The French Connections from Austria

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Erich M." <me () quintessenz org>
Date: August 24, 2009 7:32:25 PM EDT
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: [IP] The French Connections

David Farber schrieb:
>

Dave,
For IP if you deem nasty jokes on non-metrical systems appropriate ;)
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: dewayne () warpspeed com (Dewayne Hendricks)
> Date: August 24, 2009 4:08:58 AM EDT
> To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <xyzzy () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The French Connections
>
> [Note: Paul Krugman's op-ed from two years ago on just how badly off  
> the
> U.S. with the Internet when compared to the rest of the world. Now  
> here
> we are with not much in the way of real change and the rest of the  
> world
> hasn't stood still.  Food for thought...  DLH]

Dave and all,

Three weeks ago I spent a few days with the family in the mountains of
Carinthia, southern Austria, close to the borders of Italy and Slovenia.
Sea height of the house was 1.200 meters (3.936,9959999999997 feet says
the calculator)
The 10 Kilometer (32.808,3 feet) valley below us sported only two
buildings. Once a day we would log onto the net via two different
Austrian 3G providers, download rates ranged from  500 kbit to 1.5  
Mbit/sec.
The nearest city (100.000 inhabitants) around was 60 kilometers
(37,28227153424004 miles) away and we did definitely not get the
connectivity from there.
Why: Austria has been a world test market for 3G-UMTS (aka HSPA) from
2002, covering meanwhile close to 80 per cent of the country.

BUT: The next step of mobile broadband is already underway: LTE,
theoretical bandwith per cell 100 Mbit/sec. Not bad for a beginning.
That's the technology Verizon currently has tested in Boston and  
Seattle.

This time we are losing momentum here. Sweden will be the LTE world test
market, because you need fiber everywhere to transport all that traffic
from the base stations. We have lots of dark fiber buried here in
Austria from 1992 on but still no plan how to set up a _network_. The
Swedish do have that connectivity because they were in the same
situiation, but chose a communitarian solution.
FTTH city fiber optic networks are being built and managed there by the
municipalities, more than 100 providers run the services. Amongst those
is the incumbent TeliaSonera.
greetz from Europe
Erich




> July 23, 2007
> OP-ED COLUMNIST
> The French Connections
> By PAUL KRUGMAN
> <http://select.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/opinion/23krugman.html?pagewanted=print 
> >
>
>
> There was a time when everyone thought that the Europeans and the
> Japanese were better at business than we were. In the early 1990s
> airport bookstores were full of volumes with samurai warriors on their
> covers, promising to teach you the secrets of Japanese business  
> success.
> Lester Thurow’s 1992 book, “Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle
> Among Japan, Europe and America,” which spent more than six months on
> the Times best-seller list, predicted that Europe would win.
>
> Then it all changed, and American despondency turned into  
> triumphalism.
> Partly this was because the Clinton boom contrasted so sharply with
> Europe’s slow growth and Japan’s decade-long slump. Above all,  
> however,
> our new confidence reflected the rise of the Internet. Jacques Chirac
> complained that the Internet was an “Anglo-Saxon network,” and he  
> had a
> point — France, like most of Europe except Scandinavia, lagged far
> behind the U.S. when it came to getting online.
>
> What most Americans probably don’t know is that over the last few  
> years
> the situation has totally reversed. As the Internet has evolved — in
> particular, as dial-up has given way to broadband connections using  
> DSL,
> cable and other high-speed links — it’s the United States that has
> fallen behind.
>
> The numbers are startling. As recently as 2001, the percentage of the
> population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half
> that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By  
> the
> end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband  
> subscribers
> per 100 people than we did.
>
> Even more striking is the fact that our “high speed” connections are
> painfully slow by other countries’ standards. According to the
> Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, French broadband
> connections are, on average, more than three times as fast as ours.
> Japanese connections are a dozen times faster. Oh, and access is much
> cheaper in both countries than it is here.
>
> [snip]RSS Feed: <http://www.warpspeed.com/wordpress>
>
>
>
>
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