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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 question is whether these statistics play out within concentrated geographic areas. What about the state of California, or of New York, or of Massachusetts or Washington?
At times, I wonder if the "spread out America" card gets played a bit too much. Most Americans live in fairly concentrated regions. How much of the difference between US, European and Japanese broadband adoption is really about density?
I live in a small town north of Stockholm, Sweden. Our local government also installed a loop of fiber. Now I have bidirectional 100Mbit for 200 SEK (30$). The provider is a small local company, but there are several alternatives using *sdl