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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?
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?
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)
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.
Also, when you have free time in California you can enjoy the sun, hit the beach, surf the ocean, or whatever else it is that young, happy people do outside. But what are you going to do when you're stuck inside during the long, cold Scandinavian winter? Before the Internet, Scandinavian kids used to get so bored, and thus angry, that they would do crazy stuff like this. Now fast Internet access makes life bearable in the inhospitable north. Of course everyone wants it.
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.
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.
No, what I want to know is why the center of Silicon Valley seems to have the same quality of service as Carson City, Scaguay. If we extend this argument to similar surfaces, I'd expect densely populated areas in the US to have a similar internet infrastructure as densely populated areas in Europe. As far as I can tell, that's not the case.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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.