Slashdot Mirror
WSJ's Mossberg Calls For a Tougher Broadband Plan
GovTechGuy writes "Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg thinks the FCC's national broadband plan is long overdue, but he criticized it for being vague on the details and too focused on expanding access into rural areas. Mossberg pointed out that what passes for broadband in the US wouldn't even qualify as such in many other developed countries. He also noted that Americans pay more per unit of broadband speed than our competitors. He called on the government to devote time and resources to making sure Americans have the broadband access they need to stay competitive in the 21st century global economy."
1000 kbit/s is 40 times faster than what some rural residents currently have (28k or 33k analog). And it would be extremely easy to implement - just use the already-existing phone lines that lead in 99.9% of homes. All that's needed is to install the DSLAM and it's done. The entire US could be finished by 1/1/2012.
I've spoken to two people, who formerly had 26k and 33k respectively, and they love the new DSL. They jumped from those slow speed to 1500 and 3000 kbit/s respectively.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
>>>we should be leading in broadband speeds, not following.
We're not leading but we're not exactly falling behind either, when compared to other continent-spanning federations. #2 isn't a bad place to be:
Russian Federation 8.3 Mbit/s
U.S. 7.0
E.U. 6.6
Canada 5.7
Australia 5.1
China 3.0
Brazil 2.1
Mexico 1.1 Mbit/s
And if you prefer to look on a state-by-state basis of the EU, US, and Canada then you get:
1 Sweden 13 Mbit/s
2 Delaware, Romania,Netherlands,Bulgaria 12
3 Washington,Rhode Island 11
4 Massachusetts 10
5 New Jersey,Virginia,New Hampshire,New York 9
6 British Columbia,Colorado,Connecticut,Arizona, Slovakia 8 Mbit/s
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Not sure where you'd have to live in Washington to get 11 megabits - when I lived in Seattle (Queen Anne) the only two providers were Comcast and Qwest - and with Qwest it was DSL 3 megabits (and a slow DSL at that - I never saw that kind of performance).
Now that I live in Oregon - 3 megabits is par for the course unless you want to spent a lot more money :( - and again - it rarely ever goes that fast.
However when my parents were living in Scotland (South Gyle Wynd to be specfic) they got 30 megabits/cable tv/phone for about 100 dollars a month - and it was very fast.
Yeah everywhere I've been to visit and stay with friends (mostly Europe) they have it much much better and are paying far less for more service.
I think the ROI in rural areas is going to be pretty slim, and won't help the cause much. Places like Korea and Japan have a much higher overall population density, so when fiber gets laid there it ends up being used by more people, helping their numbers compete against our rural and suburban areas where population density is low. I think the geography of the USA is set up to fall behind in this regard.
I've been looking at internet rates because I'm planning to move very soon. Where I'm moving (Irvine, CA) there is only ONE internet provider (Cox).
It's $32/mo. for 3 mbps, $47 for 12.5 (10 with a 2.5 boost) or $62 for 25 (20 with a 5 boost)
Compare that to France's 28 mbps for ~$38 US, 50 mpbs for ~$65 or even 2.5 down/1.2 up gbps in Paris for ~$90
or how about Germany: 6 mbps for ~$26 or 32 mbps for ~$38.
Why are we paying nearly double the cost as other countries? Irvine is in Orange Country ("The OC") and is less than an hour from Los Angeles, so there shouldn't be any complaints that it is too rural for fast, affordable internet.
He called on the government to devote time and resources to making sure Americans have the broadband access they need to stay competitive in the 21st century global economy.
That's true, but many (possibly all?) of those countries subsidize their ISP through tax dollars to get lower rates - so you're still paying for it, it's just that the monthly bill the ISP sends you is lower but the amount the government takes out of your paycheck is higher.
Has anyone ever done a study of the real cost of internet in countries where it's partially funded by taxes? Then you'd have more accurate numbers for a comparison.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." ~Thomas Jefferson
but the United States is predominantly urban and suburban these days, and we should be leading in broadband speeds, not following.
Not really, and a few extra megabits don't make a huge difference. The entire point of having a national broadband system would be to make sure that the areas in the middle of nowhere get fast access because some don't think that the private enterprise can do it (which I disagree, which is a subject of an entirely different post why nationalized anything will harm economic development and jeopardize liberties...).
No one can efficiently run an internet-based company on dial-up (in 2010 anyways...). This ends up crippling economic development for that area. And in a lot of areas that can't get broadband, you either have spotty or no cell-phone coverage meaning that 3/4G Modems aren't an option.
When you are going from 54KB/sec to 1 Mbit/sec that is a huge leap forward. Going from 7 Mbit/sec to 14 Mbit/sec isn't too much of a real increase in noticeable speeds. There are few applications that need top-of-the-line internet access, on the other hand there are many applications where having latency-encumbered and capped satellite internet or slow dial-up is going to be a huge problem.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
This list seems like cherry-picking. How do you define a "continent-spanning federation"? Not to mention, the United States is a much more coherent entity than the EU. Breaking out the individual US states in the second list is somewhat reasonable since there's obviously a good bit of regional variation, but you're leaving Asia out of the comparison there.
I wasn't trying to say (above) that US speeds suck, but for a nation that I thought prided itself on technical leadership, it should strive to do better.
It's an AVERAGE people.
It's a gimmick. Like saying Las Vegas slot machines are advertised to pay out 98% of what they take in.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
The term "member state" when used in the context of the EU refers to so-called "nation states" as opposed to US states. There are serious cultural differences between the different nations that make up the EU, not to mention that most countries have their own language and a long history of fighting with each other (not like US states who, with a few notable exceptions, have a history of pissing contests over random border lakes and the like).
Yes, there are forces in the EU who want to turn it into a country like the US but it's going kind of slow since even among politicians this is opposed by a lot of people.
Also, the population density of Delaware (top US state in that list) is 170.87/km^2, the population density of Sweden is on average 20.6/km^2 (the region I live in has a population density of 2.2/km^2). Sure, a large number of swedes live in the south but I personally live in the northern half of the country, I have a beautiful view of the mountains and a lake from my living room window and I have a 100/100 Mbps FTTH connection. The vast majority of swedes have access to faster connections than 13 Mbps, it's just that the "average joe" of the older generation generally goes with a dirt-cheap low-speed connection in the 1-8 Mbps range.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
Where are you getting these numbers? Where is Japan and Korea on this chart? Because they always top the other charts
Anyway, average total bandwidth is wrong metric to be using. What you want is average home bandwidth available, and average home bandwidth per dollar, or some other way of measuring how evenly distributed the bandwidth is among the population. Average is astupid because it makes no distinction between the apartment complex in Seoul, and the bums sleeping in Akamai's dumpster, since both groups have an average bandwidth of 45 Mb/s. So what if in one case it's 10 people each with 45 Mb/s and in the other it's 1 person with 450 Mb/s and 9 people with 0 Mb/s?
It's transparent that average bandwidth is being used to whitewash over the inefficiencies in the American market when every other study places the oh about 33rd in the world, and all the ads are touting "super fast" 3 Mb/s links that rarely reach 2.5 Mb/s in practice.
It certainly appears that the free market has failed America once again. (And no one even start with rant that problem is too much regulation, when "socialist" Scandinavia kicks your ass, it ain't that.)
See Lawrence Lessig on why we failed in broadband compared to other highly developed nations:
http://lessig.blip.tv/file/3485790/
It's not that we over or under-regulated, it's that we got the regulation wrong.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
The devil is in the details. The US numbers aren't for guaranteed speed, but for maximum speed, and only for download at that.
No, a 0-10 Mbps down / 0-768 kbps up line is NOT comparable to a 10 Mbps up+down line. But according to your above creative "statistics", it's the same.
Guaranteed speed is what you need to satisfy the "broadband" or "high speed" definitions in many countries; video streaming, for example, doesn't work too well unless you can guarantee a bit-rate. Which you can't with typical ADSL and cable lines.
The arguments for why the US can't provide the same speeds for the same price as European countries have been retold so many times that many Americans believe them. No, it's not because the US has such a low population density, or rural areas are so hard to reach. The Scandinavian countries have a by far lower population density, and more difficult terrain (only 2% of Norway is arable land, for example. Mountains and fjords don't make cable stretching easy, but they manage.)
The real reason is that here in the US, we are allergic to government regulations, and (incorrectly) believe that corporations do a better job. So we allow de-facto monopolies and duopolies to choose their own price and level of service, and the consumer has to take it or leave it. This is called freedom of choice.
In contrast, in socialist Norway, the typical customer can choose between several broadband providers, and owns the last few metres themselves. A cable or phone company can't claim that they own the wires and refuse others to use them. So you get real competition, higher service levels, and lower prices.
And I haven't read that any phone or cable providers over there have gone bankrupt over that either. Which means that ours are lying. Which shouldn't come as a big surprise.
It's time that we demanded something back for the $2 billion or so that was paid to the telcos at the end of the Clinton administration era, which supposedly should go to ensure broadband access to every American.
Instead, they fattened the wallets of stock holders and board members, cause there is no incentive for the telcos to increase their service as long as they don't have to compete.
Ditto the US Constitution. Read it sometime. Carefully. It gives the nation-states of the US the power to completely abolish the US, and go off on their separate routes. You are trying to make a difference where none exists.
That would be false. Read up on the Civil War. All the Southern states wanted was to secede from the Union. Only Texas has that 'right' due to the peculiar way it joined the US.
The US and EU are more alike than different. Consider that 75% of laws are now passed, not by state parliaments, but by the central EU. We have a near-identical arrangement in the US.
All laws in Europe are written and passed by state parliaments. Some parts of some of the laws are written to satisfy the recommendations of the EU (issued as EU Directives), however there is a huge degree of variance between the laws that is allowed in the directives and sometimes the laws are written outside the specification of the directive and then the country and EU negotiate - EU could fine the country some amount of money or just forget the infraction if the country offers something else in return.
So before you go off and compare US and EU, better learn something about both.
No, it's not. It's an average of the maximum speed. It's as misleading as saying that the average American car speed is 150 mph.
To make it worse, that's only download speed. I hate to tell you, but if you have an asymmetric line like most Americans, the upload speed will only be a fraction of that.
That depends on your definition.
FreePress defines it as 5 Mbps downstream AND upstream, and it definitely doesn't qualify for that.
In Britain, I believe the government has pledged a guaranteed minimum rate of 2 Mbps within a few years. Yes, that's not the maximum rate but the minimum rate, which in most of the US is exactly zero.
AT&T called me the other day, wanting to know whether I would be interested in high speed Internet. I told them that yes, I would, but that they don't have high speed Internet to offer me where I live. 0-1500 kbps down and 0-512 kbps up isn't high speed. It's a shame that companies are allowed to commit fraud like this, and mislead their customers into thinking they get high speed. What they get is "High Speed Internet(TM)", which is a trademark and not a promise of Internet access that's actually high speed.
High speed compared to POTS? No, not really. Even ISDN BRI has a minimum speed that's much higher, to say nothing of PRI. And this is 2010 -- I had stopped using modems in the mid 90s. Comparing with 56k modems is as irrelevant as selling a car on the argument that it's up to 50 times faster than a horse and buggy.
Not really. The poorest US states have per capita GDP 2-3 times that of most new EU members For example, Mississippi(the poorest Us state): $30K. Slovakia $15K, Poland $12K, Romania $7K.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
Our civil war was a "might makes right" war, plenty of legal opposition to it, just the stronger armed force won. There's little to show it was legal to keep those states in who wished to leave. But, water over the dam, past history now.
With that said, the US states as a whole CAN convene a constitutional convention, completely independent of the federal government wishes, I mean they can just demand it happen and it will, one way or the other, and if they choose to, with the required super majority, completely abolish the current union, heavily modify it, make a new union or go their separate ways..whatever they want. An open constitutional convention is just that, open. All legal under our laws. Not done yet ever, but it is a possibility that it might happen should our economy really tank much worse than it has so far (and I think it will due to debt loads in the near future) and the social construct get too contentious and out of whack (anyone would have to be living in a cave to not see this happening now). I am in favor of it, an open convention leading to dissolution then rearrangement under regional lines, because I think our current federal government is just way too broken and corrupt to "fix", similar to how the USSR dissolved quickly when they went bankrupt along with a lot of the member nations just not wishing to be in that organization any longer. It was just too big, got to be too much to keep together, too much broken, too much corruption, just too much epic fail, so it dissolved.
All our states in the US-"United States"-started out as separate nations, and could return to that, or form new regional alliances, or whatever. In addition, this is one form of our law that neither requires the approval signature of, nor can be vetoed by, any federal executive branch clerk in chief.
Along with those huge wealth skimming casino banks, "too big to fail" should also mean "too big to exist" and apply it to large political organizations. The bigger they get, the farther they get from the "we the people" folks and it gets too easy for them to get hijacked by multinational big money interests or other assorted bad influences (like today). Now that's my *opinion*, but I think today's political realities and headlines are showing that sometimes, bigger is just not necessarily better all the time. Ultra small, maybe not a good idea either, but huge lumbering out of touch corrupt and incompetent..we should think twice and thrice about that "size" government as well.
Odds are this is just another giant telco scam to steal more money from
the American ppl like they did in the $200 Billion Broadband scandal.
http://www.tispa.org/node/14
The telco's took the money and screwed it off and used it to pay
stock dividends.
When you count the hideous rural connect speeds that have to go
thru analog loops giving them a max connection speed of 26.4 kbps
then we rank as 16th in the world.
It is pathetic, and if they had spent HALF of the $200 billion on upgrading
the network it would be fine.
When you look at present dark fiber in the ground it is over 90% dark in some areas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fibre#Dark_fibre_overcapacity
As I have said on other forums, we have an idiocy problem, not a money problem.
The pirates are looking to plunder our wallets again in their real life game of monopoly.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
That could have been true if the assumption that only those living in clustered areas have high speed internet access in those countries. But that's not the case. Regulation ensures that the rest have access too, as far as practically possible (yes, there are cases of people living alone on an island who have to make do without for now, but those cases are few and far between).
And I say "could" instead of would because another premise is wrong too: That "not much distance between clusters to be bridged" is (a) correct, and (b) relevant.
First of all, it's dead wrong. One example: The City of Tromsø. For one thing, this city is far away from everything else (look at a Google map), but even inside its boundaries there are vast distances and difficult terrain. Yet this is one of the more technologically advanced cities in the world.
Secondly, the distance between clusters is irrelevant due to the variation in terrain. It costs a hell of a lot more to wire two communities divided by fjords or vertical mountains of gneiss than two communities separated by corn fields.
So tell me this, o Oracle: How come a farmer in Ohio who lives a 40 minute drive from the nearest city doesn't have access to the same level of Internet access as a farmer in Scandinavia who lives a 4 hour drive from the nearest city (and, for that matter, why can he enjoy 3G access throughout the drive)?
My guess is that it's due to legislation that prevents the type of anti-competitive behavior which is S.O.P. here in the US.
1: An internet provider in Scandinavia isn't given access to Big Lucrative City unless he also provides the same services for the same price to Small Rural Community. Take it or leave it (and by the looks, there's a lot of "take it").
2: For the last mile, whoever owns it must be a separate business entity, and has to rent it out for the same price to everyone, including parent, sibling and daughter companies.
3: The last few yards are owned by the premise owner, not by the service provider. They can't refuse your connecting to a different provider on "their" lines. You don't get situations like when AT&T pulled out the existing copper when installing u-verse to prevent competition.
4: The governments actually run backbones, where everybody is allowed access. You don't have to have a billion dollar company behind you, or risk being squeezed by the big players.