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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?
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.
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'
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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"
The domestic market has a few options, hughes net, which used to be directv's offering, is out there. It's cheap enough for sat.
Directv is now pushing wildblue, which uses a new KA band launched a few years ago, and is not just a retro hack of a C band bird like everyone else. Wildblue is better, but it's not that great either.
If you want web browsing, it's adequate. If you want file downloads, it's better. Latency is the real issue, speed of light is too slow to talk to something in geo orbit 32K miles away. By time everything is said and done you're 1/2 a second to 1 second to more latency just for the 'local loop'. Clicking on a link on a webpage becomes annoying, forget realtime anything, many VPNs, gaming is out of the question.
Weather is rarely an issue unless it's intensive storms over you, or over the sat uplink facility. But a clear southern view of the sky can be an issue.
Having sold a variety of sat Internet systems years ago, it's better than dialup if that's your only option. As soon as DSL or Cable is available, it's not long before the sat internet is dropped. I'd stay away, far away from sat if there is anything else available.