US Lags World In Broadband Access 608
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
(I know what you're trying to say, but I don't know how much cheap gas has to do with our settlement patterns.)
Re:location, location, location (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:location, location, location (Score:5, Funny)
Re:location, location, location (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:location, location, location (Score:5, Interesting)
The reason for this is that the great plains are on a similar grade from east to west. Many railroad lines ran straight east/west. Going from the lower elevation up the grade to the west the trains would run out of steam (literally) and need to be refueled at pretty much the same place no matter what latitude you were on. Consequently, the same approximate distance between towns in rural areas, especially in plain states.
That has nothing to do with population density. Sorry.
Re:location, location, location (Score:4, Interesting)
B.
Re:location, location, location (Score:4, Insightful)
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The automobile contributed to sprawl around major urban centers, but it did not contribute to the way the country was initially populated.
As an aside, for anyone interested, here is an interesting wikipedia article [wikipedia.org] regar
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Today it makes American [and rural Canada] the prime regions to build up an Internet infrastructure, but we're lagging. Wireless options might start filling the gap this decade, but with large lag times for satellite Internet, I don't foresee it taking over before ground based [or balloon based] wireless does.
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Competition, competition, competition (Score:5, Informative)
a large part of the population is decentralized.
Yep, but that doesn't explain why other countries that are even more decentralized are kicking America's ass. There is no appreciable statistical correlation. Plus, even if there were a correlation, the excuse that America is diffuse is a pretty weak excuse for the technological and economic backwardness we're exhibiting with broadband.
America's broadband failures shouldn't be news to anyone who has been paying attention. Several reports have gone into extensive detail on this over the past few years. Check out Broadband Reality Check II [freepress.net] (PDF) for a solid analysis of where the US is in broadband, and how the FCC has its head in the sand.
We've been giving the phone and cable companies a free ride, buying their arguments that free enterprise is working efficiently. It isn't. These massive companies have managed to keep all other entrants out of their markets by manipulating the FCC and getting the Supreme Court to buy their argument that there's a free market for broadband. There isn't. We have the worst of both worlds: Government protection of an oligopoly comprised of regional duopolies (one cable company and one DSL provider in most markets), and tremendously high barriers to entry, without at least the broad reach that a government-controlled system would have. We need a truly competitive marketplace, or we'll keep languishing.
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Re:Competition, competition, competition (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Competition, competition, competition (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Competition, competition, competition (Score:4, Informative)
Even still, "high-speed" in Canada is still pretty slow compared to Japan.
Re:Competition, competition, competition (Score:4, Informative)
Canada has a population density of 3.6 people/sq km with a 77% broadband penetration while the U.S. has a density of 32.6 people/sq km (almost 10x denser) with only a 57% broadband penetration.
Reference:
Canada [cia.gov]
United States [cia.gov]
Broadband stats [websiteoptimization.com]
Re:Competition, competition, competition (Score:5, Informative)
Canada's actually got a considerably more centralized population than the US. You've got the vast majority of your people living in a narrow strip of land.
Reference:
Canada [pbs.org]
Canada [nrcan.gc.ca]
Re:Competition, competition, competition (Score:5, Funny)
I just keep expecting to see:
Everyone in Canada lives in one house who's front porch is on US soil, except bill, who lives on Neptune, but he still gets 1TB down and they pay him $25 a month to use it!
Re:Competition, competition, competition (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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That's the balance point between equipment cost amortized over 4 months (about $200/connection, sometimes a bit less, somtimes a bit more) and competition in the area. Once they've got payback for those 4 months, of course they keep your rate the same- after all, it's quite a hassle to change.
When I was in France I was getting equivalent service for about a third of what I'm paying now
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In fact the problem is that there is NO true competition available (it is a cartel/oligopoly situation) because of governmental regulations. Try starting your own cable or DSL company sometime; see how quickly the PUC shuts you down.
This is the result of intrusive government, excessive regulation, and big business buying legislation and regulation i
Re:location, location, location (Score:5, Insightful)
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!"
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Re:location, location, location (Score:5, Insightful)
cost, competition, length of the two-pair (Score:4, Informative)
it's too expensive to retrofit any of the bad-move 24 and 26 gauge wire that was put up in the 60s and 70s and 80s, and thinner wire makes it only worse. without equal footing between the competitors (telcos are highly regulated and every time they change light bulbs in the bathroom, they have to notify all potential competitors, and nobody else has to meet those standards,) stuff doesn't get placed unless there are basically guaranteed customers enough to pay for the expansions. that's a fact of life after the telecom bust of the turn of the century.
and for some silly reason, uptake of high-speed subscriber lines has been fitful at best, which means any equipment installed isn't filling up. you get the population wildly excited about something, they demand it, rip the walls off the corporate headquarters to sign up for it, and costs of all items come down with higher production and deployment.
the big one is distance, and getting around that engenders the cost issue.
in the US, folks like their elbow room and their freedom. overseas, where population densities are higher and the government decides through centrally-owned telcos what to push and basically what it should cost, it can be expected that high-speed like DSL is going to be more availiable and less costly.
with the bankers and the government working against it here, and distances making it tough, it's going to be harder to get. pure and simple.
Cost and competition are excuses (Score:4, Informative)
Finland is a country of 5 million peoples. The population density is 16/km. There is only one metropolitan area, Helsinki, with little over 1 million inhabitants. The other few major towns are barely over 200 thousand inhabitants. Broadband is available almost in all corners of Finland, except some northern and eastern rural areas. Even in these rural communities, usually broadband is at least available in the centre of the community. If you live in a town you can get 8mb dsl-connection with 39 and 24mb with 49. I myself have 1mb connection which costs 24.90. Even if you live in a rural area, like my parents: 5km to community centre (community total population little over 6000) and 20km to nearest town (36000) you can get broadband connection with acceptable price. You may think that government has lend a hand in here, but that isn't the case like I said. In Finland before 90s telecoms sector consisted from independent local phone companies and state owned Tele. After deregulation in the beginning 90s markets because free to competition and local phone companies loosed their monopoly to their wires. In example you can start virtual operator in broadband or in mobile business very easily by renting other operators wires and equipment as needed. And to say it again, Finnish government didn't put any pennies to build up the infrastructure, the playing field was totally left open to companies.
When you compare Finland to US states, in population density Finland is in the same bar as Colorado or Maine.
And on a note on competition. Competition really does work. Here in Finland local telecom operators have had to update their networks and try as hard as possible to get people take broadband because otherwise soon they wouldn't have no customers at all. In here mobile operators have been very aggressive and almost everybody have mobile phone and more and more people use it as their only phone. Also by introduction of GPRS and later EDGE and UTMS networks, there is pressure from mobile operators to get customers adopt mobile broadband from them. So competition and costs of operation are not real reasons for not having or having costly broadband access.
I call bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
" US Lags World In Broadband Access" (Score:5, Funny)
This might be... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This might be... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This might be... (Score:5, Funny)
Person A: US boradband sucks because the US is a big country.
Person B: Canada is bigger and boradband doesn't suck there.
Person A: Oh...
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They aren't. The major companies aren't interested in providing you with broadband access. They are only interested in providing you with "Triple Play" coverage -- television, phone and, oh yeah, Internet.
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Sure it isn't a surprise that the Netherlands is in the top with a population density of 392 people per square kilometer, but let's check the other top countries.
Population per square kilometer:
United States: 31
Sweden: 20
Finland: 15.5
Norway: 12
Iceland: 2.9
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by _ population_density [wikipedia.org]
Oh, and TFA uses OECD statistics from 2001.
The 2005 statistics are here: http://www.oecd.org/document/39/0 [oecd.org]
Re:This might be... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Ron Jeremy can do it.
Re:This might be... (Score:5, Insightful)
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:NO.. not a "natural monopoly" (Score:4, Informative)
The "companies" then bribed the government under the premise (outright lie) that they did lay the infrastructure.
Imagine if a trucking company claimed they laid the highways.. same thing.
would you tolerate a trucking company being allowed to lock out all other trucking companies, allowing them to jack up the price of every product in your local grocery store?
no? well then why do you tolerate it with internet? people in nations with real internet competition pay half the price we do for twice the speed!
Perhaps the problem lies in our leadership? (Score:5, Funny)
<snide-remark>With intelligent leadership like that, it makes you wonder how we can be lagging so far behind.</snide-remark>
Re:Perhaps the problem lies in our leadership? (Score:5, Funny)
Sheesh, you Bush bashers, always so quick to the trigger.
Again? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Again? (Score:5, Informative)
From the article:
Re:Again? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Again? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
US Adoption Behind China?! (Score:5, Informative)
Here we go.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Whose technological lead? (Score:4, Interesting)
What technological lead? The "U.S." doesn't have one. All we have is the honor of being home-port to a bunch of large multinational corporations, who seem to do most of the actual production, and they do most of their manufacturing and an increasing amount of their research overseas. We couldn't make half the stuff that "American" companies sell, and U.S. consumers take for granted; it's all made and increasingly designed overseas.
We're a market for goods and capital, and a source of lawyers, marketers, and middle-managers. And "intellectual property," which the rest of the world could quickly decide to do without, if it wanted to.
I think history is going to look back, and see the Internet as the last significant achievement of a dying empire.
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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
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I'm not sure whether the above is boosterism, chearleading, misplaced patriotism, or just cliched bits gleaned from some expert spouting his interpretation of exceptionalism theory on Fox News. One thing I a
I don't get it (Score:2)
All we have is the honor of being home-port to a bunch of large multinational corporations
Unlike the UK, Germany, France, Japan, Korea...? I don't get how your diatribe against globalism has anything to do with whether there is an "America" or not. Is Japan not "Japan" because it sells most of its goods overseas, and built its post-war economy around American industrial economic principles? Because the UK liberalized its economy during the Thatcher era to open up more foreign investment and spur growth,
What is holding us back? (Score:4, Insightful)
One word: Comcast
$60 / month for cable internet is the worst screwing I've ever received.
Something I didn't see mentioned... (Score:2)
I don't know how this compares but (Score:2)
Isn't It Obvious? (Score:2, Funny)
is this a valid benchmark? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Summary of comments (Score:5, Informative)
1. Mmmm, US BIG! ENGLAND SMALL! LAYING CABLE EXPENSIVE! FIRE BAD!
2. O NOES! US is teh sUx0rs!
3. omg teh US is teh R0x0rS! France = surrender monkeys!
4. blah blah dark fiber blah blah net nuetrality blah blah GOOGLENET!
5. I for one welcome Korean||English||Chinese overlords.
6. I'm stuck on dial-up, you insensitive clod!
7. If you want to live in the boonies, you pay the price. The invisible hand of Adam Smith will give all true Libertarians happy endings...
8. ???
9. Profit.
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
Hot off the presses. (Score:2)
Until something actually changes, let this subject die...
What came first, the cable or the wireless? (Score:2)
In some third world countries its far less expensive to develope the wireless route then to lay cable.
Population Density misleading (Score:2, Informative)
This is one of the stupider more vapid "analysis" articles..
Sorry for the Anonymous, I left my password at home...
Arbitrary pricing (Score:2)
I had 10 Mbit for a bunch of years and paid ~40 euros/month. I've had 100 Mbit for two years now and I'm paying slightly less.
Should you be as unfortunate as not to have fiber optics to your house (typically outside of city environments) you can be forced to suffer ADSL which typically ranges from 5-20 Mbit downstream and 1-5 mbit upstream. And guess
that's specious (Score:2, Redundant)
oh really?
the usa is more sparsely populated, and is much larger, than the broadband penetration leaders like south korea
this makes perfect sense to me, strictly as a function of the sheer number of new wires you need to run
now if someone made a comparison between south korea and say, the bay area to the san fernando valley or the washington-new york city corridor, approximate equally sized, equally densely populated areas, then you have a m
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Now kindly explain why Canada has greater broadband adoption than the U.S.
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So, what is holding us back? (Score:2)
One word. Lobbyist. How many times have you heard about the fights to stop the propagation of the FreeNets? These companies don't want to competition and they damn sure don't want someone to give the people something free that they could be charging for! Capitalism makes everyone rich, Capitalism not held in check makes *everyone else* poor.
Price comparison anyone? (Score:2)
I've got a 10 mbps LAN connection, I live in Sweden and pay the equivalent of $28 a month. Though, that is a student price, twice that for non-students.
How about you?
Capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Capitalism (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
At least we "do well" in other sectors (Score:3, Informative)
Need I mention more?
F YOU CABLEVISION!!! (Score:2)
Uh, maybe... (Score:2)
So far as I've seen, the only people that bring this up are trying to sell something. Politicians like talking about the US being "behind" other countries 'cause it sounds good and will get them votes, cable companies and telcos talk about it because it'll make them more money and magazines talk about it because it'll sell ads. If people are really clamoring for faster access to
Population-related causation? (Score:2)
If you are an investor or broadband provider, what motivates you to invest in infrastructure in a place where you will almost certainly have
Isn't it obvious? (Score:2)
Hmmm...let's see...under what conditions does an under-serviced market exist...
Clue: it isn't in a capitalist free market.
Telco capital outlays suck, and so did the TCA (Score:2)
My kid brother is in canada (Score:4, Informative)
I'd imagine if he ever downloads HDDVD movies, it'll have to be from rogers. He couldn't download them on XBox Video Marketplace, like I can right now, even if he wanted to. He'd hit the cap.
My point is, yes, more of them have access to broadband, but what good does it do if it's basically capped at-or-around dial-up per-month limits, and has other arbitrary restrictions on it?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
12th?! Oh you poor, poor people (Score:3, Interesting)
Seriously, if the worst you've got to complain about is that you're 12th, with only four major companies supplying last-mile access, come here. We've got precisely two companies supplying the last mile, and in our largest city [wikipedia.org] we have only one choice [telecom.co.nz] for residential connections.
Consider that NZ is at the top of the OECD for the percentage of the population that actually uses the 'net, so it's not like we're a bunch of technophobes. We're just catching it up the arse from a rapacious monopolist incumbent, which thankfully is about to be unbundled. So, sorry, but y'all should get a grip. You're in the top half, we're in the bottom quarter!
Re:I have an idea (Score:4, Insightful)
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You obviously never served in the military, nor were you paying much attention when the government was busy non-interoperating during Katrina.
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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 peo
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The US is a big country. It might just be that your little stretch of freeway has been recently repaved, but I can assure you that if you take just the west of US into account (primarily California where I live) then you will never come to the conclusion that the interstate system is all that wonderful. The roa
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Why don't we mob the criminals who price gouge consumers based on deregulation which was given to telecoms with an agreement that they would invest profits in fiber to the home? Then we can take those ill gotten gains and actually build the 21st century infrastructure we've been paying for rather than allow the telecoms to build bigger monopolies with which to gouge us more for inferior services.
Re:I have an idea (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Yes, because the energy companies told the republican party to put "Broadband over Power Lines" into their platform.
you can explore the various versions of the platform at archive.org and see that it was specifically called out, I believe even with particular technology providers mentioned. Then I guess somebody realized that picking technology winners was anti-republican-sounding so they took it out and replaced it with the more m
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The standard is 2megs (mine is reading 1.9 at the moment). Many lines are enabled for 8mb now althought the realities of ADSL 2+ mean that it's rare that 8mb is acheived.
24mbit is available in many areas according to some ISP's. However, the reality is again that this is rarely achieved.
Lots of people will now post "I can only get 0.00025 and I hate BT/ISP's" the ones that don't post will be thinking I've got 5mb and that's ok.
Most of the urban areas of the UK have cable as well, th
The Real Easy Answer (Score:4, Informative)
What? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Do all AMericans need internet? (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, because all "farm states" (I live in a metro area and am not a farmer) are backwater hicks that don't know about them Internets thangs, right? For fuck's sake, get a clue.
In fact, Internet communication and research is growing for farmers [google.com] as a way of learning about better crop yields, soil care, etc.
Re:Do all AMericans need internet? (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow. That has got to me one of the most ignorant and biggoted things I have ever seen on Slashdot. And you got modden insightful.
Let's try thinking, shall we?
The internet lets people in highly remote areas:
That's all I can think of off the top of my head, but.. I mean... WOW. I know /. hates the red states and red states may have low population density (look at large parts of Montana or even Nevada) but get a clue. This isn't 1900 any more. It's not like the people living in 1800s era cities in the "mountain country" like there were that the TVA was designed to help.
We have civilization here in the middle of the US, despite what stereotypical New York characters in sitcoms think.
It's not just rural areas (Score:4, Informative)
I also know that most people on my block are young professionals who would snap up really great broadband for about $50/month. But is there an option for this? Heck no. Verizon and Comcast would have a conniption and the Public Utility Commission, a wholly owned subsidiary of Comcast and Verizon, would kill any startup in a heartbeat Is there any way for my city to tell Verizon and Comcast where to put their "broadband" and roll its own? Of course not. Ed Rendell saw to that, and now municipal broadband won't ever happen in Pennsylvania.
So here I am, stuck paying Comcast $80/month for 3.0M/384kbps broadband and basic cable. Why? Because the government, a wholly owned subsidiary of Comcast, keeps competitors out of the market. And my other choice is to switch to Verizon and have all incoming ports blocked and have even slower access (1.5M/384kpbs). Or blackmail Comcast into lowering the price for six months by threatening to switch.
Secondly, the options in NYC don't compare favorably to the options in Seoul or Tokyo or Stockholm. They can get 100Mbps symmetrical access with a static IP for half of what I'm paying. That's an impossibility in any city of the US, even though the population density is the same.
So, you see, it's not about land area or population density. It's about the greed and laziness of the service providers and the idea that people don't have any way of forcing the issue.
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Verizon is also supposed to offer unbundled ("naked") DSL - that is, without a requirement to have Verizon phone service. When I say they are supposed to, I mean they are required to by law. They've been dragging their feet on this for years now and the FCC does nothing.
Which is what it comes down to. Since 1996, the FCC has ceased t
Re:What's holding us back? (Score:4, Interesting)