Disqus - Latest Comments for Rudolf

Re: OECD vs. SpeedTest

Rudolf — Thu, 15 May 2008 10:32:28 -0000

The OECD's methodology is that they publish the numbers as they are provided by the member states and/or as they are available from public sources.

What the OECD publishes is either the broadband penetration numbers they receive from the nations themselves (FCC, department of commerce etc provide those numbers for the USA) and they look at the offers from the largest operators in each nation to be able to do a price broadband comparisson. For a good explanation of how this works see the explanation Taylor Reynolds of the OECD provides. http://www.itwire.com/content/view/12224/1154/

What you are doing is you measure the throughput to a US site (Speedtest) from Korea and then compare this with the numbers as given. In doing this you forget that trans-pacific traffic is still a bit expensive and therefore often rationed. So while Koreans may get 50mbit/s on the network of their provider, of net in Korea this already may be lower, but towards the US this is definitely lower. Furthermore and on top of this, Speedtest relies on people going to their website and testing the speed. It just might very well be that Koreans are not too interested in the speedtest website, seriously affecting its usability.

Re: Peering and Transit at Ars

Rudolf — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 19:27:06 -0000

thanks for the compliment

Re: Telecoms competition in the US and Europe

Rudolf — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 17:30:39 -0000

Sorry to burst your bubble, but the EU is quite a bit bigger than the United Kingdom. With 27 member nations, 499 million people and 23 national languages it is quite substantially bigger. You've made the classic mistake of an American analyst. You've assumed superiority and you've only verified your numbers with those of the UK. I would like to point you first to the OECD Broadband Portal, which contains a wealth of information. Most pointing out that the United States is at best playing in the middle tier of the broadband game. http://www.oecd.org/sti/ict/broadband

Your assumptions about the differences in models for instance fail to explain why many people in the United States have only 1 or no broadband supplier to choose from. It also fails to explain why no new entrants have stepped into the market and most large providers of earlier days have now all but left the market.