The Broadband Gap: Why Is Theirs Faster?

[shirley1874]

New York Times
By Saul Hansell
March 10, 2009, 4:00 am

Bits readers have a serious case of broadband envy. I’ve been writing about the debate about how the government might encourage more high-speed Internet use and you’ve complained loudly that people in other countries have faster, cheaper, more widely available broadband service. Even customer service representatives of Internet service providers overseas are nicer too.

I don’t know about manners, but it’s easy to find examples that American’s broadband is second-rate:

In Japan, broadband service running at 150 megabits per second (Mbps) costs $60 a month. The fastest service available now in the United States is 50 Mbps at a price of $90 to $150 a month.

In London, $9 a month buys 8 Mbps service. In New York, broadband starts at $20 per month, for 1 Mbps.

In Iceland, 83 percent of the households are connected to broadband. In the United States, the adoption rate is 59 percent.

There’s more than just envy at stake here. President Obama campaigned on a promise of fast broadband service for all. On the White House Web site, he writes “America should lead the world in broadband penetration and Internet access.” And the recent stimulus bill requires the Federal Communications Commission to create a national broadband plan in order to make high-speed Internet service both more available and more affordable...

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[SteveSe939]

Costs some money to run T1 lines throughout. In the state of West Virginia, some areas "cap" you, if you use more than 30mb's in 5 minutes, meaning...if you use 30mb's in 5 minutes, say you stream a Youtube video that's 5-6 minutes long, they cap you down to 256kbps for 1 hour. This is only for Cable, and the reason for this is the lack of t1 lines running through the area. Until they can run a few more lines, then people are stuck with this "capping". That's why people switch to DSL in the areas, 'cause they don't cap, but it's slower internet, but also cheaper. 25 bucks for 3mbps, when you paid 50 for 6mbps, but kept getting capped. Comcast has now "up'd" itself in the city of Baltimore, for businesses in the area. So if you have Comcast Cable in a household connected to 1 computer, that computer's running about 25mbps. To me, that's way too fast. 7mbps is quite enough in my eyes. The faster your connection, the more illegal stuff that's bound to happen, suchas downloading music and bootleg/copied movies.