Unless Saul Hansell at NY Times dramatically changes his tune in the 2nd and 3rd part of his series on broadband, expect Verizon's Denny Strigl to complain even more his industry is unfairly maligned
In part 1 Saul goes
"it’s easy to find examples that American’s broadband is second-rate:
In Japan, broadband service running at 150 megabits per second (Mbps) costs $60 a month. The fastest service available now in the United States is 50 Mbps at a price of $90 to $150 a month.
In London, $9 a month buys 8 Mbps service. In New York, broadband starts at $20 per month, for 1 Mbps.
In Iceland, 83 percent of the households are connected to broadband. In the United States, the adoption rate is 59 percent."
and
"In the United States, phone companies could have offered a faster tier of DSL service to urban apartment dwellers. But instead they chose to offer slower speeds that they could also offer in the suburbs, where most of the more affluent customers live."
One comforting data point for US consumers
" Data from Ofcom, the British communications regulator, shows that advertising from Internet providers in the United States overstates the speed of their broadband connections less than providers in Japan and the major European countries."
