http://www.onlineuniversalwork.com

Mr. Leyden fails to mention an interesting aspect of the Hong Kong service: the international speed is 20 Mb/s. There are services available in the US in comparably densely-populated areas that offer this much capacity for a similar price, once you take out the taxes, fees, USF contributions, eRate, and all the other burdens on the bill.

So what can we learn from Asian broadband? There is an intense transnational rivalry between Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong to offer the highest speed broadband for the lowest price per month. The governments have stoked the rivalry by subsidizing fiber in the cities, where most people live in high-rise buildings. The highest speeds are reserved for local end-to-end connections (no hollow sphere) and their primary use is for low-latency gaming and high capacity P2P (mostly piracy and/or porn).

From these examples and similar dynamics in Scandinavia, one can deduce that extremely high broadband speeds are enabled by population density and subsidy, but they’re mainly the result of national rivalries. The US is at a disadvantage, as we don’t really have a national rival. We don’t particularly care what they can do in Japan or Sweden or even Canada. And if the truth be known, bad weather and crappy TV programming probably creates more demand for very high speed broadband than most other factors.

National telecoms regulators are aware of the fact that the rationale of very high speed broadband is entertainment, not productivity or free speech.

To me what that requires is calling attentions to ironies such as the one I posted above, and otherwise trying to listen with an open mind to everybody who clearly knows more than I do about lots of stuff, which includes everybody in this comment thread.

FWIW, in Santa Barbara the poles are publicly owned, but I see no sign, in spite of strong efforts by locals (including myself), that fiber will ever be run even close to homes. So regulation still requires that all pole-based service to be “undergrounded” (their verbed noun) must be “buried” in a long concrete trench the depth of a grave, so copper phone and cable TV services maintain pole-standard distances from each other under the ground — when in a less complicated future world (like the ones being built, both privately and publicly, in other municipalities), a shallower trench for electrical service plus conduit for fiber, would make more sense.

I actually don’t live in Cambridge, but in an adjacent town that decided, wisely, that the best solution was to let every competitor burden the poles with whatever they liked. The result is ugly poles and wiring and a relative paradise of fairly open market competition. The competitors could be a LOT more clueful, but the result is a predictable increase in choice over what a monopoly or duopoly would provide.

I also think it’s interesting (and consistent with your point) that some providers (e.g. Lafayette, Louisiana’s — I’d point to it, but it comes up with annoying music) offers “100 Mbps Peer‐to‐Peer Community Intranet,” and lower speeds otherwise: a difference between one local net and The Internet.

It doesn’t matter whether your first mile is symmetrical or not, the structure of the Internet does not support fully symmetrical usage end-to-end. In order to access the Internet – you know, that big, sprawling, world-wide network – you need to get to an Internet Exchange Point, and the endpoint you want to access has to get to one too. While there’s a mesh between well-connected IXPs, the connections between the edge of the first mile network and the IXP are a series of aggregation and disaggregation points. Aggregation is taking many lines down to one, and disaggregation is the reverse. Tell me how we do that with equal size pipes without creating congestion on the aggregated links or with unequal pipes without creating congestion on thr disaggregated links.

Hint: over-provisioning is under-provisioning from another point of view.

As for competition: it exists even in very small towns like the one I live in, which has at least 10 facilities-based providers and dozens of non-facilities-based ones. But admittedly, there is one thing competition won’t do: carriers won’t compete to lose money on customers. Bandwidth is not free; spectrum isn’t free; fiber isn’t free; copper isn’t free. Competition will keep the price fair, but we will all still have to pay our freight.