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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.'"
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.
broadband! What are they talking about?!
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...
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/peo_per_liv_in_u rb_are-people-percentage-living-urban-areas
I would not be so sure about that:
Percent of people living in urban areas:
#40 Sweden: 83%
#43 United States: 80%
#88 Finland: 61%
Now the real question is what are the other percentage of people doing? are they in communities which are not urban but still sizable? are in farming?
DEFINITION: Percentage of people living in urban areas. Data for 2003. Urban-rural classification of population in internationally published statistics follows the national census definition, which differs from one country or area to another. National definitions are usually based on criteria that may include any of the following: size of population in a locality, population density, distance between built-up areas, predominant type of economic activity, legal or administrative boundaries and urban characteristics such as specific services and facilities.
I don't care to start searching about the US vs Swedish or Finish definition but my basic point is, its not as simple as people are making it out to be.
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".
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Actually, no. You have 80% of your population in urban areas and those still cant get correct connections.
In the US, broadband is defined as any link that is both constant and above 128kb/s. In Korea, broadband is a link over 20Mbps both ways.
By your definition, you should be able to get the same type of connection in downtown New York city, but it is not the case...
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
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"