According to Free Press [1], the Consumer Federation of America and Consumers Union, “the United States continues to lag behind the rest of the world in accessible and affordable broadband service, with no signs of closing the digital divide at home.”
The current dysfunctional policies promulgated by the FCC have left Americans with “higher prices, slower speeds and no meaningful competition for high-speed Internet service.”
S. Derek Turner, research director of Free Press and author of the report entitled Broadband Reality Check II states: “[T]he FCC seems content to ignore the problem, manipulate the data, and pretend we’re moving forward.”
Among the report’s key findings:
- The United States is 16th in the world in broadband penetration, and 14 other OECD nations saw higher overall net growth in broadband adoption than the United States from 2001 to 2005.
- Consumers in other countries enjoy broadband connections that are far faster and cheaper than what is available here. U.S. consumers pay nearly twice as much as the Japanese for connections that are 20 times as slow.
- The most important factors explaining the digital divide among nations are household income and poverty — not population density.
- U.S. broadband prices aren’t dropping: Cable modem prices are holding constant or rising, and DSL customers on average are getting less bandwidth per dollar than just a year ago.
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