Is U.S. broadband access truly lagging?
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Blog: Policymakers like to boo-hoo statistics showing the nation trails many foreign counterparts in per capita Net subscribers. A Washington think tank calls for measuring the situation in a new way.
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By Brian Farkas  Rural West Virginians would love to take advantage of the Internet, but with access for many limited to dial-up service, residents aren't able to use business, educational and entertainment opportunities dependent on high-speed connections, according to a recent study.
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Nearly four years have passed since the peak of the fiber-optic boom, but overcapacity continues to plague carriers, and prices for bandwidth continue to fall. By Joanna Glasner.
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The number of broadband users in the US nearly tripled in the past two and a half years to more than 48 million subscribers, according to a report released this week by the US Federal Communications Commission.
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As it stands, there's almost twice as much bandwidth across the Atlantic as there is across the Pacific. But with new U.S. FCC approval for the first ever China-U.S. fiber link, this is all about to change.
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A majority of US home Internet users now have broadband, according to a survey by NetRatings. While the total number of home Internet users has reached a plateau in the US, those who do use the Internet are adopting broadband at a rapid pace, according to ...
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Few net users get the top speed promised by their net provider finds a study of average browsing speeds.
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AT&T's wireless data network is down in the Midwest and Southeast U.S.,  and BlackBerry and iPhone users are without data services. AT&T said service was expected to be back up soon.
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NEW YORK Broadband growth in the U.S. slowed last year, as nearly half of American adults now have a high-speed Internet connection at home, according to new research from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Forty-seven percent of those consumers--seven out of 10 home Internet users--have broadband as compared to 23 percent who still rely on dial-up.
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US communications regulators insisted on Thursday that the United States was making progress in rolling out high-speed Internet service, despite falling further behind other countries.
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(InfoWorld) - The U.S. government needs better ways to measure broadband availability and adoption in order to develop policies that focus on ways to use broadband to improve the economy, several telecom experts said Thursday. "As policy makers, we need to have an eye to the future," said Beth Shiroishi, senior director of regulatory policy and planning for AT&T. "Where do we want our country to go, and where do we want our citizens to go?" Participants of the forum on broadband data, sponsored by conservative think tank The Progress and Freedom Foundation, argued that broadband is key to the future of the U.S., but most said current statistics don't tell the whole picture. Broadband "does mean economic opportunity to those who wouldn't otherwise have it," said Clair Kaye, treasurer for Cumberland Internet, which provides broadband to parts of three counties in Illinois. Many participants complained about biannual broadband adoption numbers put out by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. The FCC, in its January broadband report, said that 99 percent of U.S. postal ZIP codes have at least one broadband provider. But the broadband-less zip codes change between FCC reports, said Kenneth Flamm, chairman of the international affairs department at the University of Texas in Austin. There are other errors in the FCC report: For example, it says his neighborhood has 13 broadband providers when in reality it has one, he said. The FCC also classifies 200KbpsÂ as broadband when most users would think of it as something, at least 12 times faster, that can deliver full-motion video to computer screens, said Mark Lloyd, senior fellow for the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. The congressional requirements that the FCC measure broadband adoption has been "horribly abused" by the agency, he said. "How do you manage what you cannot measure?" Lloyd added. "How do we know if there are gaps to fill?" An FCC spokesman declined to comment on Thursday's forum, but he noted that in April, the agency began two inquiries into U.S. broadband deployment, including one that will look at ways to better collect information. Others at Thursday's forum questioned numbers from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which says the U.S. ranks 15th in per capita broadband adoption among the 30 nations that are OECD members. The OECD numbers don't measure broadband at work, and they make no allowances for the relatively low U.S. population density, said Dennis Weller, chief economist for Verizon. Others defended the OECD numbers, saying they at least show that the U.S. has fallen behind other countries as it has dropped from fourth in the rankings. About three-quarters of Japan's residents can get 100Mbps, fiber-based service, said Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a tech-focused think tank. But in densely populated Manhattan, no one can get that speed of service to the home, he said. Atkinson proposed that U.S. agencies develop a "wikimap" that would allow U.S. residents to report their broadband speeds. Such a tool wouldn't cost much to create, he said. New methods of measuring broadband are needed, but not because the U.S. should refute the OECD statistics, said Joseph Waz, vice president for external affairs and public policy at Comcast. "We need to decide what problem it is we're trying to solve," he said. "TheÂ number-one goal of this data should be to find out where broadband isn't."
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InfoWorld - A bill introduced in the U.S. Senate this week would require the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to reconsider what bandwidth rates qualify as broadband, a move that won praise from some groups that call current broadband penetration statistics misleading.
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As prices dropped over the past year, broadband use at home has surpassed that of dial-up in the United States, reaching 53 percent of residential Web users in October, according to Nielsen/NetRatings.
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Why are our Internet lines in danger of jamming up?
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The rate of broadband adoption is slowing in the United States, partly because service providers already have grabbed the easiest converts, a study has found.
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JupiterResearch,  a leading authority on the impact of the Internet and emerging consumer  technologies on business, predicts that 70 percent of US homes --  some 86 million households -- will have  broadband Internet access by 2012.
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US broadband deployment is accelerating as underserved rural and inner city areas gain greater access to new services, according to a government report.