The head of Teletruth, a consumer advocacy group, writes that in spite of huge payments and other financial incentives to the country’s monopolistic telecommunication giants, the United States is 16th in broadband Internet technology and falling. How did things go wrong in your state?

By 2006, according to telecommunication companies’ own documents, 86 million customers in the United States should have received 45 Mbps service. In fact, South Korea and Japan do even better: they routinely offer 100 Mbps connections in both directions, uploading and downloading, for around $40 per month. But in the United States, the best connections top out at 1/3 this speed and cost 400% more—and very few places even have access to the new fiber-optic services being offered. The United States once led the world in Web technology. What happened?

The answer is, the merger of the phone companies that control the phone networks decreased competition. Instead of deploying the high-speed fiber-optic lines they promised, they were content to collect profits, tinker with existing copper connections instead of rewiring, and roll out inferior DSL services. The FCC defines anything above 200 Kbps as broadband (1000 Kbps = 1 Mbps), allowing them to claim that Americans have broadband access. However, this definition is a politically-driven embarrassment for technologists, the equivalent of two tin-cans with string.

Phone companies have documented plans to wire 86 million homes with fiber optics by 2006 but the United States had only 38 million high-speeds line of any sort at the end 2004. And "high speed" in this case is defined as anything faster than 200 Kbps in one direction. The most common U.S. broadband access runs at 768 Kbps top speed in one direction, hundreds of times slower than the routine 100 Mbps, bi-directional service in other countries, even though consumers in those countries pay about the same price: an average of $40 a month.

Originally posted by scientist
you bring up a GREAT point. All of the phone / cable services over the past decade were given HUGE tax breaks, because they promised they would take it upon themselves to upgrade all the networks to fiber optics and etc.

guess what.. that never happened. Here is a link and explanation:

www.niemanwatchdog.org...

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so again, the problem is NOT with the consumers, but with the companies and the government that let them get by with these lies (that actually cost consumers LOTS of extra money).

I would LOVE to see someone argue this away...

ah, the rare on-topic, logical debate. Thank you for the response.

Originally posted by stumason

Originally posted by scientist
I'm not interested in technical reasons for anything, when promises were already made:

Well, if your not interested in "why" fibre to your house is technically a complete waste of time and is so cost prohibitive, then why the bitching?

OK, let me be more reasonable. I understand the downfalls of fibre, and the implications of converting our system over to it. The most obvious answer is a hybrid of copper and fibre. There are already small ISPs that offer this, but again the major companies all promised to develop this on their own, hence tax cuts, and the mergers. Those mergers were only allowed, because they were going to take the costs of R&D, and implementation on their own - so that the government did not have to intervene.

Well, it never happened, since they have a monopoly on the industry. only a few small, local companies like SureWest offer consumer level connection speeds that are up to par with th rest of the world:

SureWest is able to offer this unmatched Internet speed by delivering 100 Mbps of bi-directional bandwidth to each customer's home on its FTTP platform, leaving room to bundle video and voice services as well. With over 190,000 total marketable homes over its combined copper and fiber Broadband networks, SureWest can offer the 50-meg product to 52 percent of its Broadband service territory.

a electircal conection using coaxial cable can give you a speed of 140Mb/s.

Right, but as soon as the connection goes to wire, it's now bottlenecking the speed for all other connections in the particular leg of the network. That't the hybrid part they never did. Also, we are so far behind, do you think 140 is really going to cut it in another 5 years even? 10?

The cost of laying fibre in the UK comes to about $90,000/KM. Not sure about the US, but I would assume it is around the same mark. Now, imagine this cost on a national scale.

Right, which was the incentive for the tax breaks / merger (the ONLY reason the merger was allowed to occur between AT&T, MCI and Bell) in the first place - the networks would develop this on their own, as opposed to government funding (we have a war to fight! but i digress..)

Even with the increasing bandwidth, you won't just be able to download excessive amounts as there is only finite capacity.

care to explain? I don't understand what you were getting at.

When was that plan put in place? Do you know anything about the industry at all? I bet that plan was announced pre-2001.

i am not ignorant, if that's what you were getting at. How about some sources:

The Bells promised fiber optics, an open network with 45 Mbps to every home, collected hundreds of billions of dollars, and failed to deploy. In some cases, they even built advanced networks before the passage of favorable legislation and then ripped them out after the laws had passed.

Bandwidth usage and speed are two different things. You can have a uber-fast connection, but you'll find that no matter what speed you are given, there will always be a limit on exactly how much you can download. I will bet that those "lucky" orientals with their 100Mb/s connections probably still have usage caps and a fair use policy. There is, after all, only a finite amount of bandwidth to go around.

But, as you said, your not interested in the technical reasons, so I', not going to bore you.

Instead, just accept that you can have a fast speed, but you cannot download 100's of GB's a month without someone complaining your hogging bandwidth.

summary of the SBC and Verizon mergers and their harm to fiber-optic deployments...

During the early 1990's, the phone companies made commitments, by state, to rewire America...

Pacific Bell was supposed to spend $16 billion and rewire 5.5 million households
Ameritech was supposed to spend $6 billion to fund over 6 million homes

after EVERY merger, SBC closed down the existing fiber optic deployments, including all of the work in California, Connecticut, and Ameritech's five states.

Verizon (Bell Atlantic) did the same thing. The company promised to spend $11 billion and rewire 8.75 million households by 2000, but after the Bell Atlantic-NYNEX merger, every state halted their state fiber optic plans—from Massachusetts to New Jersey, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania

This was 45 Mbps, bi-directional, 500 channel, fiber to the home services, that were supposed to be open to competition and ubiquitously deployed.

Combined, Verizon and SBC were to spend $48.9 billion and have 36.5 million households by 2000. But there is nothing to show for it. 26 states were impacted by two companies' bad decisions.

Instead, America is 16th in broadband because these companies didn't deliver, yet convinced regulators they would rewire America, during each merger. Overall, the Bells should have had 86 million homes already wired as customers paid over $200 billion for networks they never received.