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

Stupid benchmark.

[JustNiz]

>>> "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.

Re:Stupid benchmark.

[antifoidulus]

Yeah, and I would rather actually have access that actually goes at a decent speed and not have to worry that my neighboors are sucking up all the bandwidth. I live in Germany right now, and unless I get online early in the morning or late at night, I pretty much have 0 bandwidth. I have to fucking cache youtube videos because some asshat upstream wants to hog all the bandwidth. I say bring on the caps!

Re:Stupid benchmark.

[MightyYar]

Silence! All other country's have superior internet connection's to the one's in the US.

BwaHAHA:

[Ethanol-fueled]

From TFS:

"...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.

Re:cities are ok

[davester666]

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].

Welcome to Australia

[Chris Pimlott]

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!

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.