For starters, other countries beat U.S. broadband by the basic numbers.
-- In Japan, broadband service running at 150 megabits per second (Mbps) costs US$60 per month. The fastest service available now in the United States is 50 Mbps at a price of $90 to $150 per 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.
Why the gap? One crucial factor is the size of the United States relative to other countries. Wiring customers is costly, and it makes a big difference. Consider the following:
-- Urban density is higher in many parts of Europe than in the U.S., so it's easier to wire up large numbers of people with a high-speed network.
-- Half the population of South Korea lives in dense apartment complexes, mostly in or near Seoul.
-- Most of the more affluent U.S. customers live in the suburbs. Internet service providers therefore offer lower-speed connections that they can deliver to these customers, without offering urban homes a higher-speed alternative.
There's also an apple-and-oranges mismatch between penetration, speed, and cost data from different countries. This can lead to disparities in prices and reported speeds:
-- Internet service providers in Europe and Japan overstate the speed of their networks in advertising more than do American ISP's. Yes, our ISPs and telcos actually lie less!
-- Fiber broadband in Korea, Sweden and until recently Japan, only runs as far as the basement of apartment buildings, or street-corner switch boxes. By contrast, Verizon's FiOS runs fiber optic cable right into the customer's home.
Another factor relates to laws governing how phone, Internet and cable TV services can be sold. It's resulted in a curious competitive situation in some markets, and dominance by Comcast, Verizon and other large telcos in the United States:
-- Most big countries enforce what's called "unbunding," which forces rival phone companies to share their lines and facilities. But unbundling gives each ISP less incentive to upgrade their networks, since they'll have to share with their worst competitors.
-- The Federal Communications Commission enforced unbundling until 2003, when the FCC decided that encouraging competition was the best way to serve customers.
-- The downside of the current situation is it creates an oligopoly of a few major carriers, who can then charge higher rates.
Still, Japan, South Korea, and Sweden have much faster broadband and much cheaper rates for most of their citizens than does the U.S. Why?
-- In those countries, there are heavy government investment and subsidies, plus a lower acceptable profit margin for broadband service providers.
-- Sweden's government granted tax breaks, subsidized rural deployment, and most importantly required state-owned municipal utilities to create local backbone networks, making it cheaper for the local phone company to offer broadband access.
-- Japan let telecom companies write down about a third of their first-year investments in broadband, subsidized low-cost loans for buildouts, and paid outright for part of rural deployments.
-- National pride is part of the drive to have governments foster high-speed networks. Americans aren't particularly stoked to beat Singapore's Internet speeds the way we beat the Russians to the moon.
What's being done to boost U.S. broadband speed and availability?
-- The more than $7 billion for broadband in President Obama's stimulus bill is a good start. But universal coverage will require more government funding.
--The stimulus bill also allocates funding to help people who don't even have a computer.
--There are proposals to redirect some of the Universal Service Fund from rural telephone service to rural broadband service.
--Regulators need to find ways to increase competition. Too bad no one can agree on what those are.
--The big question: Should the government provide subsidies or tax breaks to the likes of Qwest and Charter Communications to help them upgrade their customers' networks?
After walking through entire report, Hansell's conclusion seems inarguable: "The lesson from the rest of the world is that if the Obama administration really wants to bring very-high-speed Internet access to most people faster than the leisurely pace of the market, it will most likely have to bring out the taxpayers' checkbook."
You can read parts , and in full at The New York Times' website.
(Disclosure: Paul Boutin is a freelance writer for the Times.)