Comments on: U.S. Falling Behind World in Broadband

By: Danny Carlton (aka Jack Lewis)

Danny Carlton (aka Jack Lewis) — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 12:29:49 +0000

Around the Blogosphere

Critics visit Gitmo, return with egg on face Captain's Quarters, Outside the Beltway US falling behind in broadband Outside the...

By: John Thacker

John Thacker — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 01:46:45 +0000

"U.S. mobile phone service remains awful by European, let alone Japanese, standards."

By Japanese, perhaps, at least in the number of people widely using picture service. By European, I don't really think so. European mobile phone service tends to come with more international roaming capability-- to other places in Europe. But the US is as big as all of Europe, and nationwide roaming (or the North American plans) is thus about as big a deal.

As I mentioned before, Europeans are having tremendous problems with UMTS, due to incompatibility.

By: John Thacker

John Thacker — Mon, 27 Jun 2005 01:41:39 +0000

What a stupid article. The US has always had unmetered local calls, whereas most of the rest of the world doesn't. That led to incredibly fast take up of dialup subscriptions-- but also made people a lot less willing to switch from their unmetered dialup to broadband than in countries where they were paying metered dialup. Throw in population density, and there you go.

Even in the late 90s it was clear that many other countries (with metered phone service for local calls) were surging ahead in broadband.

Sometimes being an early adopter of a previous generation of technology leads you to lag behind in the next generation because of switching costs. Consider Minitel in France, which was easily ahead of its time and widely used, but doesn't match up to the Internet. (Or consider GSM, a great 2G cellular network, but also one that the 3G networks aren't backwards compatible to, because they all have CDMA air interfaces, even the GSM upgrade path. Hence to switch to 3G, GSM customers have to get all new incompatible handsets.)

By: bryan

bryan — Sun, 26 Jun 2005 19:12:11 +0000

I recall an NPR report a few weeks ago about some other country in western europe (perhaps one of the scandinavian countries) that had sped past the U.S. in technology innovation. Of course, they also had a 75 percent tax rate, so ...

By: simon

simon — Sun, 26 Jun 2005 15:16:56 +0000

well reasoned ... poor analysis often points to more government intervention as the only solution.

By: PoliBlog: Politics is the Master Science

PoliBlog: Politics is the Master Science — Sun, 26 Jun 2005 13:46:22 +0000

Same Song, Different Verse (But a Faster Download with Broadband)

In the NYT we have the following: A Broadband Beat-Down
IT looked for a while as if the United States was firmly entrenched as the world’s leader in Internet innovation. President Bill Clinton and Al Gore, his vice president, did much to encou...