said by Nightfall:said by Ryokucha:In one way I agree with you, it is hard to compare the US to a country like Japan or Korea in which all their population is condensed into big metro areas.
The part I disagree with is, if you compare our metro areas to theirs we still fail.
While the US may never be able to fully connect every inch of those 3.79 million square miles with what smaller countries are able to do, we should at least be able to surpass their metro areas. But we don't even come close in that department either.
Why can't we, because of very old outdated carrier rules, and huge conglomerates as netddos said.
The government also funds a lot of the deployment of their infrastructure. They also maintain it as well. The government here isn't involved in our broadband. Thats the main difference. This broadband plan won't change that. We have companies that are looking out more for their bottom line and financial health. This is why the broadband deployment is so slow here. No one wants to deploy broadband to farming communities and take a huge loss on it.
I highly doubt the users here would want the government to be in charge of broadband either. Being as that we are all into privacy and such.
You are 100% correct that its all conglomerates looking out for their own financial hides. If the government was willing to take a loss and deploy aggressively here, we would be wired by now. Instead, AT&T and Comcast won't take huge losses.
Case in point, my grandmother lived in a farming community and couldn't get cable. The cost to run cable from the street where it was to her house was $20,000. They ran it to her house eventually, but that was only because they saw a benefit to running it. They surveyed everyone on the street and found more people wanted it. Then the cost was justified and they ran it.
The government doesn't fund deployment of broadband here in Japan. You just made that up.
In fact the government has very aggressive regulation to ensure competition in the market and recently tax incentives to encourage fiber deployments.
But if you look at amount of money the US government spends per person vs. Japan, it's not even close.