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.'"

Comments

Re:Stupid benchmark.

[ohtani]

I've been on road runner for some time and it seems to have a decent speed and not have a bandwidth limit based on protocol.

I'm aware some companies are doing this, but some companies != all companies.

Last mile

[chihowa]

The last mile may be a natural monopoly, but it doesn't have to be maintained by a single corporation. The last mile could easily be "owned" by the municipality and internet access could be handled by any number of ISPs who simply tap into the muni network. This would allow fair competition between huge national and small mom-and-pop ISPs. Charge a per-customer charge to the ISP for maintenance of the network (so that people don't whine that they're paying for the network but not using it, though the initial roll-out will be paid for by everybody). If your local government isn't corrupt and wasteful (this is actually possible, by the way), then the last mile net will be upgraded occasionally, unlike the one we have now.

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.