Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
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?
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?
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?
It's not just size and population density.
For example, consider a large North American city like New York. Very high population density, very wealthy, lots of demand. By your logic, broadband there should be cheap and fast, but it isn't (or not at Scandinavian levels anyway).
(don't worry about moral superiority, this debate is really just frustration almost everywhere that we can't get the astonishing service they have in Sweden, argh)
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.
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.
Right, because of all the things ailing this country we need to tackle internet speeds. Nice waste of my tax dollars.
I've had the same problem with ADSL in Vancouver. My ISP is Teksavvy (Who're Great) but they resell Telus (Who suck). For three years now I've been unhappy with my 3/1 line. It started out I was able to get 2.5 / 384. But the SN ratio sucked. I complained, Telus tweeked the profile. I kept having my ADSL drop, I complained, Telus blamed my modem. I got a new modem. I kept getting dropped, I complained, Telus blamed that my wiring was wrong. I replaced the wiring from the demark, replaced it with Cat-4 cable, put the filter right at the DMark, filtered the entire house, no improvement. I complained Telus said their was DC on my line. I switched modems back to the original, no improvement. I got myself a new outdoor filter, no improvement. I complained, they said it'd cost $200 an hour for them to send a tech to look at it. My ADSL got worse, went down to 1.5/256 (Which was not good true, all the speed tests I could find were saying 900 down and maybe 105 up). Started the process of switching to Cable, got that in and started to switch my services across, (But it has no static IP address, want it for at least DNS). ADSL completely died, I complained, Telus said their was no problem on their end, must be my end, closed the ticket. Called back on a Monday, hit the roof, told Teksavvy to yell at Telus, they did. Found that the connection on the outside of the remote box was corroded, and fell apart and was in several pieces on the ground. ADSL is now at 3/1, very good SN. But it took three years of Telus saying everything was good on their end, it must be my end, and for the ADSL to completely fail before they would even look at their end and fix the problem. I'm keeping both cable and adsl active, since occasionally one or the other will go down (At least once a week right now, mostly is the cable, but its 5x faster then the ADSL)
With my experience with Canada ADSL I'll have to say if this study is correct then the rest of the world must be terrible, no better then a 300 baud modem to AOL. But I just don't see the complaints coming out of Europe and Asia. Also I use to work for a telecom that produced IPDSLAMS (Not where I worked but another division) and they were telling everyone how they were happy to be rolling out 58 mbps ADSL to Japan, that was 6-7 years ago. I have 3 mbps ADSL now and 15 mbps cable (When everyone is asleep and hopefully my house is the only place with power). There's no way that North America is better then the rest of the world.
Software Engineer & Writer of Military Science Fiction and Fantasy Blog: petermwright.com Twitter: WrightPeterM
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 because the raw amount of nearly totally empty area we have in the US is staggering. You guys have a little bit of Montana......we have Nebraska, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon, Nevada, Kansas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, North and South Dakota, Iowa.......and we have more than just that.
Would you like to avail the Comcast?
Back when I had Comcastaway a year or so ago, their tech support was largely Indian. It was definitely a crapshoot ("To not be getting angry with me, sir! I am but trying to help you!" but if you called back a few times you'd eventually get someone with a half a clue. Now, at one point I was paying an extra couple bucks a month for a second IP (I didn't want to run my VoIP box through my main router.) Then I upgraded my service to the next tier, and all of a sudden my phones stopped working. I reset everything, and then the phones worked fine but nothing else did. Turned out they'd dropped provisioning for my second IP. So I call up about it, and was told that I needed a service call. It went kinda like this:
"No, I don't," I told her, "It's a provisioning problem."
"Well, I wouldn't know about that. We'll need to send a tech to make sure your equipment is working."
"No, it's working fine. Tell you what, send me over to provisioning."
"Oh, we're not allowed to do that. I can't call them either."
At that point I gave up.
"Whatever. Send the tech."
So a pair of Comcast technicians shows up, and asked me what the problem was. They were pretty sharp, I have to admit: the Internet boys were generally good, it was the Comcast Digital Voice techs that really needed some more training, but that's another story. Anyway, I explained the problem, and the lead tech blinked and asked, "Why did you ask for a service call? That's a provisioning issue." Duh.
So he calls up provisioning and this African-American woman answered and just wouldn't shut up for two seconds after he explained the problem, I was amazed that she found time to breathe. "He can just avoid the problem by simply plugging his VoIP box directly into his router. That would save him the monthly charges {blah blah blah, and furthermore, more blah} does the customer know that he doesn't need a second IP?". The guy looks around my shop and said, "Yes. I think he does. In any event HE JUST WANTS WHAT HE'S PAYING FOR." So the lady says, "Okay, all fixed." We restarted everything, it appeared to work, they left, and an hour later my second IP disappeared again. Argh. Still, all in all they did provide a reasonable service (a little expensive, but it was fast and fairly reliable) but they lost me when they started screwing around with torrents. Hands off my goddamn pipe, Mr. Robertson.
Now I'm on AT&T U-Verse, and so far I've been happy. I have some interference issues that I discovered are due to noise on my power line, of all things (yeah, now I'm in power company Hell, but I can't blame AT&T for that.) I'm on the 18 mbit/sec tier, am getting 22 and I'm getting 2 mbit/sec upload. No complaints with AT&T so far. Ultimately, it just depends upon where you are. I'm in a broadband-competitive area, so they have to work for it. I feel sorry for people I know that only get Internet access from a single outfit: unless it's a fairly small, well-run operation they usually get crappy service. If it's a Comcast or a Verizon, and they don't have to compete for your dollars, they usually don't bother.
Not hard to figure out why AT&T was so heavily regulated back when its Ma Bell days. I'm spite of what our laissez faire friends would have us believe, sometimes you do need regulation.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Its citizens, on average have a significantly poorer standard of living.
Except when they get sick or have their kid sick, or run into any number of exceptional circumstances for which insurances are just prohibitive
If you are sure to be on the winner side all your life, any form of socialism sucks.
There is more chance that your kid will be crippled by the time he is 30 than on the cover of Fortune mag.
You also have significant advantages, that we do not. As for comparing the whole of the USA to a single European country, yes, that's stupid. But you can do it on a state to state basis. For example California and Sweden aren't entirely different when you look at size and geography, but California has much larger metro areas (and 5 times as many citizens).
The advantage the US companies have, is they have a massive market to aim at.
* You don't need to set up a new company for every single state you wish to work in. You do in Europe.
* You can start in one state and expand without having to set up another call centre - unless you start in the UK and expand to Ireland you are going to expand into another language area.
* You don't need to have a large team of professional translators on staff, just to work in more than four markets.
* You aren't going to run into language problems across your offices in different states.
** Even setting up shop in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, you are going to have language problems, even though those three language are very similar - you are very likely to end up with English as the lingua franca in any kind of inter-office communication, and even then you'll have people who are rubbish at English leading to very bad communication. Granted, the US has its share of Americans who are rubish at English.