May

20

2008 OECD Broadband Statistics. How's the US Doing? Survey Says -- Stagnation and Decline.

sascha's picture

New broadband statistics from the OECD (through the last quarter of 2007) point to the complete and continuing failure of the United States to reclaim its prior successes, much less, even keep up with a growing list of other countries. Even the Wall Street Journal is jumping into the fray:

    "Once the undisputed leader in the technological revolution, the U.S. now lags a growing number of countries in the speed, cost and availability of high-speed Internet. While cable and telecom companies are spending billions to upgrade their service, they're focusing their efforts mostly on larger U.S. cities for now."

The Wall Street Journal article contains some real gems -- pointing to historical precedents that mirror today's broadband situation and debates:

    Chattanooga's Mr. DePriest compares his agency's plan for high-speed Internet to the rollout of electricity, which came to many parts of Tennessee only in the 1930s as a result of the creation by the federal government of the Tennessee Valley Authority. That was three decades after many businesses and homes in major urban areas like New York were first electrified. The country's electricity at the time was largely provided by private companies, which denounced any government efforts to get into the business as "socialist" -- echoing the debate over municipal fiber networks today.

Meanwhile, if a picture's worth a thousand words, here's a few bloggings worth of data:

Lots more OECD facts and figures concerning broadband statistics are available here. For the truly ambitious, take a look at the OECD report on broadband growth and national policies to read about the documented importance of governmental intervention to supporting the spread of broadband connectivity.

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  1. mattw (not verified) on Tue, 2008-05-20 18:32

    Good thing we have all the IPV4 space isn't it!

  2. Brett Glass (not verified) on Thu, 2008-05-22 07:46

    And I'm sure that Sascha and others will be jumping in here, shoting, "Muni broadband is the answer!!!!"

    But it's not.

    The problem is not that private parties can't build out Internet; they can. However, the product that's delivered over those pipes needs to be available at reasonable prices at wholesale, or there's no point trying to deliver it at retail; consumers won't pay what it costs.

    We have a big problem in this country: we're allowing extreme market consolidation (and, in many cases, local and regional monopolization) in the Internet backbone market. Corporations such as Level3 are buying up all the fiber (they've bought all three of the fiber runs through the Laramie Valley, for example) and raising the price of access -- or, in some cases, actually deactivating it to limit the supply. And you simply can't buy dark fiber from them anymore, as you once could. Ask them for access, and they say they'll only provide it in a major city, where their additional capital investment to do so is nil. So, most of America can't tap into the fiber that passes right through their cities.

    It's time to quit harping on muni networking as the answer to anything. It's a ship not only without a rudder but also a big hole in the bottom -- no feasible business plan at all. Instead, we must focus on opening the backbone back up.

  3. sascha on Fri, 2008-05-23 08:08

    I'll throw up a quick post about the COMMONS Project, which was created to address some of the issues you're talking about with the artificial scarcity and anti-competitive business practices of middle-mile and backbone providers. I've been helping coordinate the COMMONS (Cooperative Measurement and Modeling of Open Networked Systems) since 2006 -- CommLaw Conspectus just published a fairly in-depth article this month about the initiative.


  4. Sonu JIndal (not verified) on Sun, 2008-08-17 22:53

    how's up net speed

  5. sascha on Mon, 2008-08-18 08:45

    Hi Sonu,

    The U.S. has been consistently behind other countries in terms of upload speeds, so I would expect that the upload differentials would be even greater.


  6. edinburgh apartments (not verified) on Fri, 2008-10-03 12:44

    I was recently looking at data over the course of a week from the US Census, the ITU, and the OECD, all looking at indicators of broadband services in the United States. What grabbed my attention was the remarkably close relationship between the diminishing number of Internet Service Providers and the global standing of the United States when it comes to broadband penetration rates.

  7. sascha on Sat, 2008-10-04 11:10

    Edinburgh -- you are quite correct to point to this relationship. I had created a post about this very issue about a half-year ago. Check out the relationship between the number of ISPs and our international broadband rankings.


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