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High-Speed Broadband Making Headway In the US
darthcamaro writes "No, the US isn't the fastest nation on Earth, and it's not the most connected. But according to a new report, it sure is getting a whole lot better lately. 'I think the US growth rate is something we expected,' David Belson, Akamai's director of market intelligence and author of the report, told InternetNews.com. 'If you look at the money being spent to build out the fiber to the home infrastructure, and if you look at the competitive deals that are going on, vendors are trying hard to make it affordable and "outspeed" each other.'"
>>> "vendors are trying hard to make it affordable and "outspeed" each other"
Yeah...by introducing limits on customers usage of bandwidth and the most popular protocols. This is NOT a net win (pun intended) for end-users. I'd rather have slower link with unrestricted access than have a theoretically faster link that I can't use to do what I want.
"...and if you look at the competitive deals that are going on, vendors are trying hard to make it affordable and "outspeed" each other."
As opposed to, uh, slapping each other on the back while they fix prices and swallow up any hope of independent providers and actual competition while they stretch their already-inadequate infrastructure to a taffy-like consistency as they arbitrarily mess with their own traffic, routing it through mysterious big boxes that read, "NSA SEKRIT BOX -- DON'T TOUCH" after they force their customers to sign EULA's which read like some Kafka-esque road to nothing(except certain death).
And their commercials suck, too.
I live in Utah.
I can choose Comcast (6Mbs) or Qwest (who the fuck knows, slower then comcast). If my town signed up for Utopia I could get good speed but Farmington has decided to not join in. It's been this way since I got high speed back in like 1999. All this lovely stuff for like 55 bucks a month. No new vendors, no break in price, nothing but high prices and poor customer service.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
it's the rural areas where the real problems are, telcos are simply not motivated to do anything at all about it.
In the cities you can usually choose between several broadband providers, in the sticks you're lucky if you have one.
If not then it's good old dial up or isdn for you.
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...but not here. We can choose Clearwire, Verizon or Time-Warner. Time-Warner keeps inching up peak rates, currently 8Mbps downstream, but average throughput is a lot lower. Clearwire and Verizon aren't even in the running speed-wise.
FIOS isn't even on the drawing board yet.
Don't get me wrong, 8MBps peak is better than the 3Mbps peak we had when we signed up, which is better than the 768Mbps we got from Verizon DSL, which is better than the 56K we got from a local dialup. But when I look at what we bring down the pipe now vs. then, well, the load is way outpacing the capacity.
I wonder if these reports will start taking into account usage caps employed by some ISPs. After all, what would be the point of upgrading from a 5 Mbps line to a hypothetical 500 Mbps line if your ISP caps your usage to the same number of GB in both cases? It would LOOK like ISPs are offering faster speeds, but you wouldn't be able to use that faster line to do more than you could with the slower line.
Respect the laws of physics, for the laws of physics have no respect for you.
They need to stop working on getting people with high speed internet faster internet, and work on getting people that only get dialup high speed internet.
"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they AREN'T after you."
From the article:
Despite such efforts, the country still sits sixth on Akamai's list of the most widely broadband-enabled counties, with only 26 percent of U.S. Internet connections having been clocked at speeds of 5Mb/sec or greater. South Korea continues to hold the top spot with 64 percent of its Internet user's connection at speeds of 5 Mb/sec or greater.
Given the nature of the market, I don't think we'll see 60 to 70 percent high-speed broadband penetration in the U.S. for quite some time," he added.
So speeds are going up in areas that have service but fast service still isn't widely available. And only 26% of what's out there now is faster than 5MB/sec.
Belson noted that California came in 21st in the nation, with its 7 percent growth rate over first quarter having been outpaced by other states' growing broadband infrastructures. In Akamai's last report, California ranked 17th.
Slicon Valley is still pretty much only ATT DSL or Comcast Cable.
I haven't seen much in the way of vendors are trying to outspeed each other. Verizon did recently just lay down some fiber where my parents live (in virginia) but speed has been stagnating since I remember first getting cable internet sometime in 1999, maybe verizon may spearhead the switch to fiber and increased speeds.
Vendors may be increasing areas of coverage slowly but I'd say gaining customers is their priority, not upgrading networks. Lack of competition may be the source of this stagnation since only 4 names come to mind when I think broadband: Time-Warner, Comcast, Cox, and Verizon FIoS. Who else is rolling out fiber?
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
that the ISPs are finally using those billions of tax-payer dollars to do what they were supposed to?
Do you think you're alone? I'm sure most of the customers are unhappy as well. High prices. Bad service. No choice. So if there is such a high demand for better service, why doesn't your current service provide it? There's no incentive. You all keep paying for it. If you all chose to go on strike, they'd listen up. But if you go on strike, you lose the service, which is not the best solution. So what's the other possibility for incentive? Competition. If there was another company providing similar service, your existing company would want to keep your service, and persuade people from the other company to switch to their services. The only way they can persuade customers is through trade to mutual benefit. You get your money's worth, and they get your money. Right now, that is not happening.
So what is preventing competition from existing? What is stopping someone from springing up to start a local alternative to their crappy service? Or, what is stopping an existing large company that provides a similar service from expanding to provide this service that you and so many others demand? See my subject for the answer.
Weird, I guess it's not broken. It's kind of ironic that the thread I wrote out (and for some reason didn't post) was lamenting the fact that our speeds and connections are still woefully behind the potential.
:)
Oh well, I guess I'll chock that mispost up to a network error
Akamai found that U.S. broadband connections -- defined as connections at 5 megabits per second (Mb/sec) or faster
I wonder how fast baseband is?
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
...to FIOS from Comcast and have been thoroughly enjoying the 15mb download speeds. Pretty much everything I do now on the net is blazing fast whether it's downloading large video files or playing games. Plus there's bandwidth for TV as well since I use FIOS for that too.
I couldn't be any happier.
It's funny, I was discussing this earlier on the drive to work. We both live in a rural area and commute into an urban environment, and experience the pains and joys that both bring.
We both basically reached the same conclusion -- The United States, she is a big place. It's always going to be easier to wire up a thousand people living within a few blocks of each other than that same thousand living within a few miles.
If we really intend to catch up, we need to take a cue from cellular networks and increase the emphasis, availability, efficiency, and cost of satellite internet.
It's basically a matter of a high tech, potentially high-cost solution, or a low-tech, lower-cost band-aid that only treats the screaming wound -- the large urban environments. We have 300+ million people living in this country, and even our biggest city, New York, has only around 8-10 million of that encapsulated. We are a big suburban / rural society still, albeit a lot of times by choice now, and having a large, open-air data network is going to be more key to us than trying to cover each and every house in the U.S. with optical fiber.
As long as you don't read the fine print, anyway.
I've looked at the offers available here, and the funny thing is that they pretty much permanently lock in the duopoly.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
This is like the "most improved player" trophy that little leagues award to kids that used to stink, but now don't create too much trouble for their teams.
Many areas of the US can not get broadband. (ISDN and T1 are not broadband - it's not 1993 anymore). I live in a fairly middle-class neighborhood in the North East, and I have a choice of ONE broadband provider. That's right, my local cable co.
DSL - too far away. FIOS - it's always 6 months away. Satellite ok, I can get that, but $50 a month for 512k down and 128k up sucks. I don't consider that broadband.
Broadband in MOST of the US is still pathetic - slow and expensive.
-ted
What crackhead thinks that 50 bucks a month is affordable? That's for the bare minimum "broadband" access via cable or DSL. Higher speeds approach a hundred bucks a month and they always bundle tv, phone, and other crap you don't need together with the internet.
I'd like some Slashdotters' feedback on the following problem:
I live in an area of Northern New England where most people don't have broadband. It's somewhat rural, but certainly not 'very rural'. There are maybe 12-15 homes per linear mile in most areas. The ILEC was, until recently, Verizon.
The main issue was that Verizon is a big public company with a huge market. Yet, it necessarily has limited resources. It's not that running DSL up a residential road would be unprofitable, it's that for the n dollars it would cost, they could spend that same n dollars in Jersey City and get a better return on investment. You can't blame them for seeking that return. For this reason they continue to upgrade and invest in their dense plant and do nothing in their sparse plant. When they still owned the area, an engineer told me their plan went to 2014 and our county wasn't on the plan.
Now, since then Fairpoint has taken ownership of the plant. They want to sell voice and data, sure, but they also want to sell video service over DSL, which is where the real money is (for now anyway). So, they're sending trucks around, surveying lines and poles, figuring out the fastest way to get DSL in. Their logistics make Northern New England look like a huge market, where Verizon saw it as a distraction. They're even finding CO's where Verizon installed DSLAM's 3 years ago but never offered service, simply because they couldn't be bothered. Some people are getting lit up the next business day after calling. This is very positive, we're lucky the plant was sold.
However, for any sized market, there's still a long-tail where people aren't going to be profitable enough to serve. We had Rural Electrification in 1936 which is largely parallel because both served/would-serve to improve total overall economic efficiency. There are also PUC's which can force changes (in theory), and towns can bond for their own fiber plants. However, Government is always the easy 'big stick', but it would be nicer, more sustainable, and more peaceful, if there was a creative third-way. Besides that, the US Federal Government already charged us all for FTTH and it never materialized. So it's not just violent, it's dysfunctional. And the municipal fiber projects are very slow to meet market need, and seemingly often have management and funding problems.
So, I'm asking folks here for great 'third-way' ideas. I've come up empty, but there are lots of clever thinkers in these parts.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Sometimes, the comedy just writes itself.
Going down ....
Does this mean that someday soon, I may see speeds in excess of 768K/384K [1] to my very own home? You know, what AT&T calls "High Speed Internet?" Oh, frabjous joy!
1. Actual speeds based on DSL synch rate, may vary, and are not guaranteed. Many factors affect speed. Service and speed not available in all areas.
That's not fair off from the situation in Australia, where bandwidth caps are the norm. It's possible to get an ADSL2+ plan where you could exceed the monthly download cap in less than 5 minutes!
Pfft, he's OBVIOUSLY biased. Where are Akamai's headquarters located? Cambridge, Massachusetts. And where is that? I rest my case.
FIOS - it's always 6 months away.
Yeah? If that's true, you sure are lucky. FIOS has been "6 months away" for a few years now where I live.
The best way to increase the available bandwidth is to run more trunk lines and increase the number of connections between individual switching stations. The goal should be that every U.S. city with a population of 100,000 or more should eventually have a direct trunk to every other such U.S. city. Such a direct connection will reduce the number of hops, but more importantly, there will be that many additional "lanes" of traffic to get the data where it needs to go.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
Is that per capita? Square miles covered as a percentage of the country's total size? I have more subjective issues with bandwidth and access reliability when traveling in the London/Cambridge, Paris, Taiwan and Ireland than I do at my Grandmother's cabin out in BFE, Alabama, or just about any other hotel I've stayed at recently in the US. Not being combative, just curious where this study is that I can reference when I see this "most connected" phrase thrown out.
Sure I use to have my house fully connected with cable. I loved it. Six years ago I decided to move to the country. Having the belief system that America was great when it came to internet connectivity I just assumed that where ever I moved I could plug into high speed internet. Not the case, in rural Florida. In fact, I am paying $130+ a month for business internet services via Hughes.net. While waiting for a page to load I was able to load my cloths in the wash, collect the mail, feed my horse and brush my teeth. This is business class folks! The chance of any other competing service entering the market here is null. So while the city folks are enjoying there cheap access and complaining about their bandwidth, I am blowing at clouds to go away and being held hostage by the mafiosoâ(TM)s of the internet world.
My big telco keeps bugging me to get rid of my DSL ($19/month for life plus a landline so about $41/month total I need to landline til Feb for my analog 2000-era TiVo). My rabbit ears are working fine for all the major networks since I am near a major city. Look forward to converter box for digital over the air, too.
I would love to go to fibre after they open the network so that other ISPs can sell data services and only honest competition is what keeps prices low.
Can you believe some dummies are shelling out $104/month for STARTERS for basic fibre cable TV + internet when you can get TV for free over the air here (lots more choices with the converter box for over the air, too) and internet for less than half that?
Without competition, I see telco starting to charge fibre disconnect/reconnect charges to discourage people from flipping back to the cable tv vendor for price.
The phone company doesn't offer any guarantee on price for fibre beyond basic bait-and-switch after you are wired up they intend to up the charges forever just like my original cable was $6.95/month in 1986 stayed until when I left in 2005 it had inflated to $90/month with no change in content.
So they have restricted their really nice broadband in the city and will only offer higher connection speeds with a business plan.
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
The way I see it, broadband in America is a very dynamic game of chess.
Urban centers almost always get the best Internet connections first but are generally tied down to one or two ISPs available in the area. Those two usually compete for customers by increasing services but in some markets they both stagnate. Since local governments emulate each other in the US they are slowly starting to experiment and switch to what works but only the Federal or state level can really do what must be done to get rural customers some real broadband.
The problem is the cost of wiring up a single home. In the city it's easy because you have to invest much less money on equipment per person living in a certain area. But in Urban areas the cost of wiring up a home could be upwards of thousands of dollars and the broadband companies are not very likely to go into those markets. The State or Federal government should subsidize this cost by taxing Internet connections across the board. It would only add about 1-2 dollars per connection but allow the government to put more money into infrastructure.
Why bother?
Well it's becoming increasingly clear that the Internet increases education and wealth in areas where it's penetration is deep. The investment in Internet infrastructure therefore becomes an "across-the-board" investment in the health, education, and wealth of the country and it's citizens which pays back in the years to come as increased tax revenue due to higher productivity.
Don't tax my Internet man!
This might be the argument coming from the community in general and probably also the Republic/Libertarian view point as "less government". While I respect this view point in many areas I don't believe it's warranted here. The extreme of this view point generally hold that the Government should do nothing but keep the peace, protect the Borders, and deliver the mail. Unfortunatly this idea is preposterous in this day and age. America only become a super power by making investments in the common good. You can't say "we are the greatest and will always be the greatest" with a straight face if you're not willing to invest in this common good. The parallels are obvious: Tax on oil for roads & highways, inventing the Internet, discovering nuclear fusion, landing on the moon, the marshal plan, the new deal.
Indeed it's laughable the amount of money spent on the LHC when we spend that daily in Iraq.
I live in Edmonton, AB, Canada. Our real only choice is to use the cable provided internet service from Shaw.ca. They have a service which claims to double your download speed. This uses software to temporarily increase your bandwidth from anything from 10 to 20 seconds, and barely makes any difference to a download. Unless you are willing to spend $93.00 a month for increased bandwidth, which is nonsense considering that all speeds depend on the server and hops and remote latency. Check out the services at http://www.shaw.ca/en-ca/ProductsServices/Internet/Nitro/ I'm outraged that the service that I used to pay $40.00/month now costs over $50.00, and my current service for the same price has dropped to less than dsl speeds - as a current customer I am not qualified to receive any of the 'free' or 'discounted' services and to upgrade my service I have to buy the modem that they are giving away.
Some people are only alive because it's against the law for me to hunt them down and kill them.
That's... exactly what he was saying. Thus "always" 6 months away.
Yup, sorry. That's what I get for reading too quickly.
I don't think the adverage American user will notice the difference with a 10MB down line or a 2MB down line. Truth of the matter is, theya re at the mercy of latency, and how quickly data can be sent back and forth.
I had a 5MB down connection that I just changed to a 1.5MB. Why? Because unless I'm torrenting or downloading, I won't notice the difference surfing a web page or playing a video game.
Most people don't even torrent or download much. Your everyday American typically cares about a few web pages like Ebay or Amazon, their bank account and that's about it.
I think (Like another poster said) we need to worry about getting hi-speed internet into areas that have dial-up.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
I am sure that there will continue to be newer faster services. However, when AT&T raised my DSL price this year, it was the first time ever that my price for internet service went up without the service itself improving. In fact, over a period of 15 years (1993-early 2008), usually the price went down AND the service got faster and more reliable.
Those times have ended. It was pretty disappointing to get that bill with the price hike the day after seeing AT&T's profits reported as having gone up significantly. Of course, there is a relationship between the two...I expect that with the sellout of the governmental regulatory agencies, we will continue to see more advanced service, and that people will be forced to pay far more, just as they already do with cable TV.
Same story here, only one street in my neighbourhood had such a bad cable signal they could not even get a broadband connection going. I was just getting ready to extend a helping hand with a wifi booster and directional antenna, but then the cable company finally dragged a cable through a wetlands preserve and across a neighbours back yard just to get a decent signal to the last 1/4 mile on that street. The signal and transfer speeds still suck, but at least they are connected! It only took the 'whole community' to threaten and complain to the cable company, just get that much, so I wonder what it would take to get a real 'high speed' connection all the way way out there, all but a 1000 ft from the local city limit. Ok cable co, I can even yell that far, why can't you get a decent broadband signal there?
My Qwest FTTN became available at least 3-4 months ago. I upgraded from 1.5 to 12mbps. It required a new modem which Qwest gave me free of charge, a Motorola 3347 with built in wireless. I opted not to go with 20mbps because I doubt I'll need it for the time being. Nice to know it's waiting and ready too.
Not sure about the caps, but I'm not a hog anyway. We use it for 2 vpn connections to work. No issues whatsoever.
Bundling is nice. Qwest now has what I consider best in class services. Qwest for landline/LD, Verizon for wireless phone, DirecTV for TV. Why wouldn't I want to bundle and save? And they don't raise prices every 6 months like Comcast does.
FIOS - it's always 6 months away.
Yeah? If that's true, you sure are lucky. FIOS has been "6 months away" for a few years now where I live.
Seriously. Here in tech-savvy wealthy Silicon Valley, FIOS won't come here in my LIFETIME, and I'm under 30 years of age. There is a small outfit called Paxio that does FTTP (and even offer gigabit up and down), but they only seem to be in new Pulte Home Developments, that's it.
Still 10 to 20 times more expensive than nations like Japan and South Korea and even Canada.
Um, better? Maybe.
Good?
No.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
we will soon have real "unlimited" high speed Internet?
So I'm guessing by your tone that you don't have personal access to the internet. Don't want ANYONE to disturb your principles.
"Who else is rolling out fiber?"
Quaker Oats.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
My ISP must be in with those creating Duke Nuke Em, there's no FIOS near my neighborhood.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Comcast installed their sandvine traffic shaping shit so they can cook the books.
When you visit a site that comcast knows is monitoring, they open up with their powerboost shit. On speedtest.net I rarely get below 70Mbps. A lot of the time, I get above 100Mbit.
When I'm using the internet for real, I just don't see anything even remotely that fast.
They're using their grammar skills there.
The town I live in does something similar with electricity: they run and maintain the powerlines and buy the cheapest power at the moment from a number of different sources (with x% being from renewable sources). If power is expensive from everywhere, they fire up their own powerplant (coal, ugh) and generate the electricity themselves. The rates are good, the grid is well maintained, it all works pretty well.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
"If someone can "hog all the bandwidth", that is a sign of a badly managed network."
Or a sign of users who don't understand what "shared resource" means.
"Ensuring that each user gets their fair share without artifically limiting the whole network is one of the main responsibilities of an ISP."
"Fair share" is right up there with "unlimited" as the most abused words in a discussion about broadband.
If life was fair, then people wouldn't be leaving their P2P connections running full-tilt 24/7 and giving everyone else affected the middle-finger.
"Ten years ago I could have understood it, but with todays technology it should no problem ensuring that each user gets their fair share."
Good thing US schools are teaching a healthy dose of economics right along side their technology courses.
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
At least yours is planned. Colorado isn't even under consideration. Gotta be east or west coast, apparently. We hicks in the middle of the country apparently ain't good enough for it.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Japan is still light years ahead of us. Why? No incentive for US Telecoms to upgrade the infrastructure. Instead of quality/speed improvements, we get locked into contracts. You want broadband and you face the veritable monopolies like Comcast, Cox, or Verizon. I'll be willing to bet that in Japan, unlimited broadband is really unlimited and that they do not port block. Heck, the only reason for port blocking is so that US Telecoms can make more money by requiring a business tier connection. The stated reason for port blocking is spam control. Come on, spam control could be done at the server level. I thought unlimited means just that .... unlimited. Well, maybe with a change in presidential administrations will come change in the telecom industry. Then again, maybe not.
How, with all the throttling, bandwidth limitations, and over selling can you consider it making headway?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Most customers moving off dial up are happy with doing a bit of email, browsing, youtubing and getting a few podcasts. In that case most of them really just want to have their phone line back. You can easily satisfy those customers with low GB caps.
Of course many of these people will slowly get into more bandwidth heavy usage and their wants will change. That might take a few years though.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Broadband will only increase in speed, capacity and availability as also does the corresponding abilities for "them" to surveil, record and data-mine the traffic also makes enough headway to stay ahead of the broadband deployment to the masses.
I live in the boonies so I won't see it anytime soon.
Stupidity... has a habit of getting its way.
How bad is Comcast compared to that? I looked on their webpages, and they seem to have some decent business offerings on paper..good speed offerings....and I'm assuming no port blocks and servers are ok and static ip...but, I can't see pricing.
I have this running to a home...for home office...is this a problem with Comcast?
Anyone have experience with Comcast for a business connection? If so, can you please give some info on pricing, uptime, service...etc?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
If this fiber-to-the-home growth is based on the FiOS way, then it's really nothing more than an increment above cable TV.
DSL over twisted-pair is a private bandwidth all the way to the central office. There, it is possible to terminate at different providers (even if that termination has to be all or nothing with the same provider).
The cable TV model, however, is shared bandwidth. Although it uses coax with more bandwidth than twisted-pair can deliver, and you can get some significant speeds, you only get it all when others are not using it. When everyone else is using it, you only get a fraction of the promised burst speeds.
FiOS uses the cable TV model. Users share the bandwidth. All the homes in a group are multiplexed into a single bit stream. While this does give an improvement over existing cable TV service (the TV spectrum is on a different optical wavelength than the data), it is still a limiting factor.
And the FiOS model makes it much harder to have competition improve on the type of service provided.
In the future, perhaps as soon as 10 years from now, we'll be wanting TV not from the 500 or so channels FiOS and services like it can offer, but from the millions of "channels" anyone can provide over the internet. But we might not get this with a single provider system that the cable TV model locks us into.
Today we are looking at high definition TV at 1920 x 1080 interlaced at 50 or 60 frames per second. In 10 to 20 years, we'll be seeing ultra definition TV at 5120 x 2160 (cinema aspect, 64:27) progressive at 100 or 120 frames per second. You won't get that over the air. That's over 20 times the needed bandwidth (although it is likely to compress a little better). We'll need at least 200 mbps to deliver such programming.
What I propose is a whole new scheme for data service delivery (DSD) is what I call fiber from provider to customer (FFPTC or just FPC). In this scheme, the fiber (actually a bundle of at least 4 fibers) runs all the way between a home and the central office building. The customer can select which content service provider (CSP) and the fiber terminates into their equipment. Between this provider and this customer over that fiber, they can do all they want. That could be as much as 10 gbps or more.
To do this, there needs to be a clear separation between the delivery and the content. Maybe one company can have both roles, but it really needs to be at minimum separate corporate entities. An alternative would be a government or contracted entity providing this service.
Cost is a huge factor in the improvement of data based services. And most of that cost will initially be in laying the fiber everywhere. This requires very long term returns on investment to really do it right. Businesses that were in it for long term returns would not be doing the risky innovations we still need to provide new kinds of future services. And besides, businesses don't even want to be in the long term returns model. They want fast short term windfall-like growth and profits.
Either we will pay by having a lousy non-competitive system like cable TV and FiOS which cannot sustain the future demands just 10 or 20 years away, or we will over the long term for a system that can serve our needs for the next 100 years or more, includes the content provider competition we need, and drives new economic growth through innovation.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Two choices: intermittent 5M/.5M service with Charter (so full of suck they make Verizon look kind) and Verizon 3M/.8M (really 2M with drops every few seconds so youtube videos start and stop). Nothing has changed in the last five years.
There's little excuse for not having at least 10M/2M by now except greed over capital upgrades. Also cities asleep at the switch concerning franchise agreements.
Well, they initially sent me a bum cable modem, which I was rather ticked about--and then their tech didn't show up to replace it. After enthusistically complaining I ended up with a chunk taken out of my next bill.
Like the parent I live in the Twin Cities and get cable access through Comcast though it was Time Warner when I signed up. Before the switch I was having trouble with my connection and called my ISP, who uses TWC's cable. The tech walked me through some tests then said the cable modem was bad and needed to be replaced. So he set up a tyme slot for another tech to bring it over. The tech showed up and installed the new modem but there was something wrong with the cable and he had to run a new cable from the junction or whatever on the telephone pole. A couple of hours after he showed up I had a faster connection than I did before, without having to pay for anything above my service.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
if you can't live with the cap, get a business account - no caps. Yes, it costs more, but if you need the bandwidth you should pay for it instead of making MY rates higher to cover the 0.5% of the people that use 95% of the bandwidth.
If the providers didn't have the capacity then they shouldn't have sold an "unlimited" service. And that's on top of receiving billions in subsidies.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
given the state of US politics, can you even imagine the outcry if our government tried to implement such a system?
The US already has a place like that. Broadband Utopia in northeastern Utah is a broadband infrastructure owned by the communities, cities and villages, in the region. Though government owns it they let anyone to connect and offer services the infrastructure is able to deliver, including cable tv, net access, and phone service. They are planning on offering speeds of 100Mbps.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Until we outlaw companies like Time Warner Cable in Charlotte (for example) from not allowing competitors into the area - the sucky service will continue. They CALL this broadband but we're lucky if we get what we pay for. Maybe at 2-3 AM when even the college kids are fast drunk asleep and their P2P bullshit has dwindled. TWC sucks and everyone knows they allow the P2P crap to go on.
Why would any intellligent person expect the same services in a rural area vs. an urban one?
To quote LongNoi "QZTR was right and won't leave me alone because I called him a moron when I was wrong" FYS
Way less than half the service.
Yeah, quite the bargain...
To quote LongNoi "QZTR was right and won't leave me alone because I called him a moron when I was wrong" FYS
Please show me where I can find that in the places you mentioned.
I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but 4 bucks isn't much and 2 bucks is virtually nothing, so I'm skeptical to say the least.
And let's avoid fudging, kay? Close is ok (10/2 or something) but no bullshit comparisons, please.
To quote LongNoi "QZTR was right and won't leave me alone because I called him a moron when I was wrong" FYS
I would have added that qualifier before I made such a dubious claim, instead of after having that claim challenged like you did.
TBH, I think we both know that "10 to 20 times" claim was bullshit.
But let's double it. Can you find anything at 4 to 8 bucks instead of 2 to four?
To quote LongNoi "QZTR was right and won't leave me alone because I called him a moron when I was wrong" FYS
Yeah, and interestingly the "rate limiting" Comcast was doing was ultimately a lot more fair than the caps they're now forced to impose on residential customers.
There is nothing fair about Comcast selling unlimited access then limiting that access. Nor is there anything fair in receiving billions of taxpayer money to build out broadband but not doing it.
Thankfully, I have a commercial account with them. No caps. Works for me.
While I didn't sign up with Comcast my ISP uses Comcast's cable, my access bill is also on my cable TV bill. When I first signed up Time Warner owned the cable. I thought about upgrading my plan as I'd like to run my own server. That was the only limitation on the plan I signed up for, I couldn't run a server. However for the web space they offer as part of the plan they are now allowing some things like database access, perl, and php, they didn't before.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?