The Bush administration has had a hard time improving infrastructure in Iraq and they havent done much better here in regards to broadband penetration of households.
Broadband access is essential to providing all kinds of neato services yet only 16% of homes in the US has it. What is worse is that we have dropped from 4th place in 2001 to 12th place. At least we are still ahead of that "old Europe" France and Germany.
As American's we are used to thinking of ourselves as the center of the tech-universe. Which makes it all the more hard to accept that other countries are passing us by. Korea in particular has much more advanced cell phones and internet access.
And the reason for our decline? Our lame-brain politicians and the resistance of the huge corporations. Big surprise there.
U.S. Lags Behind in High-Speed Internet Access
Ranking Slips to 12th Spot Among Developed Nations; In Washington, a Debate
April 12, 2006
PARIS -- The U.S. continues to lag behind rich nations in Europe and Asia in adopting high-speed Internet connections, a critical form of technological infrastructure, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
The U.S. ranked 12th among industrialized nations, with 16.8 broadband subscribers per 100 inhabitants, as of December, the OECD said. Iceland overtook longtime leader South Korea for the top spot. Countries in Northern Europe filled seven of the top 10 spots, underscoring how the region is leading the way in taking up this pillar of modern infrastructure.
The OECD data are collected from the governments of the 30 member states, as well as from publicly available financial reports from telecommunications companies.
Mr. Martin argued that the low population density of the U.S. made comparisons with high-density countries like South Korea unfair. He added that with 42.9 million lines, the U.S. still had more people connected to broadband than any other country.
But the experience of countries like Iceland, and Norway and Sweden, which have even lower population densities than the U.S., indicates that low density isn't an insurmountable obstacle to wider broadband access.
Broadband access is usually delivered through telephone lines, also known as digital subscriber lines, or through cable networks. The next generation of broadband, which is already widespread in countries like South Korea, Japan and Sweden but still rare in the U.S., will travel over fiber-optic cables to the home or neighborhood and permit speeds that can be 100 times faster than the typical DSL or cable broadband connection.
In many of the countries at the top of the rankings, governments have taken an active role in spurring broadband use and in some cases in building communications infrastructure as they would a public utility like highways or airports. In Stockholm, the municipal government laid fiber-optic cables throughout the city and rents them out to commercial operators who sell Internet services to consumers. In South Korea, the government heavily subsidized telecom companies to encourage them to lay fiber to villages and towns.
Another approach used in countries such as the Netherlands has been to force telephone companies to allow rivals to use their lines to offer Internet services to consumers. Known as "local loop unbundling," this approach causes the number of Internet providers to proliferate, leading to lower prices and faster access as the companies jockey for customers.
The U.S. passed a law mandating such a policy in 1996, but lobbying from phone and cable companies and several court decisions have undermined parts of these efforts. In recent years, regulators have rolled back many "unbundling" requirements because they contend that competition is forming on its own among cable, Internet companies and phone-service providers, making regulation unnecessary.
