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Ask Slashdot: When and How Did Europe Leapfrog the US For Internet Access?
New submitter rsanford, apropos of today's FCC announcement about what is officially consided "broadband" speed by that agency, asks In the early and middle 90's I recall spending countless hours on IRC 'Trout-slapping' people in #hottub and engaging in channel wars. The people from Europe were always complaining about how slow their internet was and there was no choice. This was odd to me, who at the time had 3 local ISPs to choose from, all offering the fastest modem connections at the time, while living in rural America 60 miles away from the nearest city with 1,000 or more people. Was that the reality back then? If so, what changed, and when?
EU wide publically funded projects to bring high speed broadband across Europe?
We had plenty of choices for dial-up too, what we lacked particularly in the UK was free local calls, that made modem calls expensive compared to the US. Since then everything has been going our way.
Jason.
2002. They saw what we preached and acted on it. They did it with fiber because of the nature of their governments rather than the utilities.
10-100Mb wasn't uncommon in Sweden then in the cities, although rural may have taken longer.
a while ago
how? simple. its much easier to get things done for your country when it is the size of our smaller states
Its also easier to get things done when you tax your people as high as you do in the EU vs the lower taxes in the US. add in things like different priorities, and corruption. and it starts to make sense. Doesnt make it right or good, but it makes sense
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
In the early Noughties Europe got serious about building-out their telecom to replace the aging post-war system they'd been babying for many years. It also fit well with increasing European Union integration. It also seems to have coincided with the rise of the ubiquitous cell phone, since cell towers require a certain amount of backboke and resilience, and once the fiber goes in for the tower, there's no reason to not use the remaining strands for other networks. Dark fiber is unprofitable fiber.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
We got internet access from the government who at that time was owning most of the phone and cable companies.
We gotz da Super Blow!!!!1111!!!!!
HERP!
I figure that's enough to keep people from worrying about anything else... why not this too?
When the USA became a third world country, some time towards the end of the '90s.
But fear not! The best (i.e. fastest and most reliable) internet connections can still be had in many countries that have had their infrastructure bombed by Uncle Sam in the last 70-odd years...
You see, the internet is all about the cloud these days. Most parts of Europe are cloudier than the U.S., ergo, they get better internet access.
Yes, because the Europeans have that pesky NSA looking over their citizens' shoulders at all times...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Europe has always had better stuff than the US.
PAL instead of NTSC tv, because they got it after, and it was able to be improved.
America got internet when Algore invented it, and Europe got it after, when better equipment and infrastructure was available.
No surprise about that.
.
in the US ATT and Comcast pay off the GOV to keep others out and even to keep local towns from running there own networks.
Every time Republicans take control of Congress.
South Korea has been light years ahead of the U.S. for over a DECADE now. Those guys get some mad crazy speeds on the cheap (mostly used to play Lineage, I gather).
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
After that, things started tanking and telcos took their government hand-outs from the 90s and paid their CEOs' bonuses - and a few of them walked away with billions personally.
In some cases there was outright fraud.
It's kind of like living in a Third World country where the billionaire class rigs the system for their benefit, bitches about government interference (all the while lobbying for it to boost their profits) and John .Q. Public falling for the BS and thinking that one day, if he works hard enough, he'll be one of those billionaires with a private jet.
Or let's put it this way: we have a corrupt economic system in the States and no one wants to change because they have been brainwashed into thinking we have free market capitalism and anything other than our crony capitalistic system is Communism.
Yes, most Americans are that stupid.
Then why don't we have fiber in all our cities? And your use of "economies of scale" is literally the opposite of what it actually means. The larger the entity the greater the economies of scale. While we spend $1 trillion+/year on our military, it would take $200 billion to cover the country in fiber. Or $20 billion/year over 10 years- probably less as subscriber revenue would pay for it as the network expanded. That's pocket change for our government.
If I were going to guess, I would assume the reason the US has lower speeds in most areas compared to Europe, is probably about competition.
I work for a large telecoms company in the UK, so this is what I can see is happening here:
The incumbent telephone provider, BT Openreach, is forced, by regulator policy, to offer access to their network for a fixed cost to the other telecoms resellers, including the other company within BT, BT Retail. On top of this, BT Openreach covers almost all of the UK, so resellers can also offer services all over the UK too, with not much investment needed.
If I contrast this to what I see in the US: A few cable and telephone providers serve only specific areas, with hardly any competition. No incentive to improve service or reduce cost to consumer, plus regulators seem too scared to act. Also, corporate corruption in the form of lobbying means that people who work in government are just as inclined to help maintain the status quo.
Europe: Lots of competition and regulation
US: Lack of competition, basically no regulation
I don't have a lot of facts to cite that I can back this up with, but my general sense is that Europe (and a fair bit of Asia too) have the belief that it's worthwhile to have the government invest in infrastructure. They spend money to improve roads, bridges, railways, airports, telecommunications, electrical generation, and whatever else. In the US, we assume that infrastructure will take care of itself, somehow, mysteriously.
For a lot of stuff, we just get angry if the government spends money to build/repair a bridge. Railways are considered a massive boondoggle. The Internet is considered an entertainment service. To the extent that we consider the Internet "telecommunications infrastructure", we've decided to improve it by giving massive amounts of money to private monopolies, while not having any actual requirements on those companies to actually build anything with that money. There's a belief, somehow, that Verizon is a good and virtuous company that would love to provide fast internet, if only it could afford to do so, so we just keep giving them money and exclusive deals, and they keep refusing to actually roll out fiber.
Meanwhile, European countries just rolled out fiber. No outrage from the Tea Party to deal with, no big payouts to Verizon to stifle the project. They were able to do it because they simply had the government pay for it.
the economies of scale due to the US population density distribution and having to lay new mediums to connect made it not economical.
This is just total ignorant BS. I have pointed out before that Tokyo has a way smaller population density that NYC, yet Tokyo shits all over NYC for access speed. The market in NYC has a need that is not being fulfilled and lack of population density is not the reason why.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
A few others have pointed out that the EU has publicly funded broadband roll out and access which is totally true, but ultimately it comes down to who is willing to continually invest in new technologies. If you look at current Fibre to the Home (FTTH) availability, Asian markets like South Korea dominate. Talking to some contacts who work in a big ISP here in the UK, FTTH roll out still seems pretty far in the future - government funded technology roll outs (and government owned telecoms) will always be able to get things done quicker as they have the funds available and aren't so much a business.
Europe, especially Northwestern Europe, has a lot more infrastructure like cable that could be turned into broadband access. I recall a large drive to put fibre in the ground, providing the backbone infrastructure for ADSL and cable, in the early noughties. I gather this right of way thing, as well as competition in general, is habitually subverted in the US by the incumbent large operators. Though liberty global owning quite a lot of infrastructure these days, having bought out just about everyone else in the cable business in a number of countries, means the days of stagnation and expensive bad service might well be back again.
Disclaimer: I'm Canadian but have lived in a border town most of my life and watched and followed mostly US media.
Unfortunately the sad truth in the last 20 years is the US is no longer at the forefront of anything except corporate greed and government corruptness. I'm not saying other countries are any different but the big difference between the US (and Canada to some extent) vs Europe is the citizens. In Europe it seems the citizens don't roll over take it like we do in North America. Someone once told me that in most of the EU, the governments are afraid of the people, while in NA, it's the opposite. Simply put, Europeans won't stand for all the crap that happens over here. This has lasting effects on how services and corporations grow and are governed. When not controlled correctly (aka when lobbying rules) by the government, corporations have a proven track record of screwing the people!
Any Europeans care to chime in and agree/disagree with me?
Users in Europe/UK had to pay per-minute telco charges on top of the cost for the dial-up service (which itself was time-limited). Pretty much everywhere else in Canada and the US had free local-calling, so you only had the extra-fee of the dial-up service (which was usually time limited). One of the services I used (in Canada, early 90's), gave free time on off-peak hours 10pm-8am for ~$25.
Most of the people I knew from Finland, UK, Norway, were pretty jealous of our unlimited phone service.
Somewhere between de-regulating telecomms, declaring corporations are people, and that whole economic collapse that nearly destroyed the country. Its on our list of things to fix though, right after crippling wealth inequality, stagnant wages, cops that can beat and kill indiscriminately, figuring out how the NSA turned into the KGB, and fixing our crumbling highway system. Assuming we dont shut the government down for the third time I think we might be able to get to 100 megabit in the next century...assuming global warming is still a hoax. That is still a hoax in Europe too, right?
Good people go to bed earlier.
Most EU countries forced through regulation (which US is so afraid of) the monopoly telecoms to rent networks capacity, including the last mile, to competitors during the ADSL era. This spawned lot of new ISPs that drove prices down.
Cable and fiber networks aren't forced to open doors to competitors, but fortunately there are plenty of companies offering 3G and 4G internet connections, which along with existing competition in ADSL connections keeps overall prices lower even for the high speed connections.
During that time, European countries imported large numbers of Muslims. Muslims make the interweb faster. We have fallen way behind on Muslim importation. But don't worry, Obama is working hard to fix it.
Mid 90's was when modem technology still hadn't caught up to the phone line standards that were deployed far and wide across the US. Sure, you could get a nice solid 14400 or 28800 (if you were living high on the hog) and have lightning-fast IRC sessions. A few years later, you will be connecting at 31200 and bitching that you can't get a 56k handshake in your neck of the woods (as distance to the local CO and quality of lines really started to matter) and a few years after that you would have been bitching that no cable or telephone company wanted to bother spending $1M+ rolling out to a tiny town to try to grab a few hundred customers paying $40/mo for 1Mbit broadband. Meanwhile, those who did live in urban/suburban areas were being "treated" to broadband from the phone company and the cable company, neither of which was really prepared to deal with thousands of customers with 3Mbit+ connections all trying to pirate music. So, service "upgrades" were nonexistent as all the providers played catchup with customer demand for about 10 years.
And then, as if by some dark magic, wireless operators started rolling out handsets that could best all but the fastest wired connections (50Mbit+ coverage for 90% of the US pop). What a strange land we live in.
I see the comcast employees are posting on the story already.
What happened was in the days of dialup, you had competition from multiple ISPs. Now with the advent of "high speed" internet, the ISPs are tied to the hardware they own, so at most you have two choices, the local Cable monopoly, or the local Telco monopoly for DSL if you are within their range. The adoption rate and pricing where Google Fiber is available shows that we badly need a third option, but the roll out is painfully slow.
The right path is to have a nationwide rollout of a new fiber network using the US government to supervise and subcontractors to do the work with contracts written to reward performance and penalize poor quality, schedule and budget overruns. Back load the contracts so they pay directly for labor and materials only and any/all profits are only paid on successful completion. Pay for it with a 15 year bond and assess every user a monthly fee specific for paying off the rollout; once the rollout is paid off, the fee goes away. Once the network is rolled out, lease the fiber to any ISP that wants to sell service for $0.01/year, then let the ISPs pay into a pool based on subscriber number that covers the cost of maintenance, which is run on an open bid system with the proper cost and schedule controls and penalties in their contracts. Every 6 years hold regional elections that let consumers. Force the ISPs to only bill monthly, with no contracts; and only a flat rate monthly plus a 200% markup on per GB used by the consumer over their cost.
An exerpt from www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/oecdbroadbandportal.htm
.. 8,49 12,94 .. 20,97 25,49 .. 22,70 25,12 .. 20,77 25,12
Country 2003-Q4 2008-Q4 2013-Q4
Australia 3,49 24,56 25,98
Austria 7,62 21,26 26,15
Belgium 11,70 27,67 34,39
Canada 15,06 28,23 33,47
Chile
Czech Republic 0,48 16,97 17,38
Denmark 13,10 36,27 40,01
Estonia
Finland 9,48 27,89 30,82
France 5,89 27,64 37,65
Germany 5,59 27,44 34,84
Greece 0,10 13,41 26,23
Hungary 1,99 17,11 23,07
Iceland 14,31 32,47 35,77
Ireland 0,83 19,94 24,43
Israel
Italy 4,17 18,86 22,27
Japan 10,90 23,51 28,06
Korea 26,16 31,61 37,47
Luxembourg 3,44 29,39 32,52
Mexico 0,41 7,06 11,43
Netherlands 11,79 35,61 40,44
New Zealand 2,57 21,37 30,20
Norway 8,18 33,71 37,04
Poland 0,78 10,48 15,64
Portugal 4,81 15,94 24,12
Slovak Republic 0,35 11,45 15,63
Slovenia
Spain 5,25 20,08 26,31
Sweden 11,15 31,51 32,43
Switzerland (2) 10,55 32,73 44,86
Turkey 0,29 8,07 11,19
United Kingdom 5,37 28,14 35,20
United States (2) 9,59 25,48 29,79
OECD 7,03 21,95 26,97
It all depends on which part of Europe one thinks of.
The average American does not care about 100+ mbit/sec internet. The biggest use of internet bandwith is: watching videos. Youtube, and Netflix account for half of ALL internet bandwidth consumption in households, neither of which are economically productive.
Have you tried talking to neighbors about net neutrality, and municipal fiber optic internet? Have you tried talking to the cashiers at the grocery store, or gas station? You'll get a confused response. Several years ago, I went to my city of ~100,000 'city hall'. I asked around, will there be municipal fiber optic internet? They didn't know what municipal fiber optic internet was.
The opinion of the average american matters a lot, because it is their money that will be spent to install fiber optical cable in the ground. I think states banning municipalities from unilaterally commencing an expensive fiber installation is a good thing. The average american would rather go with the good enough cheap fix. We don't need fiber optics, we have DSL, errr, no VSDL, err, now it's G.fast.
It is very easy. The internet boom in europe started with the arrival of ZTE and Huawei in the european market ( 2004-2006) . Faced with chines competition the local vendors ( Alcatel , ericsson , siemens ) were compelled to reduce their prices to match the chinese. Thus with less money the carriers were able to offer bigger speeds. This is not possible in USA where the chinese cannot enter due to us paranoia and local lobby. Another contributing factor is the density of people in europe vs usa ( suburbia anyone )?
What you said is 100% dead on.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Basically it's because of the lack of corruption in Europe and the Asian nations that achieved high speed broadband rollouts. The USA is a pretty corrupt place, and it's embedded in the culture from the very bottom of the food chain: Tipping for basic goods and services (where a decent minimum wage should be paid by employers rather than just ripping off customers with tips and surcharges which are still a form of corruption), to the top of the foodchain: Golden parachutes, kick backs, earmarks etc. In an environment that allows corruption to flourish, and where people expect to get something extra for just doing the job they are paid to do. Of course there is going to be gross program mismanagement and failures. The US has up until now not been completely destroyed by the internal corruption because it's been focused elsewhere, fighting WW1/2, rebuilding the world, fighting communism, stealing other countries resources etc. Now that the wars against communism in South America (1980s) have ended. The corruption has settled on he closest target: The American People. Until the USA deals with the gross corruption within it's own borders (yes that includes the two-party system, minimum wage, drug wars, war on terror (military handouts) golden handshakes etc) They will continue to decline as a nation. At the same time that America has been declining there has been a serious move in most of the world to stamp out corruption. Sure it hasn't been 100% effective, but it's more than the USA has done and it's why we're seeing other countries pull ahead. Basically when your politics aren't being bogged down with bullshit issues from corrupt people. You get things done. This is why Germany is doing so well, they have strong laws against corruption and they are the manufacturing heart of Europe. Sure countries like Greece and Italy have stuffed up (mainly due to high levels of corruption) But the Nordic/Germanic countries are pulling the whole of Europe with them.
I can come up with some ideas:
1.) Telephone companies delayed or refused to upgrade to fiber technologies (in part because they might have to upgrade everywhere). They'd rather sit on old technologies while earning a consistent amount of money.
2.) The cable industry was relatively unregulated compared to telephone companies (this makes sense in that television itself can be considered a luxury). It doesn't have to serve every region and can perform practices to boost profitability a lot easier than phone companies. They became the default for Internet access when the telecos lagged.
3.) Verizon owns both a wireless company and a landline fiber service. They stopped rolling out fiber because wireless was more profitable. (AT&T is similar, but more incompetent.)
4.) Some communities wanted to prevent Verizon from upgrading to fiber because copper is more reliable during power outages.
5.) Comcast merged with NBC Universal and god knows who else to become an effectively vertically integrated monopoly. (Buying Internet access from a company so vested in both the production and distribution of media is horrible idea.)
6.) Market confusion. Comcast is a cable company that offers voice calls via its network. Verizon is a telephone company that offers TV via its fiber network. Both try to get out of common carrier status by claiming to be "data services".
I can come up with some solutions:
1.) Break up companies into discrete parts. Split wireless and landline. Split media production, distribution, and the physical infrastructure (cell towers or cable/fiber).
2.) Common carriers (that obey net neutrality, no data caps, etc.) receive government subsidies or benefits while non-common carriers (such as Comcast currently) receive no benefits.
3.) Force common carriers to upgrade to fiber. Perhaps provide a subsidy to do so. (A "no new copper" rule may suffice. Some communities may complain about power outages, but screw 'em.)
4.) Separate the service from infrastructure. One company (or municipality) owns the fiber or cell towers. Other companies bull resources and sell to the consumer. This is the cell phone MVNO, but it could apply to landlines as well.
5.) Allow municipalities to build, buy, or run network infrastructure. They might contract-out maintenance or actual running of the network to a private company.
6.) Allow companies and municipalities to sell infrastructure to each other. I believe Google Fiber bought the Provo fiber network. I see no reason why a municipality can't buy a network from a failing ISP (or a private company buy a network from a city/municipality).
Well, those are some ideas to get a competitive marketplace.
What you said is 100% dead on.
The sarcasm came from the fact that we (in the USA) traded in our freedom, and instead of broadband all we got was this lousy t-shirt.
Through investment in communications infrastructure?
Don't worry I'm sure the market will sort it out...
Thats why you have free market, capitalism and democracy!
I see this type of quip a lot on slashdot.
It's meant to push a specific agenda by pointing out yet another bit of anecdotal evidence that something is "obviously" wrong(*).
In this case it's the "obvious" wrongness of libertarianism and free market capitalism, even though the telco/ISP situation is so far removed from a free market that the label doesn't apply. The subtext is "we need government regulation because free capitalism doesn't work".
Except that the anecdote is completely the opposite of free capitalism.
Most people don't bother to pick apart the logic of such a statement - they rely on the innuendo as a shortcut for the best position to take. As Robert Cialdini points out in his book "Influence", it engages one of our automatic systems of information gathering: click, whirr... "capitalism doesn't work, got it!".
What could be the motivations of someone pushing this type of agenda on an audience of highly trained, highly-intelligent viewers, I wonder? Why would they want to bypass the rational process to engage the automatic system in an attempt to sway opinion?
(*) Another type is the framing association quip, such as always writing "Libertarian" next to a derogatory word such as "loonie", as in "yet more Libertarian hogwash" as if "hogwash" was a foregone conclusion.
No, we have all our national equivalents like the GCHQ, the DGSE, the BND, etc, all doing the same data gathering while busily pointing the finger at the NSA as the one who cut the cheese...
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
It's a 'thing' in Europe.
We pay them and the government puts glass-fiber under the streets, where they also already put cable, electricity, phone, water and gas.
I'll reiterate how grateful I am that cell phone charging -- and as a side effect, data transfer -- have been standardized, thanks to the EU mandating the Micro-USB connector and voltage standard. It's made life easier for pretty much everybody worldwide who owns a cell phone. Maybe it's because countries that culturally emphasize improving the quality of life, have their services change in ways that improve the quality of life.
The NSA give you the willies but that of all the others makes you feel warm and cuddly? How exactly is the data gathering performed by the GCHQ, the DGSE, the BND, etc, any different than that done by the NSA?
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
As soon as we lost that it all went to hell, and until we get it back there's really nothing that's going to fire up competition, nor can we maintain network neutrality when so few entities control the last mile.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson
...Euro-smugness! Yep, socialism trumps free market neliberal capitalism once more. Only problem is that since the European Central Bank was established, it's even more free market neliberal capitalist than the US Fed, as witnessed by our current insane austerity response to the recession, when rational economics would recommend Keynesian economic policy. Don't worry USA, we'll catch up with you soon! Maybe Greece and its new government can show us the way back to decent, humane socialist economic policy?
According to the commercials I get on my Comcast Xfinity operating system, when the government rolls out fiber networks, it uses baby carcasses to do it and violates hundreds of international non-competition treaties, so we have to leave it up to the telcos or we will all die of autism.
The US has had the most pathetic deal for internet access of any major industrial for ages. Telco monopoly, compliant regulators and general apathetic cluelessness about what is best for the common good.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
You have a false sense of how government in the United States is suppose to work. We are a Federal Republic. Infrastructure is suppose to be a local invest at the state level, not the federal level. Most problems have resulted from Federal intrusion in the state sphere.
Pre-2000, the US had "open access", meaning that cable owners had to sell use of their infrastructure. This made it relatively easy for startup ISPs to enter the market: every time you sign up a customer, you just need to buy time on the extra bit of cable you need to serve that person. Almost every country in the world uses this regulatory model.
Under intense pressure from lobbyists the US changed to a closed model in 2000. Now cable owners are also ISPs and have exclusive rights to the bits of wire they own. There are only a few ISPs, it's very, very expensive for anyone else to enter the market, and they can charge what they like, not only to customers, but upstream as well, as we're now seeing.
tl;dr: this is a failure of regulation.
Lessig talking about this:
http://blip.tv/lessig/america-s-broadband-policy-3505079
This is exactly the reason why Internet access in the U.S. is so expensive and so crappy relative to other first-world nations.
I'm sorry, but to my mind any definition of "crappy" must include the freedom to access any website, which many other first world nations (like the UK) do not enjoy.
To label it a slower is fine, but just to say "crappy" is ignoring the tradeoff from one kind of crap to another.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Of *course*! ANY failure in the market MUST be due to GOVERNMENT CORRUPTION AND INCOMPETENCE!!! Because there can't be any failure from commercial entities, can there.
This is why free markets don't work: the corporation *if it were punished* ***ARE NOT*** the ones making the decisions. Executives, who will bail out long before the backlash (and a new CEO will say they've "learned lessons from the failure from the past mistakes", natch) make decisions. And even if all of you successfully kick out corporations doing bad things, *they have already taken your money*, so it's rather late for you to get justice.
Meanwhile piles of morons bleat on about how "everybody does this, so STFO, nothing to read here, even YOUR favourite does it, so nyah!". Indicating
a) even you don't believe that BS
b) that you don't want anyone actually doing what you claim we can do, 'cos it might hurt competition.
"at the time had 3 local ISPs to choose from, all offering the fastest modem connections at the time"
Sounds like in reality you had a single provider - the telco which would connect your modem to the modem of an ISP.
Faster than that, you would have used ISDN or DSL on those same wires, which required progressively shorter distances to the local telco facility, reducing their availability to rural customers. That continues on with cable modem and fiber networks - they aren't built out as far as the old copper telco circuits were.
Europe is much more population dense, so the build-out of higher speed links has a better ROI. There are lots of rural areas in the US where the ROI is too small to justify a build-out, so it doesn't happen. To compare, the US has a population density of about 83 per square mile, Germany is about 593. And although I couldn't find a metric, I suspect that the population in Europe is more evenly distributed, too.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
And that is back in 1998-2002, Cable companies here in the USA (as well as smaller ISP's) started merging. They said it would make for better infrastructure but in fact what it did was stifle innovation. Now we have 3 major cable companies, all with their own territories, with bills in place that make it illegal for anyone else to lay cable or fiber. They can cap our data and our speeds and it's totally within the law to do so. The government doesn't care because the FCC is made up of ex-cable execs who only have the cable interests at heart. I know because I used to work for a cable company in the south east who only existed because of a law that forbid TWC from operating there. But the cable company was utilizing all of TWC's resources and networks to deliver their "brand". Europe on the other hand, dictated by government ownership of utilities saw a need to better internet, so they invested in more fiber lines and more cables to bring faster internet to their clients. Here in the US, we are still using DOCSIS crap that was pioneered in the 90's. They have no interest in expanding because expanding their lines costs money, and they'd rather squeeze it out of american's at 4mbps connections for $60/mo with a $10/mo overage fee per 1gb of data.
For us here in Norway PSTN/ISDN was our bad time, when the one monopolist could charge pretty much everything they wanted. When we got DSL, the market was deregulated and lots of offers showed up. In the US, far more people get Internet via cable, which obviously has far more reason to protect their traditional business. As for recent fiber roll-outs it's really the power companies that got the ball rolling there, eyeing an opportunity to break into a new market by running fiber optics as well as power lines. Obviously the incumbents couldn't sit around and watch that and it became a race to lay down fiber first, since it's rarely profitable to come second. So it's a very nice three-way race to roll it out, though the prices are fairly steep.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's not that the telcos in Europe *like* to have competition. It's just that the rules do not leave them the choice.
Back in the days of modems, the US was ahead because it had broken the ma-bell's monopoly, and phone companies were heavily regulated as common carriers.
Today, there are EU directives that impose competition in the broadband market. One of the things that works is forced unbundling between the last mile and the rest of the service. Even if telco A owns the wire from my home to the nearby switching box (which they also own), if I choose telco B as a service provider, telco A has to plug my cable into telco B's equipment in the switching box, and telco B pays them a regulated fee for the privilege of using that last piece of wire into my house.
This is very similar concept to what worked in the US to make long distance calling competitive: you got local calls from one provider, but could get long distance from a different one. It's not like this is not well understood here in the US as well: precisely because that model worked in bringing the price down, the telcos have lobbied hard to avoid this when it comes to broadband access as well as cell phones.
And as an IT professional working in NYC, I'll tell you that the Internet here is... not so great. I'll grant you, it's better than the parts of the country that are stuck on dial-up and DSL, but you can't get FIOS in most places. A lot of people (individuals and businesses) are stuck with TWC as their only viable source of broadband. Sure, you can run a bunch of bonded T1s and get 10mbps for something like $1k/month, but if you want something cheaper than that, you're stuck with TWC.
The problem with that is (a) TWC has slow upload speeds; and (b) TWC is unreliable and will often go offline for a few hours for no apparent reason.
NYC gave Verizon some kind of deal on the requirement that they run fiber everywhere by Q2 2014. Guess what? Didn't happen.
When you think "Population density is low in the entire USA" works,then it's "Well, duh, population density, moran!!!". When that doesn't work, suddenly "Well, duh, it's not JUST population density, moran!!!".
*Anything* to make it not the usa's fault for being shite on this subject.
This economies of scale talk does not apply. If you make one of a thing it is expensive per unit price. Making 100 brings the unit price down. At some point the cost levels off and it doesn't get cheaper to make more.
How exactly do you reduce the cost of laying fiber by scaling up? Both Europe and the US should already be in the range where increased scale doesn't reduce the cost. The scale that is important in this contex is how many miles of fiber do you need to lay?
I currently reside in Scandinavia and fiber was recently installed in my home. I now have a cheap 100/100 Mbit connection to the Internet, but the provider want the customers to be satisfied so they add 5-10% extra bandwidth. The connection has no data cap so I can max it out 24x7 if I want to.
I like to download a big file, then turn off all the lights and just sit in pitch-dark, watching diodes on the fiber modem flashing like crazy...
Then what's the cheaper way to cross non-subscribers' private property to reach subscribers without tearing up roads?
Then why doesn't each 450,295 km^2 chunk of the USA have Swedish-class Internet?
It seems in Europe, we elect a government and expect, or even demand, them to "work" for the people, while in America they seem to elect a government and then demand them to keep their hands off the "free market economy" so companies can do whatever they like.
And know you complain these companies did something that wasn't beneficial for the people?
It's easy for the state to subsidize bread (and circuses) when it's taking 50 to 80% of citizens' income (income+VAT). The US is also dealing with aging infrastructure, part of the cost of being first.
The 2007 action put some limits on local (but not state) franchising practices. It did NOT eliminate them. In fact, most of the US population still lives in areas with restricted franchises. The FCC said that local franchising authorities could not be "unreasonable" in their demands. More info:
https://www.wilmerhale.com/pag...
however, the economies of scale due to the US population density distribution
So, let the rural municipalities install broadband.
"No, no! Muh competition!"
Then shut the fuck up.
Have gnu, will travel.
Unfortunately, the Internet service market in "socialist" Europe is actually more free market than in the U.S.
This might seem like a small thing, but transparent contracts is essential... In the use you see discounts, contracts that binds you for up to two years. in the EU you rarely see contracts beyond 6 months, all contacts must state the full minimum price for those 6 months...
Have you noticed how US telecoms always offers you a discount (sometimes 50%), but then over time the price goes up... Because the discount expires.
These kinds of shady deals don't happen in Europe. Telecoms may advice a price, and that what you pay. Occasionally there is discounts, but no where near to the same extent as in the US, where it's basically a default that people always want to be on a discount.
There is no free market with regulation to ensure transparent competition.
We have FTTC, fibre to the cabinet, here in the UK which gives most people the thick end of 76Mbit which in this country pretty much everyone finds is more than enough and as a result of using the existing copper from the street cabinet to the house instead of laying fibre means that that truly unlimited 76Mbit can cost you less than $30 a month with a half price discount on the first 12 months.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
There's an Ars Technica article where a guy points out that the cable companies have a 97% profit margin on Internet. Not 100% it's true, but it sounds about right...
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I don't know about NYC, but here in Seattle you're correct that it isn't about population densities. It's about laws that prevent competition. The government here has granted a monopoly to Comcast without requiring them to offer service in the entire monopoly area. That means, for example, I can't get cable TV or Internet at home, and the city prevents anyone else from offering me service. There is just too much government interference in the last mile.
Its only pocket change if they have the money to start with. Last time I checked the country is mostly run on the government credit card. what they need to is cut back on the excessive military spending and channel those funds elsewhere, not increase spending even more.
In much of EU you have actual competition on broadband(not everywhere obviously, but overall,) whereas the competition situation in US is normally much worse with only one or two possibilities.
Monopolies and Duopolies do not help innovation and cause price cuts..
I just left Germany. The internet speeds there were terrible and very expensive compared to cable in the US.
The question presumes facts that haven't been established, and that don't actually hold true.
They had a kick-ass teletext system ( via TV broadcast) before the internet whereas we in N.America didn't even know what we were missing... and never did have a functional system anywhere near what they had standardized across countries.
History just repeats itself.
Of course... you could argue that they might not be able to follow up with a cool system without see all of our mistakes before they make their large standardized investment... or even that they'd have the choices they do without another large market giving different technologies a chance to compete and evolve. At the very least, the mess over here increases their pool of choices.
Had a look for links.. interesting that they were concerned about it replacing the need for newspapers back in 1983..
http://www.csmonitor.com/1983/0609/060937.html
Every time we discuss some tech company on Slashdot, I'm surprised no-one from that company chimes in. In this thread, I have seen a lot of comments from various people, even including some who work for telcos, just not in the USA. Given that there are quite a few cool technologies to play with at telcos, surely some of the folks who work there must be on Slashdot. Am I wrong? Or are they forbidden from joining these discussions, and afraid of the consequences if they do?
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Find me a predefined region that's approximately 450k km^2 and you might have the answer.
California is one. The Pacific Northwest (Washington and Oregon) is another. So is the Dakotas (North Dakota and South Dakota). And there are plenty of other Sweden-sized tri-state areas.
France had Fax machines in 1840 already.
I guess the post you quote is lost on you, but to clarify anyway. Europeans tip, too. They tip for good service and to the amount they can afford. The wage is high enough that you aren't sneezed upon if you can't afford to tip. There was no mention that you need to tip for government services in the post. The corruption is more hidden at government level, but mostly by paying for campaigns. A more than two party system is wonderful as two major parties only leads to less progress. Germany is moving in that direction and despite indications from the earlier post it isn't a shining beacon against corruption. Also Greece is a pretty bad example as would be Hungary were people voted against the incumbent because they felt everybody could make it better despite really needing a lot of the reforms (and you might note that neither touched the real culprits). And for England: The coalition was voted on by more people which is pretty much what it should be.
Also for shitty economy it is coping quite well. I wouldn't be giving to much to economy press. (Or most press)
I'd say per capita is more important than largest and top colleges are really overrated. It really depends on the person. Money and standing can't fix the person. Sure it gives a nice title and some weight in discussions, but 'studied @' shouldn't overrule natural laws, but for government officials that's what counts sadly.
I also wouldn't be to proud on government patent filings as you couldn't patent that stuff under european law.
The 'world' series is north american and not really world at all. It just sounds better.
Most Nobel prize winners researched in the US which is a pro for your investment in research which is lackluster in most other countries. But you might take a look at their biography to see if they are americans or moved to america and then wonder why not more Nobel prize winners are in your country for their whole life.
Yeah, they are stupid. No, free market doesn't always work. Also, "free market" seems to mean many things to many different people. Totally anarchist market is not what is usually meant by "free market". Also, totally anarchist market would really, really suck for the people, who would get shafted amazingly fast. "Free market" also makes no sense when you need to divide some limited resource up. Say, the radio spectrum, or land (roads, utilities, cables, etc.) It just won't work if everyone is allowed to do as they wish in a friendly free market competition.
Around here we have pretty working example of how you can ensure the availability of internet connection, have some healthy competition, and minimize the waste usage of resources(wiring, land). Our government has forced the companies that historically owned the cabling and offered services to split themselves up into physical layer companies, and companies that sell "internet" to people. The physical layer companies are granted monopolies (which they usually already had, considering most places only had one set of cables going around), in exchance they are heavily regulated, including the amount of profit they can make. (so, no gold mine companies, salaries aren't big, investors owning these aren't looking for any surprise big wins, but on the other hand the jobs are usually "for life", and no big surprise losses either) These companies have to lease the "last mile" to the company the end customers ISP. The lease price is regulated at a level that gives enough money to the physical wires company to keep the wires up to date, and make the forementioned small steady profit allowed by regulation(this is tied to their network investment ans shape etc. So they actually keep the network operating and in condition). On top of those wires other companies have a level "free market" to compete with. And they do. We do the exact same with our electrical companies. You can buy the energy from whoever (yes, it's a trick, it always really comes from the same place), and on top of the energy price there is fixed transfer fees paid to the local utility company for keeping the grid in shape. (same profitability arrangements apply)
In france, FREE heppened
The other ISPs at the time were agreeing on the prices (high) and innovation cycles (slow). Xavier Neil had money and was fed up with them. The battle was heated, but eventually he won.
Now, everything connected costs me 35€ per month (should be 30, but the government added another tax recently) : landline phone, mobile phone, internet, tv and media box reading youtube and divixes (mkvs, too !).
I hear they might come disrupt things in the US.
Disclaimer : I have no ties to free whatsoever besides being a repeatedly happy customer since the beginning.
I'm from Belgium...
First: the politics topic: ...) in a move that brings back memories of what we here in Europe watched (and almost didn't believe) happen in the US after 2001: the assumption that every citizen is a potential terrorist, broad and vague legislation that increases government and intelligence power, meanwhile distracting the public from all the savings the government mandates (e.g. in Belgium), reduction in public service, even more lax legislation that benefits multinationals / big corps, while the middle and lower class working (and unemployed) people have to pay up for it...
Too bad that a lot of politicians in multiple Euro countries are now using the 'terror' argument (C.H., Verviers, possible terrorist suspects apprehended in different countries,
But the sad thruth is: when u have slick politicians like Bart De Wever, who can talk even a circle into a straight line, the (even not-so-)dumb masses 'roll over and take it'... Note: While i respect the man's rhetorical prowess, his policital view on most economical items is pro-bigcorp.
Second: Back to the broadband topic:
Luckily we had a lot of rather left-wing governments in the past, so at least we have a lot of public infrastructure that is still in place which will take some time for the current government to demolish. On the negative side: with the current government, the public won't be seeing a lot of improvement in broadband internet availability. The 2 current large ISPs are not really being motivated to move to fiber, so the only choice for decent broadband is between very limited volume at around 35euro/month, or pay up and go for 'unlimited' (but if u go over a certain arbitrary volume you end up on what they call 'smallband' -> 1Mb/128kb, where the algo that calculates this is also dependent on the traffic that other users are generating) at around 70euro/month...
So is broadband really better in Europe? Don't know how bad it is in the US, and maybe it's better, but it's not cheap, at least not in Belgium. (Note: there are of course other ISPs, and all is well when everything works fine, but when there is something to be fixed, the ISPs who own the cable says it's the fault of the other ISP, and they say it's the fault of the ISP owning the cable... so then you're being 'van het kaske naar de muur gestuurd'...So cheap here also means 'bad service', first & second-hand experience, with multiple ISPs, multiple situations/locations)
Well, looking from the outside that seems like a plausible explanation. This also explains most of the other problems USA seems to be having.
In Romania, around 2001, people started making local networks, 4-5 individuals at a time who shared one internet connection.
Then those local networks grew to cover entire neighborhoods. When the cable companies realized the market is there and willing, they started making the services cheaper and available.
By 2006 most of those networks were gone and almost 10 years later all towns have at least 4-5 companies trying to provide internet by cable, wireless or mobile.
We europeans still complain about our slow internet connections. Mine e.g. is only 6Mbit :-/ :-/
And my friend have only 20Mbit, too. But one has a 120Mbit connection, he also complains a lot
You see, it is like before.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The point is that the NSA spies on Europeans far more than they do on Americans... and always will.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
My two pennies are based on our local legislation here in finland. Currently we have 3 large telcos/ISPs, one is the old postal and communications bureau, second is a conglomerate of small local phone companies and third is originally the telco-monopoly phone association of the capital helsinki.
20 years ago mobile phones were crazy expensive and land lines always had a local monopoly behind them. Landline prices were ok i guess, but not cheap. Cheaper if you were associated or investor of your local phone company, many were.
Totally locked situation, each large company had their area and while cable leasing was an option it was usually way too expensive for consumers to even think about - hundreds of dollars worth each month at worst.
Then came new legislation which forced operators to lease copper and fiber at a decent price and suddenly a lot of new ISPs emerged. Some local and small, some from abroad and even municipal or association driven projects. None of the big isps were happy about it, not at all. Service was slow and sluggish and pricing was arbitrary at times. No tools or cable map services were given out to others at first.
So our government had to intervene yet again to force the issue, at least one of the three was threaten with hefty fines to make it worth their while to fix the issues.
And now i can choose an ISP from about 20 different ones, each one having their own merits. Currently i'm using a bit more expensive one (30eur/month 12/2 adsl), but that came with a bonus of a public ip network of my own.
I have 55/10 with a 275GB cap in Peterborough, Ontario (Canada's 39th largest City) for 85$. I am sad now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_in_Somalia
Then why doesn't the U.S. get even faster internet access?
Your argument makes no sense.
The problem is we are comparing speed and not usage. All around the world they have faster internet, who cares, the problem is that if american users were on those other countries networks they would get virtually no bandwidth. The difference is in capacity, I'd like to see the statistics on the amount of data used by the average user daily in each of the worlds top twenty countries. My bet is the US is at least double and probably quadruple the volume of data in any of those countries. Think Netflix?
Americans foolishly believe that unregulated capitalism will produces positive benefits for the citizens rather than the continued consolidation of wealth and power.
When - it crept up on us, so dunno. Ours is way cheaper, too. Why - as everyone else says, competition plus government encouragement at every level from parish councils competing to be the first to get superfast broadband, to EU level. Within the last couple of hours, BT has announced the rollout of 500Mbps to our adjacent town, Huntingdon. Even my rural village has 40-ish. But no mobile reception.
You have your facts right? Perhaps in Slovenia and parts of Turkey the access was bad, but Europe was always at least staying with the curve. Same with Canada, except we were first to have nationwide cable. Because the infrastructure was already in place. We had cable TV by the mid 70s everywhere. The last people I ever heard complain about crappy dial-up were Americans..
Simple: the US stood still and everyone simply passed on momentum. The core reason for standing still? Telecom consolidation and monopolies.
Was telco's fucked us.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Try 527B for FY2013.
...has a free in(tra)net, why can't we?
Tempting. I have a bunch of 25 dB antennas in the garage.
The first home-use dialup was Demon Internet in '92, by '94 there were numerous, small, local ISPs and several national to choose from. For all EU ISPs up to the mid 90s the big problem was connectivity to the US, but by '97 there was enough non-US content that being a non-US Internet user didn't mean your experience was gauged solely on the fatness of your US pipe.
Up until that point, the major portion of cost handed on by EU ISPs was their individual pipes to the US. Because of this, EU ISPs generally provided excellent national and European peering, their networks were robust and their speeds were great.
Transit ISPs emerged and big cables laid across the pond. All that competitive energy got redirected into building local/regional/national infrastructure and leveraging it right as the transition to broadband etc happened.
In the US, ISPs basically fell into the hands of the cable and phone companies, companies who have vested interested in non ISP related business models that are often actually threatened by the internet service they happen to provide.
My personal take - as a Brit-expat who worked in the UK ISP industry through 2002 - is that somehow Europe ended up with a very democratic and capitalistic internet industry, while in the US some very deep pockets essentially knitted it up into an entirely feudal system.
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
GAH! That first paragraph should say "first ho-use dialup in the UK".
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
Yes. ho-use. I give up trying to edit today :)
-- A change is as good as a reboot.
Municipal networks and the separation of ISPs and infrastructure providers (means ISPs get equal access to the infrastructure) increased competition and competition brings better service and / or lower prices. In the US you are lucky if you can chose between a slowpoke phone company offering DSL or a greedy cable company with craptastic service - or the combination of both with satellite or mobile service. When leaving metro areas you are out of luck anyway, the reason why there are still many who use dialup. Even if there is a true choice, the cost of access and the service provided is expensive and slow compared to even western Europe. It is a matter of legislation, such as prohibiting municipalities from building their own fibre networks or putting many road blocks into the path of companies like Google. As long as the legal and regulatory framework does not allow anything else than the status quo, well, all you get is the status quo. That is followed by dumb arguments about cost, the same reason why the entire banking sector still operates with the same tech used in the 60s.
We disagree on the definition of "predefined region". In what way is the Pacific Northwest not a recognized "predefined region"? Based on the existence of this article, the region defined as Washington and Oregon appears to have "received significant coverage in reliable sources that are independent of the subject".
Is the Pacific Northwest a political entity?
Earlier you said "predefined region". Thank you for clarifying it to mean "distinct political entity".
Different utility management as well I assume too.
It sounds like you're trying to claim that Sweden sits in some sort of "sweet spot" of geographic scale between doing things at the level of the several U.S. states and doing things at the federal level. In order to get a sense of the difference in scope, I first need some questions answered: Are Internet and other utilities in Sweden handled at the national or county level? And how would the proposed merger of counties largely along the lines of Riksområden (the national statistical areas) affect this?