Over Reacting To The US Broadband Situation?
from the not-so-bad... dept
While there have been plenty of stories about how US broadband penetration and speeds have fallen behind other countries, Declan McCullough is suggesting that things aren’t as bad as they seem. Most of the countries ahead of us have vastly different circumstances, including much higher population density — making it easier to offer broadband. He also points out that most people in the US, though certainly not all, at least have the option of getting broadband. Many simply choose not to do so. Of course, what he doesn’t mention is that, for the most part, the actual competition is slim, often held back by powerful telco or cable provider lobbyists who block efforts at competitive efforts either from private companies or municipalities.
Comments on “Over Reacting To The US Broadband Situation?”
No competition
I agree. There is no competition. You’re pretty much limited to your local phone service provider, or your cable service provider. Then, those get bought out by other companies which won’t allow competition either. The circle of greed.
Re: No competition
No competition boils down to… Price. The price for DSL is getting closer to reasonable here in the SF Bay Area. While Comcrap cable is WAY overpriced. Especially if you don’t want their TV service. Being in IT, I am often asked for advice from friends and coworkers. More often than not, they hesitate at paying for DSL and simply won’t pay for cable. A significant fraction just give up on home internet connection and connect only when at work. More competition => lower prices => more acceptance.
Competition
I live in Hollister, which used to be a rural town about 1 hour south of Silicon Valley. We’re becoming more of a bedroom community for the Valley due to housing prices, but we’re sort of in the middle of nowhere (at least 20 minutes from any decent-sized cities and no direct freeway access). Some areas of our county (San Benito) have no phone service and some have old-style switchboards (last I heard). When I first moved to Hollister, we didn’t even have a local AOL number.
Things have sure changed. I used to get DSL through a local ISP (and could probably get it through SBC-Yahoo). Now I’m using Charter’s cable service. There used to be another ISP locally that sold DSL, too, but they went bankrupt I believe.
So, for a semi-remote area, we have several choices for broadband. This may simply be because we’re near Silicon Valley, but it’s still interesting.
Government Intervention
We have the case of South Korea, in which government carefully orchestrated the marketplace to ensure there would be fair and orderly competition. However, Americans go spastic at the idea of government stepping in to improve the situation — they would rather suffer the depravity of unregulated, Machiavellian free markets.
Re: Government Intervention
Well, you folks do like to ensure you’re not coddled by your government; it makes it easier to question them, of course.
Those of us living in a socialist country – which isn’t communist, although Americans may not understand the difference – enjoy our government’s coddling. We have competition but pitifully bad anti-monopoly stuff, so the biggest company usually does win out and stay on top.
We compete in the private sector, but it seems the government programs are woefully over budget because we refuse to let them bid : we have enough problems with superbugs in our hospitals without having el-cheapo janitorial staff to help it thrive. Also, while healthcare is universally available, triage starts at the GP’s office with the patient verbally (over-?) justifying the need for any procedure.
Really, we don’t know why Microsoft doesn’t come here.
Oh yeah. Competition. But we’re screwing it up even here: the utility infrastructure, built with the public trust and which should be under the stewardship of the local and regional administration, are now being sold off one by one, by administrative office unwilling to open themselves to reasonable streamlining and choosing simply to off-sell utilities for short-term profit. Our longer office terms (and no limit like you) should have prevented this mind-numblingly stupid short-term thought, but it’s not.
So even while we have a semblance of fair competition now, we’re rapidly adopting the worst parts of your set-up with none of the benfits.
Broadband
Broadband is not widely available for starters, let’s keep that comment honest. Companies like Spint won’t even upgrade my phone lines for a decent dial up connection. I can only dream of Broadband because Sprint only tackles projects with immediate profit. I live in a high tourist area, its no surprize the hotels offer Broadband. The third world has broadband maybe someday those of us in the forgotten America (Florida) will get broadband.