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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 ----
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?
right. and the average of my speed tests is less than 5% of the advertised 8mb connection I am supposed to be getting.
The summary is dumb. Mr "anonymous reader" is basically saying that North America's internet is better because it is saturated by having higher use with a lower cap.
I'll read the article, but only after posting in accordance with slashdot tradition.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
Well, at least it would be building up infrastructure that would provide long term benefits for decades to come. Sure beats buying people new cars and dishwashers.