Now, my connection to the outside world is a paltry 512k DSL line (because I’m too cheap and lazy to pay for a bigger pipe). So I guess this means I’m analogous to Sweden!

Low density and low urbanization effects both DSL and FTTP:
1) DSL: The distance from the central office determines whether DSL can be offered and the speed at which it can be offered. In low density, suburban-rural areas, homes tend to be further from the central office, limiting the speed of DSL (or even precluding the availability of DSL).

2) FTTP: The cost of laying fiber to a single-family home versus an apartment building is basically the same. However, the potential revenue from an apartment building are much, much higher than a single-family home.

No foreign government that I’m aware of has gone that far, but if you have information to the contrary, by all means share it.

And BTW, the story of Korea Telecom blocking VoIP got a lot of play here, because American servicemen were among the affected parties.

The fact is, Japan, Korea, and the other countries had national regulatory bodies that saw to it that there were single standards for things, not the hodge-podge nonsense we have in the US.

And by the way, my wife has no problem calling China via VoIP, and I hadn’t heard of anyone having problems calling Europe via Skype.

And the foreign scenario isn’t actually as “neutral” as McChesney’s mouthpieces would have us believe; foreign ISPs routinely block VoIP so they can have the whole revenue stream for themselves.

This is the old “everything’s so much better in Sweden” trick that American pseudo-sophisticates have been playing on the yokels for 40 years. Things aren’t nearly as idyllic in Hong Kong as we might like to think, they’re just a lot more compact.

-Hong Kong has far higher broadband penetration than the US.

-As a function of penetration vs. population density we’re at or near the bottom.

-The United States is the most expensive country in the world for broadband.

Read that whole report. It’s shocking and should outrage anyone.

The fact is, the free market itself has failed in BB deployment, and until that problem is addressed, the QoS problem is merely a sideshow; besides, it’s being addressed in countries wherever there is an activist government favoring BB deployment to everyone.

I think the need for QoS for TV might depend on the programming. A live action sporting event has different demands than say Prime Time programming. Specifically, you could distribute a Prime Time program out to the caching stations ahead of time. However, you can not do the same with a sporting event.

Actually, the technical issues of digital convergence are really quite interesting.

Overall, nice response. While I think you overstate your criticisms at times (e.g. some scholars seriously doubt the FCC’s authority and willingness to act if discrimination surfaces), the AEA’s report has some serious factual problems.

One question: You mentioned live TV as needing QoS, and I think you mean live broadcast (multicast) TV programming. Are you talking about IPTV or a temporarily dedicated frequency or something else? George Ou doesn’t include that as one of the time-sensitive apps needing QoS in some of his posts. I’ve re-read some of your earlier posts on the issue, but I am having a problem reconciling the possible disagreement between you two. (It very well might be my lack of understanding about the technology.) Could a TV provider use caching stations to avoid congestion in the backbone and could users use buffering software so that QoS would not be needed for TV?

Thanks.

Sweden is planning for a 1-gigabit (1,000 megabit) service for about $120 a month — this is over 150 times faster than the fastest typical DSL service available in the United States, which currently tops out at around 6 megabits.

This is sort of misleading statement . Actual end users don’t get a Gigabit connection, that’s the bandwidth at the head end. Plus, think about how unrealistic this is:

Sweden only has a few OC-192′s connectivity to the “rest” of the Internet, even with DWDM, they probably are planning on hosting more than a handful of subscribers:)

Also note the fact that they are *planning* to roll this out… BFD, so is Verizon, Sprint et. al. you don’t compare Vaporware networks with existing one unless your a slimy slideware sales droid.

And again, if Americans all lived in high rises, we’d have 100Mbps ethernet. But we don’t.

Sweden is planning for a 1-gigabit (1,000 megabit) service for about $120 a month — this is over 150 times faster than the fastest typical DSL service available in the United States, which currently tops out at around 6 megabits.

Sweden is planning to provide FTTP, which is much faster than 6 Mbps DSL, for $120 a month.

Is that supposed to be an argument? Is that supposed to even make sense?