68% of US Broadband Connections Aren't Broadband

An anonymous reader writes "The FCC has published a new 87-page report titled 'Internet Access Services: Status as of December 31, 2009 (PDF).' The report explains that 68 percent of connections in the US advertised as 'broadband' can't really be considered as such because they fall below the agency's most recent minimum requirement: 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream. In other words, more than two-thirds of broadband Internet connections in the US aren't really broadband; over 90 million people in the US are using a substandard broadband service. To make matters worse, 58 percent of connections don't even reach downstream speeds above 3Mbps. The definition of broadband is constantly changing, and it's becoming clear that the US is having a hard time keeping up."

Comments

Meanwhile, in Japan

[Pikoro]

We have 1Gb fiber to the home. :)

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[commodore64_love]

HAAA!

First-off 99% of Japanese don't have fiber but have a variant of DSL with their overall national average being just ~20 Mbit/s. Second the reason 68% of Americans don't have broadband is because the FCC REDEFINED it. It used to be 256k was called "broadband" and now they redefined it as 4000k so tons of people (including me) suddenly are considered non-broadband even though we purchased Broadband lines (like DSL or cable).

It's basically 1984. Redefine the words and change the meaning. (shrug) :-)

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[MozeeToby]

So... if the only reason that Japan has higher average speeds that the US is because they're densely populated, we should be able to look at similarly densely populated portions of the US and see a similar average. Except, you know, we don't. What's the average broadband speed in the greater New York City area? I'd put lots of money on it being barely better than the national average.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[commodore64_love]

>>>Darn government interference!

You're funny, but Broadband DOES have a technical definition and it relates to *frequencies* not data rates. To say "broadband equals 4 megabit/s minimum" makes as little sense as saying I-95's Lane Width is 65 miles an hour. It is gobbledy-gook.

Perhaps if the FCC said "broadband equals 200 megahertz minimum" then they'd sound more intelligent, instead of like politicians with no tech skills.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[SETIGuy]

My parents in rural Wisconsin (pop density 8 per square mile [3 per square km]) have fiber to their home. But they get both their phone and internet from a telephone cooperative. Maybe a cooperative without profit motive has more impetus to keep their client-owners happy.

See what socialism gets you?

Out here in California, I'm paying over $50/mo for 6Mbps (burst) down, 1Mbps up. SBC doesn't seem to be in a hurry to run fiber. Comcast has a lock on the the place because SBC doesn't offer anything above 1M/128k in our neighborhood. Verizon won't come in because we're a working class area. Thank god for profit motive or I'd be surfing the web like my parents.

Broadband != Speed

[grahamm]

Not forgetting that Broadband indicates the technology used to deliver the data not the speed. So the opposite of Broadband is Baseband, not narrowband. So any ADSL is broadband but 1000BaseT is not.

Words have meanings

[DarkOx]

What they should call this is High Bandwidth, or High Speed Internet something along those lines. Broadband has nothing to do with speed or performance it implies symbols are used to send bits as opposed to baseband which would just be sending highs and lows to send the bits. Neither is a speed thing, I don't know why have to confuse and conflate technical terms in government and on tech sites were people should really know better.

US Carriers are not having a hard time.

[kurt555gs]

They have a monopoly and they just don't care. The FCC and FTC were so weakened by the Bush administration that our government can do nothing to help protect the citizens that elected them.

Corporatism at work!

Re:Keeping up with who?

[hairyfeet]

Well maybe the users by the cheapest because the ISP are gouging and you don't get a good ROI for your money? I know when I first moved to my area I first went to the "residential" cable followed by the "business" cable and promptly went back to residential. Why? Because after running speed tests as well as real world downloads I found their "business" line did nothing but that cheap "speedburst" trick and that is worthless for anything over 50MB. Other than that I still got between 1Mb and 2Mb.

So please don't say "he/she got what they paid for" because many of us get the choices of a shit sandwich or a shit burrito. My choices are $106 a month cable/TV/VoIP combo (they screw you hard if you don't take the combo and sign a contract, we are talking 1/3 higher price) with a lousy 36GB a month cap, paying another $75 to get my cap raised to 76GB for "business", going with AT&T $62 DSL which maxes out here at 200Kb and is on 50 year old lines which they have made clear they will NOT be upgrading, or $90 a month for WISP with a max speed of 300Kb and a cap of 25GB. Now tell me, where is the choice? Pretty much all of these "choices" are like deciding if you would like to be ass raped by the knobby strap-on or the notched one.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[cbope]

Exactly, stop making excuses. I am in Finland where the population density barely crosses the 1% mark, and we have great broadband and phone coverage over 98% of the country.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Ephemeriis]

Don't you have any provider in the US that doesn't block ports? I only grudingly accept that my ISP in Sweden blocks port 25, but I can understand their reasoning. If they would block 3389, 80, or any other port I would immediately switch providers, that's simply unacceptable.

Here in the US we've got a real problem with local monopolies.

If I lived just about a mile up the street I would have my pick of 3 different broadband providers, two of which are offering fiber to the house. But where I live the only option is Charter.

Well, that isn't strictly true... If I wanted to spend a couple hundred dollars in hardware, cut down a tree or two, and mount another dish to my roof I could get satellite Internet... But that isn't really an improvement. They also filter/block ports.

I tried to get a "business" connection out to my house a couple years back... But Charter didn't want to support that kind of connection at my address.

Re:That MAN analogy is also accurate in other ways

[symbolset]

In Grant County Washington population density is 32 per square mile. They have gigabit fiber to the home at reasonable rates through the PUD. A common complaint is that they can tell which servers and regions on the Internet are on slow links by their local performance. We should all have such problems.