Why Isn’t the Price of Broadband Obeying Moore’s Law?
September 14, 2010
Northwestern University researchers have discovered that broadband Internet prices have remained nearly stagnant since 2004, despite the explosive pace of adoption since then, from approximately 20 percent of U.S. households in 2004 to more than 65 percent today.
One of the authors of the study, Shane Greenstein, argues that the 2003 decision allowing the broadband industry to regulate itself has caused much of the stagnation.
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Comments (4)
by Classic Entanglement
This research should have compared broadband capacity/prices with traffic prices for data centres.
I paid $ 250/month for 500MB of data centre traffic in 1995.
I now pay $ 50/month for 1TB of data centre traffic.
~10,000 fold increase in 15 years.
by melajara
I have a shorter answer OLIGOPOLY
by Imperator03
Expecting broadband prices to obey Moore’s Law is insane. The only thing that Moore’s Law covers is the amount of processing power you can put on a processing chip. To expect something as different as broadband Internet service to follow a law that was used to discuss the evolution of the microchip.
For one thing, you have to take into account is the size of the United States. Of course Europe and parts of Asia are faster than the US. Take out a map and look at the area covered by South Korea or Japan relative to the US. Or, God help us, Hong Kong compared to the US. Personally I think its amazing that a country as large as the US ranks 12 on their little list.
Greenstein gets a little closer to the truth when he notes that, at most, people have two choices for broadband carriers when it comes to urban areas, he doesn’t even consider suburban or rural areas who have possibly even more limited options. If Greenstein really wants to understand why broadband prices have stagnated, he just needs to look at the number of players allowed to compete at the dawn of the broadband age. What sorts of barriers to entry were put in place by players in the industry and government regulators? Those are questions that will offer more insight into price stagnation in the broadband market in the US. He might also want to check his English; instead of saying self-regulate, he might want to look into how the 2003 decision kept new players from entering the market, which would have driven down and would continue to drive down prices today.
by LaboriousCretin
Typical corruption with in America today, some what similar to how the USSR collapsed. In a way it’s sad but funny to, as the super rich and large industry’s have crippled diversity and cut their own future profit for short term gains. As other country’s harden themselves against some of americas short sidedness and buy less and less from american company’s in the near future we might even see the country boil over and divide even more. Germany was great for shielding it’s self from derivatives, and a few others have hardened themselves against needing to buy american product’s and resources. China is even set up to do better than america in the near future if they build a middle class. Sun Tzu America is being defeated by it’s own devices, sudo collages, degradation of school’s, corrupt industrial structures, lack of green technology, lack of sustainability, evaporation of a middle class, bad GMO’s pushed over on the population rather than good GMO’s, industry like monsanto taking farm’s due to the patented crop’s infecting other farm’s, oil and gas being heavy polluters and wistful, Ect… Also the stifling of some innovation on the internet, lack of good content, the dumbing down of so many people with attention spans of less than 5-15 minutes. The next 20 year’s will show what has already happened to america, as it is a 3rd world country already. Add to that the lack of infrastructure, and the degradation of infrastructure, regulatory body’s subverted like FDA, EPA, done mainly under the bush admin, and you can add a sicker population in general. Some what good though because the mean elderly population will die off faster, and between the elderly and religious some of the repressing factors will go away. But you could change stuff today and it would take 20+ years for america to come back, and I don’t see people coming together yet to stop such corruption and repression. It’s better to shield one’s self from such at this point, and make sub networks or dark net’s based off new technology with security even the CIA types cant crack from thing’s like HAM chips for encryption, and packet structures that even deep packet sniffing can’t help with figuring out.