Move to Croatia for good quality broadband!

It is the unfortunate truth that often the country that invents a technology, especially an infrastructure technology, soon lags behind almost every other country that follows. It may be sacrilege to those in the U.S. whose religion is the Free Market, but the free market is actually inefficient for infrastructure.

The U.S. highway system, ostensibly built for security purposes, is an example of where the free market would have failed. Yet, it is one of the most important aspects of a large nation such as the U.S. Without the interstate highway system, we would suffer higher prices, less mobility, less cross fertilization of ideas, and lag behind the rest of the industrialized world. Infrastructure and access to that infrastructure is crucial.

In the past we have realized this with telephone service, electricity, and postal service. This infrastructure used to be the envy of the world. Used to be. Our security lies not just in military adventures, but in keeping our infrastructure top of the line. For those of you in a bubble, your broadband access sucks. That is right, all of you with DSL and cable modems, compared to the rest of the industrialized world, and even the less industrialized world, your broadband access is expensive, slow, and the service is spotty. If you want better broadband access, move to Croatia!

It is hard to feel technological pride over that. I don’t thump my chest too often and say, “We live in a very advanced nation. We have broadband Internet access almost as good as Croatia. Beat that! Oh, you live in Turkey? Well, ok, we’re more expensive than you and slower.” There is always North Korea! We can rest assured that we will stay ahead of them for some time.

I have a cabin in Eastern Washington. Nine miles out of town on a paved road. If I want Internet access there I can get it at the screaming speed of 28KB. That’s right, dial up with noise. Don’t even think about keeping your Windows installation current via the Internet. The new version of Windows would actually ship by the time your service pack downloaded.

In a time of economic uncertainty it is hard to get people too excited about this, but the time to invest is when the world is slowing down on its investments. Now is the time to move out of 15th place for penetration and 22nd place for cost. Demand more and not just from your service provider, who has no incentive to lower costs. This is a real issue. If you started losing your power all the time, you would be complaining. This is the power of the 21st century and I am tired of all the brownouts and blackouts.