PeerFlow

Japan Still Far Ahead of US in Internet Connection Speeds

While the U.S. still hopes to get up to 10Mbps Internet connection speeds by 2012, Japan already has such speeds for cable Internet service almost everywhere. And yes, I mean Internet connections, not just broadband.

But in Japan cable Internet service is of declining popularity, because 30 or 40 Mbps for $50 or $60 per month is not really fast there.

DSL in Japan goes up to 50 Mbps for also around $50-$60/month.

But for actual fast, cheap, Internet connections, people in Japan buy Fiber to the Home (FTTH), which actually costs less and delivers from 100Mbps to 1Gbps.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S.A., EDUCAUSE has proposed 100Mbps national broadband using a funding method that already failed in Texas.

Japan didn't get to 100Mbps by a single government-funded network. It did it by actually enforcing competition among broadband providers. Why did it do this? Because a private entrepreneur, Masayoshi Son, and his company Softbank, pestered the Japanese government until it did so.

Thus it's refreshing that these graphs laying out how far ahead of the U.S. Japan is come from the New America Foundation. Chair? Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.

Not for Sale: Canadian Internet

Net neutrality has become a political issue in Canada, where a small and very polite rally occurred in Ottawa the other day.

p2pnet news | Freedom:- Today is the day Canadians are gathering in Ottawa to tell the federal government what they think about Net Neutrality and bandwidth throttling.

Bell Canada was suffering under the delusion it could choke down accounts paid for by some of its customers, wrongly claiming they’re responsible for bandwidth congestion.

— Canadians rally for Net Neutrality, P2Pnet news, 27 May 2008

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Critics, it's Time to Stop the Quibbling: Broadband in Other Countries

Ars technica sums it up:

One of the ironies of the current broadband situation in the US is that staunch free marketeers defend the status quo even though the result of their views has been duopoly and high prices. Meanwhile, other countries (including those with a reputation in some quarters for "socialism") have taken aggressive steps to create a robust, competitive, consumer-friendly marketplace with the help of regulation and national investment.

Critics, it's time to stop the quibbling: the data collection practices that show the US dropping year-over-year in all sorts of broadband metrics from uptake to price per megabit might not prove solid enough to trust with your life, but we're out of good reasons to doubt their general meaning.

— Broadband: other countries do it better, but how? By Nate Anderson, ars technica, Published: May 11, 2008 - 07:37PM CT

That post includes a table of papers and reports on per-country broadband rankings with corresponding U.S. rankings, from 11 to 24.

Then it gets to lack of political leadership:

Despite the repeated claims of the current administration that our "broadb and policy" is working, the US act ually has no broadband policy and no aggressive and inspiring goals (t hink "moon shot"). The EDUCAUSE model suggests investing $100 billion (a third comes from the feds, a third from the states, and a third from compan ies) to roll out fiber to every home in the country. Whether the particular pro posal has merit or not, it at least has the great virtue of being an ambitious policy that recognizes the broad economic and social benefits from fast broadba nd. 

Here's hoping that the next president, whoever he (or, possibly, she) is, g ives us something more effective—and inspiring—than this. It's telling that the current administration's official page on the President's tech p olicy hasn't had a new speech or press release added since... 2004.

$100 billion may sound like a lot, but the federal government alone spends that much a year on the unnecessary Iraq war. The U.S. needs better priorities.

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Kaput: What Your Domain Becomes if U.S. Treasury Says So

What a reputation:

So that's that. Register your domain name through a U.S. company and your business goes kaput if the U.S. Treasury Department decides it doesn't like you. It doesn't matter if you're based in Spain, your servers are in the Bahamas, your customers are mostly European, and you've broken no laws. No warning. Just kaput.

— Just Kaput, Kevin Drum, Political Animal, 4 March 2008

This blogger bases his opinion on a NYTimes story:

Back to the Future: 10Mbps by 2012, or, What Japan Had Years Ago

Creeping ahead:

A study from Texas-based research firm Parks Associates predicts that 33 million US households will have broadband connections of 10Mbps or faster by 2012. As of the end of 2007, that figure stood at 5.7 million, which means that a lot of change will have to occur in the US market for that 33 million figure to become a reality.

— Report: 10Mbps broadband in 33 million homes by 2012, By Eric Bangeman, ars technica, Published: March 04, 2008 - 10:20PM CT

Meanwhile, Japan is already doing 100Mbps. But in Japan there is real ISP competition. Unlike in the U.S., where, as shown in the pie chart by Park Associates (via DSL Reports), each of Comcast and AT&T have a fifth of the broadband market, followed by Verizon and Time Warner each with 13%, plus Cox with 7%, and that's 3/4 of the total market served by only five companies, of whom most people have a choice of only two in any given locality. That's not competition.

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Comcast Viewed as Great Firewall of China

Prof. Jean Camp points out that:

This is ironically exactly the mechanism used by the Great Firewall of China. When China does it, we call it "censorship".

— Re: [IP] Comcast FCC filing shows gap between hype, bandwidth, Jean Camp, Interesting People, 14 Feb 2008

She points to a paper that details that the Great Firewall of China uses exactly the same forged TCP Reset method that Comcast uses, and how to work around such damage:

Canada: Throttling Ahead

A law professor in Ottawa sums up the Canadian net neutrality situation in a paragraph:

Net neutrality concerns mount but politicians do not respond.

Net neutrality, which has been simmering as an issue in Canada over the past three years, will reach a boiling point this year as leading ISPs implement traffic throttling technologies that undermine the reliability of some Internet applications and experiment with differing treatment for some content and applications. Despite consumer concerns, politicians and regulators will do their best to avoid the issue.

— Tech law issues to watch in 2008, Michael Geist, thestar.com, Jan 07, 2008 04:30 AM

No smokescreen about we can't regulate the net. straightforward as to who is causing the problem: ISPs busily implementing throttling while complacent politicians look the other way.

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Clogged: Internet Demise Predicted, Again

I predict this prediction will be misused by the duopoly to lobby for more favoratism for the duopoly:

User demand for the Internet could outpace network capacity by 2010, according to a study released today by Nemertes Research. The study found that corporate and consumer Internet usage could surpass the Internet access infrastructure, specifically in North America, but also worldwide, within the next three to five years.

...

As Internet capabilities continue to expand and users strive to be constantly connected, usage of the Internet via the mobile phone, set-top boxes and gaming devices has exponentially increased thus limiting bandwidth capacity. This is due in large part to voice and bandwidth-intensive applications, including streaming and interactive video, peer-to-peer file transfer and music downloads and file sharing. According to ComScore, nearly 75% of U.S. Internet users watched an average of 158 minutes of online video in one month alone and viewed more than 8.3 billion video streams.

— Internet could clog networks by 2010, study says, By Sarah Reedy, TelephoneOnline, Nov 19, 2007 1:03 PM

If I had a nickle for every time imminent demise of the Internet has been predicted. This has been going on since before the Internet even existed, and the results have been different than in this prediction.

China: Unlocked iPhones

Can't get an unlocked iPhone inthe U.S.? Try China:

The iPhone is readily available in computer superstores in most large Chinese cities. In Beijing's Zhong Guancun, a 15-story mall filled with technology vendors, almost all the stalls are stocked. Two weeks ago, the blogger of Too Many Resources for the iPhone asked several of these vendors whether they could sell him 100 iPhones. They all answered "No problem."

— China's New 'Love Craze' — Black Market iPhones, By Aventurina King, Wired, 11.19.07 | 7:00 PM

These are unauthorized uninsured iPhones. Apparently they aren't copies: they're the real thing. The iPhone is manufactured in China, and these ones are shipped out and back through Hong Kong or eBay.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S. of A., you're stuck with an iPhone that works only on AT&T's network, while the FCC finagles a spectrum auction so lockin will continue and plans further media consolidation so you won't know anything better.

Bruce Sterling sums it up:

(((China is the New America because, not only do they have sexy movies, they have iPhones that actually work and aren't choked to death with legalistic BS IP consumer lock-in.)))

— China: The New America (part II), By Bruce Sterling, Beyond the Beyond, November 20, 2007 | 7:44:11 AM

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Normative net neutrality: Milton Mueller on free association and free trade

Free as in free speech, free association, and free trade: Milton Mueller drafts an Internet governance paper using net neutrality as its central principle.

... as a normative guide to policy, network neutrality transcends domestic politics. The network neutrality debate addresses the right of Internet users to access content, services and applications on the Internet without interference from network operators or overbearing governments. It also encompasses the right of network operators to be reasonably free of liability for transmitting content and applications deemed illegal or undesirable by third parties. Those aspects of net neutrality are relevant in a growing number of countries and situations, as both public and private actors attempt to subject the Internet to more control. Because Internet connectivity does not conform to national borders, net neutrality is really a globally applicable principle that can guide Internet governance.

— Net Neutrality as Global Principle for Internet Governance, Milton Mueller, Internet Governance Forum, 5 November, 2007

Basically, instead of getting mired in discussions of bandwidth or technical methods of stifling, throttling, or censorship, let's get back to deriving net neutrality from general political and economic principles, which turns out to make net neutrality a convenient lens by which to view those principles and to apply them to the Internet.

U.S. Broadband Competitiveness: Let's Study It To Death

Let's study it to death:

The United States is starting to look like a slowpoke on the Internet. Examples abound of countries that have faster and cheaper broadband connections, and more of their population connected to them.

What's less clear is how badly the country that gave birth to the Internet is doing, and whether the government needs to step in and do something about it. The Bush administration has tried to foster broadband adoption with a hands-off approach. If that's seen as a failure by the next administration, the policy may change.

In a move to get a clearer picture of where the U.S. stands, the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Tuesday approved legislation that would develop an annual inventory of existing broadband services -- including the types, advertised speeds and actual number of subscribers -- available to households and businesses across the nation.

— U.S. sees some countries overtake it in broadband speeds, but is there a problem? Associated Press, 30 Oct 2007

On the one hand, this sounds like a popular approach to global warming by its deniers: now let's ask some scientists to study it. After all, the Okefenokee and surrounds burned more acres than in living memory, western wildfires have increased fourfold since 1970, 30 million people in half a dozen southwest states may run out of water in the next decade or so, and 12 million people in the Atlanta metro area are less than 3 months from having no water. And hundreds of climate scientists have already turned in their verdict. But, hey, now let's ask some scientists to study it.

On the other hand, this is Ed Markey's committee, and he has seemed serious about doing something, so maybe he's just cojmpiling a case. Sure, he's probably reacting to people like this who are taking the same tack as outlined above:

FON: Cringely to Spain to Britain to U.S.?

Cringely claims credit for wireless craze:

Several years ago I wrote a column describing a system I had thought up for sharing Internet hotspots that I called WhyFi. Among the readers of that column were some entrepreneurs in Spain who went on to start the hotspot sharing service called FON, which now has more than 190,000 participating hotspots. Those Spaniards have been quite generous in attributing some of their inspiration to my column. And now this week FON signed a deal with British Telecom that promises to bring tens of thousands more FON hotspots to the UK and beyond. This isn't FON's first deal with a big broadband ISP -- they already have contracts with Speakeasy and Time Warner Cable in the U.S. among others -- but it is one of the biggest and points to an important transformation taking place in the way people communicate.

— You Can't Get There From Here: The myth of bandwidth scarcity and can Team Cringely really make it to the Moon? By Robert X. Cringely, Pulpit, PBS, October 5, 2007

Much like really fast broadband in Japan, FON is an American idea that people in another country adopted and ran with.

Google Planning Fast Trans-Pacific Cable?

Google may be getting into international infrastructure as well as domestic:

Google is planning a multi-terabit undersea communications cable across the Pacific Ocean for launch in 2009, Communications Day has learned.

The Unity cable has been under development for several months, with a group of carriers and Google meeting for high-level talks on the plan in Sydney last week.

Google would not strictly confirm or deny the existence of the Unity plan today, with spokesman Barry Schnitt telling our North American correspondent Patrick Neighly that "Additional infrastructure for the Internet is good for users and there are a number of proposals to add a Pacific submarine cable. We're not commenting on any of these plans."

However, Communications Day understands that Unity would see Google join with other carriers to build a new multi-terabit cable. Google would get access to a fibre pair at build cost handing it a tremendous cost advantage over rivals such as MSN and Yahoo, and also potentially enabling it to peer with Asia ISPs behind their international gateways - considerably improving the affordability of Internet services across Asia Pacific.

Google plans new undersea "Unity" cable across Pacific by Grahame Lynch, CommsDay ASEAN, September 21st, 2007

Coyly refusing to confirm nor deny, Google has nonetheless left bread crumbs along trail of its ambition: