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US Broadband Won't Catch Up With Japan's For 101 Years
An anonymous reader writes "Internet speeds of users nationwide shows that the United States has not made significant improvements in deploying high-speed broadband networks in the past year, and if the average US Internet speed continues to improve only at the same rate it did from 2007 to 2008, the country won't catch up with Japan's current download speed for another 100 years, according to findings released by the Communications Workers of America's (CWA's) Speed Matters campaign." With enough statistical mangling, nearly anything can be presented as plausible, but that's not enough to cover up my envy of Asian broadband speeds.
Yes, because we all know upgrade paths are all completely linear...
In a hundred years I plan on living on Mars and the US broadband speed is WAY better than the one on Mars...
GO US!
We still have time to catch up with the books then.
It seems to me like a lot of people have the attitude that somehow everything is better in Europe or Japan. Enough already. There's more to life than how fast you can download porn, illegal torrents, and other pointless stuff.
i am a soviet space shuttle
Of course the United States could do better but in all fairness, the land area and population density are completely different:
United States:
9.8M square kilometers
Japan:
377K square kilometers
When you're running physical cable, this makes a huge difference.
Of course, I'm probably not the one to compare to because I have FIOS (up to 45 M/bps) and Cable (up to 16 M/bps) available to me. Currently I have FIOS @ 15 M/bps downstream and 2 M/bps upstream.
I'm a big tall mofo.
Porn is better... ...in slow-motion.
it's hard to keep up with those gookers these days. I do like Japanese porn though, so I'd say it's a reasonable compromise: they take the lead in broadband Internet, we download their porn movies. Love that Japanese poon.
US Broadband Won't Catch Up With Japan's for 101 Years
Uh, could you somehow spin (regardless of truth) this as related to war and/or military prowess so our administration will mindlessly throw money at it instead of mindlessly ignoring it?
Like:
US Cyber Attacking Infrastructure Embarrassingly Lags Japan's
Japanese Identify US Broadband as "Ripe for the Pickin'"
Cyber Pearl Harbor Imminent
US President's Netflix Downloads 1/10 as Fast as Japanese President's
US Administration Idles as US-Japanese Broadband Gap Widens
Come on, these things basically write themselves! Turn it into a dick measuring contest or it's meaningless.
My work here is dung.
The Japanese are also at least a hundred years ahead of us in cartoon porn, particularly tentacle rape porn. This "tentacle gap", as I call it, cannot be allowed to continue.
After reading this summary and feeling a sense of outrage rising in my stomach, I felt obliged to call the Japanese Internet Minister and set the story straight once and for all. After many hours of argument regarding relative price structures, exchange rates, and international broadband infrastructure, he assured me that I had a very large penis. He used such words to describe it such as 'gargantuan', 'mammoth', and 'really freakin huge', and that in comparison, his penis was microscopic. I for one applaud the Minister for his honesty. That is all.
And you wish to compare the entire USA, with it's HUGE wilderness areas to Japan?
You are surprised that a country that includes Alaska, a place so wild they have to pay people to live there, has a lower average broadband connection than a small, civilized, advanced Island nation.
Let me make this clear: It is a GOOD thing that the US is not moronic enough to wire our large, open country to the same extent that a small, island country can.
Next thing, someone will complain that Japan eats more fish per capita than the US does.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I have to agree with Linus on this point.
Hentai Drawers of America's Tentacles Matter campaign claims U.S. porno industry will take 1001 years to catch up.
The headline says 101, but the story says 100. Someone please clarify this critical discrepancy.
I didn't take the time to check Google maps, but I'm fairly sure that Japan!=Asia. If you look at all of Asia, I would guess that it has quite a ways to go to catch up to Japan as well.
Japan is much more advanced in Adult Videos that US will never catch up with.
Internet access and health care are two perfect examples of why government can do good things, contrary to Republican dogma.
Proxy Servers.....big freakin' proxy servers...
Heck I bet they'll be owned by Google because instead of just cataloging the internet, Google will be cashing the internet.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Does this comparison take into account the different population distributions between the US and Japan? The urban population density in Japan is (I believe) much greater than in US, making it more economically viable to supply higher speed lines to the populace in Japan.
Not the old "but America is rural!" chestnut again. Scandinavian countries have lower population densities than we do yet have much better access. And the "rural" argument might make sense for why you can't get good access on a farm in Kansas, but then why don't we have 100 Mbps consumer connections in San Francisco or Manhattan?
"Asian Pipe Envy"
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Whether or not the prediciton is statistically shaky, the fact remains that there is a huge gap between the US and many other, quite dissimilar countries. The big question is "Why?" Japan and Korea aren't the only ones that far outclass American broadband speed, though they do have quite a speed lead.
Chart of Broadband Speeds by Country
And sure, in the US you can get FiOS at 30Mbps, but it will cost you $200/month and you have to live in a very limited area. You can get 50Mbps from Comcast only if you live in the Twin Cities (right now), but it's still $150/month.
I could point to the geography of the US, saying how its a much bigger area than the smaller countries at the top of those charts. Sure, Japan and Korea have an incredible population density. But not Finland, Sweden, France, etc. They have population densities several orders of magnitude smaller than even cities like Houston, Miami, Phoenix, or Chicago. Why aren't these cities more like those countries?
I could also try it from the angle of regulation/free market/competition. But I'm pretty sure those countries at the top aren't all the same in that regard.
Is it because our companies tend to each have local monopolies over large areas? That seems less likely considering how just about everyone in a metro area can get cable. So they have two companies, phone and cable, to compete with each other.
Is there something unique about our infrastructure? Did we make some horrible mistake that seemed like a good idea at the time but is now haunting us?
Is the US just in a perfect storm of craptitude where all these factors come into play?
Why would I need a faster connection to read 4chan?
-Cnik
what is going to happen for the next 100 or 101, depending on how you count. Give me a break and maybe you could use data from the last 20 to infer about what may happen in the next 100. Don't RTFA, all they want is advertising money, and getting a server /.'ed for the fame of it all. Wake me up when there is news that matters!
insert inflammatory comment here!
I say we can do it 97 years.
Most people use the internet for email and websurfing. The difference between 6mbps and 60mbps doesn't make a difference to the human. It's still all in the blink of an eye. Then there is the 1/3(?) of the US that doesn't even want to upgrade from their modems that was mentioned on /. earlier.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
I lived in Japan for three years, and when I got there in 2002, the *basic* package offered by Yahoo! Japan was 12Mbps DSL for an intro rate of ¥2000 a month (about US $20), bumping up to ¥3500 a month later on. By the time I left in 2005, the *basic* package cost the same, but the *lowest* speed available was 18Mbps -- something that still doesn't even *exist* at the consumer level anywhere in the US (that I'm aware of) in 2008.
The US broadband market is suffocating under the rank hypocrisy and greed of the telcos, and the bald corruption and bribeability of the congress. Somehow the Japanese broadband market has a heck of a lot more internal competition, yet the companies there can still make a profit offering much higher speeds for relatively lower rates.
Frustratedly,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Once again, I believe the old farts (sorry all/any of you elder readers) might be holding us back. Loosely, rate of new technology adoption is inversely correlated with age (i.e. the elderly of any generation have a higher percentage of Luddites). America has a spike in the age distribution of people over 50, thanks to the baby boomers. Europe (excepting Britain) and Asia never had a baby boom and a more typical proportion of elderly citizens.
Now, I've never actually crunched the numbers to see exactly how much less the elevated elderly population could conceivably drag down our average, and its very possible that this effect is dwarfed by other factors, but I've always been suspicious that baby boomers play a part. Does anyone have some more concrete, numerical insight into this?
Regardless, I moved to Germany last month and can attest to the broadband difference. Everyone has broadband, and my current 4Mbps DSL connection costs the same as my old 768kbps DSL connection in the states. What's up with that, SBC?!
The answer to why we don't have faster broadband speeds is simple: scarcity pays.
It is not in the interests of U.S. telecom providers to roll out high-speed bandwidth all at once. Thus we have a tiered service model, with people paying a little for 1Mb connections and substantially more to get higher speeds, regardless of what the telecom carriers' networks can handle.
Granted, some of the scarcity may be real and based on telecom companies dragging their feet on upgrading, but even if they could carry 100 times the traffic the can now it still would be in their corporate interest to artificially create a bandwidth scarcity to keep prices high.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
Japans freedoms Won't Catch Up With US's for 101 Years
but hey why talk about important crap! maybe we should start OIPC, "One Internet Per Child" so that our poor children in the US can have internets too! mmmm I love the smell of sarcasm in the morning.
Enhancing the telco infrastructure, I would imagine, is more cost effective than in the US. There you have a few densely populated cities with a lot less geographical distance between them, which keeps your physical archetecture costs lower. The states (Canada even more so) you have densely populated cities with fewer people per square foot than in Japan and those cities are divided by longer distances, making the cost of laying all that cable higher.
I would have gotten it, but I'm posting from the damn slow U.S Broadband.
Fortunately, extrapolation also shows us the solution. The number of Americans incarcerated in jails and prisons is doubling every decade. So in 80 years or so, we'll all be in jail. This makes broadband wiring much easier -- forget everywhere else and just wire up jails!
I am not a crackpot.
At least, give them credit, that the CWA at least recognizes the need to have more communications product to get more communications workers.
This is my sig.
...but for the rest of us with girlfriends, wives, zero personality problems & no desire to watch cartoons of Japanese schoolgirls being fornicated by huge alien tentacles, "up to 8MB" will be just fine and dandy.
...if the server is doling out that interracial BBW midget tentacle rape anime at 5kbps.
Perhaps one should try looking at a map. Japan is small, habitable areas even smaller. That means wires can be short and cheap. Japan's people are well-trained to pay any amount for whatever biz and govt say they should buy. So you end up with lots of wideband tubes, perhaps not being used to anywhere near capacity.
The USA however, is a BIG place. Expensive to wire up Montana and Texas and the rest. And consumers here while still mildly hypnotized by advertising, occasionally want a choice in speeds and costs.
You decide which regime you want to live under.
Speed kills!
100 years, eh? Look at the bright side. We should be out of Iraq by then.
What?
I bet in 10 years they will have better broadband for users then US at least..
The communists can do magic. Look at the Olympics games, the most expensive ever.
Give them a new challenge and watch them go baby.
So how com places like Finland, FFS, have better broadband? From Wikipedia (pop density) and TFA (download speeds):
31 people per sq km -- median download speed of 2.4Mbps
US population density for the whole country, but this is a red herring anyway, as we *still* can't get decent speeds even in extremely dense and high-tech areas like Silicon Valley...
337 people per sq km -- median download speed of 63 mbps
16 people per sq km -- median download speed of 21 mbps
I'll give you a hint -- US broadband sucks not because of different population densities. Instead, it's all about the profit margins.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
that speeds in the US are increasing faster than in Japan.
That's the question I keep on asking people...
What?? Fast torrent uploads and downloads?!?!...whoopee dingy....
Streaming better Video???
VOIP?!?!
What else???
Faster Slashdot?? How fast do you need text to render on a page?? It's already pretty damm quick....
I don't know folks...I'm in IT(have been for decades)....I see faster bandwidth plausibly for corporations. But home use not so much when half the sites are slower then you!
It's left blank because I have nothing to say to you punks!
I'm on NTT East Japan's Hikari Flets.
I -really do- get greater than 60Mbps sustained.
NTT provides the pipe and OCN provides the packets... it's cheaper than Rogers Cable was in canada (1/2 the price) and they throw in phone service (VoIP of course) all for $20/mo.
At my office we also have NTT East and OCN... it's guaranteed bandwidth and costs me less than $200/mo, can max out it's 100Mbps PPPoE to the Cisco and gives us 8 IPs. If you want gauranteed service in US or Canada it's T1s at $1000's/mo.
The telcos in Canada and the US are terrified that cheap IP will cost them their business.
So how come, even in Silicon Valley, I can't get a consumer connection faster than 5Mbps? In 2008? Yet, when I moved to Japan in 2002, the *slowest* most *basic* package I could get (excepting dial-up, which was being phased out) was 12Mbps.
Fine, we get it, the US is huge. That's no excuse. The simple fact of the matter is that the telcos are much happier to sit there and overcharge for crappy service, as they have no compelling reason to upgrade. If population density and geography alone were the only limiting factors, US residents would still be able to get decent high-speed connections in the urban areas. But they don't exist. I mean, jebus, FINLAND has better download speeds, by a factor of almost 9x (2.4Mbps US vs 21Mbps Finland), despite a population density of about half the US (31/sq km US vs 16/sq km Finland).
So quit the hyperbole, and look at the basic facts -- we're getting shafted in the name of telco profits.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
What, was there an earthquake?
So that's 5 in decimal, right?
Kuato: Quaid. Quaid. Benny: Forget it, man, his fortune-telling days are over. Kuato: Start the reactor. Free Mars... Kuato Lives!
In the UK, It'll never get there.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Currently my ISP counts every byte I transfer and inspects each of my packets. NSA and ECHELON dutifully does their share of deep packet inspection as well.
As far as I'm aware of no Japanese ISP throttles BT connections; nor do the Japanese government spy on its own citizens.
I could care less about my connection speed. I just don't want to be treated as a thief and a potential terrorist every time I use my internet.
Since you ignored it the first time:
Scandinavian countries have lower population densities than we do yet have much better access. And the "rural" argument might make sense for why you can't get good access on a farm in Kansas, but then why don't we have 100 Mbps consumer connections in San Francisco or Manhattan?
Your post didn't answer the first point, and ignored the second. Finland has 5.3 million people in 130,000 square miles. Wisconsin has 5.7 million people in 65,000 square miles. So, obviously Finland is gong to have a lot more open areas than Wisconsin, yet it has a median download speed of 21 Mbps, compared to less than 2 Mbps for the United States. I don't have figures for Wisconsin, but what do you think the chances are they will be remotely close to Finland?
And I have yet to see any apologists offer a reason why you can't get access in densely populated American cities like Manhattan to match what Europe is able to deliver to their people in the sticks.
1. RIAA, MPAA, and disk drive manufacturers combine to provide a 50 mbps connection to everybody in the US. Just because they're nice guys.
2. Sales of offline storage go through the roof.
3. The Pirate Bay gets Slashdotted almost immediately and can't afford to lay on new servers to handle the load.
4. RIAA sues those lucky enough to connect for copyright violations.
5. ???
6. PROFIT!
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
The provider's point of view: 1. Bandwidth is not for the user, it's for us to make "premium content" available to the user. Premium content is anything we can up-charge for. 2. Premium content is compressable. We have not yet reached the limits of compression. Compression may degrade subjective quality, but if we label it HD, the end used will believe us not notice it's worse than SD.* 3. Since our primary goal can be reached through more compression, additional bandwith is not necessary. ----------------- *God should strike down UHD for showing beach volleyball so compressed that swinging ponytails morphed into oozing blobs.
I lived in rural Japan for 15 months. I'm not talking about way up in the mountains, mind you, maybe about an hour's drive away from Utsunomiya.
The only broadband option was DSL from Yahoo. It was decently fast and only about $25 a month, but it wasn't light-years ahead or anything. I can drive an hour out from Indianapolis and find equally good service, probably from more than one provider.
If anything, my connection in Japan was slower because anything I wanted to access was coming over a trans-ocean link. I easily get 2x or 3x speed on most downloads now that I'm back in Indy and I only pay about 2x more. Sounds fair to me.
Also, my broadband was the only thing in Japan that was cheaper than in the USA.
So, yeah. Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
...the CWA, who provides the labor to install broadband, would never bias a report in favor of sky-is-falling need to urgently spend a lot of money on speeding broadband installations...
Advice: on VPS providers
wat? your title should have been wat
if only for their broadband.
Ohayo = Good morning!
Konnichiwa = Good afternoon!
Konbanwa = Good evening!
Okairi nasai mese goshiujin sama = I'm a gaijin otaku and all the japanese i've learned is from watching anime!
Why would they give us (americans) all that speed at once? They can just feed us a trickle of an increase every so often and make us pay a premium for a "blazing speed extreme boost" or whatever they call the next marketing plot. That way in a few years your gas tank and your cable modem will cost you more than your house. We will all have to take the bus to internet cafes so we can play mmos like some other places.... (my first post, yay!)
The USA have a bigger problem to attend: most of the country was shaped on "oil high availability". The increase of the ratio (oil cost)/(household buying power) will have dramatic effects since the dependency is quite high. Basically, the USA do not have to waist their time on ADSL or such. If they have to spend "energy" that would be for the final IPv6/FTTH/mobile internet. Let Japan(asia?) and Europe fine tune this internet, then use the matured technology.
Japan's Population 127,433,494/147,116 square miles
USA's Population 301,139,947/3,537,441 square miles
The USA has about 2.5x the population covering 24x the amount of real estate
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Why does this subject keep coming up on a almost annual basis? Of course most of the world is further ahead of the US in terms of infrastructure supporting communications. Its one very simple and easy answer, war or progressive development.
Fact of the matter is the US was one of the original countries that developed large scale communication infrastructures. And of those nations that fit that category, only the US remains as a country that hasn't been forced into putting in new infrastructure via destruction and mayhem on a large scale. And those countries which have not been devestated by war, but are progressively ahead of the US in communication infrastructure, all assembled their infrastructure using much newer technology/materials than the US.
That is all there is to it. The US is not as up-to-date on providing consistent readily available broadband because our core backbone within the continential US primarily consists of severely outdated physical media. It costs a ton of money to install new physical media, especially when you can't readily disconnect the old until the new is ready, and even more money to remove the old media afterwards. So the general path of least resistance chosen by most companies in the US is to not spend that money on updating the physical media, and instead developing technology which provides better connections across it. However, there is a practical limit to what that can achieve, and so we get the current stalemate that while the US has good broadband coverage, it doesn't compare to most other nations from a purely paper perspective.
Mr. President, we must not allow a broadband gap!
Proverbs 21:19
Some very specific areas in the US have ridiculously good quality broadband access and others, the majority portion, do not. The biggest reason why is because service/utility providers are too often allowed to cherry pick where they will provide service and where they will not. If an area isn't profitable, or quite as profitable as others, they simply won't install or upgrade the infrastructure there.
The utilities commissions exist to prevent this problem from happening. This is their purpose for existence. They regulate the quality and distribution requirements for utilities.
If they aren't serving the PUBLIC (you know, the guys who ultimately pay their salaries with taxes) then they should be fired so they can hire someone that will. The trouble is that for some reason, the service providers have a much more audible voice with the utilities commissions out there and they can't see or hear the public's interests.
And before anyone says that "deregulation" is the answer, and not more regulation, I will say that this experiment has been tried and is a demonstrable failure. Texas and California went with deregulation for electric power and California became famous for "rolling blackouts" and the highest prices in the nation for electric power. Texas has pretty damned expensive power rates as well... higher than just about all other states except California and with NO improvement in quality or delivery. Meanwhile these poor, abused and regulated utilities in other states are far from going out of business and they are still raking in billions in profits every month. Deregulation demonstrably hurts the public. Regulation demonstrably doesn't hurt the utilities.
If the UC's would just do the jobs they were created for, we'd have great quality of service all over the nation. Instead, I get bittorrent sustained download speeds on my cable exceeding 1Mbyte/sec, and a few miles away, a co-worker can't even get broadband access AT ALL. (Is ridiculously expensive and poor performing satellite considered broadband? I know I wouldn't consider it as such, and not everyone will buy a T-1 because theoretically, that's "available" too.)
Media conglomerates don't want faster broadband in the U.S., and all of them have some stake in the companies that could deliver it. Their assets lose value unless they can keep our attention focused on and paying for their products. People on Slashdot seem to think the challenge is technological, when technology has little to do with it. The raw truth is that Big Media has so much influence over politics in the U.S. that broadband policy is completely subject to their approval. Their influence is impossible to overstate. No candidate running for office can risk running afoul of the news media monoculture, which means that the political parties, not just individuals, are held hostage.
So forget your arguments about population density and so on, they are completely naive. And imagining that only private enterprise can solve the problem, a public utility problem, also serves the interests of NBC Universal, Viacom, Disney, News Corporation, and Time Warner
As long as the ISP's know they can get away with milking users with crappy service for high dollars,..there wont be any upgrades,..EVER.
This is definitely a YMMV kind of deal. :)
When I moved from Tokyo to the SF Bay area, I was crushed by how much *more* expensive things were in CA. The one thing that was cheaper was housing by the square foot -- but then again, housing by apartment was more expensive (i.e. a 1BR in San Carlos, smack dab between SF and SJ, cost more than a 1BR in Nakano-ku, but is generally somewhat larger).
I also once worked out price comparisons for services, and found that my cell phone bill in CA was about twice what it was in Tokyo -- for worse service. Sound quality was worse, and calls dropped more frequently, or sometimes just never came through. Our apartment was a bit north of Google HQ at Moffett Field, and my wife worked a bit south. Driving along 101, though, calls would often drop unexpectedly, and reverbs, echoes, and static were not uncommon. Meanwhile, riding the Ôedo line, the Tokyo subway line deepest underground, call quality was generally close to regular POTS, and they didn't seem to drop as often.
DSL was also cheaper and better in Tokyo, with a 12Mbps line going for $35/mo. It was upgraded (at no cost to me) a couple years after I signed up to 18Mbps. Meanwhile, despite being in Silicon Valley and so close to Google HQ, the best consumer line I could get in CA was 5Mbps, for $65/mo. WTF? More money, for less. Whee.
Incidentally, where were you in Tochigi? Nikkô, perhaps? I spent two years living in Utsunomiya. Tough town -- all the local gaijin called it "Utsunomiya-da". I once had an almost-argument with a JR ticket booth operator in Kyoto about buying return tickets to Utsunomiya. Imagine a gruff, balding 50-something fellow behind the window:
Me: Utsunomiya made ni mai onegaishimasu.
Tix: Ômiya?
Me: Utsunomiya.
Tix: Oyama?
Me: Iya, U tsu no mi ya desu.
Tix: Naze sou iu tokoro ni ikimasu ka?
Me: Achira ni sunde imasu kara.
Tix: Ki no doku...
From his expression and body language, it was clear that he was baffled why any gaijin would go there, and then baffled why any gaijin would live there. Given that the mob ran (still runs?) the city government, and given their and the local townspeople's notable unfriendliness to gaijin, it's not too surprising.
Gotta feel the love...
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
"US Broadband Won't Catch Up With Japan's For 101 Years "
And? Honestly, why should I care? In Japan, the government is intimately involved with the affairs of the businesses and that has a tendency to remove barriers. In America, we don't want our government sticking its nose in corporate business (anymore than it already is). As result, expansion happens in the profitable markets. The loss-markets may or may not ever see the service.
That is the up and down side to a capitalist economy. I prefer it this way. There are many aspects of Japanese culture I would rather not imitate, and this just one of them.
Bearded Dragon
Does Japan have download/upload caps like some providers in the US? And what about p2p transfers? 50-100Mbps with no restrictions would be incredible.
That's assuming there is a United States in 100 years.
But I aways thought the Wi-Neron Internet would fix that issue anyways.
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
This suggests that there may be room for a new indicator of technological advancement...or the lack of it. Figure out the degree by which several countries differ in the implementation of well-understood technology, and you'll have an idea of how much influence special interest groups have on enforcing the status quo. You could use the amount of money lobbyists spend in the country's capital as another indicator.
Cable television, cell phones with disabled features, broadband, development of alternative energy sources...there's quite a few places where such a measurement might help show a path through the bullshit and spin and excuses to something resembling the real story.
Any suggestions for a name? Everything I thought of (the "Ludd(ite)", the "Lobby Brake", etc. sounds lame.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Most Ironic. Post. Ever.
And the US is a 101 times as large as Japan. Could that possibly have something to do with it? If every person living in a major US city had ultra high speed internet that would still leave 99% of the country without. You might as well say they are years ahead of us in carpeting. Most of the US still not carpeted.
France even has a better bit rate than the US. Why don't we assess that fatal flaw first? Let's admit, that's a lot more doable than out rigging the Japanese.
It would be trivial to set up a 54mb network all over the place. If every geek in the country bought 3 wireless routers, and added them to their LAN (at the end of some really long cat5), there'd be FREE 54mb (assuming 802.11g) internet all over the place. Ok, so it's technically not "54mb internet", but still... a network is a network, and if it's there, people will use it.
I'm already doing this in my house with a wireless router plugged into my linux router. I've given it the SSID "FreeInternet", and blocked the router's (static) IP from accessing my local network (iptables rules to drop packets from the wireless router's ip to 192.168.0.0/16 (except for 53 (DNS) which is pointed at the "real" router) seems to work quite nicely.) My LAN is safe from lurking WiFi Demons, and I'm providing a free service to my neighborhood. I'll add some more access points later this year, on opposite ends of really long cables to maximize my wireless footprint.
The downside, of course, is that no one who doesn't know me knows that it's actually safe to use the "unsecured" "FreeInternet" WiFi, and that it's not one of those "honeypot" systems designed to trick people into connecting so that they can try to break into your system while you're surfing porn in your hotel room.
If anyone has any ideas on how best to implement a splash screen (like the ones you'll see if you fire up your wifi-enabled laptop's web browser while standing in the lobby of a hotel), feel free to respond.
My goal is to allow "unauthenticated" access to port 80 (and 53, of course, although 443 can go hang - if it's untrusted, it sure ain't secure) without requiring a login, and to allow "registered" users to access the entire port range (or maybe just common services, secure communications, etc. - it depends on whether I want to get into logging IP addresses and mapping them to credentials. There's sticky legal bits about sharing out my 'net, ya dig? I don't want to watch my traffic, but I do want to be able to give a list of connected users if the gub'mint decides to come down on me cuz someone was pirating on my "unsecured" wifi).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
the universal service fund is there to make sure that the same level of service is available everywhere in the US. I currently have 40Mbit cable with 2Mbit upstream.
does everyone else have this? NO. My dad who lives 45 miles away has the same ISP and service, but his is much slower because it runs over copper. Mine is fiber up to the demarc.
and it's in Miami, FL. No podunk midwest here. On the same token, AT&T will soon start offering 100Mbps service. Here, it's actually just an ethernet connection straight to the demarc. The problem is, they want to charge $199 a month for asynchronous service.
That's why the US will never catch up. That's why AT&T is still offering 256Kbps service for $25 a month.
The Japanese service costs that much for 20Mbps lines.
It's easy to see how, at this point, global innovation is being stifled by lack of speed. Netflix could be rolling out HD video on demand right now if customers could handle the bandwidth.
And throughput limits, AKA usage caps, are just plain wrong. US ISPs are just now implementing caps and blocking because they are selling new accounts and aren't improving network capacity and infrastructure. Which is what the universal service fund is supposed to pay for.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Canada has 1/9 the population of the US, not 1/100 (approx. 35 million people compared to the US population of 300 million.) And yes, Canada has more land mass, but the dispersion is still the same as the US as both countries have large uninhabited regions and dense population clusters. The level of infrastructure in both countries is also directly comparable. So your claim that Canada isn't remotely similar because of "permafrost and those areas" doesn't really hold water.
After 101 more years of global warming, icecaps will have melted and most of Japan will be under water.
Or in the next 30 years we could be hit by an asteroid, and civilisation is destroyed.
Or maybe : Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
In other words 100 + years in the future is way to much to make a meaningful prediction , unless you are clairvoyant or a time traveller.
Basically Japan is ahead because telecom companies are too busy squabbling over net neutrality and locking its customers into spartan agreements. US Telecom companies have very little incentive to innovate because they are all members of virtual cartel where there is no need to spend money to improve technology because they control the marketplace. You've only got a select few number of companies that you can use and, for all intents and purposes, they are one and the same. The only possible exception is Verizon FiOS. But, when compared to Japan, Verizon FiOS doesn't really stand a chance. In summary, the telecom cartel is really holding us technologically back.
No budget is in irretrievable deficit when you have missiles large enough to level any bank that tries to get back what you owe them :)
You can always find statistics to make one country look bad. This happens to the US far too often.
There's one fairly simple measure of a country's success, and that's how willing its occupants are to leave if they get the chance. You could offer free emigration to all US citizens, and I bet hardly any would take up the offer.
Sure it has problems, and to be honest, for the country that 'invented' the internet, your connection speed is a joke, seriously.
On the other hand, and American can get in a car and drive thousands of miles without crossing national borders or having their right to travel questioned.
That's a pretty big thing in my opinion, something to be proud of in fact.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
I was talking with a CEO of a large entertainment company in an Asian nation. (I won't mention where). When I expressed disbelief that he wanted to stream full HD resolution movies over the internet to his customers, he explained that internet usage is much different in his country. Everyone uses their ubiquitous cellphones for email, and hardly anyone has a computer. Real time connections are not in demand, so it's okay if video hogs all the bandwidth because no one will care. Their infrastructure is geared towards high volume streaming rather than low volume connections.
It all comes down to the economics. Supply is a response to demand, and follows the market. In the US we have a different demand profile. Sure we want more bandwidth and higher speeds. But we're satisfied with what we got. We get our movies from cable, so we don't have a huge demand for instant 4gig downloads. Hell, we have subsidized HD converters and a lot of people still aren't switching! (Remember, the Slashdot readership does NOT represent the general public).
p.s. Of course, part of the problem is because local governments want to direct things. Thanks to them we have entrenched phone and cable monopolies, municipal networks crowding out competition, etc. To top it off we have Net Neutrality advocates lobbying to get the federal government involved.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
One flaw with your railroad/roading infrastructure argument though: internet infrastructure does not last as long and nobody is keen to make the investment in something that will be obsolete in three years.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Yes NYC is extremely densely populated, but it's rather difficult to develop technology, and then roll it out for only certain small portions of the country where the development costs won't be recooperated. Since Japan is much more homogeneous and densely populated, it is easier to roll out a single type of service, since equipment costs can be scaled easily.
In fact, most of the center of the country, between the mountain ranges (with the exception of the few big cities), has their infrastructure subsidized by the rest of the country. It will always be minimally/non-profitable to set up infrastructure in these sparsley populated areas, and thus the coast dwellers pay for, and support this.
50% !! of Americas population lives within 50 miles of the coasts, and appoximately 80% lives within 200 miles of a coast.
..........FULL STOP.
. . . American internet access providers are exercising their inalienable rights to use planned obsolescence!
Think about how American companies market their products. The reason America lacks behind Japans broadband is because there is no real demand from the American market for faster internet connections. As long as technologically ignorant Americans purchase Premium "Broadband speeds" for $50+ bucks a month. Major ISP's have no reason to upgrade their networks. If you want speed, buy the basic package and refuse to pay more until they offer a real speed advantage. Create the demand for it!
In the US we have to replace existing, functional, infrastructure. In other countries much of the time they are laying infrastructure for the first time.
Am I the only one who thinks this is no big deal? I use the internet every day, and I like having broadband, but low-level DSL serves me just fine.
Sure, I could get more entertainment out of a super-fast connection. But most of the economic impact the internet has on me wouldn't change. I don't need an uber-gigabit connection to order stuff on Amazon and do job searches.
Would there really be enough impact on our economy to justify government investment in broadband? Or should we just leave this one to supply and demand?
So not in 5 years, but in 6 maybe?
You can't handle the truth.
Has no one thought of the capital required to upgrade the US broadband infrastructure versus the Japanese broadband infrastructure?
Japan is 145,883 square miles. That's ~20,000 square miles smaller than California.
The US is 3,794,066 square miles.
See the difference.
After all the debate and pomp and circumstance, it's just another depressing fact about the future of north american infrastructure. also, Yet another reason to move to Japan, and failing that, Amsterdam XD.
I've always found broadband propagation strange.
When I lived in Atlanta, I had a 6mbit/down connection, or I could upgrade to 10mbit. I moved to Kentucky and have a ~34mbit down connection for around the same price.
---
Rob Flynn
Pidgin
So the US can catch up in 5 decimal years
Thanks for answering my question above posed to the AC, as to why FiOS is relevant here. I didn't know they were offering up to 20Mbps down; the best I've heard of before your post was 10Mbps, and I couldn't even get that where I was living in San Carlos (very far from the sticks, on the north end of Silicon Valley, think smack-dab between SF and SJ, only a few miles up 101 from Google HQ). 10Mbps is also the best available here on the San Juan Islands -- but not in my neighborhood, not for another year or two. Apparently the telco laid the cable this summer, but hasn't gotten around to upgrading the switches at the local junction box, and won't for a while yet, leaving me stuck with 1.5Mbps.
Anyway, thanks for the update. :)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I am just wondering, right now, what real world application works better at 100 Mbps than at 10 Mbps? Don't get me wrong, I am sure that we in the U.S. are stupid and backwards and our country sucks ass, I am just wondering what wonderful things the Japanese are experiencing that I am not. Honestly, I don't mean to be a snot, it is just that I have had both a 20 Mbps connection and a 2 meg connection and I could never really tell the difference. Are there websites that will feed you content at more than 1 or 2 Mbps? Please do not flame too hard. I am scared.
I only scored 35% on the Nerd Test, I'm sorry.
I agree with you, the population density excuse is a lame duck that needs to be shot and hung up in some Chinese butcher shop. As others and I have both noted in other posts in this thread, population density cannot explain why the very dense US northeast has such crappy speeds, nor why extremely sparse Finland boasts a median download speed of almost 9x the US (21Mbps vs 2.4Mbps). It all seems to come down to greed, lack of competition, and congress being up for sale.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Amen. I live in a town of about 3500. Verizon does not offer DSL for internet, they only use it to multiplex up to four lines on a single cable pair. They have reduced their workforce to the point that it takes three days to get someone to work on a POTS line. They will move faster on a special circuit problem, but if you have a new location, with new cable, where engineering has to get involved.... It's like pulling teeth.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
Part of it is a basic underlying market structure that differs dramatically from the US -- Generally speaking, NTT owns the physical lines, and someone else provides the packets, meaning you get freewheeling competition to provide ISP services. In the US, the company that owns the lines typically also has the final say on who you get to use as your ISP -- surprise surprise, it's almost always the same company that owns the lines. And in a disturbing trend, what with consolidations and mergers, these same companies are owning more and more of the content end of things as well.
So in the US, you get a trifecta of conflicting interests, where one company owns the lines, the rights to use those lines (and decide how much service to provide), and the media sites whose data is sent along those lines. This combines to lead to exactly the kind of monopolistic, high-priced bad service, complete with fact-bending and underhanded competing (denying packets the ISP doesn't like, c.f. BitTorrent and various other snafus, site and IP address blocking, and the dire implications of deep packet inspection and on-the-fly replacement of online content, so you're never sure if what you see in your browser is actually what the server sent you, or if it's something your ISP "edited" for you).
Hope that helps explain things a bit.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
A few years ago, I was living in Japan and using 56k dialup, because that's ALL THERE WAS. And yes, I was living in a major city. Meanwhile, everyone back in Canada had DSL or cable modems. Japan was able to catch up, so I don't see why the U.S. or any other "reasonably" advanced country couldn't.
Where *are* you? I assumed that the Silicon Valley area would have the best internet accessibility, but it seems I was sorely mistaken. The best I ever heard about when I was living in San Carlos, smack-dab between SF and SJ along 101, was 10Mbps, and that wasn't even available in my neighborhood. My only two choices were DSL (5Mbps) or cable (6Mbps, but more expensive). Where are you that they're running fiber like that?
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
sorry about that.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
US data is taken from speedmatters at 2.3Mbps
International data taken from theInformation Technology and
Innovation Foundation at http://www.itif.org/files/2008BBRankings.pdf
This report shows US at 4.9Mbps
A significant difference in findings between the two. Ill let you draw the conclusions
Very interesting article that highlights the problems with broadband in this country. Personally, 1.5mpbs DSL that I have now is adequate for me. However, I have put a lot of thought into how this situation can improve. Part of it would require some governmental motivation. Also, the phone companies and the cable companies do seem to be working on the next generation of broadband for us although it is still not nearly as good as what Japan, S. Korea and some european nations have access to. It seems like the phone companies could have enough DSLAM's installed in Remote Terminals and even build new ones that would allow for 20+mpbs internet service using VDSL2. I know that AT&T U-Verse is going this route although because they are using HD streams for video it only leaves about 6mpbs for internet and now they are improving that to 10mpbs. Another factor from the cable companies is DOCSIS 3.0 which is now ready and will eventually allow the cable companies to offer 20, 30, 40, 50mpbs service. All of this is nice but the question is will stuff continue to cost a fortune if you want it. Where I live in Boone, NC (I go to school at Appalachian State University) the fastest plans I can get are 6Mpbs up/512kpbs down from AT&T FastAccess DSL or Charter Commmunications offers 10MPbs up/1Mpbs up. There have been rumors that 16Mpbs down is available from Charter or soon will be. However, although those are reasonable data rates for me at 6mpbs from AT&T and 10mpbs from Charter it is still a fortune to get it. Also, even then the data rates are nothing like the Asian and Scandinavian countries. And I won't even get into thinking about where this stuff is even available in this county. The outlying areas of beyond town are serviced by a local telephone coop and not by AT&T and their DSL is 1.5mpbs down/256K up ONLY and then its about $45 which is a bit silly. Anyway, anymore ideas? How do we fix this? Should government regulate broadband like other utilities including POTS phone and electrical utilities? I think it would help.
"If America is supposed to be moving away from a manufacturing economy and toward a service economy"..that's the theory the wall street pirates have pushed while they sold off everything they could. If that theory actually worked, the USA would be the ones holding all the balance of trade surpluses. What we are holding is the largest debt ever even conceived of on the planet, all the banks in big trouble, a dollar dropping in worth by the year, government that has to keep rearranging their economic stats to make it look better than it is, and so on.
It sounds great to those making 7 or 8 figures a year, Because they are in a position to arbitrage digital bits fast for alleged "work", so they keep pushing the fairy tale that "you too, joe sixpack" will be getting that. It's only taken them one generation of pushing that notion to destroy the economy, it is cruising on inertia now as all the foreigners sitting on buckets of dollars are trying to figure out how to convert them to "anything but more pieces of government or big bank IOU paper" as fast as possible without it turning to a full scale rout.
The latest is big sovereign wealth funds snapping up residential and commercial properties for dimes on the dollar from two years ago.
Sure, it looks just wonderful when you sell off all your real wealth and go into bondage for it. The only reason the middle class has the illusion of wealth and prosperity now is because by and large they have hocked everything they have including their grandchildren's labor to living large now. they just siucked that in and ran with it, thinking it could last forever, short term wealth for longer term destitution and transfer who gets to pay the tab to the next two generations.
I've used an analogy before for our economy over the last 25 years. A carpenter or mechanic can pawn all his tools and truck friday night and have a helluva "rich" weekend, man, the economy is great! Look at all the money!
Uh huh.
Eventually monday comes around and you need to work but can't, and the bills keep coming in. We are right about at monday morning now after a rich one generation long weekend.
Servicing wealth does not create wealth. Managing wealth does not create wealth. Writing about wealth or having a TV show about wealth does not create wealth. Repackaging IOUs into different bundles and giving them new names does not create any new wealth. Governing wealth does not create wealth (in spades, it is the anti-wealth). Playing sports and games and having entertainments around wealth does not create wealth.
You create wealth, or you rearrange who has it and dilute wealth, that's about it.
Manufacturing creates wealth by taking cheaper raw materials, leveraging human smarts and labor, and turning them into something useful. Servicing that is just a negative cost of wealth, every penny in service detracts from the value, and it in no way constitutes creating it.
And for that matter, all these places that now create wealth are finding out they can do their own servicing, whatever is necessary. They built up their manufacturing bases with the help of the wall street looters and their scientific and engineering bases with the connivance of the US government looking the other way as it all got hijacked, to the point now, ya, they'll keep sucking as much free and cheap R&D from the US that they can, but it is no longer strictly necessary either. That hit an "enough" stage a little while ago. From here on out everything they can get is gravy, but they don't really need it either.
The US is becoming redundant, an expensive redundancy to the planet, and as soon as all those foreign piles of dollars are transferred into something tangible and useful then that's it, the weekend binge and party is over, full daylight on Monday morning. Here is an example of what is happening, China is just *buying* Africa, all the good bits, all the critical minerals, all the good farmland, etc, by helping those folks bu
So once again, it takes a city government to build in what the telcos can't be bothered to implement. And then it takes the telcos to "buy" it underhandedly and jack the prices up.
Gotta love it. What was someone else saying about "leave it up to the free market"? The ironies...
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I was gonna say the same thing. 100 years? Smells like union FUD.
Got to love the manipulation of good ol' American pride.
Bang-on.
You don't want to be the generation that carries their children for 20 years and their parents for 80.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"Americans work on average almost 100 hours more per year than Japanese. Mostly due to the fact that Japanese get 7 more vacation days per year on average. "
So you're saying the Japanese workday is over 14 hours long?
I'll give you a hint -- US broadband sucks not because of different population densities. Instead, it's all about the profit margins.
You're entirely correct. Business must make a profit or they cease to stay in business. Places like Japan and Finland support broadband with government subsidies, which are obtained by higher tax rates than anything we have in the States.
Now, dear sir, if you think their method is better, I strongly suggest you whip our your checkbook and write a large check to the IRS as soon as possible. You seem to be rather free with spending so long as it's not your money you're spending. I'd rather your decision be based on what it would cost you rather than what it would cost me, if it's all the same to you.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
the us won't catch up to japan in population density for 101 years either. or korea, or china
that's the REAL metric involved here
adjust broadband penetration for population density, and then you have a valid metric. otherwise, nothing interesting in this figure
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
2.3mbps in 2008, vs 1.9 in 2007.
That's 1.2x better per year.
Japan to US ratio = 63.6mbps / 2.3mbps = 27.65x better
27.65 = (1.2)**N ; increasing at 1.2x for for N years
ln(27.65) = N*ln(1.2)
N = 18.2 years.
Of course, this ignores that Japan's rate would also be increasing over that period. The article neglects to mention how fast their bandwidth is improving.
Yeah, and land area of Japan is smaller than the land area of the state of Texas. I wonder if that might have a little to do with it? Gee...you think? Japan has ONE time zone. USA has (continental U.S.) four. Japan has one telephone company. The U.S. has local, long distance, wireless etc... So, the article is moot, because there are too many variables.
that the survey cited was put together by "the Communications Workers of America"? A division of the AFL-CIO? How objective do you think this report is? Does anyone think it might be in this union's best interest to convince America that we are woefully underserved in terms of communications capacity? Maybe we are. Maybe we are. I guess I'd just encourage everyone to consider the source.
I am not left-handed, either!
You don't need broadband.
What you want is a police state, with NO civil rights, NO freedom of speech, etc.
The government is GOD.
You don't need religion, sex, family, etc.
All you need is the government.
You don't need the internet. The government
will tell you what you NEED TO KNOW.
Dial up? People can't handle all that data.
Better cut them off. NO BROADBAND.
Only smart people can handle broadband, like
the Japanese. The USA can't handle anything
more complicated than "pong".
The USA gov't is giving people what they WANT!
The people are voting these idiots into power.
In a democracy, YOU determine who gets into power.
YOU don't want broadband, you won't get it.
You want broadband, start standing up.
START STANDING UP FOR YOURSELF!
You want the job done right, do it yourself.
I'm always amazed at 'news stories' that reveal nothing new. "Water is wet: film at 11!".
Japan is a small island, densely populated. There are still parts of America just getting used to indoor plumbing. Still. On the East coast it's packed pretty tightly, but out west, there's a LOT of land to cover. Haven't they had new advances in Japan, better cyber-plumbing and 'cooler' titles on video games for like three decades now?
Dvorak gets a technology move wrong! Netizen blames George Bush! Scientist claim sun will only come up tomorrow for a few million years.
Really, guys. Next you'll be telling me the latest release of Windows isn't being accepted by industry as "experts" guessed. How many times can you see the same thing over and over and claim it to be new?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
As someone living in Tokyo I find this article quite amusing.
I posted this 101 years in the past.
I checked my bandwidth on a Japanese based bandwidth testing site, and it WAS SLOWER!!!
When I use a U.S. bandwidth testing site, I'm always faster.
This article is just wrong, we are faster here in the states.
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
Dude, that horse you're on is looking mighty tall. Have a look-see here about Japanese taxes -- you might be surprised to hear that they are generally lower for the individual than they are in the US. And I can back that article up with anecdotal evidence from my own experience living there, filing in Japan, and from talking to Japanese colleagues. Oh, look, the Izumi Garden Tower -- I used to work there (follow the link to view).
Another vital part of why the ISP sector has evolved so differently in Japan in particular has to do with ownership -- NTT owns the lines, and umpteen other companies compete to offer ISP services over those lines. In the US, one company owns the lines (often AT&T for the phone lines, Comcast for the cable lines), and *that very same company offers ISP services*. This leads to all kinds of fun conflicts of interest, which I'll leave to the readers to think about. Fun, fun. Even more so once those same line-owning, ISP-operating companies start also buying up the content creators as well -- even more conflicts of interest. These conflicts happen in the US internet services market, but notably *not* in Japan.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Dude, that horse you're on is looking mighty tall. Have a look-see here regarding Japanese taxes -- you might be surprised to hear that taxes for individuals are actually higher in the US. And I can back that article up with anecdotal evidence from my own life living in Japan, filing taxes there, and talking with my Japanese colleagues. Oo, look, the Izumi Garden Tower -- I used to work there (follow link to view).
Another important factor in why the internet services market in Japan is so different has to do with ownership -- NTT owns the lines, and umpteen other companies compete to offer ISP services over those lines. This is in contrast to the situation in the US, where one company owns the lines (often AT&T for the phone lines, and Comcast for the cable lines), and *that same company offers ISP services via those lines*. Can I get Bob's Friendly Neighborhood ISP via Comcast's lines? Nope. This leads to all sorts of fun conflicts of interest, which I'll leave to the reader to think about. Fun, fun. Even more so when those same line-owning, ISP-monopolizing companies start buying up the content creators. These conflicts of interest are the order of the day in the US market, but are notably absent in Japan. Different rules there, encouraging more competition, and inhibiting the kind of monopolies that seem rife in the US.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
That strikes me as dodgy in the extreme -- were either of these companies implicated in the shady ownership transfer deal with Broadweave? To have a kick-ass service like that, for what you're saying is a very reasonable price, and *not* to be crowing about it from the rooftops to bring in business, suggests that something else was going on. Sure, fine, incompetence vs conspiracy and all that, but for companies to sit on their assets and not make a buck when it's there for the taking, that looks more than a little not right...
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I say more competetion for the telcos is good!
Support Free, Fast and Family-Friendly Broadband.
According to recent news reports, members of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) may vote on whether or not America deserves free and family-friendly broadband by August 14th, 2008.
Q: If it's a free service, how will M2Z make money?
A: M2Z will offer the free, wireless (over-the-air), family-friendly (filtered), service at speeds of 512 kbps (384 kbps for downloads and 128 kbps for uploads). This is competitive with low-end DSL and about 6 times faster than conventional dial-up. Advertising revenue will support the free service, using local geo-tagging for highly relevant non-intrusive search results (i.e. searching "pizza" will give you the local pizza place down the street and not a Pizza Hut in another city or state) M2Z also earns money for a premium (unfiltered) service at speeds of 3 mbps (3,000 kbps). This offering will be competitive with cable modem services and will be provided through wholesale partners.
Q: Is the family-friendly indecency filter bad for free speech?
A: Not at all. M2Z is offering a free, family-friendly, always-on service. The free service allows for anonymous registration and since there is no way to know the age of a specific user, M2Z cannot differentiate between a 10 year old child and a 45 year old adult. This is similar to broadcast TV where basic channels are free and subject to content restrictions but users can pay for premium channels that have no content restrictions.
Q: How does the family-friendly indecency filter work? Who can turn off the filter?
A: M2Z's filter will operate at the network level and block sites based on their domain names -- similar to what many schools and public libraries provide to protect children. It is a superior solution to software based systems that require parents to act as IT administrators and are also easy to manipulate and circumvent. People who subscribe to the premium service will establish their age and identity and therefore, can turn off the filter if they wish.
More Info here: http://www.m2znetworks.com/
*Very* interesting. And sensible -- the internet is, anymore, a basic fundamental part of modern life, on the same order of importance as garbage pickup and telephone service. I'm envious, it seems you Finns have held onto all the smart people in government. :) Meanwhile, we usians are lucky if our government simply doesn't embarrass us or inconvenience us too badly. :( Canadia is looking better and better. (yes, that spelling is a joke)
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
One of the largest factors preventing adequate broadband growth here in the U.S. is figuring out how to both provide faster service while containing piracy of various copyrighted media well enough not to get sued. After all, it's the responsibility of the service provider for the collective actions of their customer base... at least in the U.S., where we all sue the guy with the most money before suing those actually responsible for our culture's problems.
8==8 Bones 8==8
How the data for this survey is gathered? I mean it says that median download-speed in Finland is 21Mbps and I strongly disagree with that. I am working for a middle size ISP and I can say that most of customers (meaning 90% or so) are using speeds between 1-8Mb because the are cheaper and only about 10% are using higher speeds.
I heard about this earlier and after a conversation with my collegues we came to conclusion that 21Mb may be median speed that is available for customers (thought they dont have that fast broadbands because they dont want to pay for speed they dont need)
I got a call from BrightHouse the other day, trying to sell me TV service to go with my internet. I said I didn't want it, but wanted to talk about upgrading to their new 15mbps plan. I was told that I could because "your equipment couldn't handle it unless you also bought TV and Phone service from us." ... WTF? Make up a better lie next time. Rather than argue, I just said I didn't want any of it then.
So it's not that I can't get 15mpbs, I just have to be willing to pay for services I don't want or use in order to get it.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Yes, I have fast broadband. But those sites still sucks.
(And most Swedish sites are only available with the most recent version of Firefox or the two latest versions of Internet Explorer. Many of them present a blank page if you don't use Firefox or IE.)
This is Swedens most popular website (a news paper).
Go make coffe while it downloads.
Try to increase the font size -- haha!
Try to read an article -- Yes, EVERY page has the same amount of garbage. ALL Swedish news sites has that amount of garbage.
Try to navigate the site without javascript.
Try to look at a video in anything but windows -- No you can't. And some news are only available as videos.
Then try Swedens most popular finance site. Yes, all Swedish financial news sites looks and behaves something like that. Try to look at that site on a computer with a small screen, like Eeepc.
This page gives information to potential tourist to my part of Sweden (in English). No, it won't be much faster with a fast connection. It's Web2, you need a faster computer. Yes, it only work with Microsoft Web Core Fonts. No you can't make the text bigger. Last year it was still flash dependent and windows only. And yes, it's government sponsored
And those sites isn't half bad compared to most other sites. And they have actually improved, most of the big sites where totally IE dependent a year ago.
And Swedish web developers looove flash. You can't navigate through half of the sites without it.
Most analysts can't accurately predict the next year much less the next 100. Who say we will even use the internet in its current form in 100 years.
Well, if we go to war with Russia, we might just be able to get two of the three.
Who wrote this, Thomas Malthus?