Daily Archives: September 10, 2008

Senate Commerce Committee Plans Benefits of Broadband Meeting Sept 16

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The Senate Commerce Committee scheduled a full committee hearing Sept. 16 (starting at 9 am – Minnesota time) on the benefits of broadband. The hearing, “Why Broadband Matters,” will examine various areas, including access to government information, education, jobs and telemedicine.

No witnesses have been announced.

I’m hoping that it will be less than 2 hours and that it will be broadcast online. I plan to watch until my 11:00 anyways and will report in. (It looks as if it’s an hour – but I don’t have full confidence in that.)

Rural Broadband Access Dismal

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Guess how many people in rural America have access to a high-speed Internet connection? Only 38 percent. That doesn’t seem right to me – but that’s what Center for Rural Affairs is reporting in a recent article (Rural Broadband Access Key Component in Community Success). The article goes on to say that rural areas are at a widening disadvantage while they are underserved.

My favorite part of the article is the comment (only 1 when I looked). The comment points out that anyone can get access to satellite. (At what cost? But I’ll leave that out for now.) He talks about how his grandparents were the first in their area to get a phone, which meant everyone had to suffer phone poles in their yards to accommodate the new phones. An interesting question would be how people would react to such an inconvenience today for the sake of broadband.

The other thing that struck me was that 38 percent. So I looked a little further and found an even more depressing article that claimed that “According to the federal government, just 17% of rural U.S. households subscribe to broadband service.” I guess that if 38 percent have access and 17 percent get it – that’s a 50 percent take rate. But still, it doesn’t seem great.

I wondered how that stacked up to other rural areas around the world. So here’s my completely unscientific and pretty random list of how other areas are doing:

Deutsche Telekom AG says they will be offering DSL to 96 percent of all households by the end of 2008. But at the end of 2006, only half of those in the country could access DSL. (I know you can debate whether DSL is broadband, but again this is pretty unscientific.)

Recent EU research found only 60% of businesses and households in remote and rural areas of the EU have broadband. (The EU just appointed consultants to improve that situation with a €3.5 million project.

India is going great guns with WiMAX. “With respect to rural connectivity, the government’s objective is to reach about 80 million rural connections, or one phone per two rural households, by 2010.”

South Africa vows to get online before 2010 World Cup. No stats, but I just loved the motivator.