Why Every American Should Hate Hong Kong

[Lemur]

... and Japan, South Korea, Finland, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Canada, Poland, Norway, Austria, Belgium, Iceland and Germany. In that order. Death to the broadband hogs! I want a fast connection too!

It ain't right. And Hong Kong really has me cheesed off:

Hong Kong Broadband Network Limited ("HKBN") today announced a revolution in Hong Kong's broadband market, being the first Internet service provider in Hong Kong to launch Fiber-To-The- Home (FTTH) residential broadband services, "FiberHome100". Significantly, HKBN has turned traditionally cost prohibitive FTTH technology into affordable mass-deployed residential service, at US$48.5 service fee for its 100Mbps access service.

Less than fifty bucks for 100mbps? [whine]That's not fair![/whine] To get 30mbps in the U.S. costs $180 per month. Argh! Double-argh!

[The Wizard]

Too bad for Japan that housing there doesn't provide enough space for one of them huge like Xbox desktops.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Ours is always going to be slow because our country is so big. Honk kong needs way less cable than we do.

[Blodrast]

Ours is always going to be slow because our country is so big. Honk kong needs way less cable than we do.

Ah, that's the reason. Couldn't have anything to do with the $200 billion broadband-related scandal and with the telco monopolies (which are rebuilding, after having been broken up 20 years ago).

You know you can do better than that. If geographical issues were the only problem, then I'd expect small (geographically speaking) areas with high density of population to have really really good broadband prices and services (comparable to Asia, Scandinavia) - for example Silicon Valley, New York, etc.
Do they ?

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Ah, that's the reason. Couldn't have anything to do with the $200 billion broadband-related scandal and with the telco monopolies (which are rebuilding, after having been broken up 20 years ago).

You know you can do better than that. If geographical issues were the only problem, then I'd expect small (geographically speaking) areas with high density of population to have really really good broadband prices and services (comparable to Asia, Scandinavia) - for example Silicon Valley, New York, etc.
Do they ?

I don't know?? The chart shows average. A big reason for our slow average is that we got all the early infrastructure in place and it's expensive to replace it all. I'm not some telco goon trying to cover up a scam I don't know anything about that stuff.

My school has 100 Mbit broadband.

[Louis VI the Fat]

Fifth!

Sasaki, Finland and Sweden are as sparsely populated as the US, and come in third and fourth place. The UK is almost as densely populated as Japan, and comes in at place 237.
You can't compare Hong Kong with Montana of course, but on the whole, size or density of population don't seem to be decisive factors.

I'm so tempted now to post huge, bandwith gobbling pictorial jokes between the Scandinavians and French in which we get to enjoy poking fun at all you 56k third world countries.

[Marshal Murat]

That's sometimes the problem with being a leading edge.
case in point:
Industrial Revolution, where all the new looms and mills were in England, but at the end of the 1800s, the Germans were second in Europe, in terms of production, because they got all the new stuff for the same price as the English, but didn't have to renovate really anything.

[lars573]

Fifth!

Sasaki, Finland and Sweden are as sparsely populated as the US, and come in third and fourth place. The UK is almost as densely populated as Japan, and comes in at place 237.
You can't compare Hong Kong with Montana of course, but on the whole, size or density of population don't seem to be decisive factors.

I'm so tempted now to post huge, bandwith gobbling pictorial jokes between the Scandinavians and French in which we get to enjoy poking fun at all you 56k third world countries.

True. My service is 15 Mbps. Which we get via a bundle that includes basic phone (local calling here is a flat rate) and cable. For around $100 a month.

[Blodrast]

I don't know?? The chart shows average. A big reason for our slow average is that we got all the early infrastructure in place and it's expensive to replace it all. I'm not some telco goon trying to cover up a scam I don't know anything about that stuff.

My school has 100 Mbit broadband.

No, they do not. My question was rhetorical.
You may recall that there was a thread a while ago, titled "How much do you pay for your internet ?" or something like that. I also know people (friends, acquaintances) who live in California, for example (Silicon Valley), and I have a fair idea of what's available and for how much.

I could provide links, but it's not easy to filter truth from agendas, and I believe everybody should read several pieces and make up their own mind about it. (Besides which, I'd prolly also be accused of wearing a tinfoil hat and hating corporations, half of which is true. So instead of trying to convince people, I'll just let people make up their own minds.)

So, if you or anyone else would care to find out a bit more about it, google 200 billion dollars, broadband, telco, promise ... (the 200 billion is the actual figure, I didn't pull that out of thin air).

[InsaneApache]

LOL @ Greece. My dad uses Otenet and it's rubbish. The best he gets is a 56k dialup type. It's a nightmare sending him files. He's looking at DSL at the moment. He's got a great idea though, it involves some brushwood, a lighter and a wet blanket.....

Japan FTW! WOOT!

[CountArach]

Australia's internet is ---------------

USER:COUNTARACH CANNOT COMPLETE THIS MESSAGE BECAUSE USER:COUNTARACH HAS TIMED OUT

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Fifth!

Sasaki, Finland and Sweden are as sparsely populated as the US, and come in third and fourth place. The UK is almost as densely populated as Japan, and comes in at place 237.
You can't compare Hong Kong with Montana of course, but on the whole, size or density of population don't seem to be decisive factors.

I'm so tempted now to post huge, bandwith gobbling pictorial jokes between the Scandinavians and French in which we get to enjoy poking fun at all you 56k third world countries.

Finland has a population of 5.3 million,[1] spread over an area of 338,145 square kilometres (130,559 square miles). The majority of the population is concentrated in the southern part of the country.

At 3.79 million square miles (9.83 million km²)[1] and with over 300 million people, the United States

30 times the size and 60 times the people...population density isn't the issue. It's amount of distance covered. And if you already have phone lines everywhere, dialup makes more economic sense than spending a huge amount of money to get broadband, and broadband makes more sense than spending all that money to get fiber optic. People don't care about it that much. I wouldn't pay extra money for fiber optic.

[Samurai Waki]

as I understand it, Sasaki is about right on the mark. about two years ago CAT5 was laid all across our county, because it was the best and fastest and most available. Now some people are complaining that CAT5 is too slow and doesn't have nearly enough Bandwidth, so they want to upgrade the entire county to CAT6, however, by the time CAT6 is fully replaced it will only take another year before CAT7 becomes available. ughh.

[Ironside]

30 times the size and 60 times the people...population density isn't the issue. It's amount of distance covered. And if you already have phone lines everywhere, dialup makes more economic sense than spending a huge amount of money to get broadband, and broadband makes more sense than spending all that money to get fiber optic. People don't care about it that much. I wouldn't pay extra money for fiber optic.

That Sweden (and I assume Finland) has decided that optic fiber is something that should be included into the vital infrastructure might have something to do with it as well (you can get 24 mbps through the phone jacket as well, if you're outside the optic fiber area).

I'm sitting on a lousy 10 mbps line myself, but it's free so I think I'll stick with it.

*Waits for Lemur to really go into a whining mode.

[Husar]

Well, I'm paying 40EUR for ISDN + 6MBIt + unlimited Flatrate and I think it's ok, best you can currently get here from normal ISPs is 16MBit AFAIK.

Now I heard that we had a lot of money once which we wanted to spend on fiber wires across all of western Germany but then decided to buy the underdeveloped eatern part of Germany from the russians so that we could spend even more money trying to get them up to our standards (and if I might say so, currently it looks like they get more modern stuff than the west, new train stations while those here in the west rot, they get an AMD factory etc, all because doing it in the east gives huge government benefits)

So Blodrast is right, it's not just geographical, there are more factors. I'm quite happy with my 6MBit connection, it sort of makes downloading look like you actually do something and have something to look forward to. Though I was quite surprised when I gave some friend in Japan a link to a roughly 1GB Americas Army download and after two minutes he said he was installing now.
Yes, he had a 100MBit connection...
I think the best use for such high bandwidths would be HDTV over the internet, most download servers nowadays aren't even fast enough to fully utilize my 6MBit connection so in that regard having more wouldn't really speed things up.

[KukriKhan]

If I were a smart guy in Hong Kong, I'd figure out some way to capture my excess, unused broadband, and redistribute it, for profit, to broadband-starved areas.

But I guess that'd be like capturing unwanted rainfall in the Mississippi delta, and moving it to a drought area.

Maybe our kids will figure such things out.

[Kralizec]

People don't care about it that much. I wouldn't pay extra money for fiber optic.

I agree mostly with that sentiment - my previous residence had 100Mbps, but other than that it was like living in an (expensive!) ghetto. I never regretted moving.

[Andres]

Bah, beaten by the Netherlands

[Whacker]

RE: the US situation. Blodrast is a spot on. The hardware and technology to give every American 100mbit connections to the house has been here for years, the problem is the telcos. The general tactic for them, unless they have a real financial reason to upgrade, is to use equipment until it dies or is about dead. After all, if it's still there and it's working, it's fine right? You can just charge everyone obscene amounts for "unlimited high speed internet", which of course you filter out all that pesky p2p traffic, and you oversubscribe your infrastructure dozens to hundreds of times over. When they call to complain about speed, just blame it on solar flares, "maintenance", or the customer themselves. Profit!

[RoadKill]

I wanna live in Japan.

[seireikhaan]

I wanna live in Japan.

Same here. Actually, I have wanted to at least go to Japan for a few years now, as I have gradually grown to dislike my own country a bit more each year.

[Bellum]

I imagine Japan is awefully crowded, and that living there is expensive.

[cegorach]

Poland is on the 9th place... not bad - I still remember how hard it was to get a telephone some 10 years ago...

MY web access isn't too fast I must admit - only 4 Mb/s, but at least I pay only about 8$ per month for that, so I don't complain.

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

Ours is always going to be slow because our country is so big. Honk kong needs way less cable than we do.

Then why is Canada's faster than yours?

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Then why is Canada's faster than yours?

Because they have 1/10th the population and northern canada is largely empty

[Xiahou]

Because they have 1/10th the population and northern canada is largely empty

And 90% of them live within 100 miles of the US border.

[Louis VI the Fat]

Pah, rubbish! (thrash?)

Americans are teh backwards sukkorz because they didn't invest in high-speed internets. Size's got absolutely nothing to do with it.

All the top-five countries have fast internet because of centralised public efforts. Large infrastructure - railroads, electricity, cabling - simply fares better as public works. Their scale and scope is too large for a functioning market. Markets in these areas tend to not be free markets at all, but tightly regulated semi-private markets - the worst of two worlds.

[scotchedpommes]

...we get to enjoy poking fun at all you 56k third world countries.

Am I the only one on 56k here? [Just... y'know, putting it out there.]

[Louis VI the Fat]

Am I the only one on 56k here?

Nah, you're not the only one. I'm on a slow 56Mbps too.

[Whacker]

Nah, you're not the only one. I'm on a slow 56Mbps too.

I'm mentally strangling you as I'm typing this.