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2008 International Broadband Rankings

Posted by kdawson on Fri May 02, 2008 07:59 AM
from the why-your-pipes-suck dept.
Communications Businesses Government News
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."
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Submission: 2008 International Broadband Rankings by itif (1282538)
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  • I for one do not want the US government providing my broadband access. Consider that this administration has had to go out of its way to perform warrentless wiretapping, and this resulted in an open loop that was able to be leaked to the public. Can you imagine if the US government was in full control of all telecommunications? I doubt we would have even known about the wiretapping because there would be no middle man.
    • Can you imagine if the US government was in full control of all telecommunications?

      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.
    • Government provides services are generally sub-par anyway.
      • What we need is local/state government to REMOVE the monopoly status on cable companies, and allow others to enter:

        - 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, ... as their Cable Internet provider.

        Multiple cables to every home so consumers have a choice. As the Libertarians say, "Pro-choice in everything".

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by JPriest (547211)
        What have terrorists done to fix the U.S. government?
        • Bin Laden has actually done LESS damage in the last ten years, than a single congresscritter in the same timespan.

          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

          • 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

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Shakrai (717556) *

            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

      • Yeah, they're "fixing our government"? Is that what you call killing 3000 innocent civilians in one day?

        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

        • Yeah, they're "fixing our government"? Is that what you call killing 3000 innocent civilians in one day?

          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.

          One major way people do take responsibility for fixing theirr governments is to limit the power of a government to do your people harm. That's exactly what DrLang21 was talking about doing. Keeping the government's hands out of as many things as possible and making them accountable to the people is a prerequisite to "fixing your government".

          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.

  • How many countries subsidize telcos with tax dollars to create their infrastructure? I'm curious.

    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

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Narpak (961733)
      Norway has directly invested the money made from our oil resources into our infrastructure. And before the oil platforms made a profit we received loans from a lot of other countries; with security in the oil. It is far from perfect, but the profit from the oil is considered to belong to the people and should therefor be used to build, and provide services, that benefits all. In practical terms this meant that in the sixties, seventies and eighties we build schools, medical facilities, phone lines, roads an
    • 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 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)

      by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF (813746) on Friday May 02 2008, @12:05PM (#23276650)

      How many countries subsidize telcos with tax dollars to create their infrastructure? I'm curious. 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.

      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.

      • >>>"Never provided anything"

        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
        • RTFA and you'll see that countries with less money have upgraded their infrastructure considerably more than we have. The telcos in those countries also charge less for access, and every single year, we drop in the broadband rankings. Given that we actually give tax dollars to the telcos to support infrastructure (which I assume most countries don't, but I could be corrected) I'm curious how higher rates + tax dollars = worse service than the rest of the world provides.
  • Take a look at from MarketWatch about Comcast's earnings which were released yesterday. Note anything interesting about it? How about this part: [marketwatch.com]


    He said that despite a tough economic climate, Comcast has been able to raise average revenue per-customer to $107 from $96 over the past 12 months.

    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.

    • Hmm, I guess those cities suck then. I live out in the sticks in Ohio (my neighbors are a farm, a horse farm, and another 1 acre plot) and I have the option of two cable companies, U-verse (fiber to the curb), somewhat slow DSL from many providers, or wireless broadband. All of them but the wireless ISP offer triple play options. Not to say I wouldn't like higher speeds, but other than digital VoD I can't think of many technologies that won't run over all of my available options.
    • The lack of competition issue really irritates me. Where I live, I have a choice between Comcast and Windstream. I refuse to use Comcast because it's more expensive and they choke bandwidth. Windstream's customer service is severely lacking in comparison though and it's also over priced. If I didn't live in an apartment I would definitely switch to satellite.
    • Their take per customer has gone up 11.4% compared to the going 9.5% (headline) inflation rate. That's pretty impressive growth.
      • Why do some of us think the current situation will never change? Economics: It is economically unfeasible for anyone to run extra lines to every house, get their own link to the Internet backbone, and start up as a competitor to the current telcos. And that is what it would take for a new competitor to enter the market.

        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.

        • There is one chance of a major technological change: Wireless Internet access is starting to spread

          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.

  • 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.

  • For example Time Warner pays 15% of their net revenue back to the city of Cary, NC as an 'access fee'. This can only be described as a kickback, a bribe in exchange for monopoly access. And it's legal.

  • getting slow (Score:4, Informative)

    by ageforce_ (719072) on Friday May 02 2008, @08:24AM (#23273498)
    Here's the ranking:
    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

  • The rankings (PDF) place the US 15th, this country having fallen every year since 2001.

    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

    • These concerns (size, density, etc.) are addressed in the report, and in summary, there's more to it than that. Canada is way less dense and way bigger and has significantly better coverage, thanks in part to more enlightened policymakers.
    • Russia is MUCH larger than the USA, and its Internet access is rapidly getting better (in Moscow or Saint-Petersburg it is already better than in most of USA).

      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.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Ecuador (740021)
      What on earth are you talking about? Nobody's asking to push Fiber through the entire land area of the US. No, Alaska is not the problem. NYC and other large cities are the problem. As I have written before, fiber deployment is VERY scarce in NYC. The availability maps might show you some data points in Manhattan, but we are talking for just a few buildings out of thousands! For example, there is no FIOS in the four location I have tried to get it (for my and my boss), and we are talking about common Manhat

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Shinobi (19308)
      As a little comparison... I live in Sweden, and I recently visited my grandparents, in the little, well, village they live in, up in the north(Around 300 people spread over more than 150 km, and about 100km from the nearest city). Even with that, they have access to ADSL, between 2-24Mb/s, in that area, my grandparents having around 12Mb/s practical. I also had 3.2Mb/s bandwidth for my 3G broadband subscription in most of that area, while in Stockholm I'd have 7.2Mb/s.

    • Re:Yeah.... AND?? (Score:5, Informative)

      by eebra82 (907996) on Friday May 02 2008, @11:02AM (#23275754) Homepage

      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 AND then start passing us, I would think there would be something wrong with them.
      Yes, what about the size of the US? Maybe you should take the following into account:

      - 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.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Stephen Ma (163056)
          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?

          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

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by skrolle2 (844387)

      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,

  • I find it sad that the country that invented the Internet can't place higher then 15th.
  • happened to our automotive, electronic or spam industry, errr wait...
  • Anyone else beginning to smell a scam? Seems every time these reports are released, it's bawling for more money from the public purse.
  • Cause they sure have bad bandwidth.
    • Well...
      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

      • 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.

    • 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

        • 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

    • Well, there's progress being made by companies filling the rural access gaps. Dial-up isn't the big thing in rural markets that it used to be. Now it's 512Kb to 1Mb per second wireless.

      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

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by camperdave (969942)
      Well, look at Canada then. From the report:

      Canada has a population density of only 3 people per square kilometer (as compared to 31 in the United States). Yet, the majority of its citizens are clustered in the major metropolitan centers of Vancouver in the west, Toronto in the Midwest, and Ottawa and Montreal in the east, with the percentage of urban population nearly equal to the United States (80 percent versus 81 percent, respectively). At the end of 2006 the country's broadband penetration reached near

    • The problem is that commercial companies are providing broadband, and providing it to an outlying community with a small population and long cable distances isn't profitable.

      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

    • You can't compare a country, say as Korea, to a country, say as the US in terms of broadband deployment.
      Like others have already said: yes you can.

      • Then how come your big cities still fall very far behind in broadband availability, speed and price?
        Because the same companies that serve the big cities also serve the areas that aren't big cities.
      • That's largely because the big phone companies don't roll out technology one town at a time. There are a few reasons for that, too. Their first-level technical offices tend to take care of several phone company physical plants remotely. That means they like to have somewhat similar equipment for them to manage from place to place. They buy the equipment in large batches, so bunches of towns get upgraded at once due to that.

        There are other reasons for the slower speeds, too. The bigger cities themselves tend

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by CompMD (522020)
      No, it really is that we're falling. After all, we did *invent* the Internet (and the personal computer, microprocessor, and transistor...). We had connectivity before any other country. Now other countries have had the technology handed to them and have surpassed our broadband connectivity. How is that "rising" when all the fundamentals were developed in the US? Its obvious that we have in fact fallen, and unfortunately for us here in the US, the biggest reason is greed.

      You could have been far more in

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