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ITIF Senior Fellow Claims "America's Broadband Networks Lead the World"
McGruber writes "In an Op-Ed published in The NY Times, Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF.org) Senior Fellow Richard Bennett claims that 'America's broadband networks lead the world by many measures, and they are improving at a more rapid rate than networks in most developed countries.' Mr. Bennett also says, 'the most critical issue facing American broadband has nothing to do with the quality of our networks; it is our relatively low rates of subscribership.'"
Only possible because they had further to go in the first place.
There are nations with 50 mbps for pennies on the dollar to our cost in America, not to mention absolutely no throttling or data limits. Wake up Richard Bennett! There are far too many monopolies in Americas internet connections and THATS the problem, no competition means they can do whatever the hell they want!
"Mr. Bennett also says that'"the most critical issue facing American broadband has nothing to do with the quality of our networks; it is our relatively low rates of subscribership." .. which would not be a problem if the service was as cheaper and more reliable.
America's broadband networks led the world in one respect; this is where we got widespread broadband first. We lag in every other regard. Miles of shitty copper used for services it can't really handle is not a metric to brag about.
We get less for our money than almost anyone else, we have poorer penetration than almost anyone else... the former is because of corporate malfeasance, the latter is both because of that and because the USA is big. Nothing to be proud of either way.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
We're number 1! We're number 1!
I suppose Mr. Bennett just disregards the 32 countries that have recently developed faster more modern networks (http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries/). Make up some random metric, don't compare to all nations, disregard contradicting evidence, declare champion. Sounds like a good plan to me!
I was trying to share some music I created with a friend in South Korea. He has a 1 Gbit Internet connection. He couldn't connect to my IP in Canada at my house. Americans would never have this problem.
I'd rather have modest/slow speeds that connect to everything than blazing fast speeds which serve only approved government propoganda and vanilla pop culture.
Where?
I don't even have a library within 40 miles of where I live, let alone one with a $20,000 router in it.
I pay the same universal service fees as everyone else, and I don't get anywhere NEAR the access as 99% of the rest of the country.
My ISP is shit. SHIT. They WAY overcommit their crappy low-end ADSL lines (which constantly crash/go down), and have delayed any upgrade plans for YEARS. Then they have the unmitigated gall to go whining to the state legislature to block any attempts by our local municipality to seek out a better PAID-FOR solution for us.
No, the problem with broadband in 'Murrica is all the goddamned crooks in the government-backed monopolies who pocket all the money we are forced to give them, both voluntarily, and at gunpoint, and then give us sweet-motherfuck-all in return.
I couldn't be happier at this point if all the goddamned telcos died in a fire, painfully. I sure as hell wouldn't consider even pissing on them to put them out.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
The cost per MB maybe...
This opinion piece holds up Belgium as an example other European countries are trying to emulate, but Internet service there is incredibly expensive and has tiny monthly bandwidth caps, worse even than Australia. Almost any European country is doing better.
The opinion piece also omits France and the story of Iliad / free.fr, and UK, which every other thing I've read says are the best examples of good policy nurturing successful infrastructure investment and cheap, fast Internet.
The actual global story is that countries practicing "structural separation"---meaning the company that maintains the wires is not allowed to provide service over them---have really cheap and fast Internet. Iliad made so much money selling DSL and TV-over-DSL in a structurally-separated competition-fostering market that they started digging trenches and laying their own fiber (..which is, well, not structurally separated any more, but meh, at least it's there). Meanwhile after winning concessions that further destroyed the already broken DSL competition in the US on the basis it would "incent" them to invest in fiber, vz halted FiOS rollout in 2010 because they can squeeze more money out of people on vzw.
BTW, if you actually used the Internet at LTE speed, you'd use $240/hr of bandwidth. Pieces like this only quote the speed but ignore that the network doesn't actually enable any "broadband applications" like cloud disk or TV-over-IP.
US is a great example of policy derp. The pollies can't keep up with the jackmoves of these sophisticatedly-skeezy US companies.
The internet has become sentient and has taken the only sane course; it hawks crap PC cleanup tools. It sounds insane, but just think: How would you know? We all expect sentient AI to diagnose cancer and drive cars safely and run governments fairly and do all our work for us. Because that's what the run-of-the-mill sentient intelligence is like, right?
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I, too, find it very difficult to sell inferior products at a huge mark-up.
It sounds like all our country's Internet woes could be easily solved if ISPs just spent more money on marketing.
Yet another article proving that the only things the US really leads the world in is massively overrating their own country while maintaining total blind ignorance of anything outside it.
"they are improving at a more rapid rate than networks in most developed countries."
Analysis: Most developed countries already have better networks, thus less room to improve. The USA having backwater level networks, are able to improve to a much greater degree as the current "Can with String Attached" technology is much slower than your typical 2400 baud modem.
Joking of course, and exaggerating (is there anything else on Slashdot), but I always get a kick out of these PR type statements which are "technically" valid, but only because of careful wording. Also known as, statistics, is there anything you can't solve?
Another way to look at this, you just won the "Most Improved Player" on your little league baseball team, Congratulations! Your kid is fat and untalented, and we all felt sorry for them, have a trophy for participation... (I say this as someone with a closet full of them!)