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US Falls to 24th Place For Broadband Penetration
amigoro writes "According to research done by the consultancy firm Point Topic, the US has fallen to 24th place in terms of broadband penetration, with only 53% of households connected. South Korea led the pack, with 90% of households having highspeed connections. The US remains the largest broadband country in the world with more than 60.4 million subscribers in the quarter with 2.9 million new broadband additions, but China is fast catching up and has cut the gap to the US from 5.8 million at the end of 2006 to 4.1 million at end of March 2007. The firm's research also pointed out the disparity between the connectivity of first world nations and other places throughout the world. 'Many Sub-Saharan African states do not register in the figures at all: only South Africa, Sudan, Senegal and Gabon make it onto the list, with household broadband penetration running from 1.79% in South Africa - with 215,000 users at the end of March - to just 0.05% in Sudan - with a mere 3,000. North African states fare slightly better with Morocco scoring 6.78% penetration with 418,000 users and Egypt at 1.55% or 240,000.'"
How come Canada is doing so much better than the US. Our country is bigger than yours, and has 1/10 of the population. The US has a population density of 31 people per square kilometer, while Canada's population density is 3.2 people per square kilometer. If it's all about population density, then why does Canada have a much better broadband penetration.
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Interestingly, this is the opposite of the situation with respect to HD-TV in the UK and US. Here, we moved to colour later, and so got PAL, which generally has a better picture quality than NTSC, making HD less of an obvious requirement. While HD is better than PAL SD, the low quality of PAL is much less irritating than the quality of NTSC when you don't have the side-by-side comparison.
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Pleeeeease......
That is such bullshit. Not even in the densely populated areas you can get decent broadband in USA. The kind of figures you can get in Scandinavia, Korea and Japan is just not possible and that has NOTHING, NOT A BLOODY THING, to do with population density. Its about money and its about how involved the government is. Both in Japan, Korea and in Scandinavia the governments have been investing in black fibre just for the purpose to create a better internet for the people. companies that wanted to invest also got tax breaks and counties built their own black fibre networks. In my home town, Gothenburg, the city has built a large black fibre network. Unlike US cities where the city itself have run as an ISP (or tried to until they got sued in some case) the city doesn't provide internet access. other companies do that. I hear lots of baby whining from American "Why should I pay my taxes so someone else can surf porn" and I find it strange that I never hear some one whining about that your tax dollars goes to people paid by the CIA to rape young Iraqi girls in front of their fathers as a torture method (yeah, that actually happened). Hmmmmmmmmmm... Weird isnt it???
Just shut the bloody hell up with that "its not so densely populated here". California is the size of Sweden and have 4 times as many people but you can in Sweden easily get better and faster broadband than you. Yeah, right sorry, that is because the more people there is means that there is less of a market and less demand for it.
We don't even have as good broadband connectivity in Manhattan as South Korea has in their whole country. We're not just behind, our internet connectivity makes us the laughingstock of the developed world. Seriously, not only are these countries ahead of us in broadband penetration, they're doing it with their hands tied behind their backs - we define "broadband" as "128k download", they define it as anything from "2 meg download" to South Korea's "20 meg symmetric".
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