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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.
Even then when you compare with Finland or Sweden, which have a similar population density, the US compares badly. Saying that the US is larger isn't a worthwhile response, the $/potential customer is the same regardless of the scale of the operation. It's just that clearly one single company for the US is far worse than the dozens across Europe, and there isn't real competition or universal service requirements.
Then again the UK is pretty dire in my opinion, following the US model of cheap crappy DSL and lacking upstream bandwidth, rather than the Swedish model of fast fibre to the home. Virgin Media like to claim they're fibre to the cabinet, but it's still arse-slow on DSL if you're unfortunate to be stuck with them.
Manhattan is a relatively small island with an extremely dense population. Logically, it should be even better than Japan for broadband (since Japan has to run cable to comparatively lightly populated areas like Hokkaido). The fastest affordable broadband here is:
FiOS is apparently available in a small amount of downtown, but not in most of the island, and even that was only introduced within the past year.
According to the article, average broadband speed in Japan is 63 Mbps down. So in 5-10 years when Verizon finishes wiring Manhattan, we'll be up to consumer speeds *almost* one third that of Japan's *now*.
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I live in Boston and can't get anything more than 8 down 768 up from Comcast or 3.0 down (something slow up) DSL. No other options. (No Fios in Boston proper).
Even if Fios were available I don't think there are any options that will give 63mbps download speeds. And that's the apparently the Japanese average...
What's the excuse here?
Well, people keep bringing up the "small town" and "urbanisation" excuses for poor US broadband penetration.
I'm moving to Sweden from Denmark in 3 weeks. Did a bit of checking.
Here are my options for internet in Sweden where I'll be living:
Company 1 and 2: 3G modem, 7.2 Mbit/s down, 384kbit/s down - theoretical max. Realistic is 4/256 in that area according to the people who work there. 60$/month
Company 2 and 3: ADSL, up to 20/2 Mbit/s. 80$/month
Company 4: Fiber. 100 Mbit/s down, not sure about up, but FAST. Including free calls to landline phones in Sweden: 52$/month
And every single option is without a usage cap.
So, obviously I will be moving to a big city, right?
Wrong.
I'm moving to Ljusdal. A town of about 8,000 people. The municipality has about 20,000 residents and covers an area of 5,288 km^2 (2,041 miles^2). It's about 300 km north of the capital of Sweden. The biggest city nearby is the main city of the country (Gävle) with about 69,000 residents.
Not entirely sure, but I suspect that would pretty much put any kind of rural/urbanisation argument to rest. Hell, Sweden is 449,964 km^2 (173,732 miles^2), compared to Texas' 696,241 km^2, so about 2/3rds the size, but only has 9.2 million residents compared to Texas' 23.9 million. And yes, I left out Alaska of the equation. But if we're playing that game, we can always go with the Kingdom of Denmark which includes Greenland and its 830,000 miles^2 ;)
Personally I suspect it's the fact that four different companies are vying for customers in the same area that makes the big difference.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.