Slashdot Mirror
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?
Most of the contry was settled with the cheap gas in mind. So a large part of the population is decentralized.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Maybe we can reduce that lag if we install broadband. I hear ping times are noticeably faster than dial-up...
This might have something to do with the US being such a big country. It's quite easy to put cables through a heavily concentrated Asian population. It's quite another thing to lay thousands of miles of cable across the United Staes.
There should be a "-1:Groupthink"
<snide-remark>With intelligent leadership like that, it makes you wonder how we can be lagging so far behind.</snide-remark>
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
Why don't we create a mob to go and rob rich people to make sure the poor have broadband? Never mind we already have government to do that. But seriously I would hate to have our broadband run as poorly as Canadian health care.
Rural areas do not have enough subscriber density for the telcos to spend $$$$ on deploying networks. Most of the networks are DSL based which are very distance sensitive, problematic for deployments of high-speed in low population densities . Networks are a city thing generally speaking - if you're living in the country to get away from the city - network access will be something you are getting away from! Same with loud neighbours, pollution, crime, etc, etc. I'm not saying that rural communities shouldn't have high-speed, but business is business. Why would a telco spend a bunch of money for no return? It doesn't add up. I know rural areas don't even have cable tv sometimes - no one seems to complain about that. Coax cable is an excellent medium for low densities as signals travel 10 to 20 times farther down the same lineage when compared with twisted pair.
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.
Cue the 200 "US has so much more land area than _____, so that's why" threads. I think this story has been a repeat on Slashdot for a good portion of 6 years, if not more.
You're nothing; like me.
threaten its ability to maintain its technological lead
What technological lead? The "U.S." doesn't have one. All we have is the honor of being home-port to a bunch of large multinational corporations, who seem to do most of the actual production, and they do most of their manufacturing and an increasing amount of their research overseas. We couldn't make half the stuff that "American" companies sell, and U.S. consumers take for granted; it's all made and increasingly designed overseas.
We're a market for goods and capital, and a source of lawyers, marketers, and middle-managers. And "intellectual property," which the rest of the world could quickly decide to do without, if it wanted to.
I think history is going to look back, and see the Internet as the last significant achievement of a dying empire.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
So, what is holding us back?
One word: Comcast
$60 / month for cable internet is the worst screwing I've ever received.
I'm sure this will all get sorted out soon. I distinctly remember George Bush promising broadband for all by 2007. Please don't say that we're going to end up with "broadband for some, tiny American flags for others." I won't believe it.
Does this study differentiate between residential broadband and broadband being brought into a business or government entity? It seems to me that broadband is very prevalent in the US where it counts: at work and school. At home it's not. I'm sure that price and availability are factors, but I imagine lack of desire to switch to broadband is just as equal a factor. There are a lot of people who just don't care if AOL is a little bit faster if all they're going to be doing is checking e-mail and using AIM.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I live in Farmington Utah which is in Davis County. I have two real broadband choices DSL via MSN/Qwest or Cable via Comcast. I pay roughly 50 bucks a month for a max of 6mbps downstream and a less then 1mbs upstream. Seems ok but talking to other people in different parts of the country they get better or worse speeds but they always pay less. Overseas is even worse, they always get better speeds for better prices. So I would say yes based on my anecdotal evidence the US is lagging behind nations with broadband coverage. But as far as my complaining goes I don't know how to overcome this. Some places like Japan, Taiwain have very compact living arrangements making it easy to drop small amounts of cable giving large chunks of the population fast access. I think in the US we have a more distributed society and live farther away from each other. So while this can be overcome it means broadband companies have to lay more cable/fiber/wire which they don't want to do. I think what we need to do is get a little prodding/incentive from the federal government to wire up the country and make broadband more accessible and cheap. So that's my 2 cents
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
The Tubes are cloging.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Is the percentage of people on broadband a even valid benchmark of technological ability of a nation? Maybe a large amount of people don't have broadband because they don't want it? My parents live in a little town in the northern Great Plains and they recently got DSL, not because they were chomping at the bit to get broadband, but because the internal modem in their computer went bad and it would have cost them as much to get that replaced by the local computer guy as it would for the DSL installation charge. Otherwise, they would have stayed with dialup because that is sufficient for their online usage.
IMHO, the only people who harp about this are the companies trying to get a govt subsidy.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Don't think either of them is in the world top three, are they? For the Asian area, Japan would doubtlessly be the leader in broadband access, whereas in Europe many countries have either higher broadband densities than England and/or cheaper broadband access (like $35/month for a 20Mb DSL in France, for example). Should it be understood that US lie even behind England and China?
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.
The press says regurgitates the same story!
Until something actually changes, let this subject die...
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
Does your existing infrastructure meet your existing needs?
Does your projected infrastructure meet your projected needs?
Are you losing significant opportunities due to present or future shortcomings?
If the answers are yes, yes, and no then you are OK, even if you aren't at the top of the rankings.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Why do these articles appear once a month?
Broadband access in the US "trails" for the same reason mass transit lacks.. population density.
There are more reasons, of course, but ISPs have no motivation to expand services if they won't make money by doing so.
Now can we please stop posting these articles?
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
A: depends on what country you are talkin about.
In some third world countries its far less expensive to develope the wireless route then to lay cable.
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...
I had 10 Mbit for a bunch of years and paid ~40 euros/month. I've had 100 Mbit for two years now and I'm paying slightly less.
Should you be as unfortunate as not to have fiber optics to your house (typically outside of city environments) you can be forced to suffer ADSL which typically ranges from 5-20 Mbit downstream and 1-5 mbit upstream. And guess what - you pay more than for the 100 Mbit line.
So price/Mbit isn't a very good metric.
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.
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?
"California leads the nation in agricultural production, followed by Texas, Iowa, Kansas and Nebraska, according to the 1992 Census of Agriculture"
http://www.nass.usda.gov/Census_of_Agriculture/ind ex.asp
California also still has a small town that you can't call a number directly. You have to go through an operator just like in Mayberry.
It's in the hills and cell phones don't work there. The phone company won't upgrade because there's not enough of a population for them to care. Damn, I can't think of the name of the place. Article in the Sacramento Bee about 5 years ago.
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
The cost and poor quality of service aren't from population density
oh really?
the usa is more sparsely populated, and is much larger, than the broadband penetration leaders like south korea
this makes perfect sense to me, strictly as a function of the sheer number of new wires you need to run
now if someone made a comparison between south korea and say, the bay area to the san fernando valley or the washington-new york city corridor, approximate equally sized, equally densely populated areas, then you have a metric useful to me
but when you are comparing as small and as densely populated as south korea with a country that includes places like winnemucca nevada and red lodge montana, i'm really don't put much stock in the comparison on a national
the metric itself seems fundamentally skewed since it doesn't take into account some basic geographic realities
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So, what is holding us back?
One word. Lobbyist. How many times have you heard about the fights to stop the propagation of the FreeNets? These companies don't want to competition and they damn sure don't want someone to give the people something free that they could be charging for! Capitalism makes everyone rich, Capitalism not held in check makes *everyone else* poor.
Figured some price comparisons were in order:
I've got a 10 mbps LAN connection, I live in Sweden and pay the equivalent of $28 a month. Though, that is a student price, twice that for non-students.
How about you?
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
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.
This is pure capitalism. Thanks to all the competition in the broadband market, the US is well covered and the prices are great.
No... wait....
Most places are under a monopoly leading to high prices ($60 a month for 2mbps), bad service, late coming to the area, etc.
Let's look at me. I didn't get cable modem access until about 2001 or 2002 despite living near a HUGE development area. One of the fastest growing counties in the entire country at the time. And I'm in a rich/dense neighborhood. You'd think that would spur them.
Nope. I had to pay for ISDN at INSANE prices.
What about DSL? Still not available. "Too far out.". My guess is they just don't want to compete with the established cable. But I don't get a choice of cable so my prices are high and my service is terrible.
Signing up so that only one cable operator or local phone company can operate in an area is one of the worst decisions a municipality can make.
Please, Time Warner, come save me from Comcrud.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Need I mention more?
...a situation which could threaten its ability to maintain its technological lead.welcome our new T-CXR'ing overlords.
I always thought the more a certain product or technology was adopted, the lower the price would be. But if you have regular cable internet from companies like Cablevision, you're paying between $45-55 PER MONTH! They raise the price EVERY YEAR. I finally got "smart" and switched to AT&T DSL, which is only $24.99/mo, even though it's at a slower speed than cable. But the savings per month is different. I think it's funny/ironic/sad that the company that basically made broadband mainstream now lags so far behind, of all places, China.
All we have is the honor of being home-port to a bunch of large multinational corporations
Unlike the UK, Germany, France, Japan, Korea...? I don't get how your diatribe against globalism has anything to do with whether there is an "America" or not. Is Japan not "Japan" because it sells most of its goods overseas, and built its post-war economy around American industrial economic principles? Because the UK liberalized its economy during the Thatcher era to open up more foreign investment and spur growth, is the UK now less "British?"
We're a market for goods and capital, and a source of lawyers, marketers, and middle-managers.
Again, this is unlike other countries with modern economies in what respect? You seem to be implying that being a market somehow makes us *only* a market and nothing else. Oh, right, we also provide lawyers, marketers, and middle-managers. I'll tell that to all of the programmers and entrepreneurs I know. They'll be startled to find out they don't exist.
And "intellectual property," which the rest of the world could quickly decide to do without, if it wanted to.
Intellectual property is not a purely American concept. America actually had to modify its copyright laws to join the Berne Convention. The fact that as soon as you create a work it has copyright attached to it is a product of the Berne Convention, which was first established in 1886 by Europeans, not Americans. Check out the Paris Convention as well, which covers patents. I know it's all the rage to blame America for the poor state of the intellectual property regime, but it can't be gotten rid of quickly or easily, as you imply. Americans aren't the only ones with a vested interest in it.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Yeah, WOW is based here. Clogs the tubes.
So far as I've seen, the only people that bring this up are trying to sell something. Politicians like talking about the US being "behind" other countries 'cause it sounds good and will get them votes, cable companies and telcos talk about it because it'll make them more money and magazines talk about it because it'll sell ads. If people are really clamoring for faster access to the Internet and someone can make money at it, why isn't it available?
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?
Pure population density may not be the cause, but it might be a related factor. Consider states like North Dakota which, for years now has been seeing out-migration. Although the market may be good, there are a lot of people living there who want broadband access, the total population has been slowly decreasing as residents move to population centers in other States.
If you are an investor or broadband provider, what motivates you to invest in infrastructure in a place where you will almost certainly have FEWER customers next year?
Also, although some very good observations have been made about the spacing and distance between small towns, this analysis still leaves one problem unanswered. In states like South Dakota, more than 50% of the population lives OUTSIDE of town. (At least, according to MS Encarta, circa 2000) Many of these people live miles from their nearest neighbor. Will it ever be cost-effective to run a wire for 20 miles to serve one customer?
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
The telcos have been too busy lobbying Congress and suing State/Local government to prevent "competition" from municipalities that they don't want to service anyway!
Hmmm...let's see...under what conditions does an under-serviced market exist...
Clue: it isn't in a capitalist free market.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
Seeing as how DSL just became available in my neighborhood just this year (though Verizon has been tempting me with offers in the mail for the last 5 years), I kinda doubt this.
Verizon is also supposed to offer unbundled ("naked") DSL - that is, without a requirement to have Verizon phone service. When I say they are supposed to, I mean they are required to by law. They've been dragging their feet on this for years now and the FCC does nothing.
Which is what it comes down to. Since 1996, the FCC has ceased to become a regulatory entity (except when it comes to selective obscenity persecutions), and has become instead an industry protection racket. Other countries have stronger regulations. In the US the market fails, but as long as corporate profits are high, we're told it's a success.
I'd guess this has at least something to do with the weak offerings in the U.S.
So even if fiber connections do show up at US homes, it will still be inferior, artificially crippled, and overpriced.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
When you have the ability to offer Unlimited Broadband that is in fact, limited to 200GB -- how do you expect commercial adoption of any major technologies by the US when everybody is trying to make pennies on bandwith? Even more stupidly, do people not realize that vast broadband adoption and usage only expand our economy as a whole, and give us the ability to compete in markets we currently do not. Look at South Korea for this example.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
It took us several years to break apart AT&T, just to get back essentially four phone companies in the USA. All of Judge Greene's decisions were subverted by a bribed congress. It's no wonder their stock price is low-- we hate them-- and they can't get sufficient capital. Add in the move from landlines (tip and ring) to mobile/cellular, and they struggle. It used to be easy to get rights-of-way, and infrastructure. Consolidation and debt load on the telcos caused massive problems, as did poor choices (ATM) in infrastructure. Add into the mix, the lies and hubris of Enron, mix in a little MCI for fun, and the communications companies that really mattered have spoiled it for themselves.
Worse, we have no useful or standardized taxonomy to measure broadband penetration. It gets worse when you see municipalities from LA and SF to Philly and Boston doing their own muni-WiFi because coverage sucks so uniformly. Add in the prospect of the messyness of "net neutrality" and horrid leadership from the FCC and a bribed congress, and we've fallen behind because of our own stupid mistakes. It won't get fixed soon. Sorry.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
medical care... Kyoto... gun control...
Seriously though, the argument that population is too decentralized to support broadband doesn't wash. As we speak wireless broadband is being made available to every community in Nunavut, and you don't get a population density lower than that.
It's a question of political will and nothing else.
Three Squirrels
You have to remember that countries like India and China have basically skipped over entire economic and industrial phases that took the United States years to pioneer. India and China are essentially building a communications network from scratch. The U.S. spent the better part of the 20th century laying vast amounts of copper wires to create the largest telephone network in the world. Unfortunately, such infrastructure has become hopelessly outdated and expensive to upgrade. I would argue it is easier to build a broadband fiber optic infrastructure from scratch than to build a new one on top of our existing copper infrastructure.
I live in one of the most densely populated regions in the US and arguably the center of the tech industry. Yet my choice for broadband is either a single cable company, SBC or several CLECs like Speakeasy. Not only that, but in the last couple of places that I lived, I always was at the max range of the DSLAM, which meant that my connection was regularly crap.
The problem is not location. The problem is local governments being cahoots with telecom monopolies who love nothing more than charging through the roof for crap connections. Yes, other nations have telecom monopolies as well, but for some reason they're not facing the same kind of problems. I suspect that the difference is that with a state monopoly, you can vote for change. With a government sanctioned economic monopoly, you can only bend over.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Maybe the FCC is too busy looking at boobies on TV and wringing their hands while they pander to right wing talking heads who demand we all watch "Saving Grace" and "Touched by an Angel" (while we trade gay sex for meth in the basement) and levy hefty fines every time a nipple appears on our screens... and censor our content and chase people around who download content, and sue people for their wireless and hmmm wait... broadband?
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
*** Note: I'm not saying everything is perfect here (esp. in the land of telecos/govt granted monopolies), but that the many
except for canada, those countries are a lot smaller
and canada has entire regions that are entirely unpopulated, meaning the broadband penetration rate there hardly figures in the ranking. i don't think the broadband penetration for nunavut skews canada's ranking as much as the broadband penetration for wisconsin skews the usa's ranking
in other words, 90% of canada's population lives with 100 miles of the us border. that tends to make their wiring a little easier as opposed to a country whose less populated regions are still densely populated enough as to skew the results a lot more when making such a coarse-level comparison like this
so i'm still unimpressed
now, if you gave me a comparison that compared equally sized, equally dense subregions of the countries being ranked, then you'd be giving me some useful information
in fact, such a comparison might still show that the usa lags. i in fact don't doubt that the usa lags as i think its regulatory and business environment as compared to other countries hurts broadband penetration
however, the metric used to rank the usa here is still horseshit
sorry
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
1. White Lies
2. Damn Lies
3. Statistics
Okay, let us consider some facts. Statistical comparisons are only relevant within the frame of their structure. (ie: When comparing the population of a nation to the percentage that have broadband access the U.S. ranks seemingly on the low-end.)
However, such a statistical relationship being used to insinuate that the U.S. is back-watered or behind where it should be (as is commonly done with such reports) is bad science for the reason that not all facts are evaluated in such statistical analysis.
For example, the population density of the various nations surveyed is not taken into account. To insult Alaska because it has a lower % broadband access than NYC is misleading. Alaska has a vastly larger amount of physical territory to cover than NYC. NYC has millions of residents where as Alaska has about 1/2 a million residents. To ignore the fact that much more cable, wiring and technology is needed to service that 1/2 million Alaskan residents compared to serving 10 million NYC residents is inappropriate.
England has most of it's population in a few centers, and it's overall land mass is fairly small. Although the highest density of population in the U.S. is in our cities we have large population groups spread in between and in our suburbs. These things need to be considered. There are a number of factors. That said, being 12th isn't that bad. I'd expect a smaller industrialized modernized nation to have a higher adoption. Some place like Taiwan or S. Korea I'd expect to have higher access. Less territory is covered, most of the population is in a close range.
I don't expect a nation with a dispersed population and the amount of land territory as the U.S. to place in the very top.
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.
dark fiber stays under the street and along the railroad tracks and pipelines.
you fire more up, there is much better communication between central offices.
none of it gets to the household.
if you've got 16 hops to get to a peering point, you need to consider another ISP. DSL has two parts. one is carraige to an ISP, the DSL section. the next is the terminating ISP, internet service provider. if they're at the end of a chain of tier 2 and 3 ISPs and 120 mS away from a tier-1 provider sitting on the backbone, that's where THAT issue is broken. with DSL from the major telco players, you generally have a choice of ISPs. in the case of Qwest, there are about 50 ISPs on the Minnesota list alone you can have terminate your line. or you can go with their own ISP service. or any of the national outfits.
YMMV depending on carrier. but check the ISP websites and see where their lines go, a quality outfit may just have their net statistics and maybe even wireouts to destinations posted in a noc.somebodys-isp.com page, and you can figure out who's closest to the backbone that you like the policies of.
no such choices with cable, for instance.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Wow. That has got to me one of the most ignorant and biggoted things I have ever seen on Slashdot. And you got modden insightful.
Let's try thinking, shall we?
The internet lets people in highly remote areas:
That's all I can think of off the top of my head, but.. I mean... WOW. I know /. hates the red states and red states may have low population density (look at large parts of Montana or even Nevada) but get a clue. This isn't 1900 any more. It's not like the people living in 1800s era cities in the "mountain country" like there were that the TVA was designed to help.
We have civilization here in the middle of the US, despite what stereotypical New York characters in sitcoms think.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
It isn't just that some people see no need for broadband in rural areas ... there are no options for those people in rural areas. The family farm is in Kansas, 7 miles from the nearest town and major highway. The only available option is dial-up internet access, just like nearly all of the state, geographically speaking. There is no cable service to the area, there is no telephone C.O. within range for DSL, and the population is too sparsely scattered to make even mesh wi-fi possible.
"Flame away, I wear asbestos underwear"
... that people in the US just assume we are the greatest without any perspective. I'd be glad to be wrong, but it's the impression I get from people, popular media, news, interviews, marketing, politics, ...
...
:) But, I expect you to know enough to know that someone else will not solve today's problems if you are not willing to.
It goes like this "We're great because we are the USA. Therefore what the USA does is great."
I see the people are the most powerful body within the US. When they awaken to a common idea it can be done. We used to be great for being who we are, not where we are. This had been the home to the can-do people who left their homeland to create a new life. That takes allot of will. It was also home to those that expressed their political opinions and ideas, are were driven from their homeland for doing so. In any case a great force in this land has been the can-do spirit. The American spirit moved mountains in it's day. This is the land that can reward the smart and hardworking people who don't give up and don't give in to fear.
It's a new day and fear seems to have become quite a good master. When it was rare to have a phone company or cable company in a city they would offer exclusive deals and work to attract them like a popular sports team. Now these are not such rare items, as in the past. These exclusive deals are made from fear. The fear that without them we would not find a way to get these services. We will. That is a given, but the fear can blind people of that and is great for the companies security and bottom line.
When the people are sick of this, so sick they forget to be lazy, then it will change. But for now we wont change. America is great because it's America, etc, etc, etc
Lazy people look for someone else for a solution and go back to their regularly schedule program or sporting event. They claim "Someone/The government should do something about this." Then the really energetic ones write a little to someone about it, or even a letter to the editor. While that is a first step, it's only that a first step. People who know how important the issues are should get in the ring and run for office. It does not have to be big. People here have written some amazing comments. I've read enough to know that some people here have good reason to run for office. I can't say I'd vote for all of you though.
Ugly or not, a large part of the Internet is the American dream, Liberty. America is about the liberation of it's own people. A lofty goal. Liberty can best be kept alive with ideas and opinions. It can also be kept alive with arms, sure, but I doubt anyone needs that kind of liberation in America, yet. Keeping the Internet free, simple, and growing is at least as important as the US Mail or the military. In this medium people can connect and learn. Sure, there are dangers, and they cannot all be avoided. Spam, sexual predators, scams, and so on. Freedom and Liberty comes at a price. We, not the government, must come up with a solution to these problems. That's our job. After all if you look at the Constitution of the United States you will find a single branch of government sits over the other three and grants them their powers though that document. It is "We the people of the United States"
It's high time the people did their job. It's you'll excise me I'll hop right off my soap box and get back to work.
Take care everyone.
-- Prepared at the direction of, or to be sent to Legal Counsel, in anticipation of litigation. Attorney Client Pri
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!!!!
Right, so because I live in Kansas means that I shouldn't have this 5Mbps Internet connection at home and 405Mbps connection at the office that is right across the street from an Internet2 drop. Heck, my research office (which is an old airplane hangar) in rural Douglas County has a 10Mbps line.
But I live in Kansas, a farming state, so I have "no idea" what I can do with all that bandwidth.
are a lot smaller than the usa
...and besides, if deeper cheaper us broadband penetration means more people with your level of demonstrated social hygiene get on the internet, perhaps it's for the best that it is expensive and difficult for you to get online ;-)
and canada has entire regions that are entirely unpopulated, meaning the broadband penetration rate there hardly figures in the ranking. i don't think the broadband penetration for nunavut skews canada's ranking as much as the broadband penetration for wisconsin skews the usa's ranking
in other words, 90% of canada's population lives with 100 miles of the us border. that tends to make their wiring a little easier as opposed to a country whose less populated regions are still densely populated enough as to skew the results a lot more when making such a coarse-level comparison like this
and before you tell me what an idiot i am again: i have no problem with the article's conclusion. i in fact don't doubt that the usa lags as i think its regulatory and business environment as compared to other countries hurts broadband penetration
but you need to give me a comparison between equally sized, equally dense subregions of the countries being ranked, then you'd be giving me some useful information. but currently the comparison is crap
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You have good reason to be angry RS, and the lame broadband issue is just the tip of the iceberg. We're getting screwed on healthcare for the same reasons. Another huge one: the miltary industrial complex and their current campaign to burn trillions of our dollars while generating more war and terrorism around the world. You are correct as to the cause: too many politically clueless people led by right-wing robber-barons and their propaganda-spewing lackeys. I also wonder why things aren't worse than they are. I suspect it's due in part to inertia, and in part to the large number of people in this country who do have at least some clue about good government, economics, education, environment, social and foreign policy. The recent elections were a hopeful sign that we might be headed back in the right direction.
Building a better ribosome since 1997
in other comments underneath my grandfather post:
1. the usa is a lot bigger than those countries
2. in the case of canada, 90% of the population lives within 100 miles of the us border
furthermore, i have no doubt the usa lags in price and penetration due to the business and regulatory environment. in other words, i have no problem with the conclusion of the article
all i'm saying is that the metric they use is horseshit. they should compare equally dense, equally sized subregions of the countries involved. then they have a valid metric, that's all my point is. if they did that, their argument, which i agree with, would be even more valid
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Zero'th is the place to be :)
Bush wants to improve the zerabilityment of the US of A broadband situation.
So say we all
90% of you live within 100 miles of the us border
;-P
why do you huddle around that which you denigrate?
so to retain your moral highground, you need move to nunavut... then get back to me with your holier than thou attitude from there over your 5000 ms ping satellite connection/ 56k POTS modem
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Since the USA "lags the world" in broadband, and is in 12th place, that means the world must be composed of no greater than 23 nations. It IS a small world, after all!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
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.
Greed, a/k/a the "bottom line". The U.S. government won't touch it, remember government intervention = not truly a free market = socialism, and if that happens we're all going to rot in Godless-commie hell forever. Corporations are looking at their bottom line, and altruism isn't as profitable as the high fees you can charge when you're keeping expenditures at a minimum (upgrading infrustructure as slowly as possible, look at 3G) and discouraging competition (look at the opposition to loosening up telco restrictions, and look at the hoops cable companies have to jump through to get a local dial tone in most small towns.)
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
One of the Slashdot "big three articles" ("election stolen", "US broadband", and "what Bush did").
It misses out on one point, the existing instance of internet penetration was previously high which lessens the incentive to move to Broadband for many people.... not to mention that even if some countries might have a lower population per square mile, the US has some of the most decentralized urban patterns on earth.
in canada, you wire toronto and vancouver and boom, you're done
nunavut hardly figures in your ranking, no?
meanwhile, take a sparsely populated (by usa standards), but still largely populated (by canadian standards) place like wisconsin, and you skew the usa's results far more than nunavut and it's 3 inuit and 5 polar bears
get it?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/net/inde x.html
And where are those homes? I can tell because I've seen them. They're in affluent suburbs. They're not running this stuff to middle class homes or rural areas or even upscale urban neighborhoods.
I can't get it where I live, even though my house costs as much as one in a neighborhood where it is available, and even though there are 100 residences per mile in my area, compared to 25-30 in these suburbs, meaning each mile of fiber is even more profitable.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
I'm sure Italy leads us in nice shoe ownership and France leads us in wine appreciation and Germany leads us in the BDSM scene and Japan kicks out butts in dating sim penetration.
But I don't think I'll lose sleep over any of those, either.
We see one of these articles like every six fucking months. This is probably the 9th or 10th article I've seem about this on Slashdot. There are a mixture of reasons why this is the case (sparse population, little government intervention to lower the costs of broadband, cheap dial-up and landline phone service), but, in the long term, it just doesn't matter that much.
When laying down fiber for an area with the same radius reaches 5x more people in Japan or South Korea than in the US
I'm not an electical/electronic engineer but uhh don't you end up saturating the cable after a while, and need to put down extra cables/routers/dooda's etc _because_ of all the people? Doesn't that increase your cost a lot?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Maybe people just don't care. Remember we have an aging population of baby boomers who, in my observations over the years, really don't give a shit about the things for which you need to have broadband internet.
Not everything is the Eternal Struggle Against The EVIL Corporations.
Just the other day on the radio they were talking about free wireless all over Los Angeles and how it would really be great for the city. No one was able to explain why, though. None of the reporters even thought to ask. Same with handing out laptops to the poor. OK, then what? I'm not opposed to these things, I just want to know what folks think is going to happen, and some sort of empirical foundation for that conclusion.
I asked for an example of a more decentralized country with better broadband service. Clearly, I have to define what I mean by "decentralized". Specifically, I need to clarify how it is different from having low population density. I will define centralized country as the one where the density of population is proportionately high in the dense minicipal centers vs less dense municipal centers. More precisely, if municipal centers are ordered by the density of population, The more centralized country would be with the one higher H/L ratio, where H would be the people living in the cities in the top 35% in that order and L would be the number of people living in the towns in the lowest 35% of that order. I am claiming that US would be one of the least centralized countries. While even Canada would be more centralized. To put it simply, more people live in the cities in other places than do in the US.
On a different note, people site all kinds of anecdotal evidence about broadband available in some small towns in Canada, but that is not a statement about the availability of broadband in in all small towns of Canada.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
The state of broadband in the US reflects its users. Lots of people in the US know very little about what occurs outside their borders. Most broadband customers feel that $50.00/mo. for a 3 Mbps/512k connection is normal. Furthermore, they think that is all they need. I've heard plenty of people sing the praises of Verizon's $20.00/mo. 768k/128k DSL....why? Because it is cheap, and faster than dial-up. In their minds, there is no reason to spend almost 3x as much for faster service.
Thanks to this type of consumer, and local monopolies, $50.00 low-speed "broadband" is the norm in areas that have access to broadband.
Remember the Tennessee Valley Authority from your history class? Why was it important?
Our government realized that electricity was so important to the growth of our nation, that it could not be left to an unregulated market. Our government knew that if left to private industry, utility service would only be made available to densely populated areas. Our government needs to realize that high-speed data service now is as important as electricity or running water. For those that doubt that statement, try to apply for a job without using the internet. Sure, you can in some cases, but high-paying jobs almost require you to apply via electronic means.
We need to vote for guys that make this a priority (not Ted Stevens).
-ted
I think part of the problem is a significant number of people don't yet see broadband as an essential service, such as electricity or telephone service. If they did I think you might have a situation similar to electric cooperatives. A big reason that large segments of rural America have electric power is that people decided it was an essential service and banded together in electric cooperatives to build infrastructure and provide the service. There are certain segments of the country that still might not have electricity if it weren't for these cooperatives. I can see a situation in which broadband cooperatives spring up, once a significant portion of the population decides that broadband is an essential service.
Maybe I'm looking at this in the wrong light but at this point I don't think so.
One of the few truly interesting comments in this whole story (not to mention plenty relevant to the discussion at hand), and it gets modded offtopic? Somebody please fix this.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
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
All of this comes down to money.
/29 static for $350 a month.
In St. Louis, broadband is availble and works well in the newer western burbs.
I live in South City.
Until last summer, I could get broadband from the cable company and SBC(ATT) and the varous clecs.
Then the storm hit last summer and destroyed much of the infrstructure in my area.
At that time I had a business connection from Charter 1M up / 5m down
The storm ripped all of the telco/electric/cable wires from the house. Three weeks later, the cable was still down.
I was told by Charter that they do not intend to rebuild this area thus they discontinued the circuit.
DSL was not an option, I have tried several times and it does not work.
The lines in my area predate WW2. I am 5580 feet out on path 1 and 9500 feet out on path 2.
Officially ATT will not install dsl in my area even though the CO is dsl capable.
So I ordered a T1 from Speakeasy.
Here is the fun... ATT at first refused to install it.
After it was finally installed, it was turned up without a class a inspection and failed miserably.
ATT refused to support it because they used hxdsl for the circuit and they are only required to provide best effort support on it.
They tnf the circuit. TNF = technically not feasable.
This means that the telco is off the hook from supporting the install.
ATT installed a second T1 and also TNF it.
So speakeasy installed a Third T1.
This one worked but the rj45 on the smartjack was bad.
ATT refused to fix it because they could not find any errors when they looped from the co.
I put a hard loop on my inside wiring and there was no errors from pattern testing.
An att tech came out and did find that the jack was bad but refused to fixit because ATT had already determined that this t1 was in TNF status.
I am now in the process of getting a third t1 ( traditional 4wire point to point t1) from XO installed.
Right now, ATT is placing the ticket in jeopordy status becasue there are too many pairs of copper going to a residence.
My only other option is a local wireless company who seems to not want customers.
If I lived in a rural area, I expect problems installing a T1.
In fact I have a friend who lives in Hopedale Illinois (BFE) and he has had a T1 running for about six months with no problems after the initial install.
According to the news today, here in Sweden there are only 136,000 homes (total homes about 4,400,000 as of 2004) without broadband access, which would give us close to 97%.
Choices? Well, there's the cable company (Comcast) and a few DSL resellers. Those resellers are all selling PacBell DSL service, so technically there's just one DSL provider as well.
Back when I moved into this house I tried to get DSL - Earthlink had a good offer. After weeks of missed connections and contradicting stories they told me I was too far from the DSLAM and cancelled my order. Covad was much more efficient in running me around the phone tree to the "too far out" conclusion. Finally I went directly to PacBell - and surprise, I was well within range. They shipped an install kit almost immediately and the installer followed a few days later.
So I've got what they call "Business Class" DSL service. A whopping 1.5 Mbps down and 128 Kbps up. WooHoo! At least I've got five static IP addresses and it only costs $100 per month. At least it's not capped; on a quiet night I've seen as much as 4.5 Mbps down. The price is outrageous - but there really isn't any other useful option.
Cable modem? The dirty secret of cable internet is that all the users in a "service area" are all on the same subnet - and all share the same gateway to a T1 class line. If you're the only one in the neighborhood using the internet it's very speedy. But in places like Silicon Valley where a large percentage of the population is connected - well, sharing that 1.5 between 40 or 50 people really sucks. No better than dialup in the evenings...
So let's talk infrastructure. The telephone lines in my neighborhood are underground; 26 gauge wires in bundles running between unsealed concrete boxes - and the connections are made with TelCo butt connectors. I see PacBell service people on the street almost weekly. They're having trouble providing reliable telephone service to all the houses and according to the service guys the wiring needs to be replaced - and it's not going to happen because of the costs. I wonder what it costs to have a service truck parked in our neighborhood.
The cable company came through a couple of years back with backhoes and cable trucks and ran fiber to every cable box location. They "filled in" their trenches and left a doorknob hanger to let us know that they'd be turning the fiber on very soon and they'd let us know when it was available. Still waiting; I suspect it's going to be a long, long time.
One thing both corporations are very good at is pushing through regular rate increases. The usual story is that they need more money to upgrade the infrastructure - but somehow the infrastructure doesn't ever really get upgraded. At least not in any way that provides more value to the customers...
All of the countries with higher instances of broadband-per-person have lower birth rates and family sizes than the US. Logical conclusion: large families should have more than one broadband connection so we can "catch up". If you have four kids and one broadband connection, you aren't patriotic! (Perhaps a better indicator for penetration might be "per household"...)
Entertain themselves when their local video store is tiny and there isn't a theather company anywhere near
You're obviously ain't a farmer... farming is HARD WORK, boy! No time for sittin in front of one of them eejiot boxes.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
There used to be plenty of up and comming competitors for broadband access, then the telcos bribe.. i mean "convinced" the FCC to help them shut them out, then offer them local monopoly contracts.
Or maybe "natural monopoly" has been replaced with a newspeak definition?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
I had the same issue. I live well within the DSL distance from the Central Office but could not get DSL. I called Verizon and asked why not. The reason, our neighborhood had a fiber combiner at the head of the copper infrastructure. There was no direct copper line to the CO. I now have four choices for broadband though, Cable, Satellite, wireless and Fiber Optic. Ten years ago I had two, dial-up or unidirectional cable modem. I tried cable modem when Adelphia finally installed bi-directional service. Service was abysmal and cost twice as much as Comcast (the next county over). As soon as Verizon installed fiber optic to the house, Adelphia dropped their price to match FIOS. I told them no dice, poor spotty service at any price wasn't worth it. One other note, most of the top countries have telcos that are monopoly or run by the government as opposed to the US.
> Broadband is more expensive here than in other nations, as well,
> almost 10 times as expensive by some estimates.
I've paid $15/mo for 1.5kbps+ DSL in Los Angeles, for years - you mean to tell me that there's a country where it's *even cheaper*??
In Australia at least, it's definitely not cheaper - worse, they have data caps everywhere. Just a few gigs a month can cost $40-$60, after which you're summarily knocked back to less-than-dialup speeds. And as far as we've been able to ascertain (trying to get broadband for the in-laws), there are NO unlimited-data plans offered by anyone.
I don't dispute that the US lags in many aspects of Internet services, but cost isn't necessarily one of them.
Perfectly Normal Industries
Moyers spent an hour on PBS discussing this problem and how US telecommunications companies have already been paid (by the government - i.e. by us) to provide 'last mile' fiber service, but have been stonewalling for over a decade.
...
Heres the URL to watch a video of the program: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/net/inde x.html (click Watch at upper right of page)
For a transcript: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/moyersonamerica/print/ne tatrisk_transcript_print.html
To whet your appetite:
RICK KARR: The United States is the birthplace of the Internet and the home of high-tech, but we're no longer tops in the world in high-speed online connections. In fact, the U.S. has dropped below tenth place and compared to some other countries, we're pretty much crawling along the information superhighway.
BRUCE KUSHNICK: America's screwed. I mean we basically are becoming technologically deficient.
RICK KARR: Telecom analyst Bruce Kushnick says that the only thing the U.S. is doing quickly is falling behind.
BRUCE KUSHNICK: Right now what we have basically is sort of like, you know, still pictures versus what's really going to happen next which is full motion video everywhere. We're close to the dinosaurs compared to what these other countries are going to be developing in the next couple years.
RICK KARR: Kushnick says that's because telephone companies back in the 1990s promised that they'd hook us up to the information superhighway, but then reneged on that promise.
RICK KARR: The network that they promised to build, what could it do? Give us a sense of had they actually built this network what could we have on our homes today?
BRUCE KUSHNICK: Video basically allows us to do, for example, high-level video conferencing. Multi-video conferencing basically is the ability to have four or five or six people, with large screens, not these small little things, but large screens sitting around, seeing each other. What we have now is these little screens on the TV's, you know, on your computer that are about this big and everything is jerky. Everything would be smooth, everything would look like as if we were in the middle of STAR TREK.
RICK KARR: According to Teletruth, phone companies took $25 billion in tax write offs while revenues soared 128%. But they didn't build the fiber network they promised.
BRUCE KUSHNICK: So, with all this cash cow, what do you do with the money? They should have said, "Why don't we build the best network we can and therefore it'll basically, the infrastructure, and basically make our infrastructure the best in the world." And they didn't do that. They basically took the money and ran.
BILL MOYERS: When we began our reporting, my colleagues Peter Bull and
RICK KARR: wanted to call this story "David versus Goliath." They were struck by the fact that after the phone companies failed to build the information superhighway they had promised, several towns and cities across the country took matters into their own hands and decided to build their own fiber optic networks. That has landed almost every one of them in a David versus Goliath battle as phone and cable giants push back, determined to outlaw what they call "unfair competition" from municipalities. For a case study, Peter and Rick traveled to Lafayette, Louisiana, the heart of Cajun country.
JOEY DUREL: We have an out-migration problem with our young people from Louisiana, and I felt it was time for politicians to quit talking and do something.
RICK KARR: Something like building every home and business in town its own fiber optic connection to the information superhighway.
DON BERTRAND: We see telecommunications in the way of Internet, in the way of fiber connectivity as something that should be available to everyone.
The only thing shocking about this articles is that people still believe America is the best at ANYTHING. The dollar gets stomped by the pound, Canada has a much higher level of homeownership, the EU has a higher rate of education among citizens... Note, when I say this, I've been an American citizen, born of American citizens, all my life. The problem with America is our politicians forget that they're voted in by people, not corporations, but they cater to them almost exclusivly when passing laws. Lack of competition, lack of interest for investment and lack of social pressure is exactly why fibre is JUST taking a hold here. Nations like Japan and Korea have had fibre for a long time. Something else that this study may or may not take in to account is the term "broadband" or "high-speed". In the US, anything faster than dial-up (56K) is "broadband" where Canada considers 1.5 symetrical to be that. If we were to use that measurement, the US would rank even lower.
I worked for a major equipment provider doing fiber to the home. No name, but the company's initials are Alcatel. The regulations around who could provide what and at what rate are ridiculous. The telcos have their territory marked, and the cable companies have theirs. The telcos fight to provided video, while the cablers fight to provide voice. Neither wanted to buy anything until the regulation landscape was/is clear to charge for the services that the equipment offered. Regulation is a major wet blanket.
Then there's the hardware. PSTN is required by law to be battery backed (in case the lights go out, the phones should still work). The company I was working for was investigating the ridiculous idea of pushing 200V through the current corroded spaghetti mash we call an infrastructure, in order to have enough electrons to run a box on the side of the house. Broadband access is limited by the desire to rely on 0-cost legacy wire that's already installed.
0-cost installation and 0-intelligence legacy regulations. That's why we're not first.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Just for info copied from www.upc.nl
A euro is about $1.30
monthly price 14,95 22,95 32,95 39,95 59,95
Download 384 Kbps 1,5 Mbps 3 Mbps 6 Mbps 20 Mbps
Upload 128 Kbps 256 Kbps 1 Mbps 1,5 Mbps 2 Mbps
Can't set the font, and html table elements not allowed, but anyway you get 3Mbps/1Mbps for about $25 per month in pretty much all of the Netherlands, where there is cable by upc.
Bart
I live in New York City and I routinely have large files to upload to servers. As an example, I'm in the process of publishing OpenOffice.org Portable 2.1 (a package of OpenOffice.org that runs from USB flash drives, iPods, etc). OpenOffice.org's source code is nearly 200MB. I've been trying to upload it to SourceForge for the past 6 hours. Hiccup in the line... and start over.
I currently have service from Time Warner. It's about 8M down and a bit under 500K up at any given time. It's the fastest they offer, and it's the only cable company I can use in my building. I could get DSL access, but the fastest available would be 6M down and 768K up for $115 a month. And Verizon's FIOS service that will offer 15M down and 2M up for $50 a month isn't available here yet.
Portable versions of Firefox, GIMP, LibreOffice, etc
actually, Wikipedia says USA = 3,755,241 miles2 (maybe forgot to convert km to miles?) in comparison Canada = 3,511,023 mi it is a silly argument altogether using just the area as pointed out voluminously above but anyway...
I had both broadband from cable and DSL here at one time or other and now am on dial-up. Why? mainly because there is nothing worth the cost of broadband. I'll list just a few...
1.) Why do you need to pay for broadband if all you do is a handful of websites and email? Answer, you don't.
2.) The cost of broadband far outstrips the cost of dial-up.
3.) There are at most only 6 providers of broadband in the US. That is far to few to realistically say they are competitive especially when the telcos / cable are granted monopoly powers in any given community. Most small communities only have two broadband providers (usually cable and DSL through their telco). Some more rural ones don't even have that.
4.) It is far to easy with broadband to be tempted to do something illegal and wind up on the MAFIAA hit list. Add to that the wider target you present to hackers by having an "alway on" connection and it is little wonder that the botnet situation is way out of control.
In summary, broadband was a fad I went through and find no longer worth the effort and expense and risk.
B.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
"and yet both next door neighbors have it, as well as most of the surrounding houses. One next-door house is even further away from the CO than I am."
If you can manage them to do it, try to have them check the end to end cable, from your house to the CO, when i first tried to get DSL they told me the same thing, but when they checked end to end they noticed that a loop of wire was connected somewhere along the way increasing my distance by about 1000', once they re-routed my connection i was then (amazingly) within the limit for DSL.. i have had their "premium" service ever since...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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?
Well yeah of course, but let me help you out. For starters, you have to understand that the internet is not a truck. I think you can figure the rest out on your own.
The enemies of Democracy are
I travel a lot, through the caribbean and europe.. just last year i was in several european countries and i was hard pressed to find someone that had broadband... in Ireland, Germany, Spain, France, England, and Italy. Also in various caribbean countries.. most people over there said it was available but was prohibitively expensive..Not even in internet cafe's ( which admittedly are everywhere in europe ) were the broadband speeds anything close to the typical cable modem available here in Florida.. ( $45 a month for a 10 megabit connection ).. How can we be playing "catch up"? From my personal experience, broadband is practically a way of life here in the USA.. and is considered a high luxury in places like europe..unless something changed since my last trip to europe last summer.. im just not buying it.
I'm genuinely shocked to see however, that we are still above China in terms of broadband installed base. Since they have 8x our population...
when you start to doubt yourself, the real world will eat you alive.
How did you get them to try? Remember this is SBC (SBC + pig + lipstick != AT&T). So far I can only talk with a service drone who take the order and gives it to a different department. They apparently ignore the comments area (like Comment: Next door neighbor has DSL). I just get a form letter back saying it is not available in my area. Maybe I can ask the Public Utilities Commission to look into 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
There are reasons, and there are excuses. If population density is the only problem, how come high-speed internet access costs so much more in New York City than Tokyo? They have similar density and size, yet Tokyo has much faster access available at a lower price.
While the US does have a more decentralized population than other developed countries, and that is a challenge, somehow we managed to get phone service to everyone at a price competitive with the rest of the world. The real reason is that when the government decides they want to help, they only ask companies with a vested interest in the status quo for advice. Many states have been cajoled by lobbyists into pasing laws banning municipal broadband. Why would cities need protection from themselves, exactly? Why aren't there laws banning municipal water and sewage for the same reasons? Or is it really that "Verizon doesn't want it.(tm)"
Seriously, if the worst you've got to complain about is that you're 12th, with only four major companies supplying last-mile access, come here. We've got precisely two companies supplying the last mile, and in our largest city we have only one choice for residential connections.
Consider that NZ is at the top of the OECD for the percentage of the population that actually uses the 'net, so it's not like we're a bunch of technophobes. We're just catching it up the arse from a rapacious monopolist incumbent, which thankfully is about to be unbundled. So, sorry, but y'all should get a grip. You're in the top half, we're in the bottom quarter!
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
You can get 6M/768k ADSL for $60/mo (from an ISP that's gotten the Broadband Reports "gold" award if those kinds of things matter to you). If you need more than the eight included static IP addresses, perhaps you should be looking at business level accounts. That's if you're in an SBC/AT&T area (like the vast majority of the Bay Area). If you're in a Verizon area, try $40/mo for a 3M/768k profile.
The revolution will be mocked
There is a local company here in Salt Lake city that provides most area's with 15mb connections for a decent price. However, these connections are only available in certain area's, and these areas just so happen to be area's where the city "agreed" to pay for installation of boxes, cables, etc... The cities where they did not agree, cannot get access to this type of broadband internet as its just too expensive for the company to pay for all that itself.
So where i see the problem is lack of support from the right people. If cities would help these companies out, and give the people what they wanted, wouldn't we all have a reasonably fast internet connection by now?
Oh, and save your old tires. Don't ask why.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
that rural canada is a lot more rural than the rural usa, and there's a lot more of it
in other words, i didn't miss what you said about those ratios, i dispute them
there's no way you are going to tell me that hundreds of thousands of acres of tundra are as equally populated as tens of thousands of acres of prairie
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Travel, and you will see.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
http://www.retelefo.ro/produsefo.php/ has a large list of fiber optics cable, I'm not a specialist but I can assume that a cable capable of 10 gbps transfer is less than 1$/meter (way less if you buy thousands of meters).
It does NOT cost a lot to make an infrastructure. You can easily install up to 50 cables that handle 10 gbps in one pipe, at once. Telecom companies could even share the costs of digging streets and stuff like that.
People in my country make agreements with ISP providers and pay about 70% of the fiber cable and the ISP installs it almost at his house. People have no problems paying up to 1 km of fiber cable and get good deals from ISP companies (for example 100 mbps up/down inside the country, 10 mbps down anywhere and about 3 mbps upstream for 80-150 dollars/month. In two years, the person that payed up to 800-1000 dollars for the cable manages to recover the cost (his bussines is much better, gains more clients through online activities and so on, he may even resell a part of the bandwith..)
What's the gain for the ISP? Customer helps the ISP extend its network and gets a good deal in return, ISP also has a location from where it can have deals with people close to this person. ISP extends, gains customers , a win-win situation.
There are funds to extend networks in USA, the only problem would probably be installing them in the underground and under highways I guess but it's possible. I think telecom companies are simply not interested to do this as long as they can "milk" you as much as they want.
Giant corporations are created by the government. They are chartered by the government. They are regulated by the government. 98% of the behavior you ridicule and hate is either required by regulation or statute. Given that arrogation of power over telcos (post roads etc. notwithstanding) isn't granted by the Constitution, and thus federal regulation of telcos is blatantly unconsitutional, this is a failure of government. You're just proposing more unconstitutional government intervention and higher taxation to provide government-financed infrastructure. We don't have government grocery stores, and we get provided pretty decent food because of it. The government school system has broken down to where it has become a prison system for indoctrinating its students ("Just another Brick in the Wall") in the primary efficacy of government solutions for all problems. And yet you propose more expensive (read "coercively-funded") bureaucratically-designed and -operated systems. You really think this will be better? Ah yes. And North Korea is a worker's paradise!!!
Muhahahahahah!
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
So, what is holding us back?
Greed. Duh.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
DSL qualification distance is the distance by wire, not as the crow flies or by road. Other limiting factors are pair gains, RIMs (Remote Integrated Multiplexors) and line quality, although RIMs can usually be fitted with a mini-mux card (basically a mini DSLAM) to enable DSL to the clients on that RIM. Here in Australia, RIMs arent really deployed anymore, with CMUX-AU used instead. Some more info and pictures here.
Don't tailgate - the end is near!
What's holding us back?
...profit!
Wait for it...
Neutiquam erro
I grew up in Germany in a rather rural area (Rheinland Pfalz). We lived in several different homes either in a town or in a smaller farming village. Essentially after living there for 20 years my parents have only just now gotten DSL because the cost of extending the service to a smaller population isn't worth it. They have a single phone line going into the village and only the person living on top of that line gets access (Just happens to be their landlord, we also had have a cell tower right next to the house on the attached barn). For years we would call and ask about ISDN simply to be told it won't happen. EVER.
As nice as it is to talk about other countries getting better broadband penetration this same scenario plays out everywhere. If you live in an isolated location with a low population density it just isn't worth providing high quality broadband service to you.
Maybe a wireless broadband distribution system with a much better range than currently available systems would lower the infrastructural costs and make broadband easier to extend and access to more rural areas anywhere. Maybe the government should seriously consider giving away spectrum licenses to small companies who can innovate a cheap / easily maintainable / low power / high bandwidth wireless solution for use in rural areas. I'd imagine such a solution would need to top the 512kb range, ideally sit in a 1mbs+ up and down range per connection and have a minimum range of 25miles. I bet there are a lot of corn farmers in Nebraska who'd love to get broadband but can't because they live so far apart that each one needs a dslam on property just to get a signal.
Not true. I have rural friends with satellites.
I'm an American living in the UK. Broadband access in London is OK, but in the countryside (I live in Dorset) my DSL service is only marginally better than dial-up. Sorry, but if this is the defn of 'broadband' access that this report uses, I'll take the American version
>>If population density is the only problem, how come high-speed internet access costs so much more in New York City than Tokyo?
Easy: unionized telco workers. How many unions are in Japan?
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
Good point. It isn't so much that they're in cahoots, it is that each party gets something very important from the other for which they are willing to endure quite a bit of pain. Local governments are willing to turn a blind eye towards creating a monopoly, as long as they get the money. Telcos are willing to tolerate the extortion money as long as they keep their monopoly status.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
I kept at it, kept trying new reps, the most you'll get over the phone is them testing with their remote diagnostics, but if you persist they will send someone to come to the house and try the lines. Once in a while you can get a good tech who will test the line from your house to the CO.. I had driven it myself (the lines are above ground so I could actually follow them) and i knew i was well within the distance limit, i just found a tech who listened and found the extra loop...
Don't let them say you are unavailable, get them to come out to your house to do an actual line test, then you can talk to the tech.
IT took me 6 months from beginning to end, but this was before anyone else in my neighborhood had it, should be easier for you if others already have the service and are farther away.
"Wow. That has got to me one of the most ignorant and biggoted things I have ever seen on Slashdot."
/. comment!
Hey that's crazy, your spell-checking software actually emboldened your spelling mistake for you, even in a
Population density is not the issue. Population concentration is the issue. Greenland for instance has an extremely low population density (people per area), but it is also the most urbanized nation in the world with something like over 80% of its population living inside a couple of cities. The US has extremely low population concentration. Americans are a very spread out and a very suburban people, much more so then almost all European nations. Americans also do not directly subsidies Internet connections, resulting in users having to pay higher rates then many European nations, but they pay less in taxes.
Finally, you guys know that it is OK if the US is not #1 in EVERYTHING. Every time the US isn't on the top of some statistic, it is treated like the end of the world. It isn't bad to strive for #1, but #11 sure as shit isn't bad either. Take a breather folks. The US is first in all sorts of things such that you guys don't need to flip your shit every time the US isn't taking first in one statistic or another. Seriously, breathe. I feel like Americans would have a heart attack if they lived in some quiet little European nation that occupied cozy spots in the top 20 instead of always scoring in the top 3.
threaten its ability to maintain [US] technological lead
Most of the "intellectual" stuff is text-based and static images that work fairly well over modems. Broadband mostly only helps with youtube-like stuff, which is mostly sophmoric entertainment.
Table-ized A.I.
Let me explain why someone would post such a stupid bigoted post. Some people are just unhappy and have nothing of any significance on their own. So to make themselves feel better about themselves they take pride in where they happen to live by trying belittle people that live elsewhere. It is really no different that people that belittle people because of their race or religion.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Includes IPTV, and free international calls to most countries. They provide an HD set top box with built in PVR. 29.99. And they make money.
This summer they start rolling out 50Mbps symmetrical FTTH. Yay!
Some providers offer basic (no IPTV/VOIP) ADSL2+ for 14.
My local telco, Bellsouth (now with AT&T) is offering me a bit lower rate and some cash back incentives for a 1 year contract if I switch from cable. I just had the DSL installed today and essentially with the incentives and lower rate I'll be paying $26/month less than for my Comcast cable provide (savings of $312/year).
Libertas in infinitum
So, what is holding us back?
Regional Bell Operating Companies
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
How much faster, and how much of a lower price? A quick google search suggests access in Japan is slower and more expensive.
"NTT is currently the largest provider of DSL service in Japan, with 62 percent of all DSL users, and is offering competitive rates. NTT DSL service provides 1.5 mbps for between 3,800 to 4,050 yen per month." "3 800 Japanese yen = 31.3893937 U.S. dollars"
It's difficult to compare the two, though. Should we factor in cost of living, real estate costs, salaries? How about the amount of customer support the typical New Yorker requires compared to the typical resident of Tokyo?
Ah, you must mean Ted "Tubesteak" Stevens. Most of Congress is also composed of tubes ... vacuum tubes.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Yeah... funny how they did well in other hurricanes, with the same people in charge.
Actually, the Federal response to Katrina ran along the same timeline as similar sized events in Florida. FEMA routinely tells states and local municipalities to be on their own for 2-5 days after a Hurriance. The big problem with Katrina was it hit a large urban area where a lot of the people were too damn stupid to leave. I remember in the day or two before the storm hit (I had been planning on going to New Orleans for a bachelor party), the US government was putting out notices recommend a complete evacuation of New Orleans, with words like "Catastrophic loss of life". A Category 5 hurricane is like a F2 to F3 tornado...300 miles wide. There's an old saying that goes, never ascribe to malice what can be explained by mere incompetence.
And almost as if they want to only give any rebuilding contracts to non-local corporations
Given the amount of graft involved in Louisiana, this doesn't seem like such a bad idea. Remember, it was locals that used the levy money for other things, like building casinos, instead of actually spending the money on fixing the levies.
It's almost as if with 'Korina' they wanted to have the region decimated and cleared out of poor people in order to build a lot of resorts and such
That's exactly what happened. Bushco used the Haliburton Hurricane Machine (TM) just so all those poor black people would drown.
And you're a crazy consipiracy theorist if you even consider it.
Yep, pretty much. Bush has a lot easier, less noticeable, and less damaging ways to enrich his corporate buddies if that is what he wants to do.
You are right. But do the people living in rural communities who don't have high speed access, understand how beneficial the net can be?
Before I got high speed (~1998) I didn't use the internet for anything other than pissing people off in chat rooms. I got my porn from BBS, and that was about it. If my parents hadn't payed for the high speed net connection, I wouldn't have gotten it for financial reasons.
My aunt and uncle have a farm in pennsylvania and they have high speed, but I had to convince my uncle over a 3 year period (after they had put down the DSL lines in 2002) with persistence to get them to go for it. Most of their neighbors don't even have computers.
Flame me as a city boy or whatever, I don't give a fuck. But if I lived on a quiet farm, and enjoyed my life without the internet, it would be pretty hard to convince me to pass out $50 a month for something I'd never used before.
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. -Confucius
The company I work for just got a fiber connection from XMission that is 30 Mbps download AND 30 Mbps upload. It costs only $125 per month. For home users, it is only $40 per month for 15 Mbps down and 15 Mbps up.
How are we so lucky you might ask? Several cities banded together to create a world-class, 100% fiber optic network that they extend to every home and business in the member cities.
This municipal fiber broadband project is called UTOPIA and you can get it if you are fortunate enough to live in one of these cities that provides it.
So if you're disappointed by the Internet access in your area, see if you can get your cities to setup a network like ours. Be forewarned though, our incumbent telco and cable company fought and lobbied very hard against it. We're lucky that enough of our city council members were forward-thinking enough to go ahead with the project despite significant pressure from the incumbent telecom providers. Now we all reap the benefits.
How many of the leading countries have broadband access heavily subsidized by their governments? In the US it's pretty much left up to private companies, and as long as the companies are spending 75% of the effort trying to figure out how to maximize their profits, they aren't going to roll out broadband to make sure the US shows up #1 in some ranking of countries.
If the US government somehow got involved, one of two things would happen: we'd either rush toward the top of the list (if the effort was sincere) or we'd all be connecting with 2400 baud modems (if they handled it like most government activities).
- Back when I was in France, my DSLAM used Alcatel hardware. Alcatel is a French company.
- "plurality of top sites are in US". I laugh at that. As a Frenchman, the vast majority of the websites I visit everyday are hosted in Europe, even now that I live in Canada. The European backbone infastructure is quite decent, if you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_Exc
h ange_Points_by_size for example :)
- Korea is a silly example indeed, next time choose a better one.
- I'm not sure what a CLEC is. Once again, back in France, I had not just unmetered *local* calling, but unmetered *international* calling. To around 30 countries (of course, Canada, the US, and most countries in the EU, but also Taiwan, Singapore, China and Argentina for example). The ISP also provided a SIP server so that you can call for free to about everywhere you need even if you're not at home, as long as you have an internet access (using Ekiga, for example). For example, as my parents in France are still using this provider, I simply use their account from my Canadian (sucky) internet connection to call Canada or France for free, nice heh ? This ISP is Free.fr, in my "big" city (around 70 000 inhabitants) I had 24Mbit ADSL, with (cable-like) television and free international phone for 30 euros/month (all included, except some paying channels of course)... in their 300-inhabitants town, my parents can only have 8Mbit and no television for the same price, though... but the nearest >100 000 inhabitants city is 150 kilometres away so you can't really expect to have the same service.
- Haha, the last argument of the already defeated.
Sleep wellWhere on earth are you looking? I can find 100M fiber lines (depending on where you live-some places only have 70M down/30M up for that price on fiber) in Japan. look at this for a better idea (this is Sony's ISP, though, but don't let that give you a bias or anything...)
OSx86 FTW
How does a nation's broadband adoption rate affect its economy? People who have uses for broadband will use it, and the rest don't matter. It's like saying we're in deep shit because few refrigerators contain tofu.
Cheers!
I got one as well now I've thought about. Going into same bar and asking if anybody's got a fag (cigarette on my side of the pond...). Mind you, double mistranslation, I guess if I go into a redneck bar and announce I really want to smoke a fag and I am disappointed that you can't do this in a public place I'll probably have a lot of scary people wanting to be my friends?
I love this topic because I get to brag about what we have here in France...
*AHEM*
-Uncapped, unlimited ADSL (1Mb up, uncapped down)
-80 digital TV channels, with over 200 more available "à la carte" (Packages are available, but you can pick and choose your channels!)
-Movies on demand
-Free unlimited phone calls to over 15 countries (US, Canada, EU, China, Algeria, New Zealand, and lots more)
Plus some extras:
-Integrated Wifi
-Fixed IP
-No blockage on port 80, 25, etc
-Active support for Linux
-No contract (can quit whenever we want)
All this for..... wait for it..... $25 a month!!!!!!
You know what the sad part is? Compared to other countries, like S. Korea, we're far behind....
Seriously, the US really needs to get its ass in gear and let broadband competition take hold, and stop letting the ISPs rape their customers. The offer I spoke of above is the absolute minimum that ISPs offer here, and there are at least four companies offering it. Competition is a wonderful thing........
Buses stop at a bus station
Trains stop at a train station
On my desk there's a workstation....
If you look at what has been going on in Asia, the governments there are pro-technology, and have been pushing things like broadband to become as common as the telephone. In the USA, we had the .com crash in 2000(the stock market crash), followed a year later by the REAL tech crash that saw unemployment rates in the San Francisco Bay area rise to official numbers upwards of 9 percent, but with some estimates going as high as 20 percent.
What did the federal government(and state government for that matter) do to help prevent a loss of jobs, or to encourage a recovery in the tech sector? NOTHING! California extended unemployment benefits for those out of work, but there was nothing done to try to slow or stop the loss of all those jobs as company after company went out of business. Even after the worst of it, and recovery started, the government has done very little to encourage things like broadband in every home, or other initiatives we have seen/heard about in other countries.
Plenty. NTT is unionized, make no doubt. I just had NTT out to do an install today.
NTT dragged their feet on DSL through about 2001, pushing ISDN instead. Today NTT acts both as an ISP and as a line provider with other companies leasing access from them but without the passive-aggressiveness that US telcos used to destroy the layered ISP's. DSL is now ubiquitous and they are dragging *fiber* into people's homes and offices all over the place.
Why does it work in Japan? Well, the government said to NTT - "Thou shalt do it this way" and NTT said "Sir, Yes Sir" and went and did it. Sometimes slavish obedience to government bureaucrats is useful.
This would never happen in the States. The Govt who suggested such a thing would be out at the next election after the Republicans who own the national media drummed up a hate campaign againgst such a communist trate.
I dont read
Nations are an illusion, borders don't exist. Think about it: North America is one giant land mass. Canadians have better internet access because of their government and their policies. Not because they live north of some artificial line or some population decentralization arithmetic acrobatics.
Or maybe "natural monopoly" has been replaced with a newspeak definition?
Or maybe you don't know the definition of a "natural monopoly." OK, strike the word "maybe" from that last sentence.
A natural monopoly exists for any good whose marginal cost decreases with each unit. Consequently, the price war that develops among the players in the market will eventually drive all of them out of the business. This is known as a market failure, as free market forces will have negative effects on supply availability.
In the US, the government tries to mitigate this market failure by granting monopoly privileges to one provider in each market. For an example, look at how local telephone service works. Whether this is the best way to do things or not is obviously highly debatable, but one plain fact is this kind of policy certainly maintains supply availability.
Personally, I prefer a policy that seeks to make the market conditions amenable to a free market system, instead of abiding a form of market failure in a monopoly. Take control of the marginalizing factors away from the market, and you have an environment where competition can exist. There's no reason we should reasonably expect telecom companies to foot the bill to build infrastructure unless they can directly monetize it in the short-term. Much like we shouldn't expect trucking companies to build roads. This is one area that the government SHOULD stick its nose in, but it doesn't.
What's holding us (the U.S.) back from the development of cheaper, faster broadband internet access, as available in other countries? One word = MONEY. To be more specific, those in control are perfectly comfortable with their "charge more for less" approach to offering broadband internet access. And since they're making money hand over fist, with such an approach, where's any incentive for any meaningful and real R&D? -- Liz
"Remember, no matter where you go, there you are." -- Dr. Buckaroo Bonzai, PhD
Really? As a Libertarian, I don't like the gov't telling people what to do, even when I agree with what the end result is. Slippery slope and all that...
There are four boxes used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order.
I believe that sometimes the needs of society outway the needs of the individual and in those cases I have no issue with society enforcing what is best for the society as a whole.
I dont read
Hey Jim- This has nothing to do with farming, sorry. I was searching the internet for any information regarding those who have adverse reaction to tires. I came across an old post of regarding your allergy to tires. I walk near a tire store and get this horrific taste in my mouth. I tried shopping at Costco last night and couldn't stand it. Please e-mail me and let me know what you have found out. lsanford3@comcast.net