Over Reacting To The US Broadband Situation?
from the not-so-bad... dept
While there have been plenty of stories about how US broadband penetration and speeds have fallen behind other countries, Declan McCullough is suggesting that things aren't as bad as they seem. Most of the countries ahead of us have vastly different circumstances, including much higher population density -- making it easier to offer broadband. He also points out that most people in the US, though certainly not all, at least have the option of getting broadband. Many simply choose not to do so. Of course, what he doesn't mention is that, for the most part, the actual competition is slim, often held back by powerful telco or cable provider lobbyists who block efforts at competitive efforts either from private companies or municipalities.
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No competition
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Re: No competition
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Competition
Things have sure changed. I used to get DSL through a local ISP (and could probably get it through SBC-Yahoo). Now I'm using Charter's cable service. There used to be another ISP locally that sold DSL, too, but they went bankrupt I believe.
So, for a semi-remote area, we have several choices for broadband. This may simply be because we're near Silicon Valley, but it's still interesting.
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Government Intervention
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Re: Government Intervention
Those of us living in a socialist country - which isn't communist, although Americans may not understand the difference - enjoy our government's coddling. We have competition but pitifully bad anti-monopoly stuff, so the biggest company usually does win out and stay on top.
We compete in the private sector, but it seems the government programs are woefully over budget because we refuse to let them bid : we have enough problems with superbugs in our hospitals without having el-cheapo janitorial staff to help it thrive. Also, while healthcare is universally available, triage starts at the GP's office with the patient verbally (over-?) justifying the need for any procedure.
Really, we don't know why Microsoft doesn't come here.
Oh yeah. Competition. But we're screwing it up even here: the utility infrastructure, built with the public trust and which should be under the stewardship of the local and regional administration, are now being sold off one by one, by administrative office unwilling to open themselves to reasonable streamlining and choosing simply to off-sell utilities for short-term profit. Our longer office terms (and no limit like you) should have prevented this mind-numblingly stupid short-term thought, but it's not.
So even while we have a semblance of fair competition now, we're rapidly adopting the worst parts of your set-up with none of the benfits.
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Broadband
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