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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
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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.
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.
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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?
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?
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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'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.
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.
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
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.
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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...