Slashdot Mirror
East Coast Broadband Fastest In USA
Death Metal Maniac writes "The study, which was conducted by affordable-broadband advocacy group Speed Matters, found that the nine states with the fastest median download connections are all located on the East Coast. Rhode Island (6.8Mbps) and Delaware (6.7Mbps) have the fastest, and nearly triple the national median download speed of 2.3Mbps. Rounding out the Top 5 states are New Jersey (5.8Mbps), Virginia (5Mbps) and Massachusetts (4.6Mbps)."
I live on the East Coast (of Japan) and have a 100Mbps-rated optical fibre connection. Though the fastest I've got out of it is a piddling 87Mbps.
Muahaha.
Meanwhile, as of last week, we STILL cannot buy FIOS in Philadelphia. No matter how much I want to give Verizon my money, they just won't take it.
That's because FIOS requires major infrastructure upgrades on the part of Verizon. But they are working on it. It just may be a while till they get to your neighborhood.
Up here in NH (One of the many states nobody cares about, apparently), I got a flyer from my new local provider called Fairpoint.
There was a big controversy over fairpoint buying out NH, Vermont, and Maine, because fairpoint clearly didn't have the resources to roll out fiber optics, and verizon had "plans" to, (apparently not).
Anyway, I got a flyer from them announcing faster-than-ever 7.1 mbps downloads. Of course, in Boston, Comcast offers 16 mbps, but hey, this was still a nice move from my current verizon dsl at 3 mbps.
So I called them up and asked how to get started. They did some checking on things, and told me it wasn't available in my area. I was confused. Did they not have my address when they sent me the flyer? I begged them to take money from me, I just want some speed, please! But alas, We live in the USA. In internet terms, we're third world.
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
They are all flawed in that they don't take your subscription into account.
It depends who's using the list. If I'm designing web pages, I want to know what people in my target demographic HAVE, not what they can get. If it's a penis size competition, then I question the study's usefulness. Besides, we have the Olympics for that - and China has the biggest gold dick. Though the US has true melting pot of total dicks.
Interestingly, all of these states are densely populated. From Wikipedia:
Rhode Island ranked 2
Delaware ranked 6
New Jersey ranked 1
Virginia ranked 14
Massachusetts ranked 3
The only think close to an outlier there is Virginia, which is still densely populated over near Washington - which would actually be number 1 if it were a state.
I guess if I lived in number 4 Connecticut or number 5 Maryland, I'd want to know what was up!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Two years ago, when I lived in Paris, I got 20Mbit. Now I live in New York and get more like 4Mbit.
Yep, the world's richest country is years behind in technology infrastructure..
In french urban areas, the standard ADSL is 24Mb/s ATM (8 to 18Mb/s real TCP BW) for 29 to 39E/Mo (with unlimited phone and taxes included), but in a few major cities, 100Mb/s cable is being deployed and sold for the same price.
That's not traffic shaping, that's "Powerboost". They are giving you 2-3x your subscribed speed for the first 15 seconds of download.
Boston was supposedly the first metro area they rolled out FiOS, and while almost every suburb has it around here their urban penetration has been exactly ZERO.
While Slashdotters are often more interested in FiOS internet service, it's cable television services which call the shots. To offer cable in a locality, Verizon must first obtain a license from the city or town. As of now, the City of Boston has not granted them a license. Looking at the City's website, I don't see any evidence that Verizon has applied for a license either.
Maybe you should call them to see where the licensing procedure stands?
I'm paying $25 for 12mbps in Tennessee.
I have an 8Mbps/1Mbps ADSL connection to the Internet here in Paris.
My friends make fun of me. Most have got 18Mbps to 100Mpbs connections. At least one of my friends has got multiple connections.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Germany, town of 5000 residents
DSL 16 MBit/s down, 1 MBit/s up, 35 euros (currently about 52$) (includes phone calls to national landlines and unlimited internet traffic)
on bad phone lines it's slower, but these are 30% of all lines in this town (my home town)
town nearby, same size
Cable TV, 32 MBit/s down, 2,5 MBit/s up, 45 euros (includes phone calls to national landlines and unlimited internet traffic)
cable tv is not as easily available as in the US.
Cologne (rolling out); Hamburg, Munich (testing)
fiber optics, as good as 100 MBit/s down, 10MBit/s up starting, starting from 35 euros per month
Comcast has been horrific for me. Their customer service is terrible, their software for their DVRs is awful (even their own techs say it), and they engage in all sorts of shady underhanded stuff like forging reset packets, throttling high usage customers (who are within the bandwidth limits they ALREADY paid for).
Overall they've just been a terrible company to have to deal with.
I believe a major part of the problem with Fios in bigger cities is the fiber itself. Last year, Corning announced development of a bendable fiber, which will help the installation in multi-family homes. Not having ever had any experience as a fiber installer, I don't know if this is BS or not, but it seems Verizon is now making plans to penetrate the bigger cities.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
Cox
Arkansas
$45 for 9mbps
$60 for 12mbps
http://www.cox.com/gocox/HighSpeedInternet/
Arizona
$45 for 12mbps
$60 for 20
http://www.cox.com/arizona/hsi.asp
Santa Barbara
$50 for 5mbps
$65 for 12mbps
http://www.cox.com/santabarbara/highspeedinternet/packages.asp
Idaho
$42 to $56 for
7 mbps to 12 mbps
http://www.cox.com/idaho/highspeedinternet/pricing.asp
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
I've worked on embedded systems projects that have used fiber internally as a communications buffer. If a short piece is bent, it breaks and needs to be replaced. And fiber costs more than the normal stuff used for passing messages back and forth... so the bend-and-break (or stretch-and-break) factor is real.
Support the 30 Hour Work Week!!!
call fios, get them to turn on the ethernet jack at the ONT, and run your own router instead of the piece of crap actiontec router they give you. then just do port redirects. also check out noip.com
Yeah. Seems this report isn't based on what's available, it's based on what people actually have. So therefore, in the northeast, where people tend to be more well off, on average, that people would have faster internet connections, on average. You can probably get 10 mbps plus in any major city in the United States.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The problem isn't greed. The problem is that most city governments sell exclusive franchises to ISPs, giving the ISP a local monopoly in exchange for providing access to everybody in town. Since no other ISPs can offer internet service in that market, there's no need to spend money upgrading or lowering prices to compete. They upgrade when (if) the franchise says they have to upgrade.
Maybe not
If I could get unlimited broadband I would need unlimited disk too. I'd have me a local cache of Wikipedia.
Heh. Actually, those are starting to appear, though probably not with all of wikipedia. It seems that one of the things the OLPC gang is doing is providing local caches of good-sized chunks of wikipedia, whatever their "field consultants" (local teachers) feel might be of interest to their kids and is available in the local language. Someone mentioned a 350MB Spanish subset, compressed to about 100MB. Of course, it would typically be installed on the local central server, to make it quickly available to all the kids. It seems that specialized single-language caches like that are now quite practical, even in the major languages with lots of wikipedia articles. And my immediate thought was that some of the local adults might well like to have a somewhat larger wikipedia cache, including most of the technical stuff in their language.
Of course, one of the challenges the OLPC project has is finding good translators for their core UI stuff, as well as for their extracts from wikipedia. Do you know anyone fluent in Quechua or Aymara who might like to volunteer?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
15 countries have faster rates then the USA; the link is below.
In Japan they have had 100 MB up and downstream (yes that is 100 MB / 100 MB) for over 3 years now. OH yes, they pay $22 per month for 100 MB / 100 MB.
We could have had it here if the government would have done here in the USA what Japan did to NTT. I am not normally for government intervention, however when businesses refuse to invest in their infrastructure and the consumer has NO OTHER OPTIONS, then I am all for government intervening. Nothing else will work.
LOL, they took down the Washington Post article, July 29, 2008 by Blaine Harden; someone must not have liked that they were advertising that Comcast, Time Warner and other USA ISPs suck... Yo
Check this link out:
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0711/
Congress failed Americans by not passing the 1996 telecommunications law. That was the USA's equivalent of what Japan got in June 2003.
The next big battle: Net Neutrality; check the wording carefully, chances are if Comcast and Time Warner are for it, it is anti consumer....read, understand and let your politicians know how you feel.