Slashdot Mirror
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."
In this case, he is Chairman Brian Roberts. In other words, because there is almost none to zero competitors in most of the markets Comcast serves, they can get away with continually raising prices. That is why the U.S. continues to lag the world in broadband.
Yes, there is the whole issue of running fiber and cable long distances in the U.S. compared to other countries like South Korea and Japan, but when you look at places such as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, etc, you see the same pattern. Only one, or if you're lucky maybe two, providers from which to choose your broadband service.
In my area, we have two choices; Comcast or Verizon. I can pay $100/month for Comcast's triple-play or I can pay $100/month for Verizon's triple-play. But I can't pay $33/month for just the broadband access or $33/month for just the cable subscription (I currently pay $53.31/month for the combined Basic and Standard cable service).
This is the overwhelming reason broadband penetration in the U.S. continues, and will continue, to lag behind the rest of the world. The only solution is, unfortunately, government interference. Force the providers to offer their lines to others based on the logic that it was taxpayers who helped to subsidize the laying of all the cable and fiber through tax breaks and such. Either the companies open their lines and allow competition or they have to pay back all the subsidies they got when they originally promised to bring broadband to the U.S. Ten years ago.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
What have terrorists done to fix the U.S. government?
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
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
Cause they sure have bad bandwidth.
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.
Funny, we kill people "accidentally" left and right. Are we "fixing the government" of Iraq?
The USA is the world's largest consumer of Cocaine, but we are continually fucking with cocaine-producing nations. We are the largest consumer of Afghani heroin, but we paid the Taliban to combat Opium production, no joke. The Bush family has been doing business with the Bin Laden family for many years (and long before that, they did business with Hitler) Note that I have included links only from reputable publications. Note also that if you search for documents related to these particular scandals, you have a very hard time finding documents in the US news. That's because 10 megacorporations control 95% of the media in the USA, and they're all owned or controlled by rich people getting richer on the status quo.
One major way people do take responsibility for fixing theirr governments is to limit the power of a government to do your people harm. That's exactly what DrLang21 was talking about doing. Keeping the government's hands out of as many things as possible and making them accountable to the people is a prerequisite to "fixing your government".We're well past that point today. We've currently got a president who the people never elected. He wouldn't have even had the electoral college in the last election (he already didn't have the majority vote) if all votes had been counted. And the electoral college is unnecessary and inherently undemocratic. Only four times has it overridden the will of the American people, and in at the very least the last occasion it was both unwarranted and, simply, the wrong decision. We ended up with an AWOL DUI puppet instead of a genuine war hero without whom we might not have the internet today. The massive attempts to make Gore look like a whiny bitch worked and distracted all the sheeple away from the reality of what was occurring.
I'm not claiming that the Republicans are the problem. The populists are the problem, and unfortunately, that's most of our representatives - and most of our population.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
- 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
That's a retarded fucking statement and you know it.
What Congresscritter killed 3,000 Americans, drove a major industry (the airlines) to the breaking point and inflicted billions of dollars of measurable damage (loss of the twin towers) and who knows how much unmeasurable damage? (post 9/11 economic fallout)
As a New Yorker let me be the first to tell you to go fuck yourself for that stupid bombastic comparison. Let me further purpose that we need a Godwin's Law for offtopic terrorism/Al Quada references.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Although I don't agree with the "terrorists fixing governments" claim, the parent's "keeping the government's hands out of as many things as possible" claim is arguably stupid too.
After all, this is what has been the leading motto of American politics for 25 years (let's say since Reagan), and it lead exactly to where we are now: less power to governments, more power to big corporations, and eventually more crony capitalism.
How long does it have to fail for you to realize it's a dead-end?
Less power to the government has never been, is still not, and will never be the way to protect and enforce democracy.
Take the matter in your own hands, people: learn about politics, be informed, get involved, protest, *vote*.
It's as simple as that, and definitely nothing new.
Less power to the government is just a lazy way of not having to do anything to keep it honest. If you don't stand for your own interests, others will for their own. How can that be a surprise, seriously?
No, it really is that we're falling. After all, we did *invent* the Internet (and the personal computer, microprocessor, and transistor...). We had connectivity before any other country. Now other countries have had the technology handed to them and have surpassed our broadband connectivity. How is that "rising" when all the fundamentals were developed in the US? Its obvious that we have in fact fallen, and unfortunately for us here in the US, the biggest reason is greed.
You could have been far more insightful without showing your hatred of America.
We've paid more per person in tax subsidies than many other nations. Take Sweden, for example. Their population density and median population density are both about the same as the US. Their subsidies, however, had legal teeth that required the telcos to actually provide something in exchange. They also had a huge embezzling scandal where much of the money was stolen. They still have significantly faster internet at significantly lower prices than the US, in exchange for a smaller per person tax.
The high speed internet problem comes down to pretty much the same thing as many other problems in the US. Politicians are willing to give private companies billions is subsidies, in exchange for hundreds of thousands being returned as campaign contributions. So long as this legalized bribery is allowed, companies will simply pay off politicos in exchange for subsidies or for not having to fulfill the agreements they made when the subsidies were given.
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.
Gives a new meaning to having shitty cable service.
Nonsense. If Florida has twice the population of Sweden in about the same area, then it also has twice the potential revenue, even before factoring in the higher U.S. average income. So the infrastructure costs should be about the same per capita -- and this is a conservative estimate.
You also assume that the costs of the bandwidth are entirely limited to Florida. What about the fiber linking Florida to the rest of the US?
What about the fiber linking Sweden to the rest of Europe?
Face it, there is really no excuse for such horrible Internet service in the supposedly richest country on earth.