One thing I’ve noticed spending so much time outside the country, is that in many places it seems to be easier to locate public, if not free access outside the US. Last week I returned from a trip to Jacksonville and due to the ground transport arrangements, I had almost a couple of hours to kill. It’s bad enough the concessions were nearly non existent at the gate, but there was no Internet to be found. Contrast that to the hotel which not only offered free WiFi, but free ethernet connectivity as well. Pretty much most of the hotels I’m in these days have some sort of broadband, (airports too) though the fancy hotels still want 10 bucks a day and some of the more modest hotels are including it gratis.
At one point last year even though we had a production we were flying from date to date (which is a whole other story in itself…) and throughout much of Europe, even in the smallest Italian and Spanish airports, there was WiFi. Not always free, but generally always available. Even the tour of Mexico I was on 18 months ago it was pretty easy to get broadband, or at least an Internet cafe or hotel business center with good access.
Seems as though my feeling “the rest of the world is better connected than us” is at least somewhat justified. In a report issued last September, the US has fallen to 13th place in the per capita penetration of broadband Internet connectivity. Noted technorati Om Malik is trying to put a spin on this in that our percentage of penetration is low, but the raw numbers are high. He notes that “It’s easy to wire a country the size of say Florida, but it’s darn hard to wire-up a continent.” One flaw in that reasoning is that the US doesn’t have a national program to deploy and develop connectivity offers. In the States each area is controlled and limited by ILECs and local cable providers. The CLECs have mostly checked out after the bubble and still use the wire and infratructure of ILECs anyway and don’t have access to the cable networks. Could these other countries be gaining faster because they aren’t burdened by disparate standards by monopolistic incombants and outdated Federal laws? Could it be that they just have abetter handle on it than we do? Companies like Orange and Vodaphone are quick to adapt offerings and deploy new technologies whereas over here companies like Verizon, Qwest and Comcast have death grips on the technology and have been slow to invest and deploy the technology.
Although they haven’t blown networking like they did with wireless service. Well, not yet anyway though they seem to be trying…
