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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.'"
Hasn't this been known a long time now? And by long time I mean around seven years??? The US has pretty infrastructure, yet we aren't doing anything with it, and broadband remains ridiculously overpriced compared to the likes of Sweden, where synchronous 100Mbit/sec connections can be had for just few dozen kroner a month.
The real challenge is rural areas. Unless something spectacularly revolutionary happens, like somone launching a bunch of solar-powered autonomous blimps with WiMax transceivers onboard, anyone outside city areas is going to be left behind. I blame our government's lack of involvement in progressing the telecom industry here, such as a series of bad decisions by the FCC, and letting Verizon and Friends® hold the sword instead.
Take off every sig. For great justice.
The article takes issue with the FCC calling anything over 200 Kbps broadband.
/. readers) that's a pretty typical usage ratio.
Maybe I'm just alone in this, but I've always thought of pretty much anything faster than 56K dial-up as broadband.
Sure, 200 Kbps isn't super-fast, but it's certainly not dial-up.
Another issue they have is that a lot of "broadband" is upstream limited to as little as 128 Kbps and thus they don't think it should count.
While I decry providers who don't give people much upstream bandwidth, it's a bit much to claim something "isn't broadband" if it's say, 1.5 Meg down and 128 K up. For a lot of people (the less techy amongst us, not
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
I'm also waiting private libraries to replace those provided by the government. Those public libraries are for losers and eggheads.
These countries were once behind the US in terms of broadband adoption, speed, availibility. That gap has almost disappeared - having worked in the industry for some time on both sides of the Atlantic, it is obvious that the US is falling behind. Take the price of a 6 MB DSL line with VOIP included in France - you can get the whole thing for $30 (~20 euro). In the US you are lucky to see $30 for the VOIP alone, and my total bill with a 4MB cable connection is over $70.
While they push on with triple-play products in Europe to include Video and bump speeds up to the 20MB range with ADSL 2+ Verizon are bumping people to 2MB.......
South Korea is a world leader in broadband penetration and they started from zero just s few years ago. They're government made it a vital policy to get broadband to everyone, and it worked. The US Government needs to wake up, something needs to be done - and quickly before the US becoes a comsumer digital backwater.....
https://comerford.net
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.
Residential and commercial access appear to be slowly but steadily improving. Despite the progress that the US has made, the future looks somewhat mixed.
I'm worried about College and University connections. Usage limits and even outright censorship are the norm on High School networks. I'd like to change this, but for now, it's just a fact of life. University networks, on the other hand, have been the most unrestricted and fast ways of getting online since the birth of the Internet. My old High School class is starting college right now, and I've talked to a few friends about their school's network access. The bandwidth is usually good, but a lot of connections are filtered, firewalled, or otherwise limited. All of them so far have been behind an IP masquerading device. End-to-end connectivity has been a core principle of the Internet, supported, for example, by the Internet Architecture Board. NAT is a detriment to the Public Internet. Is your school even providing "Internet" service if hosts on the Internet cannot initiate TCP connections with you? Asemetric data rates and private IP addresses could make the Internet just another TV network, a medium where passive users consume content that only big rich corporations can provide. Hopefully the demand for p2p will keep upload rates up, and more users will become technically competent enough to host other services. Let's keep the Internet democratic and egalitarian!
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
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.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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
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?
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's called mod_gzip. Maybe you've heard of it.
- Dynamic HTML is fatter still, including the page you're reading
Slashdot? Dynamic HTML? Umm.... You really have no clue what dynamic HTML is, do you? Here's a tip: Dynamic HTML is not forms, or server-side-generated pages. It usually involves a little JavaScript and something called the Document Object Model.
- CSS simply adds to the problem by oversending code/data
So instead of loading style.css once per site, and keeping it in cache, and defining per-tag styles and, when that's not enough, using neat short little class="" attributes... we should instead use big ugly tags on everything? And tables and images for layout, I suppose?
- XML is another bucket of overkill; every page sends a new schema, and a bunch of unneeded, duplicate info
Umm, I'm not about to call XML a 'compact' file format (until you pipe it through gzip or something) but do you really have any idea how XML is typically used in Internet applications? I'm interested to know how you think the XML page sends a schema in a neat little HTTP attachment or something.
The idea of using more compression in more places isn't a terribly bad idea, you just don't seem to have a particularly good grasp on the reality. It's in decently widespread use already.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
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.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
All retarded bureaucracies overstate their achievements - don't you read Dilbert?
More BS to inflate the numbers -- see above. Personally, I don't view anything slower than 768/256 as broadband.
Seeing as Japan's land is all densely populated, it won't cost much to run fiber, copper, or WiFi to everyone. The US has a much more dispersed population to reach.
People with little money to spare don't spend it on faster internet access, and companies are more willing to run broadband where it's economical. No duh - next?
Mmmm... don't even want to go there. As usual, Washington whores itself out to the biggest campaign donator. This will happen as long as money is considered a form of speech.
There is nothing anyone can do about having to cover a large expanse of rural areas. The only thing we can do is force corruption out of government and reign in the monopolies, allowing competition to benefit everyone. Until then, we will see broadband access intentionally mismanaged to benefit monopolies.
Until there's even high speed (20+Mbit) Internet available in the big cities *at all*, for less then $5,000 a month, you can't say we're limited by land mass.
Right now, it doesn't matter where you live in the US. You can't get it. So until you can get these speeds in the highly populated areas you can't use the last mile arguement.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
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?
AccountKiller
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
A lot of people are perplexed at why broadband sucks in the US. They blame the government. They blame the size of our country. They blame the market. But look who's primarily behind broadband over here: Phone companies and cable companies.
Let's start with phone companies. Does it really benefit phone companies to have great and cheap bandwidth? Not when everyone switches over to VoIP killing their high profit long distance service. Not to mention that businesses pay for EVERY call they make. If broadband was great and cheap, the phone companies would disappear.
Let's move on to cable companies. Pretty soon you'll be able to watch movies via broadband. E.g., Netflix is about to offer movies. In a few years you'll probably be able to watch any movie and any TV you want with a simple clicks. Does this benefit cable companies? Nope. Because they make tons of money, nearly all their money, selling premium movie channels and content via pay-per-view. In other words, if broadband was great and cheap, they'd also be out of business.
Thus, the ONLY way we're going to get real broadband in the US is by wrestling control of it from the current status quo. That's why I'm really excited about broadband over power lines. The power companies have nothing to lose with broadband.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.