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The Problems with Broadband in America
Tenken writes "Salon has an article about the state of broadband in America. After seeing what many other countries have accomplished with their broadband markets, namely Japan, Korea, and (gasp) even Canada, the current state of affairs in the U.S. is looking pretty dismal. I'm sure I'm not the only one tired of paying $45 a month just for cable internet." From the article: "Across the globe, it's the same story. In France, DSL service that is 10 times faster than the typical United States connection; 100 TV channels and unlimited telephone service cost only $38 per month. In South Korea, super-fast connections are common for less than $30 per month. Places as diverse as Finland, Canada and Hong Kong all have much faster Internet connections at a lower cost than what is available here. In fact, since 2001, the U.S. has slipped from fourth to 16th in the world in broadband use per capita. While other countries are taking advantage of the technological, business and education opportunities of the broadband era, America remains lost in transition."
That means the existing monopoly corporation providing broadband to you would suddenly have to invest major capital into revamping their business to approach a competitive edge with this new alternative that everyone smart like you and I would switch to immediately. This would cut into profits. Businessmen like their profits, so they look for an alternative, hmmm, how not to have to revamp their networks, think think think...
So the company instead pays out campaign donations the right people in senate and congress, hires some lobbyists to naysay revamping impractical and backwards laws, say if they do change the laws the terrorists will get us over the intrawebs on their haxxor boxenz and copyrighted material will be given away on the street corners. And the people of the country that invented and played a major part in developing the internet into what it is today, lose out to nations with 1/100th of the population and GNP.
God Bless America. What would Liberty be like without a caring, guiding corporate hand to slow things down to maximize their own profits? I rarely rant on like things about this, but let's face it; American broadband users are sheer cash cows to their ISP's.
And it rocks here in America (no, really, no complaints!).
If you "get" pointers add me as a friend (116)!
Other countries are claiming that the U.S. has mismanaged the internet. Which has led to broad speculation that the internet will splinter soon while those other countries work on their own "Internet."
If one were to judge our use (read: underuse) of the internet on the public level... well, that's just a whole new angle on our lack of efficacy in educating our own. Think about it, at $50/month for a typical broadband connection in this country it's cost-prohibitive for a large segment of the population to access the internet regulary. Sure, there's dialup, but the frustration involved in dialup could discourage an internet "newbie" from using it. Let us also not forget that many, many metro areas have horrible phone lines. Our infrastructure in the U.S. is sad when you consider the fact that we're still (for now) the largest economy in the world.
The best way to build your population up intellectually is through information. The undisputed king of information is the "Internet." Imagine all the eyes that could be opened. Mixed in, of course, with all the idiocy, smut, and exploitation...
But some locales are contemplating making wireless accessible to the general public. So there is a movement. It's just a shame that in the most mighty economy in the world the cost is still prohibitive for a good segment of its population.
Keep squeaking about it... perhaps the corporations will grease the wheel. But I doubt it. What we need is a brave provider to go for the quantity, and not the quality (I never thought I'd say that) -- in other words, make the pricing attractive for everyone.
My ZooLoo
Thats all there is too it - in a America everything is ruined by greed.
You have cable? Must be nice. All I can get is satellite, and this post probably won't even go through because of all the jerks on direcway :(
I'll bet that if MY DSL were 100 times faster than my current DSL, I would have gotten first post.
A decision must be made whether to cater to the very few and very rich media moguls, or whether to cater to the interests of the other 99.99% of Americans. Indeed, at this time the development of basically the entire American citizenry is being arrested by an extreme minority. American as a whole should be willing to trade a small increase in piracy for the vast other opportunities that widespread, extremely highspeed broadband Internet access would bring.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
More importantly: How can we, as consumers, change this in America?
Most broadband users download content that's valued more than what they pay each month.
:)
3 seasons of DVD in DivX format via BitTorrent has a cash value of over $100 and most people pay $25-40 per month for the access, so that's $60+ profit!
If you "get" pointers add me as a friend (116)!
has anyone stopped and thought about how big america is?
It's going to take awhile to replace all the old infrastructure in america...
that's why many smaller countries have already have newer systems in place.
Free American broadband!
In France, you can get super-fast DSL, unlimited phone service and 100 TV channels for a mere $38 a month. Why does the same thing cost so much more in the U.S.?
By S. Derek Turner
Oct. 18, 2005 | Next time you sit down to pay your cable-modem or DSL bill, consider this: Most Japanese consumers can get an Internet connection that's 16 times faster than the typical American DSL line for a mere $22 per month.
Across the globe, it's the same story. In France, DSL service that is 10 times faster than the typical United States connection; 100 TV channels and unlimited telephone service cost only $38 per month. In South Korea, super-fast connections are common for less than $30 per month. Places as diverse as Finland, Canada and Hong Kong all have much faster Internet connections at a lower cost than what is available here. In fact, since 2001, the U.S. has slipped from fourth to 16th in the world in broadband use per capita. While other countries are taking advantage of the technological, business and education opportunities of the broadband era, America remains lost in transition.
How did this happen? Why has the U.S. fallen so far behind the rest of its economic peers? The answer is simple. These nations all have something the U.S. lacks: a national broadband policy, one that actively encourages competition among providers, leading to lower consumer prices and better service.
Instead, the U.S. has a handful of unelected and unaccountable corporate giants that control our vital telecommunications infrastructure. This has led not only to a digital divide between the U.S. and the rest of the advanced world but to one inside the U.S. itself. Currently, broadband services in America remain unavailable for many living in rural and poorer urban areas, and remain slow and expensive for those who do have access.
For instance, when farmers gathered at this year's Iowa State Fair to discuss their policy concerns with U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns, the topic on the minds of many was broadband. And for good reason. Twenty-five percent of Iowa's rural communities have no access to high-speed Internet service, and over half of the remaining rural communities are serviced by only one provider. Those lucky enough to live in areas served by Iowa Telecom can pay as much as $170 per month for a DSL line.
President Bush has called for "universal, affordable access to broadband technology by the year 2007," and Federal Communications Commission chairman Kevin Martin recently declared broadband deployment to be his "highest priority." Martin recently took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to tout "the dramatic growth in broadband services." In his editorial he boasts of "fierce competition" among broadband providers and tells us we're "well on our way to accomplishing the President's goal."
The facts tell a different story. Today, major cable companies and DSL providers control almost 98 percent of the residential and small-business broadband market. This trend is the direct result of FCC policies that fail to encourage real competition among broadband providers, giving free rein over the market to the cable and DSL giants. The corporate giants are also vigorously fighting to stop cities and towns from building "Community Internet" systems -- affordable, high-speed broadband services funded in part by community groups and municipalities -- even in places where the cable and DSL companies themselves don't offer service. Yet, like rural electrification projects in the early 20th century, today's Community Internet projects offer the best hope of achieving universal broadband service.
Like so many other challenges faced by the Bush administration, the response to the growing digital divide has been to redefine success and prematurely declare victory.
In the 1996 Telecommunications Act, Congress directed the FCC to oversee the timely deployment of Internet services that "enable users to originate and receive high quality voice, data, g
Most of Europe and Japan have much denser populations than the US. They also have fewer cities to lay cable through, etc etc. Don't you realize some towns in this country still don't have landline phones? Yeah, it's true.
This is a huge country. It takes time. It sucks, but it's true.
One thing the article probably failed to mention is all. You could have the same article and swap "broadband" with "health care".
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Just because their ISPs up the DSL/Cable modem cap does not mean faster internet service. Clearly the perspective infrastructure is missing. While at the local level, our ISPs in America may be slower, at least we have a better interstate fiber backbone system which yeilds more bandwidth, less latency, and less packet loss.
Remember, your slowest link is your fastest connection.
Life is not for the lazy.
VOTE!
If you "get" pointers add me as a friend (116)!
The US has lagged lots of the "new economy" networks. Mobile phones in the US are behind the networks in Europe, and miles behind Japan. Even basic technologies like SMS are only just being adopted in the US. And now with broadband a similar picture is evolving of other markets seeing the opportunities for MASS adoption rather than trying to fleece people with a few high cost offerings.
Considering that the US is the leader of the market economies, something the French detest, its amazing to note that in many ways market economics is working more effectively for consumers in France than they are in the US.
Has the US gone too far towards corporate economics and too far from consumer economics?
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
In most of those places, the government either owns or has significant control over the Telcoms industry.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
Rogers Hi-Speed Extreme, 6mbit down, 800k up = CAD$46.95/month.
t ent/compare.asp
http://www.shoprogers.com/store/cable/InternetCon
It's fantastic. I don't understand how the US can be lagging so far behind though.. Shouldn't they be cheaper and faster then us?
Why is the rest of the world complaining? The US pays for all that content so the rest of the world can get it for free. After all 3rd world countries like France can't afford premium content at our rates, so we have to amortize the rates and charge more in the US and less across the pond.
In France, DSL service that is 10 times faster than the typical United States connection; 100 TV channels and unlimited telephone service cost only $38 per month.
Laugh while you can, you singes de capitulation qui mangent du fromage! You'll come crawling back when the Internet comes crashing down around you! Then we'll see who gets the last laugh!
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
What?
My cable connection with cogeco (cogeco.ca) is good, I have no issues with the speed (up to 640 Kbps according to their site) but it isn't super cheap. It's $40/month, and that's with a discount for getting their various other digital services, which amount to another $80/month. I would certainly like to get it cheaper ;)
KeepTrackOfIt.com - Find the lowest gas prices in your area graphically
...for a wedding this weekend. Being the geek I am, I asked him about his internet connection. Currently, the only options where I live is $50/month for Comcast 3/384 cable, or $50 for slower DSL.
He says he pays $50 a month for a DSL line that gets 34 megabits down and 5 megabits up.
Today I was asked by someone why our available lines are so expensive and offer so much less bandwidth than that of some other countries. I said I didn't know. Now I have a slightly better idea.
Last I heard, most of these countries have per minute phone service, and bandwidth usuage caps as low as 6G per month. Also, in the US, High speed internet is considered a luxury. Of course, I also know of people who spend $100(US)+ but the extra $25-30 for Internet is too much.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
With FITL, it's fiber optic cable from the central office to a "lightspeed box" in your neighborhood, where it gets converted to copper wires to go to your home. If you're lucky enough to be in a FITL neighborhood, the best you can get is IDSL (aka ISDN). The Megababy Bells insist on putting the DSLAMs in the central office, when they could put it out in the lightspeed boxes, thus creating IFITL (Integrated Fiber in the Loop). By pushing the DSLAM out to the neighborhoods, a vast majority of people could get broadband... but that means opening up the lines to competition, which I know Verizon doesn't want to do... thus the concept of FIOS... which takes advantage of a loophole in the law, allowing them to maintain total control/access of those fiber lines because they've put brand new ones out there from the central office to your home.
Since nobody other than your local power company, local cable company, and local phone company can put lines up on the phone poles (or in the conduits, if you have underground lines), they're going to kill off the broadband companies.
OCO is Loco
In France, DSL service that is 10 times faster than the typical United States connection; 100 TV channels and unlimited telephone service cost only $38 per month. In South Korea, super-fast connections are common for less than $30 per month. Places as diverse as Finland, Canada and Hong Kong all have much faster Internet connections at a lower cost than what is available here.
Yes, and in China you can buy a house for a couple thousand dollars. That doesn't mean that houses here are overpriced.
Is it too hard to fathom that Canada exceeds the US in something?
It seems to me that this article doesn't take into account the size and disbursement of the US population. Its not as hard for Finland and France to cover their country with broadband access, and to even upgrade it to handle higher speeds, but neither country are as large as Texas, just 1 of 50 US states.
Obviously, the only way to solve this is innovation. Innovation offers a solution to our broadband problem. It's time for Congress, the FCC and the White House to stop protecting the corporate dinosaurs and start exploring alternatives that will foster a genuine free market in high-speed Internet services. Who's with me?
+1 funny, -2 overrated. Life isn't fair.
What do you pay for gas? What do they pay for gas? What's more important to the US, gas or the Internet? I say we're making up for the fact we pay much less for fossil fuels than they do. I'm willing to pay a little more for broadband access.
I pay 53 a month for a lousy 4.3 down, and something like 768 up, which is more like 3.5 down, and 512 up on average. I would be happier with at least a balanced connection.
Yes, I said it.
Maybe the sluggish rate at which the U.S. is catching up with the rest of the world in regard to telecommunications will help to inspire folks to go out on their own and start fixing the problem themselves. For some reason, wireless mesh networks come to mind... Just a thought: "We have the technology. We can rebuild him." Yes, we have the technology. But can we rebuild the net?
Broadband in America is fucked.
I live in Ohio. I've had DSL for about 5 years. In two weeks, I'm moving. I'm moving less than 10 miles away from where I live now.
I checked into getting DSL at my new home. It isn't offered. The CO hasn't been upgraded.
I looked into getting a cable modem. Cable isn't offered.
I checked into getting ISDN. It isn't offered.
I even checked into getting a T1 business class line and starting a coop. It isn't available.
I asked them (SBC) when the CO is going to be updated. Their answer: They have no plans to upgrade that CO.
Aside from dial up, satellite is really my only option (they can't take the sky from me - but lets face it, satellite internet sucks).
Let's play Comparison!
The USA has a population density of 17.
Japan is like 325 and Korea is #3 in the world for population density at well over 400.
So, seriously. This is an intelletual exercise? Comparing the telecom infrastructure of Asian nations like Japan and Korea, among the most heavily populated people in the world per land area, to the United States? Canada would indeed make for a better comparison, with its insanely low population density of less than four, except something like 90% of Canadian citizens are condensed to areas that are within 200km of the American border, so the overwhelming majority of their land mass is almost entirely unpopulated and probably does not have cheap Canadian fat pipe broadband access.
American broadband blows because it's hard to wire the 450,000 people in Wyoming using the same deployment strategy that wires the millions that live in Chicago.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
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.
My thinking is that the issue is political. With the MPAA/RIAA cartels in place with their hooks buried deep within our government, who in their right minds would risk offering consumers with high enough broadband speeds, making their system efficient enough to transfer high quality content in mere seconds? Knowing our legal system, they'd probably get sued for facilitating large scale P2P file sharing of copyrighted materials.
That's not to say, of course, these services are entirely innocent of playing games with the consumer. By trickling higher bandwidths to us slowly over a period of several years "for $10 more" each upgrade, they stand to make a huge fortune off the generally ignorant population we have here.
8==8 Bones 8==8
We've had 10 mbit up/down no caps since the 90's, 24 mbit for several years and you can also get 100 mbit connections (both up and down, no limitations or caps) for a mere $30 / month in some places. I myself live in a very small town of 3000 people in the middle of the woods, and almost all of us have 8 mbit, or at least 2 mbit. It's even better in the universities.
In the 1996 Telecommunications Act, Congress directed the FCC to oversee the timely deployment of Internet services that "enable users to originate and receive high quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications." Currently, this requirement translates into an Internet connection with typical download and upload speeds between 10 Mbps and 20 Mbps (megabits, or million bits, per second)
Can someone tell me where they get that 10-20Mbps number from? I can get pretty good video over a 4Mbps connection.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Put the entire population of the US in New York State and service will be better and cheaper.
Unfortunately, urban sprawl/lower density means it requires a lot more infrastructure to accomodate everyone.
Its mostly marketing is why you pay what you pay.
As long as they can charge you 50 bucks a month, they will. Until most of their customers balk, the price wont drop.
Its just a fact of life here, charge what you can get away with.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The U.S. is real good at manufacturing scarcity and charging accordingly.
More than courts are being lobbied. Americans are being lobbied through scarce broadcast channels that scarcity is needed.
Stop invalid scientific research. Ask your local scientists to feed their lab rats with a phytoestrogen-free chow.
Canada has long been a telecommunications leader. It's 50%+ the site for the world's first trans-atlantic wireless communication on Signal Hill in Newfoundland. It's had a transcontienent microwave network for phone and TV communication since at least the 1960s [and possibly longer I don't recall], and it's the home of Nortel Networks, and Research In Motion [makers of the Blackberry email device PDA].
Even lowly Saskatchewan has had broadband in smaller markets [compared to US markets of similar size], since the late 1990s.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the US in a similar position when it comes to the coverage of the wireless phone network, as well?
Isn't the world always on our collective asses for hogging a disproportionate share of the world's resources? So American is using a smaller percentage of the world's bandwidth supply. Shouldn't we be happy about this? Because if our usage was going UP even while ever-increasing populations of the world were getting Internet access, Salon.com would have some kind of expose about how the greedy Americans are using up all the bandwidth and starting wars for copper so they can give contracts to their rich friends at ...er.. SBC. Wow the wheels totally came off this metaphor as it trundled downhill.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
Of course the US is falling behind in broadband use per capita. When you have the telcos and cable companies dragging their feet while spending their time & money fighting/lobbying cities not to setup tax payer supported broadband. And these are some areas where the telcos have yet to deploy any broadband. I hope in San Francisco they blanket the city with wifi internet access. I am tired of these wanna be AOLs with their entirely pointless extra features and crappy service.
In big cities in the US you have a number of options for affordable broadband access. For example in San Jose (where I live) I have the choice of SBC DSL ($14.99/mo) or Comcast Cable broadband for ($29.99/mo). I use comcast and It's like lightnening. I'm sure Paris (and other big cities in France and the other countries mentioned) have similar options available. I'm also sure that there are some rural areas in those countries that don't have these kind of options available just like we have in the US. So, I'm not sure this article is comparing apples to apples by saying France has fast internet and we don't have internet available _everywhere_. Also, I'd like to know if any of the countries listed have government subsidies on these "hyper-fast" connections. If that's the case, that has to be factored in to the equation. Just because your government pays the bill doesn't mean it's not coming out of your pocket! ;)
No Sigs!
Hey -
I thought I'd post my experience moving from Insight Digital Cable (Indiana) to Eastlink (Halifax, Canada) to Aliant (Halifax, Canada).
The Indiana connection was advertised as 5 Mbps download, and not too far off actual speeds. Also, there seemed to be no throttling based on what I was doing (e.g. bittorrent, p2p). I paid $44.95, no taxes or additional fees, and was very happy.
I joined Eastlink about 2 months ago, which advertises service so fast "you don't have time to blink". However, what they don't tell you is that they use Ellacoya servers which implement technologies to throttle bandwidth to anyone using eMule, bittorrent, and a variety of other P2P technologies. Oh, and I was paying about $40 CDN/month for this.
Of course, as soon as I found out what they were doing, I switched from the cable guy (Eastlink) to the dsl guy (Aliant). Back to 5 Mbps, no throttling, much happier, $49.99 CDN/month.
The short bit: I would take Canada off the list of countries which are outpacing the US in broadband. From what I can tell, Eastlink's behavior is more common than Aliant in Canada. What good is 10+ Mbps if you can't use bittorrent? [for linux distros AND pr0n, of course].
Since when does free enterprise business offerings of service have anything to do with politics?
That said, I've got wireless broadband to my house, better-than-T1 speeds, for $24.95 a month. (you clicky linky) I'm in a rural area, and a local ISP has gone to providing broadband wireless using Motorola's Canopy system. It doesn't suck.
Why can't this be done elsewhere? It can. Get a feed, get a spot on a tower, and start selling your service. For a rural, "last miles" solution, it's ideal, might be good for city use too, I dunno (check Motorola's site, I suppose). Broadband options are out there, and it has nothing to do with politics.
There are small compaies out there, like the one I work for, who are working to change this. Granted, we are still held down by trying to price our product close to the big boys, but I think we deliver a much better product. We are deploying IPTV over both ADSL2+ lines and fiber to the home, with over 200 channels of mpeg encoded and multicasted tv watching goodness. Along with telephone service and high speed internet.
Companies like mine are agile enough to roll with the punches and implement new technology faster when it is our best intrestes. Sure the Bells will eventually impleemnt this same technology, but how long will it take? By the time they do what we are doing now, we will have moved on to the next big thing. Sure you can get burned by this early adoption, and it has happened, believe me.
The biggest problem we face is getting people to let go of their "We want Bell" perceptions. I'm not talking about the slashdot crowd here. I'm talking about Joe Punchclock, we can tell them all day long that our product is better and attempt to explain why, but Megabits and IPTV and all that jazz means nothing to him. He just wants his porn, TV and phone service to work, and for some reason this means the has to go to the "big boys" for these services.
The United States is very, very big. It has a population density nowhere NEAR Korea and Japan, the posterchildren of "supermegaultra internet to the door".
You can afford to run fiber, switchgear, etc if you get a lot of customers for your effort. Japan is 145843 square miles and 127M people; New York state is a THIRD of that alone (54471 sq miles) and has 19M people.
Let's think that through- Japan has about half the US population, yet is only about 3 times bigger than NY state.
PS:I had to post this from home via an SSH tunnel because I've been "downmodded too much". I have mod points, but I can't post from work. Funny that. Can't get more than a form-reply from "Robert Rozeboom", either...which consisted of: "You have been downmodded too many times and are in timeout for a bit."
Please help metamoderate.
Is this article about broadband in America or broadband in the US?
diegoT
The other countries probably regulate the prices more than we do. But cable is fundamentally a monopoly, just because somebody has to own the cables. The only competition is coming from alternatives like DSL, powerline, wireless etc. And both the cable and DSL businesses belong to stagnant, big, slow-moving companies. So in this kind of case the government-regulated (or g-owned, or g-mandated in some countries) model is working better, as long as the government happens to have decent leadership in this department. There are counter-examples too, in some of the former Soviet republics for example - the government has the telecomm monopoly and it sucks, worse than it did in 1970's America.
Capitalism will triumph eventually, when there are enough alternatives. Meanwhile I still feel kindof privileged to have such fast broadband over cable, and don't really mind the price that much. The total bill is a bit steep ($85); I just get TV along with it in order to get the broadband discount (and plain old analog at that, without any premium channels). But after the discount, the broadband portion of that isn't too bad. And there are extra government fees and taxes and crap that shouldn't be there. Right now in this country we have most of the disadvantages of both systems, and not all the advantages.
There have been some efforts to force cable companies to offer a choice of ISP; not sure what happened, probably got derailed, but when there is a natural monopoly it might be a good idea to have regulations like that. Then again, maybe it just ruins the efficiency of the natural monopoly by burying both companies (the cable plant company and the ISP) in extra red tape.
So I guess we need to stop looking at pr0n on the internets and pick up a bible?
insert inflammatory anti-microsoft comment here
The problem with broadband in the USA is;
.. and yet somehow at the same time require WindowsXP (which runs a bunch of servers by default .. ahem ..) ... not that they [can] enforce much of this, and I run web+mail from behind a comcrap cable modem with above terms in the contract, but I needed to spend a lot of extra cash for external hosts to relay to me on unblocked ports. Lame lame lame.
You pay > $50/month for
-Dynamic IP
-WhoKnowsWhat for DNS, non reverse-resolving
-Usefull ports (80, 25) firewalled to stop you from running a server
-Sub-Standard offshored tech support
-"No Promises" towards speed or uptime
-Did I mention that all the usefull ports are blocked?
-Terms of service which specifically exclude you from running " a server of any kind "
-Terms of service which specifically lay out that $PROVIDER promises nothing.
-Terms of service which specifically disallow hostname-based addressing (dont want you to use dyndns.org or simmilar services)
-GenTimJS
Verizon has 768/128 plan for $15/month.
Lately I find that if you don't do P2P, there's not much content that requires more than standard broadband. I mean, high speeds are nice, but it's not critical to have it. It's not like dialup, you know.
Even MP3s take 3-5 min to download on a regular DSL, so I can't complain.
Downloading movies is too dangerous these days, it's much easier to pay $15-17 to netflicks, and rent DVDs (which take forever to download even with fast connections)
Even in major cities we only get crap Internet access. I live in metro Atlanta. When I can get 10Mbps downstream and upstream for $40/month, then you can use that excuse to explain why people can't get broadband in Boonieville, North Dakota.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
...or do you mean: fromage mangeant des baiseurs de singe?
Either suck it up or move (ya right) to another country.
I would say the primary reasons are: 1) the non-centralized/socialized telecoms and 2) every consider the size of our country compared to the other ones? We are alot larger and have people living in much more remote areas.
High rates for broadband internet access (and communication services in general) have a few different components:
1) Universal access- this goes back to the telephone days when the urban users with a lower per capita infrastructure cost subsidized communications infrastructure for rural users.
2) Geography- We're a big country and there's a lot of empty space to cover between population centers.
3) DSL vs. Cable internet- There is a fight going on here between these two legacy infrastructures that ends up wasting the potential to create a unified solution and move forward there. Much like multitasking diminishes the quality of any one task; any investment made in DSL is fruitless for cable subscribers and vise versa. Parallel infrastructure is good for redundancy yet highly wasteful.
So as long as I, an urban payer in the middle of San Francisco, have to subsidize both two types of infrastructure development and also rural users spread out across a large continent, costs are going to remain high and speeds mediocre.
It's the same idea as a bar fight, the big guy may have more force in terms of mass, but the little guy has less momentum and therefore spends less energy starting and stopping his kinetics.
As far as the dual infrastructure concept, that is hitting us really hard, much like the waste of covering an area with both GSM and CDMA cell towers that don't inter-operate. We are literally funding two competing standards and splitting our effort when a unified standard would get the service activated and then more money could be spent on the content (which all around needs more investment).
Personally, I hate DSL as I have yet to see an implementation of DSL that is a reliable as cable. Yes, I know, we all have assholes and stories about which is better, but personally, I would prefer to have my coax come in and split off into data, voice and television (not unlike Sprint ION or something similar) instead of paying one bill to SBC for mediocre internet service (that I use constantly), one bill to Comcast for great cable service (that I use rarely).
Give me one wire! One wire!
The universal access is stickier as there is a social need for above average income people to subsidize below income average people (if you disagree with this, just go live alone in the forest and horde your wealth) however, it's a burden for sure. Perhaps there should exist tiered access where you are guaranteed a dialtone and 256kbps data (over your cable line) so that the wires have to be there but no one builds a backbone to nowhere.
Why don't you also ask why drugs, made in America, cost so much more in America...
Uncle sam says its a privilege not a right to buy a connection to the rest of the world
Libertarian
___________________________________________
A vote against a Libertarian candidate is
a vote to abolish the Constitution itself.
Profits are bad because people elect politicians who endorse the "state-protected monopolies are good" belief? People can get so schizo on this issue. I tell them about the benefits of competition, and they naysay me with "No, it's more efficient if we just have one business doing everything, we can't allow cutthroat competition, there's no need for a second company anyway" ... and then they gripe when the state-protected monopolies suck. There's an easy place to look for the source of this problem: it's called a mirror.
Rank my idea: http://www.sinceslicedbread.com/node/531
meanwhile, those same people in other countries are paying sometimes more than twice as much for gasoline, which brings up the old adage: Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of back-up tapes.
Linux is to the internet as Duct Tape is to the Universe.
Corrections:
Second to last paragraph: Ignore the hideous redundancy in the last statement. Consider "Apparently other things in the US factor in, resulting in the current equilibrium between broadband adoption and its price."
The last paragraph should read "...is also a bit odd, because it's not the speed, but how that speed is used (sic)..."
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
In japan you can download an HD movie in 5 minutes. Just because you've had it for 6 with 'no problems' doesn't mean it can't be better, as in faster and cheaper.
I bet you're paying the same or higher prices as you were all those years ago. If you rented a brand new car and paid the same price for 6 years, you'd be a fool. If you rented the same computer for 6 years for the same price, wouldn't you expect the technology to improve, or at least for the economies of scale to make it cheaper? Why not expect more from your Internet provider?
You have been successfully groomed into a consumer with low expectations.
The article fails to seriously consider the following factors accounting for the cost, speed, and availability of internet service in different regions:
* Population densities
* Area to cover
* Income levels & cost of living differences
* Government subsidies, taxes, and regulatory costs
It does, at points note that some of these are arguements against his point, but the author fails to adequately address them. (Ex: while arguing against the area factor, he uses san francisco as a counter arguement, while failing to provide any information about how SF is performing more 'poorly').
The article jumps to the conclusion that "the man" is trying to screw you. This may or may not be true. However, without accounting for the above factors the author doesn't have a logic basis in making that conclusion and is just ranting.
The main problem with broadband in America is Charter Communications.
What was your username again? -BOFH
Transition implies that something is changing. On the contrary, the US telecoms businesses are continuing with business as usual: use the lack of a desired service to justify increased (monopoly) rates, pocketing the revenues, then going back for another round.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
"I say we're making up for the fact we pay much less for fossil fuels than they do. I'm willing to pay a little more for broadband access."
Except they'll be laughing their ass off at our dependence on fossil fuels in a couple decades, when high fuel prices there have made alternatives a viable option in the market.
Do you think our mass transit system would be so pitiful if gas here cost $7/gallon? Hell, I live within 25 miles of NYC, and other than going into NYC, mass transit is a joke. And that's supposedly the best system in the US!
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
We just need some more homegrown American porn.
Wait...good American porn.
Like everything else that has gone wrong in the past five years, this is all Bush's fault.
Considering that the US is the leader of the market economies, something the French detest, its amazing to note that in many ways market economics is working more effectively for consumers in France than they are in the US.
I have to disagree. European mobile phone access typically carries a lower monthly cost, but a much higher per minute cost, which necessitates SMS and other non-voice protocols. Here digital phone plans met the market need with bundles of mintues. The eurpoean plans actually discourage talking on the phone. It that effective for consumers?
Free markets are the surest path to efficiency and freedom. What they don't deliver is protection from harm. That's what laws and regulation are for. As for fairness: that's not a constitutionally protected right.
"extra infastructure cost"
Sure, but aren't you suppoed to have "extra money" to build it, compared to a small country like France ?
Alexis 'jeriqo' BRET
...compared to the $12.00+ it currently is in Italy (~3 euro/litre). I fill up a couple times a month, so all in all I think I'm coming out ahead.
I don't have the figures, but maybe we need to report this as "percentage of mean national monthly income per month". We're constantly told that wage earners in some countries make less per month than US workers (hence the outsourcing we see happening) - which could mean their cost for broadband is actually more expensive for them in relative terms. If a US worker makes 54K a year, or 4500 per month, then $45 of that for broadband might be a bargain if a Korean worker makes 19K a year, or 500 a month, and pays $38 a month. 45/4500 = 1% 38/500 = 7.6% of monthly incomes Therefore the Korean worker would be allocating more of his/her pay to broadband. As I said, I don't have actual figures - I just think this should be reported in these terms. Don't know about anyone else, but the allocation of my monthly funds can mean more than the actual amount(especially when the required allocations start to exceed 100% of the income!)
The problem with high-speed access in the US actually arises from multiple sources. Think for a second, what is a 10 or 20Mbps connection good for (over a regular DSL or cable line) besides video? The media companies damn sure don't want people zipping 200MB torrents of TV shows around in 5 or 10 minutes, instead of the hours it takes even with the highest speed 6Mbps DSL lines. Let's also remember, aside from the Telco's the cable companies in particular are usually owned by the media companies (or are at least under the same corporate umbrella). They're not going to let this floodgate open until they're damn sure and ready. As to the issue of coverage, that's just the companies being cheap. The universal service fee was established back in the days of Ma Bell to make it possible to bring phone service out to the middle of nowhere. The problem is the law doesn't mention anything about data service, just telephone. Again, they're not about to throw $200k down a hole to provide DSL to three users in the middle of nowhere. This may not even be their fault, they may not be legally allowed to use universal service fees to provide DSL (or information service) access.
Sadly, the situation may be better today if we still had Ma Bell. As a single undisputed monopoly, it was easier to put pressure on Ma Bell to provide basic services while keeping prices low. (except for long distance, but come on guys..those microwave towers were EXPENSIVE!) Now that we have three "give me a freakin' break" mini-monopolies, they can all point to each other as "competition" (yeah, right) and weasel out of providing service.
How to fix this problem? In plain language..in this country, not going to happen. The market in the US just plain doesn't justify it. Nine in ten people who have 1.5Mbps probably think it's good enough, and there aren't enough people out in the sticks to force companies to bring DSLAM's out to "God's Country".
Funny, because the local DSL provider has been surveying around here and is going to be laying down fiber optic cable through the residential areas of town.
What, you say two established monopolies (cable/phone) don't truly "compete" when you put them against each other in a doupoly?
The next things you'll tell me is that:
1. Pepsi and Coke are behind fizzy water costing 50 cents for 12 ounces,
2. Republicans and Democrats collude to keep everything "right vs. left",
3. Management vs. labor is an illusion, and
4. Good vs. evil is too black and white!
How un-american! Two competitors makes a market or you support terrorism. AND AT A TIME OF WAR!!
(Hey, what are those free market regulators we pay to work in Washington up to anyways?)
Perhaps it's because they have HIGHER TAXES.
Start with your local PUC (public utilities commission). Then contact your congressmen. Seriously, it can work if you make enough noise.
The phone company is allowed to have their wires run across your property only because they are serving the public good. Make it clear that if they won't give you good service you will reject their right to run wires across your property. You can't do this alone, but the PUC is assigned the job of distributing that power by congress. So start with the PUC, and if they refuse to help (which they will) talk to your congressmen.
The best way to contact your congressmen is with a face to face meeting. Do your research (know all the facts, practice your presentation with others. Then ask for a 15 minute meeting and deliver it. Make sure your presentation is less than 10 minutes, leaving the rest for questions (which you better be prepared to answer - get a devils advocate to write them). Do your best to be out before your time is up unless they insist.
Congressmen want corporate money to buy votes. So make sure your vote is for sale ONLY to someone who will take care of the issues you want them to take care of. And make sure you talk to your friends and neighbors about it. Come election time knock on all the doors in your neighborhood and tell everyone who to vote for - this is worth far more than any amount of money the phone company can counter with, but only if you do it.
If you are like most people though you will decide that the years it takes to change things is not worth it. Enjoy your beer on the deck or whatever, but don't be surprised when nothing changes.
Seriously, you can't compare the US to other 1st world countries.
First, our population density is far lower than the nations referenced. It's easy to give everyone a 10 mbit drop when they live in the housing equivalent of stacked tuna cans.
Second, these are socialist or near-socialist countries. Just think what the US could do with government run utilities and 65%+ tax brackets! On second thought, no thanks.
Why does every fucking aspect of life have to take on a nationalist point of view?
Hmmm, I'd always suspected that my DSL connection, and I use that term loosely these days, sucked. Here in the big city, I think that Cable broadband is eventually going to beat out DSL if SBC's failure to keep up in the speed and quality race is any indication. But out in the sticks, who knows?
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
America is a rich country with a much higher average income than other countries. It's no wonder things are cheaper in other countries, they couldn't necessarily afford to pay that much.
Also services like this are usually priced based on what businesses think people will pay, not based on making their money back + a little extra... capitalism is about getting as much as you can whenever you can.
Er... Canada is even bigger and an order magnitude lower population density and has cheaper and superior broadband and telecommunication services. There's more than "the country is too friggin' big" going on here and it has to do with the inefficiencies of the partially (de)regulated Baby Bells and cable fiefdoms in the US...
Nope. Strange as it may seem, in France the broadband market is thoroughly deregulated, and the former state-owned telecom is just another player.
The French get 18+Mbps DSL (in the major cities) through good old fashioned competition. Here we just roll over to the non-state-controlled monopoly telecoms and continue to allow them their shelter from competition.
Of course I don't speak for my employer. My employer doesn't speak for me, either.
Oh, we're being taken advantage of, alright.
Oh, wait, that said other countries...opportunities. Right. Sorry. Move along.
Supply and Demand.
There are more people here wanting/willing/able to pay $45/month than in those countries.
If the demand fell, the price would too.
Canada, the largest country in the world, has much better internet access even in remote communities -- communities that would make what Americans consider remote seem down right cosmopolitan.
...and they brazenly go along with it because that's what the market dictates to be the best value for their campaign war chest...
I moved from a job in NW Ontario where I provided service for the Hudson Basin -- towns that were hundreds of miles from roads, hours by plane -- these towns had better broadband access than most of rural Wisconsin.
The average household in NWO has better access than the average household in Chicago... but of course, they had broadband available many years before most people in Chicago. The difference is the politicians, both local and national, see the value of providing their citizens with connectivity.
Finland had a much higher percentage of landline-less communities a little over a decade ago. They responded by building one of the best cellular networks in the world. Additionally, they saw the value of broadband and integrated that into their infrastructure too, despite very low population densities and long, cold distances.
Whereas in the US, politicians seem to find it better to leave it to the "freemarket", as dictated to them by the deep pocketed telecoms and media conglomerates who tell the elected official what is best
It's a problem primarily with the Capitalist economy. In a system as Capilatist as the United States only large corperations can survive, and while monopolies are frowned upon there is nothing to stop the big companies from agreeing to set their prices at the same levels.
I have two choices for internet service, the phone company, or the TV company, both offer similar services for similar prices, I thought that $30 CAD was expensive, but apperntly not.
We need options. Let's all move to France.
I don't have time to comment my code, the program is late already.
For any network built by a government or a defacto government agent (like a national telephone company), the monthly fee may not nearly represent the actual cost. How much are the residents of these countries paying via income, property, and sales taxes on completely unrelated goods which ends up funding these networks.
I may be paying $50/month for 1.5 MB/s service, but my grandma who doesn't use broadband (or dial-up for that matter), doesn't pay anything either. Any country with a national telecom business that isn't %100 self-funded (and I don't know the break-down on the countries listed in the article) is forcing the non-users to pay as well. I may like the idea of cheap broadband, but I'm considering the total cost.
That and I totally understand the problem with the population density in this country. To offer the level of service mentioned in the article to everyone, would cost a hell of a lost more in the USA than in France or Japan.
This discussion is about internet service costs in different countries. Are you saying that you just feel good that you pay less for gas than them? What does that have to do with internet access prices?
Maybe I'm just a paranoid conspiricy theorist, but I think this one might have some merit. The way an executive from one of these organizations would see it, the faster the connection, the easier it would be to pirate, therefore they'd be against cheaper higher speed connections. We already know comcast and the RIAA had a deal going on where comcast turned over names (never followed up on how the court case went though...) So honest, it wouldn't surprise me one bit. Unfortunatly what they do NOT see is people are willing to pay for their own infrastructure for at home delivery of content, make the networks faster and cheaper, and purchasing a DVD online through downloading is a reality. I am sure the merits of such a system have been discussed, and of course the fact that they already dont pay much in costs, so people would want a drop in prices, which would cut into their profit margin, so they are against it, so we are back to they are against cheaper higher speed connections, and would do just about anything to stop that progress.
Just like so many of our contries "problems", this one can also be explained by the fact that we have a surplus of greed.
Very similar complaints are raised all the time about US literacy rates, per capita health care or pharmaceutical costs, and so forth and so on. Any small and more homogenous country with a top-heavy government is going to seem "better" by these measures than the US, often, first of all, because the US is a motley collection of seriously varying communities, with a relatively weak and small central government. What works for and is valued by urban New York City twentysomething hipster stockbrokers is not the same as what works for and is valued by the 65-year-old rural Wyoming farmwife, mother of five and grandmother to twenty. Having a heterogeneous market in which all kinds of people can find their solution is expensive.
/. crowd? Is this a social justice forum or a geek forum??! I dunno about the rest of you, but I want to live in the country that's blazing trails, technology-wise, and I expect that means it will cost a little more, and there will be more of the oopsies and confusions that accompany being on the bleeding edge.
Additionally, when you expect technology innovation all the time, that also costs. You can provide any service cheaper if you surf off other people's R&D, but if you have to do it yourself -- if as a nation you expect to be living on the technology frontier -- then you've got to pay more. I think a pretty strong case can be made that most (I don't say all) innovations in networked computer technology are being made in the US. Well, that adds to the price for basic service.
Finally, why would the average or per-capita performance even be interesting to the
In other words, metaphorically speaking I don't give a damn about living in a country where Joe Average can buy a Kia Sportage for a more modest price if I can live in a country where it's possible to buy Ferraris and Lamborghinis or rocket-cars half a decade before anyone else in the world can.
With the exception of Canada, the countries mentioned have a tremendous advanage regarding broadband penetration, and that is relative population density.
As has been pointed out many times before, Canada is actually more "urban" than the US. Something like 3/4 of Canadians live in cities whereas about 2/3 of Americans do, or something like that. Yes, queue jokes about huddling together for warmth, etc., but the facts are there. It helps that only 20% of Canadian land is "habitable" (meaning you can grow crops on it), which is the type of land typically settled on hundreds of years ago. So, Canada has an easier time hitting more of its population with broadband due to population density.
Also, Canada has certain government initiatives to get broadband access to the more remote parts of Canada, such as the far north. Canada has always been on the leading edge of communications technology, and is actively trying to stay that way. The first commercial communications satellite was Canadian owned, as was the first national coast to coast microwave telephone network. This is all because the politicians realized from the start that the only thing stopping the small relatively isolated colonies that became Canada from being absorbed by the US was to overcome the vast communication and transportation obstacles that separated them. Those ideas continue today.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
I live exactly one mile from cable termination. I can't get cable. I can't get DSL. I can't get wireless (there is an open wireless AP, coincidentally, one mile away from me where the cable terminates). So I am stuck with satellite internet service - which, to put technically, sucks donkey balls.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Here in Norway, I've just upgraded my 4Mbps ADSL connection to 25Mbps ADSL2+.
25Mbps costs about $40/m here in Norway. And you can get 10Mbps for $30/m now...
>;)
Then again, in sweden you can get 100Mbps for $40/m...... Darn swedes!
That's absurd! That is, it's absurd how right you are.
I live in the heart of Silicon Valley; if any place should have fast broadband, surely it should be here. But I can't get DSL service faster than 600 kbps, so instead I pay about $60/month for 4 Mbps cable, and the only way I can make it not crap out every other minute is with gold-plated cables and a bidirectional coax amplifier.
Actually, despite the rather flamebait tone of the message, the poster has (whether he knew it or not) a point. Throughout history, the religious elite have always tried to stymie the free flow of information. This has helped the major churches keep a tight rein on their parishioners.
Is this the case now? Of course not. MightyMartian is just being a poser.
Rogers will hugely oversell their network capacity. I have basically no internet access from 5pm till 10pm because everyone in the neighboorhood is on and ping times are as bad as 1200ms with less than 5KB download speeds. And of course they will not consider even telling the network staff, much less fixing it. They just have the front line morons tell you to reset your modem and reinstall their gay software that I don't even have.
...or do you mean: fromage mangeant des baiseurs de singe? .sig, so it's probably not phrased very well. However, I think yours translates even more strangely: "Cheese, eating some monkey-f*kers." Beware the monkey-f*ker-eating cheese!
Actually, I stole the French from a Slashdot
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
The US seems to have stagnated in its own corporation architecture.
First they were the most innovative country (technologically speaking). But upon their technological advances, they built a structure conformed by companies, associations and organisms (The FCC, RIAA, MPAA, the Patent Office, and yes, even political parties). But they became more and more powerful, inhibiting the growth of additional economical resources. Sooner or later, their inner resources will exhaust. And the U.S. will be left with nothing.
In other words, the U.S. has become a corporative timebomb.
France: 259596 square miles, 62M people, so roughly 238 per square mile.
NY: 54471 square miles, 19M people, about 348 per square mile.
So, your argument does certainly not hold for New York state. Sweden for example has a very low population density, so this can't be the only answer.
The current deal here (Germany) is something like 30 Euros for 6Mbit DSL + 30 Euros for telephone (includes flatrate for calls to all landlines).
Shouldn't it be cheaper in cities where the people are dense?
Shouldn't I be able to get a true high speed fiber line inexpensively when I'm a block from a national trunk?
Yet you can't. Cost is the same whether you are 60 miles out of the city center or next door to the switching station.
Why isn't it cheaper in NY and MA. I mean 25 million people in a tiny area has to be comparable population density to Japan and Korea.
I think monopolies were formed when it was expensive and incentives were needed but now that it is much less expensive the monopolies should go the way of the buggy whip.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You know what goes hand-in-hand with high IT salaries? High IT prices.
Besides the obvious, financial hurdles when factoring in the lower density of population, you have the much less apparent cost of building and maintaining anything in the US. The same factors that send white-collar jobs overseas make it easier to provide services overseas. We're a country based on capitalism, so we better get used to it.
I live in Finland, in mid-sized town in the west cost. It's true that in Finland you can get basic broadband connection cheaply, 20e - 30e per month, and get speedier connections with just adding little more cash, ie. 8M/1M 60e, 12M/1M 69e, 24M/1M 89e. Sounds nice? Well it isn't that nice. In reality when you order 8M/1M connection you will in reality get a connection ranging from 2M to 4M. The connection itself can really deliver that 8M, but the pipes to the outside world arrent usually that fast. Actually one of my friends works at one of leading telcos in Finland, and he said that their standard answer to any question on why a customer doesn't get full speeds is "you live to far away"/"your lines are bad", just to avoid confessing that they really trick people ordering faster lines than they can deliver.
So in short, I don't think that the US situation is that bad, because the reality in other parts of the world, atleast in Finland, isn't that good.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
Everything on the internet is dependent on "Ma Bell". If they are offering T1 service at $1,500. to a business per month, why in hell are they going to offer (or allow anyone else to offer) 10 mb service to a "luser" at $30.
At least you got the section right. It's pure politics, and economics and has little to do with technology.
Well in Australia we have to pay from $69-$89($AU) for 1500/256 ADSL and thats not even unlimited download it is normally caped at 20gig a month. Atleast one company has started to roll out ADSL2 ( speeds up 12mb in Oz land) but thats only in the large cities, so me being in the "Bush" in a city of over 80,000 less than 2 hours from Brisbane ( Capital City for Queensland ) I will not get this service for another 2-3 years if I'm lucky.
The FCC is full of completely incompetent morons. I think I have said enough there but I will give my reasons why I believe this.
They are giving power to the powerful instead of leveling the playing field for the small companys. DSL companies do not own the lines; however, cable companies do. This prevents the competition between DSL and cable to properly grow as cable only has to compete against DSL, but DSL has to compete against all of the small local companies as well as cable. The answer to this. We are going to give the lines back to the big companies who control the DSL connections and keep the cable companies as a monopoly. Our government is now promoting monopolies and supporting the big companies and IGNORING the common person.
This kind of government interference in business is also occurring in the music and movie industry. RIA (aka satan) is given the power to sue 14 year old kids and go after anyone who even contemplates an alternative method of obtaining the products they enjoy. These companies completely ignore the consumers cries and instead go to our government for the ability to go after their customers.
This was a longer response then I had planned but it's a piece in the very important problem with our country.
Then why have remote fly-in communities in Canada been using broadband longer than most folks in Large U.S. cities?
The answer is still $$$ but not in the direction you are thinking -- it's the phone companies and media conglomerates that are threatened by a population of broadband users who don't pay long distance and use P2P. Countries like Canada and Finland don't have those concerns, they are concerned about their citizens being competitive in the 'New Economy' and their politicians aren't encumbered by their commitments to the Old Economics.
So really the apples and oranges are those countries who are tied to the old economy and those who are leapfrogging industrialism.
I just came back from a vacation in france, at my parent's house, in a lost "village" in the middle of the alps. There are maybe 4 farms on a square kilometer. What do you know, over there I had 20meg dsl line with wireless hotspots. Their cost: 12 euro a month (around 15 bucks).
Why do I pay 40 bucks in LA for a crappy connection ? The US has guaranteed local monopolies to corporations who have zero interest in investing anything in infrastructure when they can bring it insane profits on obsolete products. Telcos in the US function like energy and healthcare companies. They are not a public service like in most european countries, it's a racket that gets blank support from politicians to milk a captive market as much as they can.
So I'd say if anyone should be complaining about prices, it should at least be a Canadian author.
For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
First, there are no government subsidies in France for DSL.
In France, Internet is cheap (the cheapest is now around 20EUR/mo with unlimited phone) because of first regulation, then competition.
There is a strong regulator, whose aim is to offer high-speed internet for everybody, forcing the former monopoly (France Telecom) to open its network to competitors.
This enabled new ISPs to start, and take a large part of the market by offering lower prices and higher bandwidth.
Regulation can be good !
That would provide a logical explanation as to why the rural areas do not have this level of broadband. However, it does not explain why the dense urban locations do not.
Queue Mrs. Broflowski:
:)
"Blame Canada!
Blame Canada!
With all their beady little eyes
And flappin' heads so full of lies"
No, seriously, Canada is cool with me.
--
Guy
Take a look at this picture. See the problem? Compariing the US to a densly populated and wealthy small country is not valid. It might be valid to compare NY to France. But revamping the US infrastructure to support this stuff and maintain backwards compatability takes time. Plus companies have to earn back their investment in the current infrastructure. I lived in Bahrain in theearlly 90's and they were one of the first countries with cheap handheld cellular. Revamping that country's infrastructure amounded to replacing a handful of towers. Imagine what it would take for the entire US. Still, I don't see why select US cities don't push to be on the bleedign edge of comms infrastructure expecially since it would likely lead to more hightech jobs.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Hartford WI ftw
and to create a "delivery system" rather than a "networking system" (4MBits down, 256kbits up, anyone?)
what do you mean by this. unfortunately i don't completely understand why ISPs have the skewed up/down caps, but i always assumed it had everything to do with the size of the pipe and the nature of data transfer for typical home users, ie, surfing is mostly down, so they skew the download/upload rates to maximize potential use. is this wrong?
I would gladly pay $45 a month for a high speed connection if they WOULD JUST MAKE IT AVAILABLE TO ME!
Want the price to go down? The company needs more customers. How does the company get more customers? Make it available to more people!
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
Sure... lots more area to cover, though
France 2004 gdp: ~1.7T
USA 2004 gdp: ~11T
France sq miles: 211k
USA sq miles: 3537k
France gdp/sq mi: $8M
USA gdp/sq mi: $3M
Verizo started to offer 768k DSL this month for 14.95 a month. This is going to drive adoption, and prices down quickly.
In South Africa, I know a company IT manager who needs a decent sized internet pipe for their work. Nothing major - we're speaking of a 2MB down, 1MB up (yes, that's a 2 megabyte download and 1 megabyte upload) connection for just over a thousand employees, their webserver and mail server. And thats not for the ISP services on the other end - its only for the pipe. Actual internet traffic they still pay for by the megabyte on top of that.
This "broadband" offering costs them R60 000 a month. At today's exchange rate that is just over $9000 a month. They have another office a short distance away (read a couple of blocks away) with an uninterrupted line of site. However, the law forbids them from operating a radio frequency device to circumvent using the telecom's services. So they cannot set up a microwave transmitter/receiver, or hell even a wimax connection. They have to spend another couple thousand rand a month (read, probably another $1000 a month).
So yes, you may have it tough. But good god, just stop to think that there are countries out there who only dream of proper broadband. Your home connection is probably much better and faster than the connection that is serving this company - and its 1000+ employee's.
And South Africa is relatively first world compared to the rest of Africa.
The biggest difference I see is that in the U.S. of A., telecom is a weird mixture of public utility and for-profit business. Incumbent telcos don't face competitive pressures, since they have government-sanctioned monopolies in their regions. They do, however, have pressure to deliver ever-increasing profits to their shareholders.
It's not that Verizon et. al. can't deliver megabit-or-faster speeds to most of their customers, it's just that they have no incentive to do so without also demanding extortionate prices for it.
Example: Here in New Jersey, regular 256kbps down/ 90kbps up DSL would cost me $40 a month; but Verizon would be more than happy to provide me with 1.5Mbps down / 768kbps up, and a static IP, too, over the very same equipment... for around $200/month.
So you can get a speedy connection. But you gotta pay...
Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make them all yourself.
There are logistical concerns for people in rural communities, but that's no excuse why people in urban areas (like myself) pay 50 bucks for 3Mbits/256Kbs and 50 for ~60 cable channels. I'm about to drop the cable tv and download all my cartoon network shows.
No sig for you!!
France has a population density of 284/square mile.
South Korea has 1275 people/square mile.
New Jersey has 1133 people/square mile.
New York County, which includes Manhattan, has 66950 people/square mile. No, that's not a typo.
Obviously, NYC and NJ have "a tremendous advanage regarding broadband penetration". So why don't we have cheap broadband?
Whether it is a coorporation taking our money or the government, there is no free ride. Personally, I would rather get reamed by a coorporation since they generally have to run much more efficiently than a government so ultimately it probably costs less that way.
"With the exception of Canada, the countries mentioned have a tremendous advanage regarding broadband penetration, and that is relative population density."
Last time I checked China and Japan have uhhh...lots a people!
The current administration are probably pissed of that Al Gore created the Internet and not them.
Why should Americans need broadband. They've all got direct lines to God.
I am from Macedonia. Here, we are paying 60$ for 384/128 ADSL connection and that's the best offer in the country. Other ISP's are losing touch with reality, there is one WiFi operator (OnNet to be precise) which thinks that 25$ for 1GB is ok. I had to sell my kidney for this month. Well, November is coming, and I come to think what should I sell next to pay my bills...
I live in LA county and the only broadband access im able to get is verizon DSL. Dont talk about population density or any other bull ish like that because honestly it has nothing to do with it. Its a freeking joke. It is the evil molopolies, and the governments fault. plain and simple
You are mixing together a whole slew of different economic concepts, which makes it challenging to understand the conceptual models. There is a body of game-theoretic reasoning that works to explain whether or not companies will enter into a particular market in the face of [potential] competition, but a key assumption (and I believe a reasonable one) is that companies are not self-defeating. Due to the limited number of players in the provision of broadband, I would assume that there are pretty good signaling mechanisms between competitors in not having competition inadvertantly kill each other's investments off.
This is a separate issue from whether or not a particular region/market is feasible for any private enterprise to serve. If the demand function (i.e., willing to pay on the part of consumers) has particular characteristics, it may be impossible for any private enterprise to recoup a potential investment in infrastructure. What follows is an analysis of whether the public sector should get involved depending on benefit cost analysis.
My recommendation is get up to speed on some key microeconomic behavioral and organizational theory if you're serious about understanding the question you've posed. And yes, I teach applied microeconomic theory for public policy decisions.
If it means more government control of my life and more government enforced robbery, you can keep your cheap broadband!
I'm writing this from my hotel room in London (here on business)
where WiFi is costing me $23.88 for 24 hours. The same service
is usually free in American hotels.
In other news, gasoline is still cheaper in the United States than in most of the world. It's all a question of cultural priorities. Americans as a whole prefer to travel on a freeway than on a fiberoptic cable.
I'm not sure how having slower, more expensive broadband access has stifled the United States, either. Aren't American companies still innovating at a rate comparable or superior to those in countries where TCP packets are too cheap to meter?
So it really has nothing to do at all with geographic proximity
If you think your broadband is bad, see what Telescum (Telecom) in New Zealand did.
When DSL was first introduced, it was being offered at rates of 1-2Mbit, with a 20GB limit. When Telescum got wind of this (It wasn't telecom who were offering it at this rate) they basically shut that company down.
After that, they had the gall to re-introduce 128K as 'fast' Internet, with a 1-5GB limit. After the commerce commission's investigation team investigated Telescum last year, they have made bitstream access available to ISPs, and [Telescum] are now offering free modems/connections in order to meet the commerce commission's ruling (Telecom has to have so many broadband users signed up with other ISPs) so that they [the commerce commission] don't penalise Telescum.
Luckily, Telescum is unlikely to get this quota, so (finger's crossed) they [Telescum] will have to unbundle the local loop to enable good competition. At the moment, the bitstream service is OK. the problem is, Telescum sometimes limits the overall speed [of everyone on bitstream] and we get connection dropoffs every now and again.
This is the problem of monopolies. Telescum has raised the prices so high, and because they own all (or pretty much all) of the fixed land (phone) lines in New Zealand, you can't get away with not using them. The only other services such as cable and wireless are only offered in certain areas, and they have to charge over a certain amount because of the Telecom fees to lease the lines.
It's despicable, and hopefully the situation will change soon.
Hartford WI ftw
FTW?
FTW Face the World
FTW Families Than Work
FTW Feel The Wind
FTW Fight to Win
FTW Florida Tax Watch
FTW Flying Training Wing
FTW For the Win
FTW Forever Two Wheels
FTW Forget The World (polite form)
FTW Forschungszentrum Telekommunikation Wien (Vienna, Austria)
FTW Fort Wainwright, Alaska
FTW Fort Worth Meacham Field (Airport Code)
FTW Free the Weed
FTW Free the Whales
FTW Free Trade Wharf
FTW Future Technology Workshop
Which FTW do you mean, please?
The population density is a non-issue regarding broadband. The measure of urbanisation is what's important. Rural areas have worse internet connections than cities. The more people live in cities, the more people should have broadband access. The fact that the US -a pretty urbanized country- has bad broadband has other causes.
Get them to upgrade the coax from the street to your house to the biggest available (bigger than RG-11, but I forget what it is called). I live 500 feet from the pole, with a cable as big around as a large thumb, and I get great service.
With WiMAX looking fairly promising, are cable companies waiting to see if it pans out before investing billions in new infrastructure?
And if WiMAX does catch on, will performance be significantly better and/or cheaper than cable is now? Or will it ultimately fall into the same traps of overuse and monopoly? Or face new traps like not working in bad weather?
Prices -
:D):
:rolleyes:
FROM MEDIACOM IN MISSOURI:
Plan1> You can get 3mbit Cable "Hi-Speed" (no sarcasm) for $60/month.
Plan2> You can get Cable TV for $60/month.
Plan3> You can get both 3mbit Cable Internet and Cable TV for $60/month
FROM THE CHEAPEST SATELITE INTERNET PROVIDER I FOUND IN MISSOURI:
56k Satelite for a $150 setup fee, and atleast $80/month, possibly ranging from $100 to $150 a month.
DIALUP FROM FREE4LIFE (AOL + Earthlink + etc Free4Life
56k* Dialup for $21/month for the first three months, then $17/month forever. Absolutely 101% adless, program-free, absolutely no strings attached (I use this service, and I guarantee you it's probably the best Dialup ISP out in America, though sadly it doesn't have the greatness in publicity AOL and stuff has). Just use your Login Username and Password for the built-in Windows dialler, click Connect - and bingo. Not only that, this internet is unlimited (aka no per hours/minute sort of thing, no credits, etc - it's just straight smack dab all-you-can-eat internet).
Okay, I feel comfortable with what I pay for Free4Life. Another benefit/advantage of it - for ever customer you refer to Free4Life, you literally recieve $7/month for EACH customer referred, as long as they stay subscribed to Free4Life. People who are desperate enough, can just live off of refering people. =)
*5.6 KB/sec or the speed of 56k always applies for every Dialup ISP when the user has a v92 Addon for their Dialup Modem.
Solutions -
1) Boycott, but I highly doubt this will ever be successful due to the vast majority of the people who are unskilled with things related to computers, internet, and stuff like that.
2) Threaten companies, maybe this won't work, because then they'll threaten you back.
Really actually, I think Boycotting is the only valid and most effective solution that can fix it, very sadly; see next part.
Greed -
Ok, this is what I think. Prices for products are high for internet in America because of 1) greed, 2) to "equal up" with the currency in Europe (for example), 3) being plain evil, 4) the cost for owning/using satelite fields, 5) the ridiculous wages engineers and operators demand for those satelite fields, 6) the taxes, bills, or monthly payment prices for certain things, 7) gas prices, 8) the government being greedy and evil, deciding and ordering or forcing that companies should pay more to try rob Americans with their filthy pricings, and 8) all or most of all of the above.
Mostly I think the government is raising prices here and there (ie. gas prices), which forces companies to increase THEIR prices (ie. having to go out and install/plant new cable lines, etc - this is in relationship to gas prices).
But of course, most of you will disagree on my part of saying "the governement is raising prices here and there (ie. gas prices)."
This leads to that debate and discussion. Who is really behind all this? Who is controlling these prices? Stuff like that. I am discluding the damages caused by Hurricanes because even before Rita and Katrina hit - Gas prices still were going up.
I've seen lies in the front of my eyes made by the media (the press), how can you people believe everything they say? Are you dramatic enough to not have an open eye and seek second opinions other than the press (ie. BBC News, ABC, CNN, etc - all those big things)? Or are you just ignorant? Maybe you are in a state of denial.
How DO YOU ACTUALLY KNOW what the papers say is true? Yes you may go ahead and take and compare the news from other large press organizations - and you can see that there is lots of differences here and there. Must mean it's correct, right? Well maybe - but at the vast probability it is somewhat by average true.
The government can hide their evil faces, the government can act: "Oh there's nothing wrong with us, really - we're doing the *BEST* we can, and we are to our limits. We have no intentions of *HIDING* anything from
Step 1: Move down the street and transfer your existing 3 mbps service to your new adress @ $50/month.
Step 2: Set up an appointment for cable guys to come activate your service.
Step 3: Take the day off work to wait for cable guy. After 10 hours past the appointment, stop waiting. Call Charter the next day, complain and set up another appointment.
Step 4: Repeat step three.
Step 5: Repeat step four.
Step 6: Repeat step five.
Step 7: Repeat step six.
Step 8: When cable guys finally show up. You're connection will work in 24 hours.
Step 9: When you notice your 3 mbps connection is running at 386 kbps, call charter and spend 2 hours on tech support for them to realize they selected the wrong service from a drop down menu.
Step 10: Enjoy the new 5 mbps service that you're getting because, yes... once again, they chose the wrong type of service from the drop down menu.
Step 11: Don't forget to complain at ever step along the way ultimately resulting in an $80 credit that will last for 4 months at your new rate of $20/month.
For those not keeping score, the endgame resulted in 5 mbps internet connection at $20 per month with an $80 credit. And all it required was missing five days of work, lot's of frustration and unknown hours spent on the phone. Now, go and do likewise.
and it was cable TV. Cable TV in Canada grew enormously in the 1970s and one major reason for the popularity was access to American TV.
Fast forward to the 90s and the advent of the Internet over the already existing cable networks worked well for a cable market that had grown into a series of regional monopolies. We had Shaw and Rogers in the West and Cogego, Shaw and Rogers in the East. In the late 90s Shaw and Rogers swapped territories and you ended up with a Shaw monopoly in Western Canada and a Rogers monopoly in Central Canada.
The success of cable Internet forced the major phone companies to pour money into rolling out DSL and upgrading their infrastructure. Telus in Western Canada and Bell in Eastern Canada grew into the dominant service providers and what you ended up with is a duopoly of a major DSL provider and a major cable provider each competing in their own sector of the country for our dollars.
In the end, the consumer wins as cheap, reliable DSL and cable are available from an extremely competitive environment. I live in Alberta, a relatively unpopulated province by American standards and high speed service is available everywhere in every small hamlet and hick village bewteen Calgary and Edmonton. I think a large part of that success was the unique makeup of Canada that pushes technological solutions to the vast distances this country occupies, with a desire for American entertainment and lifestyle coupled with government incentives to create large scale networks.
Obviously, a country the size of Canada does not have total Internet availability and the one area where this is true is the very far north. Most of the Northwest Territories does not have access to high speed other than satellite.
In all, I think Canada is extremely lucky in this regard but we still lag behind countries like Korea and Japan in terms of raw bandwidth. It all could have worked out very differently in Canada if the market, government influence and consumer interest had played out differently.
Just my opinion.
You raise a valid point here, but is there any reason cities like New York and LA (with correspondingly higher population densities) should be offering bandwidth as low as smaller, rural cities?
Doesn't this simply point to the big corporations milking the average Joe?
Stephen Colbert on race: "While skin and race are often synonymous, skin cleansing is good, race cleansing is bad."
Ten times faster than what? Up until the telecom collapse there were a number of CLECs deploying DSLAMs with ADSL with a max speed of 7MbpsX1Mbps. Most have cut back on speed offerings due to lack of takers. The phone company offers maybe 3Mbps with a premium price paid and you have to be on top of the CO to get it.
Cable? I get 15MbpsX2Mbps which is about the speed of the big fiber push from Verizon. I pay $65 a month and it is totally worth it to me given the speed, reliability, and price. I looked at every option and this was the best one.
Ultimately, that is what it comes downt to. The paying AVERAGE consumer and NOT the whiny "I want everything for free" brigades and they're the loudest complainers, not the ones who've already adopted and been paying for years. I have had a cable modem for years, worked in DSL installation and tech support, and cable modem installation and tech support, so I know the relative strengths. I don't own a laptop and won't until milspec ruggedized books come down in cost (my big performance vs. reliability vs. cost concern is hardware not connections).
If you want T-1 speeds with the guaranteed SLAs, fine. Pay for them. Or don't. Hundreds of thousands already do just as I pay for the modem I've got at the service level I get. It is up to the end users.
As of now, there is no financial incentive for broadband to jump in speed and fall in cost for the purveyors that they themselves don't create such as several cable providers jumping their speed ahead of schedule in areas that Verizon and company hadn't bothered pushing fiber to yet, thus cutting them off at the knees by providing it early to an already existing audience at the same speeds and nearly the same price point. The lack of need to change e-mail addresses and networking specifics is an added bonus. Why save $5/month when it would cost me weeks of downtime making the transition and changing all my network set-ups and accounting?
Again, my decision. Not whiny pontificators in magazine articles. Seems like another bs article designed to arouse and anger the same usual suspects and not a serious delving into why the broadband scene is the way it is.
The kids going on about greed and corporations should grow up already. Their hypocrisy is showing when they spend 9/10 of their Internet posts on tinfoil hat rhetoric about government censorship and interference with "their internets" but then suddenly are all hot to toss total Internet access control over to the government as long as they get taxpayer funded "free" net access. Yeah, let the same government you despise, distrust, and live in fear of control your access to the net.
When pushed, what is the theory? That what they browse won't get banned or be interferred with. Of course a similar theory was had by many during WWII regarding the Nazis and who would be come after and saying nothing until they came after that last group. Everyone is fine as long as its free, and they ain't the ones being oppressed. Well the world works thus: the nail that sticks up gets pounded down; when the only tool in your box is a hammer everything looks like a nail; the only tool of government is a hammer. Sooner or later government run Internet will screw you and you'll wish you'd paid for it in a proper economic relationship.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
I whole heartedly agree, but one other point: How much government subsidizing of the infrastructure is going on in the countries mentioned?
Keep in mind the tradeoffs for what France, Japan, and Korea are doing. Their is little competition (sometimes none) in telecommunications service. The government taxes you, most times in excess of 60% of your income considering the overall tax burden in socialist democracies. The government takes that tax money and most of your service fees and gives them to that one incumbent provider. The goverment subsidizes those services, which means even the people who don't want it have to pay for it. I'd rather pay $15 more for my cable modem and not have to pay $10 for yours. What those governments do is steal, from everyone to give a little back all in the name of a better society.
I have no doubt your numbers are correct, but at the same time can the 2/3 vs 3/4 difference in urbanization really account for the difference in penetration and pricing? I would argue not. While there has been a focus on greater communications infrastructure by government (just look at Alberta Supernet for a dramatic example. Services every community in the province with high-speed internet that has any of a school, a library, or a medical centre), IMO it definitely was the co-location and promotion of competition that made the REAL difference. Telus (as well as the other big incumbents in Canada) fought tooth and nail against co-location, but it NEEDED to happen, and it has succeeded (somewhat).
But this gets into a bigger discussion about government involvment in industry. Personally I think government's main role in the market should be to encourage competition, and BREAK UP monopolies, not encourage them. With almost-no exceptions, there are always better results from MORE competition, and MORE players in the market, rather than fewer. And when the "natural" market starts creating dominant giants, either introduce factors to break their monopoly with new initiatives (mandating co-location would be one example of such), or break the companies up (more extreme, and necessary only when the previous option fails). But above all they should be ENSURING that meaningful competition always occurs.
Governments have an essential role in economies completely seperate from government spending and federally (or provincial/state) run companies. More competition is almost always good, and should be the government's PRIMARY responsability (aside from money flow), not encouraging monopolies.
I agree with the parent. I used to live in Dallas. I lived in three different "areas" of town. ALL of them had crappy broadband options. Best I could ever get, in all of my time there, was standard 1.5 / 128K DSL. And I lived there for 10 years.
Jeez, we even had an office area called "Telecom Corridor" (located in Richardson). It's where all the big telecom companies officed.
And still, we had shitty broadband. It wasn't just where I happen to live at the time...just ask anyone from Dallas and most ppl will tell you they have limited options. If they don't, they are one of the lucky few.
New York County, which includes Manhattan, has 66950 people/square mile. No, that's not a typo.
In fact, New York County is only Manhattan. (Queens is Queens County, Brooklyn is Kings, Bronx is Bronx, and Staten Island is Dutchess.) So that number is a bit skewed - Manhattan is far denser than any other borough in New York City or any part of New Jersey.
According to Wikipedia, NYC's population density is 26403 people/square mile (that's rounded up just to match the look of your number). Newark, NJ's population density is 11400 people/square mile and Jersey City's is 16093 people/square mile. Other areas close to NYC in NJ have lower densities (those are the two main "cities" in NJ on the edge of NYC). So the average of the whole NY metro area would be a lot lower than 66950. And nobody's going to bother laying infrastructure for a single borough, although typically the telcos and cablecos will start with one borough and work their way out.
Just to compare, Tokyo is similarly difficult to calculate (it depends on if you're talking the 23 official wards of the city, the prefecture of Tokyo, or something else), but the 23 wards have a density of 34734 people/square mile. So, both cities are pretty dense, but NYC is not even close to twice as dense as Tokyo, which your numbers suggest.
I do sort of agree with your main point, though, which is that there's no real reason why the Northeast Corridor, the California Corridor or the cities of the upper midwest shouldn't be wired up better, if population density is the problem. The USA is extremely regional, and there are whole areas that are just as urban and just as large (in terms of population) as all of South Korea, for example. The NEC has a greater population than South Korea in a smaller area, so it should be theoretically cheaper to wire up on a per capita basis.
According to the CIA factbook, the population of Finland is 5,223,442 (July 2005 est.)
The land area is 304,473 km^2. That is about 17 persons per square kilometer. For comparison, the population density of the United Kingdom is 250 persons per square kilometer.
With statements like: "Like so many other challenges faced by the Bush administration, the response to the growing digital divide has been to redefine success and prematurely declare victory. " and: "The current plan is to auction off this valuable resource to the cellphone companies to cover the cost of the war and tax cuts." we see that this guy has an axe to grind, which greatly dimininshes the credibilty of his message, by undermining any semblance of objectivity. The US broadband situation is a mess, but I'm doubtful that the causes of and solution to the problems are so easily distilled into this simplistic offering as our author would have us believe. It would be nice to hear from an adult on this complex, and very important topic.
I knew I should have used the preview button:
Staten Island is Dutchess
Staten Island is Richmond. Sorry 'bout that.
Supposing the initial investment of laying the infrastructure is a serious barrier (and pretending that it wasn't subsidized by government grants), why not grant a TEMPORARY monopoly (similar to a patent). After they've gotten exclusive use to it for 5-10 years, they have to open it up completely.
cablevision is rolling out 50/100 Mbps in the metro area.
I've read many times that the bulk of the Canadian population lives within 100 miles of the US border. And look at the population centers? Aren't they somewhat concentrated?
/.ers that think the government should provide everything. Who wants the government as their only option? If you don't like the broadband options in your area, move. It's THAT simple. If you don't like the broadband options in your area, start your own company. Make a go of it. Then you can bitch and moan about Korean broadband for $30.
Frankly, it's easy for Japan and Korea to offer broadband everywhere. They have government subsidized investment opportunities. 2% interest rates. Millions of people living on top of each other.
Try and offer the same services in Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Iowa, Wyoming, North and South Dakota. It'd take billions of dollars to get infrastructure built out to everyone. And big corporations aren't going to do it. The investors don't want to invest in corporations that are going to do this because there isn't any return on it. Telephone connections out to rural areas are subsidized for this very reason. The phone company doesn't want to offer service to those people because they can't charge enough money to keep the service working.
Face it, there are a lot of you
By the way, do you have a job? Married? Kids? Do you pay your own mortgage? How about taxes? If not, I suggest you try making a living before bitching and moaning about your terrible broadband options.
"So, we are basically a victem of our own greed to have cheap phone access for everyone."
What?!?! first, it is not population density that makes infrastructure expensive. In many places in the US, it doesn't even need upgrading (look up "dark fiber") This has to do with market manipulation by telecoms. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make, but its wrong.
America needs to concentrate more on development rather than war. As a big economy it should have the the fastest internet facility costing less for people.
Can you say "directional Attenna?"
GoodBoy!
It should be no problem to get a mile'ish...
Get yourself a Can of Pringles and get BUSY
http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/448
(you could probably even find out who runs the open AP and work out a deal...and have directionalal on both ends (you should be able to easily pull DSL speeds over it on clear days.
Well, yeah, it's a stupid idea because these days, people want to do live video conferencing via H.232 or whatever it is, watch HDTV, stream audio/video from their computers, etc., all of which are high bandwidth activities, and Joe Homeuser can't do that with a puny 384 kbps upload speed compared to his 4000+ kbps download speed. Plus, people like me who want to run a server have to deal with the easily-capped bottleneck of an artificially low upload bandwidth. There's no way in hell I'm going to pay Comcast $100 a month so that I can get 6+ Mbps download with, oh, maybe 768 kbps or so upload. Even a single OC-1 line has far more bandwidth than that puny-ass number.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
The high cost and low speed are not caused by high infrastructure costs, or low population density. The telcos and cable companies have plenty of cash to lay down fiber to the home. They spend it on acquisitions of competitors and huge payouts to executives. It's not a problem of population density differences between, say, Tokyo and New York. If that were the rule, NYC would have 10 dollar a month fiber connections for everyone in Manahattan. They keep the prices high because they can.
The difference between Japan and the U.S., between France and the U.S., between Canada and the U.S. is this: they still have a liberal social policy -- the concept of the public good. They spend tax dollars and regulate providers so that the cost of high-speed telecom stays very low indeed.
The U.S., in what can only be called the era of Bushism -- he didn't invent it, but he is the shining avatar of all that it embraces -- has gone Ayn Rand, and no longer has a core concept of the public good, with perhaps the exception of highways and of course the military. We don't have an emotional understanding of why regulation of commerce is needed, or why taxes sometimes should be spent to build things that private corporations simply will not provide at a reasonable cost.
After all, if you, in your car driving from your suburban home to your job, had to pay a private corporation to build and service every inch of asphalt from your driveway to your job -- how much do you think you'd be paying? Oh baby, I'm clenching thinking about it. Protect us, O Lord, from the thieves in the broad daylight...
They'd be the cheapest crappiest roads they could get away with. They'd lobby Congress to exempt them from liability from death and damage caused by baseline maintenance. Look at what happened in Ohio -- that massive electrical blackout was caused by a conglomerate cutting powerline maintenance beneath the bone to pump up profits. Private companies SUCK at that sort of thing. All the drive for higher profits at all costs. Since the people who actually run corporations have no personal responsiblity for their actions, they have no sense of same. Elected officials at least can go to jail, lose their jobs, be exposed as lying jackasses. Companies are faceless machines which just don't care. ESPECIALLY when they are monoplies. We practically fought a civil war to disable the trusts in the early 20th century for just that reason.
Most technologically advanced countries have good public health care, fast internet, and good highways because they still adhere to the concept of the public good overriding the possiblity of someone making an immense profit. It's as simple as that.
One reason is that their bandwidth allocation is based on the assumption that people will be only using it for a small portion of the day. They want to discourage use for servers, which could potentially fill a pipe 24x7, thus costing them significantly more per customer on average than their estimates would allow for.
Of course, the introduction of things like bittorrent pretty much shot the allocation to you-know-where, so these days, it's mainly just so they can use cheaper equipment at the customer site....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
...is they are ripping you off with bandwith charges - it seems far to expensive in the US - where people whine all the time about how expensive it is if people download a picture from their site.
It should be much cheaper.
But I hear Google has offered free wifi to San Francisco, so perhaps the revolution is comming.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Hmm... while we may be more clustered... why are your own clusters of population not similarly enriched with broadband... yes the average american might be more rural... but I can't see why places like California (which has a bigger population than all of Canada) with cities like LA, and SF that do not have as affordable a broadband connection as a city like Edmonton, Alberta(about 1 million people) which is like $30 CDN (about $25 US) for a 1.5Mbps connection?
Of course even while I'm living here in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories (pop. ~ 20,000) I can get a 1.5Mbps connection... (about 1500 km north of Edmonton, Alberta) so I'm unsure why it would be that difficult to wire most of rural America... maybe there's just no incentive to... where there's a will there's a way... and telcos in US seem to have no will as there is no competition based on the fact they do not need to allow "Open Access" to their networks at wholesale prices... as stated in the article.
I really feel the population density excuse ... while somewhat valid... is used too much as a crutch and excuse for why the 75% of Americans living in Urban areas (http://www.census.gov/population/www/censusdata/h iscendata.html) are not given competitive rates for broadband. I think the article has some great ideas as to why that may be...
What you say is right but you have to correct USA sq miles by putting off all no-people areas like deserts, huge national parcs and huge mountain regions. In this areas where virtually nobody lives, you don't have to invest money to put broadband service. On the contrary while in France we have one of the largest countryside area (in percentage) of Europe, there is very few area empty of people and we have to dig broadband cables everywhere.
The density argument is a bit worn.
I work for a rural telco. We have fewer than 5,000 subscribers spread over a 50 mile diameter. We offer DSL to all of them. We can provide up to 24Mbit. We are currently laying out fiber to the premise.
Here is the snag: We belong to NECA. Under NECA tariffs, the telco has to charge the ISP more than $20 per circuit. In some cases the telco is required to charge more than $30 per circuit. The telco doesn't have a choice. They can't charge less if they want to without violating NECA tariffs. So the ISP has to charge more than that to break even, and even more to turn a profit.
Even the ISP side of the telco has to charge more than $30/month for DSL to stay in the black.
So you may think that the telco is making a ton of money on DSL. Well... yes and no. The NECA tariff mandated money actually goes to NECA, not directly to the telco. Then, NECA does a giant shell game with the enormous pool of money and divies it back out to its members according to intentionally incomprehensible algorithms. Telcos with Big 5 accounting firms fare better in the shell game.
In short, density is not the problem. FCC, IRS, and other politics are much bigger stumbling blocks. To play in the telco world in the U.S. you have to compete in all the circus games, or you get buried. The costs of regulation are enormous.
In today's world, anyone with a couple million could buildout a fiber network, buy a softswitch or two, and open a local telco/ISP with all the candy. They could charge low rates and make money hand over fist. Until the feds kicked down the door, and starting screaming nonsense about LATAs, and billing rate areas, and tariffs, and excises, and some words I'm pretty sure they make up impromptu.
Bwahaha, how do you like your nice free market NOW, capitalist-boy? Just to stop you from spreading FUD, the law actually stated that companies had to lease lines to external companies at the same rate they charged internally. And in case you hadn't figured it out, we granted those cheap bastards a monopoly, gave them the public right of way in which to put their cables, they OWE us for that. If we want to regulate their sorry asses we will. If they don't like it, tough, we'll give out that monopoly to someone who'll appreciate it.
You GUESS they are subsidized, hmmmm? Based on what? Your ideology, which tells you that nothing ever works better than the American style free market? Whoo, boy! have you been hornswaggled. There is no such thing as a free market here. Politics, power and corruption have seen to that.
Because people in NYC are subsidizing those same services for people in Podunk, ID. If we all payed exactly what it cost to provide the service to us, plus a small margin, people in big cities would have $10 a month broadband and buy their monthly groceries for $25, while a rural community spend $300 a month for dial-up and $5 for a tomato.
I have my broadband. That's one reason I live in a big city, not out on some crazy hippy commune. Why should I pay for lazy hippies to watch HD video of their favorite strains of pot growing? Equitable? I'll tell you whats equitable, everyone paying for what's theirs, that's what's equitable. Can't afford it? Tough, that's not my problem, I mean hey, I want a new jetski but I can't afford it, maybe you should pay. Other people have jet skis and I don't, that's not equitable.
I mean, just beacause some liberal administration some time in the past chose to grant monopoly rights to some decent, upright, god fearing American corporation doesn't mean we should all have to suffer for their misguided commie mistakes. If other corporations want to do broadband they should buy their own politicians and get their own monopolies. That's how the system works.
It's putting cables in the ground.
That is such a ridiculously easy question to answer: YES, YOU FUCKING IDIOT!!!
While you little snot nosed kids whine about not having a super-fast Internet connection, people like me are fighting and dying for your fat, lazy asses.
It must be nice to live in a country where you take your live and freedoms for granted. MAGGOT!!
.. and the Dolans will make you pay dearly for it.
Country________Land Mass (Sq. Mi.)___Cost of Broadband_____Population____Density
_ _________280,562,489___29.14 persons/sq mile_ __________59,765,983____109.25 persons/sq mile_ ____48,324,000____490.70 persons/sq mile
US_____________9,629,091_____________~$45________
France__________547,030_______________~$38_______
Korea, South_____98,480________________~$30_____________
etc.
I was an ISP for 10 years and you are comparing apples to oranges when you speak of other countries broadband deployments. The lack of legalities for placing fiber, the population densities of smaller countries, government owned ILECs, cheap ass customers that switched to save 2 bucks a month, and believe it or not lack of American use of the internet as a whole is the reason for the US being behind in broadband deployments. When you can lay a mile of fiber in Japan for pennies because the government says you can put it through someone's front yard to serve the public cheaper which could never happen in america your cost to deploy to 100,000 people is magnitudes less. If a government owns the telco and they deploy broadband the public is still paying for it well not directly monthly but it still comes out of their paycheck in taxes PERIOD. The money to deploy this stuff doesn't come from trees. Were you around during the dot bomb? Everyone under cutting everyone until the Corp with the biggest pockets won? Less competition equals higher prices, but you wanted to save 2 bucks a month so you switched. Quit your whining your, lucky you have broadband.
Their never-ending efforts to shut down municipal efforts, to preserve their monopolies, and to create a "delivery system" rather than a "networking system" (4MBits down, 256kbits up, anyone?) are a blight on our great (if, sadly, not as great as once it was) nation.
While corporate lobbying is certainly stifling technological innovation in general terms, I'm not sure that the specific problem you imply (blocking of municipal efforts to establish broadband service) is the problem.
In Canada, we have even more challenging ditance and environmental challenges to overcome and we seem to be quite a bit further ahead in providing broadband connectivity without relying heavily on government-sponsored initiatives--and we too have to deal with monopolistic corporations (ie. there is only one company that provides cable for the entire city, and local phone service is a monopoly)--thankfully each type of broadband competes with the others.
I actually have my reservations about municipal or other governments taking big initiatives to provide broadband access--just because if what I've seen of such attempts. Such projects either suffer large cost and schedule overruns and end up more expensive than offerings from private companies (despite the lack of profit motive). Alberta SuperNet for example was far from well-executed. Also, in the end you often just end up with another monopoly (same crap different pile, just government wags protecting their turf instead of coporate wags).
Waaaay back when telephone was all government-run here long-distance was obscenely expensive, you either had to rent or buy your phone from the government telephone company, and you couldn't wire up your own phone extensions (and if they found out you didn't go through the government telephone company you were extra-billed--essentially "fined"). If you lived outside any city limits you were very often on a party line and couldn't use touch-tone phones. Rapid investment in the antiquated infrastructure of the telephone system didn't truly come about where I lived until the government telephone company was privatised. Sad thing is, they were still a monopoly and it was still an improvement. Now with rapid economic growth the problems with monopoly service are showing again as people wait over a month after moving into their new homes to get a land line.
The problem isn't with who owns the service--it is with the lack of competition and level playing field. If you replace a corporate monopoly with a government monopoly, in the long term the problems will either never go away or will eventually reappear.
With the exception of Canada, the countries mentioned have a tremendous advanage regarding broadband penetration, and that is relative population density.
This is a pretty lame excuse, especially given Canada's progress in telecommunications--and nobody should use the excuse that 70% of the population is in a strip 100 miles wide along the Canada-US border either, becasue there are still 10 million people that are not, and even the remainder that are in that strip, are in a strip that stretches the entire continent.
Sparse population should actually be a motivating factor rather than a hindrance--since so many people can't just walk a few blocks to a cyber-cafe as they might do in Japan there is great motivation in developing communications technologies to bring signals to the home. That was the case in Canada anyways--a country that is 10 percent of the US population and economic might managed to become a leader in areas lite sattelite communications technology and fibre optics. The Alouette I was the third sattelite ever to be launched into space after Sputnik I and Explorer I, and though the specifications called for a 1-year lifespan it lasted ten years. For several years starting in the 1970s Alberta, Canada was home to the worlds longest usable fibre-optic communications line (and the first ever meant for commercial use). These sorts of feats happened BECAUSE of sparse popula
However, I read about all the struggles people like Jerry Pournelle had (in the biggest urban clot in N. America!) and dreaded the DSL that arrived... So, I picked up my DSL from the local implementer, tried to plug it in and make it work a few days ahead of the official launch date. It didn't work!
Then, about 2 days later, I had a brainwave, and it worked! You can't run your DSL line in and out the modem card! Plug directly into the wall, and it works!
It's worked for 5 years. (IIRC) Minimal hassles... The local government monopoly has been divested, went public, made alliances with Sympatico and broken them, faced phone and VOIP competition - still works fine. Once in a while at first, the DNS or SMTP owuld die for a night, maybe every 2 or 3 months. Not lately...
We're a town of 15,000 that's 500 miles from a large population centre. Because the government owned the monopoly, and was planning, they forced them to build a fibre backbone to service the outlying area. And it's still only $39.95/mon. in Northern Pesos...
For a while they used their fiber ownership to keep the local cable provider at bay; however, they overpriced the business service, so the local (government monopoly) electrical utility has installed a competing fiber run to manage their remote equipment, and is selling spare capacity.
Worse yet, we have a provincial socialist government... but still have good services. Go figure.
How did all this happen? Well, the government uses the bogeyman of those hyperactive hypercompetitive tech-savvy Americans! If we don't push Internet out to our rural areas, we won't be able to compete with Silicon Valley in the 21st century. Basically, they used tax dollars and a government monopoly to finance the expansion of services that helped develop educational opportunities. What a concept!
Oh, yeah - they needed that service anyway to help run our universal health care system, cheap university access, and other quality-of-life services.
But then, this is the country that built a trans-continental railroad across basically unsettled and unexplored wilderness only a few years after the US - but using government funds and national monopolies, after a local private-enterprise failed dismally.
I don't know what you folks are dying for, but it's not for any kinda freedom right now. Maybe you're just dying for the lies you want to believe, that are being told to you by career liars and deceivers. Keep smoking the good dope from your megacorps and politicians. Mission accomplished indeed.
Of course poverty is a moral failing. Only the lazy and stupid are poor. This is America, where everyone has the same opportunity to rise to greatness. Obviously, I am rich because I am better than you, because I worked harder and smarter. Because the strong survive while the weak perish, the great American race becomes stronger. Everyone here could be rich if they wanted it. Everyone could be a millionaire in America, with servants who would all also be millionaires...
Software is like sex. It's better when it's free. -Linus Torvalds
What world?
Comcast won't let you get an Internet-only cable account. I mainly watch OTA HDTV and DVDs, so the $10/mo super craptastic basic cable TV lineup is money down the drain for me. So, where I live in the Bay Area, it isn't $45/mo just for Internet. It's $55. I'm seriously considering Sprint's EV-DO service, which costs less, gets broadband speeds, and is 100% portable (not limited to my apartment).
Wouldn't part of the problem come from the massive cost associated with installing new lines? More people / stuff to displace. Even so you'd think the rates would be cheaper.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
Because the companies making money off broadband in NYC and NJ are using that money to offset the cost of the excrutiatingly slow expansion of DSL into lower density areas.
... are busy slapping fines on Howard Stern. Faster internet access is number 9999 on their TODO list.
You bunch of weenies!!
For the amount I pay a month for my 128Kbps connection I can buy 4 broadband connections in the US!
(I pay $190.. I live in Paraguay)
[On the flipside.. for the amount YOU pay for rent each month you could rent my 2 floor office for a whole year.. so I guess it all evens out]
The article is a bunch of bunk. With the exception of Canada, no country on the list has large rural areas. Korea, for example, you could drive between any two points in about the same time it takes more than a few in the US to commute to work each day. The huge swaths of nothing that are common in the US make broadband for those areas more expensive.
US Urban areas just about all have decent broadband now too. Canada has rural broadband because the government subsidizes a big chunk of the cost -- not something we should be asking of our federal government in a time of record deficits.
The author goes on to lament that 3mbps is too slow for high definition video without mentioning that the average bit rate on a DVD movie is 3 mbps while the fixed bit rate on a directv channel is 2 mbps. With newer technologies like mpeg4, 1.5 mbps is more than enough to support television quality video. Right now. Today. Before you even consider the technologies in the pipeline.
And lets talk about one of the technologies in the pipeline. Verizon, awful hated monopoly Verizon, is deploying FiOS at a rate that exceeds 2,000,000 homes per year. That's fiber optic to the home. Rates start at $50 for 15mbps. Add Vonage for $25 like I have and what the heck are you complaining about?
Don't get me wrong. Some of his comments about the FCC are dead on target. Bush's FCC has seriously screwed the pooch on competition. But the data the author uses to support his case is weak at best, leaning towards farcical.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
- about 15% sales tax on most things; groceries, medical supplies, etc. are tax exempt.
- on a very good income ($70K range, in Northern Pesos) you'll pay about 1/3 in income tax; and then about 45% on each additional dollar. Most average wage earners pay about 25% income tax overall.
- University costs about $3000 for tuition. Health care is FREE. That's where all the tax goes. it's not perfect, but it's better than guys who have to pay $300/month plus for health care; it doesn't bankrupt the better-wage employers. People don't lose the house and savings because little Johnny has leukemia... Employer health benefits are for things like private room, ambulances, prescriptions, dental...
- the universal Unemployment Insurance (name changed to "Employment Insurance" a few years ago by the GoodSpeak bureaucracy)covers almost everyone who loses their job, for about a year.
I did a comparison about 15 years ago, with people from our New York office. Figuring in their City and State taxes, the income tax rates were pretty close. Nobody is any longer at the point where the Beatles' song "Taxman" says (of pre-Thatcher Britain)
"Let me tell you how it's going to be...
One for you, nineteen for me...
'Cause I'm the taxman, yeah yeah yeah...
Canada's standard of living is not quite up to America's, but I see George W.'s economic and budget policies are working hard to rectify that.
...by offering content instead of just bandwith. Then it would be in their interest to offer the fastest and largest pipe to the customer,to go ahead and subsidise that so they can turn around and offer all sorts of premium content on demand. that's where the next wave of money is coming from, IMO. The game console makers do that, dump the machines near cost so they can sell games. Car makers do it, the base model is not all that profitable, but all the add-ons make the money. And etc.
.5 up. 1.5 down at price X
.5 up at same price X plus all sorts of legit media, movies, custom news, music, TV shows, access to popular game servers, whatever.
company A offers
company b offers 1.5 down,
Theoretical then- Who will wind up with more customers and make more net profit? Who will have a higher gross so they can play with the monthly float? Who will have higher numbers to throw at the quarterly statements?
...but i'm from canada and was too busy looking at pr0n to post here sooner. Damned internet causing me not to get first post.
Okay, cut the US area in half to account for these 'no-people areas'. (I seriously doubt that 50% of the US doesn't need high speed infrastructure, but just for the sake of it)
France sq miles: 211k
USA sq miles: 1768.5k
France gdp/sq mi: $8M
USA gdp/sq mi: $6M
It's not that we feel so superior that we are shocked when someone “beats us”, as you imply, it's that there is such a large difference between two industrialized, connected nations in the same region of the world. Both the U.S. and Canada have similar quality backbones in place, so Canada in this case just serves as a benchmark to where we might be today.
You think you have it bad in the US? In New Zealand, we only have one telecommunications company essentially - New Zealand Telecom. There are other broadband providers, like Telstra-Clear and Orcon, but because NZ Telecom solely own and operate the exchanges the competition is pretty much irrelevant.
I pay 45$ a month, for 1Mbps ADSL with a monthly cap of 1GB. That's the best deal going in the country. Australia, is somewhat better off.. but not significantly.
At any rate, for those of you in the states that think your broadband providers are lousy.. you've actually got it reasonably good. Not south korea good, but good all the same.
Is that download/upload? If so then why is the upload higher than the download? I've never heard of any ISP offering more up than down. Where did those numbers come from? That is a huge difference from the current offer of 10/1 Mbps for most areas serviced by cablevision and 20/2 offered in certain areas like long island. Verizon Fios is the fastest service that I know of and only offers 30/5 for $180 and is available virtually nowhere.
Same reason you can't rent a nice house there for 500$/month like you can in the heartland. You picks your ambiences and pay for them. NYC is a prime example of severely overly inflated cost of living. that and Dc and LA and San Fran and a handful of other major metro areas have extremely skewed dollars for this or that. I undersatand ya'all pay more for a *parking place* than some folks make yearly outside your area. Wazzup with that noise? You people crazy? I would imagine if you wanted to drop a grand a month you could get better data transfer. You want to live expensive in the big apple, then expect to pay, you aren't going to have it both ways because everyone around you needs to make the big bucks to live where you live. Why should ANYTHING cost less for you in NYC? Your neighbors costs are the same as yours, guessyou guys ust like expensive or something. Ya'all n'yarkers are the kings of expensive for not much, you want tha high falutin "exciting" lifestyle, then just live with it and spend what it takes, buy you a T-1 line unti something else comes around.
I get 2MBit downstream and 192Kbit upstream DSL for
EUR 14.95 mandatory analog pots landline
EUR 19.99 Deutsche Telekom DSL Line DSL2000
EUR 14.95 Deutsche Telekom DSL flat classic
all in all EUR 50.00
If you think broadband in america is bad. Have a look at the costs in australia.
For 60$us you'll get: 512/128 adsl (thats bit not byte) with a download cap of 20-30gig.
If you spend between 90-110$us you'll get 1500/256 adsl and a cap of ~50gig.
The 2 main providors of cable make it not worth it because they slow down your connection to 56k modem after 10~ gig.
Resistence is futile.
I know high tech pros, doctors and people in many scientific fields who just don't care enough to have more than a megabit or so at home. They use the Net mostly at work where they have some big pipe to a main branch. There's just not as big of a demand here.
Hey Mr Frenchman, I love you.
Aww, stop cribbin guys, Over here in *Developing Land* India, I've got a 512kpbs line, ADSL, with a 1000 MB(yup, not even a gig) Cap(Ever heard of one of those?) for Rs. 825($ 18.50 at todays rate). I'd kill for a $ 40 kinda connection that you'll in the States have. The highest bandwith in and around Pune, one of India's fastest growing Outsourcing hubs(Turn the flamethrowers on!) available to a person like me IS 512kbps. And there's no such thing as an Unlimited, or should i say Uncapped plan. I have to pay an extra $ 33.20 per 1000 MB I use over my limit. And don't get me started on the monitoring software at the ISP's site, #&*@%%#$$, I had my router TURNED OFF for a day and they still charged me 40 megs of transfer. Customer service told me I had a *cough* virus. I told them to go &*%(# themselves
People in NY and NJ still have to pay federal taxes. I suspect if New York were a separate country (or at least as separate as South Korea is), penetration would be better.
Thank the expanding role/power/price tag of the federal government.
Actually this is pap. The UK has a similar problem, and outside the major cities it simply doesn't have the population density to which you have in the US. NTL/telewest are now rolling out 10mbps over their cable network, this duo (soon to be one) has the monopoly on cable TV/modems. Top speed was previosly 2mbps.
My speed in the most dense area of FL is still just over 5mbps and has been for the last two years. DSL is even worse. Tampa just down road is supposed to be getting fiber, and you can be damn sure that roadrunner will magically improve their service before losing customers en-masse.
We have zero competition, so our choice is poor.
... that they've been picked up and moved to Pougkeepsie. (That's where Dutchess County is.)
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Rural has nothing to do with it. The Yukon is 482,443 km, has 31,000 people in about 30 communities and has the highest broadband access in Canada. Communities that are not accessable by road have DSL.
Yeah, and an OC-1 will only cost orders of magnitude more than crappy comcast cable.
After all, I am strangely colored.
*cough* Microsoft *weeze* *hack* *die*
"Hello 911? I just tried to toast some bread, and the toaster grew an arm and stabbed me in the face!"
We are granting LARGE monopolies to these companies. Comcast has the coax and fiber right in my area. Qwest has the twisted pair. They are both doing a sucky job. The problem is that fed., state, and local govs. granted these companies unlimited monopolies. They have absolutely no incentive to do better. While it might be necessay to grant a short term monopoly for less dense population, none of the companies needed that.
If the USA really wanted to push broadband, they would simply limit all BB related monopolies to no more than 5 years, with one exception. After that it should be opened for all. That means in 5 years, if a company wishes to compete against qwest or comcast, by using fiber, then they should be allowed to come in and compete. If there are enough dollars being left on the table, then a new company will come.
The one exception that I earlier refered to, would be a limited size monopoly. The real issue is getting access into the resident/business. So, allow a city allows a company to have a monopoly from say the block level greenbox to the home (at a cost of 30-40/month). But this company does not provide any other service.
Then allow other companies to provide service to the greenbox. So at my block, I may have 50 companies providing fiber/cable/twisted pair. These company could then provide any service that I would shop for. If Qwest and Comcast keep delivering the crappy service that they do, no problem; Verizon or some company who knows how to provide a virus-free back-bone or can handle an issue within 72 hours will work (yeah, comcast really is that bad).
Until we get rid of all the unnatural monopolies, then the service will remain what it is; crappy, slow, and very profitable to the companies. Afterall, what did it take from MS to suddenly get better? Competition from OSS.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It's called "Broadband Reality Check, The FCC ignores America's Digital Divide". http://www.freepress.net/docs/broadband_report.pdf
You can thank Bush for putting religion ahead of science on this one. Three more years is too long...our country is drowning, while he fills his pockets! This is just another example of it!
"Instead, let the free market take care of that; governments are the wrong institutions to do this type of thing, as they are very bureaucratic and like throwing their power around."
only governments like throwing around their power, not Free Marketeers?
i guess you've never been sued for thousands of dollars because you downloaded a couple of tunes (that you already owned on CD)
only governments are "very bureaucratic", not corporations? have you ever worked for a commercial organization with more than a few dozen employees? something tells me the answer is no.
anyway, it's unbelievable that you think government should handle the creation/maintenance of ROADS, but not internet access. i mean, ROADS-- which are one of the closest public analogies i can think of for talking about internet access. "not necessary for commerce" is an incredibly ignorant thing to say about the internet, in the 21st century.
but....even weirder than that... you don't seem to be aware that the democratic republic is based on majority rule....
"Your tax dollars go to various special interest groups and some other services that you may not want (or need), just because some representatives or the majority of the people decided to approve them. What if you don't want (or need) broadband Internet access?"
that's funny because. because i don't want or need an overinflated military marching around the world poking at bees nests. --according to you, i have no freedom. yet, somehow, i have the feeling that if i said something like "they took away my freedom by forcing me to pay for destructive things that I DON'T WANT" you would rebuff me.
just so you know, if internet access was publicly funded, it wouldn't mean that "government" controlled the internet. it would mean that the government gave money to private companies for developing infrastructre in unprofitable areas, because it's the right, civil thing to do. and it ends up benefitting everyone. (just like education, which you mentioned yourself...)
you trust "government" to maintain a national military, local police force, and the entire justice system.... but you don't trust them in financing/prompting the creation of a crucial peace of 21st century infrastructre. sorry, but that makes you an ideological lunatic.
From what I've read most of the broadband overseas is business class where it has extremely high uptime whereas in the U.S. if you need uptime you have to purchase a T1 or higher contract. That was fine when everyone was on 56k but 1.5mbit for a bunch of servers just doesn't cut it anymore when all of your users have more bandwidth than that at home.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Welcome to capitalism tainted by greed.
The majority of the rest of the world does not agree.
rgds
Americans are definitely ripped off with this. My grandpa in Japan gets about 40-50mbits and he pays about 3,200yen (about $28USD?) a month.
"Nobody really needs a military right now anyhow, right? If we need one sometime later on, we'll just materialise one out of the same orifice you got that free lunch from above."
the goal of intelligent threat assessment is to minimize paranoid military funding in circumstances where it's entirely inappropriate. --and speaking of WWII, which gets thrown around a lot, the american military wasn't mobilized at large, obviously, until after america was attacked. which is what an industrious, free society does. here's what they don't do: commit to an endless program of militarism.
"Demonstrated proof of benefit, eh? Sure, give my right hand a cookie while you chop off the left. You just gave me a benefit, right? [...] Taxes are the cost we pay for a civilized society. A civilised society doesn't magically come along with that."
for some reason, a lot of people (definitely including you), can very easily imagine being bamboozled, finagled, conned, utterly DECEIVED in every possible arena of public spending.... except with regards to the military/security complex.
"Other countries have proved they can offload the maintenance of security across most of the world onto another country that values its military and is willing to take on the burden of being the world's policeman."
which countries? USA? i've lived there all my life. when have i been willing to be the "world's policeman" ? who are you talking about? do you somehow represent all of the millions of americans?
i'm asking, because i personally value the military, which is why i don't support sending its members to die by the thousands in a pointless war, while leading to the deaths of many more thousands of civilians.
and if what you're saying is true, that all those dirty socialist nations have "offloaded" their security onto you/America......... then it sure looks like somebody's been duped, doesn't it? you're practically beating your chest over having been duped into providing for the security of all those wimpy cheapskate first-world nations. (beating your chest while having a kind of "gee whiz, burden burden burden" moment at the same time)
"In a few select cases, they've shown that a well-armed populous in conjunction with harsh terrain and/or weather can bog down an invading army badly enough that the invaders might choose to reconsider."
obviously if somebody has "harsh" terrain (..and, weather? what the hell?) on their side, and their enemies can't handle it, they don't need to waste money on a bloated military, do they. but it's hard to tell what your point was: you're either saying that some countries are cowards, but safe because of "luck", or you're saying something about american involvement in iraq, or something. i don't know. feel free to explain.
If anyone says "population density" one more time in these comments, the baby seal gets it.
When I saw compared negativley with I expected the usual bout of trolling, defensive excuses and outright off topic criticism of those other places, but this really takes the cake. What is it, in this day and age, that makes so called educated americans who use the internet, so utterly unable to comprehend that some little thing, somewhere else on the planet might be better than in their country?
Why do they use the excuse that America is much bigger and more rural than any of those countries and simply ignore Canada sitting right next door with routine 2mbit connections in towns 400 kilometers from anywhere else in a country that is bigger than America and has a far smaller population? Why do they make up utter bullshit statements about so called socialist governments and other crap.
The simple answer would be that realising that you are in a unfavourable position is the first step to changing it. Denial, however, never helped anyone.
For the record, I live in Switzerland, which, while having one of the highest rates of broadband penetration is ridiculously expensive and the only cable company, which has a total monopoly on cable connections, has only just introduced 6mbit connections at around $60 per month. That's the best you can get here. And switzerland is ridiculously capitalist and has very little in the way of regulation, just like the USA. Just across the border in France, an hours drive from where I live, you get 20mbit access, free phone use and free wireless modems for around $20 per month. And while the telcos are all privately owned, there is market regulation.
Think about that. It has nothing to do with socialism or size of your penis. It has a lot to do with regulation keeping the market free of monopolies who can and do abuse their positions if left unchecked. If you're still unsure about what I mean, ask someone here about Microsoft.
If you are mentioning that it cost less dollars in France, for example, to get a broadband connection than in America, do not forget that the Euro is worth than the dollar, so any dollar to dollar conversion will be skewed.
$ units /mile^2
2084 units, 71 prefixes, 32 nonlinear units
You have: 25849.9/km^2
You want:
* 66950.934
/ 1.4936311e-05
Seriously, only around 3%-10% of the U.S. is populated with people depending upon how you define populated. We have a lot of land.
Regards,
Steve
Welcome to the information dirt road.
I feel there's the fact the US land is way bigger than in say Japan, South Korea. Thus rolling out fibres and cables look cheaper to do so in these locations.
;)
But having massive number of computer users in the US, I hope they get to a better state with the broadband soon.
Having 100mbit/s in home gives alot of advantage deploying cheap dedicated server for any kind of use, be it entertainment, education, business.
Could start having softwares causing throughput issues to get resolved quicker too
not to start a flame, but dude you sound like a typical american. have you been to france? i have, and it isn't anything like you say. little cars? poor healthcare? wow, their health care kicks U.S ass hands down. As for the work hours don't hate cause you live your life for the almighty dollar - its not the same all over the world. Americans sell a dream via hollywood, but the truth is, the u.s needs cleaning up bad. Most of the world is getting buy just fine, and actually have better infrastructure in place than the u.s. healthcare, telecommunications are just a few.
$action = empty(PHP) ? backToC() : unset(PHP) ; "when the concrete cases are understood, the abstractions are readily
Actually it's the socialistic taxes that helped the rest of the world get better broadband.
in all this mess. Thank you for being open minded and realising paying canada a compliment isn't a death wish. You are more than welcome to move here if you wish. Believe it or not, quebec and alberta have some of the hottest women around. and they all natural. we also have all the other stuff my fellow canadian said, beer, heathcare etc..also i can pretty much say anything without fear of being sued..oh and i'm typing this in my living room while watching my 500 channel satellite tv and surfing /. on a 100Mbps connection.
$action = empty(PHP) ? backToC() : unset(PHP) ; "when the concrete cases are understood, the abstractions are readily
It's not wrong.. but the idealist in all of us would like to see full equal bi-directional speed everywhere. I would rather see everyone on earth have 1M/1M than to see everyone have 4M/256. It lets the internet do what it is good at.. move data between end users. Asymmetric links encourage content to be delivered by servers hosted elsewhere, rather than by end users.
It's partly due to infrastructure, but it's also due to the desire to keep home users from running servers.
Your numbers are misleading. Your calculations presume you have provide access to land. You don't. You only have to provide access to where the people live. A lot of land in the United States is uninhabited. Take Alaska for instance. It's 1,067,653 square miles, but the majority of the people live along the southern coast. For example, it would be wasteful to provide access of any type to the 9,375 square miles of Denali National Park.
A similar case can be made with the southwest and north central United States. Those states are sparsely populated overall, but do have a few large population centers. Link the population centers, and you've effectively wired up the entire region.
Mostly has to do with infrastructure.
In South Korea they rapidly put up buildings that would only last 20-30 years and are now tearing them down. If you've ever been to cities around Seoul the buildings are setup all like cookie cutters almost.
ALSO. the telcos do not really own the DSL over in S. Korea, it's the utilities. They installed a network in their underground/utilities tunnels in Seoul to use as a communications array for the utility system and then ended up converting it all to DSL. I hate to say all this and NOT provide references (read it in online article too) but I think this is a reasonable assessment as to why broadband popped up overnight in S. Korea.
*HOWEVER* In the US, where we have cable and phone lines everywhere, you'd think we'd put some serious money into investing it. Telcos and cable providers should be raking in the $$$ but they do not because of two issues.
1.) a large majority of Americans do not think broadband or the Internet is important. This is either 40% or 60% but I cannot recall the Pew Internet American Life Project reports.
2.) Digital Divide
If you look at Internet user statistics a majority of Hispanics and African Americans are lagging behind significantly and these are primarily low income families.
If you do not have the skills or a computer or training to use it, you've got another set of barriers besides money. Look at old people, sure they CAN learn how to use it, but most do not. about 50% of those 50 and older are not using it, and are less willing to pay for broadband.
In Japan and S. Korea, you don't need to pay for broadband OR for a computer. Just go to an Internet/gamer cafe for cheap and get whatever you need done in there. Even write your paper and get it printed. The market isn't really there and won't be for another 5-10 years. Give it time though.
at least we don't have bandwith restrictions here in America.
Good karma sticks to me like velcro on a piece of plexiglass.
Move along, citizen.
Here's my take on this whole "last mile" problem: I liken wires to roads, or train lines. They're all just kinds of networks.
Possibility one, you could leave it up to a free market and individual private entities to buy land and run wires/roads how and where they feel like it (i.e. wherever it will profit them). They then have the right to use these wires/road that they built for whatever reason they please and charge whatever they feel like, which, if this is really a profitable venture they are going in to, will be whatever the market will bare, i.e. just enough to undercut the competition. This will keep prices as low as feasible wherever the wires/roads are run, but has the down side that anybody using the network has to pay for use, and it's not going to be profitable for the road/wire-runners to run them out to the boondocks - and of course almost nobody in the boondocks can afford to pay for a wire or road to be run out to them especially.
Possibility two, you could have we the people, the public, acting through the government, demand that the roads/wires be run everywhere equally, and pony up the tax money to buy the land and resources and labor needed to do so. This network now belongs to the public and is thus "free" to use, its creation and maintenance paid for in taxes, and thus the wealthy and those in (what would in a free market be called) more profitable areas are subsidizing the poor and the people who live out in the middle of nowhere, but everybody's got equal access to the network now and apparently enough people wanted that that they were willing to pay for it. (Presuming that your democracy here actually works as advertised).
Possibility three, We The People pay up front for the installation of the network, run out to the last mile so that everyone's got equal access, and then charge for wire access to the private entities who wish to provide some sort of service over this network (someone wants to run trains along our tracks, someone wants to broadcast TV over our cables, etc). These private entities then charge their customers for their service plus what they had to pay for network access, which should just be the cost the govt pays for maintenance of the lines, so in essence the customer pays the service price plus a network maintenance fee. So the network is publicly owned but what runs on the network is privately owned.
This last possibility raises an interesting question now in my mind - what service exactly are the telecom companies providing? As I understand it the installation of the lines has been largely funded by taxpayer dollars, so what have they to charge us for? Maintenance? If the government paid for the lines, shouldn't the government OWN the lines and pay the telcos for the service of maintaining them, the same as the government often pays construction companies for road maintenance contracts? In other words, shouldn't we the people be paying a network maintenance tax, and have free access to the lines, instead of paying government-granted telecom monopolies for use of lines we paid for? (Which really amounts to about the same thing, I guess).
My mind isn't so clear right now, but it's seeming more and more to me that this third option doesn't actually exist. If the lines of a network (of any sort) are privately run and funded, then those who ran them have the right to charge or do with them whatever they please. If they were publicly run and funded, they they should be free for everyone (libre and gratis) and paid for via taxes. Service providers operating over the network are paying to use the network and charging their customers as appropriate - if I'm running a shipping business across the highway network, then I'm paying gas tax (which covers road maintenance) the same as anyone else, and passing that cost on to my customers. And I'm running an e-business server on the Internet, I'm paying for network access the same as anyone else and passing that cost on to my customers too.
But if we the people paid for the network in taxes, and t
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
Maybe if the U.S. was as tiny as the countries used as examples we'd have better broadband rankings. The fact is, someone out in the middle of Wyoming doesn't have broadband because it's not cost-effective to run 100 miles of cable out to them just so 1 or 2 people can use it. If every American man cut their nuts off and moved their families to the cities we'd rank much better.
Canada is mentioned as having "better" access than the U.S. but that's an outright lie because they're bigger than we are. Go to the Yukon, or the middle of Alberta and ask for DSL. The wolves will just look at you funny. Then they'll eat you.
2-1/2 South Koreas would fit in Wyoming. France (212394 sq. miles) is smaller than the state of Texas (261914 sq. miles). My county is 404 square miles larger than Hong Kong, and this county is considered small.
Broadband availability is concentrated around population centers no matter what country you're in, and all of the population centers in the U.S. have excellent broadband coverage.
The amount of broadband coverage and its price is proportional to the population density of the area being served.
I live just outside of a small city in the mountains of Northern Arizona and no DSL is available where I live and am not certain if cable is available or not. I am just slightly beyond the end of the cable system so am not sure if it is available where I live or not. I don't watch very much TV so I wouldn't want to pay for an expensive cable connection anyway just to have faster Internet access. QWEST is the telephone company and they have told me that DSL is not available where I live. Dial-up connections in my neighborhood are only good for 26.4K even with a 56K modem. One local Internet provider offers high speed wireless access from a nearby mountain top however, it is line of sight only and there is a few large hills in the way. One person who was visiting was once able to use some kind of cellular phone based Internet connection for his laptop. He connected at something like 200K, if I remember correctly, but he said that in most cities his connection was much faster. He pays about $59 per month. I have also seen one person use a satellite dish based Internet connection nearby.
Broadband over power lines (BPL) has sometimes been suggested as a high speed Internet solution for rural areas. However, as a ham radio operator I am opposed to that. Most hams have been strongly opposed to BPL because of the large amounts of interference that would be produced on the short wave radio bands. Sending radio waves at various fequencies over unshielded powerlines is what creates the interference.
Doing a fresh intall of Windows and downloading the necessary updates is difficult on a 26.4K connection. I once reinstalled Windows 2000 on one of my two computers and had to spend most of the night downloading something like 80 or 100 MB of security updates. As a precaution, I installed a Zone Alarm firewall before connecting to the Internet. But that ment many hours of running Windows 2000 without many of the security updates. Several minutes after starting to download the patches the pop up messages started to appear. Many of pop-up said that my registry was corrupted or that I had spyware or other proplems. Most of the messages said that I needed to go to some website that I had never heard of to download some program to fix the problem. Instead of downloading the updates I had to stay up most of the night swating pop-up messages. This was despite having never gone to any website other than the Microsoft website. Finally at some point after rebooting the pop-ups stopped presumably becuase one of the security updates finally was blocking the pop-ups. Most of the time I use Linux which also requires many hours of downloading updates but at least there are never any advertising related pop-ups while downloading the security updates so I can sleep while downloading the updates.
Canada is indeed cheaper, i pay 30$/month cdn for a 3.5mbps connection. And it is not the best available.
I know a guy in china that had a faster connection, cheaper then I have now. It makes me really sad when he gets much faster connection speeds then I do with the lower price
Curiosity killed the cat, but cats have 9 lives.
If Intel is testing WiMAX in remote Southeast Asian locations, it should be good for broadband in America.
We had contractors (Bell, Axia) build the fibre network. They own the 27 largest cities. The gov't owns the rest and sells the bandwidth dirt cheap. This brings tons of us wireless guys into the game and we can give remote users high speed (1.5 meg + ) for 34.95 a month canadian.
This network cost our gov't 193 million. (ya, we got a smoking deal). We finally have it all running after four years and now the task of getting the smaller communities connected.
Wireless is not an issue now. We can shoot 25kms with current technology. It's pretty easy and fairly cost effective to cover small towns and rural areas. Considering that we have 422 communities with a Point of Presence, we hope to have high speed available to 95% of the province within a year.
It can be done. It can be cheaper. We used taxpayer money for the base and open competition to drive the prices down.
I love Alberta!
P.S. Alberta needs techs.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
Cox Cable has a reduced-speed offering at a lower price. But I agree with the cost being too high. Cox is trying to be Bill Gates Incorporated, make the stockholders rich. Their employees have the best benefits like dental. Retirement, the WORKS. My problem with that reaches farther than the cable discussion. My AARP Delta Dental plan is shunned by local dentists in the Roanoke Valley Virginia community because the places like Cox has the good Delta Plan that pays EVERYTHING and doesn't squawk about the dentist's high charges! I've lost over $1,000 paying for dental my AARP Plan doesn't pay because of that, so the cable industry helps a few with the Robin Hooding Effect. Trickle down kick the customer in the gonads. It ends up being triple dipping into my pocket. If this is happening HERE, it's probably happening a lot other places in America. As in wherever there's a decent large industry left, the locals are being deprived for the benefit of the few. Not that this is new. I saw the same thing happen in Richmond Virginia 30 years ago because of the high & mighty Philip Morris tobacco workers and Reynold's Aluminum and DuPont. If you didn't work for one of them your life was trashed because it causes the area professionals to maintain an artificial price ceiling. It's unwritten but it's there, and it has become a pall upon the land. Yet, after we don't give so many kids dental we can send them off to die for other people, whether it's a Vietnam or an Iraq. What a screw up we are. I'm hopeful & optimistic the situations will get better. http://www.newpath4.com/
Well I'm paying about $55us per month for 2Mbit down, 128Kbit up and 10GB cap connection and sometimes it's slower than dialup.
Oh the poor USA'ians, how do they cope...
Fran
:):):)
1st 1st Poster of the new Millennium!
I find it a pity that the 'US of A' and my home country, the 'UK of GB & NI', is falling so far behind. I'm here in Japan in Niigata out on the edge of the countryside. I have a 100Mbps fiber from the company '@nifty', and the first 6 months were free, and is now costing about 17 or 18 pounds (sterling) per month for the continuing service. Fixed IP address. I don't know what the problem is back in Europe - particularly in the UK, and also in the US. I am coming to the conclusions that it is not due to lack of competition, but actually lack of goverment drive pushing these companies to offer higher speed. In Japan and Korea there has been a lot of pressure from the governmnet to build high quality fast backbones reaching every city, and now almost any company may take advantage of this.
And get back to fighting and dying for my oil^H^H^H freedom.
Capitalism is great but there are negatives too. But if anyone says that I guess they're a dissenter, an anarchist, a budding Communist. I've written webpages on my site about specific ways to change Social Security that would affect a great American enhancement across the board to everyone, even children. But especially women. I don't see it happening anytime soon. The stockholders & good ol boy networks are still strong. Oops, I guess they're lobbyists now. Changing things for the better, if it doesn't happen, isn't from a lack of knowing how to do it. If I a high school graduate can figure out where the equations are skewed, anyone can. I'm not against the capitalist rising high and riding a wave of Success but I am against the wave when it rides over whole communities of fellow Americans like a tsunami. We're behind in cable service, ahead in cable charges, ahead in healthcare costs but behind in healthcare service. Anyone with a working brain can easily see we need to tighten up. The American equation needs some tweaking.
all i have to say is that currently i pay 350 dhs thats approx 100 USD for a 2mb connection .. now is that fair ?
it's symetrical- you have the option of getting 50 or 100. availability is currently limited as they've just started rolling it out.
Try living in a place like South Africa, which is known to have possibly the highest bandwidth cost in the world. Why? Because there is no competition here. There is *one* telecommunications company, and they deem it fit to charge an arm, a leg and a snip of your ear for a connection to the internet.
/.
Americans are so quick to wail about how bad it is over there. Shame. You poor little buggers. If I could get a DSL link for $45 a month, I would take it like a shot. And be damn grateful. The cheapest internet connection I can get over here is about R400pm (about $60 pm) -- and that's for a service that is capped at 1 gB traffic: when my traffic reaches 1 gB, I get moved into a high-contention, low-bandwidth pool of naughty users. And that service only exists for me if I am lucky enough to be covered by a wireless network that doesn't belong to our friendly Telkom -- the cheapest line-based DSL connection I can get is about R750pm (about $110pm), where I have a 3 gB cap which essentially puts me in such a bad connection pool that I can't even contact google. Let alone read
Before you go wailing about how bad it is to live in a country where broadband is the norm, and most people can afford it without having to make some other sacrifices (and not going to McDonald's once or twice a month is no sacrifice...), think about the rest of the emerging world, where people struggle to even get a connection, let alone get a broadband connection. I mean, Telkom's trying to get everyone all excited about their Brand New Fantastic Service: a 1 meg pipe. Old hat anywhere else. Cutting edge here. Not because we can't do the tech, but because the monopoly really doesn't give 2 hoots about its client base.
Dont know what to do with your fast internet? Try this video site: http://www.interactivehuman.com/
I live on the island of Kauai and we just got high speed cable and DSL serice in the area where I live a little over 2 years ago. The service has been very solid. I feel very lucky not to have to pay for ISDN or an expensive fractional-T1 that was, well, a fraction of the bandwidth that I have now....
Horns are really just a broken halo.
Somebody didn't RTFA, as the article was way ahead of you on this. If high population density is a requirement, that doesn't explain why people in the Bay Area or NYC don't have fast, cheap internet acess. If being rural is the problem, Canada is far more rural than the U.S. and yet is far ahead of us when it comes to broadband coverage or speed.
As a french, I must correct this text.
Yes, we have a good DSL, but the area covered with a super high speed dsl are very small.
Most of people can have a dsl connection around 512 kb - 1 Mb - 2 Mb/s for around 20 , without TV or phone.
In some area, bigger cities, you will have up to 8 Mb, with unlimited phone (free when calling a non-mobile line). This is around 40
In biggest cities, and if you are lucky, you will have up to 20 Mb, with 30 free TV channels, and unlimited phone. Other tv channels are optionnal, and costs maybe 5 to 20 more
And, still 20% of french homes can only have a low-speed Internet, so 56 Kb/s, 50 hours, and for a cost of 15 .
2MBS is third world??? Here in South Africa we pay approx. the same ($90us) for 512 Kbps down and 128 Kbps up, not to mention a 2 gig cap, (yes, two-gigabytes, as in 2000 megabytes). We basically cannot use most applications on the internet such as video conferencing or even streaming radio, as it will bleed our cap dry, and it will be a hard cap soon, so going over will kill your internet connection. Please stop complaining about free markets, there are countries much more third-world and subjugated by monopolistic government driven greedy fat-cats struggling to download the lastest distro before the next release is already issued.
With the exception of Canada, the countries mentioned have a tremendous advanage regarding broadband penetration, and that is relative population density.
Wrong. Look it up and you'll see that the USA has a larger population density than countries such as Finland (mentioned in the article), Sweden and Australia (in addition to Canada, as you mentioned), all of which have much better broadband coverage than the US.
I think it's high time we stopped letting cell companies and ISPs get away with using this as an excuse. It's just not nearly true enough to be the real reason. Monopolistic practices and campaign financing are the real reasons.
"Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one " -Albert Einstein
Population densities
.375 Mbits to be a "high speed" connection and 3) eliminating common carrier regulations.
Area to cover
As you already mentioned, the author of TFA covered these two things.
Income levels & cost of living differences
That should only change what people are able to pay, not what it costs to provide the service in the first place.
Ex: while arguing against the area factor, he uses san francisco as a counter arguement, while failing to provide any information about how SF is performing more 'poorly'
He never said SanFran was performing "poorly", he said, "...and cannot explain why densely populated cities such as San Francisco do not have access to the same types of high-speed connections found in Seoul, South Korea, or Tokyo."
The article jumps to the conclusion that "the man" is trying to screw you.
Again, the author doesn't do anything of the kind; this is a conclusion that you made up. The problems are 1) the U.S. has no broadband policy 2) the FCC considers
However, without accounting for the above factors the author doesn't have a logic basis in making that conclusion and is just ranting.
Pot. Kettle. Black.
I don't know what main land Japan has, but I am on a Marine Corps base on Okinawa, and the local providers service (Mediatti) is a fucking joke. Marines that have been here longer, say that as little as a year ago, it was worse than dial-up; it's not THAT bad now, but it is slower than any DSL or Cable service I have ever used in the states, and barely if at all worthy of being called 'broadband.'
Success is due to LLU local loop unbundling. France Telecom owns everything however about 60% of local loop is open to competition...So 6 companies offer NATIONWIDE ADSL2+: see www.free.fr www.cegetel.fr www.neuftelecom.fr etc
Most of us in the UK (in particular online gamers) absolutely envy the state of broadband in the US. Cable's nonexistent outside of the major cities and ADSL2+ has only just begun to roll out (as part of Local Loop Unbundling). Most of us are still paying companies who buy their 2MB ADSL wholesale from BT (which just escaped being broken up for their effective monopoly on telecoms). That's not to say that the US situation is perfect, but it's a sight better than some industrialised countries.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Like Finland, for example?
Finland - population density: 17.1/km
United States of America - population density 32/km
source: wikipedia
IMO, one of the main decisions in Finland that the government made few years ago was to force all phone operators to lease their copper and access to exchanges to anyone on the same price they themselves pay for the maintenance of them. The other thing that even most of European countries fail with, is the fact that you can get a DSL line from any operator without bundling it to a telephone service. Thus, our number of landlines is dropping rapidly (nobody bothers using landline anyway as in Europe the caller pays the charges when calling to a mobile phone, thus its virtually same price for calling a mobile whether you do it from landline or another mobile and as receiving calls is free, well..), but the number of DSL connections is growing extremely fast.
Also, the U.S. habit of forcing people to 12-month contracts, etc restricts competition. In Finland, its illegal to make contracts longer than 1 month for DSL or cable lines (or telephone services, including cell phones), thus the customer can change providers basically on monthly basis if they wish to do so and therefor prices drop constantly and speeds of lines tend to increase every 6 months.
With the exception of Canada, the countries mentioned have a tremendous advanage regarding broadband penetration, and that is relative population density.
I wonder how many times I have said this.. but just about any nordic country has lesser population density than the US and our population is quite spread out. You know, telecom corporations used to be in a similar monopoly position like in the US but our broadbands got a LOT cheaper when they were forced to share their copper.
I am doing my master's thesis on local loop unbundling and its effects in Finland regarding the information society.
France: Cheap hi-speed Internet, yes. However, France is considered a failure by EU because there is no competition.
Finland: Some competition is forming, but 24/1M ADSL connections are really rare. The standard for broadband here is 256kbs which is really really sad.
Sweden: They see fiber network as a true public good and there is a massive government-sponsored program underway to get it everywhere. However, last year, they ran out of money. Reason for this seems to be that the operators were paid their costs and so they did not have an incentive to do it efficiently. However, they got real far and now have hi-speed symmetric connections all over the place.
Korea: Never did unbundling of the local loop but two important aspects. In densely populated areas, they had the possibility to do fiber to the home real cheap. In not so densely populated areas, they had excellent quality cable network owned by electric company that was not used. This was then leased to other companies.
USA: DC Circuit has found something wrong in almost all the local loop unbundling models. Shitload of regulatory capture going on all over the place. CLECs and ILECs fighting. I looked at some economic research done in US and there were concepts in that research that are totally unknown in Europe. Like, in USA, the economists believe that intermodal competition between cable and telephone is enough to drive prices down and quality up. Also, a lot of american research sees local loop unbundling in Europe as a complete failure. The list goes on and on...
Anyways, I think the major thing here is that in Canada and Europe etc. Internet connections are considered a necessity and broadband a public good. Europe has actually increased regulation in telecommunications just to get cheap broadband everywhere. Not much talk about "poor telephone companies" here.
I neglected to mention that I had reinstalled Windows 2000 several times over about a 2 year time period and had those pop-up problems while downloaing the security patches each time. I was suspicious of what else might have happened so I re-installed everything again a few days and the same thing happened again. I latter put a different motherboard in the computer and a few months ago I decided to try installing Windows 2000 from the original CD once again and had similar pop-ups within minutes. Each time, I installed the ZoneAlarm firewall first before connecting to the Internet and then immediately clicked on Windows Update without going anywhere else. As I download the security updates I again again had pop-up messages asking me to download the some product to fix registy, spyware and other problems. I was confident the messages were not from Microsoft, so I ignored them.
After many hours of downloading Windows security updates I rebooted once again and scanned for viruses and everything seemed to be ok (although I had lingering doubts). That happened each time so I finally decided that is what happens when someone needs to spend several unpatched hours waiting for the security updates to be downloaded. I also have Linux on both of my computers and when installing a new version of Linux, on one occasion, I download the Linux security updates on my old computer, burned them to a CD and transfered them to the new installation on the new computer. I did that before ever connecting the new version of Linux to the Internet. When reinstalling Windows the last time I wanted to do it that way but could not figure out how to download the security updates while using a different computer. So I installed the security updates while swatting more pop-ups than I could count. As a result I have never really trusted that my Windows installation was un-compromised. I use Linux most of the time anyway. Have other people had the same experience When installing Windows from a slow dial-up connection? Perhaps that was just a local problem affecting my dial-up Internet connection or my Internet provider? So anyway, a high speed Internet connection would probably have reduced that unpatched window where I was vulnerable to pop-ups and who know what else.
On my previous post I accidently hit submit instead of preview so that is why there are so many errors in what I wrote.
Nobody minds the governmentt paying for roads... I think it would be a Good Thing for state funded fibre-to-the-premises. Then, private companies can install their equipment at an exchange to provide the connectivity the customer wants.
-BB
".. and (gasp) even Canada."
Last time I checked Canada is also part of America..
20 megabit download
1 megabit upload
100 free tv channels
Free telephone to other landlines.
This is in paris, france.
Compared to what I used to get in england (£20 a month for 1megabit download 0.25 megabit upload and nothing extra) this is a complete joke.
The $23 I pay here in Chennai, India for an uncapped 256kbps (upload and download) ADSL2 connection is light years ahead of the 64kbps / dialup narrow-band we were used to until say upto a year back . I was even feeling good about it - you know I was even thinking of downloading Damn Small Linux ISO today - until I saw this. Now I realize there is no hope - I will feel bad about the connection I have because someone somewhere has it much better and is still not happy That apart, I think more we go towards wireless, penetration will improve and prices will drop faster. But someone somewhere will have a faster connection.
In my downtown Chicago apartment I have the option for 10 Mbps cable for $40 per month, 6Mbps cable for $30 per month from a different provider, up to 6 Mbps DSL for $70 from one of a dozen CLECs, 2 Mbps DSL for $19.95 from the incumbent, and a large number of WiFi providers that I can reach out my 10th floor window (T-Mobile has the best signal).
So competition and lower prices will come to areas of high population density in the US. And some of those providers will realize there is too much competition in the Chicago market, and try to service Minneapolis or Indianapolis instead.
So I feel more regulation is *not* the answer. Regulation gives us cheerful, customer-driven entities like the DMV, Ma Bell, and the Post Office. Not a dozen companies competing for my dollars on service and price.
... of how big business in America DOES NOT care about you!!!
That also explains why customer service has gone completely down the tubes. If you get a rude sales person or defective product/service, it somehow is not their fault and they don't have to help you. All they care about is the allmighty dollar and, unfortunately, they have the size, power, and clout to back themselves up.
I say it's time for a consumers revolt! We need to take back our rights and remind them who is boss!
Who's with me???
in a perfect world, broadband access is everywhere, always on-- til then, there's governments, monopolies, and telecoms which ban, kill competition, or SUE it out of existence, the latter of which seeming to be the preferred method (at least the most frequently occurring type of "anti-access" activity taking place, currently, in the USA)--
No, its because the microwaves keep us warm!
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
"With the exception of Canada, the countries mentioned have a tremendous advanage regarding broadband penetration, and that is relative population density."
This is typical - and I mean this gently - of American ignorance of Canada. About 90% of Canada's population lies within 100 miles of the US border (if you make one little squiggle north to include Edmonton, Alberta). This makes Canada, for all intents and purposes to this discussion, one long, skinny
country, with quite noticeable hot spots of population density.
Here's the state of broadband in Toronto: you can get it in four flavours from the local cable monopoly Rogers (aka "Robbers"), "ultralite", "lite", "express" and "extreme". "Extreme" offers 6.0 mps download, 800 kbps upload for $47 Cdn/month (about $40 US). "Ultra-lite" offers 128 kbps down/64 up for $19.95 Cdn/month (about $17 US). The others are obviously in between.
The local phone company (a quasi-monopoly - they have competition but the competitors have negligible market share) offers - wait for it - four flavours of internet access, ranging from "Basic Lite" (128/64 kbps down/up) for $19.95/month, to "High Speed Ultra" offering 5.0 mps down (up not spec'd on their website) for $50 a month. Service is not available in all areas.
Attempts by other firms to provide broadband in Toronto have fizzled for the most part (Sprint Canada, which was offering alternate phone/internet service was recently acquired by Robbers). Attempts to wire up sub-divisions with new providers (when the wiring is cheap) haven't taken off. Point to point service went nowhere.
As someone who worked in marketing for an alternate provider (now out of business), I have to say this: consumers (not slashdotters, but your run of the mill schlub who wants internet for his kids' homework, email, and games) are lazy. Anything that requires effort is too much hard work. They want someone to come to their home, install the service, connect their computer, run the software, etc. To provide that requires massive capitalization up front (to hire and train service advisors, buy trucks, gear, etc.), which most entrepeneurial firms don't have, but which Robbers and Bell have already invested in for their other businesses. So we are left with the two big monopolies fighting against each other - but we still get pretty good service at a pretty good prices.
An interesting side note is the other entities with right of way, trucks, people, and infrastructure - the local power utilities - have been dithering about. Toronto's local electric utility does offer broadband, but only to businesses, and it is mostly marketed as either route diversity or disaster recovery solutions.
The fact of the matter is that the resources are there, even more than enough after being overbuilt in the late 1990's. They just aren't being used because the controlling corporations make more money not providing to the public they are supposedly serving and when communities try to do it themselves the corporate deep pockets work to legislate against this.
Recently I saw a show on PBS about how small markets are frequently refused service by the telcom industry because they aren't profitable while at the same time those telcos are using big money to buy off legistaltures to make it illegal for local governments to provide internet access because they claim it is anticompetitive.
The case used on the program involved a mid-sized community whose main employer was unable to compete without broadband since they were required to have the connectivity to fulfill government contracts. Without broadband the community's main industry would be forced to leave. When the town brought in broadband they had to fight the same telcos who originally said it was unprofitable to provide them with broadband were now saying that municipally provided broadband was anti-competetive.
U.S. taxpayers have already paid a high price for the communications infrastructure and it is not fair that they are unable to use it and it is not wise. In the long run it will be detrimental to the country's ability to be economically competitive.
I am lucky to have one broadband option where I live in Wisconsin. This is the case I hear frequently here on slashdot and elsewhere: many U.S. communities don't even have one option for broadband.
If you think that dialup is so great for education, download a Nova program or take an online course that requires video lectures. Or try to browse Wikipedia with the standard spyware riddled dialup computer that keeps getting knocked offline.
Several years ago, I helped build an application that enabled Inuits and other Canadians to connect classrooms over the internet with video and whiteboard to collaborate in an effective and innovative literacy program where childern draw pictures together for stories they read each other.
Last year, my cousins in one of the top rated Chicago schools where doing a similar lesson plan except they were mailing their drawings back and forth because they did not have high speed in the classroom. Do you not see a disparity that substance hunters far north of the Arctic Circle have better access to technology than rich childern of one of the largest cities in the country? Of course that year the whole Chicago school system was shut down for rat problems, unfortunately the main rat problem was a dysfunctional bureaucracy and they weren't poisoned or trapped...they just got raises.
It is a travesty to the people of the United States that this oligarchy is allowed to emerge and that long term prosperity is being sold for short term profits.
In fact, New York County is only Manhattan. (Queens is Queens County, Brooklyn is Kings, Bronx is Bronx, and Staten Island is Dutchess.)
Minor correction. Staten Island is Richmond county. Dutchess is a county north of NYC, considered "upstate" by city-folks.
The American economy is based on maximum payback for the least amount of investment, unlike most other economies. There aren't incremental rollouts of small improvements in technology, funded by massive government tax increases. There is just one huge rollout into a single huge increase in technology, years after everyone else has done a thousand incremental steps.
Remember when wireless internet access was 45k/sec and other governments raised taxes to implement statewide wireless internet using that technology. Then it got to 128k/sec and their governments raised taxes again to implement that technology. Then it was 256k/sec with another tax increase. Now it's 512k/sec and they're raising taxes again to implement that technology.
Here in the UK we have a company just rolling out 24Meg broadband. Mines still on order waiting for the equipment to be installed in my local exchange so I cannot comment on quality yet. But at a cost of £24 ($42) per month the cost seems reasonable.
This has been enabled by the telecommunications watchdog forcing our local monopoly (British Telecom) to allow other companies to rent space in their exchange and utilise something called local loop unbundling (whatever that means).
You really should have linked directly to the world factbook, instead of wikipedia. That's where the page supposedly gets its numbers, and furthermore, it isn't subject to sudden changes by some malicious user.
In fact, if you do cite wikipedia, you should really cite the specific version of the page you read, as it could be changed before someone else follows up on your source. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citing_Wikipedia.
Besides, didn't your teachers tell you never to use an encyclopedia as a primary source?
(That said, your numbers seem correct)
They just aren't being used because the controlling corporations make more money not providing to the public they are supposedly serving and when communities try to do it themselves the corporate deep pockets work to legislate against this.
1) Corporations control their own assets, which is as it should be. If I own a limo service, you have no right to use it unless I allow you to, for whatever price I set. Don't like the price? Don't use the service. 2) Companies do not "supposedly" serve a community; companies exist solely to serve the interests of their shareholders -- that's what drives innovation, as much as idealists wish it weren't so. 3) Companies -- and individuals -- currently and always will do everything they can, including legislative action, to make things go their way. Again, that's their goal -- profit -- and no one should be surprised. The solution isn't to naively wish that they wouldn't do that, or spend tons of money trying to make them stop and clarify what should be allowed and what shouldn't. The solution is minimizing government power (as per the Constitution) to the point that bribing and influencing legislators would be useless, since they don't have money for discretionary projects, nor the power to force them onto unwilling taxpayers.
Recently I saw a show on PBS about how small markets are frequently refused service by the telcom industry because they aren't profitable while at the same time those telcos are using big money to buy off legistaltures to make it illegal for local governments to provide internet access because they claim it is anticompetitive.
See above, with the added note that for reasons altogether different (unwarranted and illegal use of taxpayer funds for pet projects like wireless coverage), local governments *shouldn't* be providing such things.
The case used on the program involved a mid-sized community whose main employer was unable to compete without broadband since they were required to have the connectivity to fulfill government contracts.
Sounds like a bad place to do business; the company should leave the town. Life has its vicissitudes, and no one should be guaranteed any good that someone else has to provide, wireless (or other) Internet access included.
Without broadband the community's main industry would be forced to leave.
Right. And...? I suppose you'd think the local economy would totally go down the tubes. That's almost never true; a community of people will ALWAYS have goods and services to exchange that make it worthwhile to live together. Other places will inevitably have competitive advantage in some, and perhaps many, things, but then you move there instead of wishing things were otherwise and suing someone to make it so.
When the town brought in broadband they had to fight the same telcos who originally said it was unprofitable to provide them with broadband were now saying that municipally provided broadband was anti-competetive.
Correct -- if it's not profitable for a company to do it, the need/want isn't great enough to justify it being done. If enough people want it (i.e. it's valuable enough), it will be profitable. If it's not profitable, it shouldn't exist, since there are other things that people value more (and therefore spend more of their money on instead) -- and that's where resources should go. Governments don't face this limitation, since they simply extort money from taxpayers, rather than requiring the inherent support that the market conveys. Of course a government can do it when a company can't -- you can't refuse it, or you go to jail for tax evasion.
If one company decided not to provide wireless, just to bilk more money from people (as you suggest), another company would provide it instead, forcing the first to do it, etc. We all know the story, and it's even truer of wireless than of hard assets like ground lines.
U.S. taxpayers have already paid a
"Link the population centers, and you've effectively wired up the entire region."
Only if you consider leaving out a percent or few of the people "effective."
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
I read On Capitalism by Friedman and thought it was great, but it doesn't work in the real world. Look at what a disgrace the whole Chicago experiment in Chile was from Santiago stadium onward. It was an embarassing failure.
In your small government dream world the interstate highway system wouldn't exist and neither would the internet because the government shouldn't spend money on that. You're world would be like Potterville with muddy streets and crappy infrastructure and everyone's mom would be a hooker.
While Reagan said he was doing small government he was doing massive military spending and building a bigger government. Why should we pay for Star Wars when most americans can't even read the constitution? Is that democracy or facism?
Communities have a right to be served by their utilities. Small towns usually give a monopoly to a phone company for the privilege of profiting in exchange for service. If all they want is the privilege of profit without the service the community has the responsibility to provide for themselves. Why should they just say oh, that's capitalism and loose the company they built and worked with for generations just because there is no broadband? It's ridiculous and yes it can kill a community. Just look at towns who were bypassed by the railroad or the expressway -- they died and never came back. And a community has a responsibility to make sure that doesn't happen, especially when the answer of bringing in high speed is so easy.
Basically, that's your whole arguement -- "why bother when it's so much easier to give up to the natural hand of capitalism." The thing is, you have to set your own priorities. If the museum is too far away, figure out a way to get there whether it's bike, train, or saving up for the gas money or a community bus trip. Same thing with math camp, if you plan for it and forgo a latte a week and maybe get the kids to do some odd jobs or fundraising it can happen. So what if Richard Feynmann is dead, I bought several of his books and a slew of lectures on CD at ebay for $20 after I noticed my kid really liked the copy of Feynmann's Rainbow I got at the library. For less than the price of taking the family to McDonalds they are now intimately knowledgeable with one of the brightest minds of physics. But that's the thing, it's somehow easier to spend the money at McDonalds or Starbucks or $80/month cable bill and just say the ideals are out of reach. Have some backbone lad or your going to get crushed.
Sure Capitalism has Milton Friedman on one side, but it also has Maynard Keynes on the other and in the middle there is we the people. Capitalism fails if any of these three points are skewd.
The reason America is falling off the tech wagon is because we have collectively lost the dream. All the justification that that is the way capitalism works won't change that fact. Because in essense, the whole telecom fiasco that is happening is exactly how capitalism and democracy can fail. Greed can be good, but so can self control. And when your going up against a greedy bastard like a lazy telco your community has to have the foresight and self control to fight back and survive or perish. That is what Democracy and Capitalism is all about.
I was refering to upgrading the POTS to support DSL. You might not need to do that in all cases. Satellite links may be actually be more cost effective and provide good-enough access. Right now satellites can provide 2Mbps down and 256kbps up. While the upstream speed isn't that good, the downstream is comparable to DSL and cable offerings.
When the REA was established, you had to run a wire to every house. Now you don't.
I love this quote that capitalism's a great theory, but that it "doesn't work in the real world." It always makes me wonder just how fragile the fantastical reinterpretation of history you maintain in your minds must be.
For instance, how might we interpret the indisputable rise of the US as the greatest economic story probably in the history of the world, coinciding nicely with its adoption of small government and capitalism? Ah, some may point to our boundless natural resources. But, of course, that wouldn't explain Japan, which has virtually no natural resources whatsoever; yet its power was never greater -- and the lives of its citizens never better -- than once it adopted a Western capitalist system post-WWII.
Cultural factors, perhaps? Hmm...maybe you'd want to go back to the books and study the differences in GNP between East Germany and West Germany post-WWII? Same culture; same decimated infrastructure; same history; same language. Yet West Germany's economy dwarfed that of East's; people scrambled to get from East to West, not the other way around.
Ah, but maybe it was a one-off thing. Then again, what about South Korea vs. North Korea? Hong Kong vs. China? Taiwan vs. China? The capitalist areas of India vs. those remote areas untouched by such an economic system? The UAE vs. Iran? Economy, culture, politics, and lifestyle are complex, so in any given case, there do exist extant factors like culture, religion, tradition, geography, instability, and so forth that come into play; but across the wide variety of examples in the world, an undeniable theme emerges. Maybe it's easier to do this the other way: Find a country that has rejected the tenets of capitalism, yet has people that are freer, happier, safer, healthier, or otherwise better off than a capitalist country, specifically BECAUSE of the rejection of capitalism. I'd be interested in that for sure.
"The thing is, you have to set your own priorities."
Haha, and so your solution to that is to have the government take more of my money and sink it into a one-size-fits-all priority of its omniscient determination?
"I bought several of his books and a slew of lectures on CD at ebay for $20 after I noticed my kid really liked the copy of Feynmann's Rainbow I got at the library. For less than the price of taking the family to McDonalds they are now intimately knowledgeable with one of the brightest minds of physics."
Thanks for proving my point. You were able to get all that education without an OC-3 going into your house! Amazing! You didn't even need a dial-up connection, after all the wailing about the educational opportunities it curtails. Wait, but you didn't even...need...a computer. Astounding. And here I was wondering just how someone like Feynman was able to learn all he did without 20M down like they have in S. Korea. (Nova's also on tape and DVD, as well as -- unbelievably -- TV itself. You could even use Tivo or another DVR to record it. That way your kid's brain won't atrophy too much.)
"Have some backbone lad or your going to get crushed."
Not in your world -- the government's there to save the day. Hard to lecture someone on this principle after you've gotten done whining about how hard it is to learn without being able to download *Nova videos* or how awful it would be to actually think about moving your business or family to where the opportunities are. (The US is, after all, only one of the most mobile societies in history.)
"The reason America is falling off the tech wagon is because we have collectively lost the dream. All the justification that that is the way capitalism works won't change that fact."
Interesting you should mention that, since I never justified the way things ARE based on capitalism -- I just argued against your proposed changes. Gov't-instituted monopolies are not capitalism, and neither are gov't subsidies to industry. The US is falling off LOTS of wagons -- including tech -- because we're LESS capitalist all the time. Hard to be capitalist when 30
Coaxial here again.
Even if you did have to write every house in the countryside, the GDP/landarea is still a bogus metric. Say there's a single 10,000 sq foot house 20 miles out from a population center. Say that owner of that house owns an adjacent 500 square miles of wilderness. It still only takes 20 miles of copper to write that house. The 500 square mile "yard" doesn't any any connectivity, since no one lives there.
GDP/landarea assumes that you have to wire every area of the country equally. You don't. You only have to wire the homes. Refering back to the house in the above example, the metric would be $/20k sq ft == $/ 0.000358700643 sq miles. Not $/500 sq miles. Well $/sq ft + how ever much it costs to run a single 20 mile line of copper.
Okay, now you're really twisting my words. I said, and I hold to be true, that the book On Capitalism by Milton Friedman sounds great in theory, but doesn't work in practise. I gave an example, the University of Chicago Chile experiment that was an utter failure right up there with Stalin's interpretation of Communism. I went on to say that the Monist econmic theory of Friedman is a complete polar opposite to the Keynesian principles. Both are Capitalism, however Keynes is much more sensible. I never said Capitalism is great in theory, but not in practice. I am a hardcore Capitalist, but I tend to lean toward the Keynesian ways that believe a healthy economy is based on healthy consumer, business and government spending.
Just for another example, let's look at the differences between Reagan and Thatcher. Both claimed to be Monists, however Reagan was in many ways a closet Keynesian who was dramatically increasing military spending while on the surface was hacking to the bone all social spending. Thatcher only cut spending and the result for Britain was recession and a gutted infrastructure wheras the Reagan spending was the springboard for the economic boom of the late 90's.
Keynes's principles were greatly adopted after WWII when the wisdom of his interpretation of Versailles and the resulting Great Depression was understood. In effect, it was his policies that laid the groundwork for the Marshall Plan and the corollary work by MacArthur in post-war Japan. So if you want to analyze their success, yes it was due to Capitalism but a Keynesian Capitalism. The cost of rebuilding the world after the war was phenomenal,but the wisdom to do so, as proscribed by Keynes, was much more affordable than the cost of another Versailles.
So to look at the difference you point out between East Germany and West, is a clear case of the wisdom of Keynesian Economic principle, particularly as the West contrasted Stalin's rape of the East removing factories and ignoring infrastructure. Even today you can get a Russian motorcycle that is built in a stolen BMW factory removed by the Soviets. In the west we did the contrary, we paid to rebuild the German economy and because of this the Russians are driving around on fifty year old technology wheras Mercedes grew to the dominance that it was able to buy one of the largest auto manufactuers in the US and creates some phenomenally futuristic vehicles.
Much of your arguements seem to be based on the notion that I am anti-capitalist. Much of your motivation is to prove to me that the U.S. is the greatest economy in the world, ever. The fact is, it isn't and right now it is amazing everyone that it keeps going. The U.S. economy has been based for some time on people selling each other houses with Chinese money. But I will take your bait, look at the success that is Sweden. They are hardcore socialist. Something like 90% of your income goes back to the government but yet they have consistantly maintained one of the highest standard of living for decades. Finland is much the same story. It happens. The American way is not always right, look at what is happening in Iraq. Hell, over there George Bush is making concession he would never make here -- the U.S. is footing the bill for a fairly comprehensive Iraqi healthcare program.
The other countries you assess as being either a threat to us or not are generally all a threat to us. Finland has the strongest economy in the world and is one of the most technically advanced cultures in the world. Look at their flagship, Nokia if you have any questions. Canada has a much stronger economy than the US and more oil reserves than the US. Canada can spend on ifrastructure rather than military because it doesn't need to invade Iraq, it has more oil than Saudi Arabia. Additionally their strong investment in healthcare, education and technology has positioned them well ahead of the US for the long haul. Look at the reasons Toyota decided to build their new plant in Ontario rather than the US south: healthcare cos