Stefanie wrote:
Under "Broadband Penetration by Technology," I was a bit surprised to see DSL so close to cable in the United States. I would've guessed cable had a larger percentage than that.

Interesting. I'd like to know the definition of broadband in some of these stats. If it's just faster than 128K, then obviously that skews things considerably. In any case, the US has made a grave strategic error in not supporting more proliferation of broadband across the entire country. It should've been viewed as integral to economic policy and handled just like electricity or the interstate system. But I've ranted on that plenty before.

As for the cable v dsl issue, there's LOTS more copper loop (prolly orders of magnitude more) in the ground than there's cable. Copper loop passes 99.9% of the populace, whereas I think cable was in the high 60's back in 1999. I doubt it's gotten much greater than 75% by now. It's simply much more expensive plant. You'd probably see a lot more DSL subs if they would deploy to remote terminals more and use more advanced encoding technologies to cram more down the pipes. There are technical limitations here, but really, it's more a finance decision on the part of the telcos to keep you stringing along until they absolutely have to protect market share.

RE: Japanese Broadband Nears 50% Fiber - US Broadband Penetration Grows to 93.4% Among Active Internet Users - May 2009 Bandwidth Report