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FCC Commish - US Playing 'Russian Roulette' with Broadband
LarryBoy writes "In a speech given at the YearlyKos Convention in Chicago, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps lambasted US broadband policy, saying that the US is 'playing "Russian roulette with broadband and Internet and more traditional media."' Copps also took issue with an op-ed piece ('Broadband Baloney') by fellow commissioner Robert McDowell last week. 'In his speech, Copps didn't mention McDowell by name, but he did claim that broadband in the US is "so poor that every citizen in the country ought to be outraged." Back when then OECD said that we were number four in the world, he said, no one objected to its methodology. Copps also had fighting words for those who blame the US broadband problems on our less-dense population; Canada, Norway, and Sweden are ranked above us, but all are less dense than the US. Besides, this argument implies that broadband is absolutely super within American urban areas. Copps noted, though, that his own broadband connection in Washington, DC was "nothing compared to Seoul."'"
>In his speech, Copps didn't mention McDowell by name, but he did claim that
.ear deployment over my work's VPN, it sucks even more.
>broadband in the US is "so poor that every citizen in the country ought to be outraged."
I don't know if the average citizen would even realize if their downstream bandwidth were boosted significantly. If my mother can download her web page in 3 seconds instead of 5, I am not sure she really cares.
The real battle seems to be with the upstream. Face it, sending photos sucks. If I have to do any sort of large
And to worsen things, I don't believe this is an infrastructure issue. These are obviously artificial caps levied against all users (both the legitimate and abusing customers). Maybe they could throttle the upstream for those with prolonged heightened levels of usage?
Jim
http://www.runfatboy.net/ - A workout plan for beginners.
7Mb/sec download, 1Mb/sec upload, fine by me (rural Alabama... most, but not all, of the US has it better I'm sure). Seriously, there is good enough to get the job done, and then there is digital penis envy. I'm not saying don't innovate, but what's the point of pissing and moaning when 90% can get higher speeds than they need for the time being?
Didn't you read the summary. This is a bunch of nutjobs complaining that life isn't FAIR.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
is the granting of local monopolies. Until that is stopped, or the communities change the monopoly to a SMALL one (i.e. from your house to a block-level box or CO via fiber), this will continue (in fact, get worse). The current policies are disasters. And as to the news corps., they should never have been allowed to buy multiples. That has turned America's news system into a total joke. Now, nearly all are simple mouth pieces of the republican party (and will probably turn shrill when the dems win).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If I didn't get broadband for free (bene of so who works at comcast) I'd buy the cheapest dialup I could find. Wha! You can't afford broadband. If you can't afford $10 a month, I suggest forgetting about it or a shotgun mouthwash.
Canada, Norway, and Sweden are ranked above us, but all are less dense than the US.
I agree that their aren't many folks as dense as us at the moment, but which are more dense? Norwegians or Swedes?
FreeSpeech.org
Or, that's about as interesting as I find the opinion of anyone who works for the FCC...
The Schwartz space ain't from Spaceballs.
I recall reading about how 10's of billions in tax breaks to the bells or whatever media companies was never used for the intended purpose of building a super fast american infrastructure. I guess we'll have to wait for google to do it.. and they can put the bells out of business.
It's not so much the caps that are the problem it's the fact that your broadband provider is selling 10x (or more) the bandwidth they have available working on the presumption that you will not actually use your full bandwidth most of the time.
This was all good and well when email (not spam) and simple web pages were the Internet norm, but with dynamic pages, streaming video, audio, other content, and unparalleled levels of email we need to stop over-selling the actual bandwidth available. If what we have isn't good enough to service the customers -- upgrade the infrastructure to something that can handled 30MiB/s down and 15MiBs up (or whatever)
Also, stop calling them "unlimited" plans with the simple truth is every provider limits your bandwidth usage either by threats or through packet shaping.
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
Leftwing pinko whines because everything isn't free.
News at 11.
Just open up all of the lines between the telco's central office and the home. By that I mean don't have them under the same local monopoly. Allow independent businesses to operate them. If you generate a competitive revenue stream here, there will be a lot of businesses who depend on offering you the best broadband access possible.
After all, these were paid for by U.S. tax dollars. We deserve better. Right now, the third-world nations are on-track to surpass (and in some cases, have surpassed) the U.S..
If that doesn't bother you, consider what the effects of better broadband and offshoring will do to the U.S. economy.
There really is no other option if the U.S. is going to remain competitive in today's world.
...do not welcome our Russian Roulette playing bandwidth overlords.
Ok folks, comparing the density of sweden or norway is not like comparing the density of the US. First of all, the US is a shit-ton larger than those countries. I understand the argument, but I don't think they're really incorporating the total size of the US. When you take the lack of density and spread it out over an area that is many multiple times larger than norway AND sweden combined, I think you can better understand the technical problems and costs involved with such an endeavor.
That being said, I do believe that the ridiculous telco/cable monopolies that have been governmentally supported for so long now has an effect as well. It's a combination of alot of factors, just like most other things in life.
All things are subject to interpretation, whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and n
In the self proclaimed "Capitol of Silicon Valley" my allegedly 3Mbit download DSL link maxes out at 2.4Mbit ... so I see little point in paying them more for an alleged 6Mbit connection.
There should be some equivalent to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_Law for arguing that the US is a less densely populated country when faced with the fact that such and such service or infrastructure in the US is inferior to its counterparts in other industrialized countries.
It's about fucking time someone with the clout of the head of the FCC got vigorously vocal about this. Much better that Powell's focus on tit-flashing.
Also... the Canada argument.
Canada might be ranked "higher", and be a big flipping country, but 75% of canada lives within 90 miles of the US border.
All things are subject to interpretation, whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and n
If you want to fix this, I suggest the following it: take all of the cables away from the existing telcos and make one nationwide heavily regulated company that would just maintain the lines and sell bandwidth to whoever could afford it. That would go a long way towards leveling the playing field.
Sure, you could de-regulate: end geographical monopolies and grant any company wanting to run cables access to the public rights-of-way. However, this would needlessly duplicate infrastructure, and companies would use inter-networking contracts to limit competition. The biggest impediment to offering new services in a telecomm market is to connect to existing networks. Incumbent networks have a huge advantage because they already connect many, many customers. If you create a startup telco, your customers expect to be able to talk to people on the other network. The incumbents can simply price you out of the market by making it expensive for your customers to talk to theirs.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
We have backbones all over the god damned country, and we *should* have telcos and cable companies by the god damned thousand, ready to take their little monopolistic slice of the country and wire it out the ass for broadband.
Instead, we have a few huge, massive countries whining about how everything is too expensive to deploy, despite the fact that other countries that are traditionally less well off seem to have no problem doing just that.
Copps argument is that, in certain respects, the entire area of the United States should not be considered. No one should expect Topeka to have the same type of service, but one think that Manhattan should be better than Seoul.
The point is that if Sweden and Norway can get high speed internet into the wilderness then the US should at least be able to get high speed internet into their cities.
The fact that the country is larger shouldn't make it more difficult as such. Making a large network is just connecting two smaller ones no?
Ummm, why should I be outraged that I can't reload slashdot faster than I already do?
From my experience I agree fully with Copps that the state of broadband services atleast here in the San Francisco Bay Area is abysmal. When I lived in Norway I shared a 2 mb/s DSL line with 38 students and that connection was about 10 times faster at peak times than my private Comcast "5 mb/s" connection in the middle of the night. As stuedents in scandinavia tend to do a lot of P2P filesharing I expected this to be the other way around when I moved here. The things that annoys me the most is high latency, slow speeds and my FTP/SSH speeds. Judging by how my download speeds decline over time I believe Comcast is shaping traffic and btw it sometimes takes much longer than it should to get my search results from google. There are probably countless reasons for why the broadband is so much faster in Norway than in the San Francisco Bay Area, but the most noticeable difference is that the broadband competition thrives in Norway (ADSL, SDSL, VDSL, Cable, Radio Broadband, Fiber Optic, 3G Broadband etc. (and I am just listing technologies here, not providers) ) I effectively (and practiacally) only have two choices here (Comcast Cable and ADSL from AT&T + peers). In the so-called internet mecca of the world nobody offers me VDSL or fiber-optic broadband! That is not good enough. Where do you think the next google will come from? and that
We are behind in health care (all First World nations have national health care programs that cover all citizens), in broadband (the speeds we have are those that other First World nations had ten years ago), and in many levels including how long we live.
Heck, just look at our crumbling infrastructure - bridges, airports, roads, rail (talk about a JOKE), etc.
Why should we be surprised that we have second world level in broadband?
Meanwhile the ultra-wealthy, as in Mexico and other Second World nations, are becoming more wealthy as our middle class is destroyed.
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My office in Japan, located in a bedtown area about 100 miles from then center of Tokyo, has 2x100mbps symmetrical fibers. The company paid the equivalent of about $150 in installation costs, and the monthly fee is around $55 for each fiber.
For the same monthly cost back home in Southern California I can only get (at best) 10mbps/512kbps down/up on cable; granted my neighbors aren't using too much of the pipe.
So how is such a difference possible in Japan?
1. All utility cables are all mounted above ground on poles in Japan, greatly reducing installation costs. (Same in Seoul,Korea last time I was there).
2. The gov't has a "fiber to the curb" initiative; so basically the installation is either subsidized or forced (political coercion?) to be the responsibility of the provider.
I must mention to all the satisfied customers who find their 7mbps/1mbps "broadband" sufficient that there IS a difference. When the internet (at least domestically) becomes as fast as a company or home network at 100mbps. It's night and day.
I won't mention how antiquated DSL technology in the US is...
Exhibit A for the alarmists are statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The OECD says the U.S. has dropped from 12th in the world in broadband subscribers per 100 residents to 15th.
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%.
Furthermore, the OECD does not weigh a country's geographic size relative to its population density, which matters because more consumers may live farther from the pipes. Only one country above the U.S. on the OECD list (Canada) stretches from one end of a continent to another like we do. Only one country above us on this list is at least 75% rural, like the U.S. In fact, 13 of the 14 countries that the OECD ranks higher are significantly smaller than the U.S.
And if we compare many of our states individually with some countries that are allegedly beating us in the broadband race, we are actually winning. Forty-three American states have a higher household broadband adoption rate than all but five EU countries. Even large rural western states such as Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and both Dakotas exhibit much stronger household broadband adoption rates than France or Britain. Even if we use the OECD's flawed methodology, New Jersey has a higher penetration rate than fourth-ranked Korea. Alaska is more broadband-saturated than France.
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.
In short, the OECD data do not include all of the ways Americans can make high-speed connections to the Internet, therefore omitting millions of American broadband users. Europe, with its more regulatory approach, may actually end up being the laggard because of latent weaknesses in its broadband market. It lacks adequate competition among alternative broadband platforms to spur the faster speeds that consumers and an ever-expanding Internet will require.
Europe also suffers from a dearth of robust competition from cable modem and fiber. Cable penetration is only about 21% of households. In the U.S., cable is available to 94% of all households. Also, the U.S. is home to the world's fastest fiber-to-home market, with a 99% annual growth rate in subscribers compared with a relatively anemic 13% growth rate in Europe.
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," broadb
Actually, even Canada's rural areas far from the border get good broadband. Your argument doesn't hold. It's really only the truly remote, hard to reach places that are still on dial-up or slow dsl.
The real problem is the big telcos that own the majority of the "backbone" network and the majority of the copper and fiber in this country.
Bandwidth is *expensive* and transport fees are *ludicrous*. ISPs are getting screwed by the telcos, and those costs get passed on to the end-user. Now, don't get me wrong, the big cable providers are sleazy, too, but they are at the mercy of the telcos, who obviously HATE the cable companies and want them to go away.
It's just a big mess, and I think the only real solution is to nationalize most of the copper/fiber networks in this country. It's too important to our economy.
Australia doesn't seem to have a problem giving broadband to it's red center. I'm pretty sure that puts to shave any large, barren areas of the US (I.E. Nevada)
How much bandwidth can I get for $15 per month in those foreign markets? I'm getting 100-300 kB/s down and 20 kB/s up. I'm not complaining because this is sufficient for 95% of my internet usage. From a clueless customer perspective, I'm getting a great deal for my $15 worth of broadband.
Summary: Someone important couldn't download his pr0n fast enough and is complaining.
Well, it's about damn time.
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
"Your connection is not the norm. I'm in suburban St. Louis, MO, and I have a "choice" between The Phone Company (AT&T) and The Cable Company (Charter), neither of which is required to care about anything either by law or by market forces."
Really? When did "doing without" stop being a market force? Have you tried throwing money at them to see if that "market force" works?
Enter the loophole in the law that states that if they build a brand new line from the central office to your house, they can control its content. Guess who can't put in new lines? Right... the "competing services" who are supposed to be able to access the lines that already exist. Therefore, you have a conflict of interest in that the line maintainers are the only ones capable of putting up new infrastructure... thus guaranteeing a monopoly of service. Now, while it may make business sense to wire up the areas that can and will be heavily subscribing first (it's called "return on investment"), you'll find that some other areas that have gotten it only did because they're in between the source and target area, so they just went and wired up that section too.
That said, I cannot get FiOS in my neighborhood. Neighborhoods around me are getting wired for it and receiving it. We aren't... and believe me, it's not because we're a poor neighborhood (probably has more to do with our being an older subdivision that still has above-ground lines). I've called Verizon a few times and the response I always get when I ask for a date is, "We can't give you a date because that would commit us." Duh! That's the point of my asking for a date or time frame! Verizon first sticks it to us with FITL, so we can't get any form of DSL other than IDSL/ISDN, unless you go with a T-1 or other dedicated line like that... then they stick it to us by not wiring up the neighborhood... and they further stick it to us by being the only telco that can do so, and limit the service to themselves. I'm sure there are other companies that could be wiring up neighborhoods too, and would love a shot at doing it... if they were legally allowed to do so.
Basically, like you said... the ones who maintain the lines should not be allowed to sell the services. Give the line maintainers one responsibility: infrastructure maintenance and upgrades. Everyone else, including Verizon, would have to "buy" their time and space on the lines.
OCO is Loco
"We are behind in health care (all First World nations have national health care programs that cover all citizens)"
If it were true that we had second world healthcare, I don't think all those foreigners would come here to see our expensive specialists; we have the best specialists in the world. There isn't just "one" metric to judge healthcare on. (I generally agree that we should have universal coverage, but that has nothing to do with 'first-world' and 'second-world')
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WHO ATE MY BREAKFAST PANTS?
Explain Canada being above you with that logic. I could get 2mb each way DSL in a town of 1500 in north eastern ontario 8 years ago. This is 100 miles from the nearest city (a whopping 50k population itself).
If Mexico is so wealthy why are they all coming here to get jobs at less than minimum wage?
Listen to the jerk beg for socialized medicine. The completely inept federal government should provide everyone health care, right? The same federal government that runs the pyramid schemes of social security and medicare, which will bankrupt us if not reformed in the coming decades. You want that government to give every single person a health care entitlement. Federalize a huge chunk of the economy. Why don't we all just become employees of the federal government? You say in a soft voice, please government, come and rape me for crying out loud! I need free Internets and health care.
Go sneak into Europe (by claiming you're a Muslim doctor) and enjoy your Socialist paradise, you pinko piece of dog crap.
...that works to our advantage. We have a LOT of open space, which makes it damn easy to run fiber. When the line needs to go through someone's house, it tends to cost more money...
The broadband offered to the US public is seriously dumbed down. You see advertisements trumpeting "blazingly fast" broadband with speeds under 10 Mbps. Those are legacy speeds. It is horse-and-buggy technology compared to jet planes and rockets in other countries.
REAL broadband starts at an appreciable fraction of a gigabit (such as 250 Mbps), bidirectional, to the end-user, at reasonable prices. At speeds like those, any subscriber can become a content originator. Families and small businesses would be able to have full motion video teleconferences. Every Little League baseball game and kids' musical recital could be on world-wide TV. Remote medical diagnosis and surgery could become commonplace, with the best experts remotely available wherever they are needed. It is almost impossible to imagine some of the advances that would become feasible.
From the viewpoint of innovation this is like the difference between animal power and engine power. If one horsepower is a fundamental limit, innovators will be thinking of ways to efficiently hook up two horses. However, if you have engines, innovators will be thinking of things you can do with engines, which are much more powerful than what you can do with horses.
US innovators won't be thinking about what you can do with the kind of broadband that innovators in other countries have. Mr. Capps is more right than he probably even realizes.
A couple hours ago, NPR had an article about the practice of US government agencies intercepting communications between people in various other countries. Part of the explanation was that communications (both Internet and phone) in a lot of the rest of the world go via the US because in so many countries, the connections to/from the US and internal US connections are so much faster than the internal comm systems within the country, and the comm stuff generally picks the fastest available routes.
...
During the article, I kept wondering why we Americans can't use that high-speed comm gear.
One obvious theory is that the high-speed stuff was installed explicitly for espionage purposes, with no intention of letting mere citizens use it. Is this too cynical? How else can you explain all the "dark" fibre that has been installed, at great expense, and then (supposedly) not used? What other theories, in addition to sheer stupidity, can explain it?
Is it tinfoil hat time here? Is it true that, whatever your country, your local government and commercial comm traffic is mostly being relayed through American routers, for the purpose of intercepting and analyzing the content? Maybe you should ask your local ISP and phone suppliers about their routing
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Those are not their ultra-rich, but the other 99 percent of them.
Think about it, Bill Gates is the 2nd richest man in the world, according to Forbes. The richest person lives in Mexico.
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When Americans live 10 years LESS than Canadians, you know something is wrong.
But, hey, just ask the Europeans, who live 5-8 years longer than we Americans do.
Same goes for broadband - South Korea has ten times faster broadband EVERYWHERE. Canadians laugh at our internet.
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Please define your terms.
To me, "Second World" means "communist or former communist." I can see USA's dropping from First World (advanced Western) to Third World (developing) much easier than its dropping from First to Second.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
Canadians laugh at our internet.
We do. We really really do.
Actually, it's also incredibly annoying. I work in a Canadian office, in concert with an office in Princeton, New Jersey. You know, famous University town, fairly close to New York City. And their broadband connection is *pitiful*. Makes any kind of remote work on their gear painful, to say the least, and it only gets worse when we need to transfer large amounts of data (such as ISOs) between the two offices.
To me, "Second World" means "communist or former communist."
Interestingly, Wikipedia agrees with you (for whatever that's worth). This I did not know. Apparently this is why "developed" and "developing" are preferred terms, these days.
I'm so god damned sick of our "business leadership" in this country. Ignorant greed driven one-track motherfuckers who all need to be lined up against the wall.
Okay then. So why aren't more Americans emigrating to other countries to get jobs at or below those countries' minimum wage?
Why don't more Americans emigrate to Mexico? You were saying Mexico was improving over USA.
I did see a news report on ABC or NBC that noted that a record number of Americans had emigrated to Canada--which would fit your theory. But the anchor closed with a note that even more Canadians had immigrated here, which wouldn't, since Canada is still First World however you count it.
The end-note may just be propaganda (no number for the Canada-to-America traffic), but it raises questions....
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
Bow before my sig, for it is good.
I told you it's the Federal Communist Commission http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=258305&cid=200 64027.
I wouldn't expect people to "be outraged" anytime soon either. People keep getting fed shit and being told it tastes just like democracy. It's gotten to the point where you can't wipe your ass without congressional approval.
You're not going to see a government (including an FCC) that is for the people until it starts acting in the best interests of the people.
The companies that buy Washington vote with dollars, everything else is just an opinion.
Hope is the currency of fools
Sorry, I was using the economic definition of Second World.
Originally, when I got my first degree, I was not permitted to travel to communist block countries, so I am using the definition whereby the Industrialized Nations (UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada) were part of the First World and the poor nations were the Third World.
Admittedly, India was originally in that category, and South Korea too.
But, in the 21st Century, we have nations with functional first world status, and then we have declining powers.
This is to be expected as the US continues to bleed resources due to imbalances in the balance of trade globally, while much of our money goes to Canada to repay them for their resource-rich oil wealth (our primary provider, actually), and our lack of investment in our own infrastructure, as we continue to try to prop up a worldwide global military system that merely aids other first world nations such as Japan while causing our nation to rapidly decline due to carrying costs.
The same thing happened to the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, France, and then Great Britain. We are merely the latest empire to sow the destruction of our own economic empire by our foolish lack of foresight. As the UK (Great Britain) kept focussed on coal while we switched to oil, so the EU now takes our place with diverse energy, research, and other resources while we keep our spendthrift ways and our oil-based economy.
Nothing personal. Economics and capitalist structures like the market care nothing about your ideology or your birthright as a nation. The crucible of modern society merely moves on, leaving the dead whale nations behind in the dust where they lie.
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These are obviously artificial caps levied against all users (both the legitimate and abusing customers). Maybe they could throttle the upstream for those with prolonged heightened levels of usage?
It may be in part because of the infrastructure, but I think the biggest reason is because braodband providers overstated, oversold, their capabilities. I'd bet many providers didn't expect as many users to use as much bandwidth. The services were billed as all you can eat so when a lot of people did just that the providers realized they weren't ready afterall.
FalconShould there be a Law?
hasn't anyone kicked that fucktard to he nutsack recently?
I completely agree, it would be impossible to cover an area many times the size with the same amount of resources.
:p
Wait, that's not what you meant? That's nonsensical, you say? Well, it's the only way your post makes any sense.
They don't want you running a webserver off your residential internet connection.
Because they charge more for the bandwidth a webserver uses. The last tyme I saw the going rate for a T1, which cable can beat, was more than $1000/month. Of course that was years ago, they may of come down.
FalconShould there be a Law?
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=254287&cid= 19964971
I'm not trying to be an ass or troll you, but go down to city hall and ask what the laws are regarding starting a new cable service. You might be pleasantly surprised to find that anyone can implement cable service so long as they pay a franchise fee to your city for using their rights-of-way.
What is most often (but is not always) the case is that cable access is a natural monopoly in your area. If you have Time Warner, Comcast doesn't want to offer service because they probably couldn't turn a profit. Even if they thought they could, the cost of building a whole new network for your city is cost prohibitive. They wouldn't recoup their costs soon enough.
It is about American corporate priorities. That's about it. We have the technology and the money to do it. The problem is that the corp's would have to actually SPEND all the tax money that was given them by the US gov't.
All points of time and space are connected.
Why does anyone ever make these "US is huge!" types of arguments? China's huger, and look what they've done in the last 20 years. I put it down to the US's biggest cultural problem: irrational American exceptionalism. Too often Americans assume we can't learn from any other country, because we're the exception to every rule. We're the United States of America, goldurnit!
I mean really.. Puhlease... the YearlyKos Convention? Yet another band of wild eyed liberals looking to try and steal taxpayer dollars and write laws to force people to do things that they are unable to do themselves.
This is my sig.
There's no point in having better service if people can't afford it.
I'm poor. I own a cell phone because it's cheaper than having a land line. Without a land line, I can't get DSL or even dialup. All my local cable providers require you to subscribe to cable TV in addition to internet, which is too expensive even without the internet. I use the internet primarily at the library and work, and less frequently at my parents house, which is enough to pay bills and see what's happening in the world.
What puzzles me is that a friend in South America gets DSL for beans compared to what he paid here, and the connection is better.
I'm actually talking about a high quality video feed produced by professionals that would play on my IP-TV capable television.
Actually there are high quality video feeds you can download, though I'm pretty sure there are more I can name two now, BBC and CNN.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Many people have been complaining about their local governments handing out cable monopolies. This is not the case (at least in Ohio). In Ohio, anyone who wishes to provide cable service has to pay a franchise fee to the local government for using the rights-of-way. Even though this is the case, in the vast majority of cities there is still only one cable provider. This is because in many cities two cable companies couldn't both stay in business. They simply wouldn't have enough customers. Cable is a natural monopoly, except in areas where it is profitable to run multiple providers.
Go down to your city hall and ask what the laws are on starting a new cable service in your town. You may be surprised to find that anyone can do so, just no one has due to the reasons above. Of course, I don't know the laws of all the states*, so some cities may have given hard monopolies to some companies. At that point you'll have to lobby your local government to get some sense.
*I can only speak to Ohio, as I'm familiar with their laws on the books. Also, this doesn't apply to phone companies. Your local ILEC (AT&T, Qwest, or Verizon) owns the lines and sells services on them. This is a major problem as explained here.
spread it out
Density is already "spread out", that's how it's fucking defined. Now you're just making up new bullshit excuses to explain why AT&T and others can't be bothered to spend enough money to remain competitive when there's nothing to compete with, and your whopper is right up there with people whining about how other countries got to "leapfrog" ahead by installing state of the art technology while our cables rot in the ground.
Frankly, what's needed is to accept that this isn't the 70s anymore, and that we don't need to guarantee companies free cash and monopolies in order to convince them to sell their products. Kill the franchise contracts and let anyone who wants to compete do so. I'm sure they'll find a way around granny's rose garden if she won't sell them the right to run a fiber under it.
Canada is bigger. I hear that broad band sucks in New York City which has more people than ALL of Canada. So let's stop playing the "big and sparse" card as it is nonsense.
Anarchists never rule
Uhh, no. Try Urban Minnesota and the average speed is 4mbit down 384Kbit up...
I live in Minneapolis and though I haven't checked my speeds yet when I download files I rarely get even 200Kb. I have no idea what my uploads speeds are, I used to upload files for classes but didn't tyme it. That's cable, I don't even know if the phonelines are capable of dsl where I live. The lines where my sister lives in Minnetonka aren't capable, but the ones on the next street over are.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Lack of density is a valid argument for explaining why rural areas have bad broadband. But it isn't a good explanation of why urban areas don't, the size of the U.S. not being relevant. Why isn't it relevant? Because the only part of the Internet where the large size of the U.S. makes a difference is in the backbones that connect the population centers. Maybe I'm mistaken, but I thought that as of now our backbones are operating at way under capacity. In other words, the distances between cities has not proven a problem for creating large internet connections between them.
So the connections between the cities are fine, what about the cities themselves? Take NY City. It's the biggest and densest city in the U.S. There's no distance argument to be made here. And there are 10 million potential customers -- that's more than the entire country of Sweden, all in one compact area! Yet if you only compare NY and ignore the rest of the country, we're still way behind in broadband.
No, sorry, the density argument holds no water at all. At least, it is clearly not the limiting factor on broadband, because where it isn't a factor at all broadband is still limited.
You are however absolutely correct about the monopolies being the cause. Why don't we have better broadband? Because the telcos neither want nor need to provide it. Hell, it wasn't until the mid to late nineties that we started to see sub-$0.10/min long-distance POTS because of the lack of competition before that. Why would they go run off and invest in more technology when there's nobody for you to go to if you think they're too slow? Right now the only "competition" we have is DSL vs cable, and they have apparently decided that it's perfectly adequate to just compete on price and the slightly different features of DSL vs cable.
The enemies of Democracy are
yeah...isps suck in the usa.
too bad americans are too stoopid to realize that.
oh well. americans don't learn calculus till highschool. Compared to asia...grade 4. or even grade 3.
lol. dumbass americans.
Assuming that better broadband isn't important to most people is like the assumption a century ago that most people would never own cars. After all, cars were expensive, and existing transport systems met most people's needs. That assumption was shattered as soon as affordable cars started being available in 1908. Sometimes technology creates its own demand.
Anyway, the commissioner didn't say that citizens are outraged he said they should be outraged.
I think most of us are still playing Texas Hold 'Em with broadband. But if you know of a good Russian Roulette site...
Comment of the year
Yes, there's an equivalent. So now that you've invoked it will you please shut up?
Bullshit. I've never talked to a Norwegian guy who had much against swedes, nor vice versa (there are of course exceptions to every rule, but I've never actually talked to one myself). We joke about the other country's stupidity all the time, but if you thought those jokes were rooted in real hate or anything like it, you really need to reconsider. Norwegians and Swedes are a relatively homogenous group and culture. All vikings, you know. ;)
(Just kidding. Actually, ALL swedes are dumb as hell, their ugly princesses believe in funny angles and the men cant pee further than a meter. Really. I hate those guys.)
Now, let me think, do I want to stick with Cox where the service keeps improving and I get like zero outages or do I want to have some government-run bureaucracy forcibly providing me internet service?
And what do you think of the government giving Cox and other broadband providers taxpayer money to buildout broadband? How do you feel about it when they don't buildout the infrastructure they got taxpayer money to do?
FalconShould there be a Law?
In all fairness, Copps is about the ONLY FCC commissioner who has even the remotest of clues. He was the ONLY FCC commissioner to address the interference concerns of the Amateur Radio Service regarding interference from BPL (broadband over power line) deployments. The others, just a bunch of political appointees who have ZERO clue and are grossly unqualified to be FCC commissioners. These guys are just like Ted 'series of tubes' Stevens who describe the Internet as tubes and dump trucks.
Trust me, if I was in charge of the FCC things would be VASTLY different. I have the balls to tell the telcos to shit or get off the pot. The telcos have raked in hundreds of BILLIONS, where the fuck is my 45 Mbps synchronous fiber connection.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
That's your conservative government's tax dollars at work!!
They have more than enough money to commit genocide "defending the nation" in countries halfway across the world, but zero money to do things for America... like repair bridges, give education and health care to kids, keep the ocean out of major cities, or repair said major cities once their neglect causes it to be destroyed.
Conservatives have it half right about government not being able to do anything... but it's CONSERVATIVE government which cannot get anything done. Bill Clinton proved exactly how much Liberal government can get done.
Here's a recent chart of broadband speeds and costs around the world.
AT&T.
'nuff said.
Whether we're talking about the old, monopoly-that-was AT&T, or the current, Dr. Frankenstein built me a monster AT&T, the moniker AT&T represents a lack of progress. Verizon, although late, is moving in the correct direction. Sprint is deploying WiMax as fast as it can. Some cable companies are exactly where they should be (OptimumOnline, RCN, I'm looking at you), and other, although a little slower, are getting there (Comcast, WOW, Time Warner, Charter).
Notice that in areas where Verizon is competing with Comcast (or other cable companies), broadband is doing *well*. Also notice that in areas where 5-10 mile fixed wireless is implemented, things are good to. In other areas with some competition, things are okay, too: It's a little expensive, but in Chicago I have options for 8 Mbps cable (Comcast), 25 Mbps cable (RCN), 15 Mbps ADSL2+ (Cyberonic), 3 Mbps fixed wireless (multiple WISPs), or 3 Mbps mobile wireless (EVDO, Sprint, Verizon, both RevA).
But areas dominated by AT&T? The *vast* majority of customers are locked in at 3 Mbps down, 384 kbps up. A few (located close to AT&T DSLAMs) can get 6 Mbps down, 768 kbps up. And AT&T's "new" U-verse is limited to 6 Mbps/1 Mbps.
This is unacceptable.
Frankly, AT&T's status as a monopoly provider in the old days fucked up the market so badly that it took decades to recover; and the recover some how involved putting a new AT&T together that is poised to fuck up the market again. The single *best* thing that the FCC can do now is strongly regulate AT&T's capability to strangle other providers, giving time for less-evil companies like Comcast to put up some decent infrastructure.
Anyone who disagrees with me; try and imagine what the U.S. broadband market would look like if AT&T was really pushing the curve in terms of what was possible. They're financial stable, profitable, and have plenty of cash on hand; if AT&T was deploying "true" next gen broadband infrastructure (at least as good as Verizon, or perhaps better), it would fundamentally change the market. The cable cos would be rushing out the door to deploy 25+ Mbps everywhere, and Sprint wouldn't be the only company pushing WiMax.
The U.S. broadband market would be a different place if you could get Verizon FTTP everywhere. Sadly, AT&T is still the dominant company, and until either A) the FCC starts to regulate the hell out of them, or B) Consumers & Businesses wise up and stop purchasing service from them, we'll be stuck with shitty broadband.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
That's pretty impressive that you even get the choice with such a wide variety of speeds at reasonable prices. I would love to have 1M down cable for $20 a month! Here the crap speed DSL plans (256k u/d) start at around $30 unless you get the even more useless $40 a month phone package. The next step up is 6M cable, which typically gets about 1M down anyway.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Instead of waiting for the government to set a policy to fix things (yeah, that's gonna work) or sitting around whining about
the lack of broadband, has anybody considered starting a non-profit coop to provide last mile broadband in their areas? There's been
some talk about that here in the Triangle (Chapel Hill, Durham, Raleigh, NC) recently. There are coops providing broadband
in some parts of the country already: http://www.cbn.coop/ for example.
This seems like the best solution to me. But we'll probably need to find a way to get the local governments out of the business of
creating artificial monopolies through onerous franchising agreements first...
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Actually, even Canada's rural areas far from the border get good broadband. Your argument doesn't hold. It's really only the truly remote, hard to reach places that are still on dial-up or slow dsl.
Even Nunavut has broadband access.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Well South Korea's government pays for the infrastructure. It's a social program kind of thing whereas a commercial business wouldn't lay down pipes unless there was enough profit in doing so.
So here I live in rural, and I mean rural Vermont. No cable, no DSL. My only non dial-up connection is thru satellite. Which, if you've ever had to make a living, is not that reliable (rain fades, snow,etc. On either end of the link! Not to mention the latency - ever try SSH with a 1300ms lag?) So what to do? A T1 is $700/mo with a 5 year contract... I'll stick with the $80/mo 1.5 Mbs unreliable sat link. The state has been promoting "Broadband for all", but that's at least 3 years away - http://www.vtbroadband.org/. The only reason this issue came up is that the second home owners (read wealthy suburbanites from the Megalopis of NY and NJ) demanded it. This lack of broadband has actually slowed down the Real Estate market, which of course slows down the development sprawl, which was caused by none other than Mr. Howard (damn you to Hell) Dean. As a side note, when he was Governor, he presided over and encouraged the most disastrous legislation, known as ACT 60, which in effect, abrogated the lifestyle of native Vermonters (who live off the land they own) and helped destroy a way of life through increased property taxes. This regressive and oppressive legislation from a "Democrat". But I digress.
At any rate, this rural "progressive" state has sucked up to the powers that be and essentially ignored the needs of the citizens and businesses.
No one is asking anyone to do anything.
My dialtone comes from a box 0.2 miles down the road, from there it's fiber to the CO. When I asked Verizon about putting a DSLAM in the box, they laughed (really, they thought it was quite funny)! A DSLAM card costs over $15K. But in France, they paid $60 per card, because they did the WHOLE FRICKIN COUNTRY!
Arggh.
I love living here, just wish I could get to the rest of the planet in a timely fashion.
With US ISPs gouging service providers 400$ a month per 1.5mbit of upstream bandwidth, US consumer upstream broadband will continue to be crappy until the ISPs find a way to give regular customers cheap access to better upstream without losing their ability to charge ridiculous prices to service providers for the same upstream access.
Runesabre
Enspira Online
I'd like to know what this guy means by "nothing compared to Seoul. Because from personal experience broadband there is crap to what I've seen in the US. Given that most innovation on the web is coming from US companies I find it hard to believe that our service is as bad as claimed. Why bother with all the content heavy sites if service is supposedly subpar for most people.
I'll grant that South Korea has many more service providers and in most cases monthly fees are also lower. But mind you that the average income there is also significantly lower than it is in the US.
And there's something else to consider. The barrier to entry for service providers is lower in many countries than it is in the US. This means there's less government red-tape to get through to establish service. And there's far lower resistance from residents regarding the installation of equipment. They certainly aren't concerned about environmental impact like people are in the US. Basically, like essentially everywhere else in Asia, if something needs to be built it gets built.
For at least 30 years my state has been trying to complete this stretch of highway. Even though much of the land has been acquired for the project the wealthy residents of time and again blocked all construction. They don't want their idyllic world disrupted. So instead, what would be a 20 minute trip takes over an hour. The currently used two lane road sees heavy traffic which spills over onto some side roads. On particularly busy stretches accidents are quite frequent. The highway would improve quality of life for everyone and help businesses all the way up the road, but it's blocked nevertheless. So instead the state throws money away on useless improvements for the existing roadway.
Recently there was a big debate regarding power lines passing through the same area. It would help lower rates for residents and increase reliability of power delivery but nobody wants them in their neighborhood. I think the power lines will take a wildly circuitous route and a big portion of it will be underground. Electricity is already expensive and this has only helped to raise rates further.
In Asia we wouldn't even see resistance to such projects. If a company needed to put up a communications tower, for example, they'd just put it up and that would be the end of it. In the US it would be blocked and the end result would be people complaining about spotty service.
This is one of many examples of the difficulties faced in the US. I'm not suggesting companies be allowed to build with impunity; I certainly don't believe they should be given free rein to do whatever they want. My point is that what problems there are aren't so simple. These providers are the source of some of our problems, but not EVERYTHING is their fault.
And Canada, Norway and Sweden may have lower population densities than the US but that population is also condensed into a smaller area of the country making their populations easier to service. In the US you've got population centers hundreds, if not thousands of miles apart.
I wonder if anyone's taken a look at sites like this one: SpeedTest
The stats provided on that site are quite interesting. According to my results my service is faster than over 92% of the world. I'd like to think that's not too bad. Japan is the only country I see in Asia with significantly faster speeds. Korea, seems to consistently lag behind the US.
Sometimes I can't help but wonder if these guys aren't just looking for a reason to bash the US.
And somehow a single government controlled monopoly will be better than numerous independent monopolies?
It's working fine in at least one place, in northeastern Utah a group of communities have been able to build a Broadband Utopia. Anybody can start a business delivering any service the infrastructure is capable of, whether it be broadband access, phone service, tv, or a combination of them. It is capable of speeds of up to 100Mbs.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Ok folks, comparing the density of sweden or norway is not like comparing the density of the US. First of all, the US is a shit-ton larger than those countries.
So, the reason that Alabama has shit broadband is because it's larger than Sweden, despite the fact that it is smaller than Sweden. Oh, and Alabama has a greater population density than Sweden. Since you whine about the entire US is a bad comparison, please compare Alabama to Sweden and tell me why Alabama has worse broadband offerings.
Learn to love Alaska
Go fuck yourself.
Steal taxpayer dollars? Wake the fuck up. The pendulum has swung far, far in the other direction. The main beneficiaries of government freebies over the last several years are corporations. Quite literally the governement is letting bridges fall down so that rich people and powerful corprorations can get more money that they didn't earn.
And it gets worse.
Government-sponsored monopolies get to rule our broadband and give nothing back in return. Most places, most of the time, unless you want to pay hundreds a month, your bandwith is capped at 50K up. So you can suck at the tit of major media corporations, or go fuck yourself. And pay attention to net neutrality - the major broadband providers in the US, who operate virtually without competition, want to decide who gets to be on the internet and who doesn't. It could easily be the most powerful anti-freedom move in hundreds of years.
Go fuck yourself. Go back and suck the King's ass. You give not one shit about freedom.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
The fact that the country is larger does matter.
You have to "touch" a whole bunch of little networks. The US isn't just NYC, Chicago, LA, Houston and DC. There is a LOT of stuff in between. Miles and miles of empty space and all of a sudden - a 30,000 person city in the middle of nowhere.
Now multiply that by a 1000 and you get an idea of the problem. How do you get to Del Rio, Texas? Or Hayes, KS? Or Pueblo, CO? And those are the BIG cities in those areas.
I'll be damn, there are a few leaders in the USA Government. There just ain't no politician in the USA with any real leadership qualities. I don't think the corporate-lobbyist on /. can mod-down or call the FCC Commissioner Michael Copps a troll. I suspect the politicians will have him before a committee soon to look like they will do something in committee and do nothing.
...) on the verge of catastrophic failure, USA telecommunication ranking 20+ internationally, abysmal public education with high levels of dropouts and failures, great health care for the wealthy and a good Christian attitude of let the poor eat-cake and drop-dead, business that is scam and corporate-welfare driven to avoid innovation and competition in favor of greed, fraud, and TREASON ....
... are what harm the USA economy (Folks, it should be obvious by now that "CAREER POLITICIANS" are the main cause of all our problems in the USA and are the greatest evil destroying US from within our still "politically, corporately, religiously correct" unsecured borders.
... you know what I mean them politicians can spin more lies into plausibly acceptable truth for trusting USA Citizens, than Satan can concoct fairy-tails to convince fools. Grow up folks abandon the dogma and vote'em all out every election forever.
....
We still have screwed up airports and air-traffic control, 30% of USA infrastructure (levies, bridges, dams, tunnels
I could continue the list of the results of leadership failure in the USA and say like a politician how damn complex and unsolvable the problems are at public photo-ops, but I would never tell such lies to US Citizens, or whine that it cost to much to feed, educate, and assure good health care for our children, or refuse by collusion a safe infrastructure for them on which to ride to school and allow parents to get to work and home safely. Nor would I keep screaming like a fearful wimp that the terrorist are the boogy-men destroying US, or that unions, taxes, minimum-wage
The GOD DAMN MF 10/20/30... (older than Bin Ladin) YEARS OLD PROBLEMS ARE CAUSED BY THE GREEDY LYING POLITICIANS, PLUTOCRATS, CORPORATIST, AND TELEVANGELISTS. We need to end career politicians by voting them out every chance we get. It is our patriotic duty to defend The USA Constitution and our families, friends, and nation by removing from local, state, and federal office every politician at every election without exception. We must end the obvious dangers clearly and repeatedly demonstrated over decades by Oppressive Career Politicians (OCP) and their dynastic/nepotist offspring.
IOW: Save US or Die should be all our concerns, it ain't some (small, few thousands) murderous gang of religious thugs that have any chance of destroying US. Yes, our greatest enemy is home grown and within the borders of the USA today, and all we need to do is stop the career politician demagoguery by voting them out of office always and forever.
Most all USA Politicians are a bunch of theatrical corporatist-cocksuckers, image-focused plutocrat tit-slurppers, televangelist dollar-praising mythologist, dogma-minded delusion-inebriationist
The above is all open content
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
( Btw, I'm not quite sure the angel chat is just the Norwegian princess, the Swedish royal family is fairly nutty as well. Maybe we have more in common than I first thought.... *groooan* )
The US really needs to adopt socialism for certain things to fix your problems... The government should lay down the cable to provide broadband to everyone. Not to mention health care.
I think it's because Norway and Sweden are social democracies, so most people has a fairly similar, decent pay. That means everyone is a potential customer, because just about everyone can afford it.
And have you looked at a map of Norway? Driving from the south to the north is about the same distance as Chicago - Miami, and that's if you take the short route through Sweden, to avoid all the jumping from islands to island by ferry.
Its telling that, in my experience, the worst broadband service in the USA tends to be in service areas where the markets are the most valuable (high population densities, wealthy consumers, etc). This is where the major players should be competing for market share. Instead, they appear to be holding up broadband build-out as a hostage to deregulation. Meanwhile, in other news, I've had no problems getting broadband in my cabin in the woods thanks to the public utility district and BPA.
Nationalize the entire telecommunications industry. Or at least take the restrictions off building public systems where the private companies won't get off their *sses.
Have gnu, will travel.
When you see our federal gov issues days, weeks, or even months before on media such as BBC, AlJazeera, CNNi, etc, then it means that our mainstream media is now controlled. It needs to return to the time where a reporter simply told what they saw, rather than have it dictated from above.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I hear that broad band sucks in New York City which has more people than ALL of Canada
What? No, New York City is much bigger than any canadian city, but the province of Ontario alone has more people than New York City (unless you include the whole metropolitan area).
In colorado, all the cities with pop more than 10K have exclusive monopolies in place. Right now, nowbody could come into the denver or aurora unless they deliver media on something other than twisted pair, coax, fiber, and powerlines.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Several comments here:
1.) Economies of scale don't really come into play in sparsely populated areas. 2.) "China's huger" Ignoring the wonderful grammar the two countries are for all intents and purposes the same size. Depending on the way the area is figured they are 3rd and 4th in land area. But this is the important thing anyway see below. 3.) The question is more about the deviation of the population. The quirky thing about the US compared to most of the other large countries, Russia to some degree being an exception, is that the vast majority of the country is habitable and more importantly is inhabited. The US population is really spread out. Norway, Sweden, Canada, and even China tend to be focused much more heavily around particular areas of the country. All of this while important, doesn't excuse the sorry state of broadband connectivity, among many other things, but it is something that does truly need to be considered. But one that should probably be put away until at least the highly dense areas (NY, LA, SF, Chicago, Philadelphia... you get the idea) are at least adequately serviced.
They sell it at different speeds, but I doubt they actually have separate implementations. A more plausible scenario is that everyone gets the same (fastest) implementation, and then they throttle it down in software. This is kind of like the way apple used to sell 4GB iPod minis and 6GB iPod minis that used the same hard drive (6GB).
I know this probably sounds crazy. Why would a company cripple user features this way, right?
Well, it turns out that some people are willing to pay more for internet than others, but you can't just sell it at the highest price, because then people who aren't willing to pay that much won't buy your service. You don't want to price it low, because then people will pay the low price, even though they were willing to pay more. So, what sellers do is they try to segment the market. You can see this everywhere (Do you think organic salad actually costs twice as much to grow as regular salad? Of course not, but you can charge twice as much for it. Does a Cadillac Escalade actually cost 80% more to manufacture than a GM Suburban, it's the same damn vehicle with a leather interior!) Of course it's a lore more obvious when you use software to achieve market segmentation (since nothing is physically different) but it's the same principle.
I don't want to pay for your broadband through my taxes. I don't care how low the US is ranked. If you want it, pay for it yourself.
Here is the high quality video:
http://stage6.divx.com/
Well, apart from the good video quality, it is another Youtube ^^
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.
When willing pay for it as a business contract, the same cable company with the same cable modem was able to give my full 2mbs upload and download and offered 4 as well.
They don't want you running servers because they're in the media business.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
"Density" is a measure of population per unit area. The US is similar in density to Sweden and Norway. (And Canada.) Density determines the cost of achieving broadband connectivity, because it directly determines the cost of running fiber to each house.
The grandparent poster said, OK, sure they're equally dense, but THE US IS BIGGER!!!!
This makes no sense, because physical size doesn't determine cost. In fact, the US is bigger, but it also has more people. Which means it's a larger market at the same density, which means that, compared to Sweden and Norway, we should get economies of scale in our broadband. So ours should be better, but in fact, it's much worse.
If you're making an argument about the variance of density, that's a different story. The response then is, there are many areas of the US that are as dense as any area in those countries. So why can't the US even get "highly dense areas (NY, LA, SF, Chicago, Philadelphia...adequately serviced."?
Fundamentally, it comes down to two things. Weak regulation of monopolies by Bush's FCC (and to a lesser extent Clinton's). And the fact that the American people always assume we have it better than everyone else, and refuse to believe the statistics proving we don't.
Actually, I think you can categorize the 3 major ILECs like this:
Verizon: We're at least trying, sort of, in some places. Sucks to be you if you're stuck in god-forsaken ex-GTE area though. Oh, and damn the copper network [this at least I agree with, a little].
AT&T: VDSL ought to be enough for anybody. Please subscribe to our service that may have been impressive had we launched it 5 years ago. Oh, by the way, we've managed to sign up, oh, 50,000 people for it in a year.
Qwest: What? Me worry?
I think cable will eat ILEC lunch for the next 5 years outside of the FiOS areas and at least AT&T and Qwest will be in a far more precarious position. Time will tell.
I'm a Norwegian and I don't hate Swedes. I think that in a lot of ways they are as special and as valuable as normal human beings. The whole Norway-Sweden rivalry is a myth.
Would someone clue the parent in on density being measured as population divided by area? And if you want to argue that the density distribution is really that different, you'd better come up with some very good facts because as far as I know both our countries are as thinly populated as the US - hell, you have cities larger than our countries. And if you're arguing that building a bigger net is more difficult, it should be the backbone lacking when it's the last mile instead. Not to mention the small detail that we've built a global network that seems to function well enough...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I sell Verizon FiOS 6-days a week and talk to at least 40 new unsuspecting people everyday. I can tell them that I'm saving them money and giving them a much faster internet (20/5 Mbs) that operates at a much more consistant speed than their current Cable/DSL provider. After which, the objections most often heard are "No, I think I'll just keep my Internet the way it is" or "Its fast enough already". I thought this was America? I thought better, faster, bigger, etc were the main components of our vocabulary. We are then confronted with the two main issues preventing a Broadband overhaul in this country - #1 - Fear of change in technology & #2 - Limited dependence on the net. When we slash-dotters discuss these issues, we forget that the vast majority of this fine nation are, well... computer illiterate. They cannot see the benefits of an improved broadband network, mostly because they have no need for it. We need to quit gripping about how 10% of our population is disappointed in the broadband in this nation, and figure out how to rally up the other 90% to actively participate in intergrating the internet more into their daily lives. Until there is a product/site/service that appeals to the greater percentage of our population, the hopes of a better Internet can be kept in a jar on the shelf.
I'm sorry for the worthless post, but that last line was the funniest thing I've read this week. And I've wasted a LOT of time at work this week.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
Those embedded reporters may not be beholden to corporate bosses. But they are beholden to the government itself; the military doesn't have to embed any given reporter. An embedded reporter that got too harsh might be kicked out in the middle of a street that's deserted, except for the landmines...
This is a military that revoked the honor from a discharge of a soldier because he tried to participate in a peace protest. Apparently he wasn't 100% discharged. [frown]
I'm not saying your embedded reporters are wrong. They might have it closer to correct than those reporting from inside the mainstream media and outside the military, among the people or the terrorists. (I kid you not on that last. I only wish I was kidding.)
Of course, the military has been accused of firing on buildings with non-embedded reporters in them, but oh well....
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
Bravo, well said.
You are correct, but the telco's squandered the money on upgrading their cellular networks (and general profits) instead then later said they couldn't afford the upgrades but still raised rates. Not to mention forcing local communities to not deploy their own network, but then they [the telcos] did not bother deploying one either. Also, the constant mergers have also nullified most promised fiber contracts.
http://www.newnetworks.com/broadbandscandals.htm
This fucking story comes up every couple of months on Slashdot. Everything that can be said has already been said. The population density argument is trotted out, disproven, then proved again. We complain that people in Korea can get 100mbit connections for $10 per month (whether or not those connections can deliver 100Mbps beyond the local loop is anyone's guess - by your metrics I have a 1Gbps connection because I'm on a university campus).
Bottom line: I don't care. I can't tell a damn bit of difference between my campus connection (1 Gbps), my work connection (1 Mbps), and my home connection (Comcast 12 Mbps), unless I'm pulling from another university or Akamai (university has a local mirror).
US businesses, universites, and schools are all well connected. Homes are increasingly so. There is no crisis. Complaining that "broadband penetration is low" is like claiming that we're falling behind because we don't eat as much chocolate per capita as people in the UK. It doesn't fucking matter.
The US has an are that is about 11.5 times the area of sweden+norway.
it has about the same mix of urban/rual areas.
and it has abut 21 times as many inhabitants.
It also has a greater GNP.
So the fact that it has worse broadband is despite having better prerequisites.
And total area is irelevant. We can start to compare the US to europe and you will se the same difference.
You dont have to be an analretentive nitpicker to be a tester.... But it helps
Because fat isn't very dense (that's why it floats!), and we've sure got more of that.
In Paris, France, 29.9 a month gets me 28Mbps down / 1Mbps up ADSL2+, free modem included, free PVR with 40G hard drive included, HDTV over ADSL included, FREE phone calls to several dozen countries included, 2G of web hosting with NO AD and *unlimited* bandwidth (how much d'you pay for that alone in the US?), and there is NO, I repeat ABSOLUTELY NO shaping, filtering or mangling of any kind.
... oh yeah c'm'on bring 'em on 'em surrender monkey jokes ... you can't even win a war against an enemy a 1/10 your size.
What's the quality of service? Apart from the occasional outage (I'd say on average a couple hours of downtime every few months), I can pretty much saturate my link anytime I want, that means downloading from a Gentoo or Ubuntu mirror at close to 3MB/s.
The same provider is beginning to roll out FTTH, so that means that in 6 to 12 months, I will be getting 50Mbps *symmetrical* fiber at no extra cost.
Granted, that's in Paris. But that's available in almost all French cities, and while rural areas are getting increaslingly covered, they have access to slightly lesser speed, that are still beyong what you get in NYC anyway.
So yeah, nitpick all you want on that OECD report, but face it: the USA, as a nation, are being sapped to rubbles by corruption. Your health care sucks, your police is corrupt, your justice system is a joke, your bridges are collapsing, your schools fail, your food is poisonous, and your military
Some providers offer basic ADSL2+ at 15 EUR a month. That's like 20M down / 512k or 1M up.
In Europe, Japan and Korea, consumers are willing to pay for this service.
Thing is, thanks to actual FREE MARKET enforced by ANTI CARTEL provisions in the law, customers are being charged a fair price.
In my case, that's 30 EUR a month for 28Mbps DSL. Phone, TV etc included.
There should be some equivalent to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_Law [wikipedia.org] for arguing that the US is a less densely populated country when faced with the fact that such and such service or infrastructure in the US is inferior to its counterparts in other industrialized countries.
Of course the real truth would be that the American citizen are held to ransom by corporations, that are more interested in looking good to their share-holders than to their customers. I am of the opinion that the local population should be allowed to come together to build whatever infrastructure they want, especially if the private sector wasn't giving them a chance. If the local community is providing a better solution that the telcos then maybe the corporations should have done a better job.
There are other solutions to pure city provided internet and that is working in partnership with the private companies, for example the town can provide the infrastructure and the companies run the service. The companies in this situation would be pure service providers running the service, even in competition with other companies, but using the city provided network. They would of course pay a small line rental fee, in much the same way that road users pay for the road on which they drive.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Why does anyone ever make these "US is huge!" types of arguments?
This is a political issue. They refuse to admit that there are countries out there that have done a better job of building their comm infrastructure, because then they'd have to admit that a centrally-planned solution can sometimes work better than a "free market" solution, and that would be blasphemy. And the "density" argument is really the only plausible line they have, so they work it to death.
This is a problem that really bothers me too. I agree, and I am outraged, at the amount of money I have to pay for the level of service I get. What are my options though? No matter which company I turn to, it's about the same. Does anyone have suggestions on how to get better Internet access?
"he drew his sword Ringil that glittered like ice... and he wounded Morgoth with seven wounds..."
Go fuck yourself. Go back and suck the King's ass. You give not one shit about freedom.
I suppose this is what passes as political discourse these days. I don't really care for it - if I wanted some of this I've a truckload of blogs I can read on both the right and left. Some of us really don't want this here.
That's no excuse. All those 30,000-person cities have phone companies. Even 300-person cities have phone companies--maybe not one of the Baby Bells, but they do have a phone company and get phone service. Anyone can get a phone line and dial-up; there's a functional nationwide meta-network for that. All the little networks do mesh.
But not everyone can get a DSL line, because where the phone companies can put DSL lines is at the mercy of where they choose to put the DSL boxes. Since everyone can have phone service from a phone company, it's the phone company's choice whether to put the DSL boxes in reach of everyone they service or not.
Cable broadband may happen for everyone in the 30,000-person towns, assuming they put in enough intermediate cable boxes. (Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.) But cable companies won't touch the isolated 300-person cities.
(BTW: to get to Hayes, KS, take I-70 west from Topeka or east from Denver.)
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
I'm a Norwegian used to a 4Mbit SDSL line at home, and a 12MBit SDSL line at work. On my 4Mbit line I usually experience 3Mbit-4.5Mbit real speed both up and downstream...
;-)
Two months ago I visited the US for two weeks.
I first stayed at Hilton, Disney World, FL. Both the wirless and wired connection was pi** poor. More packets was lost than the ones that got through. And the line "fell down" about every 5 minutes.. It took me several hours and restarts to download a 100Mb file from Microsoft.. Remote login to my office PC back in Norway was not possible.
I then stayed at Quality Inn at Times Square, NY. Their wireless connection was quite good. Connection fell down a few times, but the average speed was very good. I could even use Remote Desktop back to Norway in near "realtime" quality.
Another thing I noticed was how all mobile phone adds focues on "the most reliable calls" and "fewest lost connections". Huh, I haven't lost connection during a phone call since 1999. All the Norwegian adds today focus on price, not quality (as the quality on Norwegian cell phone connections is near 100%).
One more thing about your cell phones. Since 2002/2003 all phones sold in Norway can be used world wide (tri or quad band phones). From the adds I saw while in the US it looks like you've got to buy special phones to use them outside the US.
You're being screewed by your broadband and cell phone providers
I've a feeling that Japan and Korea have fewer thunderstorms and fewer squirrels than America does. Thus, overhead lines likely work better for them.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
I have thought about this more than once. Being a Swede myself I know how the broadband market works like here. It works pretty decent, but it depends on where you live and how you set to live (a big full house, an apartment or a condoe). It's not optimally priced nor speedy if you live in the wrong places.
... we have only 9 million inhabitants in this country, and that's including the little babies and people below adult or even teen ages. I actually don't know how many households we have since that would be a better number to judge by. The population number is low and you would think that the profits aren't that spectacular with only a couple of millions of broadband internet users, and maybe it isn't all that profitable, I don't know.
Anyway
In the US, there is the potential of connecting at the least 130-150 million households to give a very low number, right, knowing that as much as half of the 300 million people in the US are poor (if I got my facts straight). If there was a good plan with politicians knowing what the internet is and how a computer works, plus a motivation to do it, any country should be able to deploy nation-wide broadband. If there are only 5 people living in a village with no neighbours for several hundreds of miles away, those people should still be able to connect somehow. Perhaps by settling with an upcoming launch of WiMAX providing long-distance wireless instead of fiberoptics?
I think that the strategy for a proper broadband expansion in the United States should be organized in a way that made sense to everyone and didn't base itself on short-term greed and monopoly creation but rather on long-term winnings in terms of people being connected everywhere to high-speed internet, making it possible for small towns to grow into big cities because of motivation for tech people to settle there and make businesses, people building houses there, etc. Everyday private consumers always enabled to use state of the art online-based services & technologies as well as small local companies being able to do business online with each other in a more efficient way, including a simplistic thing like connecting one company's different offices to each other + the company headquarter with low-latency. High-quality infrastructure is what creates opportunities and even population growth. Where would people be today if there were no trains or subways to get to work with, for those that need to and are fed up with traffic jams in the morning?
I think this situation will solve itself in the next 50 years, because by then the old people who grew up with no radio and TV will be gone since long. Only people who take internet for granted will be alive, and even as politicians they will want to access high-speed internet everywhere in the country.
(Sorry for my submission being rough - it's half past midnight over here and I can't think straight right now)
"People are stupid. Persons are smart" -- Agent K, MiB.
The REAL problem (please keep in mind, my opinion) is with the service and support. I work in the IT service industry, and I know how queuing and scheduling works ... but the fact that when I call Insight and tell them something is wrong, all they state is, "It looks fine on our end." They take no initiative to assist the customer. Usually, it is only after 20 minutes of pointless tests and arguing do they relent into "I can have someone out there next week around 2p & 6p." Ugh ... I feel like I am getting no value out of my service. When I deal with Comcast when at my Parents house, it's even worse. Aside from "non-customer focused" service, the downstream is smooth, and I have no complaints with the upstream. I just wish that for the $40 in change I pay a month for my 10M cable broadband, I would at least like to see some "customer" in the service. That's my beef, two cents, and $5 will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks. Actually, you might just want to head over to Speedway and get it for $1. Cheers.
Go fuck yourself
How about, you shoot yourself in the head. You would make yourself smarter if you cleared all that sh--- that's clogging up your pea brain.
Quite literally the governement is letting bridges fall down so that rich people and powerful corprorations can get more money that they didn't earn.
Great rhetoric, but how did that money not get earned? Last time I checked, it was Comcast and other companies laying down the fiber optics, buying the network switches, launching satellites, and doing every other thing to build a physical infrastructure. You have every right to raise capital to do the same thing yourself. Certainly, since you feel that Comcast and the likes are so horrible, you should be able to make a sufficient business case for a better, more open communications system that consumers will love....
but you don't... because you and your liberal likes are either too lazy or too unconfident or both, to do so. So instead, you basically want to take someone else's communications system and use it for your ends, and throw up a bunch of smoke and mirrors about freedom, when you are really arguing about is rationalized theft, based on the absurd idea that all the risk and investment that other people put into this thing somehow belongs to you.
You didn't risk anything. You didn't invent anything. You didn't buy anything. That network is NOT yours.
Thief. All of you socialists should be rounded up and shot, because really, in the end, you are all criminals.
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