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US Lags World In Broadband Access
An anonymous reader writes "When It Comes To Broadband, U.S. Plays Follow The Leader says a story in IWeek. Their thesis is that, while broadband access in the United States rose from 60 million users in March 2005 to 84 million in March 2006, the US is well behind countries like England and China. Indeed, what you may not realize is that the U.S. ranks a surprisingly poor 12th in worldwide broadband access, a situation which could threaten its ability to maintain its technological lead. The federal government is no help: the FCC has almost no data on the rate of hi-speed adoption, or of what the speed and quality of those services are. Broadband is more expensive here than in other nations, as well, almost 10 times as expensive by some estimates. The cost and poor quality of service aren't from population density, aren't from lack of interest, and are not from lack of technical know-how. So, what is holding us back?
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!"
But you wouldn't mind having it ran as well as US interstate system, would you? For all it's troubles it's better than the roads in any country in the world (with the possible exception of Germany). And it's built by slacking unionized labor. Government sucks at building and maintaining infrastructure, but it doesn't suck at making it interoperate. Private interests are good at building and maintaining infrastructure, but they suck at interoperating with each other.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
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.
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.
From the article:
A Rural Explanation? Hardly One of the rationales often given for lower broadband penetration in the U.S. is that low population density makes broadband deployment, especially in rural areas, considerably more expensive in the U.S. than among more dense populations in countries such as Korea, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. That argument falters, however, when one considers that five of the 11 nations that lead the U.S. in per capita broadband penetration, including Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Canada, have significantly lower population densities than the U.S.
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
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
1. Mmmm, US BIG! ENGLAND SMALL! LAYING CABLE EXPENSIVE! FIRE BAD!
2. O NOES! US is teh sUx0rs!
3. omg teh US is teh R0x0rS! France = surrender monkeys!
4. blah blah dark fiber blah blah net nuetrality blah blah GOOGLENET!
5. I for one welcome Korean||English||Chinese overlords.
6. I'm stuck on dial-up, you insensitive clod!
7. If you want to live in the boonies, you pay the price. The invisible hand of Adam Smith will give all true Libertarians happy endings...
8. ???
9. Profit.
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
a large part of the population is decentralized.
Yep, but that doesn't explain why other countries that are even more decentralized are kicking America's ass. There is no appreciable statistical correlation. Plus, even if there were a correlation, the excuse that America is diffuse is a pretty weak excuse for the technological and economic backwardness we're exhibiting with broadband.
America's broadband failures shouldn't be news to anyone who has been paying attention. Several reports have gone into extensive detail on this over the past few years. Check out Broadband Reality Check II (PDF) for a solid analysis of where the US is in broadband, and how the FCC has its head in the sand.
We've been giving the phone and cable companies a free ride, buying their arguments that free enterprise is working efficiently. It isn't. These massive companies have managed to keep all other entrants out of their markets by manipulating the FCC and getting the Supreme Court to buy their argument that there's a free market for broadband. There isn't. We have the worst of both worlds: Government protection of an oligopoly comprised of regional duopolies (one cable company and one DSL provider in most markets), and tremendously high barriers to entry, without at least the broad reach that a government-controlled system would have. We need a truly competitive marketplace, or we'll keep languishing.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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?
The poor? How about decent broadband for the RICH? They don't have it, either.
That's part of the point. The U.S. considers anything above ISDN "broadband", whereas in the rest of the world you can get 10 and 100 MBps access. That is almost unheard of in the U.S., rich or not.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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?
Perhaps, but what percentage of their populations live in northern Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Canada? It could be that the population density of those countries varies enough that the few very rural people without broadband can't bring down percentage, compared with the very large number of people in places with high population density and broadband.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
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?
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.
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.
Of course, that completely ignores population density density. There's two there for a reason. I bet Alaska has really nice broadband penetration, despite its rather incredible size, simply because a huge percentage of the population lives in cities. Iceland works like that too; 190,000 people live in/around Reykjavik, at a density in excess of 1000 people/square mile, compared to a total population of about 300,000 living at a density of less than 10 people per square mile for the entire country. Serve one modest city and you serve 2/3 of the country.
It would be much more relevant to consider serviceable population vs. infrastructure costs. If you integrated the part of the graph with positive slope, you could even find out how many people in a country were worth servicing at all.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
He's on Rogers cable, he get's threatening letters every month about him going over his bandwidth cap. I live in the US, have comcast, and have never gotten a complaint - and I'm the leech/pirate/dude-who-pegs-his-bandwidth-at-100%-f or-months, not him. He plays xbox live, uses skype, and grabs the occaisional mp3. His cap is something ridiculous, a few gigabytes. They also f with him, blocking ports seemingly at random. They sent him a threatening letter for connecting to me using OpenVPN (we found the easiest way to play SNES roms online was to bridge him onto my LAN). The bandwidth we used on that session was minimal, but just the connection to 1194 pissed them off, I changed ports for him.
I'd imagine if he ever downloads HDDVD movies, it'll have to be from rogers. He couldn't download them on XBox Video Marketplace, like I can right now, even if he wanted to. He'd hit the cap.
My point is, yes, more of them have access to broadband, but what good does it do if it's basically capped at-or-around dial-up per-month limits, and has other arbitrary restrictions on it?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
You 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
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.
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'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.
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buddy.. the companies didnt lay the wires, the US government provided the majority of the funding.
The "companies" then bribed the government under the premise (outright lie) that they did lay the infrastructure.
Imagine if a trucking company claimed they laid the highways.. same thing.
would you tolerate a trucking company being allowed to lock out all other trucking companies, allowing them to jack up the price of every product in your local grocery store?
no? well then why do you tolerate it with internet? people in nations with real internet competition pay half the price we do for twice the speed!
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