Quote:
Originally posted by BigBo
The U.S. lags behind most of the rest of the world in broadband usage at 60 something percent vs. around 98% for Hong Kong (the highest). Most of Europe is ahead of the U.S. too.
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Europe and Hong Kong don't have the same typical location issues that we have. You can't go for miles upon miles in Germany or France and not run into civilization. There has been a lot of talk of a federal broadband initiative. The framework already exists in most cases but the "local loop" from individual houses to the national backbone and offshoots would be prohibitivly expensive. THEN, in issues of fairness that you couldn't expect gramma & grampa to PAY out of pocket for run the local loop 27 miles to town, we would need to pickup the slack in the form of a line item charge on our phone and cable tv/internet DSL bills...
Hopefully in a few years extended distance from various types of dsl and inexpensive repeater technology might make up for some but that's still a few years off. Satellite technology has too high of a latency period to be considered for instantaneous access... At least for time sensitve services such as video conferecncing and , err, gaming
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