Poor US Infrastructure Threatens the Cloud

snydeq writes "Thanks to state-sponsored cable/phone duopolies, U.S. broadband stays slow and expensive — and will probably impede cloud adoption, writes Andrew C. Oliver. 'As a patriotic American, I find the current political atmosphere where telecom lobbyists set the agenda to be a nightmare. All over the world, high-end fiber is being deployed while powerful monopolies in the United States work to prevent it from coming here,' Oliver writes. 'I expect that cloud adoption will closely match broadband speed, cost, and availability curves. Those companies living in countries where the broadband monopoly is protected will adopt the cloud at a slower rate than those with competitive markets and municipal fiber. There's a good chance U.S. firms will fall into that group.'"

Comments

NSA aint helping either

[Anonymous Coward]

Lets not forget about the people that wont use a US based cloud service because of the NSA snooping.

Infrastructure pretty much requires the gov't

[rsilvergun]

you can't make enough money off it in the short term to make it a worth while investment. As in investor there's always something with better gains in your lifetime. That's why the gov't made the comm network, the railroads, the (car) roads, and just about everything going back to the fsckin' Aquaducts.

Re:Infrastructure pretty much requires the gov't

[mc6809e]

That's why the gov't made the comm network, the railroads, the (car) roads, and just about everything going back to the fsckin' Aquaducts.

The government paid for a lot of of those things, but that's not the same thing as making a lot of those things. And in that respect the government is simply acting as the agent for the collective purchase of something that (hopefully) provides a collective benefit.

That's sort of the point of democratic-republican (little 'd' and little 'r') government -- to do the collective will of the people. Sometimes that means buying stuff (and that's not socialism -- that's just normal government).

Re:Infrastructure pretty much requires the gov't

[NouberNou]

So much wrong in this its not even funny. Who provided the money? Government. Who provided the land. Government. Who provided the basic technologies. Government. Get your head out of Ayn Rand's rancid cunt and realize public/private partnerships are the best, because neither side can do everything on their own.

wow, mixed feelings

[phantomfive]

Slow broadband adoption? Baaaad
Slow cloud adoption (ie, not putting all your data at the mercy of someone else)? Good.

Size matters

[jklovanc]

All over the world ,in smaller high population density countries, high-end fiber is being deployed while powerful monopolies

FTFY. Comparing the US to countries like Japan is not valid.

Re:Size matters

[jrumney]

Japan population density: 330p/sqmi.

New Jersey: 1196p/sqmi. Rhode Island: 1018p/sqmi. Massachusetts: 839p/sqmi. Connecticut: 738p/sqmi. Maryland: 595p/sqmi. Delaware: 461p/sqmi. New York: 411p/sqmi. Florida: 351p/sqmi. US coastal counties population density: 440 p/sqmi.

But apparently those areas can't have high speed broadband because the population density of Wyoming and Alaska makes the cost prohibitive.

Re:Size matters

[jrumney]

Sorry, I made a mistake. Japan is 330p/sqkm, which places it at the same level as Massachusetts, not Florida. But still, there are definitely areas of the US that have the population density to support globally competitive infrastructure, and politicians and apologists need to stop using the vast empty space in the Midwest to build a population density excuse.

Is the basic premise even TRUE?

[Dahamma]

I have 50/10 Mbps for $70 and yes, it actually has been as advertised every time I have tested it for the last couple years. We routinely use two 9Mbps video streams with no issues and plenty of bandwidth left for browsing/downloading/whatever.

People in the US have routinely paid $100+ for cable/satellite TV for years. $8/month gets you Netflix or Hulu (or x2 for both) and there are a tons of VOD services now (VUDU, Amazon, CinemaNow, etc) to rent (or buy) movies/TV instead of using Showtime/HBO/Starz/etc.

The big problem is not necessarily US infrastructure (at least by expenditure) vs. other countries, it's the fact that the US has a lot less population density. In urban areas, there are almost always options and the performance/price is pretty decent. In rural areas it hasn't caught up because frankly it will cost a lot of $$ per customer. Yes, South Korea has great broadband, but that's because it's mostly VDSL, etc running to multi-unit high rises...

Re:Don't worry

[Capsaicin]

Here in Australia we just elected in a right wing government, they are intent on fucking up our Broadband network as well to protect entrenched interests such as Murdock [sic] and [sic] Foxtel, so you're not alone.

From the PoV of established media players, the threat of to-the-home-fibre, that the erstwhile Labor govt was implementing, as opposed to the fibre-to-the-node, copper-to-the-home system we will now be getting, is that it would further to erode traditional business models. The traditional producer-consumer relationship is already strained by the self-publication the web, via blogs and social media, has introduced. Reproducing this on a hardware level with a network of peers replacing a company servers - consumer clients model ramps this up to a whole new level.

The requirements of vested interests play well into the lack of scientific/technological awareness of Abbott and many of colleagues (excluding Turnbull obviously).

Why Use a Cloud?

[Phoenix666]

Yesterday I spent three hours trying to help a friend upload a mysql file to his Amazon cloud service. There was no such thing as a simple ftp. Trying to PuTTY into his setup was impossible too. Calling tech support, which he paid for, resulted in them sending us links to articles we had already found via google and which were not helpful. Everything was so cloaked in marketing speak that it was impossible to tease out how to do anything normal and straightforward. They couldn't even manage to say words like "VPN" or "ssh." Simply ridiculous. Who has the time to learn a whole new nomenclature for the same old tasks we've all been doing for decades, just to satisfy a bunch of marketing droids whose only interest is in being the least helpful they can possibly be, and sucking as much cash out of you as they possibly can. Jeeze, just set up your own server and VPN and you have your own "cloud." And it costs you nothing, and nobody gets in your way with a bunch of nonsense.