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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.'"

3 of 376 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This is just a reminder. by the+eric+conspiracy · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Europe's GDP per capita is only about 70% of the US. Its citizens, on average have a significantly poorer standard of living.

    In addition, economic growth is significantly slower in Europe.

    And of course with socialism the money that you make is spent according to how the government decides, not how you decide.

    That's why Americans don't want to live that way.

  2. Re:This is just a reminder. by coaxial · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    Nice try. Not only did you manage to bring in brown people for no reason, but you brought up the same damn canard that the providers always do. You don't have to wire up the the land. You have to wire up the people.

    Go back to glen beck.

  3. Are Europeans spending too much on bandwidth? by tjstork · · Score: 0, Flamebait

    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.

    --
    This is my sig.