
The Broadband Gap: Why Is Theirs Cheaper? - robg
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/why-is-their-broadband-cheaper/?hp
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mdasen
It's not just that foreign governments have done "better" things. It's that
the US is a much harder place to provide broadband (or any service to). The
population density of the US is 31 people per square KM. Compare that to the
UK at 246 or South Korea at 498 or the Netherlands at 398 or even Ireland (the
least dense European country) at 59 - and, of course, Ireland has crappy
internet.

The cost to lay cable in the US is higher by several orders of magnitude. 10
miles of fiber cabling will cost 10x the cost of 1 mile of fiber cabling when
both are bought in bulk. The US has inherent higher costs. The answer cannot
be, "just do what other countries do".

Since someone will ask: why then can't New Jersey and Massachusetts which have
high population densities have better cheap internet? Because companies price
things nationally and not relative to the actual cost of providing the service
to the customer. Customers revolt when you try to explain to them that they
cost more to service and so you're going to charge them more money.

The US will have higher costs for anything that has costs per mile because we
have more miles to cover. I'm actually shocked that the US is so competitive
in areas like broadband and wireless coverage given that those business have
to build a ton more infrastructure to cover the same number of people.

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felixc
I actually blogged about that specific argument a little while ago here:
<http://felixcrux.com/posts/mind-gap/>

I am curious about some of the statements you made, because I am not aware of
the data supporting them, and yet they could change my analysis completely.
Specifically, why do you say that "the cost to lay cable in the US is higher
by several orders of magnitude?" Is there a valid reason for why US prices are
so much higher, and are they really?

In terms of areas with higher population density having different prices --
I'm not sure that it's entirely true that they can't do that, since here in
Canada it's fairly standard practice to vary prices for Internet service by
postal code.

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paul_houle
I'm in a rural area with monopoly DSL from Frontier. These days they use
repeaters to service people that are more than 18k feet from the CO:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/paul_houle/3340856649/>

If you're far from the CO they use an ordinary DSL line card that communicates
to the repeater, which itself contains both a DSL modem and a line card that
talks to your DSL modem.

This strategy is good in the short term, but they'd be better off running a
fiber bundle to the repeater farm in the long term.

Cable service terminates about 1.5 miles from my house: everyone who wants TV
gets it by satellite, so Time Warner doesn't think it could get enough
customers to justify further build-out.

The main trouble w/ Frontier is reliability: the ATM network that hooks up DSL
line cards to the network goes down regularly, particularly on the weekends.
They've been making noises about a preposterously low 5 GB cap, but haven't
enforced it. I wouldn't mind having some reasonable way to pay $1 a GB or so
past a certain point, but there's been no talk about that.

Perhaps white space would help, but I've got no faith in wireless broadband
systems above 1 GHz. Our area is subdivided into narrow and long valleys that
don't get cellphone coverage -- there's an independent ISP that offers
tolerable WiMax service around the city of Ithaca, but they're having trouble
getting a stable upstream connection and trouble getting high-performance DSL
lines to support their infrastructure.

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biohacker42
Or we could pay private companies to build fiber and then let everyone use it,
which exactly how bridges work.

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maarek
The fact that this question keeps coming up without a solid, convincing answer
seems to indicate that there is no simple answer. It is most likely a huge
combination of factors.This also means that simply copying one aspect of
another country's solution is likely to be a disaster.

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drewcrawford
I've always wondered what would happen if local/state governments owned last-
mile fiber/copper lines and auctioned off the usage rights to service
providers.

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mhb
So is theirs less reliable than ours due to less maintenance of the bits which
they are forced to share?

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twopoint718
Whatever they do in South Korea, do that here (in the US).

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lionhearted
Thing that excites me about the future: Strong enough signal reception for
wireless telecommunications that there's minimal need for physical
infrastructure. Monopolies on any form of communication are ugly and greatly
slow down world progress.

