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The United States: First World Country, Third World Broadband

-- By EdwardBontkowski - 12 Nov 2009

A Disturbing Revelation

Back when I was in middle school, I was an avid online video game player, playing mostly MMORPG’s and first-person shooters. Playing online games on a dial-up connection was mostly an exercise in futility, but one day in early 1998, I came across a PC magazine article describing something called “high-speed internet”, available via either digital subscriber line or through a cable line. It claimed that with high-speed internet you could download entire movies within minutes, play online games with sub-250ms pings, and download web pages almost instantly. After reading the article, I quickly became excited and started searching online to see if such bandwidth capabilities were available in my area. Sure enough, there was a company called “@home” (which eventually was consumed by Comcast) that was planning to bring cable internet to my area within a few months. While the speeds never came even close to what was advertised, it was definitely an amazing upgrade over dial-up.

After a few years with cable internet, however, I started to notice something rather disturbing. My bandwidth speeds weren’t getting any faster, yet the bandwidth speeds of online friends (that I had met through gaming) from Europe (especially Scandinavian countries) and Korea had home access to bandwidth speeds that put mine to shame. And to top it all off, they were paying a fraction of what I was paying.

When I attended the University of Illinois in 2003, I finally had access to similar speed broadband that my European and Korean friends had been having delivered to their homes for the past 2 years. In an ironic twist of fate, though, I learned that the university was imposing a cumulative upload and download limit of a paltry 500MB per day (which was later generously upgraded to a whopping 750MB at the start of my junior year). I suspected that this limitation was brought about by a good deal of lobbying by the recording industries towards the university, as well as the ISP providing the university’s bandwidth. This suspicion was confirmed when I learned that the university and their ISP traced the IP addresses of students who were “illegally” downloading media, and then shared these IP addresses with various recording industries who then threatened to take legal action against the students who had been caught. In any case, I was in the same situation I was in before—bandwidth that significantly lagged behind my European and Asian friends.

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. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/the-broadband-gap-why-is-theirs-faster/

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 the 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. Until our government chooses to appropriately regulate the telecommunications industry, the United States will find itself perpetually behind Europe and Asia with respect to broadband speed and overall penetration.

American Broadband Is A Ripoff

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