IP Democracy: WSJ's Drucker: A Policy Failure in Broadband?

According to The Wall Street Journal’s Jesse Drucker, “The U.S. needs some big-picture thinking by policy makers about broadband. The first thing they need to do is admit that U.S. broadband isn’t keeping pace with the global market.”

The inferior value of U.S. broadband service becomes clear when you calculate the monthly “cost per megabit” of Internet access, or how much you pay to get a megabit’s worth of download capability.

While entry-level download speeds in the U.S. lag behind much of the world, the situation is worse with upload speeds. This has hit home in the Drucker household since I started sending pictures of my five-month-old son to his grandparents, waiting impatiently for the photos to leave my PC. Uploading digital camcorder movies of Hank would be even more annoying.

In the end, even talking about market forces in telecommunications is misleading. Phone companies, for example, get billions of dollars in federal and state subsidies for rural service; they also have teams of lobbyists and attorneys to influence policy. As cities try to introduce competing wireless networks, traditional telecom providers lobby to restrict such plans.

Posted by Mitch Shapiro on November 17, 2005 11:31 AM to IP Democracy