US Lags World In Broadband Access

An anonymous reader writes "When It Comes To Broadband, U.S. Plays Follow The Leader says a story in IWeek. Their thesis is that, while broadband access in the United States rose from 60 million users in March 2005 to 84 million in March 2006, the US is well behind countries like England and China. Indeed, what you may not realize is that the U.S. ranks a surprisingly poor 12th in worldwide broadband access, a situation which could threaten its ability to maintain its technological lead. The federal government is no help: the FCC has almost no data on the rate of hi-speed adoption, or of what the speed and quality of those services are. Broadband is more expensive here than in other nations, as well, almost 10 times as expensive by some estimates. The cost and poor quality of service aren't from population density, aren't from lack of interest, and are not from lack of technical know-how. So, what is holding us back?

location, location, location

[superwiz]

Most of the contry was settled with the cheap gas in mind. So a large part of the population is decentralized.

This might be...

[Bin Naden]

This might have something to do with the US being such a big country. It's quite easy to put cables through a heavily concentrated Asian population. It's quite another thing to lay thousands of miles of cable across the United Staes.

Again?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we've seen this story many times before. The basic summary of all comments is:

• The USA is a large country with a dispersed population. It's tough rolling out broadband to such a large geographic area
• The country pioneered the internet and, as such, also has to deal with legacy issues. As an analogy, it's easier to move forward when everybody has a touch-tone phone than having to move forward and keep legacy support for customers who only have rotary phones.
• ???
• Profit!

 

Re:I have an idea

[superwiz]

But you wouldn't mind having it ran as well as US interstate system, would you? For all it's troubles it's better than the roads in any country in the world (with the possible exception of Germany). And it's built by slacking unionized labor. Government sucks at building and maintaining infrastructure, but it doesn't suck at making it interoperate. Private interests are good at building and maintaining infrastructure, but they suck at interoperating with each other.

Here we go..

[LilGuy]

Cue the 200 "US has so much more land area than _____, so that's why" threads. I think this story has been a repeat on Slashdot for a good portion of 6 years, if not more.

What is holding us back?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what is holding us back?
One word: Comcast
$60 / month for cable internet is the worst screwing I've ever received.

Re:This might be...

[PingSpike]

Also, if the cable and phone companies did that they would set a bad precident for themselves upholding their end of the aggreement with the tax payers.

Re:location, location, location

[superwiz]

Russia had horses, it had more land and it had comparable population. It is mostly urban. People settled close to services in the 20th century. Cheap gas allowed the distance from the services to be further while maintaining the time it took to reach them.

is this a valid benchmark?

[ksheff]

Is the percentage of people on broadband a even valid benchmark of technological ability of a nation? Maybe a large amount of people don't have broadband because they don't want it? My parents live in a little town in the northern Great Plains and they recently got DSL, not because they were chomping at the bit to get broadband, but because the internal modem in their computer went bad and it would have cost them as much to get that replaced by the local computer guy as it would for the DSL installation charge. Otherwise, they would have stayed with dialup because that is sufficient for their online usage.

IMHO, the only people who harp about this are the companies trying to get a govt subsidy.

Re:location, location, location

[superwiz]

The country wasn't realy settled until the 20th century. That is to say to urban centers appeared (off of east coast). The prime targets for internet infrastructure are the dense population centers. Most of the people in this country live outside of them because they can reach their services in reasonable time by cars.

Re:Whose technological lead?

[planetmn]

they do most of their manufacturing and an increasing amount of their research overseas

Technological lead has nothing to do with manufacturing. And of course overseas research is increasing, you can't go lower than 0 which a lot of countries had not too long ago.

As much as the whining on slashdot would have you believe otherwise, the U.S. is a technological leader and a country that millions around the world want to come to. We have some of the best universities in the world. Have you ever noticed the number of foreign student's that come to the U.S. to study?

Technological lead, from a business perspective, means having the talent pool and the infrastructure to support research. This means having the universities (which we have), employees (which we have), high speed access (which we have, any business, pretty much in any location, can get a T1, etc.), reliable communications (there isn't a communications system in the world as reliable as the U.S. PSTN). What do we lack? People on farms and living hours outside of cities can't get broadband and can't access Youtube and Bittorrent? That doesn't prevent us from being the technological leader.

-dave

Re:location, location, location

[chill]

Wow! So, you mean, I can move to somewhere with a super-dense population like New York, Los Angeles or Chicago and be able to get 100 MBps broadband for a reasonable price?

Wait...I live in one of those places and it isn't available.

Population density isn't the problem here. If that were the case, our major cities would be wired out the wazoo, but they're still "oooo...ADSL! I can get 768 Kbps upstream for only $65!"

Re:location, location, location

[xzvf]

I agree. It is nearly impossible to get good broadband in rural locations. I'm not a big government type, but it's time to do a Tennessee Valley Authority for broadband. Without that kind of kickstart most of the US might not have electric service today.

Re:This might be...

[Bin Naden]

Not a bad argument for why rural areas are lagging, but why are urban areas lagging too?

The United States was one of the first countries to have internet widely available, as such they have the infrastructures of that generation. However, countries in which internet sprung up later have newer infrastructures that have better capacity. The internet capacity of the United States then becomes an economic problem: is the cost of updating the entire internet infrastructure of the United States worth the benefit? If you examine it from a telco point of view, you will get subscriptions whether you have a fast connection or a faster connection. There is basically no new market to gain by increasing the speed of the internet connection, but an enormous sunk cost. Also, the nature of the industry makes it almost impossible for a startup to come in, up the ante and increase the speed of the internet. Telecommunication is a natural monopoly in that sense. In short, wait a few years, or decades.

Re:Competition, competition, competition

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Here's the end result- the Quarterly Report. This makes American corporations short sighted- if they can't show a profit within 4 months, then that's a project not worth doing. With competition, margins are razor-thin on broadband unless you're the very first company into a new area with sufficient potential subscribership to pay for your equipment within 4 months, you're not going to do it. Even more urban areas rarely get broadband unless existing infrastructure can support it, and small towns in the middle of nowhere aren't sufficiently populated to pay for it.

In most other nations, government services step in at that point, but not in the United States where we are afraid of government media services.

Re:I have an idea

[chill]

The poor? How about decent broadband for the RICH? They don't have it, either.

That's part of the point. The U.S. considers anything above ISDN "broadband", whereas in the rest of the world you can get 10 and 100 MBps access. That is almost unheard of in the U.S., rich or not.

Capitalism

[MBCook]

This is pure capitalism. Thanks to all the competition in the broadband market, the US is well covered and the prices are great.

No... wait....

Most places are under a monopoly leading to high prices ($60 a month for 2mbps), bad service, late coming to the area, etc.

Let's look at me. I didn't get cable modem access until about 2001 or 2002 despite living near a HUGE development area. One of the fastest growing counties in the entire country at the time. And I'm in a rich/dense neighborhood. You'd think that would spur them.

Nope. I had to pay for ISDN at INSANE prices.

What about DSL? Still not available. "Too far out.". My guess is they just don't want to compete with the established cable. But I don't get a choice of cable so my prices are high and my service is terrible.

Signing up so that only one cable operator or local phone company can operate in an area is one of the worst decisions a municipality can make.

Please, Time Warner, come save me from Comcrud.

Re:This might be...

[QuantumRiff]

Do you have any idea how much dark fiber is running through the US? Honestly, this was a good argument about 5 years ago. I live in a town of about 50k that has 4 different companies that run fiber through it on the way between SF and Seattle. I heard somewhere that the estimate is something like 200 pairs total.. (if your going to dig up roads, you might as well lay a bunch of pairs so you don't have to dig up roads again in a few years..)..

Now, in my town, which had fiber run to all the neighborhoods by the cable company 3 years ago, I have watched my cable internet access go from $35/month for a 3Mb connection, to $45/month (because I don't have cable TV, they decided to charge me an extra $10/month to "encourage" me to purchase cable TV) This month, my rates went up to $58/month (plus taxes, modem rental, misc other fees), for a 7MB connection. Funny thing is, they don't have 7Mb service in my town yet, and never got around to upgrading their connection out of town. When my access was 3Mb/s, I was getting usually around 2Mb in the evening. Now that I have a 7Mb connection, I am getting about 1.5Mb/s in the evening. The cable company has tripled the number of customers, and doesn't want to spend the money for a faster pipe out of town. So, I am currently paying $60+ a month for a little under 2Mb/s connection.. (ie, I'm paying them almost double for slower service.) The company decided that they could pay off the cost of running the fiber and stuff by charging $35/month, otherwise they wouldn't have done it. So what exactly is that extra $25+ a month going to? They have not been upgrading their infrastructure...

Sadly, My only other broadband choices are the phone company, which I had before, but was 16 (yes that is 16!!!) hops from my DSL box just to get out on the public Internet.. (added about 95ms lag, go QWEST). and a newer Wi-Max provider, Clearwire. Clearwire blocks pretty much anything but public Web access, has a 19 page "contract agreement" with a 1 year contract, and unless you notify them in writing 30 days prior to the 1 year expiration, your automatically renewed for another 1 year contract, with something like a $180 cancellation fee.

Re:location, location, location

[Hadlock]

Do a wiki search for "Lincon Highway". Wasn't even until 1920 that we had a single road across the US. Even longer until it was paved. Rails, sure, but driving across the US was a 30 day adventure, involving fording streams and rivers. San Fransisco was already completely built out by the time of the 1908 fire. We didn't have a national highway act until the end of the Eisenhower term. And people wonder why California has a totally different culture than the east coast - it was pretty much a seperate independent country until the advent of the highway and cheap travel in the 40s and 50s.... also why none of SF's banks failed in the great depression.

Re:I have an idea

[Xonstantine]

Katrina is a non-example. It doesn't say anything about how government handles long-term infrastructure projects. It only says something about how government handles security and emergency situations.

I disagree. A substantial amount of time and money has been spent on disaster preparedness by the Government, but they seemingly overlooked relatively minor things like communications interoperability and task force coordination, which, among other things, led to trucks with supplies sitting idle while people were going hungry and thirsty in New Orleans.

Re:Competition, competition, competition

[Anonymous Coward]

Certainly: Sweden [cia.gov].

A country world-renowned for its internet access, which has about 20 people/km^2 compared to the US's 30 people/km^2.

I think I've made my point.

Re:Again?

[qbwiz]

Perhaps, but what percentage of their populations live in northern Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Canada? It could be that the population density of those countries varies enough that the few very rural people without broadband can't bring down percentage, compared with the very large number of people in places with high population density and broadband.

Re:This might be...

[tOaOMiB]

Person C: Yeah, but where do Canadian's live? While Canada might be larger in terms of land area, what if you look at inhabited land area?

I call bullshit.

[NeutronCowboy]

I live in one of the most densely populated regions in the US and arguably the center of the tech industry. Yet my choice for broadband is either a single cable company, SBC or several CLECs like Speakeasy. Not only that, but in the last couple of places that I lived, I always was at the max range of the DSLAM, which meant that my connection was regularly crap.

The problem is not location. The problem is local governments being cahoots with telecom monopolies who love nothing more than charging through the roof for crap connections. Yes, other nations have telecom monopolies as well, but for some reason they're not facing the same kind of problems. I suspect that the difference is that with a state monopoly, you can vote for change. With a government sanctioned economic monopoly, you can only bend over.

Re:Again?

[maxume]

Of course, that completely ignores population density density. There's two there for a reason. I bet Alaska has really nice broadband penetration, despite its rather incredible size, simply because a huge percentage of the population lives in cities. Iceland works like that too; 190,000 people live in/around Reykjavik, at a density in excess of 1000 people/square mile, compared to a total population of about 300,000 living at a density of less than 10 people per square mile for the entire country. Serve one modest city and you serve 2/3 of the country.

It would be much more relevant to consider serviceable population vs. infrastructure costs. If you integrated the part of the graph with positive slope, you could even find out how many people in a country were worth servicing at all.

Re:The Real Easy Answer

[sycodon]

I am speaking of regulations that prevent a company from laying down lines and competing with the established providers. I don't care what they charge because the more there are putting in lines, the lower the prices will be.

 

Re:location, location, location

[eln]

While most towns were founded prior to the automobile, the actual structure of most towns has transformed quite a bit in response to it. Even though there were many far-flung towns prior to cars, most towns tended to be fairly dense, with most people living near the center of the city (except for ranchers and farmers of course). After the car, you get widespread suburbs and exurbs, reachable only via freeways, and the population within a given metropolitan area becomes a lot less densely packed.

Re:Competition, competition, competition

[The Lerneaen Hydra]

IIAS (I am a Swede). Considering that the vast, vast majority of people in Sweden live in an urbanized city center or near there,you've essentially got a relatively small number of cities with a relatively large population, in contrast to the US, where you have lots of people living in the middle of nowhere, (though with the occasional densely populated city), and as such you can't really make that comparison.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Capitalism

[Bluesman]

Like you said, this is because you have a government granted monopoly to a private company that has no incentive to provide anything better than "good enough."

It's not a free market, it's the worst of all possible scenarios.

Most traditional liberatarian/conservatives would agree that providing infrastructure support is a legitimate and useful function of government. The logistical and real-estate problems in building a national highway system, for example, are probably only solvable through government intervention.

The fact that the U.S. Constitution explicity grants the federal government power to build roads for the use of the Post Office is telling. Obviously the founders could not envision e-mail, but facilitating the transfer of such information would most definitely be within the original scope of the document. It doesn't even require creative "interpretation" by the Supreme Court to see that.

This is one case where the U.S. government has a legitimate claim to the legal authority to provide infrastructure to U.S. citizens, and they've abdicated that responsibility instead.

Now, I'm not arguing that a federally sponsored internet infrastructure would be necessarily cheaper and more efficient overall than the one we have now. It would be more expensive in order to be universally available.

But this whole thing is a perfect example of how our government is so broken that they have to invent new "powers" that allow them to waste billions of dollars on ridiculous programs that are blatantly unconstitutional, all while completely ignoring a basic responsibility.

Re:Competition, competition, competition

[greenbird]

FYI, in the city of Iqaluit, Nunavut which is just shy of the Arctic circle and has a population of 5,236 you can get 2 Mbps broadband for about $60CDN. Elsewhere in this discussion someone mentioned that they lived is a large U.S. urban area and they could only get 768 Kbps for $65US.

I think the point is that there are only a couple of dozen isolated locations like that in Canada whereas there are thousands in the US. Expanding broadband to those couple dozen locations is trivial and cheap compared to doing the same thing to thousands of locations

Re:Competition, competition, competition

[klui]

The counter argument to this line of reasoning is "why can't a city like New York City have fast and cheap broadband because of its high population density?"

Re:Blame the people; they got what they wanted.

[goofballs]

Remember the Tennessee Valley Authority from your history class? Why was it important?

it's important because it shows what a bad idea having gov't run lun large projects is? the tva is essentially a $6B corporation carrying $29B in debt, subsidized by 250M people, so that 15M people can have chearper than normal electricity. yeah, sounds like a real winner to me. not.

Re:Cost and competition are excuses

[Anonymous Coward]

Americans think they have capitalism and everybody else has socialism.
In reality, everybody else has capitalism and the US has state protected monopolies.