Slashdot Mirror
The U.S. Falling Behind In Broadband?
prostoalex writes "Michael J. Copps of the FCC has published a column in the Washington Post describing the United States' Internet disconnect as far as broadband: 'The United States is 15th in the world in broadband penetration, according to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). When the ITU measured a broader digital opportunity index (considering price and other factors) we were 21st — right after Estonia. Asian and European customers get home connections of 25 to 100 megabits per second (fast enough to stream high-definition video). Here, we pay almost twice as much for connections that are one-twentieth the speed.' To be fair in comparison, USA is 2nd in the world as far as number of broadband lines installed."
I am not an American, but enough already. I travel the the US a lot. There is no shortage of broadband in most areas if you want it. Not everyone wants it. I have seen enough of these stories on Slashdot (and other sites) relating to poor penetration of boradband into the US last year that if I didn't know better I'd believe they were all using 14.4K dial-up. It simply ain't so...
In how many of those countries is the government creating the broadband infrastructure, or sponsoring it in the form of direct contracts or new monopoly grants, or in the form of an existing molopoly telecommunications giant?
For the most part, the US has none of the above. Perhaps in this case the free market doesn't see sufficient justification for high-speed access to justify the costs, since people don't seem to know they can't live without such access until they first have it.
I think this is a matter best handled at the local level. Either let businesses fight it out, or, if a local community considers it a useful monetary investment, let cities sponsor the broadband infrastructure. I see nothing wrong with the government creating the networks on which commerce can be done, but because the internet is such a new commerce network (compared to, say, roads), not every community will see it in the same way.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
But lower population density doesn't actually matter that much, since not only aren't there any marked differences with regards to suburbs, but because the telephone and TV cables through which to offer broadband are already installed. Few people live in ranches 30 miles from the nearest center of civilization, where the population density is pronounced and acquiring a broadband connection could actually be a problem.
That is becuase in many areas, there is only one (i.e. local monopoly), provider of broadband. In in some cases, those providers are telling their customers that they have to pay for their other services whether their customers want them or not. In other words, they're going to charge you an extra, say, $50 a month for service that may not even want.
Government regulation is usually good for businesses because it keeps the competition away and it helps comanies keep their prices high - broadband is a fine example of this.
Every time this topic is discussed, I hear the same excuses. Mostly, people claim that the US is too large and with too many rural areas. It's a load of crap. We've paid billions subsidizing the laying of lines, more per person than numerous other countries and we still have much slower and more expensive service than those countries. Sweden has been the model of how to do this right. Despite government corruption and favoritism on par with the US, they have managed almost complete saturation, for less per-person government subsidy, and with a population density almost the same as the US.
The truth is, the US has combined the worst elements of several models. We don't have a free market to drive competition because of local telcom monopolies and failure of the FCC to enforce fair use. We don't have the benefits of central planning and widespread coverage of a socialist system, because the government just hands out money in subsidies and then does not even blink when that money does not go to the projects we were supposedly funding in the first place. So we get crappy coverage and service and high prices.
The US has high labor costs, declining manufacturing, and not a lot of unique industry. The information economy and exporting intellectual property may be our best option for maintaining a real role as an economic powerhouse. For that to happen we need two things, education, and technology. We shouldn't be 5th in broadband or 10th, we should be 1st. That two trillion dollars we blew in Iraq would have run a fiber connection and provided free internet connections to every house in the US for years to come. Heck, just the money we spent already subsidizing telecoms would have provided a fast connection to every home if we'd actually just spent it on that instead of giving it away to monopolists.
Have you seen China's network backbone diagrams? They have a beautiful three tiered full mesh that came out of a textbook. I know there is a lot of prejudice against socialist projects in the US, but we're falling behind very quickly. We either need internet and phone networks treated as a public utility and run by the government or we need to remove the local monopolies, stop politicians from taking the telecoms bribes, and have a real competitive market with equally huge subsidies given to any new players that want to build a complete competing network.
The time has come. Suck it up and invest in the future of the US with hard cash and reforms, or be left behind the rest of the world. Most Americans are blind to how some other countries are now technologically superior. How their gadgets work everywhere and are more advanced than anything sold here. his needs to be corrected now.
Compare us to Japan? How about to Canada. You know, that huge country just to our north with similar... well, almost everything.
An easier comparison? Compare our big cities to theirs. We still lose. By a LOT.
And then remember that WE (the tax payers) gave them $200,000,000,000 for broadband deployment.
That might have some weight if the US had not spent over 200 billion subsidizing our broadband internet development over the last few years. The US has spent a great deal more in taxes, per person, than countries that have completely free networks via socialist programs.