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Internet Connectivity Outside of the United States
Ant writes "A Yahoo! news story says that nearly 60 publications in countries bear the PC World name, or are associated with it in some way. The editors at several of them were asked to report how their readers get online. Not surprisingly, the report indicates that many countries are substantially ahead of the United States in online access." From the article: "For example, in the United Kingdom, you can buy DSL service with a download speed of up to 24 megabits per second. In Denmark, some people have fiber-optic connections as fast as 100 mbps. And in Italy and Spain, broadband service is cheap, and dial-up service is free (except for the cost of the local call). Still, many countries have their own connection quirks ..."
You can get ADSL2+ in [some parts of] Denmark. You can get 10 Mbps/512 Kbps for 299 DKK (~52 US$) or 20 Mbps/512 Kbps for 499 DKK (~86 US$), and that includes free telephony...
I'm "stuck" with what my employer wants to pay for, which for the moment is 4096 Kbps/512 Kbps, which is not bad at all. I'd love to get 20 Mbps down though ;)
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
Nothing about France's DSL in TFA.
That's strange, because France has one of the best European DSL, if not the best.
For 30 euros per month, you get the maximum of what your line can technically support (up to 24Mbits if you are near the ISP equipment), with lots of services included.
That's with the Freebox, a DSL modem made by Proxad, based on Linux. Among the free services, you have:
- unlimited net access (no quota)
- unlimited phone calls to land lines in France, and many lines in countries (it costs zero to call a mobile phone in USA for example)
- tv access if you are in a "degrouped" area (sorry I don't have the english term)
That's what we call "triple play offer". And they are now migrating to "quadriple pay offers", the new boxes are wifi, and a wifi-gsm phone can be bought.
Pretty cool, no ? I wonder why this is not in the article.
Yann
I live in the US. I have 24 Mbps service at home (unless it has gotten faster again while I haven't been looking). My city also has free wireless access, but I don't even bother.
You have to keep in mind that when people say "in Denmark" or "in the UK", that doesn't mean universal availability, it means that in some places, you can get that. You also have to keep in mind that nations like Denmark or the UK have a larger middle class than the US as percentage of the population, so that, across the whole population, they may be better off, but the actual group for whom things like Internet access matters, may be served about equally in both places.
I just want to brag a little... :)
At my condo we have gigabit fiber to the house, and 100MBit to the apartments. All apartments can buy either 10Mbit (for 210 SEK, 22.46, or $28.62), or 100Mbit (for 399 SEK, 42.68, or $54.38). And those speeds aren't "up to", they are guaranteed.
/ The Arrow
"How lovely you are. So lovely in my straightjacket..." - Nny
I moved recently from the US to Spain, and I can't begin to tell how bad broadband providers are in this country compared to the US. It is WAY MORE EXPENSIVE (in absolute terms, but even more when you factor in the fact that here salaries are smaller), WAY LESS RELIABLE and the customer service is so BAD that congress had to pass a special law to deal with these very specific companies. For example, in most of the cases they charge you when you make a customer service call beyond (and I'm not talking about the cost of the local phone call, I mean that they actually make money out of this, even if the problem is on their side). And there is more, much more...
I have not read the article, but as far as Spain is concerned, I can tell it sucks.
Not the government.
From the CIA factbook: Sweden: land area 410,934 square km, population 9,016,596, so density=21.94/sq km ; USA: land area 9,161,923 square km, population 298,444,215, so density=32.57/sq km. No, internet access is not `offered' by the government.
In any case, it's the population density in the cities which matters. I'll leave it up to you to figure out whether New York City has a lower density than Stockholm.
Perhaps you should check your own facts? Nah, much better to make them up based on your own prejudices.
Lets just take urban locations then, you know, places with lots of apartment blocks. Places where the population density is similar to the more dense parts of Scandinavia. Think of NYC New Jersey and LA. The lines already exist, and American telecom companies are already producing all the hardware (routers/switches) required.
Its still stuck at 1997 prices.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Don't loose focus, governments are solely graded on their Infant Mortality Rate. Here is how the World is graded - https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/rank order/2091rank.html
The problem isn't having a small or a large country, but how many (potential) customers you have per square km, right?
:-(
:-)
, 8.073578&spn=0.282005,0.553436&om=1
I.e. in a small country with a mall and distributed population, the average cost per custumer will be much higher than in the US.
Here in Norway it is friday afternoon and I'm about to drive up to our small mountain cabin for the weekend. At this cabin the local power company (Rauland Kraft) _by default_ pulls along an optic fibre (or at least a pvc tube where they can subsequently blow in the fiber) on every new installation.
The result is that I have IPTV over a 300 Mbit/s connection, but as of now I can only use up to 10/10 (up/down) Mbit for regular Internet traffic.
If you want to check your maps or GoogleEarth, you'll notice that Rauland is located in the Vinje community on the central mountain plateau of southern Norway: This is one of the least densely populated areas in the entire country, but we still get fiber to every home & cabin.
http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&z=11&ll=59.698935
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
Doesnt matter as pretty much everyone(damn near 100% anyway) can get adsl 8/1 mbit here(im from Sweden).
Free, like in freebox, is a company name. Internet access is not regulated by the french government. We certainly pay huge taxes (world's biggest tax rates more exactly...) but internet access has nothing to do with it.
It has been regulated for a long time because france telecom was owned by the government, but it was privatized something like 5 years ago. Which gave birth to a myriad of internet providers and wanabe telcos.
So it's more an exemple of free market than anything else... And it's certainly nice to see the speeds go up and the price go down, but it's also a terrible mess for consumers. You'd better make a good choice if you don't want to be tied for 1 year to a company which lacks the necessary infrastructures to handle its growns. My brother signed with "Free" 3 years ago and couldn't log more than 5 minuts per day for 3 months for example... But hopefully things seems to be settling down lately.
Liberterians often miss out an extremely important point:
When you have massive corporations dominating an infastructure heavy industry like telecoms then it is often not the government who 'meddles' but the corporations themselves.
The reason the UK has such cheap and high-speed internet is because the government forced the main telecoms company who owns all the "last mile" wires (the ones going down your street and into your house) and exchanges to allow other companies to install equipment in their exchanges and use their "last mile" wires.
It is almost completely due to this "unbundling" that internet in the UK is now so cheap and fast. Believe me, 6 or 7 years ago, before this was done, internet in the UK was slow and crap.
Of course, when evaluating a service like broadband over a large region, it makes some sense to do more than simply account for population density; population concentration is much more interesting. Take Alaska as an example, more than a third of the population lives in Anchorage, at a population density of about 150 people/square mile, but the population density for Alaska in general is about 1 person per square mile. Offering access in the city is no problem at all, but offering access to every crazy in a cabin is a whole different question.
A decent measure would be to calculate the population density for a typical resident, perhaps by weighting by population density. So you have (residents*density)/area. That would be a lot more interesting than just comparing the different population densitys.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I'll spell it out for you - no, no, and no.
I am in a rual area.. I'm sitting in a CO (Central Office) in a town that has maybe 850 people. I provide SIP, MGCP, ADSL/ADSL2+, soon Video, etc. We have a Metaswitch (http://www.metaswitch.com), and we use Occam gear (http://www.occamnetworks.com). We have fiber that links a bunch of local towns around here, and everywhere in between we stick little remote terminals to feed people with highspeed internet access. I can get 27mb DSL service here. My buddy that is 6km outside of town.. literally by himself on a farm, can get 7.6Mbps down.
You see, the problem in the USA is not that you have too much land, or any other excuse that you want to make up (do you guys all work for Verizon, or AT&T or something?). The problem is that your country is mainly run by a handful of LARGE CORPORATIONS that control the telco networks. They don't give a shit about rural customers because they can just concentrate on the cities. We have that same issue here in Ontario, Canada.
I work for an independent telco. We are a co-operative, so I guess I'm not comparing apples to apples. Whenever I see an area that does not have access to highspeed services, it is almost always run by BELL CANADA. Bell is the major telco for this province. They bring DSL into a small rural town, but kill it at the edge of town, so people may only be 3km from the office, but they cannot get service - this is due to load coils. Bell could replace these coils, but it costs money. Not too much money to be profitable, but too much money to care about.
When companies grow to the size of Bell Canada, everyone suffers - except the people in large areas. I challenge anyone to ask a Bell customer if they have ever run into ridiculously shitty service with Bell Canada - my experience is that 100% of the people I ask can rhyme off a horror story to me right away. The response time is horribly slow, services are expensive, and things break often. Support is a nightmare, every department is horribly unorganized and slow to respond, and there is utter conufsion when any department attempts to communicate with any other department. Orders get lost, or the wrong data gets entered - in short, the whole thing is a nightmare.
This is what I think is wrong with the state of communications in the USA. The telcos simply don't care about you rural folk, and if you had, or have an independent telco, it will was either bought, or will soon be purchased by one of the large telcos. Small town customer service will be replaced with one of a handful of national offices where you can't actually go and make a complaint. You will be kept at a distance so they can provide you with shoddy service, and not see your face in their office. People have different needs in different areas, but you won't get that service any more. They will strip down their services into bundles, which you either take, or pay through the nose for individual services. Everything will be a "1-size fits all" mentality. There are no "tailored" services for certain areas anymore.
Any other excuse that you give, in my opinion, is false. This is simply a market that is slowly being amalgamted into a stagnant industry that provides the bare minimum service to you, and nothing more, because you simply can't get service from anyone else.
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
I get so tired of hearing about the high infant mortality rates in the US. The truth is hiding in the nature of the statistics, which so many people conveniently ignore.
Bottom line: the US counts premature babies that die into the infant mortality rate, while nearly every other country counts a dead baby only if it is a full-term birth. If you compare apples-to-apples, the US has one of the lowest infant mortality rates.
Sweden: 100 Mbit/s down, 10 Mbit/s up, fixed cost of USD 44/month. No extra per-megabyte-charges, no monthly limit. Yes, I can use my 100 mbit/s constantly, just as you can your 4... :) :)
Sweden (410,000 km2) is approximately the size of California and has a population (9 million) about the same as New York City. Virtually no-one in Sweden is further away than about 200 miles from the closest major city, and the vast majority live within about 350 miles of each other in the southern portion of the country. Any attempts to compare that to the United States which is 9,100,00 km2 (22 times larger) with a population of nearly 300 million (33 times larger) that is not clumped into a small area of 350 miles miles but well distributed along two coasts with a significant number of major cities throughout its mid-section and where distances between major cities is usually greater than the entire width of Sweden is absolutely absurd.
Small countries will always have better connectivity. That's just obvious and common sense.
Don't worry, it's often used here to justify the US's crap public transport too.
I'd say the problem is perceived demand.
I really doubt that there is anything keeping the cable providers from putting down broadband similar to Birmingham's in Philadelphia, except for cost. They're not going to do it, unless they think there's a market for it.
Let's say that a cable provider did put out a high-speed network like that: they started offering 10MB/s service or something. They'd have to recoup the cost of their infrastructure rollout somehow, so the new HS service would have to cost more than existing service.
There is a perceived risk there: if people don't value the increased speed, they might just refuse to pay the higher rates, and instead switch to come competing service which offers lower speed and is cheaper.
That's why you don't see higher-speed stuff in the U.S.; it's because too few people are asking for it. Most cable companies have several speed tiers, and the majority of people use the lowest ones. I think that it's widely held here that the first 1 to 3 Mb/s are really what sells, and then beyond that, the "average user" doesn't care a whole lot (unless they're heavy downloaders, which the networks don't like anyway).
It's impossible to blame on any one factor; obviously deregulation and the attitudes of the telco and cable companies are one thing, the vast size of the U.S. and "mass" are another, but I definitely think that you have to factor in that the demand for such services may be lower here (or are at least thought to be lower) than in other places, like Europe and Asia.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Not to spread envy or anything, but in Västerbotten County in northern Sweden (with 4.6 inh/km^2), symmetrical 100 Mbit fiber connections are available in virtually every home. Including small villages with 20-30 houses scattered throughout the terrain, often with something like 30 km to the nearest town (and with town I mean around 10 000 inhabitants).
The price is about EUR 20/month, although you have to pay for the "last mile" of fibre (a one-time payment of about EUR 700), since you own that yourself.
More information about it is available here, although only in swedish it seems (sorry).
I live in Finland. I didn't read the article, so I don't know if we're on the list, but my current connection has 8128 kbps down / 928 kbps up bandwidth. 40 euros per month, no transfer limits, servers are forbidden but no one seems to be actively monitoring them. No firewall, NAT or closed ports (or at least I haven't noticed any).
This connection began as a 512/512 one a few years back, so I'd say that the development has been quite good :).
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
They've tried it, but the frequencies they were going to use brought protests from HAM and CB radio operators.
http://www.arrl.org/news/bandthreat/