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Krugman On the Connectivity Power Shift
In today's NYTimes (registration required), Paul Krugman's op-ed piece lays out in simple terms the statistical power shift in the online economy among Europe, Japan, and the US. This shift has been discussed here for some time, but it's good to see it coming to the attention of a wider audience. Quoting: "As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did... [W]hen the Bush administration put Michael Powell in charge of the FCC, the digital robber barons were basically set free to do whatever they liked. As a result, there's little competition in U.S. broadband — if you're lucky, you have a choice between the services offered by the local cable monopoly and the local phone monopoly. The price is high and the service is poor, but there's nowhere else to go."
The price is high and the service is poor, but there's nowhere else to go.
How about Europe or Japan?I wish I could read the article but I would think that if Google's wireless spectrum bid could possibly even the playing field.
The subject stands alone.
On the topic of broadband access, he's wrong in my opinion. The US lags because we set up our telcom infrastructure the first, and thus have the most primitive last-mile connections. Throw in some wide distances between communities and you have the situation we have today.
Dance like you're hurt, Love like you need money, and work when somebody's watching.
-Scott Adams
Another problem is that the population of the United States is much more stretched out than in those other countries (especially, duh, Japan) and therefore harder to physically reach. It's easy to reach the 50% of the population nearest the population centers, harder to reach the 50% that's farther away.
It's like the problem we had in the US of upgrading television stations to Hi-Def. In Europe, you only have to upgrade two or three transmitters per country. In the US you have hundreds of transmitters dotted throughout the country (not to mention the added trickiness of local ownership of individual local television stations)...
"Flag on the moon. How did it get there?"
Could someone provide a link to a liberated copy of the article?
...robber barons were digitized! (i.e. given a digit or the, eh, finger) Turns out that the evil empire was in the other side of the Bering Sea...
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
The price is high and the service is poor, but there's nowhere else to go.
Welcome to Australia.
Did anyone actually think that the GWB (George W. Bush, or Great White Baddie --- whichever you prefer) administration would want widespread high-speed access to an infrastructure that supports uncensored dissemination of information? Knowledgeable masses are scary to social conservatives.
This is "timeselect" piece - you need to be a paying suber. What, you getting kickback from NYT now?
(Krugman is an interesting dude, but that's a separate topic)
I live in a building where the developers contracted in a "triple-play" provider. Phone, internet and television are all provided by the one company, and poorly at that. We have zero competition to choose from, and only last week at the body corporate meeting did we (the resident owners who bothered to turn up) manage to reach an agreement that the monopoly situation was of no benefit to the residents nor the owners.
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
I apologize for sounding like a whiner, but apparently the NY Times requires you to input payment information for their "Times Select" feature in order to read Op-Ed articles like this one.
You mean, former Enron adviser Krugman?
(got nothing)
Right now, the situation was changed with W. in HEAVY favor of all comm companies. It will be interesting to see what the FCC will do with Googles request for the 700 MHZ bandwidth.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I was in France last year for a few months, and I believe there were triple-play services (Internet, Phone, and TV) being offered for around EUR 30 / month. Internet telephony is a pretty common offering there; there are lots of land-line plans you can get that offer unlimited calling to certain overseas regions (North America, for example) using it.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
"As a result, there's little competition in U.S. broadband -- if you're lucky, you have a choice between the services offered by the local cable monopoly and the local phone monopoly. The price is high and the service is poor, but there's nowhere else to go."
And one can get "first post" on slashdot, compared to those poor dialup users.
Sheesh... cable "monopolies" exist on the local level. Local municipalities in a lot of states make exclusive arrangements with the cable providers. Recently, Indiana and Michigan struck down the local cable company arrangements allowing competition at the state level. Ohio has recently passed legislation, too. For too long competition meant, the cable provider vs. DSL. Hopefully real competition comes down from this legislation. Maybe someone from Michigan or Indiana could comment??
What percentage of the US population actually walks or plays outside? Two, maybe?
What percentage talks face-to-face with neighbours?
High-speed access won't make a magically better world, will it?
And thought of Pantsman's nemesis from VG Cats?
If you don't have high-speed access, consider getting a new job or attending a different university.
Even my local public library has high-speed access for all cardholders.
And a special thank you to my former neighbours, who let me piggyback on their service. I offered to pay part of the monthly bill, but they gave it freely.
Subscription is free for anyone with an .edu email addressr ify.html
http://www.nytimes.com/gst/ts_university_email_ve
Dozens of Blogs also carry times select articles, although you may want to aviod them as posting the article in full (like the site below does) violates copyright
http://welcome-to-pottersville.blogspot.com/
When I hear stats like that I prefer to compare Germany broadband to New York, or France to California. If you take size into matter there are going to be countries like Yugoslavia which would equate to Kentucky in the US. I wont argue there is a monopoly here, but it would be very hard for a startup to wire the whole US of A. That's a lot of mileage for laying cable. That's why I had such strong interest in how Google is going to do it. They bought up a lot of dark fiber and now the airwaves. They might be the 3rd party hopefully not corrupted by a 100 year monopoly and can pull us ahead.
I was wondering when keith would be back with his usual GWB trolling. Yeah, it's on a tech topic for a change, but it's trolling nevertheless. It's from Krugman ffs. When are we getting Ann Coulter stories?
Quote former NY Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent, "Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults."
Every time somebody trots out this lame excuse I will persist in pointing out that in bucolic Ephrata, Washinton - the middle of nowhere on the road to nowhere - they have gigabit broadband. That's fiber to the premises and gigabit Ethernet to the house, a symmetrical unmetered gigabit link to each subscriber, for less than I pay to Comcast each month.
They get it through their power company and they're grandfathered in but I can't get that deal because the big players bought legislation prohibiting municipal broadband.
So stop already with the story that the last mile is expensive, bandwidth is costly, density is the key lies already. It's about the incumbent monopolies maintaining their profits at the cost of depriving the average citizen of necessary infrastructure full stop.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The origional "robber-barrons" were labeled as such by socialist journalists. The Morgans and Rockefellers really brought efficiency thru lateral and vertical integration and innovation. Problem is, they were rich white people. A completely unforgivable fault in the eyes of socialists. How dare they become rich while we poor toil away. Some people might call them "captains of industry", since they found a way to employ vast numbers of people and brought the US to be an economic and military powerhouse. The best part of this is almost all /. readers are weary of heavy government interference in their lives. But every time issues like this come up, it's "wahhh...the government should do something!"
Every time you want the government to step in and regulate, and trade liberty (in the form of being able to do whatever you want with your property) for convenience (in the form of FIOS to surf porn), god kills a kitten.
THL phish sticks
It's those "social conservatives" imposing PC speech codes on college campuses.
It's those "social conservatives" that run amok protesting global trade meetings at the World Bank.
It's those "social conservatives" that shout down speakers they disagree with.
It's those "social conservatives" that term policy implementation they don't like "lies", despite the claims that policy is based on being IDENTICAL to the claims of the previous administration, which gets a pass because of the "D" attached to them.
Yeah, those "social conservatives" are so close-minded....
Omaha, eh? Why do I think your father was the Nebraska Cornhusker and your mother was a sheep?
The US lags because we set up our telcom infrastructure the first, and thus have the most primitive last-mile connections.
DSL runs fine over old copper; it's designed to. Furthermore, with the US building boom over several decades, most Americans probably have fairly new infrastructure anyway.
Throw in some wide distances between communities and you have the situation we have today.
I used to get Internet access using a parabolic. It was cheap, fast, and simple. Unfortunately, a big phone company bought the provider and killed the technology--another victim of economics, not technology.
Krugman's a fruit
And you're a nut; you make the perfect trail mix together. So what?
The problem with that argument is that even the most densely populated cities in the US are not wired for true broadband. Let's not forget that 200Kbps is considered broadband in the US, while I have had 100Mbps (symmetrical) fiber with no caps for less than US$50 per month for years. I have 3 providers for fiber, 4 offering 80 Mbps Adsl and don't live within an 1-1/2 hour drive of a city.
The problem with the US infrastructure is not scale, it's that the duopoly resists investment. Why invest if there is no competition? The FCC and locally appointed boards work for the benefit of a closed market by the duopoly, not for an open market that would drive competition and advancement. With apologies to Winston Churchill, US companies will invest only after all other options have been exhausted.
It's this simple: markets drives competition, competition drives technology, technology drives markets. Market don't pull technology, so having no market at all stunts all growth.
The only growth from the current system is the growth in the bank accounts of a few executives at the expense of investment.
So people on dial-up are getting a lessor version of world history, huh?
All else being equal, the wealth distribution in Western Europe would tend to predict a higher percentage of broadband subscription. Undereducated folks living hand to mouth probably aren't going to shell out for broadband. They may not even have a computer. As a percentage of the total population, that demographic is larger in the U.S. than in Germany or France.
The summary of this article makes the suggestion that it was the Bush appointee's laissez-faire governance of the FCC that allowed monopolies to squelch competition and landed us where we are. Ironically, it was probably the exact opposite of capitalism that caused France and Germany to lag behind back in 2000: firmly ensconced state-run telecoms.
The bigger question is: who cares? Percentage broad-band subscription is a pretty meaningless metric to obsess about. How about "average cost for broadband"? Deutsche Telekom's 6Mbit DSL is running at 45 euros/month, or about 40% more than I pay for 6Mbit DSL in the U.S. I don't speak German, but I believe the DT plan includes local voice calling. If that's the case, then the cost is approximately equal to what I pay for DSL + voice.
From the closing paragraph: "But it's interesting to learn that health care isn't the only area in which the French, who can take a pragmatic approach because they aren't prisoners of free-market ideology, simply do things better."
Interesting that Krugman uses France's health care system as a point of comparison. Particularly since the French are beginning to realize they can't afford it any more.
Telecom lobbyists are trying to get favorable laws passed so that they can spread their wares. They keep funding "studies" to show how "behind" the US is. I am not saying more broadband would or wouldn't be a good thing, but you have to realize the motives behind some of this.
A hell of a lot can be done with just modems if websites are well-designed, I would note. It's not like youtube education is the autobahn to progress for the children.
Table-ized A.I.
Lots of those high rise office buildings have fibre connections. The cities you mention are among some of the prime switching points for the internet. The available bandwidth is obscene.
There are available technologies for getting the bandwidth from where it's switched to the common citizen without negotiating a million rights of way. They are not employed for the reason in my post below: the incumbent monopolies have an unlimited budget to maintain the scarcity - and as such the price - of their product.
Let us not pretend there is some other reason. If you can see that skyscraper on the horizon from your roof, it could hit you with more broadband than you and your million neighbors could use, even if you shared it further out. This is about money and nothing else.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
As a result, there's little competition in U.S. broadband -- if you're lucky, you have a choice between the services offered by the local cable monopoly and the local phone monopoly. The price is high and the service is poor, but there's nowhere else to go. So what happens if Google starts just giving it away? Seriously, think about it for a while. Heresy, I know, but ... why not? :-)
.f00Dave
Most of Europe, "High Speed" is defined as pretty anything higher than dialup. Also, there are a lot of services that have download limits and other limits that have a lot more limitations that we have. Japan is a separate case, as the size of the island, it's easy to give broadband service to anyone who wants it. It would be like if cable/dsl companies only had to provide service to California.
I'm just curious, does population density have any impact on this? I seem to recall that I know a lot of people in the US who live further from a big city than you can get anywhere in Europe.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Thanks to people who don't secure their wireless connections, I can get free internet access.
But the service sucks.
The politician in my state that signed the prohibition against municipal broadband into law was a Democrat.
Muni broadband is the only known cure for this disease. If you don't fix it where you live, well, the people of central Washington State will be glad to host all of your datacenters and steal most of your high tech jobs.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"The price is high and the service is poor, but there's nowhere else to go."
Oh please. I live in rural, *RURAL* Michigan. I have a package from Charter cable that gives me 5Mbs down, 512 kbs up, way too many cable channels, and great phone service for $109 including fees and taxes. I chose this service over DSL and wireless broadband; since I made my choice, cellular broadband has also been introduced. Oh, BTW, the service is great.
I am not left-handed, either!
Oh no! Krugman has passed judgement upon us (again)! We're DOOMED.
It's lonely being a dogmatic lefty economist these days. But some people are never happy, and they wouldn't have it any other way.
I have a friend who lives up in California and has a bunch of people working out of his house because his home internet connection is somehow 50mbps per second because the place was setup as some ultra high speed trial a few years back. He'd like to get all his employees out of his living room but he can't because he can't find a single commercial building with comparable broadband speeds without going to an absurdly priced OC3. Just goes to show that as William Gibson has said, "The future is here, it's just not widely distributed yet".
I have plenty of choices. There is the 768k plan, the 1.5Mbit plan, the 3Mbit plan and the 6Mbit plan from AT&T.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
The service is available to almost everyone in the county. Density is low so the county is huge.
Now how many counties does that golden river of bandwidth flow through? Surely extending that one county over, or two, is no big deal. How many of these mainlines are there, and how many counties are within 100km of one? A: Many and Most of them.
In the 90's I went out and watched them lay this cable. Thousands of strands of single mode glass. How much of it is dark still? 95%?
In short, I call BS.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
If you're "lucky", you have a buffet of connection options in the US. You have cable access (in most places that's 1MB or faster) and DSL from a variety of providers (256K and up, often 1MB and faster). In many places you can get residential wireless, with speeds dependent on how many people are sharing an AP. If you live in high-density housing you may have access to fiber, with speeds from 3MB and up. Generally speaking, the cost of this access is less than $100 per month, and may be as little as $50 per month.
A rough estimate would be that 70% or more of the US population is "lucky" by the above definition.
"Broadband" connections in the US are not hard to get, are not prohibitively expensive, and generally work as advertised with little tech support required. The people who are not well served in the US are rural users, and some users in old inner city areas with a poor existing infrastructure. The people with the most technical support issues are those attempting to host servers and other business class services on residential networks, or those using old, outdated, or unsupported combinations of hardware & software; the average user, with an average hardware/software mix for the most part achieves plug & play connectivity. Tech support loads at most ISPs are 1:10 or higher (in other words, less than 10% of the customers need tech support for connectivity issues) and in most cases, tech support problems are traced to user error.
I suspect that the poor adoption rates for broadband in the US have more to do with lack of interest on the part of consumers than with technical availability. Many people don't view the internet as something they need or want - especially the 40+ percent of the US population 50 and older, who grew up without it don't know what they're missing.
I don't understand why everyone thinks that more competition would solve the problem of slow broadband growth in the U.S.. In any market with both cable and phone lines, there IS a healthy competition for the broadband market. Part of the problem is that infrastructure investments are too costly over such a large and sparse country, and the other part of the problem is that there's still less demand for fast broadband (e.g., my mother, who is perfectly happy with her 56k) than in more tech-savvy countries.
It would be nice to see the government push through some incentive for someone to lay lots of fibre so we could get the kind of bandwidth enjoyed by Japan. Sadly, this is not the kind of thing that the private sector is going to do by itself unless some new technology changes the landscape.
(And, unfortunately, planning for the future is not exactly the Bush administration's strong point...)
In Europe and Asia, populations are much more heavily concentrated in urban areas. There's a reason that most of the population of France can get 30 mbit+ connections - the overwhelming majority of the entire country's population lives within a 40 mile radius of the capital city. The same holds true for many other nations.
Look regardless of how much you might dispute the desirability of the French health care system, the analogy he is making is logically correct. That is, the French are not holding themselves prisoner to free-market ideology.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Well, the idiot who modded Troll is the reason we have, uh, idiots. Did you stop to consider that perhaps the person lives in the EU or Japan, and was extending a heartfelt invitation to join a better broadband life? Idiots abound.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
The reason why germany got so many broadband connections is rather simple. It's way cheaper to have broadband here than dial-up.
Traditionally you had to pay for every single phonecall, even local ones. So dialing-in into an ISP _really_ cost you a lot of money. In fact back then most ISPs didn't charge you for their services so you only had to pay to your local phone company.
Then with DSL and cable modems you suddenly got a flat-rate for a moderately low price.
Currently the costs are about this: (all in Euro)
dial-up 0.1 cents/minute => 43.2 Euro a month (wow, this suddenly even became affordable)
DSL is about 50 Euros a month including an ISDN phone-line with flat-rate service for data-calls for all of germany.
Dial-up used to be even more expensive, costing as much as 3 cents per minute.
That's the only reason I can think of for his unrelentingly dour take on the US. He's predicted seven of the last two recessions. He makes current low unemployment numbers sound like a con game and a pending disaster. He describes the declining budget deficit and growing Treasury revenues as symptoms of deep economic sickness. The historic rise in stock values? Waterfall just ahead. Meanwhile, he has nothing but scorn for anything created by those who don't share his politics.
I used to read him (this was in pre-NY Times paywall days), but I gave up on him for the same reason I gave up on my old girlfriend. Some people aren't happy unless they're unhappy.
The US has plenty of strengths as well as plenty of problems. I expect the commentators I read to acknowledge both.
If you have ever been to Tokyo or New York, there's a lot more people than 337/km^2 or 155/km^2. Your calculations would be more accurate if you used city populations and city area.
This is proof it's possible if those in charge have foresight, plan well, do it right, and don't give in to the pressure of the industry giants who'll try to stop them. Perhaps we should expect more from our
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Is anyone really surprised that the French, Germans, Koreans, and Japanese are beating us at downloading copious amounts of porn? Different countries have different priorities. Once the British and French outdid us in useless foreign military adventures, now we have them handily beat in that arena.
It takes all kinds in this crazy world of ours.
evanchik.net
My parents have only one internet provider in town and their download rate is HORRID for basic DSL compared to what I receive in my own area. They even pay more than I do for their meager download. There are no choices and there is little to no competition. Does not sound like a free market to me.
I think you wanted to link to this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_selected_citi es_by_population_density
You can compare Tokyo's 13,000/km^2 to New Yorks 10,000/km^2, or Munich's 4,200/km^2 with Los Angele's 3,100/km^2
There really is not a large difference between European, Asian, or North American cities. They just have different monopolies and governments ripping them off.
The US lags because we set up our telcom infrastructure the first, and thus have the most primitive last-mile connections. Throw in some wide distances between communities and you have the situation we have today.
This is Bell Bullshit. The US is a dense urban nation now and the vast majority of people live in cities. The long haul network has lots of dark fiber because our cities are still using copper networks. Ma Bell wants to sell you each bit of data and we are falling further behind despite big promisses and big spending - in short you have paid for a world class network but don't have it. That the US is not first in the world despite having invented the technology and having the money for networks is a true scandal. Most people still use dial up - that's pathetic.
How bad is it? Socialist countries like France, Finland and Sweden are kicking our ass. Germany is right behind us, and half of it's network was made by Stalin. Want to bet on how long it will take Poland, Hungry or freaking Kahzakistan to catch up? You would think the US would be growing faster than other nations but we are not and what little growth we've got is grinding to a halt.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Didn't he predict 20 of the last 3 recessions?
Yes, he's a fruit. That his textbook would be used for college classes doesn't speak well for our higher education. You might as well print the McDonalds application on the back of the diploma. It would save paper.
You changed the topic to piss on the messenger yourself.
Intentional? If so, it's a devilishly clever post.
If not...umm, maybe LGF or DKos would be more suited to your style of discussion. An assumption that we don't share identical politics is not an excuse to abandon simple civility.
Given that Krugman is part of the *actual headline* and the article *explicitly* concerns his take on the "Connectivity Power Shift," my opinion on Krugman's penchant for despair is squarely on topic.
Hideho, American expat in rural Japan here. Its been ages in Internet time since I've paid for a US connection, so lets compare notes:
I get high speed internet through YahooBB (ADSL), which is now run by Softbank. I pay 4200 yen a month (~$34 at present) for 50 MB/s download speed, which is oversold (bounces between 2 MB/s and 12 MB/s when connecting to sites where I could reasonably expect to get the full benefit, such as iTunes Japan or the WoW bittorrent installer). This includes the basic charge for VoIP phone service but no call time (which is cheap -- 3 cents a minute to the US) and equipment rental (the modem -- should have bought it, would have paid for itself around month 18). I also pay approximately 1800 yen for basic telephone service, a necessary prerequisite for ADSL unless you want your VoIP phone to not be reachable by non-VoIP customers ("uh oh"). There is also the issue of buying a lease for a landline, which is a one time charge of $100 but which theoretically has the same resale value so we'll ignore that for the present.
So, all told, about $50 for high speed service which consistently delivers 2 to 12 MB/s.
What does $50 get in the US these days?
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Quick! Someone call Randaholics Anonymous, we've got a live one!
Essentially everybody, Japanese and otherwise, thinks Japan is a "small island nation". This is a myth made true only through repetition. The only thing that makes these myths SEEM true is if you compare Japan to only the United States, which is a tremendous outlier in many many ways, including surface area.
Here, I'll prove it to you: I have listed, in numerically ascending order, the land surface areas of the United Kindom, France, Germany, and Japan below. Can you pick out which one is Japan?
241,590
357,021
374,744
545,630
(Answer, in hex, is 5B7D8. That will probably suffice to not spoil folks still staring at the numbers.)
Seperately, Japan's population density is really not that high. No, really. The greater metropolitan Tokyo area's population density is *absurdly* high, but the rest of the nation wouldn't look out of place if you grafted it onto England or next to Missouri.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
You're wrong and here's why:
My given example is Ephrata, WA, which has had gigabit broadband for MANY YEARS. I don't live there (yet... thinking about buying a shed for some servers though...). The computers at my local library have 10 Mbit links, unfiltered. Tacoma WA muni broadband (Click! Network) has 10Mbit links for the average citizen and has for several years. If your government reps are so slow, replace them.
My example muni broadband elements either turn a profit or are scheduled to within the bounds of how much a government entity can turn a profit. The startup costs are funded by bonds that are paid back with interest. The interest is low because cheap muni broadband is a good bet. The fact that competing private sector companies improve their offerings to attempt parity in service and price is just a bonus.
Not sure where you're going with this. Schools here also all have good broadband. Where are you, Somalia? Within several miles of my home it's hard to set up a WAP for all the interference. There are so many open WAPs that free broadband for the poor is everywhere. My daughter uses one. I could too but I have servers that require their own IPs.
I believe the wait time for installation in the areas under discussion is less than that for other providers. Generally they get exceedingly high marks for service. Perhaps this is because their attitude is not "We don't have to care -- we're the phone company."
You just have to trot out every strawman there is, don't you? At your local library and school they have this box where now and then you can put in little slips and change the idjits that run your county if enough of you care. Perhaps the point of my post is to create more awareness and increase the number of people who care. If you're born in the US inefficient government is not your birthright. You have to earn it once a year in November. Part of my point is that new muni broadband has been outlawed in my area so I can't have it until more of my fellow citizens see what the lack is costing us. If you and your neighbors don't care enough to make a change, you deserve what you get.
In the specific areas I referenced third parties are not constrained from competing. Far from it! They are encouraged to compete and they have improved their offerings to meet the market. Many people choose their services for one reason or another. Why people would pay Comcast $100/month for 6/.768 when they could get 1000/1000 for less is beyond me but some do.
Summary: One of the failings of pure capitalism (I'm a capitalist, but not a purist) is that in a monopoly situation (in this case data, but it applies to medicine, insurance, gasoline, and a great many
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Telecom companies were given $200 billion by US tax payers over 10 years ago to give us 45mbps both ways fiber optic wiring.
n =Ask_this.view&askthisid=186
They took the money to invest in the profitable long distance market while still laying down old copper. They invented the barely faster than dialup technology we all know as DSL.
This was to trick the government into thinking people were getting the faster speeds they were supposed to without having to remove those old copper wires.
Educate yourselves, spread the news, and call your local representative.
http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseactio
http://www.newnetworks.com/broadbandscandals.htm
In Canada, it is often the local phone monopoly vs the local cable monopoly as well. But these companies actually compete with each other and bring the prices down to very low levels. In fact, due to monopoly deregulation, they're also often competing in the phone and TV business with each other too. But even before they lost their monopolies, there were often some good price wars with high speed internet.
Why is that not the same in the US? If there are two companies in the same region, would they not still be fighting each other for business?
-I notice (taking stats from the OECD) that in 2001 we had half the broadband penetration of Canada, but now are at ~80%. Does Canada have a much lower amount of regulation than we do?
-Japan passed us in broadband penetration in the beginning of 2003. Since then, we fell to about 2.3% beneath them in 2004 and have since nearly caught up. Did our amount of regulation rebound during election season and in the beginning of Bush's second term? That seems quite unlikely to me. Perhaps the bursting of the tech bubble had a slowing effect on our broadband growth?
-According to the OECD data, we had 2.5 more broadband users per 100 people than Germany at the end of 2006, contrary to the editorial. That is larger than the 2 users per 100 people difference in 2001.
-In the Business Week article Krugman mentions, it states that ~52% of French broadband connections are used for VoIP, and he states that they also use it for internet TV. How is cell phone usage in France? Are people using VoIP in place of cell phones? Are they using their connections for TV in place of another provider? It sounds like they use their connections for more than we do. Did the companies start offering these services only after the country was wired or did the broadband penetration increase after companies started offering these services? The answer is not clear from the Business Week article. If it's the latter then it seems that it was the broadband companies' innovation that increased broadband usage, not any particular regulatory activity. That is, the broadband usage would have increased at a similar rate when their monopoly saw its growth drop off and started providing new services.
As for the quality issue, I haven't found any data yet. I have been fairly happy with both the speed and cost of the various connections I've had over the past few years as I've moved across the country. However, I don't think that Krugman has made a convincing case that lax regulation is all that is keeping us from wiring up a significantly larger portion of our population.
You've hit the nail on the head..and pretty soon broadband in this country is going to be stuffed!
Wait..oh I see.."digital robber barons".. not "digital robber baron".
Oops, Sorry...I thought you were talking about Australia there for a minute. My Mistake.
We've only got one digital robber baron.
Markets do not hate to be free. Markets have buyers and sellers, and often a monopoly on one side is most definitely not in the interest of the other side. Perhaps you mean sellers hate to be free (although there are cases of monopsony: a buyer monopoly). I would say that the market mechanism (competition) breaks monopolies much more often than government action; Slashdot readers should be able to think of many disruptive technologies that the market mechanism used to break monopolies. An economic liberal believes that the best government regulation is that which allows the market mechanism to work better. (Normally I would just say "liberal" but "liberal" in the US has come to mean anti-market, despite the origin of the word with its roots in "freedom").
Regarding libertarians and economic liberals: yes, they are strongly against market intervention in most cases. But only extremists fail to acknowledge that there are obvious cases of market failure, and these obvious cases can be well defined. They basically occur when the cost of someone's choice is borne by other people, such as the decision to buy a huge SUV in which the cost of pollution may not be paid by the owner (which is the argument for carbon taxes).
The US has a very high internet penetration, something like 6th in the world which is remarkable for a country of our size. I think the reason that broadband penetration has lagged in the US is because of early adoption of dialup. Most people who surf the internet are casual users and feel no need to upgrade to broadband, because they already have "internet". Whereas in other countries which had lower internet penetration levels than the US, when they decided to "get internet" it made more sense to get a broadband connection. It's a simliar situation for cellular phones, ever wonder why our adoption of cellular phones is about equal to Jamaica? We already had an extremely high percentage of folks with landline phones.
Much ado is made about population density, but PD only tells part of the story. It's fairly well known that US urban patterns are far more decentralized than European and even Canadian (and certainly Japanese). This is independent of any population density statistics. Americans tend to live farther away from urban centers than people in other countries. This has a larger affect on broadband penetration than you might think. It's odd how all the loonies on Slashdot are against "sprawl" but want to subsidize building broadband out to people's exurban homes.
There is a notion that digital lines should be completely unregulated though, and this is not something I support. The problem is that when you have lines crossing public property, those lines are in effect a government granted monopoly. Adam Smith does not apply when you have private lines using public property.
Slashdotters have a tendency to scream like little girls over every little thing. The fact is that broadband is not going to affect economic growth in any noticable way, the people getting their panties in a bunch about it are a bunch of little basement dwelling teenage freaks who spell Microsoft with a dollar sign and are laughed at by the rest of civilized society, and even if we fall behind for a while, we won't be for long.
In a liberarian "utopia" without any form of governmental leash, the robber barons would have nearly unlimited power to defend their turf; they would not need anything as feeble as copyrights and patents (and courts) when their goons could blow up a competitor's factories. Who's to stop them? Certainly not the government, which doesn't exist in this libertarian paradise.
Face it, libertarians. If your dreams came true, you would have freedom all right -- very briefly. Then the Tony Sopranos of the world would take over, and you would be forced to call them Lord. You would have feudalism, not freedom. Is this what you really want?
And yet, somehow, those 'wholesale' prices often tend to be higher than the retail prices those last mile providers offer to end customers. And it is illegal for competetors to install their own last mile lines. Go figure.
It was proportion representative government which put Hitler in charge! Its evil I tell you!
Well, yes and no.
1. Densities per whole state can be a bit misleading, because the USA has a ton of farmland or just empty space. The communities you need to connect (first) tend to be a bit more concentrated. Even if you take Montana as an example, I'm willing to bet that even the villages there have a bit more than 2.39 people per square kilometer. (Unless they're all hermits.)
By comparison, western Europe simply has less empty space to screw up the maths. For example, North Rhine-Westphalia (the heavily industrialized county in the NW of Germany) is almost one contiguous megalopolis spread across a whole state. Not exactly, but almost. You only know that, say, Düsseldorf (land capital city) ended and Duisburg ('nother city next to it) started only because the shields on the highway say so. There's just not that much empty space to screw up the maths.
2. If population spread was the real problem, then in the USA the major cities should all be on Ethernet, which AFAIK isn't the case. I mean, high population density = good for broadband, right?
Cities are a lot less dense down here in Germany, and while there isn't as much suburb sprawl (for lack of space and a different culture), houses are rarely higher than 3-4 floors (including ground floor) even in a densely populated area like NRW. The NRW has 18 million inhabitants spread over 34,083 square kilometres, which means some 528 people per square kilometre. Of course it's not uniform, but take it as a rough ballpark figure.
Düsseldorf itself ends up at 2681 people per square kilometre, according to Wikipedia, and that's a major German city.
By comparison, New York City packs 8.2 million people within 830 square kilometres, which means around 10,000 people per square kilometre, or about 4 times the density of Düsseldorf, 20 times the density of the NRW or 40 times the density of Germany. They should have some _awesome_ network access then, right? The New York City metropolitan area packs 18.8 million inhabitants in 8680 square kilometres, so the density is around 10 times that of Germany, 4 times that of the NRW and slightly less than Düsseldorf. (But the last one is slightly misleading since it's comparing the whole sprawl including suburbs and satellite towns to just the main city area of Düsseldorf. The comparison to the whole NRW is a lot more accurate.)
3. But that all becomes a lot less relevant when you notice that density doesn't correlate to net access that well in Europe either. E.g.:
A. Actually the best places for net access aren't in such dense industrial areas of Germany, but actually in many rural areas. Somehow the Telekom ended up upgrading the net access to some villages and small-ish towns before the larger and denser cities.
B. Among countries, the best access is in countries like... Sweden. According to the link you posted, it ends up at 20 inhabitants per square kilometre, which is considerably lower than the USA.
Ok, so there the frozen north is mostly empty space, so let's look up Stockholm on Wikipedia. Stockholm itself is pretty packed, at 4,136 people per square kilometre, but then that's still peanuts compared to, say, New York City. If you take it together with its suburbs, i.e., the whole metropolitan area, it's a meager 499 people per square kilometre. Compared to the NYC metropolitan area, it's outright sparse. Some of the suburbs have as low as 80 people per square kilometre.
Basically, to wrap this long rant up, population density doesn't seem to correlate to net access _that_ well. Sure, noone drags optical fibre to some lone hut on the top of a mountain, but you don't need ultra-packed communities to get broadband either. And in between those extremes, the correlation is at best imperfect, and at worst non-existant.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9745926-7.html?pa rt=rsss html
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070424/064058.
Thank you for bringing attention to this important issue. And thanks for proving [again] that no one here feels the need to read TFA before posting.
"Press to test."
(click)
"Release to detonate."
T'was Mr. Gore that invented the dang thing.
I live in Philadelphia, PA... home of Comcast, and their new crystal palace they are building with your hard-wasted dollars (the Comcast Center, look it up on emporis.com).
What is so funny about my internet connection is that my apartment tower is on Verizon DSL. Some areas can get Verizon FIOS, but getting Verizon permission to cut up the street and the access tubes to the subway is a major ordeal... the City of Philadelphia is stuck between Verizon wanting to expand their network, Earthlink using city light poles to setup low-cost WiFi, and Comcast not wanting ANY of this to happen.
And here I am... not even able to get BASIC cable! My building manager signed a deal with the Verizon infidels and Comcast is not even allowed near my skyscraper. So even between a choice between two monopolies, I only have one legal choice: the Verizon infidels [or, suck off someone's unprotected wifi like a Thai whore].
I'm tired of paying $70 a month for a crappy always-goes-down, DNS-server-sucks ADSL!
Death to the Verizon infidels! DEATH TO THE VERIZON INFIDE....
+++ATH
NO CARRIER
You exhibit the typical naieve beliefs of the Libertarian. Congresspeople and Senators come and go, political appointees come and go. Government once supported and subsidized slavery, are you confused that government "changed it's mind" and passed new laws to prevent the slavery that previous laws encouraged?
That's how government works! Sheesh...uninformed voters...
Blar.
The real problem with Internet connectivity in the US is the FCC.
Look around where you live. Do you see the possibility of 2 or even
10 or 100 Internet users with in 5 miles of where you use the Net.
If so then you have the potential of a free "last mile" network that
has the possibility to put you into contact with 100s of possible
Internet providers. If The FCC only did not give away our freedom
of speech to the highest bidder. The FCC needs to be told to give up
or reclaim spectrum for the public infrastructure.
Only then will manufactures make the radios for home use to
connect nodes with enough power to be practical. and only then
will Internet providers become plentiful enough to create the
competition required to beet the monopoly. This all dates back
to the days of Al Gore the "Destroyer of the Internet". Apple computer
of all people gave him the chance back in 1995 to get this started, but
he missed the boat. and we are stinking as a result.
The PETITION FOR RULEMAKING of the "NII BAND".
What we get.
More things the FCC has taken away from us.
If we consider three ideas, I think this article has no relevance to our lives except to say that the US isn't so poorly off after all.
1. More broadband does not always imply a net a positive for the nation. Like all goods and services, there are diminishing returns.
2. Politicians like to cease upon any estimator of national success and goose that statistic to the point of being counterproductive. (For instance, is more home ownership always good? Looking at our tax policy, you'd think so. But looking at unaffordable housing prices and new foreclosure rates, it's not so clear this is a good proxy for national wellness.)
3. The economies of Europe and Japan are more susceptible to government intervention than that of the US.
And, I suspect that's actually Krugman's point. We shouldn't ignore the fact that Krugman is on the more partisan left wing the NYT's editorial board (a feat unto itself, really). It's not uncommon to hear him pitching a story whose theme is that America has much to learn from the command economies abroad.
The real reason is that you had to pay a fortune for a dial-up (cost per minute in most countries). I still remember my first internet/phone bill in 1995. It was a true nightmare.
Around 2000 all European countries (with few exceptions) were lamenting about their poor position in the Internet economy.
The real trick was to enforce a true free-market. The European commission forced european countries to allow cross-broder mergers. To allow foreign actors, etc. Telcos were forced to sell bandwidth to their opponents. Suddently there were a a myriad of way to access the internet (Satellite, TV cable, phones, etc.).
The only plan was to establish a free market. There were no bureaucrat science.Just one goal: free market.
From today's Wall Street Journal:
5 .html?mod=opinion_main_commentaries
"The OECD's methodology is seriously flawed, however. According to an analysis by the Phoenix Center, if all OECD countries including the U.S. enjoyed 100% broadband penetration -- with all homes and businesses being connected -- our rank would fall to 20th. The U.S. would be deemed a relative failure because the OECD methodology measures broadband connections per capita, putting countries with larger household sizes at a statistical disadvantage.
"The OECD also overlooks that the U.S. is the largest broadband market in the world, with over 65 million subscribers -- more than twice the number of America's closest competitor. We got there because of our superior household adoption rates. According to several recent surveys, the average percentage of U.S. households taking broadband is about 42%; the EU average is 23%."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB11852409443487575
Spare me the leftist socialist refrain clothed in the tired old "US lags behind in x" and now appllied to web access in this example.
1) the data submitted in comapring the US to the EU is suspect since it is collected by
entities who report on this "disparity" and is just another angle in a long
list of US bashing themes like the "US National Health Care Crisis" meaning, we need to
pay more for another bloated and ineffective federal bureacracy because the EU or Canada
despite lacking of positive data supporting it, which is no diff than the blanket, the EU
has more internet access per user..snooze and so what
2) Somewhere Bush will be blamed or is already
Who wants to bet that the US surpasses the world in the next 20 years in proportion to other populations for true high speed fiber access.
I recently got 15 meg Fios for a mere 49.95..suckers!
3) Krugman and the NYT are good for one thing, puppy training
You know, one of the largest cities in the US. We have crappy wireless run by morons (it WOULD be good if it was done right), the cable monopoly (limit: 20 GB / month bandwidth), satellite & DSL. Except that the COs are so spread out, I can get at most IDSL, which is only a little better than dial-up. You actually have it *better* in rural areas in the US, and that's mostly because the large incumbents haven't bothered to screw you over. You're not worth it.
My brother in Iowa has a better connection than I do. Don't you think there's something wrong with that picture?
We're not 3rd world. We're just seeing an object lesson that tells us that sometimes, with infrastructure, the free market isn't always right. I'm glad at least some of the libertarians (small 'l') seem to get that and how distorted "competition" is around here, but it worries me that I see so many plugging their ears and chanting nonsense about "all government regulation is evil!" I don't buy that for a second, but even if I did, I'd take the lesser of two "evils" any day.
I'm not a fan of George Bush, but Paul Krugman is as bad Rush Limbaugh. Be careful about believing anything he says, he tends to do Michael Moore/Al Gore "Cherry Picking" of data and has been known to outright lie.
Skimming through the commentary, I have noted several common assumptions:
1) Faster internet access is necessarily better.
Although I would heartily agree that faster internet might be *nicer*, it isn't necessarily 'better' for our country, economically or otherwise. For most applications, the difference between a 1.5mbit download and 6mbits is just not earth-shattering enough to justify the upgrade of the national grid.
2) 'Robber Barons' and their influence-peddling lobbyists are holding us back.
Eh, yes, I am sure the large pipeline companies wish to have less competition. But, any of you are free to attempt to build out a competing infrastructure right now. And to those who would point out that certain municipalities are in the hip pockets of their telephony Masters, and grant monopolies of access to them, fine. Route around them, they are, after all, damage.
3) I have a right to faster internet.
No, you don't. Read that again: you do not have a right to any internet, let alone faster internet access. The internet is an incredibly convenient economic and information distribution grid. But it is not your birthright, you arent entitled to it, and you cant have any legally if you dont pay somebody somewhere along the line.
4) Free markets dont work, we need government regulation right now!
No, we dont. Read #3, you arent entitled to competition, innovation, or even ease of use. The government doesnt have any business getting into the business of information delivery. The whole roaring success of the internet is because it was largely free of government interference.
Discuss.
There is an article on the op-ed page of today's WSJ that shows why the OECD's statistics are bogus. As it says : "The OECD's methodology is seriously flawed, however. According to an analysis by the Phoenix Center, if all OECD countries including the U.S. enjoyed 100% broadband penetration -- with all homes and businesses being connected -- our rank would fall to 20th. The U.S. would be deemed a relative failure because the OECD methodology measures broadband connections per capita, putting countries with larger household sizes at a statistical disadvantage."
Also, "The OECD also overlooks that the U.S. is the largest broadband market in the world, with over 65 million subscribers -- more than twice the number of America's closest competitor. We got there because of our superior household adoption rates. According to several recent surveys, the average percentage of U.S. households taking broadband is about 42%; the EU average is 23%."
And, "The OECD conclusions really unravel when we look at wireless services, especially Wi-Fi. One-third of the world's Wi-Fi hot spots are in the U.S., but Wi-Fi is not included in the OECD study unless it is used in a so-called "fixed wireless" setting. I can't recall ever seeing any fixed wireless users cemented into a coffee shop, airport or college campus. Most American Wi-Fi users do so with personal portable devices. It is difficult to determine how many wireless broadband users are online at any given moment, since they may not qualify as "subscribers" to anyone's service."
Finally, "In fact, the European Competitive Telecommunications Association reported last fall that Europe is experiencing a significant slowdown in the annual growth rate of broadband subscriptions, falling to 14% from 23% annual growth. Growth stalled in a number of countries, including Denmark and Belgium (4% in each country). And France -- a relative star -- exhibited just 10% growth. Yet all of these nations are "ahead" of us on the much-talked-about OECD chart.
Here in the U.S., the country that is allegedly "falling behind," broadband adoption is accelerating. Government studies confirm that America's broadband growth rate has jumped from 32% per year to 52%. With new numbers expected shortly, we anticipate a continued positive trend. Criticisms of our definition of "broadband" being too lax are already irrelevant as over 50 million subscribers are in the 1.5 to 3.0 megabits-per-second "fast lane." "
Krugman as an economist should have discussed these statistics - but he is very biased.
It's all a matter of perspective. I get 1.5/768 for about two thirds the price I paid for dialup five years ago. That seems pretty cheap to me. There's a very real cost involved in rolling out these networks, and because of our physical size and population density, it's a hell of a lot higher for Americans per person than it is for the other nations listed.
My DSL is cheaper than some of the dialup being advertised on TV right now. I get it from the phone company. Remind me why that's tragically expensive?
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Seriously, Yes my friend gets 45mb/s internet for $15 a month in her Japanese apt. BUT, people are stacked together much more closely. A given piece of equipment can serve so many more people. There's no need for long haul repeaters just to service a town in BFE w/ only 15 people who want broadband net access.
At least we have lots of aircraft carriers.
We also have more native-language porn.
paintball
And yet
One exception disproves a theory, right? Must come down to our Canadian-ness or something
licet differant, aequabitur
How do you keep the market competitive now that the Supreme Court has dropped it's one-hundred-year-old assumption that price fixing is bad; collusive & a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act?
Come on you guys, do you have to make reference to an article that costs MONEY to
read?
Would it be possible to post the article on Slashdot or at least leave a link
we can access it for free. Not ALL of us programmers have jobs anymore,
or are willing to fill the coffers of NYT.
Now I need to demote this article as soon as I can figure out how.