[LINK] America's Internet Disconnect

[Richard Chirgwin]

Here comes a surprise:

I strongly disagree.

First, "we want a piece of 100M broadband" envy is no sound basis for 
"outrage" (to quote the article below).

Second, there's no responsibility for the individual user to "buy more 
broadband" because it's good for the country.

Third, people speak so much drivel about South Korea and Japan ... oh, 
boo - hoo, some people in those countries get big pipes, but if you look 
at the OECD data, boring old ADSL dominates those countries. The fastest 
home broadband you can get in Australia is fibre-based, in Perth: so do 
we hear someone saying "why can't I get FTTH like they can get in 
Australia?" Because one swallow doesn't make a summer even if it's in Korea.

Fourth: if you exclude the urban population, Australia has 0.21 people 
per square kilometre; by the same calculation, Canada is over 0.6 per 
square kilometre, America is well over unity (I can't recall offhand) - 
and South Korea is above 70 people per square km, urban population 
excluded. Yes, I realise that serious and respected somethings-or-other 
dismiss the tyranny of distance, but they're blowing it out the rear end...

Fifth: if it's so good for the economy, then how come it's so hard to 
get businesses to buy fat bandwidth even where it's available and 
relatively cheap? If I look at a distribution of private network speeds, 
businesses still buy lots of Frame Relay (expensive) at under 256 Kbps.

Really, Internet punters sound like nothing more than self-obsessed 
whingers: "what I want to have is what everybody should have." It's like 
listening to teenagers wishing they could get a nine-litre V8 into the 
secondhand Hillman Minx ...

RC

Ivan Trundle wrote:
> Couldn't agree more, Fred.
>
> Take out the word 'America' and replace with 'Australia'. Now it makes 
> sense. Our fraudband looks silly in comparison.
>
> iT
>
> On 10/11/2006, at 10:43 AM, Pilcher, Fred wrote:
>
>> George forwarded:
>>
>>> America's record in expanding broadband communication is so poor that
>>> it should be viewed as an outrage by every consumer and businessperson
>>> in the country. Too few of us have broadband connections, and those
>>> who do pay too much for service that is too slow. It's hurting our
>>> economy, and things are only going to get worse if we don't do
>>> something about it.
>>>
>>> <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/
>> 07/AR2006110701230_pf.html>
>>
>> When I was over there for a couple of months a year and a half ago, I 
>> was astounded by the quality of their service. Friends' dialup 
>> services were as fast as my 1.5Mb/s "broadband", and their broadband 
>> was simply staggering. They were paying per year about what I pay per 
>> month, and they had no download limits.
>>
>> That article says more about our service than it does about theirs.
>>
>> Fred
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