WE'RE BROADBAND LAGGARDS AND PROUD OF IT

Although Supercomm draws an international audience, its primary focus is on the U.S. market, so naturally there have been many conversations this week about this country's status — or lack of same — in the global broadband market. According to the International Telecommunications Union, the U.S. is now 16th in broadband penetration this year.

Ahead of us, in order, are Korea, China, The Netherlands, Denmark, Canada, Switzerland, Taiwan, Belgium, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Israel, Japan, Finland, and Singapore. Right on our heels and catching up are France, the United Kingdom and Austria.

This is the traditional place for a rant against government policy in the U.S., given that fact that in most of the countries listed above there have been significant government initiatives through incentives, investments and disincentives to drive up broadband deployment.

Government inaction is only one of two knee-jerk responses to the U.S. broadband penetration dilemma that we might as well deal with immediately. Yes, government policy in the U.S. leaves much to be desired — there's a lot of lip service from the Bush administration about making broadband widely available, but that's about it.

And yes, Europe and Asia have population density on their side. They don't have sprawling suburbs, they have tightly packed cities, which are easier and cheaper to serve. The fact that Canada has much higher penetration than we do seems to belie this argument, but it's hard to dispute the fact that most of the countries with high broadband penetration have achieved their numbers in urban areas.

Rather than get into nit-picking arguments about why the U.S. lags, maybe it's time to take a different perspective and begin to consider the obvious benefits of being late to innovate. Since things don't seem likely to improve any time soon, let's try to look on the bright side of the broadband dilemma.

By allowing most of Asia and much of Western Europe to get out in front of the U.S. in broadband, we stand to reap the benefits of their pioneering work in way that we are not considering.

Let them get the bugs out of new technology, drive the price of first-generation systems down and create the economies of scale from which we can then benefit. By the time we are ready to move, everything will be smaller, cheaper and easier to deploy.

While we're at it, let's encourage other countries, with geographies similar to ours — say parts of Latin America and Russia — to also pull ahead, in hopes they may solve the thorny issues of broadband deployment in rural areas for us.

Let the Asian teenagers test-drive TV on a cellphone and discover the inherent dangers. Finnish families can figure out how to best share audio and video content between PCs and TVs. Brits will show us what a next-generation telephone network looks like, and then we can copy them.

It may not be the way we've done things in the past, and we may lose some jobs and wind up importing most of our technology in the process. But if those things were all that important, the U.S. would actually be doing something to advance broadband, wouldn't we?

Battery back-up

The energy density of mobile phone batteries — i.e., the amount of juice a phone's battery can store — isn't keeping up with the power consumption of mobile devices, as new features are added, says the Boston Consulting Group. Consumers may have to be more selective in using advanced features until miniature fuel cell technology matures enough to replace today's lithium ion batteries.