage of a competing services! I can use [drum roll] satellite! I'll be free of the stifling oppression of the govmint! OK, so it costs nearly twice as much and has a disastrous latency problems and a pitifully slow upload speed. Hmm, what else can I do?

Get rid of those interferin' guvmint agencies and wait for Private Industry to fight over each other to invest millions of dollars that they can recoup after only eight years ... if they charge triple the rate I pay now ... hmm.

I got it! I'll set up my own local wireless network! Sure! If Andy Hardy and Judy Garland can do it, so can I! All I need is a few hundred bucks and a land wire connection to the internet. OK, so I'll need to pay commercial rates ... but I can share the costs with my neighbors! So, all I need then is a hundred dollars or so from each, just to start out, but we'll pay less in the long run. Yeah!

Of course ... I'll have to do some trouble shooting. And make sure everybody pays their share for the service on a timely basis. Upgrade and replace equipment now and then -- everybody would be willing to pony up some extra cash when that happens. And it'll only cost me some of my spare time!

OK ... maybe I'll charge everyone a little bit extra each month to compensate me for my time -- it's only fair, right? Sure, I'll have no time to mow the lawn or go see a movie, but at least I'm being compensated; I'll still be making big bucks at my Real Job ... at least until it gets shipped overseas.

But, hey, I'll can still collect unemployment!

[I smack my forhead with heal of my hand]

Gee, I guess I really don't need no guvmint! I could have starting do this years ago! Yeah, this rugged individualism is great stuff! Thanks, Mr. Libertarianism!

Now all I gotta do is tackle those potholes in the road. Let's see ...

Re:The S. Koreans

[An Onerous Coward]

Here is how things went down.

The United States had a much different reaction to World War II than Great Britain. While Britain was mourning its dead*, rebuilding its infrastructure, and thinking deep thoughts about What It All Means in a world where such wasteful death and destruction can occur, The U.S. patted itself on the back for saving the world, then went out on a three decade long economic kegger.

Our GI's went home, got married, copulated like rabbits (sometimes in that order), and started looking for big houses with huge front lawns and wide streets far away from the hustle and bustle and slight garbagy smell of the cities. Vast swaths of land were converted into suburban tract housing. Everyone bought a car so they could live and work and play exactly where they wanted.

As the rich kids moved out to the 'burbs, they took the money and jobs with them, leading to a vicious economic downturn that turned our most populous areas into barren ghettos. Major city centers still had all the problems they had before, but lost the tax base and education base needed to do anything about them. As things got worse, the idea of living in the city became less and less attractive to most people.

Meanwhile, the ugliness of the networking problem came to the forefront: the need to link everything to everything else in our suddenly sprawled-out landscape necessitated the building of ever bigger roads. Eisenhower started the Interstate Highway System, which is a wonderful thing if you want to drive from L.A. to New York without stopping to ask for directions, but it proverbially duct taped America to its automobiles.

Now we're in a situation that I don't think we'll be able to pull ourselves out of unless oil hits $300/barrel (which I expect to occur in June 2007, right in time for Labor Day). Given the area that needs to be covered, no city can convince its taxpayers of the necessity of a really effective mass transit system. It's just too expensive to field the sort of system that car-owners would consider a viable alternative to their own private vehicles. The only people who really use mass transit are those too poor to buy their own cars, and if you're too poor to buy a car, you're certainly too poor to buy a politician.

So instead we field crappy mass transit systems that can get the poor to their exploitative jobs and back, and call it good. In my home town of Salt Lake, buses run every half hour, and most routes shut down after 6PM. So from an arbitrarily chosen departure time, the bus commuter waits fifteen minutes per connection, and has no alternative but to come straight home after work. In order to make the mass transit system something that car owners would consider, I think buses would have to run every ten minutes on most routes, with full service running until 9PM (and buses every half hour until midnight or 1AM). Routes would have to be added, so people on the outskirts wouldn't have to walk seven blocks to the nearest bus stop.

To most people, it sounds like overkill, but overkill is barely enough if the goal is to make mass transit a convenient alternative to private vehicles. Hence, we're never going to wean ourselves from our automobiles. Looking at the hundreds of thousands of cars, hundreds of gas stations and repair shops, thousands of miles of pavement, scores of car dealerships, etc., it seems pretty clear to me that a good mass transit system would be far cheaper than the current solution. But we're too heavily invested in the current solution to give it up without a fight.

I believe that fight is coming soon.

* Yes, the U.S. had casualties. But they had about a fifth the per capita military casualties of Britain, and suffered no losses stateside after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The whole thing was just less traumatizing from our perspective. For the U.S., World War II was a successful military operation. For Great Britain, it was a near-fatal brush with nasty, pointy death. Hitler taught Europe a lot of hard-won lessons about the horrors of war. All he taught us Yanks was, "Being an economic superpower kicks ass!"

Somehow, I think this goes a long way towards explaining Iraq.

Re:The S. Koreans

[Daengbo]

You made a serious error comparing your town of a million to LA. The LA metro area was estimated by the 1990 census at over 16 million people. London, on the other hand, is estimated at a mere 11M.

If you think that London is not urbanized, read this: London's urbanised area is rarely recognised as being a metropolitan region. In fact, the area known officially as Greater London is commonly referred to as the metropolitan district, but this accounts for only 7m of the 11.8m people living in a continuous urban area (agglomeration) at the centre of which is London. 1

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.

Re:The S. Koreans

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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.

That's just South Korean propaganda! The U.S. government is owned by thousands more corporations than S. Korea can ever hope to be.

Re:The S. Koreans

[electroniceric]

Very, very well put. You are spot on with your assessment of transit frequency - people would rather wait 50 minutes or more in their car in gridlock than 25 at a bus stop, and that's hard math to change unless you can get the bus wait down below 10 or 15 minutes.

One more thing you should put in that mix is that the second half of that postwar period saw the rise of a strongly anti-statist party and movement in the US that has absolutely refused to consider government planning, of which transit is a subset. Transit been thrown to the wayside, and sustainable land use has as well - sustainable not just in the environmental sense, but in the sense of building communities that can afford their infrastructure over the long run. For example, look what happens to bedroom communities as their populations and infrastructure age - they don't have the tax base (which requires density of both residents and businesses) to pay for school systems and fixing sewers. So not only are we lacking any decent mass transit, we are also lacking the networks of people, government agencies, and the popular understanding that would allow people to begin to build those systems. Fortunately there has been some revitalization

The same anti-government sentiment and absolute refusal to engage in any coordinated efforts to keep markets sane has hobbled competition in many of the US' important marketplaces, with communications being the obvious leader in backwardness, but the finance (housing bubble), energy (Enronesque deregulation), automotive (fuel efficiency standards that feed the industry's addiction to poorly built SUV's), and airline (pension fund sophistry and slow response to commoditization) industries are doing their respective best to stamp out functional, transparent marketplaces as well.

I agree with you that it'll take a fight to make people think seriously about saner building patterns, but I'm not optimistic about it getting resolved soon, and in the interim I see our standard of living getting hammered by it. One scholar of poverty recently pointed out that while a car is a status symbol in most poor countries, in the suburban and rural US it's a necessity even for lower-income people - you simply cannot hold down a job without a car, and that makes people very vulnerable to rising energy prices. Combine that with our severely weakened support for education and scientific research, and you see some serious potholes in the US' economic road.

Australian

[cujo_1111]

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.

From the desk of the President

[peculiarmethod]

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.

Re:From the desk of the President

[peculiarmethod]

can't portray him TOO closely, or it's a federal crime. since everything else was accurate, I figured the signature should be off.

Bait and switch, but...

[theraptor05]

From the press release

Analysis of "low-priced" introductory offers by companies like SBC and Comcast reveal them to be little more than bait-and-switch gimmicks.

SBC tried that on me. Threatened to drop their service, and they gave me the lower price again in a heartbeat.

Let the free market handle this

[wheelbarrow]

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.

Re:Let the free market handle this

[hoeschen]

I'm also waiting private libraries to replace those provided by the government. Those public libraries are for losers and eggheads.

Re:Let the free market handle this

[Dr.Hair]

It's the role of the government to ensure competition in a marketplace. Y'know, the free market.

Competition reduces prices by eliminating monopoly/oligopoly pricing structures.

The current FCC is ruling in favour of monopoly/oligopoly pricing structures, since big telecom companies want government to ensure appropriate return on investment. Y'know, the antithesis of the free market.

Re:Let the free market handle this

[crhylove]

This is fine in theory, but the current monopolistic practices of EVERY MAJOR PROVIDER mean that this will NEVER HAPPEN. Unless the government steps in and levels the playing field, which those major corporations are paying them handsomely NOT TO DO. 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.. Those candidates who don't take the money don't get on TV. So really until TV is either owned by the populace and municipalities or is replaces as the primary form of information for john q. public, we're all going to keep taking up the corporate tail pipe while drinking star bucks mochas and listening to whatever the RIAA is paying radio stations to play this week, even if coldplay's new album totally sucks compared to the last two.

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.

Re:Let the free market handle this

[Mr_Huber]

Perhaps because the free market has been futzing around for the better part of a decade without much real improvement. Sure, we have a variety of platforms and a variety of providers, but somehow, they just aren't competeing.

Amazing how they're all priced within a dollar or two of each other, isn't it?

The problem here is there isn't a profit motive for lowering prices. So long as all companies involved accept the current price, consumers are stuck paying it. And they've found a price to penetration level they are happy with and don't appear to be moving.

Meanwhile, countries like Japan and Korea, who made it a social priority to have cheap, ubiquitous broadband have lapped us.

Re:Let the free market handle this

[Vellmont]

Why is it the role of the federal government to ensure cheap broadband by 2007?

It isn't, and no one but you seem to be claiming that's the goal. I don't know where you got the word cheap, certainly not in the article summary or the article itself. The goal is universal affordable broadband. I see this goal much like rural electrification that started in the 1930s.

The nation as a whole has an interest in broadband internet access being available to everyone. This is no different than roads, power, and phone service. Why is that so hard to understand?

Re:Let the free market handle this

[dal20402]

Yes, it's better here than it is in, oh, say, Zimbabwe.

But, by our traditional and very libertarian American standards, it's getting worse. The most dramatic example is the arbitrary placing of left-wing activists, including a nun, who have nothing to do with terrorism on no-fly lists. There is also good old Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act (the infamous "library clause"), which despite reports otherwise has been used. There have been the expected right-wing media attempts, aided by John Ashcroft, to equate dissent with terrorism. And, finally, there is the renewed effort by Bush's Justice Department to crack down on anything it deems pornographic using whatever means occur to it.

I would not be surprised if Cindy Sheehan is never able to get on an airplane again.

Re:Let the free market handle this

[dal20402]

Okay, I don't usually respond to trolls, but tonight I'm bored.

1. Too many left-wing activists have been put on the no-fly lists for it to be accidental. I've seen reports of a baby or two, and never of a right-wing activist, but there have been at least 20 cases of left-wing activists on the no-fly lists.

2. I cited John Ashcroft because, in 2001 when he was Attorney General (did you forget?) he dramatically and famously equated dissent with terrorism. But the right-wing media that echoed his posture did not stop when he left office.

3. Sure I cited an obscenity case. The hallmark of both the Ashcroft and Gonzalez Justice Departments' approaches to porn has been to systematically attempt to expand the obscenity exception to the 1st Amendment until it covers Janet Jackson's nipple. "Obscenity" should refer only to that material (such as child and snuff porn) that constitutes evidence of a crime.

And, no, I don't want to take away your gun. /rolls eyes
I'm more libertarian than leftist reactionary.

Re:Let the free market handle this

[Animats]

Many older US cities do have private libraries. The Mechanics Institute in San Francisco is a very pleasant little library. It's well kept, and the books, almost all on open shelves, are in excellent condition. The collection is broad, and the older material is heavily engineering-oriented. They have the engineering drawings for the Panama Canal, and bound volumes of most of the journals devoted to heavy engineering.

If you spend much time in SF near the Financial District, it's worth buying a membership. It's only $95 per year.

Re:Let the free market handle this

[bnf]

It's the role of the federal government to manage the public's "right of way", whether that's the airwaves or the powerlines or your telco. All those private sources are working within the public's right of way for delivery of their services. In managing that right of way I think it is a responsible act to foster it's utility for the common good. The fact that the federal governemnt manages it poorly (IMHO) does not mean that it isn't their role.

Re:Let the free market handle this

[The Master Control P]

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.

Re:Let the free market handle this

[realinvalidname]

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.

Exactly right. But there is no free market here. Cable and phone companies enjoy monopolies enforced by local and state governments respectively. The proper first step would be to eliminate those monopolies immediately and let anyone lay whatever wire they can charge for (and pay access rights to lay). Until we have real choice and real competition, there's no reason that the public shouldn't expect the government to demand better from their monopoly providers.

As it is, we have the worst of both worlds in the U.S.: the quality and responsiveness of a government-enforced monopoly, coupled with the interest in social goods you'd expect of private corporations.

--realinvalidname

is this really news?

[eobanb]

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.

Re:is this really news?

[Craig Ringer]

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.

Re:is this really news?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:is this really news?

[jiushao]

Mostly correct, except that 8 MBit/s is the limit for most Swedish households at this point (and 24 MBit/s is very commonly available at this point). There is an ongoing upgrade effort so it is all coming around.

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.

Re:is this really news?

[Brandybuck]

The real challenge is rural areas.

Unlike Europe, which everyone insists we must be compared to, North America is an extremely rural place. If you're going to grade on the curve, don't compare The US to Europe, compare the US to Canada. Does everyone in the Yukon have high speed broadband? What did it take to wire every home in Saskatchewan with quality reliable broadband access? Is the provider the government, private ISP, or state monopolized corporation? Do you have a choice of provider in upper Manitoba, or do you have to settle with the lowest-common-denominator solution?

Please stop comparing us to Europe. The distances between some US homes and the nearest computer retail outlet are greater than the size of some European nations.

200 Kbps?

[_Sharp'r_]

The article takes issue with the FCC calling anything over 200 Kbps broadband.

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 /. readers) that's a pretty typical usage ratio.

Re:200 Kbps?

[Volvogga]

I wonder how much longer your relatives will be happy though. I, myself, have only had a home internet connection for a little more than a year now (and yes, it is on a 56k), but I have been noticing a gradual shift in the internet. Web pages everywhere seem to be getting to be more expectent of broadband. Even a friend of mine (who initially brought this observation to conversations that we had during physics class) who runs a cable modem has noticed the added bulk of web pages.

I often find myself waiting more and more for web pages to load now due to increased adds, picture intesive web page interfaces, and flash (I see flash a LOT more often now). Whats worse it that adds are starting to be in flash and moving gif formats more often as well now. Some of them moving gifs take anywhere from 1.5 to 3 minutes to load all the way.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not sobbing into my keyboard or anything. The loading time is still far from unacceptabel. I just wonder how much longer it will be until it is.

Re:200 Kbps?

[quarkscat]

WTF? I want some of what you've been smoking (not for myself, mind you, but for evidence when I rat you out to the DEA).

I do not live in a rural area. I live in a bedroom community 16 miles from the White House. The only broadband service provider "way out here" is Verizon. (The cable company has "broadband" that requires Windoze 98, an open ISA slot, and a phone line for the uplink.) I live 18,000 feet from Verizon's closest Central Office, and due to the crappy underground POTS wiring had to use an ADSL modem instead of DSL. The line quality, as well as the amount of multiplexed "traffic" provided me with little better than 85kbps DOWN and 65kbps UP -- all for $39.95 per month. What a really great deal ... NOT! Just recently, one of the dial-up ISPs (regional/national) began offering 3x accelerated dial-up speed (compressed cache proxy servers) for only $15 per month. What is the better deal, huh?

Verizon, our regional rape-and-pillage pigopolist, is now trying to "buy out" Cox Cable one county over -- apparently to eliminate the competition they cannot compete with. The few "islands" of DSL broadband in this county is due to new housing construction where the builder wired the homes for FTTP (Fiber To The Premesis) and made their own deal with Verizon (, a service which the HOAs gladly adopted).

The regional telcos did not build out most of their POTS infrastructure -- it is a remnant of the national AT&T monopoly that was bought and paid for long ago by taxpayers and "Ma Bell's" customers. The difference today is that it is not the Federal government (excepting the corporate whoring FCC) that determines rates versus service for the telco customers -- it is the individual states' corporation commissions, and they are a LOT cheaper for the telcos to buy off than the Feds ever were.

IMHO, the states, counties, and/or municipalities should sieze the existing POTS infrastructure under emminent domain and force the telcos to compete with newer service providers. The telcos have been having it all "their way" -- restricted competition, fixed profit margins, and minimal governmental oversight is still a monopoly (by my definition). If the counties were allowed to treat telephone service the way cable service is treated, the government controls the (cable) infrastructure and contracts to one competitor or another for their limited monopoly rights to provide service. In many areas, government takeover of the POTS infrastructure and using taxpayer funds to build out a modern FTTP infrastructure will come a lot closer to bringing inexpensive universal broadband internet to their citizens.

But only in an alternate universe, because (most of) the governments are corporate whores to the monopolists/pigopolists currently in charge of our telephone service -- both landline and cellular. I will leave my rants about fractious incompatible cellular service in the USA for another time.

time to invest in broadband over power

[techarnate]

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. =)

Look at France, Germany, UK and South Korea

[Arkham79]

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.....

Re:Look at France, Germany, UK and South Korea

[MINEMINE04]

I live in a town with a pop of about 20,000. My town is not that far away from major cities (half an hour by road). I have a fiber line that runs through my town. Yet my only options for broadand are Road Runner (for upwards of $55/mo) or Earthlink satilite (more $, less bandwith). If the gov't can get Verison to open up fiber lines, then I'm all for it! Perhapse then we can get some competition...

Re:Look at France, Germany, UK and South Korea

[cbreaker]

You can't use the land-mass vs population arguement in the US because you can't get very high speed internet even in the most populated cities. It's simply not offered, unless you go for an $8,000/mo T3.

What wonderful things will happen at 10Mbit? Who knows. Until more people are on it, we've yet to see what new technologies would utilize it. Plus, who said 10Mbit was ultra-fast? These other countries are putting in 100Mbit. Quite a difference there.

Re:Look at France, Germany, UK and South Korea

[RoRo_the_Troll]

France uses existing coper line for ADSL2+ (where adsl was already working before) and for 30euros/mon you have 10Mbps to 25Mbps depending on the distance to the dslam, VoIP and IPTV, a static IP and a reverse lookup with some provider (I'm using free.fr in France). Here in USA (yes I also live in USA .. the joy off having 2 places and being able to compare), I pay over $100 for 6Mbps downstream (768Kbps up) with 5 IP, no reverse lookup, no VoIP and no IPTV In both case I live a a city of a descent size where "high speed broadband" is available using regular coper line. So no need to add extra line to hardwire everybody ... so problem is really the non competition between provider in USA and the FCC doesn't relay help....

Re:Look at France, Germany, UK and South Korea

[dajak]

You can't use the land-mass vs population arguement in the US because you can't get very high speed internet even in the most populated cities.

The population density argument assumes that the cost of wiring the same distance is the same everywhere, which is nonsense.

Wiring up a pre-19th century town with streets one car wide and narrow sidewalks is going to be orders of magnitude more disruptive economically than wiring up a modern town. It will disrupt traffic, public transport, and create parking problems as opening up one street can close off a whole neighbourhood. Either you work only at night and move your equipment out every day, or your pay reparation for economic damage.

IF you decide to make that investment, as many European utility companies did, you will make sure that you put enough electricity and data cables in the ground to last for decades. Here in Amsterdam we were forced to rewire everything anyway in the 90s because power consumption quadrupled in 5 years due to IT companies in the town centre.

I have been in the US several times, and I am sure even inner cities in the US have ample room to rewire everything without closing off streets to traffic. Even small streets are easily 4 cars wide.

There is no excuse for the US falling behind Europe: less economic disruption, lower costs for manual labour, higher average income of customers, theoretically more competition because it is a bigger uniform market for advertising and support etc.

Home, Business, and Educational

[delirium of disorder]

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!

Re:Policymakers?

[jim_v2000]

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.

Mistake in ITU data (source for this report)

[ZombieEngineer]

It appears that they mis-spelt Australia as Austria (acording to World Bank Australia is rank 13 while Austria is 21).

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

In Japan...

[Anonymous Coward]

50Mbps/3Mbps ADSL .... $35/month
100Mbps FTTH ... $55/month

I'll play the devil's advocate then

[Quiet_Desperation]

Falling behind what? Some arbitrary political goal? What does universal broadband access give us? What problems does it solve?

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?

Correction: Better source of stats.

[ZombieEngineer]

OK - So I was wrong but here is a better list that covers all of the OECD Countries

Re:Radical Thought: tighter code/codecs reduce nee

[abtain]

You can compress html pages.. Try reading about the apache module mod_deflate. Gzip works fine.
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_deflate.h tml

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.

Re:Radical Thought: tighter code/codecs reduce nee

[Pig Hogger]

- CSS simply adds to the problem by oversending code/data

What a bunch of crocky oxdung!

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).

Re:Radical Thought: tighter code/codecs reduce nee

[FooAtWFU]

- 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.
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.

Rural Areas

[vivin]

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?

Going through all the comparisons again,

[The Master Control P]

I suppose I can expect the usual comparisions of US broadband access to other countries. Despite having lost count of how many times this has been gone over and beat to death, the same uninformed posts still show up either praising or bashing US broadband penetration/quality. If US access compares favorably, the other country's system is probably being intentionally mismanaged because the US does have a difficult job facing it: A vast network of POTS and old copper, ugly monopolies, and enormous rural areas to reach. If US access compares poorly, it's usually against a small and densely populated nation that has few areas with less with 150 people/sq mile. Either way, I think the USA is doing fairly well. On to the article:

The FCC overstates broadband penetration rates.

All retarded bureaucracies overstate their achievements - don't you read Dilbert?

The FCC defines "high-speed" as 200 kilobits per second

More BS to inflate the numbers -- see above. Personally, I don't view anything slower than 768/256 as broadband.

The United States remains 16th in the world in broadband penetration per capita. The United States also ranks 16th in terms of broadband growth rates, suggesting our world ranking won't improve any time soon. On a per megabit basis, U.S. consumers pay 10 to 25 times more than broadband users in Japan.

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.

Despite FCC claims, digital divide persists and is growing wider. Broadband adoption is largely dependent on socio-economic status. In addition, broadband penetration in urban and suburban in areas is double that of rural areas.

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?

The FCC ignores the lack of competition in the broadband market. Cable and DSL providers control almost 98 percent of the residential and small-business broadband market. Yet the FCC recently eliminated "open access" requirements for DSL companies to lease their lines, rules that fostered the only true competition in the broadband market.

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.

Not a valid arguement

[cbreaker]

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.

Re:Not a valid arguement

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

"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."

Bullshit.

http://www22.verizon.com/FiosForHome/channels/Fios /HighSpeedInternetForHome.asp

Re:Not a valid arguement

[cbreaker]

$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.

At least you have broadband choices..

[lukev123]

.. 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.

Re:At least you have broadband choices..

[Secrity]

In almost all areas of the US, there are at most two broadband providers; the local telco which may provide DSL service, and cable television. Not all areas have DSL available and not all areas have cable televisoin available. SOME areas are getting broadband wireless service and the wireline providers are pretty successful in maintaining their control over wireless broadband also.

I don't know about you...

[DaedalusHKX]

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).

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 ... "petrol", when I lived in europe referred to CRUDE oil, not gasoline.

Goal

[jmv]

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".

Canada rocks for broadband, but it's no surprise..

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Broadband in America

[Nonillion]

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...

Heavy pages...

[BackInIraq]

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.

People dont understand the limits..

[TooncesTheCat]

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.

Bring Back the PUBLIC UTILITY

[Anonymous Coward]

Define your terms people! "Success" is indelibly linked to a judgment of goodness. If you want to argue that universal access is best, then bring back the PUBLIC in "public utility." That is why the monopoly was allowed in the first place! Who cares if we have faster access if all we get access to is crap!!

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.

Thank Carnegie for libraries, not the government

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

not so true

[cg0def]

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...

MY question... Who gives a shit??

[goldspider]

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.

I'm moving...

[Murasaki Skies]

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.

we used to say that too.

[doodlelogic]

the U.S. can easily lead in any field - it chooses

(in Britain)

Oh, Gee

[Winkhorst]

You mean they are substituting lies and distortion for facts? Gee, I never would have expected that from this administration... [/sarcasm]

The gap between urban and rural

[kilodelta]

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.

Re-define broadband

[mapryan]

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

Why broadband sucks in the US....

[Anita Coney]

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.

Re:Radical Thought: tighter code/codecs reduce nee

[Gopal.V]

Ok, to answer your ever allegation Macromedia and other code is way over fat

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 code

Most of recent HTML you see is generated by a program, not an HTML editor.

Most codecs produce lousy compression and very lossy, too

What codecs ?. Divx ? .. It's more of a mathematical problem.

Dynamic HTML is fatter still, including the page you're reading

DHTML 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/data

Why ?. 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 info

Almost 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 reloads

People 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 bandwidth

RSS 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

It's there in any decent browser out there. Use mod_deflate or mod_gzip on server side.

couldn't easily have our favorite pcap file filters find credit cards.

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 2005 ... files only grow bigger).

The excuse still doesn't work

[jaakkeli]

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."

In regards to broadband outside of USA....

[MtViewGuy]

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.).

Say it ain't so!

[inkswamp]

This can't be true. You mean turning over something like this to large corporations and reducing government influence so as to use the lure of profits to drive better technology and wider availability and therefore serve the public better doesn't really work???

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.)

Re:Policymakers?

[IceAgeComing]

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.