re: There's plenty of evidence to indicate that good policy can have a positive impact on telecomms. By that I mean aggregate increases in throughput and capacity at reasonable rates, in a competitive and profitable market.
There's also some degree of evidence that the US appears to have a larger percentage of technology (i.e. telecom/datacom/computing) luddites than many developed nations. This, despite the large percentage of voracious technology adoptors. You do not have that sort of statistical distribution with electricity, roads, water, and the other utility analogies in the US, and that may be a very important point when making comparisons between broadband and those "zero-learning-curve" utilities.
Policy directed at internet/broadband infrastructure supply does nothing to change that. Around 20% of the population has never been able to justify buying a computer, let alone using that computer for internet applications. Some subset of that flat out has no interest in climbing the learning curves for computer AND internet use, even if you gave them the computer and internet access for free.
Broadband advocates refuse to accept these folks have made a choice, for various reasons, not to join the market (not to mention they don't even have the prerequisite of comuter ownership and operating knowledge). In any other market, the studies and efforts to increase penetration are planned, analyzed, and projected based on TAM (total available market), SAM (served available market), and SOM (Serviceable and obtainable market), among other metrics. These concepts are largely ignored when it comes to broadband, because broadband advocates reject the notion that the obtainable market is anything short of the entire population.
Maybe this falls into the "inconvenient truth" category. If broadband supply and demand statistics worldwide were re-done considering a realistic "less than everyone" TAM/SAM/SOM analysis, the rank-ordering of countries relative to broadband would come out quite different.
If the US does in fact have a larger percentage of "luddite households" than all (or nearly all) other developed nations, perhaps the only way to address the problem is to first accept that it exists, to get detailed data, and to essentially separate out this segment of the population and treat it like a developing nation, for policy purposes. The approach would be very different, and it definitely would not start with increasing broadband infrastructure supply.
This would be "inconvenient" though, because the US broadband penetration--if you subtracted out the "non-obtainable" portion of the market--would be quite a lot higher. However, I'm not entirely sure the problem can be solved without accepting this "island of luddites" exists, and needs a completely different plan.
Just some food for thought... |
