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.

[Saunalainen]

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)

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.

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.

[TheLink]

Are street lights really efficient? Even if they are, why would a private company actually want to provide street lighting for free?

I suggest that most countries and their citizens do benefit from street lights.

To the free market worshippers: the free market only works when not all people choose to be totally selfish and greedy. Once there are too few of those "salt of the earth" types, the whole thing starts falling apart.

No matter what system you have, if you want something good from it, you will need good people.

Re:Superiority of the Free Market.

[malsdavis]

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.

Re:Superiority of the Free Market.

[maxume]

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.

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.

[badfish99]

This is exactly the opposite of what has happened in the UK.

When British Telecom was the only ADSL supplier, it didn't bother to invest anything in competing with the cable companies. And the cable companies (which are also regional monopolies) didn't bother to invest anything in competing with BT. So we all had a choice of 512k broadband from either supplier.

Then the government forced BT to lease equipment to competitors. Suddenly we have 24M broadband from those competitors, and BT has suddenly discovered that its own equipment can do 8M instead of 512k.

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.

[glaucopis]

And actually one of the few places in the US where you can get 24 Mbps, Vermont, has a very low population density. It probably helps that VTel is an independent telephone company. 24 Mbps isn't available everywhere in the state yet and does cost $50/mo, probably more than people in the UK are paying, but 24 Mbps DSL does exist in America. And if it hasn't arrived in your corner of Vermont yet, you can still get 8 Mbps for $35/mo while you wait.

And when you sign up for it, you get two t-shirts featuring smug comparisons between VTel's speed and everyone else's. All of the gloating would be annoying if it weren't so justified; I just find it frustrating that all of the nice retired Vermonters down the road from my parents' place can get nearly 10x the speed of what Verizon deigns to give me where I live.

Re:Superiority of the Free Market.

[flithm]

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

Yeah no kidding... population density really has very little to do with how easy it is to offer proper internet.

If the argument were to hold true then why are there many countries (including Canada) with a significantly lower population density that offer better internet access for a lower price?

And if you really think about it almost the entire infrastructure is already in place in the united states (cable and telephone lines). I know it's not that simple, equipment has to me upgraded or modified, but it's not like they have to roll out new wire to all the communities.

If you ask me the whole problem is the states overly capitalistic government. All of the infrastructure is controlled by a select few companies (with little regulation compared to the countries that rank high in internet access). The companies set the rates and the little guys have to live with it. While they're making a profit there's not much anyone can do about it.

Government control would most certainly help the situation, but that isn't the american way. I suspect the american public will have to wait for a new infrastructure to be built for the rules to change (perhaps WiFi). And even then, if it's rolled out by the same companies that control the wires, it may not help.

Re:Superiority of the Free Market.

[AK Marc]

It's also a matter of pure area.

Not in the least. The population concentrations are concentrated enough to be independent entities. Yes, the entire US doesn't compare well to any individual European country, but many states have similar area and distribution as European countries, and Europe as a whole can roughly compare to the US. Regardless of how you measure it, the USA is well behind other similar places around the world. Or are you saying that NYC should have crappy access because Montana is spread out?

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?

Sounds like it isn't too far from the Alaska layout. Care to guess what we get for speeds and prices? I'll give you a hint, take whatever you have, half the speed, double the price, and put a monthly cap on usage, and that's what I have access to. Yay for population concentrations!

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.

And I'm just pointing out that the US is diverse enough that every arguement I have heard is refuted by some specific state in the US. The population density in California is greater, so their prices should be lower, but aren't. The population in Alaska is more concentrated than Sweeden, yet has higher prices. Montana is more spread out and has higher prices. The difference is that the USA has private monopolies. Private monopolies have always worked to screw the customers. And it was the free market that brought us to those monopolies. The FCC wasn't involved until long after AT&T was formed.

Re:Superiority of the Free Market.

[Alef]

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).

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.

Holy internet traffic...

[__aaclcg7560]

You mean Americans don't have to bring an extra long network cord from home for internet access abroad?! :P

UK story a little optimistic

[clickclickdrone]

Yes you can get 24mbit but very few people have access to that. Many are lucky to get 1Mb and many on MaxDSL are having terrible problems trying to keep their 4-6Mb connection stable. Those on cable are better served with 10Mbit being pretty cheap.
Almost everyone I know is on broadband but none are on 24mbit and most on 1Mb.

Re:As expected

[Shivani1141]

So Does Canada, But I'm still paying $30/month (cdn) for 10mbps down, 2.5mbps up ADSL.

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.

Not in Chicago

[IL-CSIXTY4]

Here, if you drive 20 minutes, you're two blocks from where you started.

Old or inaccurate data for Denmark

[Daath]

Cable Internet speeds reach 4 mbps download/1 mbps upload, albeit at a princely sum of 594 kroners ($101). DSL, with speeds of 4 mbps download/256 kbps upload, costs a little less, at 429 kroners ($73). "[DSL] with 8 mbps download/1 mbps upload is also possible, but not really provided to private users yet," says Vanglo.

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 ;)

France DSL is pretty good, too

[ycochard]

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

grass, greener

[m874t232]

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.

Cheap broadband

[the_arrow]

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.

Re:As expected

[ComaVN]

78% of the US population lives in urban areas (2003)
42% lives in urban areas with more than 1 million people (2005)

compared to Italy (67%/20%), Spain (78%/23%) and Norway (76%/?), it doesn't look like there's an inherent disadvantage.

source: http://devdata.worldbank.org/wdipdfs/table3_10.pdf

Spain

[Bashrc]

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.

Re:where do you think the money is coming from

[ambrosen]

Not the government.

Small vs large countries

[Terje Mathisen]

The problem isn't having a small or a large country, but how many (potential) customers you have per square km, right?

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, 8.073578&spn=0.282005,0.553436&om=1

Terje

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.