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US Does Surprisingly Well in Internet Survey
Herman's hermit writes "A new report from the World Economic Forum ranks the US number four when it comes to 'network readiness,' despite the fact that the same report has the US 17th broadband subscribers and 19th in bandwidth. 'While good news overall for the US, which is poised to take full advantage of information technology gains, the report probably won't change many minds when it comes to talking specifically about US broadband deployment.'"
It took a fair bit of searching, but according to them, 'network readiness' means: the presence of an ICT-friendly and conducive environment, by looking at a number of features of the broad business environment, some regulatory aspects, and the soft and hard infrastructure for ICT; the level of ICT readiness and preparation to use ICT of the three main national stakeholders--individuals, the business sector, and the government; and the actual use of ICT by the above three stakeholders.
The Electrical Engineer in me cringes every time I here the term "bandwidth" used in place of "data rate."
Still, >200Kbs is the answer to your question.
"The term broadband commonly refers to high-speed Internet access. The FCC defines broadband service as data transmission speeds exceeding 200 kilobits per second (Kbps), or 200,000 bits per second, in at least one direction: downstream (from the Internet to the userâ(TM)s computer) or upstream (from the userâ(TM)s computer to the Internet)."
http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/broadband.html
If you really need to go so far as that to get more than one computer to share your connection.. Change your ISP to someone with sane terms as soon as possible!
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
24Mb/s ADSL2+ is £18-£24 in the UK (not available outside large settlements yet AFAIK). I'm really surprised you don't have that in New York yet (I'm sure it's been available in London for at least three years now, maybe more). What stops it? In the UK, it was the ex-state-monopoly (BT) that had to be told to allow competition over the last-mile of copper and the equipment in the exchange: the competition installed the required equipment in the exchange to support ADSL2+.
I thought this was one of those "let's bash the Americans whilst ignoring the facts" topics that regularly surfaces, but ouch. I convinced my 50-year-old parents to upgrade to 16Mb/s broadband last week, and she lives on the edge of a village of 2000 people in the countryside somewhere.
Granted, there are regions of the USA that have very few people.
But the parent poster said the best he can get in New York is 768kbits/second broadband. The best sensible price broadband in most cities in the UK is 24Mbits/s, and it's higher in many other countries (I doubt the UK is that high on the list of good broadband countries). New York City has a comparable density to London. What's wrong?
There's a problem with that, though. In Australia and Canada, the vast sections of empty space really are empty. If you look at population density maps, you see that Canada is densely populated around the borders to the US, and the rest is COMPLETELY empty. And Australia is basically a big desert island with some settlements along the coasts. I'm exaggerating, but only a little bit.
The US, on the other hand, has its two largest distributions of population on the two coasts, which sound good. But, you have to realize, the middle of the United States is not nearly as empty as the middle of Australia. There are a whole bunch of cities in between the Appalachians and Rockies, like Chicago, Houston, New Orleans, Austin, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Denver, etc etc etc. The only part of the country that's really empty is Alaska, and even that has a couple of major cities inland, like Fairbanks. China is the only country has is in a similar situation vis-a-vis population density, and it's possible that even China has more uninhabited open space than the U.S.
This, incidentally, is the major reason for the success of the U.S. in the last century or so. It has the geographic mass of a large country, but it has rates of resource use, land exploitation, and economic production of a smaller country, like England or Germany. In fact, had civilization arose in American before Europe, it's likely that the territory we now call the United States would be a fragmented group of states the way Europe is now (Canada would be Russia, of course).
Millionth time this little fact gets brought up in this type of discussion but:
The second-place winner is Sweden, which has a population density of 52 people per mile square, as compared to the US' 80 people per mile square.
I don't live in Helsinki or any other large city; in fact, I live in the countryside outside a small city a few hundred km north of Helsinki. A 100/10Mbps fiber connection here costs 75euro per month, with NO capacity limits or throttling. That price also includes telephone and a basic TV package. Wherever a new house is built in my area, the ISP puts down fiber to it (2km fiber to reach me and 4 neighbours). They stopped putting down copper a couple of years ago, and are progressively replacing existing copper with fiber. On fiber, they give you two choices: 20/2 or 100/10 Mbps, unlimited and unthrottled.
In places with existing infrastructure (cable or decent telephone lines), I can understand ISPs preferring to "extract the value" from their assets rather than add fiber beside the existing lines. But from much commentary on
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire