The Broadband Gap: Why Is Theirs Cheaper?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.