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US Broadband Won't Catch Up With Japan's For 101 Years
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Aug 13, 2008 12:06 PM
from the all-other-things-being-equal-which-they-never-are dept.
from the all-other-things-being-equal-which-they-never-are dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Internet speeds of users nationwide shows that the United States has not made significant improvements in deploying high-speed broadband networks in the past year, and if the average US Internet speed continues to improve only at the same rate it did from 2007 to 2008, the country won't catch up with Japan's current download speed for another 100 years, according to findings released by the Communications Workers of America's (CWA's) Speed Matters campaign." With enough statistical mangling, nearly anything can be presented as plausible, but that's not enough to cover up my envy of Asian broadband speeds.
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oook (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:oook (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, because we all know upgrade paths are all completely linear...
Yeah, and the US is next in line... so we should get it sometime next year!
Parent
Re:oook (Score:5, Funny)
Why do we maintain an expensive military if we won't use it to acquire things our country needs? Oil, women, and broadband. Soldiers, go get them and bring them to us.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:oook (Score:5, Insightful)
Replying only because you made this on topic :)
Ahem. China? India? Heck, Brazil?
All have far more robust economies than the US at the moment, if national budgets are anything to go by. The US government has long considered its ability to tax its citizens as an unlimited line of credit. They (you?) are about (in the near future, near being used on the historical timescale) to find out that there is no such thing as an unlimited line of credit. The US citizens' willingness to be frogboiled into paying for more and more of their income to their government's siphon-wealth-to-the-rich program is wearing thin.
If you're cynical enough, you could postulate that the destruction of the US education system is no a political misadventure, but a deliberate act to keep the working class in a poorly educated state. This would ensure that they lack the insight to interpret political reality for themselves, instead relying solely on pre-digested conclusions drip fed to them via the mass media.
But that's a position you'd take if you were cynical enough. I'm obviously not :)
Parent
Re:oook (Score:5, Informative)
That's not true at all. China's economy is pretty precarious as it is, it's not going to take a lot for them to see the sort of downturn which we in the US can only dream of.
India suffers from serious corruption problems and poverty.
Brazil is the best of the lot, but they've still got quite a bit of poverty and no particularly great path to fixing that.
And ultimately most of the exports that are being made by China are produced by foreign corporations, many of which are American, leaving a much smaller amount of the profits in Chinese hands than one would typically expect. Couple that with the deliberate acts of the Chinese government to keep wages low.
Sure we in the US have problems, but their not the kind of problems which the BRIC countries have. Assuming that we're going to keep on this course, the course formed by the least popular President ever and his lapdogs, is somewhat questionable at best.
Parent
Re:oook (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:oook (Score:4, Insightful)
The reason Japan has done so well is that the government decided broadband was something they wanted, and took a lead role in making it happen. In the UK and US, telecoms and cable companies have just been left to their own devices and so the market has driven them to offer as little service as possible for as much money as possible while spending as little as possible on upgrades. As individual consumers there is nothing we can do, only the government can speed things up.
Parent
Re:oook (Score:5, Interesting)
ofcourse, it's linear! Also Japan is the same size as the United States.
From the report the article cites:
"One explanation of why, in most instances, broadband penetration and a range of available geographic variables show little or no correlation is that large countries tend to have extensive coverage of DSL and cable networks. In fact, the total landmass of a country has a very low correlation with broadband penetration per 100 inhabitants across the OECD (see Figure 1.7). For example, Canada has the highest penetration rate among the G7 countries â" which are all smaller."
Canada has a higher broadband penetration rate than Japan, the UK, France, Germany -- in fact, Japan and the USA have similar broadband penetration rates.
It's not dispersion either (how clumped-together people are), Japan, the US and Canada have similar dispersions.
Parent
Re:oook (Score:5, Funny)
And broadband speeds also means faster downloads of penetration videos.
Parent
Re:oook (Score:4, Interesting)
These companies have no problem running their fibre through some farmer's land but they don't want to give him any of the benefits.
I know it's not that simple but the fact is the US lagging behind has nothing to do with how but the US is. It's because companies don't want to service certain areas. As someone who lived in rural Pennsylvania, I know what kind of contempt Verizion has for people in the country.
Despite the fact where I used to live isn't that far from the nearest broadband and it's an upcoming area with a lot of rich people moving in I don't think they offer any sort of broadband even now. In fact I know there are people there that don't even have decent dialup because of the line noise but Verizion's policy is basically as long as you can tell someone else is on the other end they don't give a fuck how noisy your line is. Businesses are exceptionally tight and the only way the US will ever catch up to anyone else is either force companies to roll it out or the government lays its own broadband.
Parent
So what? (Score:5, Funny)
Spin This So Action is Taken! (Score:5, Insightful)
US Broadband Won't Catch Up With Japan's for 101 Years
Uh, could you somehow spin (regardless of truth) this as related to war and/or military prowess so our administration will mindlessly throw money at it instead of mindlessly ignoring it?
Like:
US Cyber Attacking Infrastructure Embarrassingly Lags Japan's
Japanese Identify US Broadband as "Ripe for the Pickin'"
Cyber Pearl Harbor Imminent
US President's Netflix Downloads 1/10 as Fast as Japanese President's
US Administration Idles as US-Japanese Broadband Gap Widens
Come on, these things basically write themselves! Turn it into a dick measuring contest or it's meaningless.
That's not all (Score:5, Funny)
The Japanese are also at least a hundred years ahead of us in cartoon porn, particularly tentacle rape porn. This "tentacle gap", as I call it, cannot be allowed to continue.
Japanese Internet Minister (Score:5, Funny)
Geography (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
not south korea, though.
why is it countries that have US troops in them have better internet than the mainland USA.
other than size, that is, i know size makes a huge difference, but fiber optics lines, without being dug up at all, have increased bandwidth year after year for more than a decade now. america has more dark fiber than anyone else, personally my wager is on greed, being the single biggest factor in holding back high speed internet.
Future headline on "The Register"... (Score:5, Funny)
"Asian Pipe Envy"
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether or not the prediciton is statistically shaky, the fact remains that there is a huge gap between the US and many other, quite dissimilar countries. The big question is "Why?" Japan and Korea aren't the only ones that far outclass American broadband speed, though they do have quite a speed lead.
Chart of Broadband Speeds by Country [worldpoliticsreview.com]
And sure, in the US you can get FiOS at 30Mbps, but it will cost you $200/month and you have to live in a very limited area. You can get 50Mbps from Comcast only if you live in the Twin Cities (right now), but it's still $150/month.
I could point to the geography of the US, saying how its a much bigger area than the smaller countries at the top of those charts. Sure, Japan and Korea have an incredible population density. But not Finland, Sweden, France, etc. They have population densities several orders of magnitude smaller than even cities like Houston, Miami, Phoenix, or Chicago. Why aren't these cities more like those countries?
I could also try it from the angle of regulation/free market/competition. But I'm pretty sure those countries at the top aren't all the same in that regard.
Is it because our companies tend to each have local monopolies over large areas? That seems less likely considering how just about everyone in a metro area can get cable. So they have two companies, phone and cable, to compete with each other.
Is there something unique about our infrastructure? Did we make some horrible mistake that seemed like a good idea at the time but is now haunting us?
Is the US just in a perfect storm of craptitude where all these factors come into play?
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Finland is third? I have 512/512 because that's all I can afford, and I live in a city. 20 mbps sure as fuck isn't the average speed over here.
Parent
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, people keep bringing up the "small town" and "urbanisation" excuses for poor US broadband penetration.
I'm moving to Sweden from Denmark in 3 weeks. Did a bit of checking.
Here are my options for internet in Sweden where I'll be living:
Company 1 and 2: 3G modem, 7.2 Mbit/s down, 384kbit/s down - theoretical max. Realistic is 4/256 in that area according to the people who work there. 60$/month
Company 2 and 3: ADSL, up to 20/2 Mbit/s. 80$/month
Company 4: Fiber. 100 Mbit/s down, not sure about up, but FAST. Including free calls to landline phones in Sweden: 52$/month
And every single option is without a usage cap.
So, obviously I will be moving to a big city, right?
Wrong.
I'm moving to Ljusdal [wikipedia.org]. A town of about 8,000 people. The municipality has about 20,000 residents and covers an area of 5,288 km^2 (2,041 miles^2). It's about 300 km north of the capital of Sweden. The biggest city nearby is the main city of the country (Gävle [wikipedia.org]) with about 69,000 residents.
Not entirely sure, but I suspect that would pretty much put any kind of rural/urbanisation argument to rest. Hell, Sweden is 449,964 km^2 (173,732 miles^2), compared to Texas' 696,241 km^2, so about 2/3rds the size, but only has 9.2 million residents compared to Texas' 23.9 million. And yes, I left out Alaska of the equation. But if we're playing that game, we can always go with the Kingdom of Denmark which includes Greenland and its 830,000 miles^2 ;)
Personally I suspect it's the fact that four different companies are vying for customers in the same area that makes the big difference.
Parent
Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
"The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen."
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html [pbs.org]
Parent
12Mbps std in 2002, then 18Mbps in 2005... (Score:5, Interesting)
I lived in Japan for three years, and when I got there in 2002, the *basic* package offered by Yahoo! Japan was 12Mbps DSL for an intro rate of ¥2000 a month (about US $20), bumping up to ¥3500 a month later on. By the time I left in 2005, the *basic* package cost the same, but the *lowest* speed available was 18Mbps -- something that still doesn't even *exist* at the consumer level anywhere in the US (that I'm aware of) in 2008.
The US broadband market is suffocating under the rank hypocrisy and greed of the telcos, and the bald corruption and bribeability of the congress. Somehow the Japanese broadband market has a heck of a lot more internal competition, yet the companies there can still make a profit offering much higher speeds for relatively lower rates.
Frustratedly,
Scarcity (Score:3, Insightful)
The answer to why we don't have faster broadband speeds is simple: scarcity pays.
It is not in the interests of U.S. telecom providers to roll out high-speed bandwidth all at once. Thus we have a tiered service model, with people paying a little for 1Mb connections and substantially more to get higher speeds, regardless of what the telecom carriers' networks can handle.
Granted, some of the scarcity may be real and based on telecom companies dragging their feet on upgrading, but even if they could carry 100 times the traffic the can now it still would be in their corporate interest to artificially create a bandwidth scarcity to keep prices high.
Re:Thats ok... (Score:5, Funny)
The speed might be good on Mars, but the latency to most websites is going to be horrible.
Parent
Two words (Score:3, Funny)
Proxy Servers.....big freakin' proxy servers...
Heck I bet they'll be owned by Google because instead of just cataloging the internet, Google will be cashing the internet.
Re:Thats ok... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Euro/Japan envy is getting stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, like shorter work weeks, better insurance coverage, universal health care, more vacation time.
Really, people, lighten up!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Euro/Japan envy is getting stupid (Score:5, Informative)
Report on Productivity and Vacation [gaebler.com]
Go read the numbers before spouting off about things like this.
Parent
Re:Euro/Japan envy is getting stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
They are interesting numbers considering the phenomenon of karoshi [wikipedia.org], which, AFAIK, is unique to Japan.
There is also a study [jpc-sed.or.jp] about the growth of mental health problems in the workplace and the increased use of prolonged employee leaves.
So maybe it's not just the hours, but how intense those hours are.
It would also be interesting to know how the numbers were calculated and if they measure work times based on tools like Blackberry usage and VPNs, two things that "help" me work more hours than just those when I'm in the office. I couldn't find the report gaebler referenced. Quick googling didn't show it and the search function at JPC-SED is broken.
Parent
Re:Euro/Japan envy is getting stupid (Score:5, Funny)
the US system encourages people to work hard, whereas laziness is often seen to be rewarded in the UK.
I am so totally moving to the UK.
Parent
Re:Euro/Japan envy is getting stupid (Score:5, Funny)
You say that, but I'll be you're too lazy to follow through with it.
Parent
Re:Euro/Japan envy is getting stupid (Score:4, Insightful)
The lack of fast internet in America is crippling all the business that relies on fast internet speeds. Sorry to burst your bubble but the Internet is actually used for more that just surfing the web. If America is supposed to be moving away from a manufacturing economy and toward a service economy (specifically an information service economy) then we need to have the infrastructure to handle the demands of that economy. Just like when we invested tons of money in the railroad infrastructure in the beginnings of the Industrial revolution and then again on our highway system in the 50â(TM)s for trucking; we need to invest heavily in our Internet infrastructure. If we donâ(TM)t then we will surely fail as an Information Economy. Iâ(TM)ve had direct experience with this as I worked for a Medical ASP and we were constantly crippled by crappy Internet speeds that would not have been an issue in most of Europe and much of Asia. Itâ(TM)s shameful how our economic growth is being hampered by a few very greedy Telco companies.
Parent
Re:Euro/Japan envy is getting stupid (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Euro/Japan envy is getting stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Euro/Japan envy is getting stupid (Score:5, Informative)
I live in Boston and can't get anything more than 8 down 768 up from Comcast or 3.0 down (something slow up) DSL. No other options. (No Fios in Boston proper).
Even if Fios were available I don't think there are any options that will give 63mbps download speeds. And that's the apparently the Japanese average...
What's the excuse here?
Parent
Re:Euro/Japan envy is getting stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
Or like better beer, a rich regional culture and history, better cuisine, better wine.
The United States doesn't have rich regional cultures? I guess you've never been to New York City or New Orleans?
And the rest of those are purely subjective. Most of the mass market European beers (Heineken comes to mind) are just as crappy as the mass market American beers. Start talking about microbrews though I think you'll find a few American beers that stack up favorably. American wine came of age a long time ago and competes successfully on the world stage. And 'better cuisine'? Cuisine varies so much between regions (even within small countries -- ever traveled across Italy?) that I'm really interested to hear how you define "better".
Parent
Re:Japan is a lot smaller than the U.S. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Japan is a lot smaller than the U.S. (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a 20/20 fiber connection available to me for cheaper than what I'm currently paying for 1/0.25 ... how lame is that?
You have a far faster connection available to you but you continue to pay higher prices for vastly inferior bandwidth? That is incredibly lame -- switch already!
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, that goes a long way toward explaining why you can't get Asian-style symmetric 100mbit broadband out in the sticks, but there ARE densely populated cities in the US. I could throw rocks from my apartment and hit 3 AT&T buildings. Why can't (won't) they provide better than 16mbit/512kbit ADSL to subscribers who are literally across the street from their switch? Because they don't have to. We don't have the regulation to make them, and thanks to the high cost of running new copper we will never
Re:Japan is a lot smaller than the U.S. (Score:5, Informative)
Even then when you compare with Finland or Sweden, which have a similar population density, the US compares badly. Saying that the US is larger isn't a worthwhile response, the $/potential customer is the same regardless of the scale of the operation. It's just that clearly one single company for the US is far worse than the dozens across Europe, and there isn't real competition or universal service requirements.
Then again the UK is pretty dire in my opinion, following the US model of cheap crappy DSL and lacking upstream bandwidth, rather than the Swedish model of fast fibre to the home. Virgin Media like to claim they're fibre to the cabinet, but it's still arse-slow on DSL if you're unfortunate to be stuck with them.
Parent
Re:Japan is a lot smaller than the U.S. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a nice argument, but kind of falls apart when you figure that even places like New York, which has some of the highest population densities in the world, have crap internet. If the free market and unregulated business practices was going to provide good internet at competitive rates it would have already materialized, at least in select markets.
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
Red Herring Comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
Not the old "but America is rural!" chestnut again. Scandinavian countries have lower population densities than we do yet have much better access. And the "rural" argument might make sense for why you can't get good access on a farm in Kansas, but then why don't we have 100 Mbps consumer connections in San Francisco or Manhattan?
Parent
Re:Better Comparison. (Score:5, Interesting)
It is a GOOD thing that the US is not moronic enough to wire our large, open country to the same extent that a small, island country can.
And what about your major cities? Does it strike you as odd that the supposed hub of all technology, in California, has shitty internet access?
Parent
Re:Better Comparison. (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, take it from me. I'm up here in Canada, where the average internet connection is
Parent
Re:Better Comparison. (Score:5, Informative)
Manhattan is a relatively small island with an extremely dense population. Logically, it should be even better than Japan for broadband (since Japan has to run cable to comparatively lightly populated areas like Hokkaido). The fastest affordable broadband here is:
FiOS is apparently available in a small amount of downtown, but not in most of the island, and even that was only introduced within the past year.
According to the article, average broadband speed in Japan is 63 Mbps down. So in 5-10 years when Verizon finishes wiring Manhattan, we'll be up to consumer speeds *almost* one third that of Japan's *now*.
Parent
So why is Finland so much better? (Score:5, Insightful)
So how come, even in Silicon Valley, I can't get a consumer connection faster than 5Mbps? In 2008? Yet, when I moved to Japan in 2002, the *slowest* most *basic* package I could get (excepting dial-up, which was being phased out) was 12Mbps.
Fine, we get it, the US is huge. That's no excuse. The simple fact of the matter is that the telcos are much happier to sit there and overcharge for crappy service, as they have no compelling reason to upgrade. If population density and geography alone were the only limiting factors, US residents would still be able to get decent high-speed connections in the urban areas. But they don't exist. I mean, jebus, FINLAND has better download speeds, by a factor of almost 9x (2.4Mbps US vs 21Mbps Finland), despite a population density of about half the US (31/sq km US vs 16/sq km Finland).
So quit the hyperbole, and look at the basic facts -- we're getting shafted in the name of telco profits.
Parent
Re:Bu-Bu-But the free market rules! (Score:5, Insightful)
You're blaming government-granted monopolies on the free market?
Parent