Webomatica

 

Our Pitiful Broadband

August 30th, 2007

About a week ago Marc Cuban ranted about the Internet being “dead and boring,” and failing to be truly innovative any more, due to America’s flagging broadband penetration. Then today I read an article on how fast broadband Internet connections are in Japan, to the point where they can stream broadcast quality television. Speeds are eight to thirty times faster than in America. Meanwhile, this pleasant article reports that ISPs are leaving rural Americans out to dry.

First off, I’d have to agree that the broadband situation here is a pitiful embarrassment. Other nations have zoomed far ahead of us, and truth be told, that’s a big reason why other nations are going gangbusters with social networks and video games. In this case I agree with Steven Hodson who mentions corporate greed as a big part of this problem. A lot of the telecos don’t seem interested in giving us faster broadband (maybe they’re scared of piracy) for the greater good of the nation – instead giving us “packages” (broadband, land line, cellphone, and cable) as a substitute for innovation.

Why?

In 2000, the Japanese government seized its advantage in wire. In sharp contrast to the Bush administration over the same time period, regulators [in Japan] compelled big phone companies to open up wires to upstart Internet providers… In short order, broadband exploded.

I also hear the excuse that America is such a big land mass. That doesn’t explain the slow broadband options in the Bay Area, with a huge population within close proximity and tons of Internet companies. Yet it seems like the only choices are AT&T and Comcast. AT&T has its problems with spying on users, and now Comcast may be throttling the connections of BitTorrent users, and is definitely unclear what their bandwidth caps are (sort of like a speed limit that is unknown until you’re caught speeding). Meanwhile, now it looks like municipal WiFi is dying on the vine, even in the Bay Area where it now looks like the San Francisco WiFi project is in limbo now that Earthlink has bowed out.

The end result is that while my computer processor and hard drive capacity continue to more or less follow Moore’s law, my broadband Internet connection is essentially no faster than it was in 2001.

There really isn’t much excuse for this country’s pitiful broadband penetration rate. The government and the corporations remain focused on short-term profit to the detriment of our future competitiveness. However, this is no surprise for a fiscally irresponsible nation that is headed for a financial day of reckoning sooner than anybody would like to admit.

RSS Feed Please subscribe to the Webomatica RSS Feed!

folder Categories: General, Technology :: ::

Related Posts:
Back Futureworld: When Technology Comes Together
Back 10 Reasons Why I've Decided To Get An iPad
Back The iPad: "iPod Pro" For Consuming, Not "MacBook Mini" For Creating

Back Previous Post:
Back Next Post:

  • oli
    It pretty bad in Canada too.
    I just received a mail last week from my ISP telling they're going to limit downloads and uploads to 100GB per month!!! I signed up with them because they offered unlimited downloads and now they're going backwards.
    I'm from France, and when I left the country, all ISPs offered good deals at cheap price. Here services are not as good as in France, and they cost 3 times more!
    I start to be very frustrated about internet services , as well as phone an TV in Canada.
  • Yeah I hear you. The bandwith cap bugs me because while the ISPs are doing it because of piracy there are starting to be legitimate reasons for large file downloadas - for example I downloaded season 3 of Grey's Anatomy from the iTunes store which was several GB, and the episodes of Star Trek: New Voyages are distributed via BiTorrent. Then what about software downloads, which are growing larger and larger...

    If the ISPs are going so far to look at specifically what files are being downloaded that opens up a whole issue of privacy which is another subject entirely.
  • I'm always very careful about what I say and how I say it, but I actually have a lot of insight into this topic, and I can say with absolute 100% certainty that it comes down to greed. The amount of money that's spent on PAC's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_action_c...), political consultants, outright bribery, etc, is shocking. 100's of millions a year, if not billions. The level of corruption in the cable and telco industries is the stuff of Enron. The only thing that makes me happy is that it's so bad that it will at some point be exposed. I'm still trying to figure out a way to 'leak' some things without being sued to death.
blog comments powered by Disqus