US Falls to 24th Place For Broadband Penetration 273
amigoro writes "According to research done by the consultancy firm Point Topic, the US has fallen to 24th place in terms of broadband penetration, with only 53% of households connected. South Korea led the pack, with 90% of households having highspeed connections. The US remains the largest broadband country in the world with more than 60.4 million subscribers in the quarter with 2.9 million new broadband additions, but China is fast catching up and has cut the gap to the US from 5.8 million at the end of 2006 to 4.1 million at end of March 2007. The firm's research also pointed out the disparity between the connectivity of first world nations and other places throughout the world. 'Many Sub-Saharan African states do not register in the figures at all: only South Africa, Sudan, Senegal and Gabon make it onto the list, with household broadband penetration running from 1.79% in South Africa - with 215,000 users at the end of March - to just 0.05% in Sudan - with a mere 3,000. North African states fare slightly better with Morocco scoring 6.78% penetration with 418,000 users and Egypt at 1.55% or 240,000.'"
We're Number One! (Score:2, Funny)
Wait....
Re:We're Number One! (Score:5, Insightful)
EVERY time a story like this pops up on Slashdot, the exact same discussion ensues. There are a lot of readers from the US who for some reason or other just can't stand the fact that the US is not #1 in everything tech-related, and start slagging the story.
"But we're leading in total numbers!"
Yes, but penetration is important because it will be a lot more interesting when everyone in society has it, not just you, or your friends, or everyone in the upper-middle class and above.
"But we have such low population density!"
Yes, on average, the US population density is pretty low compared to the rest of the west, but on the broadband penetration list, there are countries that are less dense than the US, but still have better penetration.
"But, population density is only an average, we have such low levels of urbanization!"
Yes, on average, the US' level of urbanization is pretty low compared to the rest of the west, but on the broadband penetration list, there are countries that are less urbanized than the US, but still have better penetration.
"But, averages suck, we should compare big cities!"
Ok, New York might have the best penetration in the US for example, but there are plenty of other big cities that have better penetration, and are not situated in the US.
"But, those stinking pinko liberal commie Europeans have government subsidies on broadband!"
Well, there are lots of places in the US that had the phone copper paid for by taxes, and there are lots of place sin the US where local government subsidizes broadband, and the same goes for lots of places in the west. But not all places.
There are other countries/cities/areas that have better broadband penetration than the US, in relative terms, in absolute terms, despite being less urbanized and less densely populated, without government subsidies, and in a free market economy. Get over it for fuck's sake.
If you so desperately want to be #1 in this as well, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT instead of dismissing the reports or refuse to believe in them or squint and look at them sideways. Stop the whining already. Look at those that do better and LEARN from it.
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First, population density can be a bit tricky to compare. Canada has an extraordinarily low population density if measured in the traditional way (number of Canadians / area of Canada). However, most Canadians live in a few strips near the US border. The actual distance between the average Canadian and his nearest neighbor may or may not be higher than that of the US. The latter is a much more relevant influence on broadband penetration than the former. The same holds true in some very
Re:We're Number One! (Score:5, Insightful)
2) European conceit? What? I didn't see any "haa haa the US sucks" this time around, but there were still the same tiring excuses and attempts at trivializing this report as all the previous times. You don't see the Brits wining about South Korea being more urbanized than the UK, and you don't see the Finns whining that Sweden has a higher population density. It's always, always, US readers that try to raise the population density or the urbanization or whatever excuse is popular this instant.
THIS IS NOT A COMPETITION. Yet those readers (and the angle of the story submission itself) are making this into a pissing contest, instead of seeing the thing for what it is: Useful information about the market.
Re:"Falling" means what again? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:"Falling" means what again? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an old, tired argument. Sure, North Korea is more densely populated. The Netherlands too. But the density does not really say it all, it's just an average. My dad got top marks in his course in statistics, and he went on all his life pontificating about the "chicken average": I eat two chickens, you eat none, on average we ate one each". There are surely immense areas of the US without broadband (like Yellowstone park, say), but what about areas as dense as NYC?
The question is better put as: how many Americans live in high-density areas? Quite a few [wikipedia.org]. The overall density is low because there is a damn half of the country that is uninhabited, and that's before counting in Alaska.
Also, what is the "threshold value" beyond which population density can sustain broadband, and how many Americans live in areas beyond this density?
America's broadband problem is not just less density (granted, that plays a role): the problem is that US culture refuses governmental intervention in infrastructure. South Korea's government, instead, invested heavily in Internet connectivity [wikipedia.org], and their lead position is the result. If you want your government out of your business, fair enough, but don't think anyone else is going to come in and build infrastructure if they cannot turn a profit in less that 24 months. The argument that society as a whole will benefit from broadband does not really appeal to private actors: they want money, not to benefit society.
Re:"Falling" means what again? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're saying, eventually, business gets around to it once its absolutely sure that it will turn a profit. The parent poster is pointing out that quite often, the government would be better off leading the horse to water, because the private sector isn't going to do shit until it sees that horse drinking.
Hes only saying that the US often lags behind other countries because the US relies heavily on the private sector, which has to be risk adverse. Many other countries' citizens trust their government to promote and regulate the development of infrastructure. America seems quite split on this issue because they perceive the government to be grossly inefficient and presumably incapable of recognizing when it is in the public's interest to encourage infrastructure.
The market is reactionary; that makes it very good for refining processes, technologies, and competition, but it also makes it generally deficient when it comes to putting in the tough work required to foster a market. This is one reason why US companies are given grants by the US government to pursue foreign markets; they don't want the risk. The irony of the situation is that the government mitigates risk when it comes to selling cereal in Brazil, because nobody in rural US needs cereal, but when it comes time for the government to involve itself in more sure-bet, domestic projects such as infrastructure, all of a sudden everyone says they hate paying taxes for government waste. You get the government you vote for.
On a final note, when private companies are the ones who put in 'the last mile', they own that infrastructure. So it would seem to run counter to the capitalist goal of giving consumers a choice in service providers. If the entire process was privatized, you would end up with N service providers creating N last mile cables
Not a surprise (Score:2, Insightful)
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Your kidding right? Do you live or have you ever driven over 'flyover country' take a drive away from the Twin cities in Minnesota for a real good example, every 15-20 miles or so there is a community between 10,000 and 20,000 people. That kinda adds up.
There is little excuse for 95+% of the US to not have a decent broadband level.
There is little excuse for your hyperbole! 60.4 million households at
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We have more than 250 million people in our cities, and there's no excuse for our lagging network services.
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(1) Many in cities like NY, Boston,
(2) Many who want to just do email do it at work when they can
(3) Many people use hot spots throughout the day
People not paying for network services does not equal *lagging network services* it mean many choose not to put down 45$ a month for cable, 25$ a month for DSL, or 10$ a month on high speed dial up (which for the purp
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Excuse?
Is this yet another reason I'm supposed to feel anxious and inadequate, because someone has thrown out a number that says the corporate 'we' is inferior?
Look, if your body is producing insufficient testosterone on its own, seek medical treatment.
Anyone buying into some dismal, chicken-little line of nonsense foisted by
deserves to be ignored.
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Re:Not a surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
If we took every in the US except bill smith in Alaska and moved them to NY state the nation would still have the same population density but a much tighter deviation. So maybe the answer is fewer people living in the sticks in Sweden and Finland? This is more complicated then putting two percents together and saying A is doing better than B.
Re:Not a surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
I would not be so sure about that:
Percent of people living in urban areas:
#40 Sweden: 83%
#43 United States: 80%
#88 Finland: 61%
Now the real question is what are the other percentage of people doing? are they in communities which are not urban but still sizable? are in farming?
DEFINITION: Percentage of people living in urban areas. Data for 2003. Urban-rural classification of population in internationally published statistics follows the national census definition, which differs from one country or area to another. National definitions are usually based on criteria that may include any of the following: size of population in a locality, population density, distance between built-up areas, predominant type of economic activity, legal or administrative boundaries and urban characteristics such as specific services and facilities.
I don't care to start searching about the US vs Swedish or Finish definition but my basic point is, its not as simple as people are making it out to be.
Re:Not a surprise (Score:4, Interesting)
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That *is* the middle of nowhere!
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USA, Inc. (Score:2)
C
Re:Not a surprise (Score:5, Informative)
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The United States is the wealthiest nation in the world. We also take pride in being technologically advanced. The fact that we can't even get as good internet connectivity as South Korea and Belgium is sort of sad.
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Yeah! And why can't Canadians use question marks.
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Well... kinda (Score:2)
Of course, even then, it's not always affordable. Good thing we only gave "those guys" $200 billion, and not twice that.
Re:Not a surprise (Score:5, Informative)
That is such bullshit. Not even in the densely populated areas you can get decent broadband in USA. The kind of figures you can get in Scandinavia, Korea and Japan is just not possible and that has NOTHING, NOT A BLOODY THING, to do with population density. Its about money and its about how involved the government is. Both in Japan, Korea and in Scandinavia the governments have been investing in black fibre just for the purpose to create a better internet for the people. companies that wanted to invest also got tax breaks and counties built their own black fibre networks. In my home town, Gothenburg, the city has built a large black fibre network. Unlike US cities where the city itself have run as an ISP (or tried to until they got sued in some case) the city doesn't provide internet access. other companies do that. I hear lots of baby whining from American "Why should I pay my taxes so someone else can surf porn" and I find it strange that I never hear some one whining about that your tax dollars goes to people paid by the CIA to rape young Iraqi girls in front of their fathers as a torture method (yeah, that actually happened). Hmmmmmmmmmm... Weird isnt it???
Just shut the bloody hell up with that "its not so densely populated here". California is the size of Sweden and have 4 times as many people but you can in Sweden easily get better and faster broadband than you. Yeah, right sorry, that is because the more people there is means that there is less of a market and less demand for it.
Re:Not a surprise (Score:4, Insightful)
By the South Korean definition of broadband (20 meg symmetric), we don't even get broadband in the densest part of the USA. This report makes the USA sound backwards and technologically behind - that's true, but it's far worse than this report implies.
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(that's if you're not trolling of course - if you are congratulations!)
Then explain NY City (Score:2)
Easy to run broadband in dense populations (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the numbers matched almost identically.
Re:Easy to run broadband in dense populations (Score:4, Interesting)
Using (# w/ broadband)/(total population)/density (if you have a better way please go ahead and use it, my math skills aren't the best) we get an "index" of what percent of the population/density has broadband.
US: 53%/31 density = 1.7096
South Korea: 90%/1274 = 0.0706
UK: 55.5%/246 = 0.22560
I wonder what a real mathematical formula would show in terms of the comparison between the US and South Korea. This one has a large number of problems, not the least of which is that it's completely arbitrary. I'd venture a guess that the US is actually one of the best in terms of penetration per area, what percentage of the area can have broadband.
Re:Easy to run broadband in dense populations (Score:5, Insightful)
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U kidding? (Score:2)
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So take the metropolitan area as a whole. No problem.
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# of people with broadband / # of people who live in "urban" areas
This takes into account how rural a population is, and assumes that it is much harder for them to get broadband (a number greater than 1 indicates that the rural population has already started being penetrated in the broadband market).
Problem with this is that the urban population of the USA is quite high. There's no real excuse for a lot of these people to not have broadband.
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Beijing does too, of course, but they use nerve stapling.
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US: X% of people live in Density > than y/square mile or km
where X% is probably close to 53%
and
South Korea: X% of people live in Density then y/square mile or km (where y is the same number as the US portion)
where X% in this case is probably close to 90%
Of course, the more I think about it, if the information was available you could most likely adjust y up and down a scale to make the statistics say what ever you wanted. guess that has to do with the "Li
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Population density is extremely overused as an excuse for the horrible internet connectivity in the USA.
Let's start with this fact: We're behind Canada, they have 1/10th of our population density.
Yes, we have large areas with very low population density - like Nebraska and Northern Alaska. That doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of our population is in reasonably high density urban / suburban areas - and that those areas don't have decent internet connectivity either.
South Korea has about 500
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I submit that any 10,000 square mile area with zero population doesn't count when calculating population density.
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That effect is more pronounced in Canada, but it's exactly why the USA has a low population density too. You could start using a more complex metric, but you need something quite a bit more complex than simple "population density for a country" to get useful information out of it.
I think that if you compared something like "population density in major population cent
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Lets average over a large, less densely populated region than the United States, but with similar GDP's per capita. I have for this purpose selected Norway, Sweden and Finland, a relatively homogeneous region. Adding the populations and dividing by the total area (from Wikipedia) we get a density of: (5238460+9127058+4695134)/(338145+449964+385155) = 16.2 people / km
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Re:I finally got my DSL penetration (Score:2)
I believe the pr0n industry (Score:4, Funny)
What if you're not interested in pr0n? (Score:2)
Is it really vital to produce statistics that show how people (that are interested in pr0n) are more connected to pr0n, than those that don't care as much? While this example isn't the best, because obviously everyone should be encouraged to do more pr0n, it doesn't mean everyone should be encouraged to do more broadband internet.
Hey, I've seen plenty of penetration over my (Score:4, Funny)
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And the point is...? (Score:3, Informative)
South Korea has 1/4th their population in a single city, packed in so dense that broadband penetration is relatively cheap - contrasted with the US population's fondness for distance from neighbors, and the resultant per-foot cost aggregation.
China has over 4x the population of the USA - we could wire everyone, and they could still out-subscribe us with 75% of their population remaining entirely unconnected.
Guess the report just reflects the realities of supply-and-demand.
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You're giving the US telecom industry far too much benefit of the doubt.
Even in the areas where we have *higher* population density than, say, South Korea - like Manhattan - we still can't get internet connections for a reasonable price that meet the South Korean definition of broadband. This "wishing we had Verizon 15/2 FIOS" thing is really sad. We should have had speeds like that years ago, and we should be wishing for 200 meg symmetric connections today.
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Example 1: Timewarner was the first provider of cable internet access where I live and that was 10 or so years ago. Today, Timewarner is STILL the only cable internet access provider and instead of offering substantially better service for the same cost, they will sell you the same service at the same price or worse service at a slightly cheaper price. The only alternatives to internet access are DSL through ATT (which also hasn't improved at
Haha (Score:2, Funny)
And the rest use other peoples' unsecured wireless connection.
Americans
Sorry guys... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Sorry guys... (Score:4, Informative)
Interestingly, this is the opposite of the situation with respect to HD-TV in the UK and US. Here, we moved to colour later, and so got PAL, which generally has a better picture quality than NTSC, making HD less of an obvious requirement. While HD is better than PAL SD, the low quality of PAL is much less irritating than the quality of NTSC when you don't have the side-by-side comparison.
farmers? (Score:2, Funny)
More bandwidth to farm gold with?
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I thought we covered this already (Score:3, Interesting)
Get it? We're big, really big, and when you add in the fact that our interior isn't a barren wasteland like most of the other big countries we have a whole lot of people spread out all over the place.
Re:I thought we covered this already (Score:5, Interesting)
In the US, broadband is defined as any link that is both constant and above 128kb/s. In Korea, broadband is a link over 20Mbps both ways.
By your definition, you should be able to get the same type of connection in downtown New York city, but it is not the case...
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wifi (Score:2, Funny)
Nerds (Score:3, Funny)
It's insane (Score:3, Interesting)
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It could just be that the Internet is not central to their lives. There is so much else that may count for more.
It took me 4 YEARS to get my parents on Broadband (Score:2)
Its both a generational thing and cultural thing. Of my relatives only the younger generations have broadband, this would be the below 40 generation. Outside of that only those who have kids still around who push for it. For the most of them "it just really does not matter". Hell, for many the internet does not matter.
There's older people in South Korea too.. (Score:2)
Its both a generational thing and cultural thing. Of my relatives only the younger generations have broadband, this would be the below 40 generation. Outside of that only those who have kids still around who push for it. For the most of them "it just really does not matter". Hell, for many the internet does not matter.
Your theory of this being a generational thing falls apart when you realize that other countries with high broadband penetration have older generations as well.
Broadband prices in the US are r
Does this count fols using other WAPS? (Score:2)
So what? (Score:2)
china catching up? (Score:3, Insightful)
but China is fast catching up
But china isn't getting on the internet I know. It's getting on a strange subset of it where the government tells you you're society is harmonious and good and if you don't like it we'll kill you. Where you're not even allowed to read about those infectious ideas that are so harmfully, well... you're not allowed to read about them ... for harmony's sake.
Anyway, I think it's safe to say they're hooking up to something like the internet, but not The Internet...
How can this be?? (Score:2)
Unfortunately, that's probably the wrong kind of penetration...
Broadband is only the tip of the iceberg (Score:2)
Population Density, Broadband, Free Market? (Score:2)
I used to live in Riverside, we had two broadband options (or a local duopoly). Pacific Bell DSL, which was notoriously unreliable and featured dismally low download rates, and notoriously disconnected users from p2p and other modern broadband uses, including (at the time) quake 3, whi
detailed info (Score:3, Informative)
Here is the 2006Q4 data and 2003 population data from The Economist:
country, 2006Q4 broadband, 2003 population, 2003 area, median age
South Korea, 89.00%, 47.7, 99, 35.1
Monaco, 82.92%, 0.03, 0.002, 45.5
Hong Kong, 79.78%, 7.0, 1, 38.9
Iceland, 75.71%, 0.3, 103, 34.1
Singapore, 69.59%, 4.3, 1, 37.5
Netherlands, 69.38%, 16.1, 42, 39.3
Denmark, 69.34%, 5.4, 43, 39.5
Israel, 68.97%, 6.4, 21, 28.9
Macau, 68.82%, 0.4, 0.02, 36.6
Switzerland, 66.54%, 7.2, 41, 40.8
Canada, 63.02%, 31.5, 9971, 38.6
Taiwan, 61.40%, 22.6, 36, 31
Norway, 59.70%, 4.5, 324, 38.2
Finland, 59.52%, 5.2, 338, 40.9
Japan, 54.13%, 127.7, 378, 42.9
Germany, 53.23%, 82.5, 358, 42.1
Luxembourg, 52.29%, 0.5, 3, 38.1
UK, 52.25%, 59.3, 243, 39
Sweden, 51.76%, 8.9, 450, 40.1
Belgium, 51.73%, 10.3, 31, 40.6
Estonia, 50.35%, 1.3, 45, 38.9
Australia, 50.18%, 19.7, 7682, 36.6
USA, 50.07%, 294.0, 9373, 36.1
Population data is in millions, area is in thousands of square kilometers.
Canada would seem to throw a chain saw into the theory that this is driven by population density.
Copy-paste into a text document and import as csv into your favorite spreadsheet, make of it what you will.
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-Rick
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Re:What about total population/landmass? (Score:5, Informative)
We don't even have as good broadband connectivity in Manhattan as South Korea has in their whole country. We're not just behind, our internet connectivity makes us the laughingstock of the developed world. Seriously, not only are these countries ahead of us in broadband penetration, they're doing it with their hands tied behind their backs - we define "broadband" as "128k download", they define it as anything from "2 meg download" to South Korea's "20 meg symmetric".
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I just want a decent speed internet connection. I pay twice as much for a 3 Mbps / 768 kbps connection than a South Korean pays for a 100 Mbps symmetric connection. I'm not worried about what other people think - I'm pissed off that getting the same speed connect it would cost $30/month to get in Tokyo would cost me me more than $10,000 / month.