US Broadband Won't Catch Up With Japan's For 101 Years 708
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.
Re:Euro/Japan envy is getting stupid (Score:1, Informative)
Indeed. Yeah, so they have fast broadband. Turns out it's easy to build that type of infrastructure when you have a high population density, and theirs is so high that people live with their parents until they are in their 30s.
In the meantime, we've got areas with Fios, and 50/50Mbit symmetrical fiber connections to the 'net. So instead of moving to Japan, you can move to Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, or Texas... Or quit twisting statistics into lies and wait until the fiber gets run to where you are. Which probably won't take anywhere near 100 years.
Or keep believing the grass is greener somewhere else, and move. We're still waiting for all those people who said they were moving to Canada if Bush won in 2004 to make good though, so I won't hold my breath on that one.
Re:Euro/Japan envy is getting stupid (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:Euro/Japan envy is getting stupid (Score:5, Informative)
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*.
Re:Japan is a lot smaller than the U.S. (Score:2, Informative)
The word is "gypped." It's a racist slur meant to evoke images of conniving gypsies tricking you out of your treasure.
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.
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?
Re:Better Comparison. (Score:1, Informative)
I don't give a flying fuck about what the broadband availability is in Bumfuck, Kansas. But there's no reason that downtown Seattle, or NY, or any other metropolis should be worse off than the furthest possible rural edge of Japan.
Now on Hikari Flets (NTT's Fiber/VDSL service) (Score:3, Informative)
I'm on NTT East Japan's Hikari Flets.
I -really do- get greater than 60Mbps sustained.
NTT provides the pipe and OCN provides the packets... it's cheaper than Rogers Cable was in canada (1/2 the price) and they throw in phone service (VoIP of course) all for $20/mo.
At my office we also have NTT East and OCN... it's guaranteed bandwidth and costs me less than $200/mo, can max out it's 100Mbps PPPoE to the Cisco and gives us 8 IPs. If you want gauranteed service in US or Canada it's T1s at $1000's/mo.
The telcos in Canada and the US are terrified that cheap IP will cost them their business.
Re:Euro/Japan envy is getting stupid (Score:3, Informative)
Cry me a river.
Re:oook (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Euro/Japan envy is getting stupid (Score:1, Informative)
Better insurance/universal health care - just like the free clinics. Better chance of catching something while waiting with the poor than fixing anything.
More vacation time - so you can travel to a country that actually does more than fix minor problems without waiting for years.
Seriously, why do you think all the Canadians come to the US for health care when they need a major operation? Because with socialized medicine, the majority always gets priority. Good luck if you have a rare/uncommon disease. Just look at somewhere like John Hopkins, or the Mayo Clinic - which has served more kings/royalty than any other place in the world. There is a reason why people come to the US from other countries to get health care.
Meh, don't believe everything you read (Score:3, Informative)
I lived in rural Japan for 15 months. I'm not talking about way up in the mountains, mind you, maybe about an hour's drive away from Utsunomiya [wikipedia.org].
The only broadband option was DSL from Yahoo. It was decently fast and only about $25 a month, but it wasn't light-years ahead or anything. I can drive an hour out from Indianapolis and find equally good service, probably from more than one provider.
If anything, my connection in Japan was slower because anything I wanted to access was coming over a trans-ocean link. I easily get 2x or 3x speed on most downloads now that I'm back in Indy and I only pay about 2x more. Sounds fair to me.
Also, my broadband was the only thing in Japan that was cheaper than in the USA.
So, yeah. Lies, damn lies, and statistics.
Re:Thats ok... (Score:3, Informative)
If you think we have a snowball's chance in hell of seeing a thousand then you're being WAY too optimistic about medical advances. Average lifespan of 100 for our gen? Quite possible. 125? Stretching, but maybe. Anything over 150 ain't happening.
Re:oook (Score:2, Informative)
Umm... he is citing a source, even if only indirectly. I found it faster to google "oecd country population dispersion" and I got this PDF [aui.es] as my first result. Figure 1.8 on page 31 shows Canada, the US and Japan closely clustered for population dispersion & broadband penetration, with Canada both most dispersed and most... penetrated.
I still wonder how meaningful the chosen metric is. You're talking percentage of land mass vs. percentage of population, which is an odd way to compare Japan and Canada. I mean, the dispersion rate may be similar, but the difference in distances involved is still huge. Not that this weakens the GP's point.
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.
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.
Re:oook (Score:3, Informative)
Umm, I'm not saying the state shouldn't fund schools, roads or the military, nor am I saying anything at all about the nominal tax rate. I was making a point regarding the national budget, which has what many economists call an "irretrievable deficit". Meaning it's so far in debt, it'll likely never be able to pay it off, even if it stopped spending tomorrow. Economics 101 is down the hall.
Sure, if you measure that in terms of "televisions per capita" or "calories consumed per capita". If you measure it in terms of "suicides per capita" or the rate of anti-depressant drug prescription, the US fares not so well.
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]
Re:oook (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Well... we are in two wars over oil so which should we go after next? Women or broadband? ;-)