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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 ..."
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 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.
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.
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.