Editorial
by Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

The dateline reads “4 April 2008.”  And it’s yet another story – this time from the BBC – about how American broadband adoption trails the world. 

This may be news to BBC’s U.K., general knowledge audience, but how many times has this issue been covered by how many different publications?  We even put it in our “Top Eight Network Performance Issues you should keep in mind for Super Tuesday”

A rant follows – one perhaps uncharacteristic of NPD as a whole, but hey, there’s only so many times you can see the same story before something clicks.  The U.S.’s inferior broadband is a problem, and nothing is being done about it.

The article by Ian Hardy places the blame somewhat on infrastructure, but mostly on Internet backbone and last-mile service providers who would rather provide competing services that eschew the Internet for older, more established business models.  It’s about distribution – and control of the distribution avenues. 

But in the meantime, the companies who rely on Internet access to run their business are being choked off.  It’s well known that bandwidth is expensive in the U.S.  But it’s not expensive because demand is outstripping supply – like oil – it’s that supply is being artificially constrained – like diamonds. 

And this is important to IT groups because almost all remote connectivity has to occur over the Internet.   Applications once designed for the LAN made their way to the WAN, now apps are moving to the cloud.  Even those applications for which SaaS is a poor fit can almost always enhance functionality through having access to online databases of information – databases that connect through the Internet. 

International entrepreneurs will set-up shop in places where the Internet is cheap and powerful.  And right now that means Korea, Japan, China, France, and Canada.  It’s getting harder to find good news in the American economy in the post-Bear Stearns era; the country is saddled with debt, the U.S. dollar is drawing analogies to the peso, and the only way to get out of this mess is to build and grow our way out of it.  That means being technological leaders and innovators.  And here, we are dangerously close to losing that edge. 

The last thing most people want is government intervention, but even if it’s not recognized now – even if people are dancing around it, this is a problem.  Politically, people differ on whether the government should – or even can – intervene through regulation to solve problems. However, I think most agree that if the free market can come up with a solution that works, that solution should be tried first. 

What I’d like to see is articles talking about how Americans are trying to solve the broadband problem – not articles dwelling further about how bad things have gotten. 

I don’t have any panaceas, but if you know of something – or have an idea, feel free to leave a comment below.