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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."
Help, help ... the sky is falling! Oops, sorry ... same plot, wrong story.
Seriously though, the author completely ignores the vast geographic differences between the US and other industrialized country when categorizing the US as falling behind in broadband acceptance. The US has an average population density of ~30 people per square km, industrialized Europe's is ~100, while Japan's is 336. The higher the population density, the less cable is needed (and hence, the lower the cost) to provide broadband to all these people.
In addition, the US is HIGHLY suburban, with the vast majority of broadband users living in sprawling neighborhoods with relatively large amounts of land (e.g. 1/4 to 1/2 acre+). Compare this to Europe/Japan, where a larger proportion of broadband users (and the population) live in densely populated cities. As an example, I live in a typical suburban U.S. neighborhood where almost everyone has broadband. To hit every one of the 100 homes, it would take 1.3 to 2.6 miles of cable (depending on cable location). In a European city, this same amount of cable could easily cover 2-10X the # of families living in typical apartments/condos.
Also, I don't see how large-scale adoptance of broadband in the US would help the economy by the stated $500Billion (a whopping 5% of GDP). The only people I know who don't have broadband either: don't own a computer (lack of money, interest, or live on a farm), are worried about their kids hitting the porn sites, or are grandparent types who just have no clue what the internet is and have no desire to learn. If we got all these people surfing online watching YouTube videos, searching for nudie pics, playing solitaire, and creating myspace pages, how would the economy grow by 5%?
Crack - Free with every butt and set of boobs
Michael J. Copps is nothing but a faker.
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
Now someone like, say, China or Russia having incredibly high broadband penetration? That would be damned impressive.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Not only does the article NOT have a chart, but it doesn't even bother to list who the OTHER 14 countries are?
Also, I love how they mention ESTONIA with a tone that suggests we are somehow more "backwards" for falling behind them on some list. I'd be offended if I were Estonian.
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...
And in the 21st century, that's a bare minimum of gigapop IPv6 Internet to every home.
Just as we've fallen massively behind in scientific research (US scientists leaving to go to Singapore, only 8 percent of NIH grants accepted compared to 20 percent in 2000), so we are falling behind on every measure that dictates what a First World country is.
But, hopefully, our long national nightmare will be coming to a close. The stock market (a predictor of future investment) seems to think so.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Well, what exactly can we do to turn this kind of situation around? Whine to congress to resurrect the Broadband America Bill? I don't see that happening. "Teach them telecoms a lesson by not buying it?" It'll never happen, we don't have that kind of organization and too many groups depend on what the system does provide. So what, pray tell, do we do? I've got no idea, but plenty of complaints. How about some proactive solutions?
Demented But Determined.
Geographically, a single US state is as big or bigger than a lot of those countries. For example, Texas alone is 691,030 sq km, while the entire country of Japan weighs in at 377,835 sq km.
I'm sure implementing a powerful network infrastructure would be quite a lot faster, cheaper, and easier, if everyone in America lived in Texas.
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.
back when the internet was considered a truck. Taking UPS and FedEx out of the equation really hurt.
I did feel that someone should point out that the graph purportedly showing us as have the 2nd highest number of broadband lines installed actually shows us as having the second highest number of broadband connections added in the 2Q of 2006.
Unless you somehow think there are only 2.5 million broadband users in the US, in which case we'd be far lower than 14 on the penetration list...
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.
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
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.
So is the situation better in densely packed cities like New York? Or is the problem that the incumbent carriers are dogs in the manger?
I live in a county with a population density of 71/(sq. mile) in southern indiana. my nearest neighbor is about 1/2mi away and the nearest stoplight is 12mi away.
this is common in the US, so there is no surprise that broadband penetration is like it is. it cost an absolute fortune to run the infrastructure here. the cable tv companies decided not to install in the area because everyone already has satellite. this is the most hilly part of indiana so wireless isn't a good option. cell phone reception is great, if you're with cingular so maybe you could get broadband through them, i dunno. satellite internet isn't worth the price.
seriously, whats the options?
Gone!
If I have a 100 million people in my country and 10% of them have broadband, that is equvalent of 100% of a country of 10 million people having broadband...that means nothing. The united states is a very large country with a very large population. As a statistics professor, Its not "being fair" to mention installed lines, thats like comparing the murder rate in a city with 10 million with 15 murders to a city with 100,000 with 10 murders and saying the city with 100,000 is safer because their are less murders 33.3% fewer murders!
I know TFA was about the percentage of broadband users, so the responses in most of the other posts are defending the US because of the population density factor. But the question I have is whether we're falling behind, not based on the percentage of broadband connections, but on the capacity of our broadband connections? Especially in regards to the price we pay for it?
I pay $40/month for my 4Mb/300Kb connection. My city owns a network that doesn't quite extend to my corner of town (I'm one block from the edge of the network). The ISPs on that network offer up to 10Mb Up/Down for slightly less, but what are prices and speeds in other countries in the world? I've heard numbers tossed around here on Slashdot that put these to shame, but I don't know how reliable those are. So what I want to know is how does the U.S. compare when it comes to our broadband speeds and prices (for residential users, particularly)?
Looking at the list, you notice two trends. (1) Cold northern countries are in the top 15... Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Canada etc... (2) Smaller countries with highly dense population centers are in the top 15... Korea, Netherlands, Denmark, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Iceland (Iceland which is both cold and small is at the very top)
That said, we probably could do better with increased compensation because we're so goddamn rich, and compared to other countries on the list, we have such a low penetration of DSL.
Somehow it doesn't sound nearly so comforting put that way, does it?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Here in france, we have a wonderfull provider : Free (iliad group) Read : - Broadband connection up to 25Mb/s (depending of distance from DSLAM) - They have introduced in france the "box" concept, an adatper that do VOIP (compatible with traditional phone, at incredible prices - generally free), ethernet switch, router, and initially TV output - now TV output is on a secondary device, connected to the main (linked to the DSL line) with a MIMO wifi connection. It provides HDCP connectors and all needed for HD TV. - the TV output features : numerical hertzian TV, DSL TV, Video On Demand, records channel, record channel while watching another one (40Go integrated Hard Disk, also accessible through FTP, to put and watch a DivX on, for example) - you can watch many of TV streams on your computer through RDCP protocol - the phone system can be used with SIP exactly as if you used the phone connected to the "box" More, they have recently announced fibre channel with a 70Mb _symetric_ line. All that at the unique price of ... 30. The offer depends of the kind of connection (ADSL2+, ADSL, direct connection to free network or not, and in near future fibre channel), but it's the same price. You can have all services listed above, or a simple 8Mb/s line with VOIP.
When you have a monopoly (many areas in the US have broadband monopolies), and in particular a shitty one (Cox in this case) that will turn off your internet connection for downloading a NOCD crack for a game that was LEGALLY PURCHASED (Lego Star Wars II), It makes the whole point of broadband almost moot.
I mean, even 50x more bandwidth than the pathetic 200 kb/sec I'm liable to get on a good torrent is not a lot when they are doing traffic shaping.
Now if there was a broadband offering here in San Diego County that gave true 1mb/sec downloads without traffic shaping, monitoring, shutting off the connection YOU ARE PAYING FOR, or other such shenanigans then I could reasonably recommend them to family and friends. As it stands, You might as well just use dial up, since email, google, and MySpace is all the internet is good for anyway. What good is broadband without bit torrent? Are there hundreds of uses that I'm somehow missing? Does the average person really give two shits about streaming random teenagers singing into a webcam on youtube?
The corporate stranglehold on this country is the problem. It is the terminal malignancy that we are under not just in the technology sector, but in every way that should matter to the US citizen.
Yay, we voted out the corrupt and dirty Republicans! What's that you say, the Democrats are just as sold out to corporate interests and also don't give a shit about the American populace or the concepts of civil liberty as envisioned by our forefathers? Oh, shit....
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
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.
If you think that things are falling behind in the US, take a look at Australia. We pay three times as much for a slower connection that has monthly data limits (in most cases). Most normal ADSL connections are limited to 1500kbps/256kbps, and limit your bandwidth after you've downloaded a certain amount of data. ISPs and telcos are slowly rolling out their own DSLAMS for ADSL2+ (which will offer a theoretical speed of 24Mbps), but once you get outside of the heavily populated areas, you're stuck paying a fortune for slower, limited internet access. Naturally, I could go on to blame Telstra (Australia's major telco) for the lapse in technology and affordability, but there's a whole political side to it as well. Maybe one day we'll at least catch up to other parts of the world in terms of broadband capabilities. However, until then, Australia isn't falling behind. It's holding the rest of the modern world up from the bottom.
Clearly, we must force a regime change in Estonia before the Axis of Evil can harness their mighty broadband penetration to further their goals of nuclear proliferation, uncle abuse, and dog hickies.
That works out to ca 27 people per square kilometre, or about TWICE the density of Norway - a country with broadband offerings that are far better than most of the US...
Americans tend to compare USA to densely populated Central European nations to complain about how rural the US is whenever cellphone coverage, broadband or public transport is brought up. But there appears to be a tendency to ignore the fact that this somehow isn't an issue for Norway, Sweden etc. that have far lower population densities.
In fact, only 12 US states have population densities below that of Norway, and their total population is about 17 million.
The US isn't even in the same race. I've been on 100MB FTTH here in Tokyo for the last 3 years (25MB ADSL before that). Included with it I get IP telephony services which allow for very cheap international calling rates (I do use SkypeOut instead though) and also free domestic calls to other IP Tel users). I also get TV over IP with a variety of foreign and domestic stations. All the above for about $45US/month, no capping/limits. Eat that Uncle Sam. They need to clean up the corruption in the US Telecoms industry bigtime. There is no reason why the US cannot have comparable services.
The physical factors account for some of it, but not much. For one thing, the suburban qualities of America doesn't give much insight into why it is that city dwellers in most of America still have broadband speeds that pale in comparison to those in much of Europe and Asia. Remember that according to the FCC, broadband means anything over 200kbs, so talking about "broadband" in America and South Korea is really talking about two completely different things.
The "America is so huge" argument doesn't work when you also recognize that most Americans only have two broadband providers to choose from. The consolidation of the telecom market means that it is a losing proposition for one carrier to enter a geographic market that another carrier has already taken. Usually it comes down to "competition" in the form of a choice between the dominant local telecom and whichever cable operator has the contract for the area. You can drink anything you want, as long as it is Coke or Pepsi.
By defining broadband as an "information service" the FCC and the Supreme Court (in the Brand X decision) turned the incombent telecos and cable companies loose. They no longer had to lease excess capacity to new entrants in the market. The anti-competitive measures taken by the Baby Bells in the late 1990s were essentially excused and ratified, and almost all of the plucky broadband competitors that sprung up to bring broadband to the masses were squashed by the giant, slow-moving, ever-consolidating telecom entities.
The South Korean approach worked in part because the government created an initial infrastructure and allowed carriers to compete on top of it. Here in the US, we talk about the free market incessantly, but in reality we have coddled the Baby Bells. They are the severed pieces of the old AT&T, which was essentially a government-protected monopoly for decades. So when the heads of these companies talk about how pissed off they are at Google, et. al., for using "their" networks, just remember that they were born rich. Sure, they built the fiber optic networks and invested billions in infrastructure, but were it not for government intervention in the early years of telecom, they would have been in the same place as Covad and all the other newcomers. Anyone can compete in the broadband market in theory, but in reality if the incumbents have a decades-long lead on you and billions of dollars, how in the hell are you going to get the funding necessary to compete? Of course, with that nice head start, the mutant offspring of the Baby Bells are fervent supporters of free market competition. Funny how that works, isn't it?
Look up broadband prices in the US from 10 years ago, five years ago, and now. Evidence of a truly competitive market? Check prices per megabyte in the US against those in the OECD report linked to below. Something isn't right.
I could go on and on about this, but Copps is right. The US is getting its ass kicked in broadband, and the "hands off" approach the government has taken over the last ten years has clearly not worked. Sure, we're a big country, but the technical aspects are the smallest part of the equation. After all, the Internet was started here. DSL was invented here. Fiber optic cable was first put to practical use here. We screwed up politically, and now we're paying for it.
Broadband Reality Check II (PDF)
OECD report on broadband access in several countries
GAO report on broadband (PDF) - takes the FCC to task for failures in its methodology for determining broadband penetration.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
show the US at a 12th place
2 3_37529673_1_1_1_1,00.html
... (hmmm, that just sounds wrong)
http://www.oecd.org/document/9/0,2340,en_2649_342
it ALSO has a nifty penetration/inhabitants per sq km
anyhoo, here's the list:
1 Denmark
2 Netherlands
3 Iceland
4 Korea
5 Switzerland
6 Finland
7 Norway
8 Sweden*
9 Canada
10 United Kingdom
11 Belgium
12 United States
13 Japan
14 Luxembourg
15 Austria
16 France
17 Australia
18 Germany
19 Spain
20 Italy
21 Portugal
22 New Zealand
23 Czech Republic**
24 Ireland
25 Hungary
26 Poland
27 Turkey
28 Slovak Republic
29 Mexico*
30 Greece
Here in Canada things are starting to open up. I know my cable provider is going to be offering a "Nitro" service of 25Mbps in a week. We already have 10Mbps "Extreme" service, and the rest of us (cheap) chumps have to live with 5Mbps.
:)
I believe Telus and other phone companies are bringing out products with speeds similar to 25Mbpsvery soon. I'm just not willing to pay $100/mo to get them.
Salvance,
/..
... have been on the increase for the past decade.
... it is all about SFI (Special Ducking Interest) and the citizens [AKA: public] are feed spin&BS as the cause for fraud and treason.
...?
...?
....
This sounds like the typical Democrat and/or Republican spin/BS.
I know some times there are MS hired-guns on
Are you a USA Telco/Cable wideband service hired-gun that tells US citizens the wideband is broadband?
The US telecommunication infrastructure is very ducked up just as the ITU and other reports have been stating for the past decade.
Telcos software/service patch/package and area-code/subscriber databases upgrades are as directed more than as needed. So, even wire-call miss-routing, phantom-rings, disconnects
Also, the telco and cable companies working with congress have delayed or prevented new technologies from entering the USA market, and holding customers hostage to one provider at obscene prices. Neither democracy or capitalism functions in the USA
What happened to Wireless local loop, 802.16 WiMax,
Why have USA Cities/communities trying to provide all their citizens with Internet access (including the poor) via WiFi (802.11*) been taken to court by the telco and cable companies to prevent any improvements for public citizens' Internet access?
Why can I get COMCAST but not DirectTV service
IOWs Don't drucken lie to US like the politicians. US ain't idiots or your cockless bitches, and mamma can kick-ass too on
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?