Unbelievably stupid article.

They totally failed to account for rural/urban distribution, centralization of population, and population density. They are all major factors in how difficult the development of bandwidth trunks. It's not cheap.

So I did some research refute/prove this article. Instead of making it simple with no correlating factors (instead of merely connecion speed), I charted it with population density and urbanization.

My sources used are:
- Speedtest.org - they publicized their top 14 countries + the US
- CIA.gov World Factbook on Urbanization
- Wikipedia.com for population density (in p/km)

You can find my research at:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tQ2Bc2EAghfYLfmYPbjn0pQ&output=html

Essentially, it's important to take urbanization and population density into account. Many countries listed as being very high in speed have high urbaniztion (>70%) and high population density (>50 people per square KM) also correlate to strong broadband connection speeds.

Those are important things to take into the discussion if the US is not making good progress for speeds. Our population density is quite low (3rd lowest), and I'd beg to argue that our urbanization is localized into smaller cities, as opposed to larger ones (hence the low density). Because of such, it's more costly to upgrade the infrastructure for a country with a large, but spread out population in many, many cities, as opposed to a smaller country with a greater density like a Korea or European country.

That's not to say the US is perfect. Russia seems to be doing very well on that list of density, urbanization, and speeds, and bravo to them.

Also, it should be noted that the speedmaters.org is affiliated with a number of progressive, left-leaning websites. Not really a website I think I'd trust to put forth non-biased information, really.

I think that's why they left out any sort of possible differentiating material like density and urbanization, lest they realize that there are economic problems in the way of broadband. What's interesting is that their by-state report correlates with my theory: Higher density/urbanization = better connection speeds. Rural states such as Idaho scrored with 2.3MB/s, while New Jersey was 8.7MB/s. One should also note that their sample size really isn't that great. There were under 500,000 tests ran in the US. Not very definitive given that speedtest.net (another broadband test website with no affiliation whatsoever) has ~20,000,000 tests per MONTH.

Of course, in America, we have broadband solutions for a number of people, in expanding ways. It's called 3G. You can get 3G coverage in a large majority of America. It's what I've been using for the past year in an area that a physical broadband connection isn't possible.

In the end, America is behind. But the reasons for that should be a bit more clear than they argue. I'll be biased on this, but I don't think government investment is really the answer - if the government invests in the internet, will they pull an Australia and define what can, and cannot, be looked up?

@mrstickball

I don't believe the Australian filter has been passed by parliament. And our internet isn't completely government owned. Telstra is partially owned by the government and the rest is owned by private investors (initially I believe the future fund that owned Telstra had a majority but I don't believe it does any longer). Regardless the board of directors of Telstra aren't affiliated with the government.

Unfortunately the issue Australia has is that Telsra has a virtual monopoly on the infrastructure (the other isp's buy bandwidth from them), this monopoly was caused by the fact that our internet infrastructure use to be government owned.
However due to the negligence of Telstra, many isp's have been creating their own ADSL and ADSL2 networks to compete. So the situation isn't as bad as it use to be.

The filter idea was initially looked into by Howard's Liberal government and was rejected because of the negative economic impact that running the filter would cause (let alone the freedom of information and actual effectiveness of the filter issues as-well). Which is why the bill has caused so many issues again.

Thankfully I very much doubt that the bill will be passed, in fact the Rudd government has already made steps to move themselves away from the bill.

So the issue of censorship (which unfortunately has a history in my country, look at risen) doesn't have much to do with the former federal ownership of the internet. Its being pushed by the government to protect children from "paedophiles" eg the usual, predictable tactic of appealing to peoples pathos, in order to scare them into compliance. Just like how most of the horrible anti-terrorism bills were passed in the US and the rest of the West/Europe.

Sorry for my long post :P

Sweden has lower density and urbanization than the US, and it has radically better broadband.

Incorrect. Sweden has higher urbanization than the US (85% vs. 81%), but lower density. If you look at a population density map of Sweden, you will see that the vast majority of Swedish citizens inhabit the lower half of the country, making broadband penetration easier. This would kind of be like discussing New York's broadband - most of the population inhabits the NYC area, therefore broadband rates (which are some of the best in the nation) are skewed.

The problem with the United States (and to a greater extent Canada) is that it is a very large sparsely populated country; the United States has (roughly) the same area as Europe with 40% the population (and Canada is basically the same area as Europe with 4% the population). One of the few areas where the federal government can operate efficiently, and can produce far greater benefits than the private sector can, is in the production of infrastructure that is necessary to make these large countries operate as one unified economic block.

Now, one of the most valuable things the federal government could have done to "Stimulate" the economy would have been to build a new backbone for the internet that connected all of the states together (and the Canadian government could have connected all provinces and territories); and from there the states could have connected all cities and towns together, and the private sector could use this new higher-bandwidth back-bone to sell services to consumers and (indirectly) connected all citizens together.

As a rough guestimate, I suspect that the cost of the infrastructure on the federal and state levels would have probably been between $10 Billion and $50 Billion (1.5% to  7.5% of the stimulus bill); but the goods and services that would come from having 300+ Million people connected to each other at ultra high speeds could translate into this money being recovered long term through tax revenue.

I massively agree with this post. Of course, giving the private sector the money to invest in building up the infrastructure (rather than the Gov't doing it on its own), would be more effective, still.

HS-

Sadly, we totally avoided that we could have done that with the stimulus bill. The bill only set $7.2B for funding the infrastructure when more was likely needed.

If we really were going to do a smart stimulus bill (which is an oxymoron in congress, really), we could have capitalized high-return projects like broadband, and space-based projects.

I think that building up broadband is a worthwhile investment, but it shouldn't be funneled to the government, nor run by the government as the host article tends to lean towards.

Sweden is a unique case because of its population distribution. Approximately 78% of Sweden's population resides on its southern coast; the southern coast is approximately 1700 km in length. In the US, approximately 50% of the population lives on the lengthier Atlantic and Gulf coastlines. The remaining 50% lives in the inner states, on the Pacific coast, and in the two non-contiguous states.

Privatize bb or talk to the govt when it is not 12.7 trillion in debt 2010-2019.

no wonder those people from other countries kick my butt on xbox live