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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.'"
We're Number One! We're Number One! We're Number One!
Wait....
After all the US is only #172 in population density. Do you really expect to have broadband out in podunk Montana?
Or, more people to move in.
Try bringing Mexico in. If that doesn't work, there's lots of countries willing to migrate too.
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.
Would have to strongly distance itself from these statements. Penetration has never been stronger!
broadband! What are they talking about?!
Such is the nature of varying population distributions.
South Korea has 1/4th their population in a single city, packed in so dense that broadband penetration is relatively cheap - contrasted with the US population's fondness for distance from neighbors, and the resultant per-foot cost aggregation.
China has over 4x the population of the USA - we could wire everyone, and they could still out-subscribe us with 75% of their population remaining entirely unconnected.
Guess the report just reflects the realities of supply-and-demand.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
...with only 53% of households connected...And the rest use other peoples' unsecured wireless connection.
Americans
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...
"South Korea led the pack, with 90% of households having highspeed connections."
More bandwidth to farm gold with?
We can't just run a cable 300 feet to an apartment complex and take care of 10% of the population in one shot like most European countries can.
Get it? We're big, really big, and when you add in the fact that our interior isn't a barren wasteland like most of the other big countries we have a whole lot of people spread out all over the place.
does this take into account that we're all connected on our neighbor's wifi?
i support the right to offend.
Decades ago, we got electricity to remote rural areas. There's no reason we can't do the same now for broadband.
A month ago Slashdot linked to an article about an effort to reclassify broadband by the speed: anything greater than 2MBps.
:-)
If so, depending on who runs the survey we may drop considerably in rank. After all, I'd say a good chunk of our broadband numbers come from basic DSL (not the 3MBps package) and maybe satellite. And from what I hear, many countries' broadband solutions are higher than the proposed 2MBps limit so it wouldn't be a universal drop.
Come on, doesn't the Democrats watch Colbert? If you're going to change the rules, change them in your favor
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?
Leave it to the nerds to have penetration issues.
I was at someone's apartment yesterday that's pretty much on the edge of an almost 100,000 person city and they can't get anything but dialup there. They can't even get cable, they have to have a dish. I was actually considering moving in there cuz it was really nice and the price was right but then I heard that and was like forget it. It's not even close to a rural area either. It's like half a mile from one of the biggest malls around here. If the stupid cable and phone companies would just spend some money and lay down some fiber or at least copper, it wouldn't be so bad. When 99% of people with dialup are pissed, that's a pretty good business opportunity for broadband here.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
All they did was survey how big the broadband Internet markets are. Nobody claimed this or that country was better. Americans and their affirmation problem...
So making hay (political or otherwise) of the lack of penetration is kind of silly.
Its both a generational thing and cultural thing. Of my relatives only the younger generations have broadband, this would be the below 40 generation. Outside of that only those who have kids still around who push for it. For the most of them "it just really does not matter". Hell, for many the internet does not matter.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I get my broadband from AT&T and I know for a fact that they have it a lot more than halfway in.
I hope it's almost all the way in cause I don't know how much more of it I can take...
Seriously in NYC its not uncommon to open up your laptop and see a half dozen open points in a given apartment / condo building.
Could be they are doing something right or it could be because this is more complicated than 2+2.. Population density without a measure of deviation is meaningless..
Yes, it is a surprise and a disappointment that we would end up so low. It has everything to do with the influence of business on government; broadband providers use their monopolies to keep prices high and reduce competition. Unless I'm mistaken, much of this technology was pioneered here in the US. We would have been the first to widely deploy the technology and then the technology would disperse to other markets. How could we have fallen from the first adopters to the ones with the least penetration?
Considering the significant competitive advantages to this type of technology, I am discouraged that this doesn't get more attention from our political 'leaders'.
Best regards.
but by george, those few connected citizens do their best to make up for the lack of email of all the others...
"You only get ONE LIFE." Richard Rahl, Faith of the Fallen - Terry Goodkind
Come on America, we need to penetrate more!
What day is it? Could you please tell me?
I can't speak for everyone, but I would say I have an 87% chance of getting it daily (unless of course the river is flowing...in which case I have 100% chance)
Living With a Nerd
Is it really vital to produce statistics that show how people (that are interested in pr0n) are more connected to pr0n, than those that don't care as much? While this example isn't the best, because obviously everyone should be encouraged to do more pr0n, it doesn't mean everyone should be encouraged to do more broadband internet.
If memory serves correct, New York, San Fran, Chicago, and LA are in the top 15 wealthiest.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
[obligatory] in soviet russia broadband find you!! [/obligatory]
Why UNIX?
In other words, just because our large land mass and low population density gives us a valid reason for other countries beginning to catch up to us or passing us in per-capita broadband usage, it won't save us from the effects of not being highly connected. America cannot afford to become a telecommunications backwater.
Its both a generational thing and cultural thing. Of my relatives only the younger generations have broadband, this would be the below 40 generation. Outside of that only those who have kids still around who push for it. For the most of them "it just really does not matter". Hell, for many the internet does not matter.
Your theory of this being a generational thing falls apart when you realize that other countries with high broadband penetration have older generations as well.
Broadband prices in the US are relatively high ($40-60) from the prices I've heard of in say Japan. I'd say penetration is low because there's a lot of people that think it's too expensive for what they get. My father didn't sign up until I pointed out that DSL was now about the same price as his second phone line + ISP costs. He still only has barely-broadband speed of only 256 kilobits/second, but it's a hell of a lot faster and better than the modem. And it's not like he's a new internet user. He started on the Internet probably in 1996, and only got DSL in 2004.
AccountKiller
7. a politically unified people occupying a definite territory; nation.
NT
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".
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
State means Country in more places than it means subnational entity.
Exceptions to the rule include the US, Australia(The State of Western Australia), and Mexico(The State of Chihuahua), but again, these are the exceptions. Even then, the US has the "State Department" and the "Secretary of State", where State means Nation(al), and has nothing to do with individual states.
Your statement is equivalent to a Russian saying "It is not the Middle Eastern Federation. The Middle East is not a country. All of the 'Republics' listed are individual countries."
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
With the abysmal quality of connections/service, ridiculous pricing, and monopolistic behavior, I'd say the U.S. is undoubtedly first in the world with regards to broadband penetration.
Unfortunately, that's probably the wrong kind of penetration...
I was in rural US when several potential service providers got federal money to "connect" rural America. Where I was at, it was long distance to get dial-up from most named providers. What we got was 768k dsl "if" we were close to the highway, which I wasn't. This means to me that the service providers leveraged existing services to collect federal money; the lines were there already, they just needed a tap. Sham, scam, thank-you ma'm. The dollars are not in rural US. Therefore, the services are not.
What's the total population (documented) of China? Think about that again. China is not making large inroads (ratio-wise) between other countries and its own broadband rollout.
I think they are concentrating a little too much on Africa's broadband penetration. I mean, they are having troubles with genocide and starvation which may be a little more important.
622677120
...the apartment buildings are ALREADY WIRED for broadband. There's no such thing as filters on phone lines or DSL/Cable modems. You plug your computer right into the RJ45 jack in the wall! They call it "jacking on"*.
Oh and something about only old people do-something in South Korea. I forget how it goes...
* Actually I just made that up right now. It's probably not true.
Available? Well, if we define broadband in terms of late 90's technology.
Of course, even then, it's not always affordable. Good thing we only gave "those guys" $200 billion, and not twice that.
It turns out the phone company actually installed the equipment in 2004, but they only updated the records in the database a few months ago.
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.
I'm not so sure this survey should even be considered worth reading. Of course other countries like South Korea has more penetration (meaning users have access). The country is roughly the size of Minnesota. We have a total are much larger than other countries. If the report stated that China had better penetration, we would have a statement worth looking at. They are larger, but then again, they have less populated areas (wilderness) than the US does overall. Heavily populated areas with broadband access make it much easier to make this survey skewed.
I moved from Australia to California around 10 years ago to be very unpleasantly surprised at the amount of old technology in use. Sure, there were certain companies where this definitely wasn't the case - but aside for the exceptional cases, for the most part the infrastructure was outdated even then. If California/Silicon Valley is backwards technologically then the rest of country must be worse off. As an example, when I moved here very few people had even heard of "direct deposit", let alone were using it - but it had been commonly in use in Australia for at least 10 or 15 years.
This sort of thing was even more shocking as America touts itself as being technologically advanced. Perhaps some of the companies in the US are, but the country itself certainly isn't.
The cable box sits approximately 300 yards from my house, and yet Cable One refuses to run the broadband/TV capability down my road because they don't believe the cost is worth it despite there being an appeal for broadband by the families living down my road. These cable folks are quite thrifty and dense all the same. It doesn't matter how many times you call them to inquire about broadband, they all have the same answer: Move into the city because it costs to much to branch out any further. We can run telephone lines with 53.3KBPS data throughput (FCC regulated) all around the country, but anything more requires an act of God to wake these people up. Meanwhile, my local cable company has an ad with their tech driving his white van over an extended bridge with the phrase "Watch Us Make You Smile" singing away in the background. Sick, isn't it? Remember: Almost 45% of this country lives away from the city. So it stands to reason that the growth of broadband companies will always be capped by their own reluctance to grant broadband access to rural America - as if half the US population will suddenly move into the city to save their business model. Many people enjoy the comforts of living away from the sprawl, and if that means ordering fractional T1 access for my home, then so be it.
There are probably a number of things holding back broadband in the US. However, it is my guess, based on personal and professional experience that by far the biggest barrier to broadband penetration is corporate monopolism.
I used to live in Riverside, we had two broadband options (or a local duopoly). Pacific Bell DSL, which was notoriously unreliable and featured dismally low download rates, and notoriously disconnected users from p2p and other modern broadband uses, including (at the time) quake 3, which was a major factor in even WANTING broadband at the time. Our other choice was Charter cable, which was also expensive, unreliable, and invaded your privacy by selecting which part of your bandwidth exactly wasn't going to go well. Both of these networks slowed Napster, and then later gnutella and eMule. I wasn't around to see how they handled torrents, but I'm sure it was poorly.
I now live in San Diego (area), and your choice is Pac Bell DSL (still over priced, unreliable, and slow enough to barely be considered broadband, unless you spend for the "Deluxe" or "Business" or whatever), or Cox.
I've had Cox most of the time I've lived here. They will randomly shut off your cable modem, causing frequent reboots of (Any model) your cable modem, throttle your bandwidth for nearly any application (however sometimes they just SHUT that service down, which often is the case inexplicably for AIM and ICQ), threaten you in numerous ways if you leave your wifi router open for public use, monitor what torrents you download and then threaten to remove you permanently from the network if you get "three strikes" by downloading "Illegal" torrents, even if the likely offender merely used your open wifi point, and you have no idea what they are talking about, and suffer frequently from slow speeds, hangs, connection failures, and complete lack of service.
So yeah, I can see why people who primarily just need email or to surf the news for the day are OK with dial up.
BROADBAND MONOPOLIES SUCK. Just like any other monopolies that have existed: The service is poor, the price is high, and the competition is non existent, meaning people constantly look for other options, or they go without the product altogether. All of this strikes me as patently obvious, now the fact that broadband adoption is holding back our technological advancement as a civilization, well, what did you expect when we allow corporate monopolies to decimate our entire economic system?
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Raw states for Western Europe available at: http://point-topic.com/home/gbsdemo/countryGrowth. asp
Makes quite interesting reading. username: bugmenot password: bugmenot
btw, where's the reply button gone?
I have a few possible explanations for this:
1. More US customers adopted dial-up internet access early, and this has been sufficient for them so far. (big one, I'm sure)
2. The US has more monopolistic cable and telephone companies who drive the price of broadband up and up, $50
3. More people in the US are "borrowing" wireless internet access from their neighbor.
4. The "Moral Majority" in the United States doesn't want their kids to look at internet porn, so they just use it at work.
gets? or gives...
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
I just want a decent speed internet connection. I pay twice as much for a 3 Mbps / 768 kbps connection than a South Korean pays for a 100 Mbps symmetric connection. I'm not worried about what other people think - I'm pissed off that getting the same speed connect it would cost $30/month to get in Tokyo would cost me me more than $10,000 / month.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Which itself only has 38% broadband penetration. What, a market of 10 million people in a very dense area isn't enough for our ISPs?
The enemies of Democracy are
Here is the 2006Q4 data and 2003 population data from The Economist:
country, 2006Q4 broadband, 2003 population, 2003 area, median age
South Korea, 89.00%, 47.7, 99, 35.1
Monaco, 82.92%, 0.03, 0.002, 45.5
Hong Kong, 79.78%, 7.0, 1, 38.9
Iceland, 75.71%, 0.3, 103, 34.1
Singapore, 69.59%, 4.3, 1, 37.5
Netherlands, 69.38%, 16.1, 42, 39.3
Denmark, 69.34%, 5.4, 43, 39.5
Israel, 68.97%, 6.4, 21, 28.9
Macau, 68.82%, 0.4, 0.02, 36.6
Switzerland, 66.54%, 7.2, 41, 40.8
Canada, 63.02%, 31.5, 9971, 38.6
Taiwan, 61.40%, 22.6, 36, 31
Norway, 59.70%, 4.5, 324, 38.2
Finland, 59.52%, 5.2, 338, 40.9
Japan, 54.13%, 127.7, 378, 42.9
Germany, 53.23%, 82.5, 358, 42.1
Luxembourg, 52.29%, 0.5, 3, 38.1
UK, 52.25%, 59.3, 243, 39
Sweden, 51.76%, 8.9, 450, 40.1
Belgium, 51.73%, 10.3, 31, 40.6
Estonia, 50.35%, 1.3, 45, 38.9
Australia, 50.18%, 19.7, 7682, 36.6
USA, 50.07%, 294.0, 9373, 36.1
Population data is in millions, area is in thousands of square kilometers.
Canada would seem to throw a chain saw into the theory that this is driven by population density.
Copy-paste into a text document and import as csv into your favorite spreadsheet, make of it what you will.
Oh My God. China is going to catch us in broadband penetration, and the world as we know it will come to an end. First it was the Russians racing us to the Moon. Now it's China racing bits to our houses. Declare a national emergency. Mobilize the Army. This Cannot Be Allowed To Happen!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Out here in the plains of South Dakota, the local baby Bell was Qwest. They ran broadband to the local metro area, Rapid City (pop ~60,000). None of the other towns in the area had broadband. Even dial-up numbers were located in Rapid City or Souix Falls (350 miles east), and both cities are outside of local calling except for the immediately neighboring towns. Cut to 2002. After years of complaints and wishing and being told by Qwest that there just wasn't enough profit in this area (your argument), PrairieWave Communications launched their own highspeed cable / phone / isp service. I travel to lots of local ranches in the area, places where a close neighbor is 5 or 6 miles away, and they have broadband access. They might not have cell-phone reception, but they have highspeed. Qwest saw the demand, and put in trenches and cables, and now they're laughing all the way to the bank.
Moral: If enough people want a service, eventually a company will come along and provide it for them.
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
Everyone steals broadband from their neigbors. So an entire apartment building counts as a few users.
georgespamungus@gmail.com
What really matters is what cool stuff we or they can do with them. If it lets people have more fun compared to broadcast TV, cool. If it lets workers be more productive, cool. If it lets people develop new applications to take advantage of the network connectivity, way cool, but I've seen surprisingly little of that, except for a few things the Koreans seem to be doing with online grocery shopping.
I've run into very few applications where I need more bandwidth (other than filesharing, of course.) I used to telecommute at 9600 baud, which was a bit limiting, but email was almost all ASCII in those days so it was ok. Given the current bloatware that we use today, I'd be grumpy with less than 384kbps, though just about everything I do works fine at 128kbps. Obviously watching videos works much better with faster connections, but surprisingly I'd rather have Tivo watch my television for me (which it does on cable) instead of having my computer do that.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
hmmmm .... Let me apply your formula here. Australia has a density of 2.6/km^2 with 19.2% on 'broadband' (quotes used as I don't believe that 512Kb/s is broadband - which is what by far the majority of the population with broadband is on).
19.2/2.6 = 7.385
Does this mean that we are way ahead of the US/SK/UK? I think not.
I understand the point you were trying to make but statistics is a *very* tricky subject.
.
Based on broadband penetration, South Korea is by far the world's top broadband user with nearly 90% of households online.
Let me make sure I understand this. We're being taxed out th' ass to station troops over there in case that gurkin jerkin' little pompador up north decides to invade them and we got less broadband penetration? Did I miss anything?
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Yep, if you look at a slightly different metric - broadband subscriptions per 100 population - the US comes in 12th, with 19.2 subs/100.2 3_37529673_1_1_1_1,00.html
http://www.oecd.org/document/9/0,2340,en_2649_342
It looks like those of you who have broadband have it mostly to themselves, while the rest of the world shares their connections amongst a larger group.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
The question is better put as: how many Americans live in high-density areas? Quite a few.
The first question to ask is what is the cost of rebuilding the three-dimensional infrastructure of a city the size, scale, age and complexity of New York. New York Underground
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"
I just moved back to the U.S. from Vancouver (excellent summers but couldn't take the 6 months of continuous rain every winter). In Vancouver when I called for DSL I had it in one or two days and the Speakeasy speed test said 8 Mb/sec down and 6 Mb/sec up (confirmed with other tests and randomly over a couple months). It was with a company called Novus who have fibre all over the downtown there. It went down a few too many times for my liking but in my opinion beat the local telco and cable service hands down (Telus and Shaw respectively). And for $CDN40/month. And no DSL modem... direct port. Like that for all the buildings in the downtown.
Got back to St. Louis. Took ATT a week and a half to get me hooked up and they sent me a DSL modem I didn't want. Then I find out they want me to install some crap software in order to 'activate' my account. Told them to blow and went with another (local) company. Similar price to what I was paying in Canada but 1.8 Mb/sec "best availability" down and 300 Kb/sec "best availability" up. But this is what I would have been getting with ATT anyway. Mind you I could pay double what I was in Canada for 'broadband' and get half of what I was getting.
So yes... I agree there is an issue with competition in the U.S. Credible competition anyway. Meanwhile I am still trying to get used to this shitty lag that I have now.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Apparently the U.S. is having trouble penetrating their broads.
Maybe they arent "pushing" hard enough or dont have a "hard on" for their Broads.
The US has the sixth highest internet penetration rate in the world. With a population of about 300 million. Did any of you unthinking, unknowing basement-dwellers ever consider that perhaps so many people have internet through dialup here that they weren't as motivated to get broadband? Same thing with cell phones.
The same mindless posters, the same mindless comments. ALL THE TIME.
Apart from broadband not having penetration in all regions of the US, we're also hearing that broadband might not be broadband if they don't like your data or just don't understand your data. I don't know if it was a coincidence that my home broadband Internet connection has slowed to a crawl in the past few days, with half the DNS lookups failing. I just got my new Dellbuntu laptop (see here for my review in my Slashdot journal if you're interested), and it's taking forever to get and install the software packages over the 'net. (Are they punishing me for pirating? I'm seeding the Kubuntu 6.06 and 7.04 DVD's on BitTorrent.)
Whatever the cause for the sudden lack of bandwidth, I've wondered whether there's a way I can get around that with multiple Internet services. In addition to DSL, I have modem dialup service available (but have never used it), and can connect to my cellphone Internet service via Bluetooth. Granted, the speeds may be unimpressive compared to broadband, but they are non-zero, and should my broadband provider start getting finicky on me, I would have a backup plan.
Is there some software that would allow my computer to connect to multiple carriers and present the aggregate connection to the rest of my SOHO network? I'm envisioning my little desktop with one ethernet port plugged into the DSL modem (say 100kb/s), another plugged into the cable modem (another 100kb/s), the external serial modem dialed out over the phone line (56kb/s), and the USB Bluetooth adapter paired with my GPRS cellphone (20kb/s). Then yet another ethernet port is hooked up to the rest of the network, which sees a single connection with a bandwidth of 276kb/s. If my DSL provider says, "Hey, you're using the intrinsically evil BitTorrent!" and shuts down my service, the network sees the bandwidth drop by 100kb/s but nothing else.
Is there such a thing out there? Ideally it would be a software package that I would "sudo apt-get install aggregate-a-tron" onto my Kubuntu box, but if there is MS Windows software, I'm sure we'd like to hear about it too. Maybe I could finally put that decrepit Win2k computer in the closet to good use.
I've heard people say, "I hate ISP#1, so I'm going to switch to ISP#2" or some such, so I know there are others who have multiple ISProviders. With such a software package (if it exists), you'd be able to get the best of both worlds --pay twice as much to get twice as much total bandwidth from ISP#1 plus ISP#2, but increased reliability from the redundancy.
Heck, we could even get ten crappy decade-old computers with ten crappy Wi-Fi cards leeching off ten wireless AP's, and aggregate the connection into a usable carrier via a desktop with eleven ethernet cards installed.
Anyone know of a feasible setup? It might not exactly improve broadband penetration, but for some residents of rural towns, it might convert some small town's teensyband service into not-so-teensyband.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Man, that's even worse than in New Zealand, where we all have ADSL links through Telecom's monopoly, no matter which ISP you chose, since Telecom owns copper to households. Used to be very fast back when it was really expensive but they just kept signing up more and more people without upgrading hardware at their end.
These days I pay NZ$70/month for it with data capped at 15G (additional 5G chunks added automatically for $10). Speed is kind of OK, in average 6Mpbs down but sucks upstream - I never saw it faster than 1meg.
Now, this was just the intro to what I really want to say, since quite a lot of us are quick bashing China every time it is mentioned, in any context. Workmate of mine tells me that his parents, who live in 1.5 mil population city 100 miles from Shanghai, have 10Mbps / flat rate, all you can it ethernet to their living room for NZ$300 (US$225).
Per year.
"Heavily populated areas with broadband access"
Then again, other countries, like Sweden or Finland with a far lower population density than the US still have a higher broadband penetration.
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
I don't think it's as simple as that. You're can get a router to spread various sessions across different external links based on how much spare bandwidth it thinks each link still has - basic load balancing - but you will not be able to combine, for example, your 200kb/s GPRS and your 56kb/s dialup line to get a single channel that would give you 256kb/s downloads over a single TCP session.
If multiple links come from the same ISP, and they're cooperative, and the latencies are similar (i.e., you're not combining dialup and ADSL) then you can do it. But that doesn't seem to fit your scenario.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Methinks that tracking Amount of Data consumed per capita would be a more useful metric than raw availability of bandwidth. Access to 100mbps connections is useless if you can only download 1G/month.
Cool link!
I moved from the UK to sleepy Andalucía (Spain) a couple of years ago. The first ad I see for broadband was literally 10x what I had been running in the UK; 2Mbit > 20Mbit. They have issues constantly running water and electricity in Andalucía, but they still manage to churn out 20Mbit pipes. If the Andaluces can do it, the US has no excuse believe me!
throw new NoSignatureException();
First, the Japanese government does not subsidize internet infrastructure or providers. Private investment is what has built it to be so reliable and fast. I've had 100Mbps (symmetrical and without caps) for over 5 years for about the same cost as a dinner for two. Even when I lived in the countryside before that, I had 40Mbps Adsl. How in the world did the US get wired for telephones if it's so spread out? What nonsense. The US is hardly a free market any more. Lobbying by corporations has replaced voting by people to determine who benefits from regulations and tariffs. You're being conned by companies who do not want to invest unless they are forced to, and no one is forcing them to since there will never be real competition as long as community franchising remains. I can choose from 3 different fiber providers, and I'm not even in a large city. I'm always astounded at how poor, yet expensive, the service is every time I go back to the US. I stopped long ago telling people about how different it is outside the US. They don't want to hear it or refuse to believe it. But, if you're lost in a fantasy that your small world is better than anywhere else, I suppose it's natural. Kind of like the people of North Korea believing that they have a better life than anyone else on the planet, since that's all they read and hear.
The problem with comparing broadband:population density, is that it assumes that rural in a first-world country should be expected to be no better than rural in a third-world country.
Most of the online US population seems to be embarrassed by the religious backwardness of their bible-belt rural states, yet the US government seems to be doing little to boost broadband in these areas. Communication is key to learning, education, understanding and scientific achievement. State governments enforcing creationism wouldn't be news in third-world areas such as sub-Saharan Africa; it's only news because it is happening in the US. People believe in nutty superstitions because it is what their family and their community have taught them; without good communications, they are rarely going to hear a thorough opposing argument.
There's also the issue of US coastal population density. Due to waves of post-Roman tribal warfare, European countries tend to have relatively evenly-spread populations; even supposedly spartan locations such the Scottish Highlands are significantly more populous than most rural American areas. To give an example, the UK government considers "rural" to be defined as "more than 3 miles from the nearest pharmacist, doctor OR high school"- can you imagine that in the US?!? Whereas the US has massive population concentrations on the east and west coast, with almost bugger all in between. This skews the figures. Even rural areas of the UK, more than 99% of all telephone exchanges already provide broadband; lack of take-up is usually down to elderly population. Whereas in rural US, lack of take-up is usually due to lack of availability in the first place.
Geography really matters, and if the US is to stop embarrasing itself with its bible-belt country cousins, it needs to solve its own specific inland rural broadband problem using technology that is massively different from that used in coastal regions or Europe. Ironically the only other major country with similar geographic issues is China, often considered an enemy; the US either needs to invest more than, or invest in partnership with, China to solve this problem before China overtakes them and leaves them in the dust.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
"The first question to ask is what is the cost of rebuilding the three-dimensional infrastructure of a city the size, scale, age and complexity of New York."
Because places like London, Paris, Beijing, and Athens are so new and tiny when compared to New York that putting their high-speed Infrastructure in place is a mere bagatelle by comparison.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
Notice how many of the countries with large surface areas lie close to or above the 60th parallel. Which makes sense - the internet is a great activity for when the weather suck.
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.
And the thing that gets me is that Americans arent even embarrased about this. I mean its Americans that run the government yet Americans cant even run their own governemnt efficiently. Its just pathetic.
I live in montgomery village, MD. I asked verizon about FIOS recently, and was told (near quote) "We have received numerous inquiries from others in montgomery village, but the council has not approved our entry into your area at this time."
I'm not sure what the hangup is - it's probably something super silly - but at least in my area the issue is with government stopping business from proceeding.
-Jeff
Please learn the difference between a dissenting opinion and a troll before you moderate.
And actually... ATT still owns the copper to my place even though I am using another ISP... In Canada the other ISP owned the fibre. The funny thing is that the ISP I use in St. Louis told me that the city has fibre layed down through the whole downtown even out to where I am, but no-one has hooked it up. That is what they told me, so take it with a grain of salt.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
How NOT having broadband is correlated with... oh, say... medical insurance coverage.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
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.
Heh. Amusingly enough, Alaska has a higher than (United States) average broadband subscription rate:http://isen.com/blog/2006/04/state-by-state-broad
Partly due to the fact that half of the state's population resides in one city, partly due to the fact that one company strives to be a good community member. The USF certainly encourages the stewardship.
Sweden and mainland Europe have a much more unregulated system when it comes to telecommunications and Internet-access, and we have better and cheaper Internet.
USA's biggest problem is that you have free local calls, so many people don't see the point of broadband. Here you basically can't afford to use the Internet unless you are having broadband access. This creates a big market for broadband, and many small companies stimulate the innovation and keep the price down.
In my apartment, I can select to use the 100 MBit-accesspoint from Bredbandsbolaget, the 8/1 MBit from the cable company ComHem or I can use ADSL and there a huge range of operators there, but all use Telia's copper wires.
There has been some government investments in city-nets and such. Maybe that have had a price lowering effect, but the competition and the will to build well and cheap is the main issue.
I'm not certain about the population density of those countries, but when I visited them, there are a lot more people in densely populated cites than what the United States has (Just my observation of course). When looking at places like France, there are areas of low population, but not wide open spaces like the US. States like North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho, Montana, etc have very few people and are larger than most other countries. Those states listed alone make up almost the same area of Western Europe alone, and I doubt they have nearly as many people as the several small European countries. Sure, the US has major cities, like New York, Phoenix, Portland and LA (others too), but overall, there are a few European countries that have nearly the same Population as the United States, and all packed into a country the size of a single State. When they are talking about penetration, they are talking about broadband reaching ALL areas of the country, even the poor frozen guy in Northern Alaska...speaking of which, the study would be very skewed if it included Alaska, a state over twice the size of Texas, and having an extremely low population). Penetration could very well be calculated in the study by size of the country, population, and the number of people with access. This would be a very poor way to determine penetration, but I am betting this is how they did it.