Web mogel proclaims 'Net"dead and boring"

The Washington Post story in the preceding item is bad news for those who care about broadband in the United States. It notes that median download speed for a U.S. customer is about 2 Mbps (only about 59 Mbps behind Japan). It also notes other metrics, many of which the U.S. telecom industry is painfully familiar with at this point, that show how far behind the U.S. is in other categories.

But, hold on. Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks and all-around broadband guy, is taking the telecom industry to task, saying it's not only a problem of bandwidth access. He suggests on his blog, in a posting now winding its way through every other telecom-oriented blog, that the whole Internet infrastructure is not keeping up.

Actually, what he says is "The Internet is dead and boring," a typically shrill comment that he waxes on sarcastically while making a couple of prescient observations, but from which telcos should draw this inspiration: Broadband isn't just a last-mile access infrastructure game; it's about moving bytes upon bytes as efficiently as possible through a  multi-tier infrastructure.

Level 3 Communications, which has made a whole bunch of bandwidth-related acquisitions and recently invested in the content delivery network area, seems to get this, but I'm not sure many others do.

For More:
- Here's Cuban's original blog posting, with follow-up analysis at GigaOM