According to a post on GigaOm, FTTH Council is pushing the US government to adopt a 100 Megabit Nation policy with the goal of extending, through both private and public sector initiatives, affordable next-generation broadband (100-megabit-per-second connection) to a majority of Americans by 2010, with universal US availability by 2015.
Hmmm…
On the other hand, over here in Tunisia:
I had to wait for over 3 months for Tunisie Telecom to give me a crappy phone line…
During the first two years, my phone line worked only a quarter of the time…
I’ve been waiting for over 7 months to get a simple 256Kbps ADSL connection at home, and I expect the wait to go on for several more months…
Some of my friends already went through the waiting periods and got their ADSL connections, and a few of them are actually happy with their connections, but still we’re a long way behind, and it all affects how competitive we can be and limits our chances to innovate or become noticeable players on the world level.
I know that there are a lot of factors behind this, I also know that the Tunisian government gives a lot of importance to this, doing all its possible to extend access to faster connections, but we’re still trailing in this area, and maybe it’s time to try a new approach at this and open more doors for some big private players to enter the market and push the country forward in broadband access. It can only be of benefit to everyone: public entities, private companies and individuals.
I think 100 Mb/sec is not reachable since the hard disks and memory access are slower. This problem is discussed now for the case of network routing. Routing protocols are now facing now hardware limitations instead of optimization ones. We are reaching transfer rates faster than hardware access speeds.
Dear bidules,
The problem was never the hardware capability, it’s all about us being behind all the time, and I really do wonder why..
It took me exactly 76 days to get a DSL connection, despite the fact that there is a lot of ISP’s here, but later, i’ve discovered that they were subordinated ISP, three guys in here controls the whole internet connections, of course along with the Egyptian telecoms, it’s not better either in Jordan, but a lot faster, I don’t know about other countries..
In KSA, it’s quite expensive.
In UAE, expensive but behind a proxy which might block you’re own website because of the proxy policy.
the maximum connection speed in Egypt and Jordan (for regular connections)is two mega, which pretty expensive.
No more comments.
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Yeah I know what you feel MMM…
I was in Tunisia two months ago and I noticed the slow connection speed. My parents are “supposed” to have a 256Kbps ADSL over there. I don’t want to sound negative but, the real speed is slower than a 56Kbps modem connection in North America.
You are definitely right. We can’t be competitive and innovative if we don’t have the right tools in our hands. Our government should really think about it. Look to the economic growth in India due to the internet… There is no reason we can’t do the same in Tunisia.
@bidules: Even if hardware presents a limitation today, that doesn’t mean that in the future solutions won’t be found to make hardware faster too. Anyway the idea to me isn’t whether we get to 100Mb/sec quickly, it’s about getting quicker and reliable connections period.
@AmerM: Exactly… Even though some of the Arab countries you stated are way ahead of Tunisia, they’re still trailing the rest of the world.
@David: Thanks for sending me your link, I’ll check out your blog asap 🙂
@lot: Exactly… people have to wait to get these adsl connections and then they end up with slow connections that aren’t even close to the advertised speed, and it leaves us trailing behind not just in connectivity but also in competitiveness, innovation, creativity, information, …etc.
Tunisia’s main wealth lies in its educated youth, but without the resources in terms of connectivity they’re crippled and limited in how much they can do.