Friday, March 31, 2006

 

America's Technology Future at Risk

A new report, America's Technology Future at Risk.pdf, by Clyde Prestowitz, shows how U.S. trade in high tech goods has fallen in recent years.



Here's the telecom-specific picture:



The problem, of course, is bad policy.

Thanks to Jim Baller for the pointer.

Comments:
How do you count technology costs? I imagine that a lot of technology is invented in the US, and then is manufactured in China. So how do you measure that? (I ask that not to be antagonistic but out of curiosity.)

Even in the invention area, Chinese are getting much more aggressive in filing patents; it will be interesting to see how Americans maintain their leading position.
http://china-netinvestor.blogspot.com/2006/02/chinese-patent-applications-skyrocket.html
 
Is K-Street giving us numbers we can trust?

On p.11 of his report, Prestowitz states:

"In Japan and Korea, for example, broadband usually means data speeds of 100 megabits per second.[Footnote 13]

[Footnote 13] Takada and Shinohara, p. 11."

The full citation to Takada and Shinohara is given on p.10 in footnote 12:

"Takada, Yoshihisa, and Shinohara, Takeshi, Promoting Broadband: The Case of Japan, International Telecommunications Union, Document PB/07, Geneva, April 2003"

On p.11 of their 2003 report, Promoting Broadband: The Case of Japan, Document PB/07, available from the ITU, Takada and Shinohara state:

"The quality of service has improved. ADSL service speeds have been widely upgraded from a maximum of 1.5Mbit/s in 2001 to a maximum 8M bit/s or 12Mbit/s in 2002. FTTH services were launched in 2002. At first, the normal service speed was a maximum of 10Mbit/s, but with soon
increased to 100Mbit/s."


And according to South Korea's Ministry of Information of Telecommunication, in their 2004 whitepaper, Dynamic Digital Korea, not until 2010 are 20 million South Korean subscribers expected to have access to 50-100 Mbps broadband. (Table 2-2: Deployment Plan of BcN, p.25.)

Perhaps someone has some better--or more recent--data.
 
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