We are #1

[whell]

Originally Posted by Boreas

According to the author, US broadband is great because, even though it's only half as fast (or a third as fast in customers with speeds above 10 Mbps) as the fastest, it's pretty?

Basically, that article admits that we're slow and expensive but insists that we're not that slow and expensive. Typical Forbes apologist for Big Business.

It also addresses net neutrality not at all.

John

No, that's not what he's saying, and it certainly does speak to net neutrality.

n large swaths of this country, the incumbent cable operator faces a fiber-based telco offering triple-play packages. Unless you think that cable operators are colluding with the telcos—a position espoused by Ms. Crawford—Internet prices are less than monopoly levels where telco-based fiber is available. And help is on the way for the rest of us in the form of wireless 4G LTE offerings, satellite broadband connections, and further telco deployment.

This is not to say that market forces and a largely hands-off Internet policy have delivered the ideal state of competition. In a market with large fixed costs, when consumers are reluctant to switch providers, and when certain must-have video programming is controlled by the incumbent cable operator, we shouldn’t expect ten broadband providers in each zip code.

IMHO, you don't need to drop restrictive network management regulations, since the market is on its way to taking care of this itself. As more broadband options become available in more markets, and as more content that is currently captive to cable becomes available on competing content providers - and this is truly more about the delivery of content than it is about download speeds - the issue of blocking, throttling and network management will become far less relevant.