Broadband in America

We have a problem in America. The United States is the last standing superpower in the world. As a country, we have some of the best scientific minds in the world. We have access to some of the best universities in the world. We spend billions of dollars to “police” the world, and yet our technology infrastructure is lagging behind most of the worlds developed countries.

According to Phillip J. Weiser and Thomas Bleha in an article from the September issue of Foreign Affairs the number of DSL connections in Japan went from 100,000 in 2001 to more than 9,000,000 in 2004. He reason for this phenomenal growth in Japan is simple. Japan does not have policies that stifle competition in its telecommunications industry. As a matter of fact, Japan provides incentives for expanding broadband and wireless technologies and making them available for it’s people. As a result, there is more competition in Japan, which means lower prices and higher speeds for it’s high tech consumers.

Japan is not the only one ahead of the United States in broadband technologies. One study I saw while researching this topic puts the United States at 16th in the world in broadband technologies and another study, published on money.cnn.com ranks the US at 12th in the world. In case you where wondering who was ahead of us, they were (in order) Korea, Netherlands, Denmark, Iceland, Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, Japan Finland, Norway, Sweden, and finally the United States.

OK, those are the stats. Now you may ask yourself how could this happen? The standards body for the Internet is located in the United States. Silicon Valley is in California, not Korea. We should be the world leader in technology, right? Wrong, and the answer to why is simple. Lobbyists. The telecommunications industry has one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington and they will do anything to protect their interests. As a result, in 2002 the FCC made a stupid decision in favor of large cable companies. They do not have to let their competitors lease their backbone network, so much less competition. Some would say that the reason for this is to encourage providers to invest in a more robust backbone for their networks and theoretically expand their services to a bigger market without fear that they will be building lines for the competition. This is a weak reason. There are thousands of miles of dark fiber in the US that is not being utilized already, and I believe if this infrastructure was opened up to smaller, newer providers. This would foster growth and competition.

But as usual, when the United States government is involved, growth is stifled to protect the interests of the bigger corporations. Another industry that is involved is the television and movie industry. They are so afraid that people will start stealing their content that they would love to stop growth in the industry. I say to them, if they would be innovative and provide a viable alternative to theft, just like iTunes did for the music industry, they wouldn’t have to worry about it.

If the government continues to favor the big companies, and suppress innovation, there is no hope of making the US a major player in the world technology market. The only hopes that I see is maybe America will finally wake up and realize George Bush is a terrible president and get those Republican warmongers out of congress and elect a forward thinking Democrat.