It’s miserable being a minority. According to the self-test on www.bandwidthplace.com, my download rate is 42.5 kilobits per second, meaning that my connection is a little better than average for Maryland dial-up connections. Still, such a connection is painfully slow and places me squarely in the minority among Internet users, according to the March 2007 Nielsen/NetRatings extrapolations posted at www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0703/; over 80% of US surfers have made the jump to broadband. Granted, for the area where I’m staying, DSL is an option (cable, even ComCrap, isn’t), but the price difference is a prohibitive one. Fortunately, I can’t feel too awful about my personal situation, since I’ll soon be heading back to Shenzhen, where my connection speed is bound to fall into sync with the local average.
I became interested in the whole connection speed issue after reading part of Thomas L. Friedman’s The World is Flat; in a section called “Dirty Little Secret #6: The Infrastructure Gap,” he argues that the US is just not doing a good job of keeping up with the rest of the world when it comes to Internet connections, pointing to the US’s 16th place ranking for broadband penetration among developed countries (according to the ITU report for of December 31, 2004) and the US’s low standard (200 Kbps) for defining ”broadband” (350). Friedman argues the the US’s lagging in this area is an example of misplaced priorities and one part of a crisis for US viability in a world that increasingly relies on the Internet for business.
Friedman’s is a compelling argument, especially given that the US’s actual broadband speeds (even at the most optimistic approximations, such as the ITIF’s) remain pathetically slow compared to some other nations’. Just compare Japan’s 61 Mbps to the ITIF estimate of 4.8 Mbps for the US, and you start to feel that the lag is a very real thing: see http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070529-survey-average-broadband-speed-in-us-is-1-9mbps.html.
Congress at least seems to be seeing the light, with the introduction of the Broadband Consensus of America Act and the Broadband Data Improvement Act. For the State-side sort of thinking this is sparking in small circles (and should be sparking in much larger circles) check out this editorial from Chris Hill on Dr. Blip’s. Could an election be in the balance? It would be nice to think so. The growth in free-market demand that the increasing percentages of broadband users represents certainly seems to present a political mandate.
For myself, I’m more interested in seeing how the connectivity race plays out between the sleeping dragon and the States.
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