Blog: 
Aug
Bandwidth Blues
Jul
Jun
In his weekly PBS column, Bob Cringley
laments
America's poor standing in the international broadband olympics. Why, oh, why, asks Bob, does
almost everybody have faster Internet than we do?
A somewhat creepy publicity shot of Robert X. Cringley,
who is actually Mark Stephens, but that's not the point of this post.
It's true that commerically available bandwidth in other countries is often loads better than what's available
in the US. You can get download speeds ten to forty times faster in countries like Korea, Sweden, Japan and Canada.
At first, that seems unreal, but considering I started out on a 1200 baud model (~1.1 kpbs) I'm now operating at
a blistering 300x over hazy memory.
Anyway, Bob's theory, as with many angry tech writers, is that corrupt and stupid politicans are to blame for
this problem. He writes: "Much of it comes down to government policy or lack of it and some of it comes down to pure luck."
Hogwash. The issues here are all engineering and econonmics; policy can't really impact bandwidth any more than
lawmakers can control the spread of rumors. Information flows, as fast as the market will carry it, from sender
to receiver.
Bandwidth is not getting faster fast enough in the US because of one principal engineering problem: putting cable in the
ground. Our population is spread throughout the vast expanses of the countryside, unlike almost every other highly
industrialized nation. (Seriously, we are #172 on the list of population density, and nobody larger than us is behind us.) That means that we've got it worse
than almost anyone else when it comes to installing the actual wires needed for more bandwidth. America's full of people with
plenty of space between them.
We've got a lot of this to do before we all have faster broadband.
Of course, almost no American who has any high-speed access today is connected via new wires specifically intended for blazingly-fast
Internet delivery. Because of the incredible expense of laying new cable in the ground, we're repurposing the two networks that
were already installed---telephones and cable television---for this web surfing. The cost of laying all of the cable was so
phenomenally high, I wouldn't be surprised if it still hasn't been entirely recovered. We're stuck
with the slow growth of Internet service as a necessary result of the slow installation of the "last mile" of high-speed
connections to our homes and businesses. This is just an engineering reality, and no lawmaker can change the laws of physics.
Other countries, especially developing nations without a significant infrastructure, aren't in this bind. They can deploy
the best-fit technology for today, instead of being strapped by what was installed in the recent past. This is why most
telephones in the third-world are mobile, because the bandwidth requirements for phones are small enough to make this
a viable choice for audio communications. However, high-speed Internet traffic in these areas still requires high-density
wiring to be physically installed. There's no magic bullet.
Science and technology Journalists like Cringley seem to frequently fall victim to the problem of not actually understanding
the science and technology behind their claims. Readers already have enough trouble finding good information; those entrusted
with discerning the facts (even when giving their personal opinion on the facts) have a responsibility to actually understand
the mechanisms at work.
Links:
- The Double Life of Robert X. Cringley
- PBS analyst falsely claims Stanford Ph.D
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