New report: U.S. broadband is still a miserable failure
3 comments- IT TOPICS:Government & Regulation, Networking, Internet
The latest broadband figures from the international organization the OECD are out, and once again, they show the U.S. trails most of the industrial world when it comes to broadband penetration --- we're an anemic 15th place, with broadband penetration of 22.1 percent. The world winner Denmark has more than 34 percent penetration.
The numbers are getting worse, not better. The U.S. increase in broadband growth came in at a dismal 19th place, trailing Greece. But hey, let's not complain --- we beat Turkey!
Everywhere you look, there's bad news. When it comes to broadband speed, for example, we're a lowly 19th place, with an average advertised speed of 8.86 Mbps. Contrast that with Japan, with a whopping 93.69 Mbps average speed.
All this is cause for concern because broadband is an engine of economic growth and innovation. The further we fall behind, the most likely that our economy will suffer, and that others will catch up. Don't look to the federal government for help -- it won't even admit there's a problem, much less do anything about it. Just this week, the FCC once again issued its usual broadband whitewash, claiming that everything is hunky-dory. But that's only because the numbers it uses are bogus. It claims, for example, that any speed over 200 Kbps is broadband.
There's a lot more wrong with the FCC report as well. More on that, though, in a future blog. The point here is that we're falling further behind the rest of the world in broadband, and ultimately we'll pay the price for it.
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