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.'"

Comments

Large

[webmaster404]

I think the main point in broadband that people just don't get is that the US is huge while many smaller countries are the size of one of the US's states, its is expensive to get broadband.

Re:Large

[Anonymous Coward]

But we've got 50 of them. Maybe it's tougher to wire up the more rural states, but doesn't the lack of clusters of high-quality inexpensive broadband in our urban areas (comparable to, say, the level of service you might find in the Netherlands) suggest more issues than geography comprise the bandwidth problem?

Re:Large

[tindur]

Does this count as a Slashdot meme already? Every time there is a story on Slashdot about how the net is somehow better somewhere else than in the US the result is "But the US is so big" and then we get "There is a country that is even less densely populated than the US that has better net connections.

Re:Large

[Ecuador]

I don't understand your point. A country that is huge, but has few people or a very low GDP per capita would logically have a problem getting everyone on broadband connections.
The US does not have a low population density and most certainly its population is not poor.
And I did not say it is easy to give broadband to every rural area. We can start from cities.
I live in NYC. In the middle of Manhattan the best you can do is 3/768 or 5/384 connections. I mean, really.
The same at my previous house in Queens (Long Island City) and Brooklyn. I was excited when I heard speakeasy was finally installing ADSL2+ connections (up to 10Mb/s in my area), only to find out they wanted $180/month without voice (yes, it is static, but I don't need it, and they don't have a dynamic option). At the same time I hear of much poorer countries where 24Mbit ADSL2+ connections are $50 or less.
So, who is not getting what? I guess the reason for having nothing done for years is that a lot of people share your mentality. Hey, we are a big country, it is expensive... Like ONE FRIGGIN CITIZEN has to pay for the whole thing???

Re:Large

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot "but service in densely populated parts of the US sucks too!" followed by "but cities like New York are old and hard to rewire!" followed by "City X in Europe has been there for a thousand years, still has the original roads, and has great broadband!"

Or "Nobody needs that kind of bandwidth" followed by "Well, if comcast had that kind of bandwidth, they wouldn't have to compress the hell out of their HD channels, and they could (yeah right) quit complaining about people downloading a file interfering with the TV."

Or my favorite, "Quit whining and buy a 155mbps OC3 already oh wait you can't afford it lol!" when talking about consumer broadband in Tokyo or Seoul.

It's not a meme, it's just the exact same stupid bullshit that gets trotted out Every. Single. Time. And every single time they get trotted out, they're debunked. Again. Nobody cares what kind of speed Billy Bob is getting out there on his tractor, most of us live in cities, some of which are very large cities. I don't care that some guy on the wrong side of a mountain has to use dial up, if I cared I'd go live on the side of a fucking mountain.

Re:Large

[leothar]

Yep, I have a pretty common 100 Mbit down/10 Mbit up for about $50 per month. In a medium Swedish city with a population of 150 000. :p

Re:Large

[EaglemanBSA]

The US does not have a low population density
The U.S. has roughly one tenth the population density of many western European countries at 80 people per square mile.

and most certainly its population is not poor.
Clearly you've never been to Appalachia. Or southern Louisiana. Or rural Mississippi...the list goes on. Some people along the Ohio River live in tar-paper homes.

Re:Large

[Anonymous Coward]

That might be a believable argument if the denser parts of the U.S. had internet access on par with that of Europe.

Re:Large

[JohnBailey]

Not to mention the ISPs in some countries (the police state, UK especially) will try to limit service by machine with mac address (forcing you to use mac spoofing to allow a router). While others in the same police state will supply a wireless router as part of the subscription and couldn't care less how many computers are hooked up. Personally I have two desktops, an N800 and a Wii all happily accessing the Internet over here in Airstrip one through an iSP provided router, and not a word of complaint from my ISP. So long as I pay my bill and don't max out my bandwidth all the time, they couldn't care less.

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!

Re:Large

[xaxa]

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.

Re:Large

[MichaelSmith]

I think the main point in broadband that people just don't get is that the US is huge while many smaller countries are the size of one of the US's states, its is expensive to get broadband.

Here in Australia with one tenth the population density the situation is almost exactly the same as in the USA. That doesn't sound right to me. I think the service should be better in the US.

Re:Large

[xaxa]

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?

Re:Large

[electrictroy]

I don't understand:

Why do these surveys keep comparing a 2500-mile wide continental nation to tiny little states? There's a huge difference between wiring metropolitan France and the cornfields of America. Apples and oranges.

A proper comparison would do one Federation versus another federation:
- U.S. v. E.U. v. Canadian Confederation v. Australia v. China.
Those are comparable territories with similar challenges to overcome (lots of empty space).

Re:Large

[electrictroy]

>>>"The US does not have a low population density"

Oh really? I challenge you to drive from NYC to California on I-80, and then repeat that statement. You won't be able to, because then you'll come to realize what I have realized from my cross-country journeys:

- The U.S. is one large cornfield, sprinkled with a few cities here and there.

Re:Large

[menace3society]

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).

Re:Large

[jiushao]

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.

"Network Readiness"

[ShadowMarth]

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.

Don't look at the ranking, look at the scores

[EmbeddedJanitor]

There's no statistical difference between the top ten or so (+- 4%) and the top 25 are all within a +- 10% band.

Given that online surveys are notoriously bad and need wide margins of error, I would not read anything into this except for the obvious: First world countries (EU, USA etc) are ahead of Chad, Zimbabwe etc.

Duh!

Re:Definition of "broadband"

[coolsnowmen]

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

Pretty much dead wrong there.

[ZombieRoboNinja]

Here's a global population density map: http://soils.usda.gov/use/worldsoils/mapindex/popden.html

Notice how the EU is all dark orange, except for parts of central Spain. Lots of people, more financial incentive to wire everything.

Notice how 80% of Canada is completely deserted, because it's too far north to be habitable. The Northern Yukon does an awful lot to decrease Canada's average population density, but since there's NOBODY there it doesn't affect the difficulty of wiring up broadband. Australia, same thing, except it's like 95% instead of 80% empty.

China is enough of a mix that it might make sense to compare to the US, but I'm guessing there are enough other issues with development, etc. to make it a tough comparison.

Re:Pretty much dead wrong there.

[MadnessASAP]

Ahem... It's not that its too far north to be habitable, It's that when you only have 30 million people it's kind of hard to fill up that much space. You can take any Canadian and stick him up there with nothing but a teabag and a pair of underwear and he'll be happy as fleas on a dog, we just like to be able to hang out with each other.

Re:Large - irrelevant

[AliasMarlowe]

I think the main point in broadband that people just don't get is that the US is huge while many smaller countries are the size of one of the US's states, its is expensive to get broadband. I live in Finland. Compared to some of the larger US states, Finland is (i) slightly larger than Arizona with a somewhat smaller population, (ii) twice the area of Florida with one third its population, or (iii) half the area of Texas with one quarter its population.

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 /. and elsewhere, it seems that in many parts of the US the existing infrastructure is overwhelmed at the local level, lacking the capacity to support even a fraction of the bandwidth that has been sold to connected customers. The highways get repaved or widened when the circumstances demand it; communication infrastructure also needs occasional improvements.