Uncle Sam knows... or maybe not.

For reasons I don’t fully understand the US has often seemed unreasonably obsessed with its international broadband ‘performance’, the debate swinging between ‘the sky is falling’ rhetoric of the likes of Susan Crawford  and other, more Chauvinist voices.  I was therefore rather relieved when I saw that yet another academic - Christopher Yoo, a Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, had waded into the debate, promising to provide a definitive judgement.  His is a substantial report but, for what it’s worth, Professor Yoo believes that his data are incontrovertible and his analysis comes down firmly on the optimistic side regarding US performance, e.g. 

“The answer is clear and definitive: as of 2012, the U.S. was far ahead of Europe in terms of the availability of NGA. The U.S. advantage was even starker in terms of rural NGA coverage and with respect to key technologies such as FTTP and LTE”. 

A bit more controversial is Yoo’s analysis regarding transatlantic differences in regulatory policy.  He uses mapping data to correlate the degree of unbundling (measured by the DSL market share of non-incumbents) against NGA coverage in the USA and Europe.  The methodology (especially causality) looks suspect to me on a number of grounds and it appears as though the results have been driven largely by the historical dominance of the US cable industry.  But Yoo is nothing if not bullish: he concludes: 

“The evidence… is fairly definitive (sic), confirming that facilities-based competition is more effective in terms of driving broadband investment than service-based competition”. 

For a coup de grace, Yoo sums up with this linguistic triumph: 

“These data stand as a major landmark with which anyone asserting otherwise must come to grip”. 

Well, they may not be ‘asserting otherwise’ but a couple of independent voices have this month bemoaned the state of so-called infrastructure competition in the US, in particular the hegemony of the cable operators.  First, FIBEREVOLUTION  picked up on research by consulting group cg42, showing that ‘US Cable is reviled by its customers’.  Apparently, 73% of those questioned in a customer survey agree with the proposition that ‘I feel cable companies are predatory in their practices and take advantage of consumers’ lack of choice’.  Moreover, within the same survey, 53% said ‘I would leave my current cable company if I actually had a choice’. 

Putting a more satirical slant on the dissatisfaction story, ‘the Onion’ ran an article this week announcing that: 

“Offering no justification for the action aside from their own desire to do so, executives from the nation’s leading cable companies announced plans Wednesday to take $100 from every one of their subscribers”.

 

The European model of service competition may well have proved less effective in terms of promoting investment in broadband networks but there are times when it’s reassuring to know there is at least a regulator keeping an eye on quality-of-service issues.