The embarrassment of American broadband

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart () pobox com>
Date: April 26, 2009 11:17:40 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net, ip () v2 listbox com
Subject: Re: The embarrassment of American broadband

What David, Brett, and Jonathan Seff's Macworld.com article are
really disagreeing on is how fast "broadband" is or should be.
People like Brett, who sell wireless service to remote areas,
and telcos that sell cheap low-end DSL as well as faster service,
and maybe still sell IDSL in remote areas,
think that anything faster than dialup is broadband.
Some other pundits out there think that under 100 Mbps is lame,
and anything under 1 Mbps isn't broadband at all.

Yeah, Korea and Japan and even Sweden have really fast
cheap service - but are they doing anything interesting
with it besides TV, downloading movies from Pirate Bay,
and occasionally looking at the produce at their
neighborhood grocery store?  Where are the cool apps
that drive new connectivity?  For dialup, it was email,
and for low-end broadband, it was Napster and the web.

I'm more interested in what you can do with the service
than I am with absolute speeds - the big applications for
speeds over ~1 Mbps are television and its competitors,
which are intellectually uninteresting even though they
may be important market drivers and may cost less than satellite.
On the other hand, I really object to ISPs that won't let me
run any kind of (non-spam) server on my home machines,
or which limit my monthly download, both of which are
bad habits, one learned from cable modem companies
and the other learned from Australian ex-monopolies.

The reason Brett objects to the cost of wholesale bandwidth
he has to buy, and therefore to heavy bandwidth users,
has a lot to do with why he's standing out on customer
roofs in bad weather installing antennas -
it's because he wants to provide good service
but lives way out in the middle of nowhere
instead of somewhere warm and civilized.
And he's visited the Bay Area often enough
that it must be out of stubbornness, not ignorance :-)

        Thanks; Bill Stewart

(Disclaimer: This is my own personal opinion,
not that of any current or former employer or
company owned by either of the above.)





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