Is U.S. broadband access truly lagging?
An ever-popular lament among U.S. politicians and regulators in recent years is that the nation is falling behind its foreign counterparts in delivering widespread broadband access to its citizens.
For instance, the latest oft-quoted statistics compiled by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) ranked the United States 15th out of 30 as of last December, with 19.6 broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants and more than 58 million total subscribers.
But a new paper (PDF) by a Washington think tank challenges the assertion that the United States is doing so poorly.
Unlike the OECD and the International Telecommunication Union, which rely on raw numbers of per capita broadband subscribers to derive their rankings, the Phoenix Center for Advanced Legal and Economic Public Policy Studies is proposing a new method that assigns a numerical score--they call it the "Broadband Performance Index"--to the relationship between broadband penetration and factors like broadband subscription prices and a population's income, education levels, age and density.
By that measure, "we find that the United States generally meets expectations in its conversion of its national endowments into broadband subscriptions," concluded co-authors Lawrence Spiwak, George Ford and Thomas Koutsky. The Phoenix Center bills itself as a non-partisan organization that "seeks to demonstrate that consumer welfare is best maximized by promoting free markets, competition, and individual freedom and liberty."
The group said it's not enough to look at broadband subscription rates in a vacuum. That's because "broadband adoption is not a race--broadband is instead a service purchased by households and businesses, and it is reasonable to expect that households and businesses in different societies with different conditions will make different purchasing decisions," the paper's authors argue.
By that logic, the report concluded that countries like Turkey and Portugal, which fall behind the United States in the OECD rankings, are actually making better use of what it calls "national endowments." Countries like Denmark and Norway, which top the United States on the OECD charts, are "underperforming" considering their demographic and economic realities, and nations such as Japan and Korea hailed as broadband "miracles" are really pretty average, the report said.
Their calculations determined age and income are the two most significant factors influencing broadband subscription levels. Overall, Finland, Iceland and Portugal were the best at "transforming their nation's endowments into broadband subscriptions," while New Zealand, the Czech Republic, the Slovak Republic, Luxembourg, Ireland and Greece were the worst, the report said.
The findings aren't meant to suggest that broadband penetration in the United States need not be improved, the group wrote, but to suggest that "the typical rhetoric surrounding broadband rankings can be misleading and misguided."
After working a contract job for a broadband provider, I found one thing that disturbs me. All they want is money and return on investment. They do not care that a whole town is not on their broadband availability list. There is no social responsibility at all. If it doesn't pay, the public cannot play. Well you can play, but sell your house and move if you want broadband!
I'll just stay disconnected.
ranting, note that the researchers should have also taken into
account urbanization. Densely populated, the Netherlands is
more easily wired for broadband and a less densely populated,
rural and small town US. In much of the US, houses can be 1/2
mile or more apart.
There's also the social factor. Given their long & dark winters, I'd
expect Icelanders to be more inclined to get broadband than
someone in Florida, where even the winter doesn't force you
indoors.
When I Lived in Van Nuys California our area was one of the last to get Cable Broadband, we were one of the first to get DSL. 128K up 384k down 5 years have past. DSL hasn't improved since we happen to be at the end of the line. In the Middle of a 50 year old tract of WW2 Homes. Cable has improved they upgraded.
I now live in a small farming "village" not town in central Illinois. No broadband except satalite,
(expensive slow) or cell phone (expensive slow).
while towns a little larger than ours have had 5-10 generations of improvement. The school children in nigeria either have or soon will have better broadband access than we do here. Cable is still analog in this area. No broadband. Do it ourselves? $1600 a month for a 1.5 kps connection. 12 Miles away 1.5 kps connection 29.95. something is wrong same telephone company same cable company. The fiber runs through town to the school but no way for the locals to access it. AT&T will allow us access when they get around to it. I happen to live at the end of the line again.
You can not expect to force the cable and phone companies to shell out all the money for fiber for a town that only has 10,000 ppl when they can get 30 times that amount from a population of 400k to 600k.
Basically those that complain that rural area's do not have broadband are better off complaining that they do not have a Parks 5th Avenue store instead.
With that said, regardless of how "on track" we are, as stated before, we should AT LEAST have top rated high speed access (50-100mbps)in our biggest metroplitan areas, where it's easy to feed the major populated areas with sufficient fiber. We arn't even seeing this.
And all of this from companies that were supposedly given hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars to upgrade the nation's Internet infrastructure.