U.S. Fiber, Crippled Networks?

I know several people in the DC/Baltimore area who are in the Verizon FiOS service area, and have been hooked up with new fiber optic transmission of both digital TV and internet service starting at 5 Mbps for $40/month (up to 30 MBps for - holy shit! - $180/month). People are excited about this, because they can now ditch their despised Comcast cable, and also upgrade thier broadband speed, all the while saving some money. Now, we ditched Comcast years ago, and went with DirecTV's decent performance and solid customer service, and are also happy with our Verizon DSL, which is reliable if unspectacular. But FiOS would clearly be an upgrade, so I went online to try to nail down a schedule on when it may be coming to Baltimore City.

Well, I didn't find that schedule, but I did find plenty else. Over a year ago, I bitched about how France, among other places, had cheaper and better TV & internet service, by far, than we do in the states. Apparently, our broadband infrastructure itself is coming up short when compared with other developed countries. This page spells it all out, and spreads the blame around between the Baby Bells (Verizon, AT&T, etc.), mergers, FCC inaction and incompetence, and state governments afraid or unwilling to hold these corporations to their contracts. No surprise there, after all it's popular these days for governments to abdicate their utility and infrastructure resposibilities to corporations; look at red light cameras, privately operated toll roads, and the deregulated power grid. Then there's always cable "competition", and...oh hell it's Friday, I don't feel like dwelling on the same old bullshit politics, let's move on.

So what about the numbers behind Teletruth.org's accusations? $6.63 per Mbps (vs. $0.34 in Korea and $0.41 in Japan)? Going by the current FiOS price structure, at the cheapest monthly rate - assuming the maximum advertised 5 Mbps download speeds - that's $8/Mbps. Moving up to the $180/month 30 Mbps, the math is still easy - $6/Mbps. Not a pretty picture, and Verizon's fiber is still a better deal than AT&T's U-verse (formerly Lightspeed, both stupid names), which as far as I can tell only offers up to 6 Mbps. AT&T also bundles their price with the TV component, so it's difficult to figure out how much each Mbps costs, but it looks to be somewhat more expensive than FiOS.

How about the claim that the U.S. is 16th in broadband according to the ITU? Let's take a look at the current numbers, shall we? According to their growth rate metric, whatever the hell that means, we're actually ranked 13th in the world. But looking at the Network Index, the ITU measurement of fixed phone lines, mobile subscribers, and internet bandwidth per capita, the U.S. drops down to 23rd.

Is FiOS still a good thing? Sure, you take what you can get, and it's probably preferable to dealing with Comcast, Adelphia, or any of the regional cable fiefdoms. But it sure would be nice if we weren't being left in the dust by Asia, and to a lesser extent, Europe. The most frustrating aspect is that it seems like an infrastructure problem that could have been avoided, given better decision-making and some FCC backbone.