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Why Broadband In North America Is Not That Slow
An anonymous reader writes "The Globe & Mail has an article written in response to a recent study done by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard about how far behind the rest of the world the US and Canada are with regard to broadband internet. The refutation basically tears apart Harvard's analysis and shows why the US and Canada are actually far ahead of most European countries. 'Canada has a true broadband penetration rate of close to 70 per cent of households. And North Americans use the Internet somewhat more intensively than do Europeans, according to Cisco Systems data on Internet traffic. Further, business Internet traffic in North America appears to be at levels substantially higher than elsewhere in the world. Sadly, there is little systematic effort by international agencies to measure the intensity of Internet usage. Instead, we see comparisons of advertised speeds and "price per advertised megabit," which are especially misleading. Advertised broadband speeds vary from actual speeds. In North America, this is largely a result of "network overhead," and is quite modest. In Europe, however, the variation is often dramatic.'"
I have 40Mbit/s with no caps for $60USD/month. I live in a small town about an hour north of tampa, in florida. My ISP is Brighthouse networks/roadrunner.
I can personally say that you do. Of course I won't be getting that 1Gb/s from most http sites especially if they're in the US, just because they either don't have the bandwidth, are limiting per user or that you just can't deliver that fast from other countries - but the bandwidth is still available and will work 99% of the time to its full extend, provided you have the hardware capability. Now you don't really need that fast yet, but that's an another matter and will change over time.
Also, we have quite strict laws regarding advertising. What you describe wouldn't cut it.
Europe isn't just one country. Perhaps you don't see complaints from Portugal because we can hardly ever stay online long enough to post them? ;)
Your story sounds just like my typical interaction with my ISP... Except I have to do that about every six months - I've probably had trouble about fifteen times by now. They, Portugal Telecom, the former state-run company which has a monopoly on telecommunications in many areas of the country and owns one of the only two DSL infrastructures - never, EVER fix *anything* at *all* unless it's 100% broken, and even so you have to be lucky. You absolutely cannot get in touch with them - Their support staff is trained to slowly feed lies to the customer that stretch the amount of time he's supposed to be waiting gradually from 3 days up to 1 month; After 1 month they silently close the ticket. Phone calls to this support cost about a meal each and it is only open during work hours on weekdays. The only tool their support seems to be allowed to use for fixing problems is to chop the customer's allotted bandwidth in half (over and over) until the connection becomes stable; This does not result in a lower monthly bill.
When my phone line breaks, which coincidentally is the case just as I am writing this, I usually these days just go outside with a ladder and spend a few hours to make fresh cuts and mend the connection myself; If this doesn't solve things, I try different modems and routers or even buy new equipment; Ultimately, if there is nothing else I can do, I beg a few people I am fortunate to know (ex-university-colleagues and such) that happen to work in the company so they can pull a few strings and directly breathe down the necks of the actual technicians, who are one hundred percent isolated from the normal customer and do not seem to have to account for whatever the hell they spend their time doing. This was the *only* way in which I could get one of the many company-side problems with my line fixed in the past five years.
I have no idea of how the average customer deals with them without having a heart attack; From what I hear, the company is almost universally hated and other people do have trouble with them too - From shady business practices, litigiousness against their customers, paid service that is not provided, etc. For example, my own satellite TV service (provided by the same monopolistic company) has signal interruptions about every two minutes and the crappy receiver crashes whenever the TV is turned off and must go through the painfully slow booting process again. My neighbor's internet line also stopped working, but after months of being unable to do anything about it he simply told them to go to hell and set up his entire home with USB wireless modems that patch into the cell phone network provider, Vodafone, which is a perfectly good ISP; Unfortunately, this kind of service is too expensive for me to afford...
I wish I had service like in north america.