Editor’s note: Richard Bennett is a Senior Fellow with the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation and co-author of ITIF’s 2013 report, “The Whole Picture: Where America’s Broadband Networks Really Stand.” Follow him on Twitter @iPolicy.

We’ve all heard the story: America’s broadband networks are second-rate. We pay exorbitant prices for shoddy service because broadband providers print money and hold innovation in a death grip. While America languishes, our competitors in Europe and Asia are racing ahead to a user-generated content utopia. The only way forward is a government takeover, or, failing that, a massive dose of regulation.

So go a number of recent treatises such as Susan Crawford’s “Captive Audience”; works by like-minded Internet aficionados Tim Wu, Lawrence Lessig, and Yochai Benkler; reports by public interest advocacy groups Free Press, Public Knowledge, and the Open Technology Institute; as well as numerous tech bloggers.

The only problem with this story is that it’s almost completely untrue.

Granted, as recently as the late aughts, the story was plausible: In those dark days, our rankings in terms of both broadband subscription growth and speeds were falling. Increased demand for data capacity and a technology lull combined to push our average Internet connection speed down to 22nd in the world at the end of 2009, according to Akamai’s measurement of “Average Connection Speed.” Since then, the speeds of such shared connections have nearly doubled from 3.9Mbps to 7.2 Mbps, raising the U.S. to eighth place.

U.S. Average Connection Speed per Akamai

Akamai’s Average Connection Speed measures individual TCP streams over IP addresses that are often shared — and doesn’t sum simultaneous streams — so it’s more a measure of usage than of network capacity, however. To see the capacity of the underlying broadband network, it’s best to look at Akamai’s “Average Peak Connection Speed” metric.

The distinction between these two metrics flummoxed Ars Technica’s Cyrus Farivar, who maintains that the shared-connection measurement is the more meaningful indication of “user experience.” Farivar is clearly wrong about that, and Akamai’s “Average Peak Connection Speed” is the better indicator of network improvement.

The Average Peak measurement shows performance in the U.S. tripling over the past five years, up to 31.5Mbps in Q4 2012. We don’t know where the U.S. ranked on this scale before mid-2010, but it’s currently 13th. The tripling of network capacity combined with a doubling of “shared speed” says that networks are getting faster, as the U.S. is simultaneously using them more heavily

Average Peak Connection Speed per Akamai

America’s broadband speeds are improving for two reasons: first, broadband providers have installed newer technologies, such as Verizon FiOS, DOCSIS 3 cable modems, and ATT U-verse that are four or more times faster than the technologies they replaced; and second, users have begun to demonstrate a preference for higher-speed broadband by opting into higher-speed upgrades. Some upgrades are costly and others are not; Comcast recently doubled the speeds of most of their Bay Area broadband plans for free.

While our networks are improving, we’re retaining low prices for entry-level broadband plans first noticed by the Berkman Center’s “Next Generation Connectivity” report: the U.S. is currently second in the price of broadband for entry-level users. The nation is also third in network-based competition, second in the fiber-optic installation rate, first in the adoption of next-generation LTE, ahead of Europe in broadband adoption, and doing quite well in Internet-based services.

While U.S. cable TV companies still lead telcos in new broadband subscriptions, fiber-based telco broadband is gaining subscribers at a faster rate than cable. U.S. broadband providers are profitable, but much less so than Europe’s or Korea’s, where applications like YouTube must pay ISPs for access to residential customers. Significantly, we’ve gained ground on competitors despite an enormous disadvantage stemming from America’s very low urban population densities, which make U.S. broadband networks much more expensive to build and maintain than those in most nations.

Amazingly, the European Commission’s top telecom regulator, Vice President Neelie Kroes, tells a story much like the tales of woe we hear from American broadband critics, but with the roles reversed: Kroes laments Europe’s declining standing relative to the U. S., where “high-speed networks now pass more than 80 percent of homes; a figure that quadrupled in three years.” To facilitate private investment in networks, Europe has developed a “Ten Step Plan” for a single, cross-border market for broadband that mimics our interstate, facilities-based broadband market.

But these facts are glossed over by the critics of U.S. broadband policy in large part because they directly contradict their neo-populist narrative of rapacious, profit-hungry broadband monopolists gouging consumers. The long tradition of American populism distrusts private provision of “essential” services and refuses to believe that competition can ever be brought to bear on infrastructure markets. Crawford in particular relies too heavily on a strained analogy with electricity, a genuine natural monopoly that is as different from the competing information networks we have in the broadband space as any network can possibly be: Can you get electric service over the air?

Critics also come up short on research, generally refusing to consult updated primary sources in favor of blog posts and news articles from inside the echo chamber that simply reinforce the traditional narrative. “Confirmation bias” is rampant in broadband criticism.

Broadband advocates would do better to focus their efforts on real problems, such as our dismally low level of interest in the Internet, the primary reason non-subscribers give for refusing to go online. Ideally, these efforts would be combined with initiatives to increase computer ownership among the poor — the second reason so few Americans use the Internet. The world’s high-subscription nations, such as Korea and Singapore, aren’t the price leaders for entry-level Internet services as we are, but they’ve led successful outreach efforts to spread computer ownership, digital literacy, and Internet awareness across their entire populations.

Getting all of America online is a goal that all Americans can support regardless of party creed or ideological doctrine. If we can make as much progress with online participation as we’ve made with speed, Europe will have a second Internet crisis on its hands.

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Mark Suster of Los Angeles’ GRP Partners is known for his unique insights on the tech and digital media worlds, having famously had success on “both sides of the table” as a repeat entrepreneur turned investor over nearly two decades in the industry. And he hit headlines several times this past week, with his viewpoints on acqui-hires (he says they’re often very bad) and founders stepping down from the CEO role such as what happened with GRP portfolio startup Awe.sm (he says sometimes, it’s the best thing that can happen.)

So when we heard that Suster was in San Francisco for a couple of days, we asked him to come by TechCrunch TV to talk a bit more at length about all that’s been going on. And while he warned us that he was a bit tired due to a late night visiting with industry folks here in the Bay Area the evening before we met, he was just as engaging as ever, talking about the topics mentioned above as well as the latest hot stuff coming out of the Southern California tech scene.

Check it all out in the video embedded above.

• MARK SUSTER

Companies:
Launchpad LA, GRP Partners, Cendana Capital, GumGum, Ad.ly, Bedrock, App7, awe.sm, Dealmaker Media, RingRevenue, Qualys, Burstly, DonorsChoose.org, MyTime

Mark joined GRP Partners in 2007 after having worked with GRP for nearly 8 years as a two-time entrepreneur. Most recently Mark was Vice President, Product Management at Salesforce.com (NASDAQ: CRM) following its acquisition of Koral,where Mark was Founder and CEO. Prior to Koral, Mark was Founder and CEO of BuildOnline, the largest independent global content collaboration company focused on the engineering and construction sectors, which was acquired by SWORD Group (PARIS: SWP). Earlier in his career, Mark spent…

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Editor’s note: Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research and blogs at Techspressive. Each column looks at crowdfunded products that have either met or missed their funding goals. Follow him on Twitter @rossrubin.

An ancient and once-sacred bond between author and audience, reading and writing have become but two more tasks along with a multitude of other things that we do on a host of digital devices — watcing videos, listening to music, playing games, and really anything except using Facebook Home. Still, there are some for whom the intimate act of interface between pen and paper retains more magic than all the electrons powering all the devices in the world have not been able to recreate. For them, a trio of European crowdfunding projects have trotted out a range of products to improve both endpoints of analog document creation.

Whacked: LazyPete. Arrgh! Listen up, ye scurvy dogs, as I tell ye the legend of Lazy Pete, a pirate so wrapped up in his romance novels that he didn’t see a great white shark leap from the ocean to leave him with just one hand. ‘Tis in Lazy Pete’s honor that Philip Musche surely named his one-handed book reading contraption, which essentially puts one of those book stands that keep pages open on a beefy handle. Despite showing off the reading aid in nearly enough colors to cover the Seven Seas, Musche failed to capture enough crowdfunding booty, and the campaign ended with only £533 of the desired £30,000 treasure.

Backed: Idae. What the GoPro is to most digital cameras, Idae is to most pocket journals, even the durable Field Notes. The waterproof, tear-resistant notebook is just the thing for when you need to make that critical addition to your grocery shopping list in the middle of your next scuba dive, and a perfect match for your Fisher Space Pen. And if you needed any more proof of just how extreme it is, it has a hole for a carabiner.

That said, fire will consume it along with the haiku you were inspired to write on the slopes. And if you’re not planning to keep your notes around indefinitely, the notebook can be recycled. Developed in Milan and shipped to backers last month for between $20 and $30 depending on cover color, the 32-page thought preserver cleared its $7,200 funding goal with a couple of hundred dollars to spare, but you’d expect that kind of nail-biting excitement from such a tough guy.

Backed: Meteor Grip. The pencil has been thin enough to serve as a benchmark against which to compare high-tech electronics. While it’s comfortable for many, at least for short periods, it can be difficult to grasp for some. Receiving inspiration when his partner Zoë, a tattoo artist, began suffering hand pain in December 2011, Pontefract, UK-based Jai Dickerson Pierce developed the Meteor Grip. Few details are provided about what material is used to create the grip. Rather, the key to its uniqueness is being available in both right and left-handed versions. As the campaign page employs double negatives to claim, “No other manufacturer produces an ergonomic hand grip that is not ambidextrous.”

That said, the campaign is not above covering a spectrum of uses, claiming that the product is useful as a novelty gift while also proclaiming that it is “changing the writing experience forever.” Not yet changed for kiddies, though, as a potential meteorite grip is for now on the drawing board. With a bit over three weeks left to go, the Meteor Grip has collected about a quarter of its humble £875 goal. Seven pounds will marry your love of astronomy with hatred of thin writing tools, and ten pounds can get one for you as well as the cramping tattoo artist in your life as soon as this month.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/-QW0Ov96wDw/

As the Tumblr/Yahoo deal continues to be negotiated by press, and the world gears up for whatever is being announced Monday morning, Tumblr founder David Karp is probably having a very interesting weekend. It’s likely, in between multiple discussions with his board members and Marissa Mayer, that he’ll take a break, like a walk or something, to gather his thoughts.

On this walk (or jog or glass of wine at a bar), he will likely mull over two main outcomes. He could take Yahoo’s money, whether it be the $1.1 billion that the board is trying to approve giving him, or the more that he negotiates. Or, well, not.

If he took Yahoo’s money, he would join the Billion Dollar Exit Club — you know, the ranks of Kevin Systrom, Chad Hurley and Steven Chen from YouTube, the PayPal mafia, Tony Hseih, James Clark, Marc Andreessen, etc. He would be considered “successful” by the Valley’s ridiculous standards and everyone else’s, but not Zuckerberg successful, but definitely Michael Birch successful. Maybe he’d buy a nice house in Presidio Heights for when he has to be on the West Coast, and fill it with art and an apartment in Chelsea? [And maybe a vacation home for his family. And maybe a plane.]

He’d still oversee the Tumblr product at Yahoo, at least until his lockup expired, and maybe users would leave and maybe they wouldn’t … But the game would be over. The race would be in its cool-down period. Still, a pretty chill life overall. Especially in this economy. What would Kevin Systrom do?

Sell.

But with this, just like with the Instagram sale, comes a nagging, cloying afterthought: “What if Tumblr (or Instagram or _______) could have been the next Facebook?” And this nagging opportunity cost would grow even louder if Yahoo succeeded with Tumblr, finding a way to monetize its millions of eyeballs much like Google did with YouTube.

“Tumblr could have been a contender.”

It’s this thought that will lead to a “No” from Karp and his board if it gets nagging enough. And this thought is weighty — Zuck had it too when he was being courted by Yahoo, and we all know how that turned out. But what happens after the “No,” the fact that Karp will be challenged to build a real business on top of Tumblr’s scale, is daunting enough to turn that “No” once again into a “Yes.”

Can Tumblr turn the process of following other Tumblrs through your dashboard into a stream it can monetize with sponsored, story-style ads? Or find a way to cram ads into the notoriously independent, and risky, content?

Can Karp put on the big-boy pants, hire a Sheryl Sandberg character, and create a money-making machine? Because if he’s not sure, and he’s not ready for a long, hard, uphill fight, he should sell.

Look what happened to Groupon; still trading below its $6bn offer.

A billion dollars is a lot of money.

• TUMBLR

Tumblr is a re-envisioning of tumblelogging, a subset of blogging that uses quick, mixed-media posts. The service hopes to do for the tumblelog what services like LiveJournal and Blogger did for the blog. The difference is that its extreme simplicity will make luring users a far easier task than acquiring users for traditional weblogging. Anytime a user sees something interesting online, they can click a quick “Share on Tumblr” bookmarklet that then tumbles the snippet directly. The result is…

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