What's Holding Up Broadband in the U.S.?

ProfBooty writes "A recent opinion piece in the Washington Post discloses that the broadband could potentially aid in the economy's recovery (and that Canadians are 2x as likely to have it, South Koreans 4x), but it's not regulation that is the hold up, it's *surprise* content holders' fears of 'piracy' as well as unwillingness to adapt to new markets. Also discusses the governments of Canada and South Korea and how they were involved in bringing broadband to the people. In additon discusses how in the past, Congress would pass laws as to protect innovators as well as the old guard." The article's by Lawrence Lessig.

Rural Canada

[getafix]

I agree that in the Canadian cities, they have a good number of high speed internet providers, and at amazingly cheap rates too (compared to what I was paying in Atlanta before I headed north for the winter).

Out here in rural Canada (North Gower/Kemptville, south of Ottawa), there are few options. There was a company called Look Communications, but they are no longer installing new sites - just making the most of their existing customer base. It kinda sucks.

But the scenery is great, and the air is clean!!

Re:It's Held Up?

[JThaddeus]

Yes, the is a hold up! I live about 40 miles WSW of Washington, DC in a largely rural county and growing bedroom community. Except for a small radius within the local town, there is no option for DSL or cable modem nor will the local phone or cable companies tells us when they will provide these services. My only option is to pay for ISDN--a setup charge of about $500 and a monthly fee of $240/month for unlimited use.

Even in Fairfax County, the nation's richest, broadband is not univerally available. A friend of mine lives within walking distance to the Metro and still can't get DSL or cable modem.

Contrary to popular opinion

[Sunken Kursk]

Broadband is not available everywhere in the US. I've noticed many people post stating that they have several broadband options available to them. I don't doubt that's the case, as where I currently live I have both cable and DSL options available for me. Of course, I also live in a major metropolitan area.

However, let's take the case of my parents that live in a small town in the Shenandoah Valley. They've been asking about broadband options for their house for several years now. They own a Bed and Breakfast, and a dedicated high-speed Internet connection would definitely be a benefit for them. Every time they inquire at the local Cable provider, they're told that "We're still testing it in the big town up north." Whenever they go to any DSL provider, they're told "We haven't upgraded the hardware in the area for that. However, we can offer this 64k ISDN line at 3x the going DSL price, or a fractional T-1 at 10x the going DSL price."

I doubt it has much to do with hardware or anything like that. It has more to do with the following lines of thought...

• "Country Bumpkins" don't care enough about that fangled Internet thing to demand Broadband.
• Even if they do care enough about it, they're not educated enough to know that a 128k ISDN line is not the same as a DSL line. We can get away with charging the uneducated heathens more for installing the line, more for delivering the service, and more for any support that needs to be provided.
• Even if they are smart enough not to fall for our ISDN trap, they're in the major minority and we can simply blow them off. What are they going to do, take their business elsewhere?

So long as the major broadband providers can get away with pushing around the local carriers, nothing's going to change. Even when the major broadband providers are responsible for delivering the product direct to the consumer, there's not much difference. Verizon has long waiting lists to get DSL in their service area's (Oh, and they don't allow smaller local carriers to gain access to their DSL lines. They pay the minor fines and screw the competition until it dies and Tauzin-Dingle passes/goes into effect.) Cox Communication is the monopoly Cable Internet provider for Fairfax County, VA. Their Road Runner service is notorious for outtages, high latency, dropped packets, etc. Do they care very much? Not really. So long as customers are willing to pay them $50/m for crappy service, they will continue to provide it and stuff their wallets with their massive profits.

Re:Broadband Providers are holding up Broadband.

[Anonymous Coward]

Try speakeasy for DSL. They have some great packages with static IP's. I've been hosting on them for 2 years now.

Thank you Canada!

[ADRA]

I would just like to say I am very happy with the broadband services provided in Canada. I am in Vancouver, where I can get Cable or (A)DSL. Both services have become very stable over the last year, and their availabilities are almost limitless. A very affordable $40CDN a month is pretty cheap for 400kps cable service that I get now.

The Cable companies Shaw and Rogers support internet basically everywhere you can get regular cable tv. It is fast, and they have scaled reasonaby to meet customer demand. I used to find rogers (when they were in vancouver) a little flaky, but that has all gone away now..

I think adoption of canadian broadband has been sucessful because:

a: Cheap
b: Reasonable to Excellent Quality
c: Availability

Keep up the good work guys!

The Railroads of the United States

[ObligatoryUserName]

After reading this note about Canada, you might say "gosh we've got lost of flat stretches of railroad land, why doesn't someone run fibre under it?"

Someone already has. Qwest was founded to take advantage of this opportunity. The funny thing is that no one bothered to take note that the railroads only had the surface rights to the land- which means that all those lines are running through land that Qwest doesn't own. Now there's a liability that I bet they don't put on their balance sheet... I wonder if buying US West with their over-inflated stock gave them the assets needed to survive such a fiasco.

Re:Reasons for broadband slowdown

[Anonymous Coward]

Bandwidth is cheap. At tier-1 level, one penny buys 10MB. You do the math.

Re:Nope

[GreyPoopon]

I just verified the numbers. It's 18,000 straight-line feet for full speed access. Otherwise, they give you iDSL at 144 Kbps. This comes from a Verizon competitor. I suspect that the 18,000 feet refers to 18,000 feet of wiring, vs the 3.5km radius for Canada. In fact, I'm almost certain that this is true because when I lived in that area, they told me that I was something like 22,000 feet away, and I know that my house was less than 2.5 miles from the CO.

Also, the signal may start breaking up after 3.5km, but maybe the technology can give you DSL at reduced speads (but better than iDSL) at slightly greater distances.

Re:Canada and the US

[Malc]

As a Brit whose lived in Canada and the US, I can tell you that the US doesn't have much competition. When I left Britain, I could have chosen from 11 phones companies for my local service. My experience in the US (Denver) and Canada (London, ON) indicates that there is virtually no local competition in the telco market. (there is in long-distance, hence the really cheap prices there).

It seems in the US, competition in broadband has been along technological lines, e.g. cable vs. DSL vs. wireless, etc. I'm now living in Toronto, and I can tell you in contradiction to your statement that there is plenty of competition just within DSL in parts of Canada. In this case, all of the ISPs (including Bell's Sympatico) lease DSLAM ports in the CO. Some of the ISPs go a step further and install their own equipment, which is why IStop has maximum residential speeds of 3mbs/800kbs, and business speeds of 6/1mbs.

Now, can somebody explain how the DSL "resellers" work (worked?) in the US? Is that like here, where they lease DSLAM ports, or is it truly the "reselling" of the service? I've been gone from the US for over 2 years, so is my impression of competition just within DSL out-of-date?

Canadians pay WAY less than Americans...

[AnimeFreak]

I am currently on Telus.NET ADSL. This is what I get in my package.

• 1640 Kbps Down
• 640 Kbps Up
• 5 E-mail addresses
• Two dynamic IP addresses
• A VERY cool TOS/AUP

Guess how much I pay? $35.99/month CAD. That is $22.30/month USD. For Shaw High-speed Internet (Cable), it comes with a higher speed and costs about $5 more ($40.99 CAD which is $25.40 USD).

After seeing some people pay $49.99 ($79 CAD) for Cable Internet, and about 10 bucks less for dial-up, I am sure as hell not going to move to the Internet with Internet rates THAT high. Hell, you can get 56.6 Kbps Dial-up for $6.30 USD/m.

You Americans are getting ripped off or we're getting a pretty impressive deal.

Mergers with web-advertising-funded portals :-(

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just VCs that aren't giving broadband companies much money. @Home was doing relatively well, as a cable modem company, but unfortunately it had decided to do a multi-billion-dollar merger with the Excite portal site, which depended on web advertising for its revenue base. When that business model went sour, the revenues dried up but the huge debt was still all there, so it dragged them into ruin. (Investing nearly a billion dollars on an online greeting-card company didn't help much either.)