What if your IBM mainframe salesperson came along and said "sure, this machine does not have the most blazing MIPS, but the art deco facade has won several critical awards" or your broker called and said "we take an hour longer than the competition to execute your trades, but by golly we just won the most environmentally sensitive business award" would you be impressed?
Along comes this report from Insead saying the state of US telecom is not really as bad as other studies have indicated because “It is not just a question of technology. Political and economic factors become extremely important.”
In other words, what we do with we have, we do pretty well. But the report distracts from the part about "what we have" - which is average, not world class.
Just yesterday I posted on New Florence a study of the global mobile data market. Japan and Korea have almost 75% 3G penetration, the US is only around 25%. And there are fears we may swamp that as "unlimited plans" kick in - and of course with the deluge likely to come as the iPhone goes 3G.
Our broadband penetration is pretty low as the phone and cable companies focus on selling bundles, not competitively priced broadband. Compare us to Japan which has the fastest broadband today. Compare us to Finland when it comes to broadband pricing. Compare broadband penetration to Estonia, one of the most wired countries in the world.
So let's focus on speeds, feeds, prices. What we do or not do with that as a country can be a focus of other social and economic studies, not technology based benchmarks.
