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US Lags World In Broadband Access
An anonymous reader writes "When It Comes To Broadband, U.S. Plays Follow The Leader says a story in IWeek. Their thesis is that, while broadband access in the United States rose from 60 million users in March 2005 to 84 million in March 2006, the US is well behind countries like England and China. Indeed, what you may not realize is that the U.S. ranks a surprisingly poor 12th in worldwide broadband access, a situation which could threaten its ability to maintain its technological lead. The federal government is no help: the FCC has almost no data on the rate of hi-speed adoption, or of what the speed and quality of those services are. Broadband is more expensive here than in other nations, as well, almost 10 times as expensive by some estimates. The cost and poor quality of service aren't from population density, aren't from lack of interest, and are not from lack of technical know-how. So, what is holding us back?
While I could accept that the US was/is behind South Korea, and even, with qualitative judgement, behind some Western European countries, it is not behind China. China has a little more than 100 million Internet users. Many of them use broadband, yes. But China also has a population of 1.3bn+. China lags the US's Internet connectivity, not to mention the quality/speed of service (contention rations of ADSL of 100:1 common, DSL poisoning common, plain not being able to access content common). Heck, those in China that don't have Internet access probably don't have running water or reliable electricity. Where the Internet is connected here it is important, but connection quality and, more importantly, basic poverty in all but the bigger cities, mean that it's not that important. The US does not lag China in terms of Internet connectivity, and any study that says so clearly hasn't experienced the Internet in China.
Oh.
Cheap gas wasn't really the factor for settling the country, as it happened for the most part before gasoline was invented. Things like agriculture and waterways played the main role.
Today it makes American [and rural Canada] the prime regions to build up an Internet infrastructure, but we're lagging. Wireless options might start filling the gap this decade, but with large lag times for satellite Internet, I don't foresee it taking over before ground based [or balloon based] wireless does.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
From the article:
A Rural Explanation? Hardly One of the rationales often given for lower broadband penetration in the U.S. is that low population density makes broadband deployment, especially in rural areas, considerably more expensive in the U.S. than among more dense populations in countries such as Korea, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. That argument falters, however, when one considers that five of the 11 nations that lead the U.S. in per capita broadband penetration, including Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Canada, have significantly lower population densities than the U.S.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
1. Mmmm, US BIG! ENGLAND SMALL! LAYING CABLE EXPENSIVE! FIRE BAD!
2. O NOES! US is teh sUx0rs!
3. omg teh US is teh R0x0rS! France = surrender monkeys!
4. blah blah dark fiber blah blah net nuetrality blah blah GOOGLENET!
5. I for one welcome Korean||English||Chinese overlords.
6. I'm stuck on dial-up, you insensitive clod!
7. If you want to live in the boonies, you pay the price. The invisible hand of Adam Smith will give all true Libertarians happy endings...
8. ???
9. Profit.
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
a large part of the population is decentralized.
Yep, but that doesn't explain why other countries that are even more decentralized are kicking America's ass. There is no appreciable statistical correlation. Plus, even if there were a correlation, the excuse that America is diffuse is a pretty weak excuse for the technological and economic backwardness we're exhibiting with broadband.
America's broadband failures shouldn't be news to anyone who has been paying attention. Several reports have gone into extensive detail on this over the past few years. Check out Broadband Reality Check II (PDF) for a solid analysis of where the US is in broadband, and how the FCC has its head in the sand.
We've been giving the phone and cable companies a free ride, buying their arguments that free enterprise is working efficiently. It isn't. These massive companies have managed to keep all other entrants out of their markets by manipulating the FCC and getting the Supreme Court to buy their argument that there's a free market for broadband. There isn't. We have the worst of both worlds: Government protection of an oligopoly comprised of regional duopolies (one cable company and one DSL provider in most markets), and tremendously high barriers to entry, without at least the broad reach that a government-controlled system would have. We need a truly competitive marketplace, or we'll keep languishing.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
I am afraid that this one is even funnier because it's true. Soviet Russia did force large population re-settlements.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
See This map for why it really IS about population density. Canada, pshaw, sure they have a lot of land, but they have almost no one in 90% of it. It certainly looks like almost all of Candada's population is within 200km of the US border. Norway, Sweden, and Finland are in the same boat...
This is one of the stupider more vapid "analysis" articles..
Sorry for the Anonymous, I left my password at home...
Regulations that prevent competition is why.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Um, most of their land is unusable, frozen tundra. Also, Communism probably had a big influence on keeping most people in the cities with no "suburbia" developing, since nobody was allowed to own their own land until very recently.
Have you ever been remotely near a "farming state"? I'm shocked that you actually believe that people in rural areas don't know or don't want Internet access. Do you have any idea how important and useful online shopping, weather information, and instantaneous communication are for those who don't live close to large population centers or retail hubs?
IMHO, the only people who harp about this are the companies trying to get a govt subsidy.
You pretty much hit the nail on the head. I like my cablemodem, because I'm a geek, but up until just a couple years ago I was landlocked on a dial-up modem, for my entire life. I managed to make it through Uni with a comp sci degree, get a job programming, and all of that. My lack of broadband at home didn't hamper me one bit.
I still don't see what else I need it for. Dialup was and is a bit of a hassle, but I still have some sites to maintain via dialup. I'd prefer a vpn and a snappy connection and all, but I can still get the job done.
BTW, some of what these countries call broadband really amount to about a 5-10k downlink. Ie; 56kbits over coaxial cable = broadband. Encoded over POTS = dial-up. People call ISDN broadband, and it's only marginally more useful in the real world.
Only very recently have I even been able to justify having broadband to my wife - we've rented some HD movies online via XBox 360.
So without access to broadband, these people won't be able to buy movies on the internet and will have to use netflix or go to the store, and somehow this is going to topple our economy.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Farming states are full of people that have no idea what they could use it for and don't think they need it.
Yes, because all "farm states" (I live in a metro area and am not a farmer) are backwater hicks that don't know about them Internets thangs, right? For fuck's sake, get a clue.
In fact, Internet communication and research is growing for farmers as a way of learning about better crop yields, soil care, etc.
Need I mention more?
someplace like new york city, where the infrastructure (wires and boxes 'o' bits and the like) is generally quite close to the subscribers, DSL is an easier play than in north dakota. the peturbations of the signal as the line gets longer deteriorate the possible speed you can deliver, and beyond about 18,000 feet, your line rate is about two bits per week. ADSL2+ gets you a little better, but the rule "inside" is that beyond 15,000 feet, service becomes tenuous.
it's too expensive to retrofit any of the bad-move 24 and 26 gauge wire that was put up in the 60s and 70s and 80s, and thinner wire makes it only worse. without equal footing between the competitors (telcos are highly regulated and every time they change light bulbs in the bathroom, they have to notify all potential competitors, and nobody else has to meet those standards,) stuff doesn't get placed unless there are basically guaranteed customers enough to pay for the expansions. that's a fact of life after the telecom bust of the turn of the century.
and for some silly reason, uptake of high-speed subscriber lines has been fitful at best, which means any equipment installed isn't filling up. you get the population wildly excited about something, they demand it, rip the walls off the corporate headquarters to sign up for it, and costs of all items come down with higher production and deployment.
the big one is distance, and getting around that engenders the cost issue.
in the US, folks like their elbow room and their freedom. overseas, where population densities are higher and the government decides through centrally-owned telcos what to push and basically what it should cost, it can be expected that high-speed like DSL is going to be more availiable and less costly.
with the bankers and the government working against it here, and distances making it tough, it's going to be harder to get. pure and simple.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Finland = 338k square miles
Norway = 324k
Sweden = 449k
UK = 244k
South korea = 98k
Iceland = 103k
Japan = 377k
Netherlands = 41k
Luxembourg = 2.5k
Total 1,976,000 Square miles
United States has 9,629,091 square miles.
I, for one, am shocked that the US is trailing behind 9 countries whose total area barely equal 20% of the US's in deploying broadband technology.
He's on Rogers cable, he get's threatening letters every month about him going over his bandwidth cap. I live in the US, have comcast, and have never gotten a complaint - and I'm the leech/pirate/dude-who-pegs-his-bandwidth-at-100%-f or-months, not him. He plays xbox live, uses skype, and grabs the occaisional mp3. His cap is something ridiculous, a few gigabytes. They also f with him, blocking ports seemingly at random. They sent him a threatening letter for connecting to me using OpenVPN (we found the easiest way to play SNES roms online was to bridge him onto my LAN). The bandwidth we used on that session was minimal, but just the connection to 1194 pissed them off, I changed ports for him.
I'd imagine if he ever downloads HDDVD movies, it'll have to be from rogers. He couldn't download them on XBox Video Marketplace, like I can right now, even if he wanted to. He'd hit the cap.
My point is, yes, more of them have access to broadband, but what good does it do if it's basically capped at-or-around dial-up per-month limits, and has other arbitrary restrictions on it?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
You can't get 10 MBps or 100 Mbps Internet links in the San Fernando Valler or the Washington-New York City area. At least, not without paying close to $1000 a month.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I live in Lancaster, PA. Yeah, I'm surrounded by Amish country, but I'm on a main thoroughfare between Harrisburg and Philadelphia, and I live in the city where the population density is near 10,000 people per square mile. I know for a fact that there's dark fiber under my block because I talked to a guy who was trying to sell it to my former employer.
I also know that most people on my block are young professionals who would snap up really great broadband for about $50/month. But is there an option for this? Heck no. Verizon and Comcast would have a conniption and the Public Utility Commission, a wholly owned subsidiary of Comcast and Verizon, would kill any startup in a heartbeat Is there any way for my city to tell Verizon and Comcast where to put their "broadband" and roll its own? Of course not. Ed Rendell saw to that, and now municipal broadband won't ever happen in Pennsylvania.
So here I am, stuck paying Comcast $80/month for 3.0M/384kbps broadband and basic cable. Why? Because the government, a wholly owned subsidiary of Comcast, keeps competitors out of the market. And my other choice is to switch to Verizon and have all incoming ports blocked and have even slower access (1.5M/384kpbs). Or blackmail Comcast into lowering the price for six months by threatening to switch.
Secondly, the options in NYC don't compare favorably to the options in Seoul or Tokyo or Stockholm. They can get 100Mbps symmetrical access with a static IP for half of what I'm paying. That's an impossibility in any city of the US, even though the population density is the same.
So, you see, it's not about land area or population density. It's about the greed and laziness of the service providers and the idea that people don't have any way of forcing the issue.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Did you even read the damn thing? There's a lot of metrics in the report, not just one, and RIGHT BELOW the metric you are referring to is a comparison between
%population living in urban areas vs. broadband adoption. It found no significant coorelation. Therefore you're wrong, and there must be another reason. There is simply **no excuxse** for the US. Our system is broken.
Try gov't sanctioned monopolies and you may be looking in the right place.
I'm sorry to say but costs and competition are poor excuses for having no broadband available or having it cost much. You state that in other countries where broadband adoption is higher the government through state owned telco has made it priority to have broadband adoption high, its not true either. Just to give you an example...
Finland is a country of 5 million peoples. The population density is 16/km. There is only one metropolitan area, Helsinki, with little over 1 million inhabitants. The other few major towns are barely over 200 thousand inhabitants. Broadband is available almost in all corners of Finland, except some northern and eastern rural areas. Even in these rural communities, usually broadband is at least available in the centre of the community. If you live in a town you can get 8mb dsl-connection with 39 and 24mb with 49. I myself have 1mb connection which costs 24.90. Even if you live in a rural area, like my parents: 5km to community centre (community total population little over 6000) and 20km to nearest town (36000) you can get broadband connection with acceptable price. You may think that government has lend a hand in here, but that isn't the case like I said. In Finland before 90s telecoms sector consisted from independent local phone companies and state owned Tele. After deregulation in the beginning 90s markets because free to competition and local phone companies loosed their monopoly to their wires. In example you can start virtual operator in broadband or in mobile business very easily by renting other operators wires and equipment as needed. And to say it again, Finnish government didn't put any pennies to build up the infrastructure, the playing field was totally left open to companies.
When you compare Finland to US states, in population density Finland is in the same bar as Colorado or Maine.
And on a note on competition. Competition really does work. Here in Finland local telecom operators have had to update their networks and try as hard as possible to get people take broadband because otherwise soon they wouldn't have no customers at all. In here mobile operators have been very aggressive and almost everybody have mobile phone and more and more people use it as their only phone. Also by introduction of GPRS and later EDGE and UTMS networks, there is pressure from mobile operators to get customers adopt mobile broadband from them. So competition and costs of operation are not real reasons for not having or having costly broadband access.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
buddy.. the companies didnt lay the wires, the US government provided the majority of the funding.
The "companies" then bribed the government under the premise (outright lie) that they did lay the infrastructure.
Imagine if a trucking company claimed they laid the highways.. same thing.
would you tolerate a trucking company being allowed to lock out all other trucking companies, allowing them to jack up the price of every product in your local grocery store?
no? well then why do you tolerate it with internet? people in nations with real internet competition pay half the price we do for twice the speed!
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Also (referring to the slashdot summary)
... :-)
Comment 10. England, U.K.? Heck they are the same let's use them interchangeably.
Oh dear oh dear please dumb American cousins* please be careful, going into a pub in Glasgow and loudly exclaiming "my it's good to be here in England!" could be bad for your health.... please note 'England' and 'U.K.' are not interchangeable expressions for the same place.
* I know it's only a minority of folk in the USA who are dumb, we've got loads of stupid people here as well who would likely make an equivalent mistake. In fact I am so dumb you'll have to tell me what the equivalent stoopid thing to say would be if I walked into a bar in the USA