IDG News Service - U.S. residents rank among the world's top in broadband use per month, meaning the broadband picture in the country isn't as bad as some critics might make it, a telecom trade group said Wednesday.
Much of the recent debate about broadband in the U.S. has focused on subscriber numbers and speed, but use should be part of the equation, said Jonathan Banks, USTelecom's senior vice president of law and policy. "There's this argument about whether the broadband networks in the U.S. are good enough," he said. "A lot of people compare network capacity to Europe or Japan. You may have a lot of capacity, but if people don't use it, what does it mean?"
USTelecom looked at the broadband use of seven nations in North America, Europe and Asia, and found average U.S. consumers transfer about 14.2 gigabytes worth of Web content to their Internet devices a month. South Koreans were by far the greatest users of bandwidth per month, at 24.5GBs, followed by France, at 14.3GBs, and the U.S.
Germans averaged 12.9GBs per month, Brits averaged 11.9GBs, and the Japanese averaged just 9.9GBs, according to USTelecom. The average broadband connection worldwide generates 11.4GBs of Internet traffic per month, or 375 megabytes per day, according to the Cisco Visual Networking Index, upon which the USTelecom study is based.
The average broadband user, then, generates traffic about equal to downloading 3,000 text e-mails per day or 100 MP3 music files per day, Cisco said.
While Japan has high-speed fiber networks across much of the nation, U.S. broadband networks support more use, Banks said. USTelecom sent its study to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which is in the midst of creating a national broadband plan.
"We'd love to have fiber to the home here, but in some countries there's more government subsidy," Banks said. "Some of the telecom companies can really build out a network without worrying about whether they can finance it or whether it is going to get used. What this says is we're tailoring our networks to what consumers really do with it, and people here really use it a lot, so our networks are good enough to support more usage."
The FCC and other policymakers can look to the study to see if U.S. broadband providers are giving consumers what they need, Banks said. "It's nice if you can build a network for 20 years out, and somehow, the government will finance it, but here we're trying to build for the next few years and make sure we have something that matches up with what people want," he added.
Last month I blogged about the partnerships you should build inside your organization. In keeping with that tone it's time we discussed expanding that partnership mentality to include some of the best technical resources you can ever get hold of, those are the ones that work in your neighboring cities, municipalities, counties, regions, townships etc. Come on folks, these people are already doing exactly the same things as you!
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