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| | | 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 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. | >
> | 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. | | | 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. | | | The results of this abandonment are exactly as one might expect. While Europe experienced a decline in average revenue per broadband connection between 2006 and 2007, the average revenue per connection in the United States continued to increase. This increase was directly the result of the typical duopoly in the United States comprised of the local cable operators and local phone operators. Such existence of a duopoly allows for minimal competition in the United States and places American broadband companies in a position that makes it far easier to maintain or increase prices than it is for their European counterparts. | |
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> | This is not a
sufficient explanation. You don't have the technology right
underneath (no one can provide 50Mbps using DSL, for example, and you
don't explain the difference between asymmetric and symmetric
bandwidth, which is crucial) and your explanation of the regulatory
and market situations is too glancing to provide real insight.
| | | The Potential of an Accessible and Affordable Pipeline
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. Until very recently, courts have been all too willing to continue this regime of dominance. In April 2010, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals held that federal regulators power was limited and that Comcast was free to block or slow users' access to certain websites and possibly even charge users to get content more quickly from bandwidth intensive sites such as YouTube? . However, even more recently, the FCC has responded by outlining an internet regulatory scheme that splits access from content, a move that helps push the U.S. towards the mythical "network neutrality" (for those who believe in such a thing). While this is a small step for a broken system that will require many steps to fix, it is at least a step in the right direction. | |
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> | This is not a coherent
explanation of what's going on. Not having explained why "network
neutrality" is mythical, you haven't explained what the FCC's
regulatory outlook now actually is. You didn't identify the
preceding duopoly theory correctly, or explain what limitations the
FCC faces in moving away from it. Your exposition of European
regulatory structure is too limited to be more than fanciful, and you
don't explain Korean or Japanese regulatory or market settings at
all. So we've got some observations about end results, some
confusion about technology, some incommensurable observations on
regulatory and market situations in the US, Europe, Korea and Japan,
with hardly any real information about the latter two societies, and
a generally accurate tone of pessimism overall.
Part of the difficulty here is that even a sophisticated explanation
that was based entirely on studying and thinking about the bandwidth
industries would be missing important context. That the US is a
society of private wealth and public squalor is hardly news, at least
since the publication of John Kenneth Galbraith's The Affluent Society
in 1958. American infrastructure in all areas including
transportation, energy production, education, health care, and
telecommunications is poor compared to that in less rich and powerful
societies. The bandwidth revolution is happening at a time when that
discrepancy is accelerating.
Bandwidth distribution is inefficient under conditions of social
inequality, like health care distribution. Using public resources to
defeat inequality is not easy to arrange in an aristocracy, which the
US has become. Trying to explain what is happening without reference
to the larger context is hardly impossible: most social policy
discussion in the US proceeds without any reference to the change in
social systems spurred by rising economic inequality. But if you
want to be clear about something complex in 1,000 words, using the
large context to align the intermediate concepts and the evidentiary
details helps.
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