Home > Computers and the Internet > DSL, e-Japan, and the La-Z-Boy Mentality

DSL, e-Japan, and the La-Z-Boy Mentality

May 29th, 2006

It’s strange to see news articles from the U.S. talking about DSL starting to become widespread.

About 84 million U.S. residents now have broadband Internet access at home, up 40 percent from 60 million last year, a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found.

The increase comes as both the price of personal computers and the cost of Internet service continue to fall. AT&T, for instance, is selling DSL to new customers in the Bay Area for as low as $12.99 per month.

One interesting point in the high-tech San Francisco area paper is that they don’t mention speeds. A provider in my family’s area–very close to Silicon Valley–is offering “High Speed Internet” packages. While starting very cheap at $13, the speeds offered start at 1.5 Mbps, and top out at 6 Mbps. And as the article pointed out (as does the ad, in asterisks), the prices are promotional, to try to steal away customers from cable providers. But the speeds are what catch my attention; these are new speed levels, a big improvement over what’s been available up to now.

And yet, here in Japan, those speeds are way out of date. I believe it was 3 or 4 years ago that the 12 Mbps speed stopped being the fastest rate. Now most ADSL services are providing 50 Mbps as the top speed, and most areas have some form of fiber-optic, usually topping out at 100 Mbps. I still read about some American colleges and universities boasting a 100 Mbps fiber optic connection for the whole school, which includes hundreds, perhaps over a thousand computers in the network. My school has had that speed for years, and we have only a few dozen computers sharing it. When I explain this to my students, they’re shocked; they expect America to have better Internet connectivity, not worse.

While the telecoms can blame rural areas for being expensive to upgrade, what’s their excuse for urban areas, like my parents’? There are certainly no problems with great distances in such areas, and no shortage of people willing to pay. So why is even the heart of computer territory still so painfully slow?

Part of it is probably that, despite being allowed to charge higher fees in exchange for the promise that they’ll build broadband networks, the telecoms are just putting off any significant upgrades and instead are just raking in the fees for as long as they can. But part of it is that the government has no unified plan for encouraging broadband.

Japan was backwards in Internet speeds in 2001, and in just a few short years, leapfrogged high over the U.S. with a strategy called “e-Japan,” which had the philosophy of “maximizing the benefits of users” and “promoting fair competition” to establish 30-100 Mbps Internet connections for everyone in the country by 2005. And guess what: it worked. They did it. It’s here. In fact, they finished before 2005, and in 2003, they started on the “e-Japan Strategy II,” a plan to use those fast pathways to the best effect, especially in the areas of “medical treatment, food, life, small-and-medium-sized-enterprises, finance, knowledge, employment, government service.” The idea is to ensure good IT management and high-quality content, with strong interconnectivity between public and private institutions, with a focus on user satisfaction.

The American government faces bigger obstacles in the size of the country, but that’s no excuse for not having a coherent policy at all. It’s no excuse for such paltry speeds even in the heart of the computer industry, in crowded urban areas with almost every home owning a computer.

This is all to reminiscent of America’s lapse back into big gas-guzzlers, with Japanese carmakers again being in the forefront in terms of high-milage vehicles. It’s as if the lessons of the 80’s were completely forgotten, and America eased back into its “La-Z-Boy” mentality. Only this time there probably won’t be a Japanese bubble-burst and decade-long recession to allow American businesses to come back from behind.

I won’t be too surprised if we see a repeat of the last generation all over again–except that while Americans apparently have not learned from past lessons, the Japanese may have learned very well indeed.

Categories: Computers and the Internet Tags: by
  1. ykw
    May 31st, 2006 at 12:56 | #1

    Many americans are using cable modems, where 300 homes share one cable that has 1ghz of bandwidth that carries 200 tv stations and approx 1 to 3 mbps per house. This is low cost since the cable is already there. It is difficult for other companies to compete w/ that.

    Dsl is limited by the quality of the telephone wire from home to the central office building (it typically maxes out at 1 to 3 mbs). Americans have older wires than many, and longer distances than crowded asian urban areas.

    The quoted 30 to 100 mbps in asia may be maximums. I doubt the typical telephone wire can support those speeds, unless the telephone wire goes to a central room in an appartment building (e.g. 100 meters distance) where it converts to fiber.

  2. Luis
    May 31st, 2006 at 13:07 | #2

    Older phone lines may account for some older areas, but many areas–like the one my parents live in–are of more modern construction, and the wiring not so different than what you might find in parts of Japan that already have 30 Mbps+; old wiring cannot be held responsible for what is happening everywhere. Also, it does not account for why the US telecoms have not laid fiber optic where populations are high and people are affluent enough to afford it. They did here in Japan.

    As for maximums, the same is true for America as it is for Japan: a connection advertised at 6 Mbps may perform much lower when distance is factored in. I had that problem here, getting maybe 2 or 3 Mbps when I had a 12 Mbps DSL line, about 4 years ago. Now I have vDSL: fiber to the street, DSL to the door, a solution that would serve very well in the US to lower to-the-door fiber costs. I get 70 Mbps, and have experienced up to 40-50 Mbps in practice–my speeds more likely limited by low upload speeds by the other side of the connection rather than the speed of my side of things.

  3. ykw
    May 31st, 2006 at 17:43 | #3

    To get fast dsl speeds at your parent’s house, someone would need to put fiber on the street, and then do something like dsl to their house (e.g. 100m of telephone wire). That someone may not be able to make money since the existing cable company’s cost are less (the cable is already there), the cable company would certainly price less, and the fiber guy would end up loosing his shirt. Hence, no one is jumping in to do this. I think economics drives what happens in each area.

  4. Luis
    June 1st, 2006 at 02:37 | #4

    With cable offering only a few megabits, and vDSL fiber/DSL hybrids offering around 70 Mbps, I have a feeling that the fiber people could charge a wee bit more and get a lot of customers.

Comments are closed.