US' Mobile Catch-Up Game Plan

U.S. broadband providers have gotten away with shoddy speeds and restricted access because Americans consumers are pretty clueless about what they're actually buying. A whopping 80 percent of broadband users in the United States do not know the speed of their own broadband connection, a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) survey found. It's no surprise, then, that the nation is stupidly happy with the suckiest broadband speeds on the planet. Even many third-worlders are rocking rich media faster than the richest American household.

"While Europe and Japan have Fiber to the X (FTTX) services, we have not rolled out much here in the U.S. at this time," Asif Hazarika, senior director of product management at IP Infusion, told TechNewsWorld. "The issue that we see is that the U.S. has a great deal of legacy deployment and thus, to match the speeds with GPON or EPON, the cost is much higher."

Mobile broadband, says FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, is a quick fix to this dilemma -- but the U.S. is dead-weight, if not dead-last, in mobile broadband too.

"The U.S. is definitely behind the rest of the world in mobile broadband access, both from pricing and access speeds," explained Hazarika.

Genachowski insists that 4G mobile broadband is the best way to "drive innovation, to drive broadband's success, and to drive competition in broadband" prices and accessibility. But is mobile broadband a true fix or just a patch for the American "best country in the world" psyche?