2008 International Broadband Rankings 198
itif writes to let us know about a major new report, released yesterday by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, showing how the US and other countries compare in terms of broadband access, speed, and price. The rankings (PDF) place the US 15th, this country having fallen every year since 2001. Here's the full report (PDF). According to the report's executive summary: "The US broadband policy environment is characterized on the one hand by market fundamentalists who see little or no role for government, and see government as the problem; and on the other by digital populists who favor a vastly expanded role for government (including government ownership of networks and strict and comprehensive regulation, including mandatory unbundling of incumbent networks and strict net neutrality regulations) and who see big corporations providing broadband as a problem. Given the policy advocacy and advice they are getting, it is no wonder that Congress and the Administration have done so little."
Government provided broadband? (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re:Hello? Anyone Home? (Score:2)
They learned long ago they don't need "full control" They learned where the choke points are and gather information there.
Legislators do nothing simply because it's not a high enough priority for the telcos. Right now the telcos are preparing to decimate cable/satellite and rid themselves of their public obligations (POTS) altogether.
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- Let competing companies lay-down 3-4 wires to each home.
- Put the power in the hands of the People, to decide if they want Comcast, Cox, Time-Warner,
Multiple cables to every home so consumers have a choice. As the Libertarians say, "Pro-choice in everything".
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That's cost effective.
Is that why Ron Paul supports a woman's right to choose? Oh wait......
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In the 80s, we had plenty of incompatible corporate networks, where you would get charged an arm and a leg for what was effectively access to a few mailing lists.
In the meantime, the U.S. government was hard at work creating a set of networking standards that would allow anyone to connect to any network. After the work of a few visionaries, including a then Senator, this network was opened to the public, making it possible for you to post your inane drivel on a free discussion site.
Yeah, government-provid
What kind of idiot (Score:2)
What kind of idiot thinks that the highway between producers of goods and their markets, between the markets and consumers, are in the domain of government responsibility?
Oh... wait... never mind.
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Also note that the US government already runs a major communications network: The Postal Service. And items sent through the US postal service are protected under Federal law. Items sent through private carriers have no protection at all. There's no reason we couldn't do the same for the internet.
Government provided broadband! (Score:2)
I recall a clue here I followed here on Slashdot to an interesting story. It happens that in the 90's there was literally no interest in building out broadband to rural areas of the state because of the enormous cost of wiring sparsely populated areas. Three state power districts (PUDs) had embarrassing surplus funds from their overbuilt hydro installations they needed to get rid of. They got permission to pilot broadband over fiber to the home (FTTH) to dissipate some of the excess. After some time bui
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What we need is LESS government, and more choices.
Run 3-4 wires to every home.
Let the consumer decide if they want Comcast or Time-Warner or Verizon.
Put the power in the hands of the People, not the ______ politicians.
ALSO: Once again the survey compared apples and oranges. It compared little tiny states (france, britain, netherlands) versus a 3000-mile wide union of states. That makes no se
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Bin Laden has actually done LESS damage in the last ten years, than a single congresscritter in the same timespan.
So has Stalin. So have criminals who've been incarcerated for the last 10 years. So, that point of yours is epic fail. But just that one.
Well, I for one can already decide between several providers here in central Ohio. Time-Warner, AT&T, WOW! Cable, etc. However, prices and service have both gotten worse across the board over time. In the end this choice hasn't benefitted me much, but you can bet that all three of those companies have increased their bottom line quite a bit.
What one would assume would
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Bin Laden has actually done LESS damage in the last ten years, than a single congresscritter in the same timespan.
That's a retarded fucking statement and you know it.
What Congresscritter killed 3,000 Americans, drove a major industry (the airlines) to the breaking point and inflicted billions of dollars of measurable damage (loss of the twin towers) and who knows how much unmeasurable damage? (post 9/11 economic fallout)
As a New Yorker let me be the first to tell you to go fuck yourself for that stupid bombastic comparison. Let me further purpose that we need a Godwin's Law for offtopic terrorism/Al Quada referen
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Which congresscritter continues to fund the war and contribute to economic decline, systematically selling our government to foreign interests through bonds to get more money to spend on killing our soldiers?
Billions of dollars of measurable damage plus economic fallout, versus $341 million a day. That's 124 billion dollars a year. So far the Iraq war has cost us over
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9/11 did damage for sure. I'm not belittling that.
No, you aren't. The GP using it to bolster his neo-conservative economic arguments did. I largely agree with most of what you said (particularly the part about selling out our own interests to finance our deficit spending) but I still think his comparison was stupid and deserved scorn.
I'm getting sick and tired of seeing people use 9/11 to bolster completely unrelated arguments and/or confuse the issue at hand. I fail to see how pulling out 9/11 in the middle of an unrelated discussion is any better
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I'm an Aussie and I will point out your theory to our fedral government. Since our government hates to be at the bottom of the list we will soon have 10
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Hamas, I guess, has done so much for the freedom and stability of Gaza? The Taleban was a giant hippie freedom lovefest in the park for Afghanistan? Somalia's better off because people are tortured and killed for having parents who don't bow their knee to the demands of bullies and tyrants?
One major way people do take responsibility for fixing theirr governments is to limit the power of a government to do
Re:Government provided broadband? (Score:4, Interesting)
Funny, we kill people "accidentally" left and right. Are we "fixing the government" of Iraq?
The USA is the world's largest consumer of Cocaine, but we are continually fucking with cocaine-producing nations. We are the largest consumer of Afghani heroin, but we paid the Taliban to combat Opium production, no joke. The Bush family has been doing business with the Bin Laden [www.cbc.ca] family for many years (and long before that, they did business with Hitler [guardian.co.uk]) Note that I have included links only from reputable publications. Note also that if you search for documents related to these particular scandals, you have a very hard time finding documents in the US news. That's because 10 megacorporations control 95% of the media in the USA, and they're all owned or controlled by rich people getting richer on the status quo.
We're well past that point today. We've currently got a president who the people never elected. He wouldn't have even had the electoral college in the last election (he already didn't have the majority vote) if all votes had been counted. And the electoral college is unnecessary and inherently undemocratic. Only four times has it overridden the will of the American people, and in at the very least the last occasion it was both unwarranted and, simply, the wrong decision. We ended up with an AWOL DUI puppet instead of a genuine war hero without whom we might not have the internet today. The massive attempts to make Gore look like a whiny bitch worked and distracted all the sheeple away from the reality of what was occurring.
I'm not claiming that the Republicans are the problem. The populists are the problem, and unfortunately, that's most of our representatives - and most of our population.
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We've currently got a president who the people never elected
I hate Dubya as much as the next guy but he did win 2004 fair and square. In fact he got a majority of the popular vote as I recall (something Clinton never managed to do).
And the electoral college is unnecessary and inherently undemocratic
You realize that the United States is a Republic right?
and in at the very least the last occasion it was both unwarranted and, simply, the wrong decision
Something tells me that the people who voted for Bush probably didn't view it as the "wrong" decision. And what about it was "unwarranted"? That's the way the rules were setup. If you want to blame anybody, blame Al Gore. If he had managed to win his own state or New H
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One wonders if, when the Florida recount had proved skullduggery, if some investigations might not have occurred in other states.
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After all, this is what has been the leading motto of American politics for 25 years (let's say since Reagan), and it lead exactly to where we are now: less power to governments, more power to big corporations, and eventually more crony capitalism.
How long does it have to fail for you to realize it's a dead-end?
Less power to the g
Hamas and the democratic world. (Score:2)
Not that I am supporting the actions of Hamas, nor the Israelies for that matter, but Hamas were elected by the Palestinian people in what was judged by international observers from the democratic world as a "free and fair" election. Hamas won 70% of the popular vote, obstensibly because of their habit of providing material aid to their own people and their refusal to "bow their knee" to Israel.
One major reason Hamas are ineffect
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To stand out as one speaking out of his/her ass on slashdot is quite an accomplishment. Kudos. I'm glad to know that you are qualified to judge the guilt or innocence of 3,000 people. Maybe you could throw us a source on the Evil that infested those towers? Most people who died in NY were normal people going about their lives, much in the same way as you do. Should someone walk into your workplace and shoot you in the head, I'll be sure to say that ShieldW0lf got
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I sure as hell don't call them innocent. People have been in the streets protesting the actions perpetrated by the people working in that building around the globe for many, many years. They got what they deserved.
Holy shit, That's got to be the worst thing I've ever heard on slashdot. They got what they deserved?? I wouldn't wish what happened to those people on ANYBODY, not my worst enemy!
That being said, unfortunately, it seems Bin Laden and his flying trapeze group actually did considerable harm to the country. I wouldn't compare the harm to our own congress- I would add up the sum instead. It's almost completely convenient that 9/11 happened, and our government has "hijacked" this tragedy to do their own evil
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Japan? What exactly are we 'bringing to bear' on Japan?
Please tell me that you aren't going to whine about stuff that happened 60 years ago in a war that we didn't start and actually have something more substantial to offer.
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You can argue whether bombing a city is a fair thing to do in war, but at the time it was hardly unheard of. Germany had been bombing London for years at that point, after all.
You can also argue that Bin Laden (who is a millionaire and had never, ever suffered any trouble from the US) was provoked by US foreign policy. I'd think you'd have a much harder case than those defending an action taken in war.
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Not exactly unprovoked. The US had an oil embargo against Japan at the time. And since the US back then was the major oil producer (those where the times ey?) it was only a matter of time before the Japanese economy would collapse.
Obviously there were reasons for the embargo (mainly the invasion and treatment of the rest of China) but I'd argue it was certainly "provoked". I doubt whether the US wouldn't use
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I like my privacy, plain and simple.
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I'd look at it from the opposite side -- A government that only stays in power because its people prefer it is by definition a good one. Otherwise it would be replaced.
How many countries... (Score:2)
I know we are a spread-out nation here in the US, but there is no reason why cities with people living on top of each other (LA, Boston, New York, etc) can't easily have the infrastructure that the rest of the world has.
I'd buy the spread-out excuse, except our big cities had poor broadband, and our rural areas are still on dial-up. In that regard, we are very much behind other nations.
That's your tax dollars
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I think we could go a lot farther than that. We probably couldn't run fiber to every farm in West Virginia or every ranch in South Dakota, but even small cities and suburbs would be doable if it were a priority. Here in Lafayette, LA [lafayettegov.org] we are running fiber [lusfiber.com] to every household in the city via
Re:How many countries... (Score:4, Insightful)
We've paid more per person in tax subsidies than many other nations. Take Sweden, for example. Their population density and median population density are both about the same as the US. Their subsidies, however, had legal teeth that required the telcos to actually provide something in exchange. They also had a huge embezzling scandal where much of the money was stolen. They still have significantly faster internet at significantly lower prices than the US, in exchange for a smaller per person tax.
The high speed internet problem comes down to pretty much the same thing as many other problems in the US. Politicians are willing to give private companies billions is subsidies, in exchange for hundreds of thousands being returned as campaign contributions. So long as this legalized bribery is allowed, companies will simply pay off politicos in exchange for subsidies or for not having to fulfill the agreements they made when the subsidies were given.
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Oh really? Hmmm.
- They upgraded their phones line from analog to digital, thus increasing speeds from 28k to 56k during the late 1990s (I personally benefitted from this one).
- They wired-up rural communities that used to have no cable television (this too benefitted me).
- They upgraded central stations to provide DSL (again, this benefitted my neighborhood)
- They upgraded cable to digital to provide internet (ditto).
- They are laying fiber optics in various cities to p
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The day Qwest offers a higher speed service before competition is the day I crap my pants in disbelief. Qwest is
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I have Cox giving me 9 Mbps for $50 a month, and for $65 you can get 14 Mbps. They keep increasing their rate with basically no competition in town which is nice, but it still doesn't compare to what you can get in Europe.
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See:
http://www22.verizon.com/content/consumerfios/packages+and+prices/packages+and+prices.htm [verizon.com]
I think Comcast's deployment in Minnesota is only available at the highest price tier ($120) at the moment, but they plan to scale it later, or at least that's what I remember from the article.
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2. yes.
3. yes.
4. ? cable internet doesn't have to do with digital cable. AFAIK, digital cable is TV service being provided in the manner of a cable internet signal.
5. which is not being done as agreed to. verizon is implimenting a closed fibre system, rather than an open system, as it was with copper. also several years late.
6. yes.
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It's 2008, how many households have fiber?
They have stolen from us, plain and simple, and those responsible should go to jail.
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Lack of competition is the biggest reason (Score:5, Interesting)
In this case, he is Chairman Brian Roberts. In other words, because there is almost none to zero competitors in most of the markets Comcast serves, they can get away with continually raising prices. That is why the U.S. continues to lag the world in broadband.
Yes, there is the whole issue of running fiber and cable long distances in the U.S. compared to other countries like South Korea and Japan, but when you look at places such as New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, etc, you see the same pattern. Only one, or if you're lucky maybe two, providers from which to choose your broadband service.
In my area, we have two choices; Comcast or Verizon. I can pay $100/month for Comcast's triple-play or I can pay $100/month for Verizon's triple-play. But I can't pay $33/month for just the broadband access or $33/month for just the cable subscription (I currently pay $53.31/month for the combined Basic and Standard cable service).
This is the overwhelming reason broadband penetration in the U.S. continues, and will continue, to lag behind the rest of the world. The only solution is, unfortunately, government interference. Force the providers to offer their lines to others based on the logic that it was taxpayers who helped to subsidize the laying of all the cable and fiber through tax breaks and such. Either the companies open their lines and allow competition or they have to pay back all the subsidies they got when they originally promised to bring broadband to the U.S. Ten years ago.
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The DSL market doesn't have the same benefit. While I don't believe I can get a cheaper rate through Qwest without something like a triple play, I do know I can
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The main problem with satellite internet is there is usually significant lag. If you just browse the web or stream video that shouldn't be a problem, but if you want it for games you'll probably have problems (I've read they have done some improvements, possib
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Re:Lack of competition is the biggest reason (Score:4, Insightful)
On the occasional small-scale this isn't always true: A mid-sized town could wire themselves if they wanted to. Note that this is local government doing the job at that point.
The US telecom/television/broadband market is in free-market monopoly status, with the barrier to entry enforced by both government regulation and the sheer size of the initial install. Ask any economics professor; once a market hits that status it takes either government intervention or a major technological change to break out of it.
There is one chance of a major technological change: Wireless Internet access is starting to spread, and may reach equal speeds. But at this point you either have to have the government break the monopoly or hope the cellular companies do a better job soon.
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There is one chance of a major technological change: Wireless Internet access is starting to spread, and may reach equal speeds. But at this point you either have to have the government break the monopoly or hope the cellular companies do a better job soon.
You overlook the fact that the major wireless carriers are also (most of) the major wired broadband providers. Sure Verison wireless could enter areas currently wired by Comcast, Wow or other, but what makes you think they would actually complete?
Being right inside the boundry between 2 cities, I have a choice of 3 wired providers: AT&T, Comcast and Wow - and all 3 know this. While I used get letters from the other 2 to switch for the low introductory rate of $xx for 3 months (or maybe 6), each of t
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One of the game-changing aspects of wireless is that it crosses roads. Often you'll find the large telcos have a monopoly on digging cables under roads (or crossing them from above) which has acted to inhibit competition in many places in the past.
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Pretty much what I was going to say. They claim Australia and New Zealand have a lower cost per MB than all these other countries, without pointing out that at 20mbps you would go through your entire monthly allocation on a typical Australian broadband account in two hours.
Such shallow analysis makes this report almost useless.
Who wrote the executive summary? (Score:3, Informative)
The sharp dichotomy presented in the executive summary is just plain wrong. Sure, the two extremes exist, but I think most supporters of net neutrality regulation don't actually want the government to take over networks. The summary is as accurate as "All people in the U.S. are either knuckle-dragging Bushtards or communists."
The point of net neutrality is not to change who is running networks, it's to prevent network operators from effectively blocking or slowing down connections based on who or what the user is trying to connect to.
Look at municipal access fees aka "kickbacks" (Score:2, Offtopic)
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getting slow (Score:4, Informative)
Score on Specific Broadband Measures
Household Price5
penetration3 (Lowest monthly
Ranking2 (Subscribers Speed4 price per Mbps)
per (Average download (US $ purchasing Composite Score6
Nation household) speed in Mbps) power parity)
1 South Korea 0.93 49.5 0.37 15.92
2 Japan 0.55 63.6 0.13 15.05
3 Finland 0.61 21.7 0.42 12.20
4 Netherlands 0.77 8.8 1.90 11.77
5 France 0.54 17.6 0.33 11.59
6 Sweden 0.54 16.8 0.35 11.53
7 Denmark 0.76 4.6 1.65 11.44
8 Iceland 0.83 6.1 4.93 11.20
9 Norway 0.68 7.7 2.74 11.05
10 Switzerland 0.74 2.3 3.40 10.78
11 Canada 0.65 7.6 3.81 10.61
12 Australia
Yeah.... AND?? (Score:2)
Why is this surprising to anyone? I know a lot of people will post responses regarding net neutrality, the roles of government, policies, politics, etc.
What about just the SIZE of the US? When some new fiber cable comes out that can dramatically increase the speed, or some other sort of technology, it takes a HECK of a lot longer to deploy in the US. If Japan, South Korea, Norway, Sweden, etc. did not catch up to us AN
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Besides, the limiting factor in Russia is backbone network - it's almost saturated during peak hours at lots of places. And the USA doesn't have shortage of backbone capacity.
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Hmmmmm. Try and picture this. 2 MASSIVE 30 lane highways built out of 3 foot concrete with advanced embedded sensor technology that makes the Autobahns look like dirt roads. They both meet in the middle, and for even just a 1 mile stretch turn into a 2 lane wide dirt road. What do you think will happen to the traffic going across it?
For every S
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First of all, your claim that there is a serious lack of backbone bandwidth is unsubstantiated. If you wish to make such a claim at least provide your sources. I am under the impression that the problem in the US is a "last mile" problem.
Secondly, even if there was such a problem, why do you think it is harder to address for the US than any other country? Do you think that a strongly connected graph
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Re:Yeah.... AND?? (Score:5, Informative)
- Most of the countries listed above the United States are European. Most states of the United States would still be dominated even if they were compared directly as smaller pieces of the US to the smaller pieces of Europe.
- The size of the country doesn't matter as much as you may think. The US is heavily urbanized which means that the network isn't as much webbed as you may think.
- The price per Mbps in the US is $2,83. How do you justify your claims when you look at Sweden, which is down at a low $0,35 per Mbps, yet is the size of Florida and only 9 million citizens? Florida has more than twice as many citizens and not even close to Sweden.
I think your nationalistic thoughts got in the way of all reasoning here.
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Nonsense. If Florida has twice the population of Sweden in about the same area, then it also has twice the potential revenue, even before factoring in the higher U.S. average income. So the infrastructure costs should be about the same per capita -- and this is a conservative estimate.
You
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You said it yourself. Florida has twice as many citizens. That is twice the bandwidth required. That means the "pipes" have to be twice as big to deliver the same level of service as Sweden. Which stands to reason that maybe the cost will already be twice the cost of Sweden?/quote> You are not making sense at all. You claim that the main reason the US is behind is because of its size. Now you are basically saying that providing broadband to larger populations (although over the same size) will cost more per customer? It's actually the other way around.
You also assume that the costs of the bandwidth are entirely limited to Florida. What about the fiber linking Florida to the rest of the US?
And Sweden isn't connected to other countries? And for that matter, Sweden must connect most of its broadband via sub-oceanic cables which is far more expensive.
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What about just the SIZE of the US?
Every single time this kind of news pop up there's always someone crying "But the US is so laaaaarge!!! Bwaaaahhhh! Not fair!". And every single time this stupid argument is thoroughly rebutted. Have you never seen this? Are you new here?
There are countries that are less densely populated and more densely populated, there are countries that are more urbanized and less urbanized, and there are countries with more government subsidies and less government subsidies than the US, and every variation inbetween,
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Heh. I did not "cry" and say it is not "fair". Now you are just being a little insulting. I was stating that you could not do a direct comparison of the United States against a country like South Korea. While it might be "unfair" to do so, it is better to say it is inaccurate. No emotions or ego involved here.
US (Score:2)
Could you IMAGINE if this (Score:2)
Annual Broadband Shell Game (Score:2)
Wonder if ITIF is hosted in the US? (Score:2, Funny)
It's the Public-Private Ties, Stupid! (Score:2)
STOP POSTING THESE (Score:2)
I don't care anymore.
Yeah, I would like to see more competition in the US. It's coming. Qwest is finally rolling out FTTN and ADSL2+, which will put more pressure on Comcast
Bad numbers (Score:2)
For instance, me and my friends are all nerds with reasonably heavy usage habits. This means we use 80gb per month, which is basically the largest limits you can get.
These plans cost $100+ AUD and we on average get 5
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What if the government owns the physical infrastructure, or a non profit body, and then providers rent the infrastructure from them... And force them to reinvest any and all profits in improvements of the underlying network.
Kinda like the UK system, but where the owner of the infrastructure isnt trying to compete with the same companies they're providing infrastructure to.
In the UK, BT have to rent out lines wholesale to other ISPs as well as allowing the bigger isps to install kit in exchanges... Re
Re:I hate to side with the obvious... (Score:5, Informative)
The situation in the UK is peculiar and accidental. Back in 1982 the government sold off the state-owned telco, including all the lines in the ground (now worth a vast fortune) for not nearly what it was worth. But you could argue that at the time very few people really understood that the plain ol' telephones would turn into such an important service for the economy.
Since then it's been mismanagement all the way. A series of toothless regulators did nothing when BT basically refused to get into broadband (1995-2000), did nothing when BT refused to install fibre to the consumer (1992-today), actually backed down when BT refused to implement LLU deadlines required by law (2000-2003), and are still doing nothing about access speeds, the backhaul network, price of POTS, phony "unlimited DSL" adverts, premium line rip-offs, fibre again, etc. etc.
BT realised belatedly that they could make a bit of cash from one technology, ADSL, which didn't require them to dig anything up and only needed them to install a few racks of equipment at the exchange. The only thing the regulator did was force them to sell wholesale ADSL to themselves (BT) at the same price as to other providers. I was involved in the early days and the other providers still had to fight to access BT's order provisioning systems (which involved a lot of rekeying orders multiple times into slow BT-owned mainframes).
So now most peole in Britain have, almost accidentally, access to speeds around 2-20 Mbps (mostly 2-8) for still quite a lot of money.
But, here's the thing. Where is the investment in speeds over ADSL 2+? BT have spent a few billion implementing what they call their 21st Century Network [btplc.com], which amounts to replacing a bunch of ATM and Frame Relay switches with IP routers, which will allow BT to reduce their costs. But where's the fibre into homes and offices? Where's 100 Mbps+ going to come from? What about the 3/4G mobile access that isn't charged at ££/megabyte?
None of this bodes well for the future of Internet access or indeed the economy as a whole.
Rich.
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Eh, excuse me, but take a look on the list and you will find that Finland is third. Finland is geographically large country with a small population having population density of 15.6 per km where as US has 31 per km. The telecommunication sector is one of the freest in Europe with fierce competition between communication providers. You can get broadband, be it based on DSL or 3G wireless networks, in whole country. The government doesn't subsides the industry nor usage of telecommunication. So you have count
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The question you should be asking yourself, is there such a thing as "laissez faire" market. In US you too have regulation starting from laws regarding consumer protection to competition laws, so where you draw a line on when a market is regulated and when it's not? If we look a "laissez faire" market it's actually a market where there is no competition as eventually market will turn into a monopoly, duopoly or cartels. Now, competition is good, market economy is good, free markets are good, but free market
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My cousin for example has 768k down and 256k up via wireless. She lives smack in the middle of a 42-acre plot of land that's 6 miles from the closest town, and that town only has about 900 people in it.
The price is high, the latency's high, the throughput is lower than cable or DSL, and weather can have pretty bad effects on
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If you have government or a non profit providing it, the cables are actually cheaper per mile to lay out there since there's less in the way, the cost of digging up city streets is very high because of the disruption it causes. If you just dig a trench alongside an empty highway, or alongside a railroad, you don't cause much disruption
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There are other reasons for the slower speeds, too. The bigger cities themselves tend
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You could have been far more in
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We discover it. Other people take it and make it better and drive us out of business due to our corrupt plutocracy.