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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."
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.
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?
Wait. Is it a problem? 10 times faster doesn't mean much to me, since almost all of the delays I experience now are the remote server being slow to respond rather than a pipe that's too small. I have 4 megabit download speed, with the option of going to 5 megabit, and I've never felt like I need it any faster.
I don't download large ISOs or anything very often, but maybe if I did I'd feel differently.
I'm going to play devil's advocate, and it may be based on an ignorant assumption of mine, but here goes anyway:
As I understood it, the initial cost of laying down this infrastructure is massive to the organizations who do it. As such, once they've setup their infrastructure they can then offer their service to paying customers over whom they have a local monopoly. However, if multiple organizations were to place down dual infrastructures to lay claim to an area they are a) doing duplicated unnecessary work and b) will not have a monopoly on the local customers. I've heard it said, and it may just be FUD from the ISP's, but if multiple broadband ISP's (ignore the fact DSL and cable can be available in two places) were to compete in the same region then prices would be driven down in competition to a point to where the providers costs in laying in the infrastructure down are not going to be made up in profit. As such, there would be no motivation to provide broadband and we would still stuck with dialup.
*shrug* Let me know if I'm off base here. I'm curious to learn more about this.
The company I work for bought a small company in a small town in Oklahoma. We set them up on our Frame Relay network and then began investigating a DSL connection for their location. We discovered that a DSL line runs right in front of their business. I called to if an installation was possible, but the people at SBC informed me it's not. The county they're located in hasn't been part of 911 'zoning' yet and doesn't have a street address per-se, so that can't run the DSL line their. This means that if there is an emergency, they can't dial 911 on their phone.
Crazy.
When you get to hell -- tell 'em Itchy sent ya!
Believe it or not they're working on it. SBC is currently in the process of rolling out fiber to the home in Houston. They plan to have everyone in the city connected up to the new equipment within a couple years. I asked the technician that was out at my house how much they planned on charging for their new "limitless" connection and he said it was going to run the same as what we were currently paying.
I found it hard to believe at first, but now I see they really have no choice. DSL can only go so far, and Time Warner was running them out of the internet biz by ramping up speeds. So in the end everyone will end up with uber-fast fiber connections and pay about the same $40-$60.
Then again, that was Houston. There are quite a few cities nationwide that aren't nearly as cut-throat. Some that have only 1 "high-speed" option, that isn't really even high-speed.
But I'd say, once the word gets out about those new blazing fast connections, EVERYONE is going to want one, and the demand overcome the cost of all the telcos upgrading their lines and equipment.
All this IMHO
You're nothing; like me.
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.
What gave you the right to use the copper verizon bought fair and square on the open market?
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
However, we can break it down on another level:
Sweden is roughly the same size as California, has less than a third of the population, and thus a lower population density too(with comparatively more people in the rural areas), yet has a more widespread "broadband" infrastructure(Around 85% of the population can get ADSL in some form for example)
This is a good point. Geographically speaking, the U.S. is huge. Only Canada and Russia and China are bigger. Of those, Canada does well with broadband, and 90% of Canada's population lives within 50 miles of its southern border, so they escape their geographical problems.
Another related issue, is geographic distribution of population. The U.S. population is still 50% rural. IIRC, all the countries on the list have population distributions that are far more urban than the US (I could be wrong about Switzerland, The Netherlands, or Iceland, but I think I'm right on the rest). This is particularly true of Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and Korea.
Also, age of infrastructure matters. The U.S. infrastructure is being built on stuff that's about 100 years old. The Asian countries on the list have the advantage that most of their telecommunications infrastructure is about half that, particularly in Korea.
Let's try to make this as apples-to-apples as we can: within this list of the top 20 economies, Canada is the only one with greater geographic area. If you only count the geographic areas that are populated, then it's much, much smaller than the U.S. The next-largest country by geography is probably France, which is about twice the size of Colorado (according to CIA Factbook --- which also indicates that the U.S. is nearly 2.5 times the size of the entire E.U.), and has less penetration than the U.S. does.
Part of the problem is that there are no apple-to-apple comparisons. The only geographically larger countries (with distributed populations) are Russia and China. China has a centrally-planned economy with little capitalist sprinkles. Russia is more market oriented, but its economy (1.4 trillion) is nowhere close to the U.S (11+ trillion). or China (7+ trillion). India is large both by geography and population and is much more market oriented, but has a much smaller economy.
WiMAX, when it is finally commercially available, will do a lot to help in the U.S. "Wireless DSL", as it's come to be called in the area I live in, is also being adopted more and more in the rural areas. A great example is that my parents didn't get broadband until a year or two ago, because it was simply not available --- it didn't have anything to do with price. Finally, someone came out to my little bitty home town and put a microwave transmitter on a tower, got a t-3, and started selling bandwidth.
Another thing to note is that certain market forces also determine the speed at which things improve. In Korea, for example, online gaming is way bigger than here in the U.S. I think the largest MMORPGs here in the U.S. have on the order of hundreds of thousands of players, but in Korea, it's more like a third of the population. In the U.S., there isn't really anything like that in the market that really creates the demand for broadband, although we're getting there with on-demand video content and such.
What I gather is that the real motivation behind all the criticism of the U.S. is "I want to get a 10Mbs synchronous connection and unlimited telephon and television for $38/mo.". Instead of bitching about how bad the U.S. is, or how the big telecom companies are screwing us for profit (which they aren't -- they'd love to be able to offer the type of service you want because they'd make *way* more money in the long run), why don't you (you, as in all Slashdot readers):
a) call/write your DSL/cable company and tell them what you want
b) call/write your political representatives at all levels and tell them you
want the telecommunications industry to be deregulated instead of being
choked to death or hog-tied by the FCC
c) offer up intellectually serious arguments about what can be done
d) start a business that offers such a service. You'd be richer than bill
gates in about 5 years.
e) come up with a killer app that will suck up a large market in the U.S. (like
gaming in Korea) that depends on broadband.
Anyway, I'm getting paid, but not for posting to Slashdot...gotta stop now.
Don't become a regular here, you will become retarded. -- Yoda the Retard
I don't know much about the difficulty of installing this in America, but I do live in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. In urban London I get speeds on my Cable internet of about 5000/800 Kbps.
Like I said before, I don't know much of what urban Chicago or New York would get, but by the sounds of it I am getting better speeds than most of America for $40/month Canadian. Wow, go Canada.
first, by not calling ourselves "consumers".
in a business transaction, there are merchants/vendors then there are customers.
citizen might be a useful alternative if you equate consumer with "anyone who does business with corporations and has no control of their "representatives"
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
And if socialism works so well, why isn't Johnson's "Great Society" a reality today? The democrats had decades to implement plans to eliminate poverty, racism and social injustice from the federal level... so why isn't poverty eliminated?
Because the goal was to reduce it, not eliminate it. Poverty can (probably) never be eliminated, and outside of political speeches no serious student of public policy would ever make such a claim. This sounds suspiciously close to a straman.
Be that as it may the results of the Great Society are still alive and well, thank you. AFDC, WIC, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, etc. These have all been successes. Between 1963 and 1970 America saw a full 10% decrease in the number of Americans living below the poverty line; this was the most dramatic decrease in the nation's history.
This is where most liberals miss one of the key points of federalism. If you want to live in the Great Society, do it from a state or local level.
But you said it yourself: the economy of scale means that the federal government can do it more efficiently than the states can.
Fundamentally this is an ideological issue. Libertarianism works in theory, socialism works in practice. For evidence you need look no further than the world at large. And whereas it is nice to believe that we have fully earned every penny of our paychecks, the simple fact is that we owe our personal successes not only to our own hard work but also to the society as a whole and the government which set up the support structures, from educational systems to laws on corporate governance to SEC regulations and fair hiring regulations.
So to sum it all up, it's not just a cost/benefit issue. It's also a political, moral and "freedom" issue. Even if the cost/benefit analysis looks good your solution (for me at least) fails on the other issues.
So like the OP, you are willing to sacrifice personal (and even social) gain for the sake of ideological purity. You would reject something that works better for no reason other than the adjective attached to it.
Pardon me if I think that is... silly. What is the justification for a belief system if not the underlying belief that it works better?
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.
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'm happy that I have fairly high-speed internet access from Comcast now, and happier that WiMax is on the way in my area courtesy of Speakeasy, happier still that Verizon FIOS was becoming available where I used to live before moving, and still happier that all of that is happening without huge chunks of my paycheck going to pay for the government to build the infrastructure so someone else can download porn as fast as they want at my expense.
Free-market capitalism will rarely, if ever, get you the best thing possible instantaneously. It is a gradual process that evolves as demand increases for certain things and people find ways to provide it at reasonable costs - where "reasonable" is determined by how much people are willing to pay. You won't get lightning-fast nationwide internet access overnight. And that's not a bad thing. You'll end up getting an infrastructure that's not overly expensive because companies aren't going to build it unless it's worth it to them - ie. unless it's worth it to *us*. They aren't going to spend $100 million if it's only going to bring in $10 million. Nor should they. Nor should the government. It's fiscally irresponsible and it's not someplace I want my tax dollars going. The fact that the public is NOT paying for something that it does not NEED is what I'd consider the "public good."