Worldwide State of Broadband - S Korea, Japan Lead

Geek of the Week writes "No surprise here, a report by the International Telecommunications Union shows the US lagging in broadband adoption. S Korea and Japan lead with between 60 and 70% of S Korean households wired for speed, with Japan catching up quickly. The U.S. ranks 11th. Story here and the full press release can be found on the ITU website. Having traveled through Asia for business I can't say I'm surprised, but it is disappointing that the availability and price are in such sorry states here in the U.S."

Obvious

[Breakfast Pants]

These countries have concentrated areas of high population density.

Rural Area

[rabbit994]

Did they take into account that we are much larger then either of those countries with a large amount of rural area where broadband is expensive to run and with no ROI? It's easy to make everyone broadband when they don't have the amount of land to cover. Why don't they look at broadband saturation in suburbian and urban areas and compare us to Korea?

Not too hard to get that level of penetration...

[ewombatnet]

With a highly centralised and urbanised population, as well as a telco infrastructure that wasn't originally laid in the 1920s (as with most of the western world).

Now if they could just do something about the price barrier for UK, US, and AU we might get some penetration...

It's not entirely population density

[Peter Cooper]

So does the United Kingdom, although I doubt the UK is even in the top 20 of their list (it's not in the article), thanks to having one of the worst deployed broadband systems in Europe.

Countries like Canada, however, fare a lot better than the UK, yet their population density is a mere fraction of that in the UK.

In other news

[Hadlock]

Small, countries on the eastern Pacific Ocean have a population of at least 60-70% people with darker skin than Americans.

Or somthing

Comon people, this is OBVIOUS; Smaller land mass + higher population denisty + late to the technology party = High rate of adoption. If local phone lines were as cheap there as they are here, they'd probably still be adopting dialup, not broadband. Instead, they skipped that phase, which is why that brings us to this point in time. Same deal with cell phones, for the most part.

Population density??

[jimlintott]

Yeah. That would explain why Canada was third, eh.

Re:Rural Area

[puppetman]

Umm... Canada was 3rd. Kind of blows your theory. With 6 million fewer people that California, and the second largest country (in square kilometers/miles), we're alot more rural that the US.

The problem in the States is a fragmented industry (too many small players), the inability of one company to deliver the service all the way to the doorstep of the consumer (most broadband offerings are offered by a consortium of companies, complicating delivery and support), a lack of interest and/or vision by these companies, and (I believe) a strong desire by the larger corporations to screw the consumer.

All of this means the average online American is a high-ping bastard, being schooled by your friends to the north :D (just kidding, of course).

RTFA

[Quasi Qubit]

1st: South Korea 2nd: Hong Kong 3rd: Canada

Really?

[WebMasterP]

Imagine that, countries that are a fraction of our physical size can get broadband out faster. Wouldn't 1 CO be around 10 or 20% of their population (purely speculation)?

Re:Rural Area

[sys$manager]

Keep in mind that here in Canada something like 90% of the population lives within a small strip along the southern border too, it's not like we're running DSL links to Tuktoyaktuk.

Geographic density??

[meanfriend]

It shouldnt come as a huge surprise that countries who 1 )generally embrace new technology and 2) feature high population density would tend lead in adoption of broadband (like Japan).

It would be more cost effective on a per capita basis to wire a urban center for broadband compared to huge expanses of suburbia or rural regions.

An interesting statistic would be to compare broadband availability vs subscription rates in major metropolitan areas from various countries.

ie. New York vs LA vs Paris vs London vs Tokyo vs Beijing etc...

Re:Rural Area

[kaan]

that's a very good point. Japan, for instance, is widely known to have some of the highest property prices on the planet because there are so many people per unit of land. so if you put a single high-speed connection somewhere, you're going to be reaching far more people than you would if you laid that same amount of cable to a typical, spread-out metropolitan area in the United States.

dsl, for instance, probably sees much higher adoption in areas where population density is high enough for the telcos to justify installing the infrastructure. otherwise, cable is much more cost-effective.

Re:It's not entirely population density

[Hadlock]

If you only counted the population of canada w/in 50 miles of the US border, you'd get a much higher population density figure. the UK and Canada both had (Fairly) cheap phone lines previous to broadband, unlike s.korea, which caused a very slow changeover rate to broadband in the UK and canada. s. korea has fairly expensive land lines, causing people to adopt broadband when they never had landlines previously, alowing them to leapfrog the changeover from a previous technology.

Re:Rural Area

[Unknown Relic]

What about Canada? We've got more land mass and far fewer people than the US, and we ranked a very respectable 3rd place, at 11.2 percent (compared to 21.3 in South Korea and 14.9 in Hong Kong). Pricing likely has something to do with it though, as from what I've heard the prices in the states are quite steep. Here in providers are offering "lite speed" packages with speeds 5-10 times faster than dial up, for as little as $25 Canadian per month .

Re:Population density??

[umofomia]

Actually, 90% of Canada's population lives within 100 miles of the U.S. border. You can argue that the population density of that region (the region most likely to have broadband anyway) is rather high.

Re:Rural Area

[garcia]

How about I don't want 1 single company delivering broadband to my door?

I already have a SINGLE option where I live. That's right, town of 60k+ people and no cost effective option other than Comcast Cable.

How about the fact that I don't want CATV, I just want Internet. They are apparently tied and it costs MORE to have just Internet than both basic cable and Internet??!?!

How does that make sense?

More competition, more options, less money. That's what I want.

Re:Rural Area

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's worth mentioning that than more than 70% of Korea is mountainous terrain and because of Japan's electoral divisions, small farmers have lots of political power (ie they probably don't care to have broadband lines running through their farms).

Who gives a damn?

[evilviper]

"No surprise here, a report by the Intenational Telecommunications Union shows the US lagging in broadband adoption.

And who gives a damn? Since when is the status of a nation dependant on how many people utilize high-tech toys?

Should we be ashamed that Japanese tend to own multiple videogame consoles, while us backwards Americans only tend to own one?

Broadband Slowdown

[Bruha]

Better would be to focus on the slowdown of American broadband. When it was first rolled out there were no caps whatsoever and it was generally allowed to run at the speed that the equipment could handle. So the average DSL user ran over 3mbit in some cases if they had good lines. Uncapped both directions.

Then came the abusers and greed of the communications companies and today you see the extreme chokehold on the broadband today. SBC's base package for DSL is 384/128k dn/up compared to Verizon's 768k-1.544M/128k and the cable companies provide service comparable to Verizon.

New trends are starting to take hold in some areas with Verizon Wireless rolling out EvDO 3G which can run upwards of 2.3M and Verizon Landline (Seperate companies) is testing 2M+ speeds in certain (Lucky) markets with future plans to turn up the dial on broadband.

While those trends are nice to see you still have many who still have dialup due to cost and some worse off areas still cannot get a better connection than 26600kbps!

Interestingly people have pointed out monopolies. There is basically 1 telepone company in South Korea. Korean Telecom and a handfull of offshots after other companies were allowed to spring up but I'd say 90% of that country is serviced by KT and TMK there is only one cable company there. So it's questionable if more competition really is the answer (Korea may regulate, the us de-regulates)

I'm not sure what goes on in Japan but I would suspect nearly the same situation there also but you'll have to understand both countries until very recently had complete conglomerates (Sp?) of many things from electronics to communications systems. Now there is free market competition but not in the manner of how the US Govt mandated AT&T split up those companies were just forced to allow competition to "try" to work their way into a established system. Which probably will work becuase the exec's of those companies realize given choice people will pick the better company that provides them value.

Re:It's not entirely population density

[Zocalo]

Actually, I think the UK's problem is more marketing and pricing, rather than technically orientated, and suspect many other countries have the same problem. Sure, the coverage by area in the UK is pretty poor, but in terms of population reach it's not too bad - BT claims 80% [bt.com] (pinch of salt). So, for a population of 60m (to keep the numbers easy) we have 80% of that elegable for broadband, which is 48m. Great! Despite this, BT's own figures [adslguide.org] just released by Oftel show only 1,263,000 BT wholesale customers, which is just 2.6% of those capable of getting broadband via DSL. That doesn't include cable and other non-BT provisioned circuits though, but that can't add more than a couple of percentage points.

People can *get* broadband in the UK, they are either just choosing not to, don't understand the benefits, or plain do not think they require it. A survey of SMEs [theregister.co.uk] on broadband take up gives a few more pointers in this direction too. Those that have broadband, would recommend it and have come to rely on it heavily in 90% of cases. Yet 80% of SMEs have no plans to upgrade from dial-up access in the next 12 months, citing "lack of business case". What? When I worked at an SME (~300 computers) using ISDN access our phone costs were astronomical; we got a 256kb/s leased line for less.

The only way I can think of that explains this discrepency is that it all comes back to marketing. J.Q. Public sees the flashy ads by BT, AoL, NTL and others and thinks "Huh? Why do I want/need that?". The corporate types see these ads and see happy families around the computer and cartoon characters on the street and class it as a consumer product, and therefore irrelevent.

But then again, why complain? It's not like we need *another* huge bunch of noobs jumping on the 'net, is it? (Only half joking)

Open proxies = Korea

[Agent R]

S Korea and Japan lead with between 60 and 70% of S Korean households wired for speed, with Japan catching up quickly.

With about 80-90% of these households running open proxies to be hijacked by spammers. That is not really something to be proud of. (Ask any ISP who resorted to using korea.blackholes.us.)

but it is disappointing that the availability and price are in such sorry states here in the U.S."

Price is more of a setback than anything else.

Re:In Japan

[Ranma21]

I live in Tokyo, and have enjoyed my 12Mbps ADSL for over a year now. I would love one of those new 20Mbps Yahoo bb services, but after finally chatting to one of the gals pushing those free modem packaged on me I discovered that I could not use it. Why? Well we never got a phone service connected as its too exxy. We use mobiles only. There is a wire connected to our phone sockets but thats just for the ADSL. Yahoo requires an existing phone connection. Damn... Apparently the 20Mbps service has connects more often approaching the theoretcal max, whereas my older 12Mbps connection connects at just over 3Mbps most of the time... One last thing for those grumpy folks from the US making excuses as to why you are down the list. Excuses = poor sportsmanship. There will always be advantages to being a small densely populated country. There are also many disadvantages. Get over it.

Lazy Cheapskates

[vtechpilot]

I am a DSL salesman, and I have called thousands of americans and talked to them about DSL so I consider myself somewhat of an expert here. The main reason adoption rates of broadband are so low is a combination of two things.

1: Americans are lazy. It doesn't matter if there is a better service available. If it requires them to lift a finger then they don't want it. God forbid you have to change your email. It takes how many seconds to send a message to your entire contact list? Now some services are providing high speed services with the same old software they have been using, and you would think then that people would be all over that, but that brings be to my second point.

2: Americans are cheap. Sure you could get high speed and keep your aol.com address for $50 a month. Or you could get DSL from the phone company for $30 to $35 a month. But why should you do that when you can get dialup for $9 a month now?

Thats all there is to it. I would say only about 1 in 15 sales for me are people who decided they just need something faster, and all of these are usually customers where DSL just recently became available. Typically if speed is the issue, customers sign up with who ever offers it first (you know who you are.) For the other %93 of them its about points 1 or 2.

In Australia

[pythonisman]

In Australia, where a huge proportion of our population live in major cities, and "within 100 miles / 160 kilometres" of a major city / regional centre, and the broadband situation is appaling.

There are a few decent providers out there, (a very few) the majority do nothing but deliberately trick people into long contracts at hopelessly slow plans)

In australia, $70 a month would be lucky to buy you 256/64 ADSL on a 3Gb plan, $90 a month for 512/128 with 5Gb, $150 a month for 1.5 / 256 with 8 / 9 Gb...

I have not seen any advirtisements for residential ADSL with speeds higher than these, and I don't imagine if they existed they would be 'affordable'.

Sure, there are cheap providers. if you don't mind being stuck in a pipe with too many people getting timeouts and incomprehensibly slow speeds.

Then there's the cable.
With so many people now sharing the cable, at peak times, the speed just drops. And drops. The Australian Personal Computer magazine reviewed broadband and the Cable service "at peak times, you would be better off with dial up".

Not to mention it costs $90 a month for 3Gb .

I wish you 'poor americans' would stop crying.
I pity those in the same situation as me, over there, but the fact is, when I thought 33.6 was pretty cool, relatives in the US had cable for hardly much more cost.

Dialup Isn't a bad thing. If you don't need broadband, you shouldn't have to pay for it, but I would sooner see a range of cheaper, slowed DSL like products adopted as opposed to the majority of dialup, because it is a far better technology.

Wireless internet is interesting, and being trialled, but the security problems are a concern.

Please, US, please, stop crying about "The state of broadband". I give it to you that you don't have a high %age of broadband uptake with the population, but that also comes with a high %age of people who don't want it, or don't need it.

Re:Population density??

[lamasquerade]

80% of Australia's population live in about 10 cities on the coasts, yet I know we are not anywhere near the top due to, wait for it, bad pricing, bad marketing and bad regulators. What's so hard about admitting your country messed up?

Sure, but look at the differences

[Anonymous Coward]

Compare the size of the two countries. Compare who deployed technologies first. It's just like the cell phone network. One reason why we've got such a mix of providers and a lack of commonly available high-speed wireless connectivity is that we've got all this expensive legacy equipment deployed in almost all population centers.

It's similar to the story that in some African communities, cell phone access is being installed instead of wired telephone service. Technological jumps just make sense in some areas. Just because one country has a more widely deployed "new" technology doesn't mean that every other country is in a "sorry state."

Just be thankful that a majority of our (U.S.) population have Internet access and that such access is not filtered by our government.

Some comment about broadband use in Hong Kong &

[sdugoten2]

I have lived in the States for 13 years and now live in Hong Kong. I guess I can share some of my experience regarding to broadband use in both Hong Kong and US.

The reason why US broadband usage is not as high as other Asian countries is because of adoption and availability. I used to lived in California. If my memory served me right, SBC (aka Pacific Bell)first offer DSL service back in late 1998 or early 1999. When they offer DSL, it was price at $49.99 for 1.5mb/128kB DHCP (and later become PPPoE) and $199 for 6mB/384kB with 5 static IP. I had the $199 plan back then. Dial up service from Earthlink was around $25 bucks. Most areas still didn't have broadband service. My area didn't have Internet cable (Comcast) service till 2001. I think SBC offer [sbc.com] the the 6M/384k plan for $159 and 1.5/128 still at $49.99 now.

Hong Kong offer DSL service at about the same time in late 1998. However, the difference is that availabilty become much higher than the State due to the coverage is alot higher. Dial up service was required to pay per minute charge (what they called PNet charges). So, people quickly moved to the flat rate DSL services. Right now, you can get 6mB/640kB DSL service at around $40 bucks with dynamic IP, and $80 bucks with 4 static IP. 1.5Mb/256kB is as low as $20 bucks.

In Hong Kong, pricing is already an advantage over the State. And the other reason is the coverage is much higher, people are easier to get broadband service. And thirdly, people in Hong Kong tend to like to use newer technology at a premium price. In the State, majority of the people who use Internet for checking email or light web surfing might just use dial up service. On the other hand, the same kind of people in Hong Kong will use the low end broadband service. Dial up service in Hong Kong is no longer offered except being a value add bundle with the pruchase of broadband service.

So, adoption of new technology is the key here. For example, celluar phone in Hong Kong is now a necessity. People will buy new celluar phone as new model release. It is a fashion and trendy thing. It is HARD to find an adult in HK without a celluar phone. Over 80% of high school kids have their own cell phone. Elementary school kids have their own cell phone is not uncommon too. Cell phone with built in camera is very popular in HK. 1 out of 10 people, you can find someone with one of those cell phone. On the other hand, celluar phone usage in US is a bit different. It is more or less still a luxuary stuff since the air time charges is not cheap. In Hong Kong, celluar plan can be as low as $17 with 1100 mins out of network + 1000 mins within network.

So, the key reason why broadband usage in the State is not as high is because of adoption of new technology, availabilty and most importantly, the way how people look at new technology.

What really matters: the TREND & its coming re

[Anonymous Coward]

The general trend is that these countries (esp. Korea) adopt new technologies faster than US or Europe. What will obviously follow is that those countries will be better suited for future opportunities, while others play a catch-up (U.S.) Unless U.S. starts to look at broadband infrastructure as an investment (like a library/university) rather than a cash cow for the greeds of capitalists, this trend will only accelerate. Remember that Russia was a superpower like U.S. only 2 decades ago.

Re:A Nation of trolls

[LeBlueBoy]

If people wanted broadband, they would have it. More americans would rather spend their dollars on either having fake tits or squeezing fake tits to change things in the USA.

These are probably the same idiots that actually leave the house occasionally to see a movie in theaters, rather than download a zero-day cam release to watch on their 21 inch flatscreen monitors. The same people who pursue fortunes and adventure outside the realm of Everquest and engage in games and activities that exercise more than just their thumb muscles.

And some of those people may still have a library card.