Finland makes 1Mb broadband access a legal right | Webware - CNET first France, now Finland. i look at the cellphone specs in Japan and Europe think, we invent all this stuff and everyone else perfects it while we seem to settle for 2nd rate. why is this?
Money. We mostly do things to make money. If a few people can make more money by screwing over some subsection of the population, that's how we do it. Tom
Actually, Canadian firms have invented more than their fair share of Internet and data related products. The now-defunct Nortel had a wide range of leading-edge Internet access products The Canadian company Research In Motion has the BlackBerry So, you would think that every square foot of Canada would be Broadband access, right? WRONG. Various Crown Corporations just loved giving billions of dollars away to foreign countries to set up phone and internet access (Industry Canada, Export Development Agency, Canadian International Development Agency, etc), but mostly ignoring such access in their home country Once you get outside of major population areas of Canada, you're lucky to even have a cell phone signal, let alone Internet access
The U.S. domestic cell phone market was initially hampered by very stiff competition from an extremely high quality, universal coverage, low cost land line system. And our cell service continues to be hampered by a huge geography, with many mountainous areas of low population density that still cannot be economically served. In contrast, there are many markets on other continents with compact geography, high population density throughout, and that entered the cell era with land line systems of low quality, high cost, and/or incomplete coverage. Pent-up demand in many of these markets caused cell service to explode, very quickly surpassing the adoption rates and feature availability of our own market. Having been part of the cellular industry until the Internet and Telecomm meltdowns of 2000-2001, I must challenge the 'we invent all this stuff' comment. Japan and Europe were just as prolific in the inventions and developments as we were.
cell service is a COMPLETELY different bird born of regs and NIMBY rights out of control. i can easily say that in all populated areas we have cell service and that is where small portable cellphones are handy, since you will need about 5 of em all from different providers. but again, another story. i have a guy i know who was in Japan LAST year and brought back a phone that has 8 MP camera, full frame video capability, etc. and can transfer (not here since we don t have the network) at over 3 Mbps. THIS year, we still have nothing along those lines and cell service availability does not affect (or shouldnt) what selection of devices we have here. what is really the case is that we accept trash because we feel that that is the best available. only a very small percentage of us push for something outside the box. its almost as if SE Asia has brainwashed us into thinking that "99 cent" products are better even if we have buy a new every year because technology changes so fast, spending a lot of money now is not worth it when one will just change to something incrementally better next year.
As Fuzzy mentioned, in the EU market most of it is highly concentrated, which makes providing cell service (3G, 4G, etc) very easy. When you have a geospatially distributed customer base, the incremental cost to provide service quickly becomes astronomically expensive, with little hope of ROI Now, in the case of do-gooder Canadian Crown Corps legally exempt from audit and investigation, I'm all in favor of closing those do-gooder Crown Corps and putting the money (Tens of billions of dollars a year) into Canadian infrastructure Of course, we'd have to find alternative employment for those hordes of pencil-pushing Crown Corp unionized employees. I'm thinking we could send them into sewer pipes to scrub all the poopies out
I travel many places in the U.S. that lack cell service. NIMBY has nothing to do with it, and the only regs that prevent service are National Parks and Wilderness restrictions. The rest is simple economics. If the marketing projections had been accurate, mobile broadband service trials would have been rolled out here before the Dot Com bubble fully deflated, and within months of the Japanese trials. I kept wondering how that could happen before our test equipment was developed. It didn't take long to get the answer. The Marketing folks, with their estimates of the market size, their confidence of what the customers would pay, and their development schedules, were guilty of Irrational Exuberence. Many of the rest of us were visiting the unemployment office.
NIMBY DOES have EVERYTHING to do with it, and i am not talking about cell service in areas that has less than one person per square mile in population, i am talking downtown (insert large city name here). the reason why our services SUCK is not because cell companies lack the technology or the money. they lack the permission.
Ok, for example, rural access to broadband internet. People still think of using phone lines, wireless, whatever. But in rural areas, almost everybody has electricity. Why not provide broadband over power lines? FCC gives Broadband Over Power Line a second chance - Ars Technica Never mind amateur radio. Teleco's also whine they have exclusive right to market such service, along with cable co's, even in areas where they will never in a zillion years think of offering such services BPL would be ideal for rural areas that currently have dial-up, or nothing at all
Duh, of COURSE! Troposcatter! They could have reused all that White ALICE equipment. Who wouldn't like a giant "picket fence" antenna in their back yard, complete with a transmitter shack full of humming vacuum tubes?
i always hoped that BBPL would fly as it eliminates interior wiring, wifi setups, etc and it was first proposed back when wi-fi sucked. had speed limitations, but still waay faster than dial up without the latency issues of satellite. but i guess there is a significant infrastructure cost factor to overcome. similar to running single pole out to someone 5 miles off the main line. i have an ex co-worker who lives 10 miles from the Olympia and is about 1600 YARDS off the main line. it was (this is 1992 dollars) $3.80 PER FOOT for basic service to connect to Puget Power. i can remember a few BBQ's we had out there when people would ask him why he spent so much on the generators he was running. didnt take long to justify the $10,000 generator setup he had. back when he first did it, his costs to make power was about the same as PP rates, but since the Bonneville kickback was removed (we used to get subsidized rates from BPA which took a good 30% of our electric rates) he has to be making out bigtime
Not bad. I've heard $10/foot elsewhere much more recently. Good thing my dad's house, long ago, was covered by the REA legislation.
