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 ..."

Comments

Superiority of the Free Market.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

As any libertarian will tell you, government regulation and meddling in a market can only hurt consumers.

It's for this reason that the United States, with fewer government controls has a superior and chepaer broadband, telecoms network...oh what? Crap.

Turns out for some things regulation is better - look at how a poor country like Cuba has better healthcare (with lower infant mortality rates) than the wealthy US.

Oh, and I note they don't have sweden on the list where (last I heard) you could get 100Mbps for something like 30 euros/month in a large city.

Re:Superiority of the Free Market.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or maybe, just maybe, it's that these coutries have:

A: Higher population density
B: Government OFFERED internet access (As opposed to regulated, as you stated)

or

C: A combination thereof.

Nah, it's better to be flamebait and blame it on 'the market'.

Re:Superiority of the Free Market.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hate to break this to you but the FCC has massive controls over things like DSL. The reason that DSL/fibre has lagged in the US while cable surged ahead was because of the FCC. The FCC REQUIRED the phone companies to lease thier equipment at a loss to competitors. Guess what? The phone companies decided it didn't make sense to lose money so they didn't install the equipment.

        The FCC was more interested in lining the pocket of the small companies that would provide "competition". At the same time they let the cable companies do whatever they wanted.

    The dream team that runs the FCC ignored the simple fact that real competition requires people competing not leaching off the work of others. They ignored that internet connection is an internet connection. Competition isn't between DSL providers but between ALL internet providers. DSL,Cable,wireless etc.

    Finally a few years back the FCC changed the rules. No longer requiring the Baby Bells to lease all equipment. Suddenly the phone companies started competing with the cable companies. For the consumers this was a good thing.

Re:Superiority of the Free Market.

[Stradenko]

I'd much rather compare what percentage of the population of each country lives in urban vs. rural areas, since rural areas generally seem less likely to have high-speed infrastructure.

Re:Superiority of the Free Market.

[WhiteWolf666]

This is horseshit.

The phone companies (of which there become fewer and fewer every year) _must_ be heavily regulated, because the entire phone system was built through government intervention. The phone system was built as a heavily subsidized monopoly; if it wasn't for Uncle Sam and AT&T, we may have had the cable companies replace the phone system entirely much earlier on.

Instead, vast sums of money were spent on the behemoth.

Until you can demonstrate that the current phone system remains a competitive landscape, heavy regulation will be necessary to maintain some kind of consumer fairness. I'm quite a libertarian, but until we see a true free market in the phone system, we'll have to keep up the red tape.

The phone companies are making billions of dollars utilizing a system that the U.S. government built for them. They didn't invest in it, we, the people, did. The phone companies should be nationalized into one giant entity, have all of their assets stripped by the federal government, and then privatize the physical access region by region. That _might_ be enough shock treatment to resolve the current, ugly situation.

As it is, we've spent billions upons billions of dollars, we we're promised fiber optics years ago, and the primary phone comany (SBC/AT&T) is deploying a "fiber" solution that is not speed competitive with the cable providers (6 Mbps, max, 1 HD stream). Something's broken here, and something smells funny. The problem is regulation; the ugly frankenstein monster we've built needs to be ripped apart and sold for parts.

In short, the AT&T anti-trust ruling didn't go far enough, because the old AT&T, as an entity, was only broken up, not completely destroyed. It should have been privatized, and have it assets redistributed by the market. Trolls like you do not seem to understand that the history of the phone system in the U.S. reads like an anti-free-market textbook.

Re:Superiority of the Free Market.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

A: Higher population density

I can't believe how often this is used as a legitimate justification for the US's crap broadband.

Manhattan island is one of the most densely populated parts of the world. And Broadband is still expensive and slow. If population desnsity is the problem, why does this happen?

Re:Superiority of the Free Market.

[fitten]

It's also a matter of pure area. The USA is just over 22x the size of Sweden, for example, in both land area and population. In fact, the USA is larger than all of Europe put together. Europe, as a whole, has a much higher population density than the USA. I imagine that Sweden's population is highly concentrated around the southern portion of the country with it being very sparsely populated to the north, and then typically in isolated pockets of towns. How many people who live in Sweden do not live in a large city? Wikipedia link Coincidentally, large cities are much more apt to have the infrastructure and market to install higher speed networks. The 15th largest city in Sweden has about 100,000 people living in it. The 10th largest city in the USA is larger than the 1st largest in Sweden. I'm not throwing rocks, just pointing out facts and how/why it may be easier to give most of the people in Sweden better Internet access than most of the people in the USA.

Re:Superiority of the Free Market.

[Blakey Rat]

I love this little gem from the summary:

In Denmark, some people have fiber-optic connections as fast as 100 mbps.

Well, hell, here in the US some people have fiber-optic connections as fast as 100 mpbs (Verizon's FIOS). It's a very very small percentage of people, but it still falls under the header "some people."

Re:Superiority of the Free Market.

[dgatwood]

The reason that DSL/fibre has lagged in the US while cable surged ahead was because of the FCC. The FCC REQUIRED the phone companies to lease thier equipment at a loss to competitors. Guess what? The phone companies decided it didn't make sense to lose money so they didn't install the equipment.

Horseshit. The government required the incumbent local exchange carrier to lease their lines to the competition because the government subsidized its installation to begin with. Having multiple line providers in most areas simply isn't practical because 97% of the U.S. by area is rural with very low population density.

Further, despite the fact that the required line leasing for ILECs ensures availability of those lines for low prices to the competitors, most of those competitors STILL don't compete in rural markets, and without competition, the telcos have zero incentive to improve their offerings. More to the point, the fact that they don't compete means that the leasing requirement has had no effect on fiber in those areas.

Finally, the telcos want to compete with cable and want to be able to provide TV services. They can only do this via fiber. Thus, in markets where fiber will pay for itself through cable subscriptions, the telcos will put in fiber regardless of line leasing rules. In areas where the human density is low enough that a competing cable company couldn't survive (97% of the U..S. by area), though, they still won't do it because the telcos don't see any real advantage to simply providing more bandwidth unless they will lose users to another service that is faster.

The line leasing rules forced competition to be possible in markets where it would simply never have existed were it not for those rules. The only reason ISPs have improved their speeds at all has been in response to threats from competitors, including those leased line services. If the FCC had not put in rules that required ILECs to require them to lease their lines, in markets where the cable company doesn't provide service, there wouldn't be ANY competition in the market. Many would would still be paying $50/month for 128k/64kbps down.

The dream team that runs the FCC ignored the simple fact that real competition requires people competing not leaching off the work of others. They ignored that internet connection is an internet connection. Competition isn't between DSL providers but between ALL internet providers. DSL,Cable,wireless etc.

Satellite internet is a joke (minimum half second round trip packet latency due to the laws of physics). Wireless is only practical in large cities with high population density. BPL hasn't been approved for general roll-out. So in your ideal world of "competition", consumers would have two options: the telephone company (note that there is not enough human density to have more than one) and the cable company (and again, not enough density to support a second cable company). Explain how a duopoly exhibiting a Nash equilibrium is competition.

Short of government intervention forcing the issue, the only thing that will cause consumers to see better internet service is the introduction of a disruptive force. That means adding new competitors. As has been repeatedly shown, this is not possible if the customers must lay down a wire infrastructure because this is unprofitable in the vast majority of cases even when viewed over a relatively long term (>20 years) period. As such, short of a new, disruptive tech like BPL, there is no incentive for corporate-sponsored telcos to compete in the U.S..

Finally, note that for the purposes of comparison, Europe has a population density comparable to America's average cities even when you look at the entire countries in Europe as a whole. Competition is possible there where it is not practical in the U.S. Therefore, by definition, you cannot use Europe as a model for understanding U.S. telcos. The mere fact that a free market will work in a high population density ar

Re:Superiority of the Free Market.

[fm6]

The FCC REQUIRED the phone companies to lease thier equipment at a loss to competitors.

According to the phone companies.

Re:Superiority of the Free Market.

[julesh]

Yes, but conversely it is much easier to provide such services to major US cities than it is to most European cities, because US cities tend to have a higher population density.

So how do internet access services in, say, Birmingham (3739 people per square kilometre) compare to, say, Philadelpha (4,208 per square kilometre)? The 24 megabit broadband described in TFA is available cheaply in most of Birmingham. How about Philadelphia?

Re:Superiority of the Free Market.

[raju1kabir]

I doubt an island in the Caribbean ruled by a Spaniard dictator (Spain is the poorest Western European country) is able to succeed

1. Castro is not a Spaniard, his father was. Fidel was born in Cuba.

2. Spain is not the poorest country in western Europe (it's only the most annoying country). Per-capita GDP is lower in Liechtenstein, Greece, Malta, and Portugal. And of course Spain's economy is larger than these as well.

3. What a stupid argument. You are basing expectations of someone's professional competency on present-day ascribed characteristics of the government their parents were born under?

Re:Superiority of the Free Market.

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

No...no..no ...wrong. Your simplistic approach is laughable. You are like the Swedes who always talk about how much "free" stuff they have...and this goes right along with that. take a look at how much they pay in tax...starting with that lovely little 90% + inheritance tax.

You're the one making unwarranted assumptions here. Sure the Swedes pay more in taxes, but they provide less in subsidies to Telia and the other local telecoms than the US does. The US has spent billions of our tax dollars laying fiber then selling it off for pennies on the dollar to telecom companies in the US. More importantly, since Sweden is one of the companies with very open records it has repeatedly been used in studies and comparisons as an example case, providing piles of data showing that Swedish telecom providers are collecting much smaller margins than their American counterparts with local monopolies.

In this particular instance, Sweden's policies of subsidies to benefit the people are a lot more effective and beneficial than the US's policy of subsidies to big companies who are likewise empowered by the state to gouge citizens. The Swedes have cheap, high speed access and less money from each citizen is spent subsidizing it than is spent for each US citizen.

I'll take our capitalist system over any of their socialist ones any day.

Every nation on the planet has an economy that is a mix of socialism, capitalism, and communism, the US included. If you want to see the sweet spot for the best mixture, take a look at where the quality of living is the highest.

Socialism creates worse people time and time again.

The number one, most effective correlation we can draw with violent crime is income disparity. Socialism, especially inheritance tax is simply mitigating income disparity. Strangely enough when everyone starts out life with more similar amounts of money and no one is born into extreme wealth people are less likely to feel justified in using violence to redress that imbalance. Further, since so few people start out life moving into huge amounts of debt they must borrow from those born wealthy, they are less desperate and less likely to take extreme actions. Sweden, like most countries with a slightly higher rate of socialism, better directed socialism, and without a long established, wealthy ruling class has but a tiny fraction of the violent crime in the US.

I'd say that argues against your absurd assertion that socialism makes for "bad people."

...we have way too many socialist ideas in our govt/society as it is...but then again maybe I just feel that way because I busted my ass to be as successful as I am today.

Good for you, but a whole lot of people work really hard. Statistically, that is not the path to success in the US. Being born wealthy is the path to success. For every dollar you earned working hard, inventing new things, or making the right moves, some person in the top 1% wealth class makes 1 million bucks by doing nothing but letting the banks use his money to gouge those who started with nothing. Every time someone invents a great new invention and makes a million dollars, a hundred other people who did nothing but be born rich made 10 million each funding the development and distribution of that invention.

I suggest you look at the wealth disparity in the US and the condensation of wealth principal before you start badmouthing large inheritance taxes. Without them you end up in the same boat as many nations like the US, where a tiny percentage of the population controls more than half the wealth and gets rich by making everyone else borrow it. These systems usually end in an abrupt revolution where the poor kill the rich, redistribute the wealth, and the cycle starts anew. Unless the US reforms its misuse and underuse of socialism, some day you or your descendants will either be the elite being killed or the poor and desperate reduced to near slavery, despite your abilities and hard work.

Re:Superiority of the Free Market.

[ultranova]

First, if there is more than one company providing infrastructure then there is competition (see: competition between cable broadband and DSL.)

Assuming that the corporations don't simply decide to cooperate and divide the potential customer base between themselves. This is beneficial to them both, since competition has a tendency to drive prices down, and that lessens corporate profits. See: cartel.

Second, if you don't like a company that meddles (or how they meddle), you can refuse to pay them. If you don't like the government meddling (or how they meddle), and you refuse to pay them, you go to jail.

No, what happens is that the government confiscates your property until the required payment is met. The same as happens when a corporation decides to engage in barratry against you (see: RIAA).

Besides, without paying the company, you don't get Internet access. If that corporation happened to hold the local monopoly - though shit.

The lesson here is that a sufficiently large corporation is indistinguishable from government.

If the government were prohibited (again with limited government) from providing protection for special companies then they would have little or no influence (because they don't have anything to influence except the limitation that government not provide them protection.)

So basically, if you just outlaw corruption it goes away. Right.

But tell me, how is the government that's too weak to protect the corporation going to stop the corporation from hiring a few musclebound goons to break down your front door and asking money for your "protection" ? Because if the government is too weak to help the corporation, then the government is too weak to hinder it either.

In the post-feodal system money is power - literally, since it indicates available resources - and corporations have wastly more money than you, so they can abuse you with or without the government's aid. A large corporation is easily as powerfull as a national government, and should be held to the same standards.

Re:Superiority of the Free Market.

[jrobinson5]

Well, I'm in Houston, and pretty soon Fusion well offer 100mbps fiber. But seriously, a few people have 100mbps fiber. They may pay thousands of dollars for it, you may be able to count them all on one hand, but they still fall under the "a few people" category.

What's THE REAL speed though?

[Anonymous Coward]

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 ...

Yeah, my provider tells me I have the download speed of 15 mbps. And they charge me for that. And that's how fast it is in print.

But whenever I try and test my connection it comes up between 1 ~ 5 mbps. Did you get those numbers from the providers or the people? And, most importantly, is this something that consumers experience world-wide or are Cox & Comcast raping me by the side of the road in a desert?

Re:What's THE REAL speed though?

[OverlordQ]

If you're using Cox, use a speedtest on *their* network, otherwise it doesn't mean jack. They're only saying you'll get 15mbps from them to you, not from the entire Internet to you.

http://speedtest1.ks.ks.cox.net/speedtest/

Re:In defense...

[clickclickdrone]

There was a story either on TWiT or Digg recently that noted that the US providors had been given tax breaks and so on to the tune of several hundreds of billions to ensure they provided fast internet access for all. They had failed to meet all the requirements and deadlines but naturally got to keep the money.

UK isnt that good

[Soupy69]

I like the "upto" 24mbps in the UK, reality is that only a small percentage of inner cities are currently enabled for that sort of speed. Dont get me wrong it's coming to the sticks but I live in a field and I want it NOW!!

Yes, yes...

[mattkime]

Look, we know that many countries have better internet access than we do. However, they often have much higher population densities making it less expensive to roll out the network. Other countries often have better cell reception as well. Would anyone like to propose a solution to this?

Density

[Henriok]

The market in Sweden is not that regulated and we could tell you that it's the former State Monopoly that holdning the brakes. They are refusing access to telephone stations, they are keeping the prices up, they are the last to implement just about anything (cable, dsl, wireless, fibre, GSM, 3G, and so forth). They are more expensive and offer less flexible terms. The only redeeming factor is that they are large, and have much larger coverage of the population.. They still have monopoly to "the last mile" out in the less densly populated areas, and in the suburbs of the larger cities, and the adoption of broadband are considerably slower in these areas. This would seem quite strange since it's wehere the richest people live and those in the most need of fast Internet access, but it's due to the fact that independant companies doesn't have access to this market, the former Monopoly does.

However.. I must say, after RTFA that Sweden is _miles_ ahead of most countries, even our close naighbours, Denmark and Norway. I would've guessed that they would have been in front of us, but they're not. I cant say why really. We've had some pretty vocal individuals/visionaries in the late 90s who really have set the stnadard of the market an made policy. 100 Mbps for everyone is the goal. Perhaps this was a necessity?

Re:Am I the only one...

[JustNiz]

You think the UK or Europe is lacking in cultural diversity? wow are you misguided.

Re:Later = better

[raju1kabir]

The USA were the first ones with access to the Internet. Every other country got their infrastructure built later. When the more recent infrastructures were built, they used the latest technologies available, which are obviously better than the early ones. So the result of this study is not surprising in my opinion.

I don't see how this adds up. The US has a huge amount of dark fibre, so the long-haul links are not constrained by early development. And many countries built out consumer broadband before the USA did, but now have better service.

Some countries who are building their Internet infrastructure these days are going straight to wireless.

That'll come back to bite them in the ass. Wireless is a severely bandwidth-constraining medium with unknown public health risks. It's the choice of those who don't want (or can't afford) to invest in real infrastructure for the long term.

Internet in Costa Rica

[palpatine]

Broadband connectivity is getting cheaper in Costa Rica, where I live, because of competition between ICE (the government telecommunications monopoly) and its own subsidiary called RACSA.

Cable modem access is available by 2 private companies (Cable Tica and AMNET), using RACSA as an upstream provider, and costs $35 for 512/128, $50 for 1024/256, and $70 for 2048/256, with unlimited bandwidth. Availability is limited to higher-density areas, but some of the beaches have connectivity via cable.

ADSL is a newer option and is provided by ICE, the telco. Costs are $19 for 256/128, $25 for 512/128, $38 for 1024/512, $62 for 2048/768, $72 for 1536/768, $91 for 2048/768 and $169 for 4096/768. Availability is limited to proximity to the telco's CO, and ports, but they've installed ADSL ports throughout the country, including more rural towns and beach communities.

Just recently, RACSA launched a pilot program for WiMax in one part of the Central Valley. Costs are $29 for 512/256, $74 for 1024/512, and $244 for 2048/1024. Once this rolls out throughout the Central Valley, I hope to try this out because my house is just a little too far for cable modem or ADSL availability, but the 5-mile radius of WiMax and the great view I have will make it possible.

Re:The thing that makes me laugh about the US tech

[JustNiz]

thats because you're female, so therefore have a handbag or equivalent to carry your big phone in.
Most men carry phones in their pockets or if you don't mind looking like a nerd, on a belt clip. hence small is convenient.

I agree with you about the flip/camera/color screen etc. Its all a redundant waste of money & battery power to me. I jsut want a basic but tiny phone. Can't get one in the US.

Re:Consider population density.

[AK Marc]

Simple economics would dictate that for the same monetary equivalent, a provider could serve more people in Europe than they could in North America.

That is incorrect. Simple economics would dictate that, for the same monetary equivelent, a provider could serve more people in the US. Why? Because you are counting Montana and Alaska in with the rest of the US. Take out the least dense 5 states, and the US has a greater density than Europe. So, NYC should be nearly free while MT would be expensive. But the DSL companies have chosen not to do it that way and are holding NYC to Montana prices and Montana speeds because they are a monopoly more interested in profit than service. They know that the government won't force the monopoly to act in a responsible manner. But, Europe has a greater history of smacking down out of control monopolies, so they act as if there was competition and provide better services. It is not now and has never been about the population density of Alaska for what the prices are in Chicago.

It's standards & people work together that cou

[superswede]

In the long, it is standards and skilled people that works together makes the difference.

My hypothesis is that you need a long-term plan in the society and in peoples minds, and the free market does not provide that. This is easier in a country with smaller and more homigenous population. Without a common target, we get stuck in local minima and suboptimal solutions with wasted human and natural resources. By free market I mean "laissez faire" with minimal rules. No, the alternative is not communism.

I think this applies to broadband connections among other things. As an example, the "free market" (Yahoo DSL) managed to send us in total three DSL modems back and forth between California and Texas when all we wanted was a change in the name of the account holder of an already working DSL plan. There was no sense what so ever about how many hours and natural resources we wasted to effectively get a name change. Why is this?

For instance, look at the cell phone systems for instance; small countries like Sweden could early agree on using GSM (before that NMT) with well defined frequencies on and all the players in the ball park followed. In the US, it wasn't long ago that one cell phone wouldn't work in another state because different frequencies and different standards were used in the different states (maybe it is still like this), and finally the US (free) market is realizing that GSM is the way to go. I believe the market does not know its own good here. How many these hours from harding people could have been used for better things? Btw, it is funny to see ads from cell-phone providers saying "we've the lowest drop rate" - I can't even remember when a call drop on me last time back home. So, why is this?

I've been living in California on and off the last 10 years and I must say that there actually not not impressed with the "free market" for optimizing technology/society. I think you have add other "rules" of the game to get where we want. I'm a little bit dual about this though, because big and skilled companies do pop up here, but I think that is also the case in other companies though here you have a kind of a magnet bringing the brands to the Bay Area. However, there are so many things that is lagging behind. For instance, the bank system, which somehow is fundamental for a free market, is hilarious and so efficient! Online banking is finally catching up here, but in the end of the day what is called online bill payment in many cases turns out to be sent as printed checks in the mail. That can not be efficient! So somehow the "free market" has created its own standard and its size is preventing it from adopting better solutions.

While writing this, I just received a scam call trying to cheat us into a free directory service using poor sound quality and asking me to confirm our address. Why is this?

Yes, I'm Swedish and yes my family had a Beta VCR for many years when my friends had VHS, so maybe that is why I'm so a-al about standards and working toward a common goal. Don't waste resources, don't be egoistic, realize that every hour counts, and good things will follow.