Ask Slashdot: When and How Did Europe Leapfrog the US For Internet Access? 495
New submitter rsanford, apropos of today's FCC announcement about what is officially consided "broadband" speed by that agency, asks In the early and middle 90's I recall spending countless hours on IRC 'Trout-slapping' people in #hottub and engaging in channel wars. The people from Europe were always complaining about how slow their internet was and there was no choice. This was odd to me, who at the time had 3 local ISPs to choose from, all offering the fastest modem connections at the time, while living in rural America 60 miles away from the nearest city with 1,000 or more people. Was that the reality back then? If so, what changed, and when?
Government Intervention (Score:5, Informative)
EU wide publically funded projects to bring high speed broadband across Europe?
We had plenty of choices for dial-up too, what we lacked particularly in the UK was free local calls, that made modem calls expensive compared to the US. Since then everything has been going our way.
Jason.
Re:Government Intervention (Score:5, Informative)
In the US we gave our telcos massive tax cuts in the 90s in exchange for fiber rollout. The telcos took the money and ran.
Re:Government Intervention (Score:4, Funny)
In the US we gave our telcos massive tax cuts in the 90s in exchange for fiber rollout. The telcos took the money and ran.
Don't worry I'm sure the market will sort it out...
Thats why you have free market, capitalism and democracy!
Re:Government Intervention (Score:5, Insightful)
A market where utilities have government-mandated monopolies is not free.
Re:Government Intervention (Score:4, Insightful)
A market where utilities have government-mandated monopolies is not free.
Google is demonstrating that there isn't a mandated communications monopoly per se, but just an extremely high barrier to entry and some incumbent legislation that moves out of the way as soon as enough people are teased with hyperfast internet hookups.
Re:Government Intervention (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, Google has shown that you need to have deep pockets to get over incumbant efforts to keep you out. Many municipal broadband efforts have fizzled because the incumbents muscled them out (sometimes without even serving the area that the municipal broadband network would have covered).
Re:Government Intervention (Score:5, Insightful)
it's not government mandated, it's a *natural* monopoly
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N... [wikipedia.org]
things like fire, police, healthcare, powerplants: there is no market for such things. for a number of reasons. with broadband it's because of high barrier to entry: no one has the billions to gamble on entering the market with uncertain payout
oh google does. so go ahead and wait 40 years until they get to your city
but if you make believe (like the usa does) that things like broadband and healthcare are free markets, you just wind up with grossly expensive, inefficient jokes
what we need is universal healthcare, and government owned fiber
i hear it already: "oh you evil socialist statist..." *drool, snort*
i don't like the government. but unlike some people, i recognize that on the topic of *natural* monopolies, government control is the least horrible situation, and certainly better than the usa's joke of healthcare system or approach to broadband
capitalism is a wonderful tool. i love capitalism
for example: governments should own all fiber, and then lease it to private companies to deliver services. any private company can lease to provide any service. that's wonderful capitalism, embraced in a manner of fair competition. without the bullshit notion they own the fiber too, and there's "competition". no there isn't. and there never will be. and no government policy is to blame. it's the simple nature of the sector fo the economy: too high of a cost to enter. no one else can afford to roll out the fiber
capitalism is not a fucking religion, and it has its limits
natural monopolies represent those limits
if you don't understand what a natural monopoly is, stop talking about economics, you don't understand the topic
government is not your enemy, rent seeking parasites CORRUPTING your government are. you want to remove the corruption and have your government work for you. not weaken and remove government, thereby allowing the monopolists to rape you even more
there's just a certain kind of person in the world that think government is the problem no matter what. and on topics where the real problem is something else: natural monopolies, they simply enable the monopolists by misdirecting their anger at the wrong target (government). propaganda funded by the plutocrats are happy to feed this error, because indeed, with a weakened government, they get to rape you even more without even the pesky need to buy off congresscritters and pass warped regulations at all
Re:Government Intervention (Score:5, Insightful)
The threat of competition prevents long term monopolies from persisting.
explain how that works. you've just made a statement of unsupported belief
i've explained to you reality, straightforward: a high cost of entry into the market prevents competition. high cost alone
you have opposed my description of reality. that's fine, you don't have to agrere with me
but you have to be able to explain how or why i am wrong. you have not done that
"go read my religious literature" is not an argument
if you can't make your case in plain language, that says something doesn't it?
an unsupported faith in an unsupported statement is trendy nonsense
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that's called corruption
the error is with those who believe it is government behind it all
the truth is the monopolies corrupt the government
for those fools who think the answer is to weaken government, well the monopolies can do away with corrupting legislators and regulators and rape you directly. they want that
then what? with no government/ weak government, how is the monopoly challenged?
the answer of course, is that nothing stops them now
only government is your tool against monopolies
those who argue for
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agreed except for two points:
1. for chronic conditions there isn't informed choice. choosing oncologist A over oncologist B because A smiles more doesn't mean much. 99.99% of us lack the educational capacity in oncology to know which is the better oncologist.
2. broadband for the narrow topic of internet connectivity is pretty much about fiber/ cable. it's too slow to get it over dial up/ cell networks/ satellites (unless you live in nunavut, not much choice otherwise). so when we talk "broadband" the topic
restricted, did not eliminate franchises. Most ppl (Score:5, Informative)
The 2007 action put some limits on local (but not state) franchising practices. It did NOT eliminate them. In fact, most of the US population still lives in areas with restricted franchises. The FCC said that local franchising authorities could not be "unreasonable" in their demands. More info:
https://www.wilmerhale.com/pag... [wilmerhale.com]
Re:Government Intervention (Score:4, Insightful)
Nor did I limit myself to thinking that the only dirty tricks competitors play require government involvement.
And yet it's happening. Municipal fiber efforts are being stymied by bureaucratic referees handing the game over to the telecoms. That's real, honest-to-god corruption, and it's being ignored so we can have a contrived pissing contest over free market capitalism.
Re:Government Intervention (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, the US does not have free market capitalism on broadband communications. In most areas it is either monopoly or duopoly, with local government regulating it. So it is really like having the worst of both systems and the best of neither.
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As much as I don't like existing ISPs, I'm not sure I'm really in favor of a government-run (municipal) ISPs either. It's not hard to imagine, like highway funding, the federal government offering money for municipal ISPs, contingent upon compliance with a few minor requirements. Or criminal penalties for "excessive" bandwidth, or unsanctioned usage. Or for it to come full-circle, with private companies offering muni's better, faster connections, and funding it through tolls.
But maybe I'm just a pessimis
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There is also a third option. The government builds the ISP and then sells it off.
My very first dialup internet connection was this. It was called Global Info Links and was an entity owned and run by Ipswich City Council. They built all the necessary infrastructure for it to work because the telcos didn't believe there was a business model there. 2 years later they sold the business off to private equity for a healthy profit.
So in the end the tax payer got a service that the market wasn't going to provi
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No the way it works is that government builds and maintains the infrastructure - the physical cables and such - but then leases access to this infrastructure out to private companies so that those companies can offer retail services to the consumer on it. In countries/regions that have done this, the government itself isn't in the business of actually being your ISP, and it's not interested in doing so.
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Re:Government Intervention (Score:5, Informative)
The so called density problem in the US is bollocks. Sweden has less population density than the US and their Internet access speeds are among the fastest in the world.
Re: Government Intervention (Score:4, Insightful)
So explain to me why internet access in LA and Manhattan is so bad compared to comparable European cities. Besides, with a comparable density, a larger area should result in better overall efficiencies, not worse.
Re: Government Intervention (Score:5, Informative)
I have 75/75 for $60 in metro LA. I don't find that unreasonable.
I have 76/20 truly unlimited for $34 a month in my small 11,000 popultation town in rural East Yorkshire, England. I find that more reasonable.
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I get 100/100 fibre for about 40 bucks a month in Stockholm. No caps or throttling, either.
Re: Government Intervention (Score:4, Insightful)
Um, Sweden is only 170K square miles. The US is 3.8M square miles. So, while Sweden's population density is less than the US, the coverage area, and thus cost, is MUCH higher. Granted, a good portion of the US would not need full coverage as there is nothing in some places but wilderness and loggers... (grin)
The "population density" argument is a red herring. Americans managed to build roads.
Is fiber really that much harder?
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While I don't necessarily disagree with you, I'd point out that the reason "damn near everyone" has a telephone line running to their house is the Communications Act of 1934 [wikipedia.org] and the Rural Electrification Act [wikipedia.org].
Re: Government Intervention (Score:5, Insightful)
Sweden is about the same size as California, but has only 10 million people vs. 40 million in California.
So how come broadband access is better and cheaper in both the cities and rural areas in Sweden compared to California?
Define "Crappy" (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly the reason why Internet access in the U.S. is so expensive and so crappy relative to other first-world nations.
I'm sorry, but to my mind any definition of "crappy" must include the freedom to access any website, which many other first world nations (like the UK) do not enjoy.
To label it a slower is fine, but just to say "crappy" is ignoring the tradeoff from one kind of crap to another.
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The telephone and cable companies already have decent profits in their core businesses without investing in infrastructure. The internet side of their business is seen as a money pit. They like the internet only so far as they can piggy back cheaply on top of their existing infrastructure, but to actually invest and improve the internet is not in their interests.
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It would be nice if we actually had a free market. Instead we have local franchise authorities everywhere that dictate who can and can't offer telecom services.
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So now we have a bunch of government created monopolies and government regulations wreaking havoc across the landscape, and when the
Re:Government Intervention (Score:5, Informative)
The US government has given the telcos hundreds of billions of dollars in USF fees over the last 15+ years. No one in the world has subsidized broadband as much as we have.
Re:Government Intervention (Score:5, Insightful)
No one in the world has subsidized telco profits as much as we have.
Fixed that for you.
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Re:Government Intervention (Score:5, Insightful)
Well ... nobody has been scammed by the telcos as much as you have.
If you gave them hundreds of billions and got nothing in return, blame your politicians, and shoot their lobbyists.
Subsidized and conned aren't the same thing.
Re:Government Intervention (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Government Intervention (Score:5, Funny)
We subsidized something, it turns out it certainly wasn't broadband.
I think you subsidized the bonus payouts to the telco executives...
Don't worry I'm sure the benefits will trickle down through the economy
LOL
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I think you subsidized the bonus payouts to the telco executives...
Don't worry I'm sure the benefits will trickle down through the economy
LOL
Maybe a few more hookers got coke snorted off their butts, as a result.
Re:Government Intervention (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, unbundling caused 1000s of CLECs to pop up. But that was too much competition for the bells, so CLECs were shut out, restoring the monopoly/duopoly (depending on location). Had the unbundling continued, locking out bells from their own network, then we'd be much better off than Europe. But the government is bought and paid for (both sides), so we got the government we deserve by voting them in.
Transforming the copper/fiber network to a distribution-only model is what works best. Anything else fails.
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Yup. We've made that mistake before, too - running government-funded trains over privately held tracks is ludicrous compared to the alternative, yet that pattern the "compromise" we keep making again and again resulting in nothing more than guaranteed payments from taxpayers to some of the largest corporations in the country.
Yes, that is stupid. The tracks are a natural monopoly, whoever builds a track has a monopoly for a certain connection. Natural monopolies should always be in the hand of the state.
Train services can be run by several companies on the same track. It is easy to have competition there, this is where the free market is good.
But I think no country is getting this right.
Re:Government Intervention (Score:5, Insightful)
The US government has given the telcos hundreds of billions of dollars in USF fees over the last 15+ years. No one in the world has subsidized broadband as much as we have.
And, apparently, no one in the world has as little to show for the investment...
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However, the issue of free vs metered local calls hasn't been relevant for a long time. I don't think government intervention is a great explanation either, given that the UK telecoms network was privatised.
For large parts of Europe I think there's a simpler explanation - a combination of population density and
Re:Government Intervention (Score:5, Informative)
There is another reason (at least in my country).
Instead of giving money to ISPs and asking them politely to connect rural areas to a fiber network (like I understand happened in the US resulting in the ISPs taking the money and doing nothing) the government in my country is laying the fiber cables itself and then leases it to anyone who wants to use it at a set price. Which means that if ISP A does not want it, ISP B will get it.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Here in the US, there was a sea change that happened in 2000-2002. When consumer-level broadband happened, the old school "boutique" ISPs went extinct just because they couldn't offer the bandwidth of DSL or DOCSIS.
Europe didn't have that entire cottage industry be swept away in the span of 9-12 months as was done in the US.
It would have been nice if the small, mom-and-pop ISPs could have continued existing and making money. There was some odd pride in having an E-mail address at a place like io.com, eden
Re:Government Intervention (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Government Intervention (Score:4, Interesting)
In the Netherlands, the incumbent telco PTT (now KPN) was first forced to co-locate equipment from other ISPs (they actually sabotaged that equipment from time to time), then forced to share the local loop for a reasonable fee.
Yeah, we had the same thing here, complete with sabotage, but then we got rid of it.
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EU wide publically funded projects to bring high speed broadband across Europe?
That is part of it. Another reason is that for infrastructure there is a first mover disadvantage. Later implementations can learn from the early mistakes, while the first mover is stuck with them. That is a big reason that cell service sucks on America: we had a really good POTS system, so we layered cellphone service on top of it. Few other countries made that mistake.
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The US wasn't the first adopter of mobile telephony. Japan and a group of European countries got there first. And the major carriers in the US no longer support the first system, so there's no good reason to be "stuck with" the mistakes.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Government Intervention (Score:5, Informative)
EU wide publically funded projects to bring high speed broadband across Europe?
We had plenty of choices for dial-up too, what we lacked particularly in the UK was free local calls, that made modem calls expensive compared to the US. Since then everything has been going our way.
Jason.
Yeah, who would have thought that European 'socialism' would be more effective at bringing the internet to the masses than American private enterprise? But sarcasm aside, here are the world's 16 most connected countries according to a study done by Harvard University for the FCC:
1 Sweden
2 Denmark
3 Japan
4 South Korea
5 Switzerland
6 Netherlands
7 Finland
8 France
9 Belgium
10 Norway
11 United Kingdom
12 Germany
13 Iceland
14 Italy
15 Portugal
16 United States
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Unfortunately, the Internet service market in "socialist" Europe is actually more free market than in the U.S. You guys have multiple companies vying to provide and improve internet service. In the U.S., most local governments have regulated the market (under the guise of limiting unsightly wires by restricting who can build in public easements) so most A
Re:Government Intervention (Score:4, Informative)
Sweedish population and population density: 9.7 million and 21/km^2
Wait... that doesn't make sense... why are they on the TOP of the list of countries in terms of internet connectivity?
Re:Government Intervention (Score:5, Insightful)
I think there's more going on here than just European "socialism" vs. American "capitalism". Demographics, for instance, are wildly different for the US.
Average population and population density for countries 1-15: 34 million and 193/km^2
United States population and population density: 316 million and 34/km^2
Well, that explains why all of our large cities are so well-connected with gigabit fiber for $50/mo, at least.
Oh, wait, they're not are they? The simple fact that Montana exists shouldn't be used to excuse terrible service and pricing in NYC, Houston, Seattle, or any other major US city.
Re:Government Intervention (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, the U.S. has more densely populated cities than Sweden or Portugal (San Francisco and Manhattan), and 1/3 more population density than Sweden. So....what's the excuse again?
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The UK isn't doing very well. Many people can't get 25Mb because that's way above what ADSL2 can offer them and there is no alternative. I only have a choice of one ISP (Virgin) and they suck.
I remember back on 2004. My girlfriend in Japan had 100/100Mb fibre and it cost her about £20/month. Over a decade later nothing like that exists in the UK. That's how far behind we are.
Re:Government Intervention (Score:5, Funny)
I don't believe you (about the "girlfriend" part, not the "fiber" part).
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Two years ago, I was in France and the UK. 4G was still not really deployed.
And in France at least, many coffee shops had closed down their wifi hotspots, because they really didn't want to be bothered with getting a permit to have a public hotspot (yes, this was the doing of the copyright lobby apparently).
The net result is that people have less internet access than in the US, not more. It doesn't really matter if you have faster upstream speed, when most of your downstream users can't have access to it on
2002 (Score:5, Interesting)
2002. They saw what we preached and acted on it. They did it with fiber because of the nature of their governments rather than the utilities.
10-100Mb wasn't uncommon in Sweden then in the cities, although rural may have taken longer.
when? (Score:3)
how? simple. its much easier to get things done for your country when it is the size of our smaller states
Its also easier to get things done when you tax your people as high as you do in the EU vs the lower taxes in the US. add in things like different priorities, and corruption. and it starts to make sense. Doesnt make it right or good, but it makes sense
Re:when? (Score:5, Insightful)
Uh, no. The bigger the country and its GDP the greater the economies of scale. The density issue is stupid as well since we don't have FTTH in all the cities.
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That may have once been true, but now even relatively sparsely populated countries in Europe (like Iceland) are getting faster speeds.
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Early Noughties (Score:2)
Simple Really (Score:4, Funny)
You see, the internet is all about the cloud these days. Most parts of Europe are cloudier than the U.S., ergo, they get better internet access.
Europe has always had better stuff after the US. (Score:2, Flamebait)
PAL instead of NTSC tv, because they got it after, and it was able to be improved.
America got internet when Algore invented it, and Europe got it after, when better equipment and infrastructure was available.
No surprise about that.
Hell, look at SOUTH KOREA (Score:2)
South Korea has been light years ahead of the U.S. for over a DECADE now. Those guys get some mad crazy speeds on the cheap (mostly used to play Lineage, I gather).
March 11, 2000 (Score:5, Informative)
After that [wikipedia.org], things started tanking and telcos took their government hand-outs from the 90s and paid their CEOs' bonuses - and a few of them walked away with billions personally.
In some cases there was outright fraud.
It's kind of like living in a Third World country where the billionaire class rigs the system for their benefit, bitches about government interference (all the while lobbying for it to boost their profits) and John .Q. Public falling for the BS and thinking that one day, if he works hard enough, he'll be one of those billionaires with a private jet.
Or let's put it this way: we have a corrupt economic system in the States and no one wants to change because they have been brainwashed into thinking we have free market capitalism and anything other than our crony capitalistic system is Communism.
Yes, most Americans are that stupid.
My view (Score:5, Interesting)
If I were going to guess, I would assume the reason the US has lower speeds in most areas compared to Europe, is probably about competition.
I work for a large telecoms company in the UK, so this is what I can see is happening here:
The incumbent telephone provider, BT Openreach, is forced, by regulator policy, to offer access to their network for a fixed cost to the other telecoms resellers, including the other company within BT, BT Retail. On top of this, BT Openreach covers almost all of the UK, so resellers can also offer services all over the UK too, with not much investment needed.
If I contrast this to what I see in the US: A few cable and telephone providers serve only specific areas, with hardly any competition. No incentive to improve service or reduce cost to consumer, plus regulators seem too scared to act. Also, corporate corruption in the form of lobbying means that people who work in government are just as inclined to help maintain the status quo.
Europe: Lots of competition and regulation
US: Lack of competition, basically no regulation
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Only one correction. Regulators aren't too scared to act. They're paid off not to react. Hell, some of the regulators are/were employees of the companies being regulated. If that's not a conflict of interest, nothing is.
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Yeah, I thought about that right after I posted. That's a very good addition.
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The incumbent telephone provider, BT Openreach, is forced, by regulator policy, to offer access to their network for a fixed cost to the other telecoms resellers
We had that in the US for awhile. I remember when my city was serviced by Time Warner Cable and their RoadRunner internet service. At one point, Time Warner was forced to offer competitors the ability to sell cable modem service. Earthlink and AOL entered the market. As a RoadRunner customer, I could fire up a sniffer and see all the .earthlink.net and .aolbroadband.com ARP traffic flying past; all three vendors were sharing the same coax, and it was working just fine. I don't recall quite what happened, bu
Re:My view (Score:5, Informative)
I don't recall quite what happened, but that arrangement didn't last very long, I don't think a year had transpired before ELN and AOL were booted back off the pipes.
National Cable & Telecommunications Association v. Brand X Internet Services [wikipedia.org] happened.
My best guess... (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't have a lot of facts to cite that I can back this up with, but my general sense is that Europe (and a fair bit of Asia too) have the belief that it's worthwhile to have the government invest in infrastructure. They spend money to improve roads, bridges, railways, airports, telecommunications, electrical generation, and whatever else. In the US, we assume that infrastructure will take care of itself, somehow, mysteriously.
For a lot of stuff, we just get angry if the government spends money to build/repair a bridge. Railways are considered a massive boondoggle. The Internet is considered an entertainment service. To the extent that we consider the Internet "telecommunications infrastructure", we've decided to improve it by giving massive amounts of money to private monopolies, while not having any actual requirements on those companies to actually build anything with that money. There's a belief, somehow, that Verizon is a good and virtuous company that would love to provide fast internet, if only it could afford to do so, so we just keep giving them money and exclusive deals, and they keep refusing to actually roll out fiber.
Meanwhile, European countries just rolled out fiber. No outrage from the Tea Party to deal with, no big payouts to Verizon to stifle the project. They were able to do it because they simply had the government pay for it.
Re:My best guess... (Score:5, Insightful)
For a lot of stuff, we just get angry if the government spends money to build/repair a bridge.
Yesterday I was listening to a right wing talk show host on the radio who was letting us all know what he thought government should be for, and how the US government was so crap. The first bullet point on his list was "starting wars", the second was "Protecting us from bad guys".
Where they are willing to pay, there is progress. (Score:2)
The Sad Truth (Score:3, Insightful)
Disclaimer: I'm Canadian but have lived in a border town most of my life and watched and followed mostly US media.
Unfortunately the sad truth in the last 20 years is the US is no longer at the forefront of anything except corporate greed and government corruptness. I'm not saying other countries are any different but the big difference between the US (and Canada to some extent) vs Europe is the citizens. In Europe it seems the citizens don't roll over take it like we do in North America. Someone once told me that in most of the EU, the governments are afraid of the people, while in NA, it's the opposite. Simply put, Europeans won't stand for all the crap that happens over here. This has lasting effects on how services and corporations grow and are governed. When not controlled correctly (aka when lobbying rules) by the government, corporations have a proven track record of screwing the people!
Any Europeans care to chime in and agree/disagree with me?
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As another fellow Canuck, I would also agree with this assessment.
America has maintained for a long time now, this fallacy that they are the 'best' and have the 'brightest', from people to technology. Sadly, this isn't a reflection of reality, and hasn't been for some time.
Subsidies or not, the ISP's in the US seem to have failed to invest in infrastructure. When the world moved to 4G / LTE, most US carriers refused, or dragged their feet. In comparison, in Canada in the mid-2000's, ISP's invest (and I beli
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Spain, Ireland, and Greece have been taking it far harder, longer, and with less lube than the American citizen. Yeah, great, Greece just voted in a leftier government that has promised to renegotiate the predatory loans forced on them by German banks....but the new government is committed to staying on the Euro, making any real recovery impossible.
When it was Dial-up, in Europe & the UK (Score:2)
Most of the people I knew from Finland, UK, Norway, were pretty jealous of our unlimited phone service.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Your standards were low. Soooooo low. (Score:2)
Mid 90's was when modem technology still hadn't caught up to the phone line standards that were deployed far and wide across the US. Sure, you could get a nice solid 14400 or 28800 (if you were living high on the hog) and have lightning-fast IRC sessions. A few years later, you will be connecting at 31200 and bitching that you can't get a 56k handshake in your neck of the woods (as distance to the local CO and quality of lines really started to matter) and a few years after that you would have been bitchin
Lack of corruption (Score:5, Informative)
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WTF? Of all the anti-US drivel on slashdot, this is some of the stupidest. Tipping is custom, not corruption. It isn't for the right to get access to government service, it's something done in private businesses.
Two party system is wonderful. Take a look at the recent election Greece, where the far left party forms a nonsensical coalition of the far-left and far right. Or in England, where party that received the most support is kept out of power by a similar coalition.
And the economy of Europe is bein
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The bombast is strong with this one!
Or in England, where party that received the most support is kept out of power by a similar coalition.
How on earth does that make no sense? The coalition combined got much more support than Labour. Therefore it makes much more sense for them to share power than to hand it all to Labour.
It has the highest rate of worker productivity, the economy is growing, it has the largest manufacturing economy in the world by a large margin,
It also has higher rates of poverty and long
A semi-related issue (Score:3)
I'll reiterate how grateful I am that cell phone charging -- and as a side effect, data transfer -- have been standardized, thanks to the EU mandating the Micro-USB connector and voltage standard. It's made life easier for pretty much everybody worldwide who owns a cell phone. Maybe it's because countries that culturally emphasize improving the quality of life, have their services change in ways that improve the quality of life.
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Ever tried to plug an iPhone into a PC?
Lightning USB connectors only, and you have to install iTunes to do anything like sensible data transfer.
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Lawrence Lessig on this (Score:4, Informative)
Pre-2000, the US had "open access", meaning that cable owners had to sell use of their infrastructure. This made it relatively easy for startup ISPs to enter the market: every time you sign up a customer, you just need to buy time on the extra bit of cable you need to serve that person. Almost every country in the world uses this regulatory model.
Under intense pressure from lobbyists the US changed to a closed model in 2000. Now cable owners are also ISPs and have exclusive rights to the bits of wire they own. There are only a few ISPs, it's very, very expensive for anyone else to enter the market, and they can charge what they like, not only to customers, but upstream as well, as we're now seeing.
tl;dr: this is a failure of regulation.
Lessig talking about this:
http://blip.tv/lessig/america-s-broadband-policy-3505079 [blip.tv]
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Regardless of who owned the local loop or who sold service on it, US local loop lengths are longer than most other countries (regardless of population density).
I believe the long local loops relates to a massive central office "centralization" in the US when digital switching came along. Why exactly this centralization did not happen in Europe (and Australia) is not clear to me, it might have involved timing of DSS deployment versus the timing of DSL practicality.
The result is that the US has fewer COs, an
There's only one reason... (Score:3)
It goes in waves (Score:3)
For us here in Norway PSTN/ISDN was our bad time, when the one monopolist could charge pretty much everything they wanted. When we got DSL, the market was deregulated and lots of offers showed up. In the US, far more people get Internet via cable, which obviously has far more reason to protect their traditional business. As for recent fiber roll-outs it's really the power companies that got the ball rolling there, eyeing an opportunity to break into a new market by running fiber optics as well as power lines. Obviously the incumbents couldn't sit around and watch that and it became a race to lay down fiber first, since it's rarely profitable to come second. So it's a very nice three-way race to roll it out, though the prices are fairly steep.
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What you said is 100% dead on.
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What you said is 100% dead on.
The sarcasm came from the fact that we (in the USA) traded in our freedom, and instead of broadband all we got was this lousy t-shirt.
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The NSA give you the willies but that of all the others makes you feel warm and cuddly? How exactly is the data gathering performed by the GCHQ, the DGSE, the BND, etc, any different than that done by the NSA?
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No, we have all our national equivalents like the GCHQ, the DGSE, the BND, etc, all doing the same data gathering while busily pointing the finger at the NSA as the one who cut the cheese...
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Re:Population Densi.. stop asking dumb questions! (Score:5, Insightful)
Then why don't we have fiber in all our cities? And your use of "economies of scale" is literally the opposite of what it actually means. The larger the entity the greater the economies of scale. While we spend $1 trillion+/year on our military, it would take $200 billion to cover the country in fiber. Or $20 billion/year over 10 years- probably less as subscriber revenue would pay for it as the network expanded. That's pocket change for our government.
Re:Population Densi.. stop asking dumb questions! (Score:5, Insightful)
the economies of scale due to the US population density distribution and having to lay new mediums to connect made it not economical.
This is just total ignorant BS. I have pointed out before that Tokyo has a way smaller population density that NYC, yet Tokyo shits all over NYC for access speed. The market in NYC has a need that is not being fulfilled and lack of population density is not the reason why.