Thursday, July 16th, 2009
By Ryan Womack, Reporter-Researcher, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, July 16, 2009 - The Phoenix Center on Wednesday released a report today that aims to further debunk the frequently-cited Organization for Economic Cooperation Development’s report ranking the United States at 15 in broadband penetration among OECD members.
“If you live by the metrics, you die by the metrics,” said Phoenix Center Chief Economist George Ford.
Ford referred to the OECD’s report that ranks countries’ broadband on a system that leans upon population size to the number of possible connection points. The Phoenix Center report said that the OECD reports do not qualify for residential households and their respective sizes nor the number of business connections and the potential and actual number of people gaining broadband by these connections.
Phoenix Center President Lawrence Spiwak said that “the problem is our focus on ranks.”
Even if all the current funds are dumped into broadband nationwide and actual coverage increases, he said, it really will not help the U.S. ranking in OECD reports because “they do not really account for demand-side broadband.”
Newly reinstated to his second term as a commissioner at the Federal Communications Commission, Robert McDowell said that even “if America was 100 percent broadband saturated, they would still fall...
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Wednesday, June 24th, 2009
By Ryan Womack, Reporter-Researcher, BroadbandCensus.com
WASHINGTON, June 24, 2009 - Actual costs in the price of residential broadband in Japan are both cheaper and faster than those in the United States, according to a new report from the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative.
Chiehyu Li, a research fellow of the NAF, assembled a price comparison of residential broadband that includes types of broadband - cable, digital subscriber line (DSL), and fiberoptics - and the speeds and which these prices include.
Japan's most extensive incumbent telephone provider Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) has focused on fiber-optic lines, in competition with Yahoo! BB and @nifty, offering downloading speeds ranging up to 100 Megabits per second (Mbps) to 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps).
The U.S.’s principal fiber -optic broadband provider is Verizon Communications, with downstream speeds of 10-50 Mbps. The comparison shows fiber in Japan costs around $25-56 per month, or $0.06-0.70 per megabit) for condominium residencies and $55-67 ($0.03-0.60 per megabit) for single house residencies, still less that Verizon's $50-145 per month ($2.90-5.00 per megabit).
The same three Japanese companies compete in the DSL and cable service fields, with speeds up to 8-50 Mbps with costs around $30-60 per month ($0.40-$32.00 per megabit), but there is...
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