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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.
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.
Sounds like a pornographic contest...
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.
.
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
Don't worry. My Republican friends assure me that everything will be made better again if we just give more tax cuts to the wealthy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
I see those sort of quips everywhere. Ironically, I find it comes from people who like pay lip service to open-mindedness and open debate.
Anecdotal? I don't think I'd use that word to describe something that can be objectively determined by anyone willing to look at the numbers.
The snideness about Libertarianism and the Free Market comes from the fact that very, very few markets are really Free Markets, government or no government.
To be truly free, not only do you have to be free of government regulation, you must not be able to profit by economies of scale (positive feedback loops, which help form monopolies), not have a natural monopoly (that is, only you can produce Jackson Pollock paintings because you're Jackson Pollock), and not have such a major mismatch between buyers and sellers that one side or another can unilaterally set terms the way that say, corporations can for most non-union employees.
That basically means Free Markets mostly exist as things things like neighborhood pizza joints and dry cleaners and even dry cleaners may be endangered if a recent franchise ad I saw recently comes to anything.
We laugh not because the Free Market "is a failure", but because the Free Market is such a rare beast that it's simply not available to cure all the problems that it's alleged to be capable of curing. And on top of that, the Free Market doesn't select for happy customers, or even quality for quality's sake, it selects for maximum profitability. Which is why Your Call is VERY Important To Us, so Please Stay on the Line. Average Waiting Time is now ... 54 minutes.
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'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 subtext is "we need government regulation because free capitalism doesn't work"
Yeah, we have to define 'free market capitalism' and show if it could work without regulation.
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
So Vietnam, North Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan have better internet than the US? Vietnam I dunno, but the other 3, I can go out on a limb and say that it ain't the case.
A lot of the above countries ain't a part of Europe - the United States, New Zealand, Korea, Japan, Israel, Chile and Australia. How are they in the above list? And what do the numbers mean - is higher better, or is lower better?
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...
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
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.
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.
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..
Was telco's fucked us.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
...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?