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> | WORK IN PROGRESS | | | The United States: First World Country, Third World Broadband | | | American Broadband Speeds Are Second Rate
In Japan, broadband service is available at speeds up to 150 Mbps for only $60 a month. In the U.S., the fastest commercially available broadband is 50 Mbps and it costs $90-150 a month. In London, 8 Mbps speed can be bought for $9 dollars a month, whereas in New York 1 Mbps speed costs over twice that much. The average broadband speed in Japan is 16.7 Mbps. The average in Sweden was 8.8 Mbps. The average in the United States was a relatively snail-paced 5.2 Mbps.
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< | So how is it that the United States, a country once at the forefront of the high-speed internet movement, has fallen so far behind the rest of the world? For sure, one significant factor that explains the speed disparity is population density. With over half of Korea’s population living in incredibly dense apartment complexes, Korean ISPs do not have to provide connections to an incredibly large geographic area like U.S. ISPs have to. However, as big of a factor as population density may be, it does not account for the lack of Japanese-equivalent speeds in population dense areas of the United States such as New York City. The real reason we don’t have such types of speed is because our government is unwilling to engage in the amount of public investment towards broadband infrastructure that European countries have engaged in. Instead, the government has chosen incredibly capitalistic regulatory policies (purportedly to create “open competition” which have definitely failed in that respect) which result in diseconomies of scale and disincentives to create infrastructures similar to those that exist in Europe and Asia. | >
> | So how is it that the United States, a country once at the forefront of the high-speed internet movement, has fallen so far behind the rest of the world? For sure, one significant factor that explains the speed disparity is population density. With over half of Korea’s population living in incredibly dense apartment complexes, Korean ISPs do not have to provide connections to an large geographic area like U.S. ISPs have to. However, as big of a factor as population density may be, it does not account for the lack of Japanese-equivalent speeds in population dense areas of the United States such as New York City. The real reason we don’t have such types of speed is because our government is unwilling to engage in the amount of public investment towards broadband infrastructure that European countries have engaged in. Instead, the government has chosen capitalistic regulatory policies (purportedly to create “open competition” which have definitely failed in that respect) which result in diseconomies of scale and disincentives to create infrastructures similar to those that exist in Europe and Asia. | | | | |
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- You are overusing the word "incredibly." In fact, you shouldn't need at it all. Ever.
| | | American Broadband Is A Ripoff
Even more troublesome than our lack of bandwidth speed, however, is the price we pay for our second rate bandwidth. As seen in the section above, a small portion of the difference can be explained by the population density problem the United States faces. However, the true culprit for the United States’ overpriced bandwidth is, of course, the lack of competition that exists in the United States as opposed to Europe. | | | Ultimately, unless the United States government makes a massive overhaul of the current telecommunications regulation infrastructure, the existing duopolies will continue to crush any sense of actual competition within the United States. We will continue to fall even further behind to Europe and Asia with respect to speed, cost, and penetration. The effect that a regulation overhaul would have is enormous. Currently in the United States, over 10 million homes remain unserved, another 50 million are able to subscribe but choose not to because of cost concerns or speed concerns, and the 50 million that are subscribed are stuck with only duopoly choices. With proper regulation, affordable internet connections could reach millions of children, resulting in millions of brains, previously on the other side of the digital divide, to be reached and finally be given one of the greatest learning tools on the planet. Anarchistic distribution channels would become far more efficient and numerous. Broadband penetration would become so high that ideas like high speed wireless networks built solely from personal Wi-Fi connections could become a reality and rid us of the need for giant telecommunication companies to provide our cell phone service.
Once we make the internet affordable (and hopefully eventually free) for every person in the United States, the walls of capitalism will begin to crumble and the changes we have discussed in class will come like a freight train. It all starts with making the pipeline free and accessible. | |
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- Well, no. Actually, it has to end there. Given the hold of the oligopolists on US political outcomes, the impoverishment of the US public sphere as a result of the collapse of 2008, the alliance of right-wing populism with concentrated media, and a number of other systemic and contingent factors, there is no reason to expect the political realignment of forces necessary to create a social-welfare priority in the provision of bandwidth. Like health care, this is an area in which Americans are going to be lied to by everybody about whether their deal is good or not, and they're going to be shown too little of the non-US possibilities to get the wrong idea.
- One group of people has decided to make government at least responsible for inhibiting unreasonably anticompetitive substantive network operation, which is what "network neutrality" turns out to mean once you get rid of all the ignorance and bullshit. Another is continuing to work at the replacement of unfree technology by free technology in the operational structures of everything, with the intention of building first the technical followed by the political platform for a movement in the direction of free bandwidth along with other benefits of a social-welfare priority in the development of digital technology. (This eventually yields a program more or less like the one presented in The dotCommunist Manifesto.) Other positions, too, have their occupants, and the political interrelations are too complicated to set out in a paragraph, but the important point is that I don't know anyone working for these outcomes who thinks the telecomm oligopolists are going to implode peacefully to make way for socialism, or that they can be beaten using our existing resources, or that they're only a problem in the US.
- I think a revision that went beyond where I went in class, and which avoided mere speculative triumphalism about how all the prisons are going to burst and turn into clouds of yellow butterflies would be very helpful.
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