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2008 International Broadband Rankings
itif writes to let us know about a major new report, released yesterday by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, showing how the US and other countries compare in terms of broadband access, speed, and price. The rankings (PDF) place the US 15th, this country having fallen every year since 2001. Here's the full report (PDF). According to the report's executive summary: "The US broadband policy environment is characterized on the one hand by market fundamentalists who see little or no role for government, and see government as the problem; and on the other by digital populists who favor a vastly expanded role for government (including government ownership of networks and strict and comprehensive regulation, including mandatory unbundling of incumbent networks and strict net neutrality regulations) and who see big corporations providing broadband as a problem. Given the policy advocacy and advice they are getting, it is no wonder that Congress and the Administration have done so little."
How many countries subsidize telcos with tax dollars to create their infrastructure? I'm curious.
You of course realize that in the US our infrastructure has been heavily subsidized with tax dollars, right? But the problem is that thanks to deregulation, the telcos instead just pocketed the money and never actually provided anything.
The sharp dichotomy presented in the executive summary is just plain wrong. Sure, the two extremes exist, but I think most supporters of net neutrality regulation don't actually want the government to take over networks. The summary is as accurate as "All people in the U.S. are either knuckle-dragging Bushtards or communists."
The point of net neutrality is not to change who is running networks, it's to prevent network operators from effectively blocking or slowing down connections based on who or what the user is trying to connect to.
Here's the ranking:
Score on Specific Broadband Measures
Household Price5
penetration3 (Lowest monthly
Ranking2 (Subscribers Speed4 price per Mbps)
per (Average download (US $ purchasing Composite Score6
Nation household) speed in Mbps) power parity)
1 South Korea 0.93 49.5 0.37 15.92
2 Japan 0.55 63.6 0.13 15.05
3 Finland 0.61 21.7 0.42 12.20
4 Netherlands 0.77 8.8 1.90 11.77
5 France 0.54 17.6 0.33 11.59
6 Sweden 0.54 16.8 0.35 11.53
7 Denmark 0.76 4.6 1.65 11.44
8 Iceland 0.83 6.1 4.93 11.20
9 Norway 0.68 7.7 2.74 11.05
10 Switzerland 0.74 2.3 3.40 10.78
11 Canada 0.65 7.6 3.81 10.61
12 Australia
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Norway has directly invested the money made from our oil resources into our infrastructure. And before the oil platforms made a profit we received loans from a lot of other countries; with security in the oil. It is far from perfect, but the profit from the oil is considered to belong to the people and should therefor be used to build, and provide services, that benefits all. In practical terms this meant that in the sixties, seventies and eighties we build schools, medical facilities, phone lines, roads and started providing free (well almost) medical care for all citizens and public scholarship and loan to all that gained entry to a university or academy (and gaining access have been uncriticized as being too easy).
Newest policy of the state is that at the end of 2007 98% of the population should have access to broadband, and hopefully 100% at the end of 2008 (we have some spots with low population that is kinda hard to reach; but we are getting there). Of course access don't mean that it is free, you still have to pay for it, but at least if you wanted a connection you could have one.
I am not trying to make any type of point with this really. Just make a bit of an explanation before I replied; Norway subsidized their Telecompany to create the infrastructure; though at the time the Telco was operated by the state. Today it is partly privatized with the state still owning a minor controlling part (I think the term is).
The Long Now Foundation
The situation in the UK is peculiar and accidental. Back in 1982 the government sold off the state-owned telco, including all the lines in the ground (now worth a vast fortune) for not nearly what it was worth. But you could argue that at the time very few people really understood that the plain ol' telephones would turn into such an important service for the economy.
Since then it's been mismanagement all the way. A series of toothless regulators did nothing when BT basically refused to get into broadband (1995-2000), did nothing when BT refused to install fibre to the consumer (1992-today), actually backed down when BT refused to implement LLU deadlines required by law (2000-2003), and are still doing nothing about access speeds, the backhaul network, price of POTS, phony "unlimited DSL" adverts, premium line rip-offs, fibre again, etc. etc.
BT realised belatedly that they could make a bit of cash from one technology, ADSL, which didn't require them to dig anything up and only needed them to install a few racks of equipment at the exchange. The only thing the regulator did was force them to sell wholesale ADSL to themselves (BT) at the same price as to other providers. I was involved in the early days and the other providers still had to fight to access BT's order provisioning systems (which involved a lot of rekeying orders multiple times into slow BT-owned mainframes).
So now most peole in Britain have, almost accidentally, access to speeds around 2-20 Mbps (mostly 2-8) for still quite a lot of money.
But, here's the thing. Where is the investment in speeds over ADSL 2+? BT have spent a few billion implementing what they call their 21st Century Network, which amounts to replacing a bunch of ATM and Frame Relay switches with IP routers, which will allow BT to reduce their costs. But where's the fibre into homes and offices? Where's 100 Mbps+ going to come from? What about the 3/4G mobile access that isn't charged at ££/megabyte?
None of this bodes well for the future of Internet access or indeed the economy as a whole.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
What on earth are you talking about? Nobody's asking to push Fiber through the entire land area of the US. No, Alaska is not the problem. NYC and other large cities are the problem. As I have written before, fiber deployment is VERY scarce in NYC. The availability maps might show you some data points in Manhattan, but we are talking for just a few buildings out of thousands! For example, there is no FIOS in the four location I have tried to get it (for my and my boss), and we are talking about common Manhattan locations (near Union Square and near Lincoln Center), one Queens location (Long Island City) and one Brooklyn location (Bay Ridge). None of my friends in NYC can get FIOS either. In all these places until recently the only options were DSL 3/768 for $35 (which I went for in all cases) or Cable 5/384 (yeah, right, 384 upload is "broadband"?). The last few months there is a new option, ADSL 2+ from Speakeasy. It tops to 12/1 (but they quoted me lower speeds depending my distance from their DSLAM) and costs... wait for it... $180/month (+extra for voice)!
My friend who teaches at the University of Miami so lives around that area, ended up with a lousy 3/384 line for more than $50 that cannot hold connections (ssh, vnc etc) for more than a few minutes. He had to pay A LOT to get something just a little better.
So, don't give me the usual crap about the vast land area that is the US and explain to me:
-Why are urban areas still not significantly covered by fiber? The "small countries" you talk about have certainly covered their cities. After the cities are covered, there are ways to address rural areas (obviously fiber is not the most cost effectiv option there).
-Why is there no cheap ADSL2+ available everywhere there are phone lines less than 4 miles long (i.e. most parts of most cities)? In most European countries you can get the up to 24Mbit ADSL2+ for something around 30 euros a month (less or more depending the country). I wouldn't really need fiber if my DSL was 10Mbit+
Also, someone who know could tell us if what the "$200 billion broandband scandal" is true (google for the phrase to see what I am talking about). If it is true, then the fiber to the home is already paid for, just not delivered.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
As a little comparison... I live in Sweden, and I recently visited my grandparents, in the little, well, village they live in, up in the north(Around 300 people spread over more than 150 km, and about 100km from the nearest city). Even with that, they have access to ADSL, between 2-24Mb/s, in that area, my grandparents having around 12Mb/s practical. I also had 3.2Mb/s bandwidth for my 3G broadband subscription in most of that area, while in Stockholm I'd have 7.2Mb/s.
- Most of the countries listed above the United States are European. Most states of the United States would still be dominated even if they were compared directly as smaller pieces of the US to the smaller pieces of Europe.
- The size of the country doesn't matter as much as you may think. The US is heavily urbanized which means that the network isn't as much webbed as you may think.
- The price per Mbps in the US is $2,83. How do you justify your claims when you look at Sweden, which is down at a low $0,35 per Mbps, yet is the size of Florida and only 9 million citizens? Florida has more than twice as many citizens and not even close to Sweden.
I think your nationalistic thoughts got in the way of all reasoning here.
Full Tilt
There are countries that are less densely populated and more densely populated, there are countries that are more urbanized and less urbanized, and there are countries with more government subsidies and less government subsidies than the US, and every variation inbetween, that still beat the US on that list.
Even if you break it down and compare US states against comparable countries or US cities against comparable cities, the US still deserves its rating. Size, population density and urbanization are not the factors that cause the US to come in at 15th place, instead it is the lack of competition.
Funnily enough, your problems with throttling and censorship are also caused by the lack of competition, simply because your greedy ISPs can get away with it. They save money by throttling and monitoring, therefore they do it.
Over here, some ISPs market themselves saying that they will never throttle or monitor, and this means that the rest of the ISPs can't do that for fear of losing market share to those that don't.
In a healthy market consumers get what consumers want, which is cheap, fast and reliable internet. In a non-healthy market consumers get the least possible the monopoly can get away with providing. Are you getting what you want? No. Is your market healthy? No. There's the problem, not the size of your continent.
Interesting to note that Singapore is not listed - with 100 mbps cable service widely available (at a decent rate as well).
Not to mention rates of 8mbps to 25 mbps being offered even cheaper as well.
Last I heard there is sizable internet usage here, with most government services available online thru the "Singpass" system.
I guess they only rated a few countries. (am sure at the very least Czech / Slovak Republics got worst connectivity compared to here.