Toubling contrast between US and Japan broadband studies

There’s something very telling in reports released by the Japanese and US governments about the respective nations broadband goals and accomplishments.

For the Japanese, not only did they set a goal for 100 MBPS access, they have huge deployment numbers and the cost to the consumer is lower than what most in the US pay for 5 to 10% of the bandwidth.

At an address to the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, Kiyooshi Mori, the Japanese vice-minister for communications policy, said that Japan had already rolled out 100Mbps fibre broadband to 85% of households.

Japan expects ubiquitous access for businesses and consumers to high-speed broadband by 2010 - the result of a four-year government programme designed to improve access.

“Studies showed that the ICT industry accounts for 40% of real Japanese GDP. This helped the government realise the importance of starting a programmme for ubiquitous access with a deadline.”

Mori said the government also introduced competition policies to make it easy for new ISPs to enter the market and for open, shared access to networks. As a result, the price of broadband per 100kbit/s is 0.07 dollars compared with the UK where it is 0.69 dollars. (from Computer Weekly)

And from the US government where 200 KBPS is considered broadband:

“Networked Nation: Broadband in America” is an upbeat assessment of the administration’s efforts to spur growth and competition in the high-speed Internet market. Critics said the report’s conclusion is too rosy.

The report was prepared by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, an agency within the Commerce Department that acts as the president’s principal adviser on telecommunications and information policy issues.

The report concludes that “a reasonable assessment of the available data indicates” that the objective of affordable access to broadband for all has been realized “to a very great degree.”

Richard Russell, deputy director for technology in the executive office of the president, also answered the question in the affirmative, but with a caveat.

“The answer is by most metrics yes,” he said. “However, there’s still a lot more that needs to be done.”

Broadband penetration has been a sore point for the government and industry as international surveys have shown that the United States, the birthplace of the Internet, lags behind other nations. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ranked the U.S. in 15th place for broadband lines per person in 2006, down from No. 4 in 2001.

The NTIA report drew its conclusion using data from the Federal Communications Commission and other sources. The FCC reported that more than 99 percent of all U.S. ZIP codes received broadband service from at least one provider by the end of 2006.

Critics say the FCC’s data is misleading. A broadband provider has to serve only a single residence in a ZIP code for it to be counted. The agency has launched its own inquiry into how it can “develop a more accurate picture” of broadband deployment.

“More data is necessary,” Meredith Attwell Baker, acting chief of NTIA, said in an interview. “We support the FCC’s current efforts to produce better data.” (from Cnet)

What makes the US study even worse is availability to a single customer in a zip code enabled the access provider to claim a zip code was served.

The US has set a low goal and missed it horribly. The fact is that there is far less access competition now than there was in the days of dial up access. Those say the private enterprise solution failed do not understand we do not have a working martketplace in the access business. What we have is a cartel that has been franchised by our government. We have the best politicians money can buy, and they belong to the duopoly. Every time we pay a duopoly bill, we continue to enable it.