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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.
...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."
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
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.
but the most bizarre thing [at least for me, even though I'm not in the US], is that small towns, after asking the telco/cableco's to provide the town with higher-speed internet access and being told no [generally because of the relatively small population], when the town then plans to setup their own high-speed service, the very companies that told them "No, we can't be bothered", turn around 180 degree's and sue the town to stop the implementation [not that they would then provide the service if the lawsuit succeeds, but just to delay and/or prevent the town from providing the service].
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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
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!
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.
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.
"it's the rural areas where the real problems are, telcos are simply not motivated to do anything at all about it."
I agree, but can you blame them?
The telcos couldn't be blamed if they hadn't been given billions of dollars in subsidies to build out broadband, but they did get paid and didn't build out. So yes, they are to blame. They are also to blame when because they refuse to build out, even though they were paid to, they sue local governments for doing it themselves.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Two parts of Minnesota, but my primary, most recent experience with Comcast taking over TW-Roadrunner areas, was right here in downtown Minneapolis.
I went from more than a clean MB down to 800KB, with artificial 'boosts' to 1MB down. Under TW I was getting 1300-1400 KBs per second, at night, regularly, for entire files. But Comcast was a serious drop, yet they advertised as being an improvement, but really, the improvement was an artificial boost for the first 5 MB of a file, IF the bandwidth was available. So, what they were actually saying was: Your throughput will be lower than the "up to" number we advertise, but, once in a while, we'll come up with short bursts of speed, that approach the advertised max.
And, as Groucho once said, I don't care how you slice it, it's still baloney, to me."
Some people will be fine with that. And I know a few people, in other markets, (Waterford, CT, for one), who get very good sustained throughput on their Comcast accounts.
The whole 'Powerboost' hype is only when available, and only for the first part of a large file. The TCP window isn't even open long enough to take advantage of it, for normal web surfing because most web servers are specifically set up to NOT saturate every customer's line (which is reasonable, obviously), and, as well, most pages get served as repeated HTTP Requests for every little image, spacer, etc, so, again, no burst window of opportunity. I saw this discrepancy between advertised vs. real life behaviour, all the time, I kid you not.
I don't run Bit-Torrent or any P2P stuff, at all, ever. But I used to. And the presence or potential presence of 'bursts' is not cool for those type of transfers, either. I think part of the reason for that might be the huge 'gap' between download vs. upload width. It's not that hard, with good servers on the remote end (capable of saturating any, multi-tap requesting IP) to actually overwhelm the upload stream, locally, with ACK packets. And when the uploading ACKs fall off, all hell can break loose. That can get messy, and the workaround is usually to self-manage (throttle) the incoming stream, on the User's own end, by user choice.
I saw degradation of real-world use parameters, from the second day after the TW-to-Comcast changeover, here in Minneapolis. It was depressing, but you know we're all troopers out here, and we deal with the situation as is, rather than 'as-wished', or, certainly in Comcast's case, 'as advertised'.
They have a 150 or something dollar a month plan now, that is basically a set bandwidth, with the same artificial 'boost', or doubling of bandwidth, that runs on the same exact principle of irregular, when-available, artificial temporary boosts. It is advertised "Up to 50Mb. Caveat emptor, that's what I say.
There are a lot of co-factors, and, of course, my experience, even very accurately portrayed is only anecdotal. I saw the same issue after a TW-Comcast changeover down South. But again, there are others who would find the same situations tolerable, or even 'transparent' (as non-issues, in other words). But here in the Twin Cities I think it's a sad situation. I'm with Qwest, what can I say? As far as the issue of tech support goes, I never have trouble with ANY company's tech support people, because I see them as being people, like us, who don't need me to play I'm-smarter-than-you, or you're-ruining-my-life games,ever. On the rare occasions where I lose it, I go out of my way to apologize and explain. That, a little patience, and, of course, the ability to 'lower myself' and 'accept' reality, are very helpful in dealing with this stuff.