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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)."
That's nice.
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.
Does anyone have comparable statistics for Europe and the relevant parts of Asia?
In Romania UPC gives 20mbps for ~30$/mo ... and it is considered a developing country.
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My comcast connection just did 15.5 Mbit/s on the speedmatters test but it's just the result of comcast's traffic shaping policy. For a sustained transfer, the speed would be half that.
The study obviously wasn't that thorough. We have Fiber in utah that gives you 50 Mbps UP and down for $80/mo. It's a helluva lot cheaper and better than Verizon fios.
Mod me up, mod me down, do your worst you modding clown.
So far it seems that the fastest AND most affordable internet (combo) here in the states is available in the Cincinnati area (that I've personally seen). It's got 3 major cities within about 1.5 hours, one of the busiest airports in the mid-west (I'm still EST time zone), a few major train rails and highways 70,71 and 75 all very near by. This makes it a prime location for major companies, except that there aren't THAT many (proctor and gamble is here for example).
I mention this because there aren't too many nerdy types like me out here.. except that they set up the broadband out here to handle major *potential* commercial needs.
So here I sit paying $50 a month for "20 meg download" (which is literally about 2.4-2.5 megabytes per second at maxed connection). That's the upgraded package. Normally it's $40 for "10 meg download"... but 10$ more for double the connection? Easy choice for me! What is interesting is that my speeds actually can hit that through usenet / bittorrents.
Just curious, do these speeds at that low of a price exist anywhere else out there for that cheap? I've not yet heard of that elsewhere. I use Insight Broadband. Note: Internet speeds are great, but the commercials and customer service / "pay-by-internet" really really suck.
Three of the top five are among the smallest states in the Union by total land area. They are mostly densely populated, too.
Virginia has the extra bonus that it has suburbs of Washington, D.C. and several government installations. The Pentagon is actually not in D.C. (although its postal address says it is), but is in Arlington. The FBI and CIA are headquartered in the state. One of the largest USMC bases is there, along with the DEA and FBI training centers. There's a Federal Reserve Bank. Qimonda has a DRAM fab there, and Genworth Financial is headquartered in the state. Of course it has all kinds of telecom infrastructure.
I get about 756k in Miami for $10 a month. I could go faster I guess, but why bother? When I went from 2400 baud to 44k baud, that was really cool. When I went from 44k baud to cable modem, that was really cool. Any incremental increase after that is eh.
Want to know why we have slow broadband? GREED! Telco's have figured out we will all open our wallets at a certain speed and are trying to milk us for every penny without upgrading their infrastructure. Why don't you have 100mb fibre at your house? Because the Telco's want to spend that $60+ per month on ferrying around their CEO in a chartered jet rather than to provide the service your paying for. Its rather comical that the Cable companies and telco's are screaming about bandwidth when we have the most developed backbone network in the world. All of those high speed foreign connections are running into a smaller backbone than we have here in the USA yet the providers scaremonger that with HDTV the internet is going to melt down. Perhaps their profit centers might but the current backbone is more than capable.
I work at a large backbone internet provider and we have a vast untapped amount of dark fibre. Most of the bandwidth issues that you hear about from ISP's are artificially created. It's not because the bandwidth is not available its because the higher ups want to pressure their network engineers to squeeze every penny out of that connection.
Its about time people stood up and called shenanagans on the lies that ISP's spreading on the technical difficulties of dialing up better speeds. The only thing stopping them from providing you the speeds you pay for is GREED!
Good question, I've only had it a week, and my router only does 54Mbps anyway... I can get good quality streaming video (probably not MPAA approved) from South Korea though, and there is lots of streaming content (TV, VOD) available for an extra fee (kind of like cable in reverse).
What is that competition you are talking about? For last three years, I do not have any choice other than comcast for "high speed internet". And this is central NJ - probably the largest urban sprawl in the whole freaking world.
Here in rural (think Amish) PA we have 15 megabits from the local cable provider. Not sure how long it will last though as Comcast is trying to push into the area and take over.
From New York City, inside the "speed zone"
I was paying $50 for 3Mb DSL, which only negotiated at 1.7Mb on my router. The only other mainstream alternative was TimeWarner, who doesn't sell naked cable (i.e. you need their "extended basic" service for $45 before you can get Internet service), so I thought I was screwed.
However I was able to get Earthlink 8Mb for $75 with unlimited long distance and various other stuff.
I was worried the low speed negotiation that hampered Verizon would continue when I switched to Earthlink, but I get 750Kb downloads consistently, so that wasn't the case.
I have Earthlink's DNS crap and the slight double click on the phone when I first pick up, but other than that, the service has been stellar.
The difference for me was the response on some sites like Youtube and the ability to stream radio stations without interruption.
Let's face it broadband in the US is going to be intermittently crappy for our lifetime. It's in the hands of companies who don't give a hoot about anything but their own short term goals.
Any solution wherever you are will only temporarily solve the problem.
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In my particular area in Wisconsin with almost 100,000 people we almost all have Road Runner which is 8 megabits and we also actually get that speed in reality. Florida is also really big into Road Runner and they usually get speed increases first. I guess the northern Wisconsin dialup rural people went and ruined the average but I don't think we should count them lol.
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That's unfair.
New York City is a ROTTEN example.
I once worked in a dot com in a VERY old building. We had DSL, and SHOULD have gotten a very fast connection (this was for our servers AND employees, mind you) but it would randomly slow down to a halt. It was eventually discovered that the wiring within our offices was brand new, and the wiring to the building itself was brand new, BUT...
The wiring within the building was eighty years old and absolutely worthless! It shorted out all the time! It had to be ripped and replaced!
Now, we couldn't just do that because the landlord didn't give a shit and wasn't interested.
And we couldn't run a line down the outside of the building because again, the landlord wasn't having any of it and there were zoning issues.
Eventually, the situation was resolved but it took a LOT of bitching on our part and a threat to break the lease.
Now, this is just an example. Remember that New York City is 500 years old, and doesn't invest in its infrastructure as it should. It is also much denser and more crowded than Paris.
Most of the infrastructure is under the streets, and you can't block 'em off to work on it. Also it costs an ENORMOUS amount of money to fix anything down there. You've got to block off the street, rip it up, make sure you don't break anything or blow yourself up by cutting a natural gas line...
The "City that never sleeps" is basically fucked. It needs major updates, but can't actually DO them.
Did you know there are still water pipes down there made of WOOD? Literally, carved out of a tree, like telephone poles with holes in 'em! And clay? My brother in law works for Con Ed, you should HEAR some of the stuff he's told me... Like the utility tunnel whose walls were moving, and when he shined his light on them, millions of cockroaches and rats took off down the tunnel... Literally MILLIONS. Like a living carpet.
UGH UGH UGH. I'm so glad I don't live there anymore. No offense...
I think it's a pretty unique situation.