US Ranking for Broadband Falls 298
Ant writes "Broadband Reports mentions Declan McCullagh's CNET editorial where he believes everything is a-ok in the world of broadband, and people concerned with falling global rankings are over-reacting. 'FCC figures released last month show that 94.3 percent of U.S. ZIP codes have high-speed lines available to them,' he writes; though as we've pointed out, the FCC considers one home in a zip code with broadband to mean that entire zip code is 'serviced.'"
It's all percentage versus real numbers (Score:5, Insightful)
Note, however, that on the same page it says US is leading the world in the total number of broadband connections [itfacts.biz] with 31.7 million cable/DSL/other lines. The nearest competitor - China - only has 22.2 million broadband hook-ups.
USA #1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:USA #1 (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure getting broadband to every Bubba in the woods, Jebediah on his farm, and Kaczynski in his mountain shack is relevant to competition. The fact that the US has vast swathes of nearly empty countryside means that they'll have a greater percentage of "disconnected" areas. The fact that there's no great competitive loss as a result is overlooked. A proper comparison would be per-capita broadband connections sub-divided into categories based on population density.
Re:USA #1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Universal service gaps don't refer just to "dead weight". The threshold for ROI by monopoly telcos is too high to serve even many urban neighborhoods with otherwise very high productivity and consumer potential. None of the excuses about density or infrastructure are the truth, as belied by the experience in NYC. If it's true here, the media capital of the world, it's certainly true in other aggregated communities which could potentially rival it if they were properly connected.
Re:USA #1 (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:USA #1 (Score:2)
Re:USA #1 (Score:2)
True, but I think Verizon is a special case: a combination of the worst baby bell (Bell Atlantic) and the most inept and inefficient non-bell ILEC (GTE). I sw
Re:USA #1 (Score:2)
Re:broadband experience...increases... earning pow (Score:2)
Re:USA #1 (Score:2, Troll)
1.) I lived in Seoul for the last 4 years, and enjoyed it when they upgraded me from ADSL to VDSL, no charge, just to free up space in the lower speed catagories. I'm in China now, and IPv6 is underway.
2.) American predominance? Don't look now, but English will be surpassed as the most widely used language on the net in less than two years - o
Re:USA #1 (Score:3, Insightful)
By what? According to whose statistics? The #2 language used by Google users is German, and it's not going to be overtaking English anytime soon.
"I lived in Seoul for the last 4 years, and enjoyed it when they upgraded me from ADSL to VDSL, no charge, just to free up space in the lower speed catagories."
You want to know why that doesn't happen in the US
Re:USA #1 (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to change subjects - in Europe, there are cars that have 27 horsepower, but they can go several hundred miles on about 8 gallons of fuel. In the US, we have 500 horsepower cars that can travel gas station to gas station. With all the crying over gas prices, people also don't understand that Diesel is the way to go as
Re:USA #1 (Score:2)
Re:USA #1 (Score:2)
Re:USA #1 (Score:2)
Re:USA #1 (Score:3, Insightful)
Most "broadband" in USA isn't really that broad (Score:3, Informative)
For about the same price, in Korea they give you 10mb/s both ways. Orders of magnitudes faster.
Re:Most "broadband" in USA isn't really that broad (Score:2, Insightful)
IDSL (144k) is not broadband; even bonded IDSL (max 576k) isn't broadband. ADSL/SDSL is not always broadband either -- ranging from 160k to around 7M. (down anyway)
For the modern world (read: the world we live in right now), dialup is just too damned slow to get anything done. I've h
Re:It's all percentage versus real numbers (Score:3, Informative)
Show me the website of someone offering 24MB/1MB DSL in New York. This guy gets that in Tokyo. [typepad.com] Show me the website of a company providing VDSL to a New York apartment for $50 a month like you can get in South Korea [hanaro.com].
I'm sure its nothing to fret about, after all 11th place is respectable for a country that didn't even bother to show up.
Re:It's all percentage versus real numbers (Score:2)
Re:It's all percentage versus real numbers (Score:2)
Re:It's all percentage versus real numbers (Score:2)
Re:It's all percentage versus real numbers (Score:2)
I know it's surprising to NYC'ers, I used to live there and suffer with TWC with the rest of you, but CableVision is just another reason I'm glad I
Re:It's all percentage versus real numbers (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It's all percentage versus real numbers (Score:2)
Re:It's all percentage versus real numbers (Score:2)
In case your wondering you almost can't find a job around here that isn't about selling something in retail in one form or another..
Re:It's all percentage versus real numbers (Score:2)
One could argue that price is irrelevant, but the US is far behind on average connection speed, which does matter.
Re:It's all percentage versus real numbers (Score:3, Insightful)
Since when does something being hard give you an excuse to do a crappy job at it?
Plus, as others have pointed out in this thread, they percentage of Americans how live in Urban areas is about the same as that of Canada, yet the Canadians managed the #3 spot... Not only that, but in Seoul, people have tens of megabits of throughut. I don't know about you, but I live in a fairly urban part
Re:It's all percentage versus real numbers (Score:2)
China isn't a superpower (yet). IIRC, a much greater percentage of Chinese are pretty poor. China does have great wealth, but I think a greater disparity than the US.
Re:It's all percentage versus real numbers (Score:2, Funny)
Yep, good old Canada, weve got a real high pop density here...
Re:Sure, but the percentage difference is staggeri (Score:3, Insightful)
"The majority of the Canadian population, about 60% is concentrated within a thin belt of land representing 2.2% of the land between Windsor, Ontario and Quebec City." [atlas.gc.ca]
Re:Sure, but the percentage difference is staggeri (Score:3, Insightful)
Complete BS (Score:3, Interesting)
How about breaking it down by zip+4 and that number would drop dramatically.
And what about Bush fixing the digital divide?
Re:Complete BS (Score:2)
There are what, 50 million Zip+4's in the US? How about breaking it down by Zip+2. I think that would make more sense.
Re:Complete BS (Score:2, Interesting)
Depends on your definition of "fix":
Fix, as in give everyone broadband or fix, as in create disparity.
fix: v. fixed, fixing, fixes
1.) To place securely; make stable or firm.
2.) To influence the outcome or actions of by improper or unlawful means.
Re:Complete BS (Score:2, Insightful)
Typical FCC lawyerspeak bullshit. Not unlike the FCC's fiction of how many households can get over-the-air DTV.
And what about Bush fixing the digital divide?
Yup. He'll take care of that, just like he's taken care of the environment, education, security and the economy...
Re:Complete BS (Score:2, Funny)
He's being held back by Al Gore patent on the internet.
Re:Complete BS (Score:2)
FCC (Score:5, Funny)
Re:FCC (Score:4, Funny)
Re:FCC (Score:2)
It's not a right (Score:3, Insightful)
Most of the U.S. is farmland. Very little of it is what you call "Blue States". And as anyone who studies these things can tell you, farmland doesn't have the population density of even relatively small cities. So you wonder why you don't get broadband out in the sticks? It's because you don't have enough neighbors.
It's one of the prices you pay for peace and quiet.
Re:It's not a right (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:It's not a right (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:It's not a right (Score:2)
Unless I put in one myself. B-) But then I'd have to rent some T1s or better out into the boonies. B-(
Re:It's not a right (Score:5, Insightful)
Parts of Sweden are very sparsely populated, and yet broadband access is widely available. The government decided a few years ago that Internet access was important and that appropriate funding should be provided to remote municipalities with low population densities. Since private companies did not find it attractive to build high-speed connections to remote places, the government and municipalities agreed to cover part of the cost.
Access to communications _should_ be a human right, just like the right to education (article 26, Universal Declaration of Human Rights). Private enterprise cannot be trusted or expected to cover human rights -- infrastructure in particular should be provided by public organisations.
Re:It's not a right (Score:3, Insightful)
Bah. Pretty much every home has an internet pipe. The phone line. Where is the compelling need for govt mandated (and taxpayer funded) broadband?
Since private companies did not find it attractive to build high-speed connections to remote places, the government and municipalities agreed to cover part of the cost.
Unless this is a different planet, the Swedish government makes just as much money as every other government. Exactly zero. They get it from taxes.
Re:It's not a right (Score:2)
or ensuring that the recipients of that money are using it properly. the problem in the US is not taxes or funding, the problem is that the government protected monopolies that are responsible for providing the technology (and that do make money) don't have any incentive to provide better service, because the fcc isn't doing its job.
Re:It's not a right (Score:5, Interesting)
That will never happen in the US as long as a republican is in office. You can't offer up that kind of idea in the US without being called a socialist. The odd thing about this is that the very people that this kind of thing would help (the red staters) support bush and the republicans.
Access to communications _should_ be a human right, just like the right to education (article 26, Universal Declaration of Human Rights). Private enterprise cannot be trusted or expected to cover human rights -- infrastructure in particular should be provided by public organisations.
I totally agree. In fact I once expressed the idea that people should have a right to the internet and that the government should support initiatives to broaden access, and I was shouted down and called a communist. I still don't understand why people in this country fight against themselves.
Re:It's not a right (Score:3, Interesting)
South Carolina's voters recently refused to change the segrationist language in their state constitution specifically because it might create a right to a public education.
If they're that concerned that they don't want to pay for kids to get a good education, what makes you think that they're going to pay for them to get broadband!?
Re:It's not a right (Score:2)
The key word there, BOTH. In a free country, when 'both' sides get as similar as they are in the usa, natural forces bring more parties to the table, more names on the ballot, and tides swing with the new names. Then again, that would require a free country, where natural forces can sprout up and swing the system. Will never happen when you can only have 2 parties in the system, and both are equally corrupted by the finances.
Re:It's not a right (Score:2)
However, with extremely few excpetions (Score:3, Insightful)
Dialup is perfectly functional at this point for information access. The web works fin
What do you mean by a "human right"? (Score:2)
Second of all, it's all well and good to say that in your opinion, all humans should be entitled to communications access, but it's much harder to say just how far this access should extend.
Do all humans, in your opinion, have the right to free telephone access? Free dialup access in public libraries and schools? Free dialup access in the home? Free broadband access in every school? F
Re:It's not a right (Score:3, Insightful)
Why? Dialup is available throughout the entire country. While it's more convenient to surf the web at broadband speeds, this isn't a food/shelter issue.
The reality is you choose where you want to live in the US if you're a citizen. If you live somewhere without broadband, and it's important to you, then move. There are lots of reasons to live in "the country" - infrastructure isn't one of them.
If broadband is a right for country people, when do I get m
Re:It's not a right (Score:3, Informative)
There are two entirely different things, and people often get them confused: rights and entitlements. Rights are things like the right to bear arms, the right to practice any (or no) religion, and so forth. Entitlements are things that the government should give somebody, such as cheese to poor people.
Access to communications _should_ be a human right, just like the right to education (article 26, Universal Declaration of Human Rights).
The fre
Eh, some areas you'll never manage to cover.. (Score:5, Funny)
Them 'engyneers' betta get the hell off ma land!
Broadband (Score:5, Informative)
In
Additionally, nobody LIKES this one carrier, who up until just recently were actually charging their wholesale customers (ISPs who lease DSLAM ports via PPPoA/L2TP) more per connection than their retail customers. This ended when the ACCC (.au equivalent of the US FTC) served them with a competition notice, which they are now currently trying to work their way out of.
Yes, America has it good, comparatively. And, unlike Korea, they're not responsible for ~5/6 of all reported open proxy hosts.
Re:Broadband (Score:2)
Generally, this isn't true. Your choice is DSL or cable. We have a government mandated one cable carrier per area, so you have no choice in cable. DSL regions are generally serviced by one company, so IF you're close enough to a station (and only one person I've ever known is) you can get broadband from one company. Sure, many companies sell DSL, but it's all remarketed from the same provider.
Additionally, nobody LIKES t
Re:Broadband (Score:2)
So while out their somewhere are more carries I still have a chocie of one and some people have a chocie of none...
Re:Broadband (Score:2)
in almost all of the US you have exactly one cable provider. cable internet costs a ridiculous amount of money unless you are also a cable tv subscriber. (minimum $55/month for cable internet or ~$80 for internet and tv(*))
if you choose dsl instead, you do have choices, but they still suck. choice 1 is to get the crappy service offered by the local phone monopoly. in many area
Re:Agreed AU ISP is a pain. (Score:2)
Currently in AU i'm getting 1.5MB down/256k up with 15GB a month. After 15GB the connection gets throttled down to 64k. This is $49/month.
Re:Agreed AU ISP is a pain. (Score:2)
If I wanted to move to 30 gig / 30 gig (60 gig a month), the price would become $60 US. Bigger plans exist (as well as flatrate plans), too. Sure, there are far cheaper places around the world, but it's not as bad as people make out.
Check out:
http://www.netspace.net.au
http://www.inter
Re:Agreed AU ISP is a pain. (Score:3, Informative)
I pay $A109.95 a month for 512/512 DSL with 30GB of included data, and $A10/GB additional to that (although the 30GB is only for transit data, not data received via a second tier IX such as Pipe or VIX, so it's very hard to move 30GB in a month on a 512K line in any event)
Michael Powell (Score:4, Funny)
Has Michael Powell really become this useless?
Re:Michael Powell (Score:2)
Michael Powell isn't terribly concerned. "Better data is needed," Powell admits. "But the data we have is still valuable." Who most benefits from the "value" of that data is the billion dollar question.
1) Need Better Data
2) Data we have is Valuable
3) ???
4) Profit
Skew You (Score:2)
Then, what, there are 6 people in Nevada with broadband?
Seriously, it's so expensive for what I need internet for I can't justify it. Further, I'm concerned with paying for services I don't want and having some type of service rammed down my throat which I don't want at all.
SBC/Yahoo talk like everything is rosy and wonderful, but I don't see it in my future and it's probably going to be more and more packag
Bah... (Score:3, Informative)
Wireless. I don't know how many other places have access to it, but I have microwave through michwave. Only requirement is LoS to the tower. Seems like rural areas with lots of farmland could really benefit from microwave.
Declan is gonna get some Big Corporate Cash! (Score:2)
Declan, your wallet gonna be gettin' mmmmmiiiiighty fat, dude!
The telcos and entertainment industry won't forget you when it comes time for payback. Or has that part already gone?
You sly dog!
It's not rocket science. (Score:2)
Oh wait. That wouldn't sound as good. Never mind.
So many definitions... (Score:2)
It's debatable what is considered to be Broadband - with most surveys falling back on "always-on" service. But average American speeds (oh, and what ARE those) compared to South Korean speeds - should that be taken into account?
Then the survey refers to zip codes that have service "available" - which does not seem to take into full account what might be available on the edges, efforts to drive service outside of the normal methods (friend a mile away with a Pringle
Re:So many definitions... (Score:2)
will not spend the money to upgrade the
infrastructure they inherited from Ma Bell.
DSL service is "available" in my neighborhood,
but is nearly useless. The Central Office (CO)
is greater than 18,000 feet away, with most of
the POTS cabling being 30+ year old buried
copper wire. The local telco (VERIZON) would
like to charge $30 per month for their consumer
DSL service that is (as tested) only 20%
faster than dial-up. Their Business Wireless
DSL is also available, at n
Garbage? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Garbage? (Score:3, Insightful)
His logic is spot on. You don't seem to understand 'ru
Re:Garbage? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Garbage? (Score:2)
It doesn't stretch the truth much to say that everyone in Canada lives within a three hour drive of the U.S. border. But more significantly, perhaps, the Canadian population is concentrated in just four urban regions: the Golden Horseshoe in southern Ontario, (Niagara Falls-Hamilton-Toronto,) Montréal, British Columbia's Lower Mainland and southern Vanco
Well duh (Score:2, Interesting)
But lets talk about speed, what does broadband mean to them? (Pedants aside, since we all know broadband doesn't technically mean fast internet)
Koreans and Japanese have these crazy fat 100mbit pipes and whatnot I'm always reading about.
We're far behind when I'm actually getting excited because Comcast bumped my service up to 3mbits.
Shallow article (Score:3, Insightful)
About govt regulations : European countries _regulate_ their former monopoly telcos into offering to host their competitors' routers into their own last-mile hubs for _regulated_ fees, allowing customers to subscribe directly to a competitor's DSL offering bypassing the telco completely. So in this case gvt regulations _enable_ competition and the effect on prices and qos is dramatic. I will leave the most ideologically blindsided anti-gvt drones think about the paradoxical situation.
As for landmass, well, it brings obvious benefits to US residents, here are the drawbacks. You don't here from Japan that they are the #1 nation in agriculture because they make do with their small space. They just say ok, we depend on imports to eat, let's make up to that on smthg else.
Korea is more connected than the US, and that's a fact. The same way that Finland will nevercompte with spain for the tourism euros of the Germans seeking sun during their vacation, the US will have to cope with a huge overhead to keep up in the world of connected societies.
Maybe they should throw a little bit of gvt regulation into it.
Re:Shallow article (Score:2)
Canada is larger than the US, and it much better connected.
Its geographic challenges are much more difficult to overcome than the US ones.
Re:Shallow article (Score:2)
Says who?
The US could just accept that there will be a higher percentage of Americans without broadband access than, say, Koreans. There's nothing wrong with that - people who want broadband can live in areas where there is broadband. If there is an economically sufficient number of people outside those areas, someone may develop a new technoogy to serve those areas.
But the US doesn't have to "cope with a huge
Re:Shallow article (Score:2)
If you look at the rest of the US and the big cities are well served for the most part. Lots of small towns are well served as well. The
What a bunch of insensitive clods (the FCC) (Score:2)
The phone company doesn't provide it here. And what reason do they have to? Not the FCC.
They don't care a bit about service.
Coverage in the US is kinda crazy.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I cannot get DSL in my apartment complex. I can get a cable modem from Comcast, but that's it. Astound Broadband has tried to service this area but was shut out by Comcast.
My friend down the street is in the Walnut Creek city limits. We're all on the same SBC fiber ring. Her DSL line cannot carry data reliably if it's set to 1.5mbit. Speakeasy has backed her down to 768kbps, but is still charging the same. She called Comcast and Astound - *neither* can service her with a cable modem.
We're *not* in the boonies out here. So why the hell can't we get decent service? It doesn't make any sense to me, and when asked, the SBC & Comcast sales drones just say "planning on servicing that area soon..." (repeat every 6 months)
1 person in ZIP 94523 sure as hell doesn't mean that everyone is happy - or can even get decent service at all.
Stupid FCC.
Re:Coverage in the US is kinda crazy.. (Score:2)
DSl Coverage (Score:2, Informative)
My question is... (Score:2)
I'm not trying to troll, but I'm really asking how this will effect the US instead of just bragging rights.
Grant County WA Case Study for Fiber says it all (Score:2)
No county can make excuses when this county with 2600 square miles will soon be fully lit of over 50,000 miles of fiber.
Landmass myth (Score:3, Insightful)
Living in the technological boondocks (Score:2)
For example, take mobile phones, where the Europeans -- and especially the Scandinavians -- are far ahead; the U.S. is still stu
32 million high speed lines nationwide (Score:2)
look at the individual states, IL has over a million high speed lines..it's the highest state for one I would not have thought of as a GIMMIE for how #'s.. but I guess chicago clinched it for them
it's really ooky to see the breakdown by state..
Why worry about broadband? (Score:2)
wait... is FCC encouraging neighborhood wireless? (Score:2)
Wait a minute, lemme get this straight. The FCC goes by Zip code to determine a percentage of the broadband service. In fact, one home in that zone means the rest of the zip area is serviced. Gees... Sounds like they're actually encouraging wireless routers to be setup and range extenders for the entire neighborhood. Or else I don't understand how all the people in that zip code could access the broadband in
You won't overcome poverty (Score:2)
53.6% of US Internet users are on broadband now (Score:2)
Most of the noise about the "broadband penetration problem" comes from telcos who want a monopoly over the local loop. There really is no "broadband penetration problem." So quit worrying about this.
There are millions of people out there satisfied with their 56K modems. Since the US has flat-rate local
I helped skew the numbers (Score:3, Informative)
The FCC form (Form 477) doesn't actually ask for any kind of correlation between "ZIP codes" and "number of people per ZIP code". One page asks about how many broadband customers we have, and another page asks for a shopping list of all our broadband customers' ZIPs. We offer broadband in about thirty different ZIP codes, even though most of them only have one or two customers.
(Since a T1 qualifies as broadband, natch, they think we have coverage thirty miles from our nearest tower -- one customer out there wanted a hookup badly enough that they were willing to pay through the nose, so we did it.)
Re:"Companies relucant to run business at a loss" (Score:2, Insightful)
Satellite (Score:2)
Re:Dude (Score:2)
diasgreemsg (Score:2)
Re:Nits to pick (Score:2)