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Why Broadband In North America Is Not That Slow
An anonymous reader writes "The Globe & Mail has an article written in response to a recent study done by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard about how far behind the rest of the world the US and Canada are with regard to broadband internet. The refutation basically tears apart Harvard's analysis and shows why the US and Canada are actually far ahead of most European countries. 'Canada has a true broadband penetration rate of close to 70 per cent of households. And North Americans use the Internet somewhat more intensively than do Europeans, according to Cisco Systems data on Internet traffic. Further, business Internet traffic in North America appears to be at levels substantially higher than elsewhere in the world. Sadly, there is little systematic effort by international agencies to measure the intensity of Internet usage. Instead, we see comparisons of advertised speeds and "price per advertised megabit," which are especially misleading. Advertised broadband speeds vary from actual speeds. In North America, this is largely a result of "network overhead," and is quite modest. In Europe, however, the variation is often dramatic.'"
Checklist:
[ ] Can I get 1 Gb/s to home in Canada? (I can in my home town Stockholm)
[ ] Is the true broadbrand penetration 98+% like in most of the Europe?
[ ] Is the quality of line actually such that you get angry when the line goes down for a few minutes once per every 1-3 years?
Seeing all the complaints here on slashdot too, I really don't think it's the same. Often times I am even surprised how you put up with it.
Hell, even in the beginning of 2000 the competition was so bad that features that usually only came with business lines were offered to tech-savvy home users. Needed static ip's or a block of 32 or larger ip's? Ask for it and they gave.
I also seriously doubt North Americans using Internet more intensively. Even if I personally dislike it, P2P is pretty damn rampant and that takes a lot of bandwidth. Also everyone uses YouTube and other high bandwidth sites (which obviously have local datacenters because of the demand)
What comes to business lines, I think they are quite equivalent to each other. Premium, fail-proof lines cost in both NA and EU. But as the home-lines in EU are reliable and theres no bullshit terms to deny such, a lot of businesses who directly aren't working on the Internet use those.
Especially if you are penalized by your ISP if you use it..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Uhm, the speed used is not the speed advertised. Why, because it varies wildly and would be stupid to use. They use averages of speedtests. Which is the best indicator you'll ever get of speed. That kind of makes their point moot.
Well now I'm pretty sure the internet speed is going to be capped (and or its progress slowed down) somewhere by some "oh so nice people" from a bunch of fantastic organizations.........RIAA???? "Increased internet speeds will only lead to more piracy, going back to dial up will fix this" I can't stand 3mbs I want 100mbs at my house, its a shame fios isn't in town
The original report is really badly written. For example, this is a section heading:
"A multidimensional approach to benchmarking helps us separate whose experience is exemplary, and whose is cautionary, along several dimensions of broadband availability and quality"
Why do people write like this?
Probably the worst thing around here [US] is the upload capping. I've had a dozen or so broadband providers and they all seem to cut it down to almost intolerable levels.
I wonder how much difference there really is between the various counties?
I've been in places in the Americas, Europe & Asia where 'remote' could be as little as an hour's drive away from a big city.
Guess what? No broadband, & crappy cell coverage, (forget high bandwidth via cell).
Why? Normally simple economics. Look at the cell maps; they all claim to cover '9x%' of the population, conveniently forgetting that that's != to '9x' of the inhabitated surface.
Anyway, how much bandwidth do you really need? Is it really a handicap if you cannot run a call/data centre from some remote mountain or desert retreat?
Has anyone else noticed that this was posted in the future?
I live less than 20 miles from the center of a major metropolitan area and cannot get broadband, none, no option.
The numbers for broadband penetration with active internet users in north america are 95+%, and for businesses are over 98%. That basically means everyone who actually uses the internet is on broadband.
At that point is there really much to discuss? Everyone who actually uses the internet in any significant fashion is on broadband.
I live in San Francisco, where Comcast advertises 8Mbps. We actually get 1Mbps down. If you want the full 6Mbps, you have to live some place like San Mateo County, where they don't have insane oversubscription.
The Comcast drone I chatted with online asked me: "Would you like to avail the Comcast?" I don't even know what the F that means.
My Parents live in the US (Missouri), i live in Germany.
They pay more then i do, they only have one choice for broadband (SBC Global which is now AT&T) and their download speed is slower then my upload speed. And i don't mean 'stated', i mean actual.
They have 768kbit/s down stated and they do get that but they pay around $45/month. In Germany i pay 29.90 euro for 32Mbit/s stated of which i actually get 3.9MByte/s sustained so 31.2Mbit/s actual and 2Mbit/s upstream stated of which i get like 220kbyte/s so 1.8Mbit/s).
My brother lives in mountain view (near google) and used to live in menlo park. On both occasions he had only two choices (dsl and cable form one provider each).
Each was horribly slow and very expensive. And this is in the F*ING HEART OF SILICON VALLY!!!. At least now in mountain view he gets free google wifi (which he uses exclusively, thank you google!).
In Germany i have 8 different DSL providers, all tying to outbid each other (this is in a small rural town with maybe like 5000 inhabitants). Unfortunately with DSL the max they can provide is 16Mbit/s over twisted pair, that's why i went with cable, which for the speed is just as cheap and way cheaper then anything i ever saw in the US. Sure i heard of things like 'Fiber to the premises' but in the areas my parents, my brothers and i lived it was never even considered, and in the last 10 years the price of 'broadband' was actually raised 2x. Each time my parents would cancel or threaten to cancel to get the 'new user' prices again which would be what they payed before. But it's not really much of a choice, if they want broad band they have to pay what AT&T asks.
This article is either total BS or somehow every place i know in the US has been miraculously spared of any type of competition leaving horrible service, horrible speeds for extravagant prices.
Does anybody in the US have something like 32Mbit/s (uncapped) $40/moth? If so, where do you live and what is your ISP?
I used to live in the US from 1996 to 2008, and I lived in the freaking center of a major city. In 1998 or so they started offering DSL, 768k SDSL, for like $80 per month. That was concentric, which ended up becoming XO and canceling all their consumer accounts. I switched to the excellent Speakeasy, but it was still more money for less speed at the time. Later, the truly craptasic Verizon DSL showed up, which many people signed up for, since the advertising was heavy. One of my friends have had that go on and off once a week or more until he finally got fed up and cancelled it. Another one of my friends signed up for their DSL in order to set up a test web site for class, but then found out after the fact that they block port 80. By the time I left, I had 3 or 6Mbit DSL for around $60 a month, but at least it actually gave that speed and had a static IP. On the other hand, cable internet also arrived, and gives speeds "up to 12mbps" last I checked, but seems to vary drastically according to my friends who use it. I had AT&T 3G before I left, which with my company discount was $80 a month for 3Mbit, which even in the best coverage areas was usually 2Mbit max. The upload speed was truly pathetic. Around the time I left, Verizon started to offer their FIOS service, which isn't even available in the city I was in, but in the suburbs. It could offer speeds "up to 30Mbps", but that would have cost more than whatever default speed they gave.
Now... The DSL here, is like $5 a month for 14-16mbps. 100Mbps or 160Mbps fiber is about $40 a month. 1Gbps is available now for not much more. 21Mbit 3G (with 4.8Mbps upstream) that actually delivers that speed most of the time is about $50 a month. 40Mbps WiMax is also available for cheap, but the reception is not good. In every case the bandwidth is better, they don't play games with port blocking/rate limiting and shit, and the price is cheaper. In fact, I use my 3G router to download at least dozens of GB per month.
Also, nearly everything mentioned above is available almost anywhere in Japan. I don't want to hear the excuse "oh that's because Japan is a small island." We have as much empty space as the US to be sure. As for people not being heavy users, there is a reason why the higher speeds are available. I don't know the situation in Europe first-hand, but at least in Korea it's similar to here.
The area of Sweden is about 450,000 square kilometers. The area of the state of California is about 425,000 square kilometers. The number of illegal immigrants alone, in the US, is estimated at around 10-15 million, depending who you ask. The population of Sweden is about 9 million.
You can throw out all these comparisons of broadband, but when you get down to it, it turns out that things are radically different over on this continent. Just want to point that out before we start saying that one or the other is morally superior.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I fail to see how internet speed relates to internet usage, after all there's still quite a few americans intensively surfing on analog modems. Must sure take a long time to load slashdot with that.
Yes, California is a lot denser populated than Sweden. Hence, it is a lot cheaper to build out infrastructure in California. The actual size does not matter. Larger country with more people => same as several smaller countries, or likely even better due to economics of scale.
Why does Sweden (sparsley populated) have a lot of fiber build out + really large ADSL build out and low prices?
Usually when a study comes to such dramatically different conclusions from a fairly respectable institution my alarm bells start ringing. It usually smells like media manipulation. So, let's see. The Globe and Mail is owned by CTVGlobemedia which in turn is owned by among others Bell Canada. Bell Canada (as well as the other former Bells) were excoriated by the Harvard report for being anti-competitive and providing poor value. Hrm... Nothing definitive but fairly fishy.
In fact, Europe as a whole trails the United States severely in the deployment of next-generation broadband infrastructures. This performance gap is far less ambiguous, far more dramatic, far more accurately measured and far more meaningful than most of the measures of ...
So infrastructure is where this article places meaning, but meaning is for the putter to place. I don't care about infrastructure. I care about the exact speeds I can get, and what options I have. I live in LA and they both suck.
International comparisons almost always suffer from limited data and limited comparability, particularly comparisons of prices and speeds.
Bullshit. All this information is publicly available and advertised. Advertised speeds may be off, but this can be derived by looking into the infrastructure behind any service. I don't see anything limited about this information.
Regulation curtails economic freedom, which is why a very high standard of evidence is required to justify regulation.
Oh, how we would all love for this to be the case. Regulation is proportional to lobbying efforts, and the biases of those elected into public service. When has science ever played any role in politics?
If regulation was based on evidence, we would all be driving electric cars and weed would be legal.
... In North America, this is largely a result of "network overhead," and is quite modest. In Europe, however, the variation is often dramatic.
Bullshit. Any decrease in anything can be attributed to "overhead"!! And "quite modest" based on what?
Buying internet access is like buying a gallon of milk, and finding it to be half empty, or worse. No, its not half full, its half empty, and I want my gallon dammit!!!
Nor, I suspect, that of many other slashdotters.
I expect this to be rapidly crowdsourced into the dust.
The state of broadband in North America may suck now, but it doesn't have to stay that way.
The Obama stimulus bill provided billions of dollars for broadband development in rural areas. I don't know if any of that money is still available. If it is, then we (collectively) should start forming Co-ops like the East Vermont Fiber Project that was featured on Slashdot a while back and start building out our own infrastructure.
My Sysadmin Blog
Even the article itself says that compared to Europe, we trail only an "elite group" of (mostly northern) countries.
The problem with that, (if you're old enough to remember the sixties when the destruction of WW2 was recent enough to have much of Europe still like developing nations today where you couldn't trust the water), is that WE used to be the "elite". That even some European countries have pulled way ahead when they used to be far behind is all the proof you want that we haven't done nearly as well as we could have. (And as for Japan and South Korea pulling way ahead of us: both countries REALLY were developing nations when I was a kid. People in shacks. Widespread hunger.)
Secondly, it's not how well we're doing leveraging an old 1930's copper wire infrastructure that was paid off by 1960 by telephones, or what we're doing with a 1970's coax infrastructure paid off by 1990 by cable TV bills; it's how well we're doing at putting in a whole new infrastructure for the Internet itself - one that will wipe the other two away.
That is, where are we with fiber-to-the-home? Ten years ago, it was reasonable to address voracious demand for the new service by piggybacking it on old infrastructures never designed for it, but were sitting there, already deployed. That should have been matched by an aggressive build-out of the replacement infrastructure designed for the job. It should be nearly done by now.
Alas, being able to send out TWO bills for the same infrastructure after dropping a few humming boxes on either end of the old wires, was far too lucrative to give up in favour of spending about 3 years of bills per house to run new lines, and government dropped the ball on regulating them to do that.
Whether just a few, or several, European countries are were just as sloppy, their regulators just as captured, as ours, does not mitigate the mistake; it just gives us some more company. Big deal.
"Canada has a true broadband penetration rate of close to 70 per cent of households...." Is that US or Canadian dollars?
Say NO to unpaid Internships!
In France I had 3+ Mbit/s unlimited internet + unlimited nationwide calling for free, for 30E in 2006.
Right now, basically, in Washington DC, my ISP just upped my 1Mbit/s service price from $20/month to $35/month, at the end of the initial 1 year subscription period.
And I can't seem to find cheaper...
Yes, I can have 40Mbit/s or faster for $45+ dollars / month or TriplePlay or similar crap, but:
- I use net for Skype, e-mail, watching some online videos on new sites. I don't need 50Mbit/s for that
- I don't need 200+ HD channels, I'm fine with on-the air TVs
- I use my cell phone for calling, no home phone please
Fiber optic internet penetration may be higher than in Europe but you can get it only coupled to tons of crap that personally I don't need.
Hell, sometimes "remote" can be one block away.
But that's always been the problem:
In the 1930s, all the power companies were happy to connect into downtown Nashville, but rural TN? No payback, no investors, no way.
In the 1950s, the Bell System was permitted to be a monopoly only if they agreed to build out to 100% of the country. There's places in rural Colorado that have no electricity, single track road, cell phones are offline, but you can get wireline telephone service. That copper hasn't made AT&T a dime, except that they could charge it off over decades (and the monopoly status has value of course).
Network build out is expensive. It's estimated that it costs Verizon between $3000-$5000 to install a FIOS customer. I'm sure that drops the more people on the street take the service, but if there's only 3 houses/mile, that cost can easily go through the roof. Cable construction is quite a bit lower, figure about $1/ft for aerial and $2-3/ft for underground if it isn't new construction/open trench.
I'm not exactly in favor of a TVA or Bell System solution, but it does get results. A compromise might be to let all comers have an accelerated depreciation schedule for rural build out, or maybe have the treasury back a 30 year bond issued by the provider. If a TVA style solution is proposed (and it usually is), there should be a clear exit strategy for the government to get out of the business after the capital is repaid, perhaps converting the business into a co-op or some such entity.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
The US is the least "free" economy in the world. Highest agricultural subsidies. Spends the most of ANY country in the world on bailing out private corporations. Gave Warren Buffets (largest stockholder in AIG and Moodys) enough of that "gubbimint cheese" to make Buffet the single largest welfare recipient in the known universe ...
And you're "free" to pay for all this over the rest of your, and your kids, and your grandkids, lives.
... you are in for a huge surprise and a lot of down time.
When it comes to internet, cable solutions are still very unreliable. One example, how many days of down time did cable customers had when Comcast decide to test their new DNS server??? Three days. Then you get dynamically throuttle back because they don't want you to use the bandwidth you legally paid for .... basically using the alleged P2P usage as a cheap excuse. Don't believe me .... check out the BBB for all the complains.
...for this article, as:
"Canada has a true broadband penetration rate of close to 70 per cent of households." is NOT EVEN CLOSE to my experience with people in southern Ontario.
Nice how the article also quickly segues into businesses, which if they're of any size have, IME, had "broadband" for almost 2 decades and many even longer than that dependent upon what type of business they were in and number of locations, etc. Hell, it was pretty much a necessity for businesses by the mid-90s. Conversely there was NO residential broadband at all in my area until the last two years of the 90s, and then it was by a single regional monopoly carrier(cable) that has done nothing but raise rates while adding nearly zero value of the last decade. Unfortunately once DSL started becoming widespread in the early 00s, it still offered me no alternative given the distance to the local CO, i.e. I'd be just about as well off with ISDN as DSL at that time. Now matter have changed by DSL speeds are still lower than cable, leaving the only other option to wait around for Verizon to show up with fiber.
That said even with the availablity of some type of broadband in this residential area, I seriously doubt that it hit even 50% penetration until 5y or so ago, and has, likely, continued a very tepid growth rate given what I can sniff out of the local network setup and other clues.
And going back to Ontario one of the areas I frequent, there are very LARGE areas which had ZERO alternative to dialup until a few years ago when an entrepreneurial spirit(teeny tiny local ISP) started offering wireless broadband in some of those areas, however the monthly costs, as expected, are HIGH, even for Canada.
Checklist:
[ ] Can I get 1 Gb/s to home in Canada? (I can in my home town Stockholm)
I think that's too harsh. We damage our point by exaggerating in our examples... While you might be able to get that in Stockholm, you won't get that just about anywhere in Europe or even Sweden. But even when using more common figures... We are well ahead. We don't have monthly caps, have little to no throttling (I've never noticed any), etc... which seem to be more common elsewhere.
I live in Finland and am surfing through 100 Mbit/second line. It should be 100/10 but I usually get about 95 megs/second down and about 65 megs/second up assuming it isn't peak traffic hours (when it's closer to 100/10). Thus, from my somewhat anecdotal evidence I have extremely hard time believing that USA has more reliable connections. Also, while that gigabit connection is still rare, 100mbps connection begins to be pretty common at least here in Finland and operators constantly dig fiber and the area is expanding rapidly. Not in all areas but capital area and around notable cities at least. 24mbit/s has been pretty common in many areas for several years.
In my old apartment (suburbs of East-Vantaa) I could have gotten 100/10 connection but I didn't see the point so I just used the 10/2. I recently moved to HOAS student apartment with a roommate and we decided "Meh. We both study computer science, getting 100/10 would cost just 20 euros a month divided between the two of us... Why would we not get it?"
Now... I think that USA might still win us when it comes to price. In my previous apartment, 100/10 would have cost 55 euros (=75 dollars) a month. That might not be easily comparable if those bandwith's are less common in usa but even the 10/2 cost 45 euros (=61 dollars) a month. I think that you would get one cheaper than that in USA? Then again, prices between USA and Europe are never directly comparable. We have higher prices, usually higher wages (Our lowest wages are higher than at USA but our high end wages are less than there), higher taxes, need to spend less money to education/healthcare/etc. but need to pay more for gas... So it is very hard to just compare costs in the two without going in to deep analysis about respective quality of life... I guess that you should just look at "How large precentage of population has product X" instead but even then we would have cultural differences affecting that.
i thought asian countries such as japan and korea are the real pacesetters for broadband internet penetration/connectivity?
The article sites some numbers, but... what do they actually say? Nothing. You can state a whole list of numbers, but the actual user experience is what counts. Here in EU, I haven't had a single minute of internet downtime for the last 2 full years. Not a single minute. However, my American friends complain quite often about internet downtime, while they pay absurdly large prices. For comparison: I pay €39,99/month for 20MBps (practically it's around 13 MBps) internet, telephone and digital TV (state-funded channels in full HD) in one single package. I wonder if you can get something like that in the US (€40 is about 50 USD). And yet another thing: we have wifi almost everywhere, even in trains (for free!). It's just a matter of time before they'll put wifi in subways and buses. Are these services available in the US? I wonder.
Instead, we see comparisons of advertised speeds and "price per advertised megabit," which are especially misleading. Advertised broadband speeds vary from actual speeds. In North America, this is largely a result of "network overhead," and is quite modest. In Europe, however, the variation is often dramatic.
What a weasily way to make it sound like internet connections in the US are not so bad. The reason why advertised speeds aren't so different from actual speeds in the US, is because the offer is extremely low. If you have an advertised 3 Mbit connection in the US and in reality you get 2 Mbit, that's only a 1 Mbit difference. But if you have a line for the same monthly fee in Europe, advertised as 20 Mbit and you actually get 12 Mbit, there's suddenly a whopping 8 Mbit difference. So according to these folks, the 20 Mbit line is a lot worse than the 3 Mbit line.
Lies, damn lies and statistics, right.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Spends the most of ANY country in the world on bailing out private corporations. Gave Warren Buffets (largest stockholder in AIG and Moodys) enough of that "gubbimint cheese" to make Buffet the single largest welfare recipient in the known universe ...
And you're "free" to pay for all this over the rest of your, and your kids, and your grandkids, lives.
Is that in total or per capita? Because I'm pretty sure the per capita numbers are miniscule compared to some economies. No, we're blowing all our money on health care (16% of GDP!), apparently.
I believe that is spelled "Pokemon Village"
If akamai is not coping with French geeks starving for bandwidth and only deliverying an average of 3.2Mbps, it does not means that the internet access is 3.2Mbps here in France.
FYI, I got an average of 80Mb/s, 40Mb/s and less than 2ms to most french sites (Mo => MB for those who likes 10MB/s).
ping to french hosted ping to google.com is about 12ms, .uk is about 20ms and slashdot is about 130ms.
But ping to akamai.com is about 50ms and the same for lemonde.fr (a akamai customer) 40ms.
The only conclusion for me is : akamai is slow ;-)
By the way, I pay less than 30€ per month (unlimited bandwith, unlimited call to most countries, free wifi to millions of AP, more than 150 of TV chan, IPv6, tivo like boxe provided, etc).
If Bell want canadian citizens to think Canada is the best country for broadband, it is up to them. European, Korean & Japanese knows where is the reality.
OH GEE i can go one gigabit for one hour BOY THAT WAS FAST
people that up articles like this should be shot
pissed on and have there gene's removed form humanity
YOUR attempt at obfuscation has FAILED
got it EPIC FAIL
caps , throttles , user based billing
all make highspeed USELESS today
And now, I will tear apart the analysis that tears apart the Harvard analysis!
Economists with extensive practical experience of telecommunications regulation have already rebutted the Berkman Center report that harshly assessed Canadian broadband performance, but it is also worth pointing out how much room for interpretation there is in broadband comparisons.
Let me back up this point by just letting you know the research was refuted and not bother pointing out anyone who's refuted it.
Residential broadband subscriptions, however, are taken at the household level, not at the individual level. And big businesses often connect several hundred employees with one “line.” The United States and Canada have 2.6 individuals per household, compared with 2.2 in Germany and some other European countries. Thus, if North American household sizes fell to German levels, and all households subscribed to broadband, the United Statse and Canada would have an additional seven lines per 100 persons... Thus there could well be more employees “connected” in North America, although there might be fewer connections.
So, wait, you're saying that there's more internet penetration in North America because in NA there are more people able to check their e-mail from work?
And North Americans use the Internet somewhat more intensively than do Europeans, according to Cisco Systems data on Internet traffic. Further, business Internet traffic in North America appears to be at levels substantially higher than elsewhere in the world. Sadly, there is little systematic effort by international agencies to measure the intensity of Internet usage.
In fact, there's so little effort to measure internet usage that I can just spout this line and pretend it's true without anyone having to refute it!
Real-world speed testing efforts, while not perfect, tell a dramatically different story from comparisons of advertised speeds. Using real-world data on the amount of time taken to deliver files to end users from its global network of servers, Akamai Technologies reports that the average download speed for Canada was 4.2 megabits a second, against 3.2 Mbps for France, whereas the OECD finds that the average advertised speed from French ISPs was a staggering 51 Mbps.
Ah, but were they testing from home servers, or from work, which is where most people check their email in Canada?
Fifty-Mbps speeds (and their prices) are representative of user experience only where advanced fibre and cable networks are widely on offer. Although parts of France have developed impressively in this regard, such networks are accessible to at most 25 per cent of households, and the take-up of high-speed services is very low.
As opposed to the, what, 2% of North American households that get that kind of speed?
Canada is likely soon to have a proportion substantially higher than France's of homes served by advanced fibre and cable networks that can deliver such speeds, thanks in part to the ubiquity of cable networks that are less costly to upgrade.
Also, next year the Cubs will win the pennant. It's gonna be the year! They've been building such a strong team!
Robert Crandall from the Brookings Institution has shown that in recent years, the capital intensity of the wireline operations of the incumbent North American phone companies has significantly exceeded that of their European counterparts. In 2008, Telus's wireline capital expenditures were about 25 per cent of its corresponding revenue, nearly double the ratio for many European incumbents. Likewise, the Wireless Intelligence database shows that between 2004 and 2009, the capital intensity of wireless operators has been 50 per cent higher in North America than in Western Europe.
How do we know that North Americans get better internet? Because they spend more money on it! Or do they?
So it is that in Ca
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
It is clear that the premise of the posted article is false. Broadband in the US is neither universally available nor of the quality of modernized countries. The more basic problem is that Slashdot feels free to allow the post of the most absurd items at times - read it on Slashdot and you had better bring a load of salt with you - a grain will not do.
The total cost of the bail-out, past and going forward over the next decade, is now estimated at being in the area of 20 trillion to the US. That's a quarter-million per family of 4. This is, on a per capita basis, more than 4x the Iceland "Icesave" bailout that is threatening to bankkrupt Iceland.
It won't make the US lose it's AAA credit rating - the ratings companies will come up with an AAAA rating for some of the other countries instead, and AAA will become the new "A with negative outlook".
There are still areas of the US where you cannot get telephone service and eve some where you cannot get electricity so the article stating that internet speeds are not that slow is just plain - insert sneeze here - bullshit. Japan has 1GB to the home and I'll wager that the Japanese are far more "connected" a society than we are. I am also willing to bet that we pay substantially more for our service. I am more apt to believe a Harvard study that is done with significantly less bias than the Globe & Mail. The Globe & Mail certainly doesn't want to potentially piss off its advertising base whereas Harvard is more apt to get at the turth.
Now... I think that USA might still win us when it comes to price. In my previous apartment, 100/10 would have cost 55 euros (=75 dollars) a month. That might not be easily comparable if those bandwith's are less common in usa but even the 10/2 cost 45 euros (=61 dollars) a month. I think that you would get one cheaper than that in USA?
???
I'm unemployed. I recently moved from dial-up (.05/.03) for $22 a month (not including phone) to low DSL (.7/.3) for $20 a month (phone irrelevant, taxes and fees extra).
So I see AT&T/Verison, Comcast/Turner, and Clear battling in single digits (mostly 6/1 and less) for a massively underemployed populace. And I'm totally losing the point of the article.
But, yeah, I'm beating you in price. Whoop-de-friggin'-do.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
The US is the least "free" economy in the world. Highest agricultural subsidies.
Actually, both Europe and Japan have substantially higher agricultural subsidies than the US.
If you RTFM and look at the comments, a blogger notes that Bell Canada has a significant ownership stake in The Globe & Mail which immediately takes any shred of impartiality out of the article.
Free market capitalism, or economics in general, is not a natural law of the universe like physics or maths. Economics is just a completely arbitrary, man-made system of resource allocation.
Europe decides to allocate its resources to communications infrastructure, America decides to allocate its resources to a few rich people to do with as they wish. By the way, there's no such thing as a free market, capitalism can't exist without strong government intervention in damn near everything.
Right, because of all the things ailing this country we need to tackle internet speeds. Nice waste of my tax dollars.
A lot of things tend to be needed in any country. You don't drop one to work on "more important" matters. You can solve problems in parallel you know.
when some big company comes out with something that's obviously wrong, it's usually paid advertising. the sad thing is they actually think we're too stupid to see it. The sadder thing is for many average CEO's they're right.
This isn't a detailed critique, I don't have the data or the time for that. However the article talks about a different family size in Germany, & some other EU nations (2.2 individuals per household) versus (2.6 individuals per household) in the U.S. & Canada. The article implies that this changes the lines per person somewhat. Disregarding the fact that Germany is an extreme case, in the U.S. at least, family size increases at lower income levels, and lower income levels probably equate with lower internet use. I think the article's argument is very weak.
One other observation: The article's complaints about broadband connectivity to employees, due to larger business size in the U.S.- seems reasonable to me. Most complaints on slashdot and elsewhere are from consumers and small businesses. Of course I don't know how you would measure the bandwidth of Google with it's uTube. That would seem to be a third category of bandwidth, neither household consumer or business employee.
Having lived in various parts of Europe for the past year (albeit probably not in the finest of establishments) my biggest comment to this would be that it's understandable that almost all of the Euro comments here are coming from Sweden. I'm currently living in Belgium where all of the ISP are capped to the extent that everyone in the house is on a 56K quality connection for three weeks a month because it's provided by their landlord and they refuse to pay more. In Germany my experience was more familiar, uncapped but service varies greatly between what people are trying to get and what they actually have access to. By contrast I was in Bulgaria for two months and our internet access was frequently wireless only, shared access point between God knows how many customers but I guess it's still broadband!
Sweden would do well you enjoy their connectivity, because it's not the same story everywhere else.
High enough in fact that they can export their grain to sub-Saharan Africa and run local farmers into the ground in some cases. Add in the status symbol of buying EU grains instead of the local ones and it can be hard to compete.
Did anyone read the reports? I appreciate the links, but broadband access in the US and Canada sucks. The problem is that broadband in Europe is more focused on upgradability, mobility and a co-operative competition than the broadband in the US. AT&T and other US companies providing broadband services have engaged in illegal business practices that in Europe would get them fined. In addition the United States faces competition between various network systems that are incompatible. Canada does a better job of providing compatible wired communications and a crap job of providing wireless communications. Providers in the US are so busy trying to screw each other and the consumer over to put a couple more bucks in their pockets that, well, it makes the US look a lot like a street vendor selling fake Rolexes in the world of broadband technology.
The immutable laws of economics? Really? Is that like the immutable law of Homo Oeconomicus that utterly failed to predict the result of certain money sharing experiments? Or the immutable laws that prevented economists the world over from figuring out why people walk (or even run!) up escalators? Or the immutable laws that completely failed to force banks like Bear Stearns to act in their own best long-term interest?
I don't know whether to laugh at your blind faith in economics, or cry at your ignorance of reality. After all, people like you vote for my representatives.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
This is all a weird argument to make. Broadband is much faster and cheaper in quite a few European countries than in the US, and while you can try to weasel your way out of it trying to paint it as unimportant or something, it is a strong demonstration of an important principle: government-enforced competition works.
As soon as the Bush gov't got into office, its FCC removed the line sharing mandate that allowed competition in the broadband market. Inversely, at the same time, the European Commission forced member countries to implement such competition. In France for instance it allowed a small company, Illiad, to innovate. While we had disastrously low penetration for Internet connectivity before 2002, the numbers shot up after that. They also introduced VoIP, free international calls, TV over IP, and so on. Another company started offering free WiFi to all its subscribers through any of its subscribers' "boxes", a feature that is now available on all ADSL providers. Every ADSL modem doubles as a WiFi router, and broadcasts a distinct ESSID for the "free wifi" network. You connect to the hotspot, log in with a user id / password, and you are then connected on a different VLAN than the owner's so you don't see what's happening on their home network, thankfully.
It might be that the situation in the US is not as bad as it's cracked out to be, but there's no doubt that it didn't have the same level of innovation.
You've got 1Gb/s fiber and you still get the same lousy 5mb/s from every website just like the rest of the world. Congratulations on building out a fiber infrastructure at today's costs 10 years before you need it!
This is some bullshit to make people feel like our tax dollars aren't well spent on rural broadband projects and getting fast, internet access to everyone equally. The plain and simple truth is, Swedes can get 100mbit fiber for less than what I pay for 3mb or less DSL and a phone line. And even that took 15 years to get to me. Oh btw, Verizon, what did you do with those billions of dollars we gave you back in the 90's to lay fiber every where? Oh that's right. You shoved it up your ass and paid people like this to write articles about how the internet "isn't so bad" here.
Fine, just remove Montana, Oklahoma and South Dakota. Take New England; more densely populated than most of Europe, if not all of Europe, yet its broadband sucks, comparatively.
NA starts in Panama, and Canada has like no people 30 something million. This report does not work.
Unless you are downloading tons of porn, illegal software, etc....6meg down is enough for anyone :)
See for yourself: debt clock
Of course you have choices: dial-up, DSL, satellite, 3G, or moving. Each has pluses and minuses.
In Bad Kreuznacnh, Germany, in 2004, my apartment building didn't even allow dial-up. This was something I couldn't even imagine, but the stupid phone plug was not compatible with any of the modems I purchased at Dr. Best, and I later learned that the building code did not allow internet over the phone line.
When I left San Jose in 2002 there was only dial-up as an option in the two neighborhoods that I had lived in. AT&T had wired up much of the city, but the city council wasn't letting them conduct business.
RCN wired fiber up all over San Francisco, and how long was it before the city let them offer their services?
The problem in the U.S. isn't just the issue of the FCC's limiting competition, it's corrupt city councils and citizens too busy doing other things to care.
I once took an excursion to Reddit, and later HN. Unlimited up/down voting sucks when dealing with a hive-mind.
and you can just string wires between poles and no one seems to care.
Have you been to Bucharest? Seriously, wires EVERYWHERE!
How much traffic the net carries is irrelevant. All that matters to the end user is the speed that he gets all the time. The US has slow speed net service and that is obvious to all. I'm on fiber optic cable and even that is a bit slow in my area at this time. It has never been fast by world standards and is worse than usual in my area right now. How about 100 megabyte per second service like they get in some places in Europe?
Here in good old Australia we are held hostage to a legacy single infrastructure provider to the premise. This means artificially high ADSL, ADSL2 and ADSL2+ costs. Even if another provider builds a DSLAM in the exchange, the rental on the physical copper is a killer. Entry here (256Kbps/64Kbps with 2GB of bandwidth) is AU$30, on an often congested backhaul.
With the provider only now getting 100Mbps connections, with cable being upgraded to 30Mbps and for 200GB, counting up and down it is AU$179 a month.
Other providers are out there, but we are crippled by the last mile provider, who I might add has the worst call centre in a third world country, and books appointments between either 7am-12am or 12am-5pm blocks, and even then doesn't phone or turn up.
You really should be moded higher.
Anyway, how much bandwidth do you really need? Is it really a handicap if you cannot run a call/data centre from some remote mountain or desert retreat?
Is so true. I see all these people 'I get 40mbs, well I get 60, well I get 100'
Why?
Of the last 4 US cities I've lived in they've all had at least 10mbs which is enough to stream DVD quality live. So really the only thing I'm 'missing' out on living in the US is real time HDTV over the internet?
I think Slashdot needs to realize there are better ways to rank a country then the amount of gigabytes you can download per day.
The whole thing is rubbish. They only mention Canada's broadband penetration percentage when we already know it's higher than in the US and I agree with what you said about Akamai. There are still some aluminium phone lines running between me and the exchange and I still typically get 6+ megs of my 8 meg DSL connection. Sure some sites can be slower but, for instance, if a site gets slashdotted, that doesn't mean my connection is bad.
There are some interesting points to raise regarding the EU vs the US.. The first is very obvious and that the US is a very different market to what exists in the EU. Having worked previously for a large international tier 1 we found that a large percentage of internet traffic would stay in the EU. There are several reasons for that but the biggest being that most of the languages that people speak natively are not english based. Secondly many of the 'big bandwidth sites' have local EU CDN presence. Having also spent huge amounts of time in North America the internet there seems to be much more of a mixed bag. Some providers have excellent interconnections to others while there are others which apparently refuse to peer together making connectivity between them dreadfully slow.. now I know that problem is not just isolated to the US but it seemed very apparent when browsing there, much more so than my experience of using the internet in Germany, France, Spain, UK, Romania, Bulgaria, Italy, Austria... The classic statement of 'your isp is only as good as its slowest uplink'...
Why is there this dire need for the US to be the first, the best, at everything? Some people act as though if they US is dominant in every facet we are screwed. I just don't see that. I mean the US is dominant, is #1m in many areas that, by definition, means all other countries are not. Well I've been to those other countries and I've got to say, I liked what I saw. I go to Canada often, I've been to Europe and in both cases I'd have no problem living there. They may not be #1 at everything, or even at anything, but they are nice modern places to live. They've got all the comforts I've come to demand and expect in the US and so on. Life seems good there, despite not being "the best".
So I fail to see what the problem is if the US isn't the best, the top at something. I'm ok with that. All I care about is are we good enough (good enough varies depending on what we are talking about). In the case of Internet, I'd say ya we are. We may not be the best but who cares?
The US is a massive country. It has a low population density. Geometrically it is roughly rectangular, but the skinny part of the rectangle is very wide, leading to a large area compared to its perimeter. Politically, there is a great deal of internal division but the smaller divisions are relatively weak. This is a horrible combination for building infrastructure.
The size, low population density, and geometry of the country mean that everything is spread out. Even worse, everything is spread out in all directions. Attaining coverage of a significant fraction of the population is a massive project and it should come as no surprise that new infrastructure technologies are slow to be implemented in this situation.
Politically, the internal divisions mean that not everyone gets on board with big projects, but the weakness of the smaller divisions mean that while they have the power to be obstructionist when they disagree, those divisions that agree are generally unable to take the initiative and build the infrastructure themselves.
All of these problems have been clearly visible in every major infrastructure project in the history of the US. The US highway system was a massive and expensive project and many local governments were obstructionist. Cell phones took far longer to catch on in the US because poor geographic coverage meant that cell phones were unreliable for a longer time. etc. Every time the system needs a major overhaul due to new technology a whole new infrastructure needs to be built, and the same problems apply.
These problems also harm other infrastructure proposals that have worked well in other countries. For instance, rail works well in countries like Japan but (re)building the rail infrastructure in the US would be a massive undertaking.
If you look at countries that have excellent infrastructure, you'll notice that they have the opposite attributes. Japan is a great example. They are a small country with a very high population density. 10% of their population is even more densely packed into their capital city. Their nation has a very elongated shape. Even better, the center of the country is mountainous and nearly all of the population lives along their very long coastline, which means that when building infrastructure they can focus on that area. Although they are split into four islands, they are all close enough to be connected by bridges and tunnels. They have a very strong national government.
With all this taken into account, I find it highly unsurprising that the US is lagging in this area. The bottom line is that infrastructure will take longer to build and be more expensive to operate in the US than other countries because we have to build (and maintain) more of it to achieve the same effect.
Reason is there is no way you are actually getting a true, no BS, 1gbps to everywhere kind of line to your house. If you know about the sort of infrastructure involved in high speed Internet links, you know there is no way they can have the necessary bandwidth at higher levels to support that to a bunch of houses.
What they have is more or less a big LAN/WAN situation like what we've got at work. I've got 1gbps Ethernet to my desktop. So I guess I can claim I've got a 1gbps connection... But to do so is misleading. The switch in our area only has 1gbps back up to the floor switch. That floor switch (which has many other 1gbps connections) has 1gbps back to the core switch. That has 1gbps back to the distributions switches and so on. Then the total upstream for the campus I work on is about 700mbps. So while I have very fast Internet, I don't have 1gbps. I don't even have 700mbps because I'm sharing it with others.
This sort of situation seems common in the Scandinavian countries, as well as Japan and some other places. Well the advertised numbers are extremely misleading because of this sharing that is going on. Even best case, you don't get your advertised speed to anywhere off network, and average or worst case you get much less.
For example on Slashdot there was a guy from Japan talking about his 100mbit Internet and how great it was. Said he could download a CD in just under 10 minutes. Ok, great... But he hadn't done the math, that's what you'd get on a 10mbit connection. Someone else pointed this out, and I pointed out that I can download a CD in like 7 minutes. My line is advertised at a much slower speed, however my advertised speed is what I get to more or less everywhere.
Just being able to deliver a wire with a high physical signal rate to a house doesn't do much good. You need the routers and bandwidth at levels above it that can handle that. Gets real expensive real fast for big numbers.
That's something I've always liked to ask people when it comes to Internet coverages in somewhere like, say, Japan. They talk about what you get in Tokyo, how amazing the net service is in an apartment building. Gee, there's good service available where there's a lot of people in a city of a lot of people. Ok fine, how is it in Ikuno? That's a little town of about 5000 up in the mountains. How's the broadband up there?
Not every Australian lives in Mexico...
You never catch me alive
Meanwhile in Finland you can have broadband connection even if you live in a cave and cellphone works everywhere.
Was this study conducted by Rogers and Bell Canada? The two Monopoly's in Canada who provide internet?
Current Rogers Packages (costs per month)
$27.99 - 500 Kbps Download speed 256Kbps upload speed 2GB monthly Usage (Upload and download)
$35.99 - 3 Mbps Download speed 256Kbps upload speed 25GB monthly usage (upload and download)
$46.99 - 10 Mbps Download speed 512Kbps upload speed 60GB monthly usage (upload and download)
$59.99 - 10 Mbps Download speed 1Mbps upload speed 95GB monthly usage (upload and download)
$69.99 - 25 Mbps Download speed 1Mbps upload speed 125GB monthly usage (upload and download)
$99.99 - 50 Mbps Download speed 2Mbps upload speed 175GB monthly usage (upload and download)
Let me explain something to the un-initiated, those download speeds? are advertised as UP TO.
So if you sign up for the $69.99 package and can only get 17Mbps and you call support, you are
than told that is within the exceptable speed limit.
You tell me thats better than $29.99 for 100Mbps Fiber in Japan?
to the short sighted "fuck everything but the quarterly earnings report" attitude of many of our telecoms today.
I love how everyone likes to say, "ah, to heck with the earnings reports", and then are shocked to find that state budgets are strapped because their pension funds took a beating. I mean, you do know that by the far most ruthless shareholders are in fact the teachers and other state employees unions. Calpers comes to mind but other states are as supposedly greedy as they want to be. The reason is simple - hanging off of each of those dollars reported as shareholder's equity is potentially a dividend and that's money in the pockets of retirees.
The People paid the telecoms 200 billion [newnetworks.com] for nationwide 15Mbps broadband, only to have them stuff it in their pockets and give us the finger. For those that wish to look up the relevant bill for themselves, it was the 1996 telecommunications a
I skimmed the bill, and I do not see any provisions for the government giving carriers 200 billion dollars.
Hell there are good chunks of the country where you can't get diddly squat here in the USA! Where I live (Northern AR) the cableco and DSL haven't run so much as a single foot since the mid 90s.
Northern Arkansas? Like, the state still flies a flag derivative of the old Confederate flag, the economy has been in a shambles since, well, its never been good, and to top it off, you have a state the size of a European country but with only 2 million poor people, on a geography that looks like its all mountains and granite. Like, yeah, someone is going to go run fiber there and be profitable across an entire state, when they can do the same in a -city- and get way more out of it.
Enjoy the scenery, I guess.
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there's no such thing as a free market,
Capitalism only says that people are allowed to invest their own money in what they want, plain and simple. If you want to get rid of gov't intervention, sure, you can, and what would we have, well, we would have what we had in the 1800s, when, GDP soared dramatically, and a lot of people got really stinking rich, the standards of living improved dramatically and the USA leaped from behind Brazil to challenge the British for ocean hegemony, and unlike Germany were smart enough to back them down simply by guaranteeing their access to raw materials and markets.
America decides to allocate its resources to a few rich people to do with as they wish.
No, America lets people decide how to allocate the fruits of their own labors. It's not like, oh, I work or invest and make something, and suddenly some commissioner gets his hands on it.
The fact is, Americans don't care as much about broadband as they do about other stuff. That other stuff includes housing and automobile ownerships. Americans would rather spend their money on bigger and faster cars than Europeans, and tend to have much larger houses than Europeans and Japanese both. Indeed, I wouldn't live in Japan for a second - sure, you have a nice download speed, but the people are practically living in fricking shoeboxes and shacks. F--- that. I have 1500 square feet that I can rent on just about one week's pay, a screened in porch, a big oak tree in my yard, and on weekends, when it is nice out, I go outside and plant stuff - no bandwidth is required for that.
Quite frankly, the reason more Americans do not have bandwidth is that, they do not want it.
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The USA has states larger than European countries.
'Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.' - Mao Tse-tung
Oh yeah so fast here... Tell that to my "6Meg" DSL line that if I download anything from any source, FTP, HTTP, Torrent, Usenet, P2P through IM's any form of data I wish to download will bring my home network to such a snails pace that it will trash every other pc on the network and will not allow any forms of traffic to get through that is internet related (shares and printer work flawlessly though). Its so frustrating my ISP swears everything is working fine and they are not throttling anyone, but if I look at my dsl modem logs when I begin a download I get ATM congested warnings and then my connection tanks. Whats the best part is when I do download im lucky to top 300kbps, ever.... Where is my 6meg down? Why am I paying nearly 75 bucks a month for 2x ISDN speed? Why am I forced to upgrade my internal network to 1Gbps and N wireless when 54g and 100Mbps suited my needs just fine? And why after I buy new crap I still suffer from problems??? Curse you ISP blaming my working hardware, forcing me to buy new hardware, only to be left with the same results!!!
Whats even more frustrating is where I live there is only 1 ISP (Damn foothills!!!) But the town of which I am in the county of only has 2 ISP's ATT and Comcrap... NA major problem is lack of competition. ATT laid fiber down nearly 30 years ago! They dont care if it gets used or not, they wont drop a dime on it and why? Cause no one has many choices either you get one evil or the other and they both offer slow speeds or false high speeds and either way in the end you get over charged and you get an inferior product.
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who is going to grow your food?
I see where you're coming from; my mom is married to a farmer. But when I tried this argument before on Slashdot, other users told me that most food is grown on factory farms, whose economies of scale let them afford satellite or 3G Internet.
Oh stop spreading BS or prove it. The cost of not doing the bailout was probably a new great depression. You're an idiot.
My ISP is Teksavvy (Who're Great)
There is a reason why this particular contraction isn't usually employed. Think about it.
The money given to the banks so far would have bought every underwater mortgage in America. Someone did the math BEFORE the bailout, and posted it on seekingalpha.
The ROB ran a long, long article just a few days ago with some insight into Canadian broadband politics.
Who do you call to clean up a mess like BCE? A man called Cope
On one side of this issue, I've got a copy of Zittrain's "The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It". It's an excellent book. I've read big chunks of Benkler's "The Wealth of Networks" and I agree with most of it. I've watched the Edge Talk with Yochai Benkler.
On the other side of this issue, I've had broadband from Shaw Cable since June 2005. The Berkman report about the broadband situation in Canada is slanted, and this irritates me immensely, because I agree with their perspective *and* their agenda, but I can't stomach the way they have distorted their data to bring Canada into line with their desired conclusion.
I've had landline phone service from Telus during this time as well, which is why they've never earned my broadband loyalty. Telus definitely plays "blame the customer" as a form of cost control. Especially since Darren Entwistle gained control. Telco landlines in Canada are under very strict regulation about availability of service. On my service there was some floating voltage associated with rainfall (not good when you live fifty miles downwind from a rain forest) which kept triggering my phone to go off-hook when no-one was calling. People would ring, the moisture goddess would signal that my phone had already been answered, the caller would hear nothing, and not even be able to reach my voice message service. There was one wet spring month when my phone was going off hook every few hours. Many waste-of-life conversations with Telus support ensued where I was roundly assured the problem was on my end. Many tickets were closed, which I violently reopened. Meanwhile there was a Telus service truck parked on the street every other day a block away from my house having the most intense romantic affair with a sidewalk service opening. Coincidence? They finally found me a line pair above the water line, and my service has been fine ever since.
My father-in-law spent twenty years flying to oversea oil fields to supervise telephony infrastructure. We have passed some extremely pleasant evenings together discussing this Telus-presumption-of-customer-stupidity-until-they've-charged-you-a-big-fee. He had a problem with his service in Alberta, I forget the details, but it was a misconfiguration on the Telus side. He called them up and explained to them *the precise misconfiguration problem*. Telus of course did nothing for weeks or months, while blaming customer premise equipment. Finally, it did turn out to be their problem, exactly as originally described. Neither of us will ever get that chunk of our life back.
What we need here is a telephony ombudsman. When Telus says we'll charge you $200 if the problem is on your end, then you say "fine, I'll hire the ombudsman". I would easily pay $100 to the ombudsman to show up and adjudicate who really owns the fault. If I'm proved right, Telus owes me $1000. If Telus is proved right, they get my $200 (so I'm now out $300). The fee is higher for Telus, because they have the infrastructure and latitude to know better (should they choose to use it, which would entail some major culture shock).
Mr Entwistle, what's the point here? You waste the time of a lot of competent technical people, now we all hate your guts. Hey, that worked great for Bill, didn't it? No, none of us ever pipe up when the CRTC runs a public consultation. Is this your idea of job security? Scorch the earth so badly no one else *wants* your job? Do you carry "good will" on your balance sheet? How about "bad will", of which there is no shortage? With guerrilla marketing, scoring with the "in" crowd is supposedly a coup. So what
When you see somebody like a Germany plunging from 80+ million now to barely 50 million by 2100, every claim of European cultural superiority must be taken with a grain of salt. How much of a socially superior state can you really have, when birth rates are so low that the population is going to go puff into a demographic bomb over the next century as birth rates on that side of the pond continue to plummet. It baffles the mind that Europeans, for everything they do in terms of social services, have not figured out how to make babies. If Europeans have created the perfect state, why is it that no one ever there has kids? And, what kind of Europe is there going to be when 25% of it is radically Islamic? Viewed in that context, Europe right now is just tech host for someday having 100TB / sec calls to prayer some decades from now.
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Dude I'm in Japan right now. The speeds are tremendous to anyplace within Japan. We're talking true 100mbit/100mbit symmetrical here. Yes outside of Japan the speeds are slower and more like 5-10Mb/s, but that's often advertised to begin with. Besides it doesn't matter since the Japanese don't understand any language besides their own. They don't need to torrent games with people from America or watch Youtube from servers located in Europe.
Holy moly. $3000-$5000? Are you nuts? Do you even bother to fact-check before spouting nonsense? Verizon has reportedly stated that it costs them less than $1000 per home passed. And another $600/700 to install the wire. Jeez you're off.
as a work around they now offer a dual line setup to get though Bell, but it costs more money because of the need to split the packets to get around bell.
Having spent some time recently on the teksavvy/dslreports forums recently, I assume you're talking about multi-link PPPoE (ML-PPP). TSI charges $4 for the ML-PPP option, and in fact users on the forums will tell you that ML-PPP can be employed on a single TSI/Bell DSL line to avoid throttling--no need to get a costly second line to enjoy this benefit. I can't personally verify this claim, as I'm on single-line TSI/Telus account, and throttling has never been an issue for me. It's probably worth a try for somebody who's already using ML-PPP and wants to rid himself of the expense of a second line.
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
No bank in America has been "given" a dime. They have to pay it back. Unless they fail, that is a virtual certainty.
The allocations we have to worry about are when the government buys its way into operations that may never recover, like AIG, or will likely remain on life support for all eternity, like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. One has to be a little concerned about whether GM will make it in the long run as well.
I guess my question would be, how many additional hours a year would you be willing to work to pay for all of this statist stuff?
There's the US budget.
http://www.mightyware.com/federalbudget.bhs
Right now, the number of additional hours you have to work, just to balance it, is 127. So uh, how many?
I could care less and am generally opposed to
world trade. Currency conversion is a total fraud, particularly when converting asian currencies, because somebody is always gaming the system. This sort of free trade is just like socialism, nice idea on paper, but completely cannot work.
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So why don't we have fiber in every major metropolis in the US? Besides we gave away $200+ billion as part of the 1996 Telecom Act. We've subsidized far more per capita than any other country besides maybe South Korea.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Again, I ask the question, do you want to work 127 hours more this year or not, to balance the budget. How many more hours of your life, each year, are you willing to donate to the Feds? Just answer that question.
Your whole ridiculous diatribe did not answer the question.
Answer it.
I bet its going to be some b.s. about how you shouldn't have to work more hours to balance the budget because you are a victim of something... which basically translates into tyranny.
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Harvard thinks everyone that doesn't go to Harvard are idiots.
The idiots disagree.
The issue is, with federal spending, not so much the amount of money involved itself, because really, it could be worth anything because currencies these days are a joke. What is important is how much of your life do you want to live for yourself, or your government, and hence, hours worked. I went through the federal budget, line by line, and honestly, for the most part, there's really not a single line on it that is bad. But there we are, at the end, we need to work 127 hours more to pay for it. And you have to ask, is that fair? How many hours should a man have to give to the government, per year. That's what I'm asking, I'm asking you to choose, to prioritize, and, that's something the Democrats have never done either, just as much as you demonize Republicans.
Whether it be phone lines, electricity, and water all the way to the boonies, or research into "useless contraptionsJ" like vacuum tube computers that can do a massive 8 calculations per second, or transistors that are too large to have any useful applications, government involvement is indepensable to the growth of a modern, developed nation's economy.
Phone lines, electricity and water, all were done by the private sector.
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Loans at market rates to insolvent businesses ARE a gift. It's like giving someone who's bankrupt a loan at 5%.
Buying their toxic assets for 100 cents on the dollar is also a gift, when they won't even fetch 20 cents on the dollar on the open market.
In cash flow terms, none of the commercial banks were insolvent. If the market asset valuation is a temporary anomaly, and the the loans will cure that anomaly, they are an extremely good risk, especially compared to the wreckage which would ensue if most of the banks in the country fail, and of course have to be wound down by the FDIC and all the depositors made whole.
That is not to say that I am a big fan of fiat currency, and even less of fractional reserve banking. FRB only works when the government insures bank deposits. That insurance dramatically changes the calculus of the rationality of offering loans to banks during a financial crisis.
Only if you define "temporary" as 10 to 20 years ...
Housing values aren't coming back any quicker than they did in Japan after their bubble. There's something like 10 - 20 million vacant homes out there (not the less than 2 million "officially" vacant, which represents such a tiny fraction in comparison to the shadow market that it's pitiful).
If the stock market is any indication, people think that the commercial banks actually have net asset value. If not, well I guess we own all those underwater loans anyway. There is no way around it.
If we insure commercial bank deposits, we are responsible to make sure the banks follow rational lending policies because we are on the hook for all the deposits if they do not. If the banks were really insolvent, we were just bailing out ourselves.
Now of course there is a significant issue about pricing deposit insurance correctly, to cover for the risk of an incident such as this. If the FDIC itself requires a bailout then we know that insurance has been underpriced and needs to be raised in the future.
What really makes me angry though is the bailout of AIG, which should have been left to crater in the dust. The idea that we are going to bailout any organization that we do not explicitly insure (and charge insurance premiums to) is perverse.
No - there's a limit to how much is covered per account for deposit insurance. Also, not all types of bank accounts have insurance.
Deposit insurance could be reformed so that it is per person, not per account, to save more on premiums. That would provide more of an incentive for the people depositing their money to look at the real risk, instead of palming it off on the taxpayers.
I know about the limits. I just assume people with more than $100K in their deposit accounts are the exception that proves the rule. Per person would be a great idea.
Is that like the immutable law of Homo Oeconomicus that utterly failed to predict the result of certain money sharing experiments?
You are confusing pop-psychology with the hard science of economics. You can objectively prove that you exist (cognito ergo sum), that you desire your existence (or why do you bother feeding yourself?), and that your existence is subject to certain natural materialistic laws (you can't eat your cake and have it too). The simplest Natural Right to explain is the Right to Life - a society that fails to punish arbitrary murder cannot possibly evolve beyond the caveman era, much less build the level of civilization that your existence depends on. The same applies to the (negative) Rights to Liberty and Property as well.
I don't know whether to laugh at your blind faith in economics, or cry at your ignorance of reality.
I don't have "faith". I do have some level of scientific confidence that took me many years to establish, but my premises will always remain subject to perpetual challenge and review. I have a well-documented history of admitting my mistakes when proven wrong and changing my ideology accordingly, which is how I became an Anarcho-Capitalist. It is you who has blind faith in government, in spite of the hard historical and modern economic facts that contradict it!
After all, people like you vote for my representatives.
I don't vote, and I consider voting an act of aggression no different than hiring someone to commit theft and murder on your behalf.
Economics is just a completely arbitrary, man-made system of resource allocation.
To a socialist, maybe - just as sciences like geology and cosmology have no sway with a young earth creationist. But to a capitalist, on the other hand, reason is the basis of all knowledge!
Europe decides to allocate its resources to communications infrastructure, America decides to allocate its resources to a few rich people to do with as they wish.
Europe and America are not sentient organisms with a functional capacity to reason. They are abstractions for millions of human beings, each of whom has an autonomous capacity to think, act, and experience consequences of one's actions. A vague abstraction cannot own resources - those resources have been created (or homesteaded / brought into the human economy), sold, bought, transformed, etc by specific individual human beings!
In a rational (and therefore free) society, people own themselves and the consequences of their actions (aka "capital"). No one may "decide" how to allocate their minds, bodies, and fruits of their labor except them!
By the way, there's no such thing as a free market, capitalism can't exist without strong government intervention in damn near everything.
You couldn't be more wrong. The correlation between absence of government intervention and economic freedom is almost a truism, especially when you accurately define "government" as any institution that violates Natural Rights, no matter if it's a modern parliament or a Somali warlord.
The more government you have, the less freedom and less economic growth.