Demand Super-Fast Broadband in the US
An article in the NY Times yesterday really upset me. If you live in the US, it should upset you as well.
Hong Kong has a broadband service that costs less than $26 a month. This option for its fiber-to-the-home service offers a speed of 1,000 megabits a second. A gig. To put that into perspective, Verizon offers the “fastest” broadband in the country for $145. It’s speed: 50 megabits down, 20 megabits up.
“Why doesn’t Verizon offer gigabit service?” Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic.net asks. “Because it doesn’t have to.”
We are sheep. We need an Apple 1984 moment. Someone needs to throw a sledgehammer through somebody’s screen to wake us up.
But that’s the problem, isn’t it? The Internet is not an option that people can boycott. We can’t turn it off. We need our broadband. As such, it will take a bold company to produce the demand. We need a company that is willing to push the limits, building the infrastructure, and supply the speeds that will force the rest of the ISPs to respond.
Will it be Google? Verizon? The US Government? There are so many possibilities out there, but nobody is stepping up yet.
If you are “in the know” about a company that needs support, please tell us. We will help get the word out through social media. We will blast it out there for the masses to see. Slow Internet is no longer an option. We need someone to step up today.
Who will it be?
You are ignorant. Did you do ANY research before you wrote this? You need to learn a little about the ‘last mile’, then ask yourself “What is the difference between the United Sates and Hong Kong?”. If a U.S. internet provider could profitably offer even 100 mb/s service for $30 per month to every home in the country, they would do it in a heartbeat. They would immediately take 100% of the ISP market and their shareholders would see unimaginable gains.
If you are so sure that the Hong Kong model can be directly applied to the U.S, then put your money where your mouth is. Go to any bank or even the most high risk taking venture capitalist and tell them that you think you can build or buy a network that can offer 100 mb/s to nearly every home in the country. Then tell them that you plan to pay for that network by charging customers $30 per month. Once you have done this, please write a new article describing their reaction and tell us exactly how long it took for them to stop laughing. LOL
Well, to put it into perspective, the reason it’s an entire gigabyte for only 26 US a month is that your sharing it with HUNDREDS or THOUSANDS of other people. So, it’s more like 7 Megabytes at most. The reason I know all this, I live in Hong Kong
And I thought helping the 20 million uninsured who die every year was important, but holy shit our web pages take a whole 4 seconds to load, Barrack Obama, we need change!
Expand the infrastructure needs for Honk Kong, an island city of 426 square miles, to the United States, the third largest country in the world with over 3,794,101 sq mi… That’s why we don’t have it.
I work for a ISP in portugal and I thought our prices were high… guess not! 35€ for a 12Mbps service with cable TV and phone, or 40€ for a 30Mbps and TV….or 250€ for a 1Gbps service with TV!