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Whatever Became of America's Fat Pipe?

For a nation of work at home employees, telecommuters, SaaS based business tools, and web based management systems, noncompetitive Internet bandwidth adversely impacts American productivity.

Cyberspace

Gigabit Connectivity Soon To Blanket Korea

“While policy makers in many places are still debating their high-speed broadband strategies, considering, for example, whether development should be led by the public or private sector, broadband users in some parts of Asia already have access to the next generation of high-speed networks.

Japan and Hong Kong have been leading the way, with private companies already offering speeds as high as one gigabit per second, or 1,000 megabits per second — many times as fast as the 35 megabits per second required for streaming high-definition video. But these networks do not cover every home.

South Korea, one of the world’s most wired places, has also announced plans to complete a new broadband network offering one gigabit per second in all major cities by 2013.”

Sonia Kolesnikov-Jessop, The New York Times

Faltering Digital Infrastructure Threatens U.S. Interests

Computer network engineers call their electronic connections pipes because they deliver content between two points in much the same way natural gas arrives in our homes. Pipes come in all sizes, some small and some very large. In general, the fatter the pipe the more commodity it can deliver. For most users of the Internet, the information pipes that deliver content to their computers are skinny and slow. For a nation of work at home employees, telecommuters, SaaS based business tools, and web based management systems, noncompetitive Internet bandwidth adversely impacts American productivity.

Fat Pipes Matter

United States Ranks 9th in Average Broadband Speed. Source: OECD

While there has been improvement in the usable bandwidth of the digital pipes that connect us to the Internet, growth in America’s average bandwidth is minuscule compared to the really fat ( multi-gigabit connections ) that link our cities and nations together. Today’s Tier One backbone networks, for example, can exchange data at 10 gigabits/second or higher while most American homes are limited to slightly more than 1 megabit/second.

Elsewhere, users in Japan, Korea and many other countries connect to the Internet at speeds of 100 megabits/second or higher. While the big U.S. telecommunications companies make little more than token investments in delivering such speeds to our homes and businesses, Korea has already launched a massive digital infrastructure upgrade that promises to connect every Korean home at speeds as high as 1 gigabit/second — one thousand times the U.S. average connection speed.

From Bad To Worse

A little over a year ago, Newsroom Magazine wrote about how the U.S. lags behind other nations in terms of Internet connectivity and bandwidth. We cited this graphic from OECD.

What’s so troubling is that since the 2007 Internet bandwidth study, the U.S. appears to have slipped from 9th to 22nd place even though there has been improvement in connectivity due, in part, to continuing DSL roll out.

The nation that largely invented and pioneered the internet remains among the least well served by commercial  interconnection providers. The problem isn’t that providers don’t know how to deliver broadband connectivity, but that they choose to limit end-user bandwidth to optimize profitability by not investing in higher bandwidth equipment and facilities.

Genachowski’s Broadband Initiative

Average Connection Speeds 4th Quarter 2009 -- Source: Akamai

Being free of governmental demands and concentration of ownership thus conspired to let the U.S. fall behind in bandwidth availability to American homes and businesses. That’s about to change today due to a National Broadband Plan promoted by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski that is in development at the U.S. Federal Communications Commission.

Until such a policy is put in place, and there is substantial new investment in gigabit connectivity facilities, U.S. competitiveness will continue to slip, just as the Q4-2009 Akamai study confirms.