Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
After all the US is only #172 in population density. Do you really expect to have broadband out in podunk Montana?
I'd like to see a correlation between this data and the total numbers of people living in dense vs. scarcely populated areas.
I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the numbers matched almost identically.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I haven't been doing my part -- dial-up at home is still good enough for me. Sorry if your self-esteem is based on national broadband penetration rates...
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
We have satelittes that cover the entire continental US, and Hawaii and Alaska have options too.
But, being a free market economy, people are free to choose whether they want to buy it.
Rather, it being put in our homes as a government service.
My point is, broadband availability is 100%, anyone in the US can get themselves a fast hookup to the 'net.
The 10% of Koreans who the government hasn't hooked up yet, well those guys are just out in the cold, aren't they?
but China is fast catching up
But china isn't getting on the internet I know. It's getting on a strange subset of it where the government tells you you're society is harmonious and good and if you don't like it we'll kill you. Where you're not even allowed to read about those infectious ideas that are so harmfully, well... you're not allowed to read about them ... for harmony's sake.
Anyway, I think it's safe to say they're hooking up to something like the internet, but not The Internet...
Imagine if you weren't allowed to use roads because a bus company complained about your driving 3 times. --skunkpussy
Laughingstock? Seriously, you need to stop caring so much what other people think of you.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
No, not again!
EVERY time a story like this pops up on Slashdot, the exact same discussion ensues. There are a lot of readers from the US who for some reason or other just can't stand the fact that the US is not #1 in everything tech-related, and start slagging the story.
"But we're leading in total numbers!"
Yes, but penetration is important because it will be a lot more interesting when everyone in society has it, not just you, or your friends, or everyone in the upper-middle class and above.
"But we have such low population density!"
Yes, on average, the US population density is pretty low compared to the rest of the west, but on the broadband penetration list, there are countries that are less dense than the US, but still have better penetration.
"But, population density is only an average, we have such low levels of urbanization!"
Yes, on average, the US' level of urbanization is pretty low compared to the rest of the west, but on the broadband penetration list, there are countries that are less urbanized than the US, but still have better penetration.
"But, averages suck, we should compare big cities!"
Ok, New York might have the best penetration in the US for example, but there are plenty of other big cities that have better penetration, and are not situated in the US.
"But, those stinking pinko liberal commie Europeans have government subsidies on broadband!"
Well, there are lots of places in the US that had the phone copper paid for by taxes, and there are lots of place sin the US where local government subsidizes broadband, and the same goes for lots of places in the west. But not all places.
There are other countries/cities/areas that have better broadband penetration than the US, in relative terms, in absolute terms, despite being less urbanized and less densely populated, without government subsidies, and in a free market economy. Get over it for fuck's sake.
If you so desperately want to be #1 in this as well, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT instead of dismissing the reports or refuse to believe in them or squint and look at them sideways. Stop the whining already. Look at those that do better and LEARN from it.
This is an old, tired argument. Sure, North Korea is more densely populated. The Netherlands too. But the density does not really say it all, it's just an average. My dad got top marks in his course in statistics, and he went on all his life pontificating about the "chicken average": I eat two chickens, you eat none, on average we ate one each". There are surely immense areas of the US without broadband (like Yellowstone park, say), but what about areas as dense as NYC?
The question is better put as: how many Americans live in high-density areas? Quite a few. The overall density is low because there is a damn half of the country that is uninhabited, and that's before counting in Alaska.
Also, what is the "threshold value" beyond which population density can sustain broadband, and how many Americans live in areas beyond this density?
America's broadband problem is not just less density (granted, that plays a role): the problem is that US culture refuses governmental intervention in infrastructure. South Korea's government, instead, invested heavily in Internet connectivity, and their lead position is the result. If you want your government out of your business, fair enough, but don't think anyone else is going to come in and build infrastructure if they cannot turn a profit in less that 24 months. The argument that society as a whole will benefit from broadband does not really appeal to private actors: they want money, not to benefit society.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
>Yes, but penetration is important because it will be a lot more interesting when
>everyone in society has it, not just you, or your friends, or everyone in the
>upper-middle class and above.
Why would it be more "interesting"?
Why is this even important?
Answer: It isn't.
Food is important. Shelter is important. Medical care is important. Happiness is important.
Broadband? Not so much.
Get a life.
2) European conceit? What? I didn't see any "haa haa the US sucks" this time around, but there were still the same tiring excuses and attempts at trivializing this report as all the previous times. You don't see the Brits wining about South Korea being more urbanized than the UK, and you don't see the Finns whining that Sweden has a higher population density. It's always, always, US readers that try to raise the population density or the urbanization or whatever excuse is popular this instant.
THIS IS NOT A COMPETITION. Yet those readers (and the angle of the story submission itself) are making this into a pissing contest, instead of seeing the thing for what it is: Useful information about the market.
No, the moral of your story is that businesses are risk-adverse when heavy upfront investment is required (after years of complaints and wishing and being told by Qwest that there just wasn't enough profit in this area (your argument).)
.. which seems awfully redundant. Imagine privatized roads: there isn't enough physical space to allow 5 companies to all offer 5 different road surfaces to your house. I don't see how a free market can exist if the cables themselves arn't at least at their inception regulated to allow competition.
You're saying, eventually, business gets around to it once its absolutely sure that it will turn a profit. The parent poster is pointing out that quite often, the government would be better off leading the horse to water, because the private sector isn't going to do shit until it sees that horse drinking.
Hes only saying that the US often lags behind other countries because the US relies heavily on the private sector, which has to be risk adverse. Many other countries' citizens trust their government to promote and regulate the development of infrastructure. America seems quite split on this issue because they perceive the government to be grossly inefficient and presumably incapable of recognizing when it is in the public's interest to encourage infrastructure.
The market is reactionary; that makes it very good for refining processes, technologies, and competition, but it also makes it generally deficient when it comes to putting in the tough work required to foster a market. This is one reason why US companies are given grants by the US government to pursue foreign markets; they don't want the risk. The irony of the situation is that the government mitigates risk when it comes to selling cereal in Brazil, because nobody in rural US needs cereal, but when it comes time for the government to involve itself in more sure-bet, domestic projects such as infrastructure, all of a sudden everyone says they hate paying taxes for government waste. You get the government you vote for.
On a final note, when private companies are the ones who put in 'the last mile', they own that infrastructure. So it would seem to run counter to the capitalist goal of giving consumers a choice in service providers. If the entire process was privatized, you would end up with N service providers creating N last mile cables
"Old man yells at systemd"