Game Over: The U.S. is unlikely to ever regain its broadband leadership.

I, Cringely ^ | August 3, 2007 | Robert X. Cringely

[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 ~

[Bogey78O]

You know Arkansas would so be on that list.

The spun off states would get screwed even more. Look at who has the fastest speeds in the cable industry across more of their area. Cablevision services how many rural towns?

the rurals are a net drain on finance and left to their own would not ever be upgraded unless it became cheaper to run fiber than to maintain copper. So far that’s at least a decade off.

[lepton]

Unfortunately, AT&T doesn't really care about our position in the global economy or our national security

It really, really didn't help a few years ago when AT&T went around buying up cable services so that they could implement a high-speed delivery system (which as AT&T, they were barred from doing themselves), and immediately upon completing sinking a couple decades worth of profits into the project, the FCC announced a regulation change which required them to give free access to the bandwidth to all communications companies....making billions of dollars just go "poof".

[sitetest]

Dear Bogey780,

Having seen what Verizon had to do to roll out FIOS in my neighborhood, I can say it’s quite an undertaking, and can understand the costs involved.

As well, I think that the time to take to roll it out isn’t only a matter of costs, but also a matter of availability of workers to do the roll-out. That's part of the difference between rolling out infrastructure in urbanized settings and in rural settings - it takes more workers and more time.

Nonetheless, we’ve had FIOS for over a year now (I was the first person in my neighborhood to sign up for it) in my semi-rural neighborhood out in the sticks of Anne Arundel County, MD. For $100 per month (plus taxes), I get phone service with unlimited local and long-distance calling, basic television (local channels), and 15Mbps/down 2Mbps/up Internet. It works very, very nicely.

sitetest

[billybudd]

See, that’s a total strawman argument. I’m not talking about dialup vs. broadband. Obviously, dialup is too slow for *any* internet application. My argument is that the big bulk of economic benefit comes within the first 250 to 500kB of bandwith. What I don’t get is why we need 100mbit lines. Even the 3-8mbit lines available in most of the country are overkill for most productive applications. Also, how would increasing our bandwith reduce our energy demands? Please don’t say telecommuting - that ship sunk about 10 years ago. If anything, people would leave their computers on longer to download more porn and movies, wasting more electricity.

[billybudd]

Dude, enough with the strawman arguments already. Are other countries which supposedly have superior connections really using all those fancy appliations you're talking about? Of course not! They're using them for porn, movies, and music. Your "obscene phone calls" analogy fails, since downloading pirated stuff is the *only* thing I can think of that we'd use such high speed connections for.

You haven't given me one application that is in use today that is dependent on a super-high-speed connection *and* benefits the economy. "Home automation"? You've got to be kidding me - nobody is doing that! "Visual communication"? It's been tried - 15 years ago! Nobody cares, nobody wants it. And how would it even benefit the economy? That's why I'm so skeptical about these claims that we're "falling behind" - nobody ever gives me a *single* high-speed application that is so critical to the economy that we're falling behind other countries.

[capitalist229]

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?

Yes, if we did it for telephone and power, we can do it for the internet as well.

Just a long term infrastructure investment, like everything else.

BUMP

[capitalist229]

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?

Yes, if we did it for telephone and power, we can do it for the internet as well.

Just a long term infrastructure investment, like everything else.

BUMP

[Bogey78O]

That’s it in a nutshell. AT&T doesn’t want to spend billions running fiber to every house just so some FCC 2-1 vote years down the line can cause them to have lost everything from a long term investment.

Look at FiOS. There are people clamoring for Verizon to maintain the copper that they’re trying to abandon. It totally undercuts the reason for the upgrade.

[Bogey78O]

Err 3-2

[billybudd]

How many people trade stocks and currencies in the US? A tiny fraction. And for that tiny fraction, it is worth their while to invest in a high-speed connection. This is neither an argument for widespread broadband coverage, nor an argument for 100mbit lines.

This article doesn't talk about the cell networks, it's saying that high-speed landline connections are critical to our economy. The issue with the cell networks deals with how the FCC auctions off spectrum. Right now, it's not a very open system, but maybe things will change with the new FCC rules in response to Google.

[Bogey78O]

Having a 10Mb/s line is simply having a line capable of transferring a certain volume of information is a certain amount of time. Technically latency would play a far bigger role in terms of speed. Having a line that can respond in 15ms is far and away better for a trader or buyer than a 10Mb/s line with 120ms response time.

[theBuckwheat]

>>
A lot of our infrastructure was built by the CCC during the Depression. They installed 89,000 miles of telephone line.
<<

That was about 70 years ago. I don’t think that buildout is germane to the issue of broadband. Today, we would have more than 89,000 circuit-miles of line in a small town.

[garyhope]

“How many people trade stocks and currencies in the US?”

I don’t know the exact figure, but I think it’s lots now. The internet, broadband, new trading software and brokers has increased the numbers a lot recently and it’s growing.

You couldn’t trade currencies as an individual just a few short years ago, now you can. The Forex market is the largest financial market in the world.

[dfwgator]

So, that means the rest of the world gets their porn faster than we do.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

Dude, enough with the strawman arguments already. Are other countries which supposedly have superior connections really using all those fancy appliations you're talking about? Of course not! They're using them for porn, movies, and music. Your "obscene phone calls" analogy fails, since downloading pirated stuff is the *only* thing I can think of that we'd use such high speed connections for.

LOL - my analogy doesn't fail simply because you aren't able to think of other uses for high speed data connections besides piracy.

You haven't given me one application that is in use today that is dependent on a super-high-speed connection *and* benefits the economy. "Home automation"? You've got to be kidding me - nobody is doing that!

And the reason they're not doing that is because we don't have the bandwidth to make it happen. The point is that we're talking about future applications and their benefits to our economy 5, 10, 20 years down the line. Make electricity available to every home in the US, reliable and at sufficent power, and we see applications like vacuum cleaners, televisions, lighting, etc. developed to take advantage of the power infrastructure. Make high speed broad-band available to every home in the US, reliable and at a sufficient speed, and we will see thousands of applications developed to take advantage of this data infrastructure - many of which will be monetized and sources of employment for our children and grandchildren.

If a high speed, uniform, openly accessible data infrastructure is never made available anywhere in the world, you can continue to not miss what you've never had. But many other countries aren't following the US's lead in letting telcos and cable companies keep consumers on slow, overpriced, proprietary data feeds. Those countries will produce applications that we won't see in this country because our data infrastructure won't be able to support them - applications on which businesses are founded, people are employed, and taxes are paid.

That's why I'm so skeptical about these claims that we're "falling behind" - nobody ever gives me a *single* high-speed application that is so critical to the economy that we're falling behind other countries.

And no one could have described Google or Amazon to you when ARPAnet was being implemented at universities in the '70s and '80s, or when ISPs began rolling out dial-up Internet access in the '90s. For that matter, no one could have described a personal computer to you when homes in the US were being wired for electricity. We don't need to identify technologies of the future to recognize that they will require an infrastructure that we can build today.

[R. Scott]

He’d probably access through a 3rd party courier. It could be located in a village a day’s horse ride from his hole. Even if he had it in his cave, how would we identify his signal from others? Various warlords, drug growers and other of the wealthier of the tribesmen could also have internet.

[DoughtyOne]

Wouldn’t you agree that about 90% of our population lives in major metropolitan locations?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Thought you might find this of interest~!

[Marine_Uncle]

Thanks E. I'll tell you what will really perk up my interest.
If tommorow I can actually get the 3MB transfer rate connect advertised by Earthlink for the wireless service to actually allow me to sign in and use the damn stuff! Heheh.
I shouldn't laugh. Clowns are going to charge me 21 bucks regardless if the service ends up working with any form of reliability. One day in almost two weeks taint to good.
I feel like part of an experiment at present.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Keep after them,...that’s a damn good price....I am paying way more than that...just signed up for Time Warner phone serive over the Cable,...not that great though....

but the speed on the internet cable is excellent....they say it is 6M/sec.....assume they mean bits ...but downloads can be quick....