Posted on 08/04/2007 11:53:48 PM PDT by HAL9000
Excerpt -
~ snip ~It is very doubtful, almost impossible, that we'll catch up to those countries ahead of us in broadband penetration. They are too far ahead and our native demand is simply less because our Internet economies are developing more slowly. Absent some miracle, the game is already over.
As I wrote two weeks ago, the situation is likely to improve somewhat over the next year or two as the telephone companies sacrifice a little to lock us in before we switch to DOCSIS 3 cable modems and the cable companies, in turn, offer incentives to jump to their voice products. But these companies don't think at all in international terms and they simply don't care about international competitiveness or the growth of our economy. They should, but they don't. And they don't because they have never had to. Though they are required to operate in the public interest and to provide public services, these monopolies have never been forced to consider our place in the world.
~ snip ~
(Excerpt) Read more at pbs.org ...
Those ISPs in other countries with their broadband - just about every one of them is buying Cisco routers to sling bits processed by Intel, AMD, or Sun processors. The data generally land on Seagate or Western Digital disk drives - all built into HP, IBM, or Dell servers.
In the US, we pay a lot for communications services. Why? Because we can afford it.
Here’s the secret about telecom costs. The telecom company is going to charge as much as you are willing to pay. That is, unless their government tells them how much they can charge. We DO NOT want that.
For example, Japan could fit easily inside of California and their urban areas are concentrated in an area roughly analogous to that from San Diego to San Francisco. So when you compare Japan to the entire continental United States, well, there really is no comparison.
And I don't think anybody from San Diego on up to San Francisco are wanting with respect to broadband.
So when one says Japan is better wired for broadband than the United States, that's sort of like saying Manhattan has better taxicab service than all of Alaska. So what's the point?
For ISDN the phone company was about $40 to $75 a month depending on usage. The ISP was $35 a month for unlimited ISDN (not including the phone company charges). I didn’t spend thousands a year on ISDN even when that's all I had.
If you live out in the middle of nowhere, do you expect that the phone company or government should dig a trench to your house and lay fiber? Because that is the issue, not technology per se. It is all about the costs of getting to low density populations.
I believe if you go to the other countries you are so sure are ahead of us it is no better, and likely much worse for the people who live far from the cities. The difference is most Europeans live in the city unlike us. We like our space as obviously you do. We have far more roads and cars than Europe for the same reasons.
Cell phones were such a success in Europe before they were here because their wired phone systems sucked bad. Most are directly run by the government and are notoriously unreliable. I'd be surprised if that's changed much in the last 15 years.
I believe that your state government does, in fact, regulate the rates of local wireline utility service, and the utility gets a guaranteed rate of return on their investment. The tradeoff is that the utility gets quasi-governmental powers of eminent domain, and use of the public right-of-way, and the right to bury cables and poles in your yard without paying rent to you. That's how the utility system works.
China is larger and even more rural. They passed us in broadband deployment last year -
N.B. - The regulatory regime I described in #24 is about “plain old telephone service”, not Internet. But both services run on the same wirelines.
Isn’t that the truth...
China has more than 3 times the population of the US.
Huge areas of China are extremely poor and likely can’t even come close to owning a computer much less have broadband Internet access.
And look at the “leader”, Hong Kong. One of the most densely populated places on earth. Duh...
I assume Osama uses satellite access. I have it available, but don’t find it that much better than the cable access I now use.
I doubt it.
If Osama had satellite Internet it would lead our bombers to his cave.
China has 3 or 4 times the population, so to say they pass us in the “number of broadband lines” is again a new media misconception. Additionally China now owns Hong Kong which initially had almost no infrastructure for broadband, and was built from the ground up with fiber to the premise. Just looking at three or four major China population centers it is easy to see how they could have more broadband lines.
The real issue here is enabling BUSINESS to do business faster and better with high speed connectivity. International business operations should not be built in podunk. Not only does one lack high speed connectivity, but other infrastructure as well - highway access could be restricted, distance from suppliers and raw materials - all those things play into this discussion. High speed Internet access alone does not make or break a business nor does it affect the success of that business.
I own three business’s. One is an Internet Service Provider. Two of the businesses make money the old fashioned way - selling stuff to people. They don’t need any high speed anything! To imply the the US is falling behind because we don’t have 10 megs to each home, or our kids are less educated than those who have fiber to the home is generally stated by those who chose to live in the sticks but expect to have all the same services as those who live in the big city (or any city for that matter).
I believe that if you survey every city with at least 15K population you will find broadband there. Additionally when DOCSIS 3.0 is finalized we will be providing 15 megs to each home on our cable system along with voice services. Very few computers can handle a download at 15 megs today, and probably well into the future.
So the issue really requires an examination of population density, cost vs benefit, plus you have to find out what percentage of the rural population really wants broadband.
Yeah, but that’s not a good comparison either because they have so many more people than us. It stands to reason they would have more broadband lines.
China has captured a lot of our industrial sector jobs and their economy is growing much faster than ours. Are we supposed to shrug our shoulders and surrender our supremacy in information technology to Asia too? Can you suggest a strategy to reverse the trend - or are you saying we should just carry on as we currently do and continue to fall behind?
Availability is more important than raw speed. We don't have to have the fastest broadband speeds, but we do need the widest deployment if we are going to regain the leadership position. The one advantage we have is top-quality content. But if we don't have a way to deliver it, that could change too.
Analogous to the Interstate system and railroads. Everyone always gushes over the Autobahn and their train system, but forgets Germany is the size of Indiana.
If AT&T was never broken up in the first place (1984), then perhaps this would not be an issue.
Then again if AT&T was not broken up, then I doubt long distance calls would still be expensive.
China started from practically zero not long ago.
Of course they are growing quickly, there was nowhere but up to go.
We’re highly developed so there isn’t nearly as much room for growth.
Large parts of China are dirt poor, literally.
As far as deployment, it would be far more interesting how many computers there are per capita in each country and how powerful those computers are.
Internet access is available virtially anywhere in the world in one form or another.
I disagree. Electronic commerce is becoming more important every day. A company or a nation with good communications capabilities has a distinct competitive advantage over one without.
A lot of U.S. companies are outsourcing their work to offshore companies, and the thing that makes it possible is high-speed connectivity. Those jobs could be done as well or better in rural America. If we can get telcos can provide telephone service to rural areas, they ought to be able to deploy broadband to those areas too.
Some people have adopted a "can't do" attitude about broadband, but I'm not one of them.
While those of us in urban areas aren’t complaining much...the rest of the country is primarily dial-up and don’t expect any relief...for at least a decade or two. The problem is that rural America isn’t getting new telephone infrastructure or upgrades...and it will simply continue. My brother works in a town where DSL and cable is everywhere....but he live 40 miles away...and dial-up is the only option. The amusing thing is that he is a modem engineer and builds all of these great modems that urban area telephone centers use. He goes home and checks email/news...forget any video/audio links or movies.
I live in Germany, where 75 percent of the population has access to DSL at this point. Private companies are competing hard to get business and cut rates...plus putting pressure on the national company that installs all telephone hook-ups to upgrade.
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