US Lagging on High Speed Internet
A new study shows that the United States is not even in the top 15 countries in terms of the average hours its citizens spend on the internet each month. In the past decade, the US has gone from being the world leader in internet access and innovation to being a world laggard, and this is due in large part to poor governmental decision making. For example, Thomas Bleha compares US and Japanese policy towards broadband internet over the last six years. In the late 1990’s, Japan was far behind the US in broadband internet access, but the Japanese government launched an aggressive plan to bring “better-than-basic broadband to 40 million of Japan’s 46 million households within five years.” They pulled it off – and the way they did so ought to be of interest to conservatives who somehow think the way to promote “market competition” is to have a do-nothing government:
…because cable providers were mostly mom-and-pop operations in rural areas, officials realized that they would also have to create a highly competitive private-sector environment. So the telecommunications ministry came up with one of the most competitive regimes in the world: it compelled regional telephone companies to grant outside competitors access to all their residential telephone lines in exchange for a modest fee (about $2 per line a month). The antitrust authorities also ensured that these companies did not create obstacles for their competitors, helping provide a level playing field.
The results were extraordinary. Yahoo! BB, created by Masayoshi Son’s venture-capital firm Softbank, and several other companies soon entered the DSL market. Yahoo! BB began offering high-speed service five times faster than current U.S. broadband for $22 a month. After aggressive marketing forced its competitors to meet Yahoo! BB’s price, high-speed DSL subscriptions skyrocketed. By the end of 2002, such access was available to many more than the 30 million Japanese households the government had targeted. Within another five months, a greater percentage of homes in Japan than in the United States had access to broadband.
…Thanks to the government’s competitive framework, the speed of the DSL service offered also rose dramatically, from 8 megabits per second in 2001 to 12, 26, and 40 megabits today. (The typical U.S. broadband connection, whether DSL or cable, is still only 1.5 megabits per second or slower.) Meanwhile, the price of monthly subscriptions remained stable, even for 26-megabit access speeds, at about $22 per month — by far the lowest price in the world. By September 2004, 15.3 million Japanese subscribed to high-speed broadband. Moreover, for an additional $5 per month, users of Yahoo! BB can also have Internet telephone service. One in every 25 telephone calls in Japan is now made over the Internet, and the number keeps growing.
Contrast this with the “Big Corporations Know Best” approach taken by the Bush regime:
U.S. broadband policy drifted during the Bush administration’s first two years. The FCC tended to other matters. The Department of Commerce insisted that the market, not the government, should drive the rollout of broadband. Meanwhile, regional telephone companies relentlessly tried to reverse some of the promising measures that had been taken under President Clinton. Continuing efforts they had launched after the 1996 Telecommunications Act was passed, they lobbied legislators and sought court decisions to overturn regulations that had forced them to open their residential telephone lines to competitors.
…[FCC Chairman Michael Powell] favored pitting the cable television industry against the regional telephone industry.
…But these new services will probably appear only slowly, and competition between the telephone and cable companies will remain limited. The reasons are simple: cheap, high-speed broadband would lead to widespread use of Internet telephones and thus threaten the phone companies' lucrative voice-telephone business, and more inexpensive broadband would multiply outside video and movie offerings and endanger the cable companies' profitability. So, although both the telephone and cable companies could provide cheap, high-speed broadband if they chose to, they are not rushing to develop it.
So while the rest of world is cruising along at 40 megabits per second and greater, we’re stuck at 1.5 megabits per second. And the effect of this is not just that we have to wait a little longer than the rest of world to send our emails and visit websites: it means that entirely new uses for the internet are unavailable to us. While the rest of the world is on their way towards high definition video over the internet and good phone service over the internet, we’re stuck dealing with the Time Warner’s of the world for our cable and phone services. Get more information on this issue at freepress.net.