I am always stunned of how USA are both forerunners of new technologies, and very backward as well... for credit cards with chip, digital television, gsm diffusion, etc etc... Also, in most of United States you can not get an european level ADSL.
The US is very, very big, and very, very empty compared to Europe. Outside of the I-95 corridor on the East Coast, some islands of density in the midwest, and the coastal zone of California, Oregon, Washington, it's overwhelmingly rural or uninhabited.
Nope, population density is only important outside of cities. Circa 2000 the US had a lot of unused backhaul capacity between cities. So, the real reason why most people in the US don't have cheap high speed internet is simply corruption at the local, state, and federal levels.
PS: This is also why for example Florida lags in solar adoption. When you dig a little into politics you find US politicians are horribly corrupt at all levels which has deeply infected US law.
Calling policy differences corruption is silly. The US made a choice to favor competition and low regulation over no competition and high regulation. It was probably a poor decision.
But you can't just label it corruption.
Plus backhaul capacity has virtually nothing to do with ISP costs. Almost all the costs is last mile network.
What completion? US has far less internet completion due to various local monopolies than the EU. In much of the US it's flat out illegal to try and compete with the incumbent.
Second, Europe has telecom monopolies and the US doesn't. What Europe does is force the monopoly to sell service to ISPs. But only one company owns the copper/fiber. There is one company in charge of building a fiber network and everybody has to use it. The ISP competition makes sure nobody is ripping you off, but it doesn't ensure network quality at all. Since there is one physical connection to your house. They have no incentive to keep their costs down. They have no incentive to build faster networks. And there is nothing the ISP can do.
So what they do is regulate the telecom. Make them do it.
In the USA, most areas have two competing telecom-ish companies. The telephone company (AT&T, Verizon, Qwest, Frontier, but never more than one of the above) and a cable company. In populated areas, both of these provided high(ish) speed internet. In some areas only one does, and in some areas none do. But these companies actually own their networks. But they don't have to resell their service like Europe enforces.
But that increased competition on the network to your house doesn't work very well. If Verizon makes a huge upgrade, there is no insurance that people will pay more for it. Which is exactly what happened. Verizon spent a ton of money on a nice fiber optic network and people mostly stuck with their old cable service. So in America you have two networks, with overlapping coverage, each delivering to roughly half the market. Competition actually causes less efficiency.
But in the end Europe and Americas ISPs aren't really that different. America has better ISPs than the France, Italy, Spain, etc. But countries who can more effectively regulate, have better outcomes.
I wish America regulated it better, but it's not corruption. Just a bad policy choice made in 1996.
Norway and Sweden have excellent Fiber-to-the-Home and very low population density. You can get 1GBit/s symmetrical quite cheaply (I don't remember how much, one Swedish offer I found just now is $120/month).
I've never been anywhere either country, but I suspect this uberInternet Meme about Scandinavia is not quite representative of average Scandinavian ISP speed.
Sweden is globally ranked 4th in that report, and Norway 7th. Just because GBit fiber is availabe to many doesn't mean that everybody wants to have (or pay for) it.
1. I suspect that offer isn't available in northern Norway.
2. They are only a couple hundred miles from the big internet exchanges in the Netherlands and Germany. Most of those miles can be covered with undersea cables, so you don't need to dig, which is expensive.
3. The U.S. regulatory environment for internet providers is horrible and everyone knows it.
See [1], which is a request to tender: "Tromsø Municipality will contribute to the initiation of construction of a powerful and progressive fibre-based broadband network in the outskirts of the municipality of Tromsø". I assume that means the town itself already has it.
Or [2], a press statement from Luleå's largest fibre broadband provider, back in 2012.
Both places are in the Arctic, Tromsø is 3000km from Amsterdam. NYC to London is only 5,500km...
1. Many regional providers exist all over the country that provide similar services in fairly remote towns.
2. Symbiote addressed this quite well. They're really not that close to the big exchanges.
3. That's not a technical problem though, and could be changed if there was a will to. Which is exactly what this discussion is about—in Scandinavia (in fact, most of Europe), there is competition and the broadband situation is fairly good.
Heck, I pay less than $50/month for 200/10 MBit/s and cable TV in Germany. There's no technical reason this wouldn't work in metropolitan areas in the US.
Even if the densities are similar, infrastructure is harder at scale. It's also true that the places in the US with less density tend to have less economic engines.
Population density of Norway: 14 people per km².
Population density of the USA: 35 people per km².
Sure it's hard to do this at scale, but nobody is asking for it to be deployed everywhere at the same time. You could start in populous areas, where it would be cheap to do so, and gradually supply less populated areas.
It's never going to make economic sense to put gigabit fiber out to rural areas, unless it is heavily subsidized. If there were some business location that required high speed, people lucky enough to live along the trunk line to that location might get service - that's the only reason I had cable TV as a child.
That's more an issue if your looking at land vs where people actually live. More people live in DC than Wyoming.
The population of Nebraska, Idaho, Maine, Montana, Alaska , North and South Dakota put together is significantly less than the number of people living in New York City.
That's not a good comparison - when Congress was set up the massive debate between the founders was over how to do representation. Which is why we have a bicameral legislature. When doing population comparisons, you should use the numbers from the House of Representatives (population based, which is why we have a 10 year census) instead of the Senate (2 per state, regardless of size).
Huh? I was pointing out that population is not necessarily correlated with decision making authority. The thing you think I overlooked is exactly the point I was making.
If low population density is the reason the USA overall doesn't have fast, cheap broadband and is behind in mobile technology, then why aren't very dense areas within the USA (or dense states like New Jersey) up to the standards of Europe and East Asia?
They are up to European standards. In fact US has more people over 10 Mpbs than the big European countries like France, UK and Germany. Only 34% of people in Sweden do better than 15 Mpbs. I get 75/75Mpbs in DC. Comcast offers 105Mpbs. We pay more, but that's probably because competition lowers install rates.
Several East Asian countries--namely Japan and Korea--have placed great important on ISP speed. It's heavily subsided. America could do that, but it's a policy priority.
I dont think ADSL can compare to what you can get in most metro areas in the US. I have basic internet and get 18mbps but most of the time its more than 20. Google fiber will be coming to my area soon so I can expect this to go way up even if I dont switch.
As far as CC chips almost all of my cards have a chip in them with the exception of a credit union debit card. Larger retailers that had security breaches are now using this tech such as Home Depot and Target. It will take a very long time to get smaller retailers or even gas pumps to update their card swipers.
G.fast can offer ~1Gbps of bandwidth over a standard copper pair and BT OpenReach is currently trialing services at 330Mbps down with the expectation of rolling out nationally within the next few years. You can do quite a bit with a copper pair, though the distances involved are quite short.
Its when corporations get into the business and extra every cent from a technology. Expensive cable subscriptions, expensive cell subscriptions, etc... They all add up quickly.
