4 ms·

Unfortunately, the article completely ignores the geographic realities or the United States and Japan. First, Japan's population density is orders of magnitude

by mdasen 18y ago

Unfortunately, the article completely ignores the geographic realities or the United States and Japan. First, Japan's population density is orders of magnitude greater than that of the United States. It's going to cost less to deliver high-speed internet when people live closer together. Likewise, Japan is a smaller country. That 160Mbps is not the speed you're going to get traveling over underseas cables to North America. That's the speed you'll get for servers located within Japan. Backbone connections are going to cost more to create in the United States simply because Americans are as likely to access a server across the continent as they are within 100 miles of them. Where you can essentially create a backbone in Japan with a under 1,000mi of fiber, in the US you'd need 20x that amount or more. Those are stark differences. I mean, it wouldn't be too hard for an ISP to provide faster connectivity from Boston to Philly where populations are dense for sites hosted in that area, but that wouldn't be helpful to users - since most of the time I'm not connecting to servers hosted within eastern Mass, RI, CT, the NYC metro area or Jersey. In fact, I'd say that most of the time I'm connecting to Texas or California. Can we stop comparing Apples and Oranges? The US can never have broadband like Japan and it's not because of corporations or government or any sort of conspiracy. Maybe those things could offer marginal improvements (seeing our service go from 6Mbps to 10-15Mbps), but we simply won't have service like Japan will since we don't locate ourselves close to the servers we want to access or to each other.

endtime 18y ago
The US can never have broadband like Japan and it's not because of corporations or government or any sort of conspiracy. I accept that geography is a factor, but do you mean to say that lack of competition isn't? It seems to me that it's simply not in the interest of US cable companies to improve bandwidth (which, as the article says, might lead people to stop paying for TV) or lower costs (which would lower their profits).
- mdasen 18y ago
  In a country like Japan, it's decently easy for a company to run its own backbone and provide connectivity to, say, 80% of where a customer is going to be connecting to with minimal investment. In the United States, you don't really have that option. Bandwidth is going to be expensive here. If you up people to 160Mbps service, you're going to need a ton more backend capacity and because you can't just create that capacity yourself, it's prohibitively expensive. Sure, lack of competition is a problem, but that's just an easy scapegoat. I mean, bandwidth at 10 cents per GB is really cheap bandwidth - cheaper than you'd get with most dedicated hosts. Part of what makes that expensive is that fiber has to go a long way to provide that bandwidth - if I'm downloading from NY to San Fran, that's a huge expanse to cover. In Japan, it would be a lot easier for companies providing bandwidth to consumers to also run their own backbone. Sure, competition is a problem in the US, but we're talking about having to do 20x as much cap-ex to cover the US. Anytime you have 20x greater costs, you need to expect that the product will reflect that. Saying that it's just competition is an easy way to be anti-corporate without addressing the issue - it costs a lot more to create and run the internet in the US; it doesn't cost a little bit more or 50% more, but orders of magnitude more because we're more spread out. We don't need to overcome a cost premium of 20%, but probably in excess of 1000% - and it's somewhat incredible that we aren't doing worse.
  - kiba 18y ago
    Dude, the geography and distrubition of population in the US isn't uniform. Some cities are super-dense. Yet it doesn't mean that they will have really fast internet, since the cost of upgrading is a lot cheaper. What it cost to run line in a community is entirely different than what it cost to run in a city.
    - mdasen 18y ago
      Yeah, but generally speaking carriers price things independent of cost. I'm guessing this is because it would be lethal to say, "you live in a less dense area, but we still serve you, just at twice the price." Plus, if you had read, a large part of the issue is that some places might be dense, but you're not connecting to servers within that dense area. If you live in Manhattan, you might live in a dense area, but the backend cost of connecting you to servers in Texas and California and laying (or paying for) a lot of fiber to do that. So, there's two costs. The cost of wiring a less dense population and the cost of backend wiring a larger geographic area where servers might be located. Even if you live in NYC, you still have the second cost.
      - deleted 18y ago
        [deleted]
      - pbz 18y ago
        1) The "backend cost" cannot be much more than what it is in Japan. They have to develop those networks as well. You make it sound like all the Japanese are actually accessing US servers. I would guess that the vast majority of the traffic is internal to the country. Yes, the distance is greater, but running "a few" high speed cables between the East and West coast is way cheaper than wiring a whole city. 2) You argue that you can't have one price for densely populated areas and another otherwise. In effect, this is exactly what it's happening, except that in those less dense areas you don't get service at all. Any way you slice it, you just can't add up the huge difference in what we're getting and what they're getting.
        18y ago
DarkShikari 18y ago
This argument is complete BS. Running fiber lines between large cities is cheap; there's far more bandwidth there than anyone could possibly need at the moment. The main cost is the last mile of connection. And the last mile of connection is going to cost you pretty much the exact same thing in New York City as in Tokyo. There is absolutely no technical justification of any sort for the United States' backwards internet situation, at least in regards to urban areas.
- krschultz 18y ago
  I'd agree with you for most places in the US vs most places in Japan, but NYC vs Tokyo may or may not be an apt comparison. Putting any lines at all in NYC is a huge hassle. There is basically no clear map of the underground areas. Try getting some quality dedicated lines put in in NYC, it sucks. I can't comment on Tokyo, but it would be a lot easier to run a startup in the suburbs simply for ISP reasons if only the talent would agree (damn fickle trendy programmers).
tokenadult 18y ago
Japan's population density is orders of magnitude greater than that of the United States. Japan: 337/km2 United States: 31/km2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population... Only one order of magnitude, it appears. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude And Japan has quite a large land area as countries of the world go. It is larger in land area than most European countries, and is a mountainous archipelago rather than a continental plain. It's hard to say what cost difference between the United States and Japan might be "natural," and what cost difference results from policy differences.
- jrockway 18y ago
  I doubt that everyone in Japan can get Internet that's this fast. I assume that "Japan" in the article means Tokyo or Osaka.

by mdasen 18y ago

endtime 18y ago

The US can never have broadband like Japan and it's not because of corporations or government or any sort of conspiracy. I accept that geography is a factor, but do you mean to say that lack of competition isn't? It seems to me that it's simply not in the interest of US cable companies to improve bandwidth (which, as the article says, might lead people to stop paying for TV) or lower costs (which would lower their profits).

mdasen 18y ago
In a country like Japan, it's decently easy for a company to run its own backbone and provide connectivity to, say, 80% of where a customer is going to be connecting to with minimal investment. In the United States, you don't really have that option. Bandwidth is going to be expensive here. If you up people to 160Mbps service, you're going to need a ton more backend capacity and because you can't just create that capacity yourself, it's prohibitively expensive. Sure, lack of competition is a problem, but that's just an easy scapegoat. I mean, bandwidth at 10 cents per GB is really cheap bandwidth - cheaper than you'd get with most dedicated hosts. Part of what makes that expensive is that fiber has to go a long way to provide that bandwidth - if I'm downloading from NY to San Fran, that's a huge expanse to cover. In Japan, it would be a lot easier for companies providing bandwidth to consumers to also run their own backbone. Sure, competition is a problem in the US, but we're talking about having to do 20x as much cap-ex to cover the US. Anytime you have 20x greater costs, you need to expect that the product will reflect that. Saying that it's just competition is an easy way to be anti-corporate without addressing the issue - it costs a lot more to create and run the internet in the US; it doesn't cost a little bit more or 50% more, but orders of magnitude more because we're more spread out. We don't need to overcome a cost premium of 20%, but probably in excess of 1000% - and it's somewhat incredible that we aren't doing worse.
- kiba 18y ago
  Dude, the geography and distrubition of population in the US isn't uniform. Some cities are super-dense. Yet it doesn't mean that they will have really fast internet, since the cost of upgrading is a lot cheaper. What it cost to run line in a community is entirely different than what it cost to run in a city.
  - mdasen 18y ago
    Yeah, but generally speaking carriers price things independent of cost. I'm guessing this is because it would be lethal to say, "you live in a less dense area, but we still serve you, just at twice the price." Plus, if you had read, a large part of the issue is that some places might be dense, but you're not connecting to servers within that dense area. If you live in Manhattan, you might live in a dense area, but the backend cost of connecting you to servers in Texas and California and laying (or paying for) a lot of fiber to do that. So, there's two costs. The cost of wiring a less dense population and the cost of backend wiring a larger geographic area where servers might be located. Even if you live in NYC, you still have the second cost.
    - deleted 18y ago
      [deleted]
    - pbz 18y ago
      1) The "backend cost" cannot be much more than what it is in Japan. They have to develop those networks as well. You make it sound like all the Japanese are actually accessing US servers. I would guess that the vast majority of the traffic is internal to the country. Yes, the distance is greater, but running "a few" high speed cables between the East and West coast is way cheaper than wiring a whole city. 2) You argue that you can't have one price for densely populated areas and another otherwise. In effect, this is exactly what it's happening, except that in those less dense areas you don't get service at all. Any way you slice it, you just can't add up the huge difference in what we're getting and what they're getting.
      - 18y ago

DarkShikari 18y ago

This argument is complete BS. Running fiber lines between large cities is cheap; there's far more bandwidth there than anyone could possibly need at the moment. The main cost is the last mile of connection. And the last mile of connection is going to cost you pretty much the exact same thing in New York City as in Tokyo. There is absolutely no technical justification of any sort for the United States' backwards internet situation, at least in regards to urban areas.

krschultz 18y ago
I'd agree with you for most places in the US vs most places in Japan, but NYC vs Tokyo may or may not be an apt comparison. Putting any lines at all in NYC is a huge hassle. There is basically no clear map of the underground areas. Try getting some quality dedicated lines put in in NYC, it sucks. I can't comment on Tokyo, but it would be a lot easier to run a startup in the suburbs simply for ISP reasons if only the talent would agree (damn fickle trendy programmers).

tokenadult 18y ago

Japan's population density is orders of magnitude greater than that of the United States. Japan: 337/km2 United States: 31/km2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_density http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population... Only one order of magnitude, it appears. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_magnitude And Japan has quite a large land area as countries of the world go. It is larger in land area than most European countries, and is a mountainous archipelago rather than a continental plain. It's hard to say what cost difference between the United States and Japan might be "natural," and what cost difference results from policy differences.

jrockway 18y ago
I doubt that everyone in Japan can get Internet that's this fast. I assume that "Japan" in the article means Tokyo or Osaka.