Today's Wall Street Journal carries a story on one of the current topics that both presidential candidates have been discussing for awhile, Broadband Access for All ($).

For months, President Bush and his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry, have been one-upping each other about the necessity for ubiquitous broadband and how to achieve it. But for all the rhetoric, the two candidates aren't far apart and both duck a central issue: Should a nationwide broadband rollout be subsidized by the government?

Industry executives, who by early August had contributed nearly $11 million to the presidential candidates, are pushing for a national broadband policy to speed adoption of the technology. Countries with such policies, including South Korea and Canada, have used government funds to boost subscription rates, and the technology industry wants the U.S. to do the same.

While I think subsidies are the wrong way to go in this case, the system needs to be deregulated. South Korea is where it is today in broadband usage because of the way they deregulated their telco system in the 1970's and 80's. While this result in a per-minute charge for even local phone calls, it allowed for the neccessary infrastructure to be developed for the current broadband they have in use (Graphic of countries with top broadband usage). As the story points out they get over 3 million bits per second on transfer rates. My best connections are only around 400k bits per second and usually around 100k bits per second.