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

[pecosdave]

Bet the streaming tenticle porn is great!

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[robthebloke]

It's not a fiber. It's a series of tubes.....

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[muntis]

Latvia is still lagging behind with miserable 500Mbps

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Oasiz]

I have a pathetic 200Mbps connection :(
One ISP in Finland is starting to roll 1000/100Mbps though, It will cost like close to 100e per month.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Calydor]

Oh, so that's why all homes in California have 1GB fiber straight to the door, right?

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

Shh don't bring logic into this

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[muindaur]

...and absolutely unecesary for most people.

I have a 50Mbs connection and have no problems streaming anything or loading webpages. I'm conent. To upgrade the speed in this rural area the costs would be really high, and cause interuptions. After the upgrade was complete I would be paying more for the connection. This is a capitalist country and it's completely unfair to expect a company to upgrade the lines, if 99% of it's customers are happy with their speed, and still charge the same rates. My cost would go up for more bandwidth that I'm not using.

One thing I am doing is downgrading my connection speed to save $15 a month from $45.

Those of you in countries that have really high taxes so the government can do the upgrades can have you 1Gb connection. I'll keep my taxes low, and my internet costs low(charity works as some teens died and the funerary expenses were raised to help the families in a couple of days in this terrible economy.)

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[alen]

and how fast is the speed past your ISP? how fast can you access data around the world?

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Chrisq]

Congratulations, you successfully managed to ignore population density.

Area per head or area per unit mass? It makes a big difference when comparing America and Japan.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Aqualung812]

Congratulations, you successfully managed to ignore population density.

Right! That's why LA, Chicago, and New York have 1gb fiber to the homes! Oh, wait...

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Helios1182]

Finland: 40 people per square mile
California: 234 people per square mile

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[chrb]

If population density were really the only issue, then you'd be able to get Japanese-style broadband to the home in every U.S. city that has a population density equal to or greater than that of Japan (337 residents per square kilometer, 873 per square mile). NYC has a population density of 27532 residents per square mile, so average broadband there should be much better than the Japanese national average, no?

U.S. cities by population density
Nations by population density

South Korea = 1,261 people per square mile. So by the reckoning that population density is the significant factor, most U.S. metropolitan areas should have better broadband than South Korea.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[TrisexualPuppy]

It's not a fiber. It's a series of tubes.....

In Japan, it might as well be a MAN. You have densely-packed cities, a small land area, and a fairly homogeneous, tech-savvy society that takes the mandates for the latest and greatest technologies regardless of whether they are practical there or feasible elsewhere. Practical or feasible in the US? Not really, 1mbps is plenty BROADBAND for me. I have something like 15mbps, but that's 15 times excessive for what I need.

Not to justify the Bells for stealing fiber infrastructure upgrade subsidies ten or so years ago in the States (Hello, Congress???), but FTTH at faster rates than my LAN is pointless when existing media are already pushing excessive speeds.

At 15mbps, I an stream HD videos and download porn torrents while maintaining a 10ms ping on my favorite Crysis server all day long.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[LordLimecat]

Is that every home, or just some?

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[DJRumpy]

The arguments about population are both relevant and irrelevant to different aspects of the argument. If you have 100 square miles to cover with broadband access, the total cost of the infrastructure is relatively cheap. On the other hand, the return on revenue is much steeper as it will take longer to make money off of that infrastructure with a relatively low population density.

On the flip side, if you have a 1000 square miles of territory to lay lines for, the initial cost of the infrastructure is much higher to build out, but the return on investment is much quicker since you have a much larger user base to get a return on investment.

To make matters more difficult, the US has basically locked out competition in this market, making it impossible for a startup to lay new lines due to contracts local municipalities have with telecom companies have with providers. Hell, even the cities themselves can't lay new lines without being sued by the same providers.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Vectormatic]

bah

and meanwhile here in holland i end up settling for 16 mbit ADSL, because i just moved into a region where due to the regional cable monopolies i have to pay out the nose for 32 mbit (or 16 mbit for twice the price of the same ADSL), whereas at my old adres, i had 80 mbit for less...

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[commodore64_love]

Cute but not factual.

California doesn't have 1 Gbit/sec fiber to all homes, but neither does Japan. 99% of the homes are DSL and the overall average speed is just ~5 Mbit/s faster than california's average. (according to speedtest.net)

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Albanach]

No, you miss the point. Let's compare population density.

Tokyo: 5,937 /km^2

New York: 10,194 /km^2

So, obviously New York residents will have 1GB fiber to the door?

KDDI offer the 1GB connection and telephone service for jsut under 6000 Yen, or about $70US per month.

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

[Dorkmaster Flek]

One could argue that labelling 256k "broadband" was a joke to begin with, and thus you never had broadband in the first place.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Chowderbags]

So the real question is why American broadband was redefined to a low number like 4 Mbit/s? Shouldn't we be reaching higher? Oh wait, we'd see that maybe 1% of our population actually reaches 20 Mbit/s and might actually want to do something about it (like make the telecom companies actually build instead of sitting on fat local monopolies).

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[interkin3tic]

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) :-)

I know! My dell circa 1995 was "cutting edge!" Now just a of a decade-and-a-half later, it's been downgraded to "Wait, is that YOUR computer or your grandmother's?" status? It's just not right them changing the standards! Darn government interference!

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[GameboyRMH]

Yeah I was talking with some Latvian guys on Skype one time, they showed me some funny Latvian website with a picture of a guy wearing a toilet like a hat, saying "oh yeah this is the hot fashion here" and joking that Korkey Buchek's Bing Bong Bing was the hit song in all the clubs, I was LMFAO'ing XD

Then later they said they were streaming a soccer game, live, in HD, to their computers 8-O

I said "Wow, you have that kind of bandwidth!?"

Now they were genuinely offended. "Of course, you think Latvia is some kind of backwards shithole country?"

Then I explained that I was genuinely surprised because I didn't have anywhere near that kind of bandwitdth. They have 3G and 4G wireless too.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh I dunno, the US population is pretty dense.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[GameboyRMH]

Note: Was talking with both Latvian and Lithuanian guys, don't remember who said they were streaming a live HD soccer game.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[saleenS281]

The FCC redefined it because the way our connections get used has changed. In 1990, there was no youtube, and 256k was a pretty damn decent connection. In 2010, when people want to stream Netflix in HD over the internet, 256k is about as useful as a dial-up modem. Queue it up on Monday so you can watch it on Friday!

It's why I get sick of people trying to say a certain amount of bandwidth "is enough". It's "enough" for the technology we have today. It is NOT "enough" for the technology of tomorrow. If you build it, people will find a way to take advantage of it.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[pctainto]

So do we in the US, although Chattanooga, TN is the only place to have it, as far as I know.

https://epbfi.com/you-pick/

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Jeremy Erwin]

My guess is that has to do with internet TV, though netflix recommends 5 mb/s for hd. It only really has to be indistinguishable from a 15-20 MPEG2 stream for the FCC to start making plans to reclaim spectrum from the television broadcasters.

Still, the FCC lowballed their last reccomendation-- at the time 256 kbs was below the requirements for "decent" internet video.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[IICV]

You have densely-packed cities, a small land area, and a fairly homogeneous, tech-savvy society that takes the mandates for the latest and greatest technologies regardless of whether they are practical there or feasible elsewhere.

Which explains why major US cities and technology centers like New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Seattle and other such places have average Internet connection speeds equivalent to Japan's, right?

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Jeremy Erwin]

Not everyone lives in Lapland.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[BrokenHalo]

256K is not broadband, it's fraudband.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Tuan121]

Way to miss the point entirely.

The comparison was because the topic is "68% of US Broadband Connections Aren't Broadband". A response from someone saying that in Japan they have X but the US doesn't have Y doesn't take into account the massive size of the US vs Japan. Thus, takes nothing into account in terms of infrastructure. If Japan has this awesome broadband, that's great. But it's pretty easy to do relative to all of the US broadband providers.

And of course California isn't connected like Japan. When did I ever imply it is? It was used as a relative size comparison. Just look at the population density, it doesn't make sense that it would have the same.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[icebraining]

Incredible, I know! And more, bloodletting is not considered a treatment for "hysteria" anymore! And since when ads featuring conjugal abuse stopped being hip?

Words definitions change as conditions change, and in fact, "broadband" was a relative term to begin with. 256kb was OK three years ago, when websites were much lighter and Youtube used showed videos in 320x240.
Yes, it may be more than enough for you, but that doesn't mean it isn't slow, just like a Smart is enough for many people but it's not a fast car.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[icebraining]

At 15mbps, I an stream HD videos and download porn torrents while maintaining a 10ms ping on my favorite Crysis server all day long.

And that's why 15mbps is considered broadband, which 68% of US citizens don't have.

1mbps is enough for basic use, like dial-up was enough for many when cable and ADSL appeared, but it's not enough for many uses, like those you cited, especially if there are more than one user sharing the same connection (remember that we have gone from 1 PC per household to multiple laptops, consoles and tablets).

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Sancho]

Definitions like this sort of necessarily change. Or else we have to do some crazy things like calling new speeds "high speed broadband" or "ultrabroadband."

Realistically, broadband should probably be indexed against some percentage of the mean data rates to homes. And that's probably what they're doing--not some orwellian scheme to make you doublethink.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[muntis]

4G is in early testing in some towns, but for youtube HSDPA is good enough.

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

[Sancho]

Neat. You get 50mbps for $45/mo.

That same $45/mo gets me 3mbps. It's enough to stream OR do something else, but not really both.

I'm all for raising the standard of broadband.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[vlueboy]

I agree, especially about streaming and HD.
Used to be that 240p and 360 were standards. With 480p and HD starting a few years ago, it felt like uploaders and youtube are DoS'ing my machine on purpose for an arguable increase of quality. Yes, visually "bigger" is good for your eyes, but at some point after 240p all of us with 768k/128k downstream are *killed* by the buffering. Streaming and files like linux ISO's made me spend a few more bucks to the next tier at 3M/768k.

I called a friend in the Caribbean and was ashamed for him that 256k was even offered --prices were high there. Makes me feel sorry for zombified home machines sucking all the speed out of people's sub 1Mb internet. I am glad the US is redifining our crap. Back in 2005 or so I was surprised and demoralized by the report "50% of US now on broadband" because that opened the door for webmasters to get bolder with bandwidth-wasting designs. I'm glad that the number has been scaled back to 32%, but doubt those numbers will scale back the sites --they will just hold for longer before upping their flash and Megapixel-images-per-page guidelines.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[number11]

In Japan... You have densely-packed cities, a small land area, and a fairly homogeneous, tech-savvy society... Practical or feasible in the US? Not really, 1mbps is plenty BROADBAND for me. I have something like 15mbps, but that's 15 times excessive for what I need...
FTTH at faster rates than my LAN is pointless.

While it's true that FTTH that's faster than your LAN is pointless, most of us have LANs that are faster than 1Mbps (most LANs these days are 100Mbps). Maybe it's time to upgrade that token ring hardware.

The population density argument is BS, if you're using national population density but looking at city dwellers. If population density was the key, the US would be ubiquitous 100Mbps in our cities. True, if you live in the boondocks your speed might be slow, but I'd bet that if you live in a rural area in the mountains of Japan, your speed isn't great either.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[commodore64_love]

>>>One could argue that labelling 256k "broadband" was a joke to begin with

Not really. At the time of that definition, most people had Narrowband modems of 14k or 28k. So 256k was considered damn fast. In fact it was twice as fast as the fastest tech available (IDSN) for home users.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Hythlodaeus]

IMO, "broadband" is "better than a POTS analog modem"

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[m6ack]

What interests me is not the percentage of people that have broadband (by whatever definition). I'm more curious about median cost per unit bandwidth. Also, I get sick of people trying to say what is enough for others -- and set "minimum standards" for others.

My mom and dad, at their place, use the internet still for email & an occasional youtube video. They wouldn't know what to do with 4MB if they had it. I on the other hand, at my place, have just /started/ Netflix streaming over the net, and it runs just fine on my DSL connection... Not HD, but still just fine for now, and I'm happy with what I have for what I pay for bandwidth. If I want to see something in truly high definition, I get it shipped to me on Blue-Ray.

And if I need more, I'll PAY for it. I may switch from DSL to something of a higher rate... I just don't want to spend $80 right now for it. I'll wait until it comes down more -- until the market decides that it should be cheaper.

So, when more mom and pops discover Netflix streaming, the price will come down, and we'll all have better bandwidth for low price. And that's what I want to see... Bandwidth price curves... How do we compare with other nations here?

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[commodore64_love]

>>>to a low number like 4 Mbit/s?

LOW? I have 0.7 and it's more than enough to watch streaming video on hulu.com and other sites (which was not possible with dialup). Even if I, my wife, and two kids were all watching videos at the same time in separate rooms, all we'd need is 0.7*4= ~3 Mbit/s.

So why would I need more? Realistically you don't unless you're being greedy (i.e. I don't need an Acura to get to work - a Honda is good enough).

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Lifyre]

And Japan as a WHOLE has 10.5 times the population density of the United States and almost 4 times the density of California. He was talking about California not New York and Tokyo.

You're making the point as to why the situation in the US is unacceptable but it has nothing to do with comment about homes in California having 1GB fiber.

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

[EastCoastSurfer]

Dunno, I live near a big city and just checked my internet (I'm wireless to my router so that may limit my speed a bit).

21.17 Mb/s down
3.65 Mb/s up

That's with 2 computers both VPNed into work plus whatever other network services I run.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Corbets]

In 1990, there was no youtube, and 256k was a pretty damn decent connection.

You weren't around in 1990, were you? A 256k then went pretty far beyond decent!

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Rhywden]

That definition would not make much sense either. Optical fiber comes to mind. You don't need multiple frequencies for that one to be the equivalent/superior to the bandwidth of the old definition of broadband.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[danomac]

Realistically you don't unless you're being greedy (i.e. I don't need an Acura to get to work - a Honda is good enough).

Not a good analogy, an Acura IS a Honda. For some strange reason North America didn't carry over normal naming. Toyota and Lexus are the same, as are Nissan and Infiniti. Everywhere else in the world the NSX is known as the Honda NSX.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[noidentity]

Broadband doesn't mean "faster than what I currently have". It refers to the portion of the frequency spectrum (bandwidth) used.

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.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[scot4875]

You mean like how the term "Broadband" was redefined the first time to mean a high bitrate, rather than the type of signal that the wire carries?

Would you feel better if they had called it "high speed" and defined it as 256k, and 10 years later redefined "high speed" to mean 4Mbps?

--Jeremy

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[cayenne8]

"Yeah, but mark my words, 4 or 5 mb/s is enough. What could require more BW than streaming high-def video? It's enough. Really, it's enough."

Perhaps Wonka-Vision ??

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[quacking duck]

This isn't like redefining a megabyte to mean a different amount of storage. Certain descriptive terms should be updated as technology progresses. The desktop or even mini-tower "computer" for instance would've been referred to as a micro-computer in the late 70s or early 80s (to distinguish from the computers (servers), or mini-computer workstations).

Perhaps it should've been more clearly labeled, e.g. this is "broadband 2.0" or "broadband 2008", but when a 3G phone is able to pull down data at 5 or 6 Mbps, calling 256k "broadband" is misleading.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[stdarg]

You might need more but we're talking about a society-wide definition of broadband. I don't think it's defined by what is needed so much as what is possible and what others (as in other countries) are doing.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Maxo-Texas]

If they are watching video, they have the potential to need it with very little warning. I have low tech friends who went to bluray + netflix before I did.

You go from 0 to 120 in 2 seconds the instant you start watching heavy netflix.

I'm not sure if the local providers can buffer netflix for multiple users either. (Anyone know if they can?)

It's an obvious improvement for any popular movie to keep copies buffered in various internet spots so it's not all coming from netflix every time.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Ultra64]

Enough for what?

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[lenzm]

The point is that American companies can't keep up with what broadband is.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Jeremy Erwin]

Maybe the problem is just that the american ISPs are cheap?

Quite possibly.

I apologize for offending your province, though perhaps you should take up issues of orthography with Wikipedia

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[coaxial]

Congratulations, you've ignored the fact that populations aren't uniformily distributed.

Tell me this. Why does network speeds still suck in Manhattan?

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[witwerg]

+1 Finally

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[haruchai]

That's not 1984; that's called progress. Remember when 28.8 modems were the new hotness? When I got my first DSL connection, over 10 years ago, I was amazed that I could have that kind of connectivity at home. Now, at a bit over twice the speed, it's still great for e-mail and basic surfing but only adequate for everything else.
  The point is, "broadband" is a moving target and that target SHOULD be moving upwards.

Think of it this way - if the gov't had a definition for BigHardDisk that was based on the largest available drive in 1999; a not-so-tech-savvy consumer buys one now, then tries to copy all the erm, 1080p tasteful videos that his buddies have. How far do you think he'd get? Wouldn't he feel cheated?
As we do more online, transfer speeds MUST get faster; either we continually redefine "broadband" or we come up with new terms every time.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Chowderbags]

VHS quality is 2 Mb/s. DVD quality video is 8 Mb/s. HDTV is 27 Mb/s. I don't know about you, but I'd like to be able to stream 1080p to my computer at some point reasonable soon (well, I am lucky enough to have FiOS).

You may not want to put the pedal to the metal all the time, but when you do, do you want to spend time waiting for your car to respond?

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[skarphace]

The point is, "broadband" is a moving target and that target SHOULD be moving upwards.

bzzt, wrong. 'Broadband' is a technical term that does not change in meaning. "[Broadband is] a term used to describe a network that can transmit a wide range of signals, including audio and video. Broadband networks are especially useful in the Networked World, as they can carry many signals at once, resulting in faster data transmission"

Think of it this way - if the gov't had a definition for BigHardDisk that was based on the largest available drive in 1999; a not-so-tech-savvy consumer buys one now, then tries to copy all the erm, 1080p tasteful videos that his buddies have.

No. A better analogy would be if the government had a term of 'BigPipe'. That is a relative term that is subject to interperitation.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[thetoadwarrior]

Anyone who thinks 256k is broadband is living in a dream world.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[thoromyr]

I know, you're just using terms you don't understand, but... talk about redefining words, coining new terms and double speak/think: modems *are* broadband in the original meaning so when you say "at the time of that definition" "Narrowband" did *not* apply to modems in any technical way. I've never heard them called narrowband before your post.

Amusing. Just so you know, broadband *used* to mean something like "responding to or operating at a wide band of frequencies" or "a signal that contains energy over a broad range of the frequency spectrum". Then marketing decided to call asynchronous DSL "broadband" and the meaning started changing.

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

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[thetoadwarrior]

It's still bullshit because someone brought this up ages ago when there was a topic on Sweden (might have been Norway) improving their broadband and actually their density and population were lower.

Sweden - 9,302,123
New York - 19,541,453

There the whole of the US isn't Kansas. There are densely populated areas and they're broadband is still generally shit. So we should drop the Japan argument, while it may be true, there are European countries providing better broadband and they're not necessarily more densely populated, have high populations, etc, etc.

Americans can keep telling them whatever they want to make themselves feel better about their lack of broadband but the only reason it is the way it is will be because the companies do better by fucking you up the butt rather than providing good service. That is also why your mobile phone market is too expensive and rubbish.

Unfortunately I think some people enjoy this because they can then feel special because they have something (broadband) that most people don't have and therefore opt not to push for their nation's infrastructure to improve.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[evilWurst]

The answer is that *local* population density is not the only issue. You have to not only connect some people to each other, but also connect the people to the content. In South Korea, half the population and all the content are already in the greater Seoul metro area. In Japan, 20% of the population are in the greater Tokyo metro area. When you have a natural hub like that, there's an obvious incremental strategy; wire the core, then gradually plug in more outlying areas. Each step of the plan links more people to the total body of content. Many of the smaller European countries have some of the same plans - though they are not as densely packed, all the native language content is in the same smallish area.

In the US, the major cities are individually fairly small fractions of the total population (New York City is the biggest at 6-7%); you'd have to not only wire them up, but connect them all to each other. Otherwise you've got a blazing fast connection to your neighbor but dialup-like speed to the server on the other side of the country. And they're not close together at all; they're spread all along thousands of miles of coastline and chunks of the interior.

And, as far as I know, that's how it was - eventually - done. The higher density areas were done sooner and hooked into a very large backbone network. And that's why it's taking so long. To *really* connect the most English-speakers to the most English language content, it also has to be tightly linked in to Canada and the UK.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[thetoadwarrior]

No, but they wish they did so they could be kick it with Santa Claus.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[noidentity]

This whole thing is basically like this: Back in the 1990s, a say 200 MHz computer was fast. So when people saw 200 MHz, they thought "fast". Now, a 200 MHz computer isn't fast, but they want to believe that one advertised at that speed is fast, so they think they can get a really good deal on a fast computer. So they complain that it's false advertising, that this 200 MHz computer isn't fast, and had the FCC redefine 200 MHz to mean a modern fast computer. Of course if you actually incorporated terms like fast, then you'd end up with the USB situation, where you have low speed, full speed, high speed (shouldn't full speed be the highest possible?), and SuperSpeed (what next, SuperUltraSpeed, ReallySuperSpeed?).

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[haruchai]

Okay, let's look at that definition.

Hmm, it all seems to hinge on "wide" and "many".
What are the technical definitions of those terms?

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[commodore64_love]

>>>I know, you're just using terms you don't understand

Amazing then that I have 2 college degrees in electrical & general engineering. Wonder how I could have done that if I didn't understand the meaning of the technical words? Hmmm. Answer: Because you're wrong.
.

>>>I've never heard them called narrowband before your post.

I can't help you lived in a cave. 14k and 28k modems on phonelines were considered "narrowband" because they were only 4 kHz wide. That's even more narrow than an AM station (10) or FM station (200) or TV station (6000 kHz) or DSL (100,000 kHz and up). Nobody would have ever called those old phoneline modems as "broadband".

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[aztracker1]

I've thought they should apply a marketing standard to lower than suggested... If you connection is 10mbits, they can only market as "Low Speed Internet" or "Dial up" no other marketing terms allowed that have text larger than those two terms. That would encourage investment in the infrastructure. As it is, they don't even have to market it as "Broadband", they can use terms like "High Speed", "Really High Speed" or "Ludacris Speed" for that matter. It they had a minimum requirement to use anything other than those base terms, that would do it... as it is, marketing can work around it.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[commodore64_love]

>>>VHS quality is 2 Mb/s. DVD quality video is 8 Mb/s. HDTV is 27 Mb/s

Not even close. VHS is analog and not comparable. Mass-produced DVDs average just 3-4 Mbit/s. And US-HDTV averages just 10 Mbit/s. It's even lower for cable and satellite HD channels - more like 8.

PLUS since all those use old MPEG2 codecs, the bitrate is about twice what it needs to be. The modern MPEG4 codecs used on the web can do the same quality at only half those rates (2 and 5 Mb/s for dvd and hd). While having high-def is nice, I don't think it's necessary to define that as the "minimum" standard for all americans, even the poor. Watching the Kardashians in HD is not a necessity.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[commodore64_love]

>>>Optical fiber comes to mind. You don't need multiple frequencies for that one to be the equivalent/superior to the bandwidth of the old definition of broadband.

Wow.
I don't think I've ever seen such a dumb statement on this "news for nerds" site. Frequencies are frequencies. The medium (fiber or coax or twisted pair) is irrelevant. If your optical fiber is confined to 100 kHz (bad glass maybe) then it won't be any faster than a standard 100 kHz DSL line (twisted pair).

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[commodore64_love]

The point he was making:

If you're happy with 750k (me) or 3000k (him) why should the government call us "deprived" or "poor"? Worse: The FCC is planning to spend billions of OUR dollars to upgrade us to faster speeds (4000 minimum). Except neither I nor the other poster want that tax burden - we're happy the way we are. It's annoying to have politicians forcing us to spend money we don't want to spend. And yes that is their goal (read the Obama/FCC Broadband Plan.)

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[commodore64_love]

Yes I know they are the same.

The point is that I don't have to buy a $35-40,000 Acura when a $15-20,000 Honda will do the same job (get me to work). Likewise the typical mid or lower-income family doesn't need a 100 Mbit/s line when 4 Mbit/s is enough. There's no reason for the FCC to make the minimum standard higher then 4.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[DA-MAN]

bzzt, wrong. 'Broadband' is a technical term that does not change in meaning. "[Broadband is] a term used to describe a network that can transmit a wide range of signals, including audio and video. Broadband networks are especially useful in the Networked World, as they can carry many signals at once, resulting in faster data transmission"

Words get new meanings over time. Organic has been supplanted to mean something other than "life". Get with it, because as much as I hate organic it is here to stay. So is broadband as a synonym for "big pipe"...

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Darinbob]

But how do you fix it? You can't just magically make DSL be a magnitude faster, and that's the only option (other than dial up) for quite a large number of people. Things like cable or u-verse require you to get the TV service with them and are very expensive. For most homes you can have DSL outlets in every room of the home, but only one output in the entire house for cable (or go with wireless and have your neighbors try to crack in). I would like faster internet, but I can not get it.

Many people still use dial up because that's what is affordable. DSL is next up. Having $100/month service is ridiculous.

One solution I think is to have internet carriers separate from television signal carriers. Much like how AT&T phone service was broken up, and people could lease the lines to provide their own service. So someone could lease Comcast cable lines and provide a better service at lower cost.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[haruchai]

I hear you about "organic". I used the term way back among friends, one of whom is a geologist.
His comment was "So, everyone who isn't 'organic' is farming rocks?"

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Maxo-Texas]

Actually, this is one of the governments proper purposes. To be wise and lead.

Just as they "force" us to wear seatbelts (and save a lot of lives while irritating many) and "force" us to pay higher prices for food, they are going to "force" us to pay higher prices for internet... but hopefully it will maintain our productivity advantage over the rest of the world and preserve our pay levels.

And a lot of people will bitch about it (including many who will benefit from it).

Personally- I agree with the other poster that they already paid for this upgrade and the Telco companies stole the money.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[saleenS281]

You setup co-ops to run fiber to every home, just like we had/have co-ops to run electricity to every home.

The government owns and maintains the "last mile", and third-parties can lease the lines. This will create true-competition, and remove the monopoly protections.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Anonymous Psychopath]

We have 1Gb fiber to the home. :)

It's a bit easier to physically install cable infrastructure in country slightly smaller than California.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[dgatwood]

And I'm smack in the middle of the silicon valley, and my only choices are DSL, U-Verse, or wireless. The wireless costs a small fortune for lousy service. With DSL, the best I can get is 3 Mbit down, 768 kbit up. With the U-verse service, as I understand it, I lose my ability to ever go back to DSL if it doesn't work correctly, which is simply too big a risk. (If I could get U-Verse on the dry second pair, I'd be all over that.) That's pretty sad.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[endymion.nz]

No, the point is that if you have a choice between a 35-40k acura and a 15-20k honda, you are comparing two different car models. A 35-40k acura is just a 35-40k honda with an acura badge.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Lawbeefaroni]

What? Japan isn't a city, nor is South Korea. For a fair comparison you'd need to compare Tokyo or Seoul to NYC. Or all of the US to all of Japan.

Lies, damned lies, and comparing apples to oranges.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[mysidia]

Not really. At the time of that definition, most people had Narrowband modems of 14k or 28k. So 256k was considered damn fast. In fact it was twice as fast as the fastest tech available (IDSN) for home users.

"broad" used like they use it is a relative term, suggestive that "broad" is not "narrow". Relative terms lack staying power -- broad today narrow tomorrow.

It is unfortunate that we have settled for such relative terms. You'd think by now the industry could have settled on some sort of logarithmic scale to tell users "Grade 3 internet service" meaning it meets some minimal characteristics that people care about. For example... peak downstream of at least 2^3 megabits per second; peak upstream of at least ((1.9)^3)^(1/2) - 1^(1/2) megabits per second, and "burst in available throughput available temporarily or during periods of low congestion" not allowed to count for more than 33% of that.

And "Grade 4 internet service" would have at least 2^4 megabits per second down, ((1.9)^4)^(1/2) - 1^(1/2) mbps up. "Grade 4+ Internet with 10% downstream boost" would be a lot meaningful than "Broadband internet"

This is the problem with the term "broadband" in being relative... it's no more specific naming the technology "fast data network connection" (FDNC) - 1990s that would be 64 - 128K full duplex.

• "fast data internet connection" (FDIC) - 1990s that would be 128K - 256K down 64K or better up
• "very fast network connection" (VFNC) - 1990s that would be 257K - 512K down 128K+ or better up
• "super fast home/total internet connection" (SFTIC/SFHIC) - 1990s that would be 1.544mbps down 256K or better up
• "high throughput internet connection" (HTIC) - 3.08mbps+ down 512K or better up
• "very high throughput internet connection (VHTIC) - 6.16mbps+ down, 1mbps or better up
• "super high throughput internet connection" (SHTIC) - 12.32mbps+. 2mbps or better up
• "extreme throughput internet connection" (XTIC) - 24.32mbps+. 4mbps or better up
• "very extreme throughput internet connection" (VXTIC) - 44.736mbps+ full duplex
• "super very extreme throughput internet connection" (SVXTIC) - 149.76mbps+ down, 80mbps or better up
• "ultra extreme throughput home internet connection" (UXTHIC) - 601.344mbps+ down, 300mbps or better up
• "ultra wideband home internet connection" (UWHUC) - 1202mbps+ down, 1000mbps or better up
• "ultra extreme wideband home internet connection" (UXWHUC) - 2400mbps+ down, 2000mbps or better up
• "super ultra extreme wideband home internet connection (SUXWHUC) - 4800mbps+ down, 4000mbps or better up
• "ultra super extreme ultra super extreme home internet connection" (USXUEHIC) - 9600mbps+ down, 8000mbps or better up
• "otherworldly super ultra home internet connection" (OSUHIC) - 19200mbps+ down, 16000mbps or better up
• "super otherworldly super ultra home internet connection" (SOSUHIC) - 38400mbps+ down, 3200mbps or better up
• "ultra otherworldly super ultra home internet connection" (UOSUHIC) - 76800mbps+ down, 6400mbps or better up
• "very ultra otherworldly super ultra home internet connection" (VUOSUHIC) - 150gbps+ down, 12.5gbps or better up
• "ultra ultra otherworldly super ultra home internet connection" (UUOSUHIC) - 300gbps+ down, 25gbps or better up
• "very ultra ultra otherworldly super ultra home internet connection" (VUOSUHIC) - 600gbps+ down, 50gbps or better up
• "extreme ultra ultra otherworldly super ultra home internet connection" (XUOSUHIC) - 1.2tbps+ down, 100gbps or better up
• "cool home internet connection" (CHIC) - 24tbps+ down, 4tbps or better up
• "very cool home internet connection" (VCHIC) - 48tbps+ down, 8tbps or better up
• "super cool home internet connection" (SCHIC) - 960tbps+ down, 160tbps or better up
• "ultra cool home internet connection" (UCHIC) - 1.920pbps+ down, 320tbps or better up
• "ultra cool home internet connection"

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[sauge]

The meaning of terms change. For example, "fast" describing a car in 1910 does not refer to the same speed as "fast" describing a car in 2010.

I post this not as a retort to the parent, but as an observation to the changing meaning of words.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[LordVader717]

Where did you pull that from? The Bandwidth of an analog signal describes how many frequencies are used in transmission. This correlates to the amount of information the signal can transmit. For digital transmission this means a higher bitrate.
Now, for telephone internet connections this could be used as description to distinguish the voiceband modems from DSL modems which use frequencies far above the voiceband.

But I've almost never heard the term used in such a technically correct way, and the term has come to be a synonym of "high bit-rate data connection".

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Eudial]

By Scandinavian standards, 4 Mbit/s is downright medieval, even the double is on the low side of the spectrum. I have 100 Mbit/s socket (up and down, no transfer cap, 10 IP addresses) in my apartment, costs about $20 a month.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[deniable]

So you're telling me that 10BaseT Ethernet and its descendants are broadband then? There's a collision of two technical definitions there, I think.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[deniable]

We had one side of the continent running on, IIRC, 2Mbps at that time, probably less.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[sjames]

Read broadband as "current middle of the road technology" and you never need to redefine it, just keep up with "current".

We have also continuously upgraded our expectations for "housing". It's perfectly fair to say that the guy living in the tar-papered shack with no electricity or running water is living in "sub-standard housing" even if at one time it was a big upgrade over the neighbor's soddy.

The problem with U.S. telecommunications is that it's stuck back in 1984 while the rest of the world has welcomed the 21st century.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Starcub]

So the real question is why American broadband was redefined to a low number like 4 Mbit/s?

Probably because the FCC doesn't want to have to regulate the internet under the net neutrality rules it adopts. The FCC has to at least appear to make an effort to regulate the net in fullfillment of it's responsibility to protect consumers. However, the latest (and probably last) proposal the chairman has drawn up is weaker than what was promised by both the chairman and the president. Among other glaring problems, the latest proposal rests ambiguously on the same basis that the court has already ruled against and ignores the court's advice on how to go about creating rules that the FCC can legally enforce: ammori.org/2010/12/01/fcc-chairman-proposes-garbage-calls-it-net-neutrality.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[iamhassi]

""Narrowband" did *not* apply to modems in any technical way."

The internet disagrees

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[RockDoctor]

One could argue that labelling 256k "broadband" was a joke to begin with, and thus you never had broadband in the first place.

As commodore64_love says, at that time the most you could get out of a normal phone line was between 28.8k each way or sometimes 33.6k up and 56k down. Having started on 2400bps (2.4k) modems and worked my way all the way up through all the various configurations of modems, 256k "broadband" was actually a "broad" piece of "band"-width. I watched a friend trying to start a business doing streaming training videos etc with a dedicated 128k symmetrical link that was costing him nearly all of my monthly salary (pre-tax) every month. That worked well enough to get him brought-out and move to a different part of the country.

You should try surfing on a 33.6kbps modem one of these days.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Phoghat]

I have Time Warner Cable and I connect using Earthlink servers. I just went to Speedtest.net and checked speed. I get 10Mbs download and 0.449 Mbs upload. I guess I don't have broadband either

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[AmiMoJo]

Japan is a large country with 120m population. There are many rural areas which bring the average speed down. Still 20Mb/sec is pretty good considering the UK can't even offer 1Mb to lots of rural areas.

In cities the average is much higher. They replaced their old copper POTS network with fibre to the cabinet so with bonded ADSL you can hit over 100Mb/sec. Upload speeds are much better too. In places that can get it, which is a lot, fibre to the home is really cheap and really fast with no stupid limits or throttling. Well, okay, DoCoMo has a 30GB upload limit, but that /per day/.

You can argue the numbers all you like but the bottom line is they have HD movie streaming on demand and it works, where as in the US Netflix is being squeezed out and in the UK BT doesn't let you view HD video on iPlayer in the evenings. I think the difference is that we see the internet connection itself as the product while Japanese ISPs see it as a gateway to other services they can sell. They view investment in the network over the long term so don't try to recoup the money in the short term by bumping prices up. It makes sense as fibre and internet access are going to be good for 50 years or more, plus the government subsidises it because like roads, water, gas and electricity they see it as vital infrastructure.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[rhalstead]

When NetFlix has to pay the same for content as cable and satellite and charge accordingly the competition should get interesting. According to a NY Times article they are paying about a 1/4 or less than cable or satellite. The entertainment industry says that will change next year when the contracts are renewed. I would expect the prices of other providers to follow suit. That may put a crimp in streaming video and it may not. But, what difference does it make for the end user as to how the FCC defines broadband? Either you have sufficient band width or you don't. Anything above "sufficient" is nothing but bragging rights. I have 16 Mbs but rarely see it go above 8. A tracert has never shown the bottleneck to be here or my provider. At odd hours streaming video works fine, but "prime time" shows pauses,..lots of pauses while the Internet plays catch-up at a few hundred K to maybe 1 Mbs.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[skarphace]

The Bandwidth of an analog signal describes how many frequencies are used in transmission. This correlates to the amount of information the signal can transmit. For digital transmission this means a higher bitrate. [...] But I've almost never heard the term used in such a technically correct way, and the term has come to be a synonym of "high bit-rate data connection".

I really don't want to spend the time to look up a better reference than my quoted definition above, so correct me if I'm wrong. However, it is my understanding(and yours, it seems) that 'many frequencies', or multiplexing, like with DSL lines is what 'broadband' defines. So yes, while faster than a single freq modem from back in the day, speed is not the basic definition.

I won't argue that the term has been misused a lot, likely thanks to some marketing departments, but I'd rather not contribute to its watering down.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[LordVader717]

Multiplexing, again, is a different term. Basically all technologies rely on some sort of frequency multiplexing to increase the bitrate including voiceband modems.

It's always a relative question as to what consitutes "broad". A DSL modem which is far away from the DSLAM will not be able to use higher frequencies and thus have a much lower bitrate.

Similarirly the broad spectrum of channels on a UHF cable modem are capable of delivering much higher bitrates than DSL. The same goes for optical fibres and improvements like ADSL2+.

Tying your definition to the destinction between dial-up internet and DSL seems rather arbitrary and useless.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[bill_mcgonigle]

Maybe a cooperative without profit motive has more impetus to keep their client-owners happy.

See what socialism gets you?

A co-op is the opposite of socialism. Those paying are directly receiving the benefits.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Rhywden]

Yeah, good luck in trying to push a 100KHz light wave through glass, nevermind finding a 100KHz LASER. I'll let you in on a secret: Visible light (the kind you usually put through a glass fibre) operates in the Terahertz range. Additionally, you'll find it pretty difficult to reach Terahertz frequencies with electric pulses and push that through a wire over any kind of longer distances (skin effect). So, I take your "dumb statement" and hand it right back at you.

Does it address what ports are open?

[pecosdave]

To me "Internet access" is an I.P. connection on the Internet, not a filtered and plugged natted off I.P. What good is "broad band" if you're not "really" on the Internet? This article didn't address that.

Also, beyond just having crappy maintinance and ethics a majority of the land mass in the U.S. is difficult to give proper broadband to since there such low population density over such a large area. Of course that doesn't excuse Verizon for only giving me 3 Mbps when I paid for 20 and got 20 for the first month. /yes, I'm being a squeaky wheel.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Anonymous Coward]

a majority of the land mass in the U.S. is difficult to give proper broadband to since there such low population density over such a large area

I agree that it is difficult to supply broadband to the few people living in the middle of nowhere, but they don't have much of an effect on the statistics precisely because there aren't very many of them. The USA is actually slightly more urbanized than South Korea. Stop with the excuses already.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Ephemeriis]

To me "Internet access" is an I.P. connection on the Internet, not a filtered and plugged natted off I.P. What good is "broad band" if you're not "really" on the Internet? This article didn't address that.

This really annoys me.

Back when we got our first broadband connection (a blazing-fast 768k DSL connection) it was a genuine connection to the Internet. I wasn't doing anything amazing with it... But I would periodically use RDP or VNC or whatever to connect into my home machine for something. I had occasion to fire up an FTP server at home once or twice as well. I even tinkered around with a web server at home briefly. All those ports were readily available for my use. I had to play some games with NAT since I had a couple computers sharing that one public address... And it wasn't a static address, so I had to constantly look up my IP or use a free dynamic DNS service... But I could at least use those ports.

These days I cannot use those ports. I know for a fact that 3389 and 80 are blocked. And any time I run RDP on a different port it'll wind up blocked again after two or three connections.

One of the things that initially made the Internet so awesome was that everyone was basically a peer. Anybody could host information... Share resources... Communicate... It was all kinds of decentralized and whatnot.

These days there's a very clearly defined producer/consumer relationship. It isn't just a matter of bandwidth or anything... I simply cannot host a website on my home connection. I am barred from doing that.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[lingon]

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.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Lumpy]

Everything you want to do I do at home on my "not real" internet connection.

You just have to take your Meds for your ADD and use ports that are not blocked, and use a dyndns service.

I do VPN back to home, I run a SFTP, I run a webserver on Port 81 and Port 82.

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?

[rjstanford]

Ah, so you're one of those "there are people in California, and people in a couple of cities going down the eastern coastline, and nothing else counts" sorts, huh?

His statement is pretty spot on -- there are some pretty wide swaths in this country where you've either got low population density or geographical problems making it difficult. Look at Appalachia as a whole, for example -- a good chunk of it is "difficult" geographically, and having a significant percentage of the populace nestled in mountain hollows doesn't help.

Ah - you'll be happy to know then that we don't actually have a significant percentage of the US population nestled in mountain hollows. And in other good news, it turns out that the existence of Appalachian Mountain Dancers doesn't necessarily preclude the good people of Manhattan from having blazingly fast high speed internet access.

For my next trick, I'll show how letting two gay men get married to each other shouldn't cause millions of straight people to get divorced.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[morari]

That's funny, we all have electric and public water down here in the hollows and up ontop of the ridges...

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[dkf]

Ah, so you're one of those "there are people in California, and people in a couple of cities going down the eastern coastline, and nothing else counts" sorts, huh?

In population terms, yes. There's no excuse for urban populations having crap broadband, and there's lots of people in cities and towns in the US. If you're out in the boonies, it's going to impact on your speed (or costs) but that's true all over the world. But more to the point, just look at where the majority of people are, in urban and suburban areas. Is there any reason why it's impossible for such a large fraction of them to get broadband? (Well, yes there is, and it's got to do with lack of real competition between providers. Regulatory fail.)

His statement is pretty spot on -- there are some pretty wide swaths in this country where you've either got low population density or geographical problems making it difficult. Look at Appalachia as a whole, for example -- a good chunk of it is "difficult" geographically, and having a significant percentage of the populace nestled in mountain hollows doesn't help.

Because cables can't go down into mountain hollows... (Or did you think that the rest of the world does broadband always by wireless telecoms?)

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[khallow]

The USA is actually slightly more urbanized than South Korea. Stop with the excuses already.

Half of South Korea's population lives in a single metropolitan area.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Ephemeriis]

Everything you want to do I do at home on my "not real" internet connection.

You just have to take your Meds for your ADD and use ports that are not blocked, and use a dyndns service.

I do VPN back to home, I run a SFTP, I run a webserver on Port 81 and Port 82.

I'm really not sure what ADD and medication have to do with anything...

Like I indicated in my post: And any time I run RDP on a different port it'll wind up blocked again after two or three connections.

It isn't just that 3389 is blocked... If I run RDP on 3390 or 3391 or 3392 those ports will be blocked after one or two incoming connections. I've run a web server on alternative ports as well - 8080, and 8088 for example (so that I could remotely manage my router) and they got blocked after a couple connections.

I suppose, if I really wanted to, I could automate the whole thing... Throw together a script of some sort to randomly select a new port for every connection attempt or something... But that seems like an awful lot of work for very little reward.

I've started using LogMeIn for remote access to my home computer, which gets around these blocks on incoming connections by opening an outgoing connection to their central server.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[masterwit]

Best argument I heard to why the United States has trouble delivering bandwidth to the same degree as other developed countries is from a friend who works for Akamai.

He states that it is not a matter of money, rather it is when the internet first came to be, we really designed a stupid infrastructure. Other countries implementing the internet after the U.S. were able to learn from our mistakes when their "tubes were being placed". (Hindsight is 20-20 after all) The U.S. problem, however, is that we still use a lot of this basic infrastructure today when really our system needs an overhaul, not a bunch of workarounds...

But he would also agree with your comment that collectively everyone needs to "stop with the excuses already"... To fix the infrastructure, it will cost a good bit of money. I for one think this "economic bailout", as the media calls it, should have gone more to infrastructure in the U.S. from highways to telecommunication services (but don't get me started with the brilliance of our current politics).

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:Does it address what ports are open?

[WoLpH]

This has nothing to do with business class or not. You pay for an internet connection and should be able to use it to the fullest.

My ISP gives me the option in the control panel to let them filter the standard/dangerous ports for my connection if I want them to. But _every_ port and just about any protocol is available for when you need it. Including native IPv6.

Business lines should be about reliability and extra features like trunked lines, not about something as basic as having all ports available.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Headw1nd]

Calm down, no one's trying to insult middle America. You've completely missed the parent's point.

Yes, there are very remote areas in the US, and it's very hard to get services to these locaations. But comparativly few people live in these areas. (By the 2000 census, only 20% of the population lives in "rural" areas.) Even when you look at Appalachia, you still have cites: Chattanooga, Charleston, and Pittsburgh are a few. So when someone says "oh, 60% of America's internet access sucks because America is too spread out" it's crap. America may be spread out, but Americans by and large arn't.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[AltairDusk]

"Broadband" here in the US is typically limited to one or two choices for your provider in a given area. Limited (or outright lack of) competition provides little motive for our ISPs to actually care about their customers or about keeping up with the rest of the civilized world speed-wise.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[swrider]

In the 1990's, after the small ISP's had invested their money into purchasing infrastructure and invested their time into fighting with the incumbent carriers to get that infrastructure working the way it was needed for internet access, Congress gave billions (with a 'b') dollars in credits to the cable and large telco providers to upgrade their networks for internet access. Where did that money go? Most likely to fund the consolidation in the telco and cable industries. But one place it didn't go, was to fund upgraded infrastructure.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[AltairDusk]

Ugh, submitted too soon (that will teach me to actually proofread the post next time, sorry). Anyway what I also wanted to say is that in my own experience the only way not to have ports blocked with most providers is to pay for a business-class plan or higher.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[pureallstar3482]

I work for an ISP in the US and we don't block any ports. In fact, most ISPs don't block any ports at all here. Unless you live in a country that tries to regulate the internet, you are pretty much good to go. I know for a fact that, in the US, no ports are blocked by ISPs. You basically get an open pipe to send any traffic you want through it. As an ISP we aren't allowed to manipulate any traffic, we are only allowed to monitor and track it. So, by saying "Port 80 is blocked" doesn't make sense, unless of course you are outside the US. In most cases, it is hard to provide most customers with a "broadband" connection. While I do work for an ISP, our footprint is small to moderate. I live in Maine and population is scattered. Most connections, all we can offer is DSL, which, as everyone knows, all depends on how far away from the DSLAM you are. Unless you are using a bonded DSL link, no DSL connections can reach the 4 Mbps standard that is considered a "broadband link". The only services which can consistently offer a high rate of bandwidth that most home customers can get is FTTP (fiber to the home) or Cable, everyone else is left out of the mix unless you want to pay excessive amounts of money for high speeds over copper (T1 etc.). I know my company offers 40 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up at around $40 a month, which is extremely cheap. I can't get our service where I live and I pay upwards of $45 a month for a 7 Mbps down and 1 up. I guess it all depends on where you live. To be honest, I would rather have a slower speed, but have everything at my finger tips. I really don't understand how people in other countries brag about their speeds when a lot of sites and content is blocked by their ISP due to country restrictions. Guess its all in what you would rather have.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[elsurexiste]

Even if you are right on your urbanising level, it smells like an average with a huge standard deviation.

You can't really compare those two countries! Just the size difference skews all the statistics.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[chrb]

... and the population density of that area is 5276 people per square mile, a number exceeded by many cities of the United States .

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[zrelativity]

OK, so what is ATT's argument for not being able to provide better than 3Mbps in the heart of the Silicon Valley?

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[gad_zuki!]

Who is your provider? On the residential level I've used 5 or 6 different providers and have never had issues opening ports up for rdp, ftp, ssh, etc. SMTP yes (which I generally agree with), but not the others. Is this a new fad or is it just one or two badly run ISPs?

I'm currently with Comcast, who according to slashdot is the most evil of ISPs, and have something like 15/3mbps with rdp, ssh, and ftps running 24/7.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[pecosdave]

It's the "semi-dense" areas that are really hard to get. In the southern/eastern part of Texas where there's plenty of people all living 1/2 - 2 miles apart. It's the communities of 50 people in West Texas that are 30 miles from the next biggest town which has 400 people. If it were just people in Alaska 30 miles apart I see your point, but it isn't them that makes it really hard. Heck, there's areas considered Houston Metro surrounded by enough undeveloped land to be out of DSL range with dense population surrounding their/their-neighbors property lines.

I am not saying this excuses crappy performance like my 20 Mbit really 3Mbit Fiber. I'm not saying this excuses suburbs that just happen to be of the wrong income level close to a city not having any/many broadband options, it doesn't excuse a lot of stuff.

What is 100% true is that a sparsely populated area doesn't justify the cost of equipment as easily as a densely populated area.

From Wikipedia:

South Korea The country's total area is 38,622.57 square miles (100,032.00 km2)
South Korea is noted for its population density, which at 487 per square kilometer is more than 10 times the global average.

Texas has an area of 268,820 square miles (696,200 km2), and a growing population of 24.7 million residents.
79.6[5]/sq mi (30.75/km2)
Ranked 26th in the US

What that population density doesn't account for is things like Reeves County where I grew up is 5 people per square mile, where as Harris County is 2,302 people per square mile so that really throws the average density off.

I'm not completely defending the ISP's, but they have a few valid excuses.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Totenglocke]

Your country is also around 1 square mile. It's not just population density, but also sheer size. I just looked up the size of Finland and the US - Finland is 3.44% the size of the US and your population is 1.73% of the size of the US. It would be an embarrassment if you COULDN'T fully cover a country that tiny. No, I'm not insulting your country, merely pointing out that you have no understanding of how big and spread out the US is, where you can drive for hundreds of miles at a time and see nothing - that plays a big role in it.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Maxo-Texas]

In many area's america is no longer capitalistic.

We let a single large provider (or perhaps two) get a monopoly on an area for extended periods of time (up to 25 years) in return for a tiny amount of money to the local government.

It's why our service is so bad. Eventually someone else "drives around" the provider with new technology but it can take decades.

The internet should really be a utility like electricity.

And I agree with one of the other posters. We are losing the producer/creator mentality as to serving content. But you can set up a site inexpensively on a provider and upload/download your content.

I've noticed my connection has gotten faster. I used to top out at 33mb/s upload on comcast in houston. I now hit 60 to 90mb/s. I've hit 120mb/s a few times. So upgrades are happening.

I also use more 3g/4g (and consume about 500mb to 1gb per month).

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[tepples]

And any time I run RDP on a different port it'll wind up blocked again after two or three connections.

I do VPN back to home, I run a SFTP, I run a webserver on Port 81 and Port 82.

If Ephemeriis were to do as you do, it appears (s)he would end up with ports 81, 82, and whatever nonstandard ports you use for VPN and SFTP also blocked.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[khallow]

Seoul's population density is almost 45k people per square mile and is home to more than 20% of South Korea's population. Only three of those US "cities" on your list have a population density at least that great.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

Will someone explain to me why unintelligent or otherwise unmotivated poor people ruin the fun for the rest of us?

Because we let them live.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[tepples]

Oh wait, you want business class OC3 at the price of tier 1 DSL.

Then how do ISPs in foreign countries provide service comparable to a U.S. "business class OC3" at monthly prices comparable to U.S. DSL?

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Ephemeriis]

Who is your provider? On the residential level I've used 5 or 6 different providers and have never had issues opening ports up for rdp, ftp, ssh, etc. SMTP yes (which I generally agree with), but not the others. Is this a new fad or is it just one or two badly run ISPs?

I'm currently with Comcast, who according to slashdot is the most evil of ISPs, and have something like 15/3mbps with rdp, ssh, and ftps running 24/7.

We're with Charter.

It may very well be negligence/incompetence on their part... I wouldn't be surprised.

I had to stop using Charter's DNS servers because they were broken so often, the connection itself drops far more often than I'd like, and even when it is up we only get a fraction of the speed we're paying for.

Hell, it took them over 3 months just to get Internet service at our house.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[khallow]

I frankly don't care what AT&T's argument is. What is interesting here is that even in Silicon Valley, with a competitive ISP market, relatively slow bandwidth is common. This says to me that national efforts to increase average bandwidth speeds to rather high levels may be a bad idea in general, even ignoring population density.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Svartalf]

Instead of using the consumer accounts, why don't you get a business service account. The cable companies are more than happy to hand you one for about 2-3 times what you're paying now- ditto AT&T and Verizon (For $160/mo you too can have a business contract and roughly half a T3's bandwidth if you're in a FiOS area...). No bandwidth increases- but they're much less likely to dink with your pipe's contents like they will with a consumer account.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[stewbacca]

I think the argument is that all of West Texas is statistically insignificant because of Houston, San Antonio, Austin, and DFW.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[OverlordQ]

Finland's population has always been concentrated in the southern parts of the country.

It depends not only on density but distance between these population clusters. Even if everybody is clustered together you still need the infrastructure joining these clusters together. So yes, while Finland may have a lower density, your centers of population are also close together.

Finland: 338,424 km^2
Texas: 696,241 km^2

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[NotAGoodNickname]

Also Seoul has many providers that claim 1Gb/s to the home as well. It is all lies. You aren't getting 1Gb/s. There is no accountability there, they can claim whatever they want. I lived there for years and the internet speeds in the US and in Korea are on par.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[NotAGoodNickname]

They don't. They just claim to. Do you really think you are getting 1Gbps to the home? How would you aggregate 1000x1Gbps connections? Simple math will tell you it is not possible to deliver HONEST 1Gbps to the home at this point. It sounds like a lot of Slashdot people swallowed the marketing pill.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Ephemeriis]

Instead of using the consumer accounts, why don't you get a business service account. The cable companies are more than happy to hand you one for about 2-3 times what you're paying now- ditto AT&T and Verizon (For $160/mo you too can have a business contract and roughly half a T3's bandwidth if you're in a FiOS area...). No bandwidth increases- but they're much less likely to dink with your pipe's contents like they will with a consumer account.

I tried to get a business account from Charter a couple years ago. They didn't want to support that kind of connection at my address.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Jenming]

The urban and suburban areas do have good broadband. Check the broadband options for any city, you'll see a wide ranger of available speeds. Often including fiber optics. There is enough of this faster broadband for anyone who wants it.
There happen to also be slower lines available. Why might this be? Is it a failure of US internet? Or perhaps there is just a market for them and random person who just browses the web would rather purchase a slower line that meets their needs than purchase a fast line, use a fraction of the bandwidth and subsidize the people who want faster lines.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[xaxa]

My parents' £12/month broadband only has port 25 blocked, and you can unblock it by reading a few pages on a website and clicking "I agree". I don't remember the speed, it's at least 8 Mb/s. The company increases it every so often to stay competitive. The village has a population of about 1500, so it's not too bad.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[interkin3tic]

For my next trick, I'll show how letting two gay men get married to each other shouldn't cause millions of straight people to get divorced.

No please!!! I need an excuse for my super conservative soon to be ex-inlaws!!! They have more guns than they do bibles!!!

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[lowlymarine]

I live in metro Orlando and the fastest broadband available here is $60 a month for a whopping 15/1.5, and it's cable so that comes with all the usual cable caveats. Not to mention Bright House (Time Warner) has atrocious uptime - I get thrown offline at least once a day.

The only commercial fiber that I know of in the US is FiOS, and the coverage area of FiOS is so laughably small I'd be surprised if even 1% of Americans can get it.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[AhabTheArab]

For my next trick, I'll show how letting two gay men get married to each other shouldn't cause millions of straight people to get divorced.

They'll probably end up getting divorced anyway.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[VortexCortex]

I know for a fact that, in the US, no ports are blocked by ISPs.

Bullshit. Your "fact" is outright wrong.
AT&T blocks port 25, so does Comcast, BellSouth, Verizon, etc.

I had to purchase a "business" plan to get port 25 unblocked just so I could use my own mail server.

Sure, port 25 isn't blocked to my ISP's mail server, just every where else on the Internet.

And really, who the hell uses the ISP's email service? If you change providers *poof* no more email your you. Talk about Vendor Lock In, this is ridiculous.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[kgwilliam]

Since the article and discussion is about providing high speed broadband access, then I assume the point of your statement is that because you have running water you should also have 1GB internet access?

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[lordmage]

I agree. Local providers block almost anything they can get thier hands on. And they do not give out Static IP's anymore.

However, you have to purchase a business line access and the blocks disappear. Its 3x the cost or more though.

Cox blocks 80.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, average and standard deviation of what? 82% of Americans (versus 80% of South Koreans) live in cities and suburbs. These are not averages of anything; they are simple facts.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Bob-taro]

a majority of the land mass in the U.S. is difficult to give proper broadband to since there such low population density over such a large area

I agree that it is difficult to supply broadband to the few people living in the middle of nowhere, but they don't have much of an effect on the statistics precisely because there aren't very many of them. The USA is actually slightly more urbanized than South Korea. Stop with the excuses already.

Why do the ISPs need an excuse? Are the ISPs are in collusion with each other? Is broadband is a right? The ISPs want to make money. If fiber to the home was a money making proposition, I think the ISPs would be all over it. If there's anything besides lack of demand holding them back now, it's probably a reluctance to invest in building out capacity during a recession. Now some will respond that the government should step in and help, but really, if the business experts don't think it's the right time to invest in something, why does it make sense for the government to do it? Actually, maybe the businesses are waiting around to see if the government will let them build out with other people's money.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[saleenS281]

So have co-ops lay fiber to every home, including in the middle of nowhere (you know, just like when large corporations used the same excuses you are to not wire every home in the US with electricity). Then the co-ops can have third-party ISP's like earthlink or speakeasy, or any number of smaller local players come along and lease the lines to provide service. If government owns the last mile, and leases out the lines to third parties with a conveniently placed aggregation point, we'll actually see real competition.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[saleenS281]

But you're all socialist!

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Biotech9]

I went on a hike to Trolltunga in Spring and had better phone coverage over the whole trip than I did in NYC. It does seem weird to me that I can sit on a mountaintop in the middle of a huge national park and get great 3G coverage, but in America's most populous city I can't have a five minute phone conversation without getting the call dropped. The usual retort is that Norway has tons of oil and so can afford great infrastructure, but Sweden and Finland manage pretty well on relatively meagre GDPs.

The one constant guarantee when it comes to stories on slashdot about American broadband coverage (or lack thereof) is that someone will point out how vast the US is compared to Japan and that is why the coverage is so shit. Except in the US the coverage also sucks for wireless broadband in the major cities, and the coverage in Scandinavia is world-leading despite having a population densities well below of that in the US. (Norway and Finland have almost half the population densities). The obvious reason why the infrastructure sucks is that it's not getting invested in.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Jeremy Erwin]

True pier ti pier is like the wild west

The wild west was a inland region, with very few ports.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[CharlieHedlin]

I can get AT&T DSL which only has port 25 blocked, 6mbps x 768kbps.... Or I can get cable with a 107x5 mbps (or the 20x2mbps I have purchased). The Cable blocks the following ports, all supposedly because of worms:

25 TCP SMTP Both* SMTP Relays
80 TCP HTTP Inbound Web servers, worms
135 UDP NetBios Both Net Send Spam/Pop-ups, Worms
136-139UDP,TCP NetBios Both Worms, Network Neighborhood
445 TCP MS-DS/ NetBios Both Worms, Network Neighhood
1433 TCP MS-SQL Inbound Worms, Trojans
1434 UDP MS-SQL Inbound Worms, SQLslammer
1900 UDP MS-DS/ NetBios Both Worms, Network Neighborhood

I run a small web server on https and have had no trouble. I run ssh, no problems. If you want the blocks removed they charge for a very expensive business connections.

I bought hosting and moved my websites to dump AT&T DSL. It was too slow. I am 4400 ft from the switch, so I won't be getting their newer services.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[moortak]

It really doesn't excuse them at all. If they had wired up even the largest, wealthiest, high density cities you might have a point. Just wiring up New York, Chicago, and LA with good internet service would bring the numbers up noticeably nationally and they wouldn't have to worry about low densities.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[symbolset]

You may not be aware of this, but the "Appalachian Mountains" are what a Californian would refer to as "low hills". Back east they've never seen a proper mountain.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Nadaka]

Be prepared to be sued into oblivion and have the state monopoly cable company bribe... I mean donate to the reelection campaign of, state officials to have coop or local government sponsored internet banned because it is "unfair competition".

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[NotAGoodNickname]

Thats because you don't apparently know how wireless signals work. Hint: big buildings block things.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[pjbgravely]

My DSL modem intercepts ports 21,23, and 80 from the WAN side. That started when the ISP did a remote firmware update to the modem.

I thought they were blocking the ports until I figured out what they did. It was simple to bypass, and I was able to run my web-server on port 80 again.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[DrgnDancer]

But again, this doesn't explain why Dallas, Austin, Houston, etc don't have any real high speed Internet options. Texas is huge, and parts of it have very spread out populations, but *most* Texans live in one of the cities, which have perfectly reasonable population densities. Yet the best broadband options in most of those cities are 15/1.5 or worse. The common argument here is that lack of population density makes it hard for broadband to be deployed here. The simple fact of the matter though, is that like 20% of Americans live in low population density areas.

If a report stated that 15% or even 20% of Americans don't have access to broadband, we could say, "Oh, well, those people live in low population density areas... It's hard to get them broadband". Reports more typically say that 50-60% of Americans don't have access to broadband, and that number is likely to jump now that they've actually redefined "Broadband" to a reasonable number. That leaves us with a delta of 30-40% of the population (more now) that live in areas with perfectly normal population densities, yet can't get broadband.

That's just using the US Government's definition of broadband. On top of that, very few Americans, even in the highest population density areas (New York, LA, Chicago, Boston, etc), can get the kind of speed that is actually considered to be "normal" in other parts of the world. Lots of places in Europe and Asia have 100mbs+ speeds available to the home. Many can even get 200mbs+. There are precious few places in the US where you can get that kind of speed regardless of population density.

Whatever the reasons are for poor broadband access in this country, population density is pretty low on the list.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Wowsers]

Don't use the size of a country's land mass as an excuse. It it were that bad, there would be no roads / freeways across the USA, and there would be no railroads either..... but the USA has both. Sounds more like an excuse by the phone companies to not invest in the networks and keep those profits for the bosses.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[EastCoastSurfer]

Crazy. My friend lives in Tampa and I almost sure he said he recently bought FiOS. I wonder what made it easier/more cost effective to put in Tampa, but not Orlando?

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[fikx]

"One of the things that initially made the Internet so awesome was that everyone was basically a peer."
So, you want to be able to route packets just like all the other peers do? Isn't that what peers on the internet are? The "peer-to-peer" nature of the internet changed when PC's starting getting onto it as clients. Yes, I think the port restictions and filtering are wrong, but citing the "internet should be only peers" is ignoring some basic changes that have happened to the internet...

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Lilith's Heart-shape]

Is this my cue to play the internet tough guy? I can't be bothered. Not for an AC.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Ephemeriis]

"One of the things that initially made the Internet so awesome was that everyone was basically a peer."

So, you want to be able to route packets just like all the other peers do? Isn't that what peers on the internet are?

No. I'm not talking about peering agreements between bandwidth providers. I wouldn't even have anywhere to route packets to.

The "peer-to-peer" nature of the internet changed when PC's starting getting onto it as clients. Yes, I think the port restictions and filtering are wrong, but citing the "internet should be only peers" is ignoring some basic changes that have happened to the internet...

Back in the day you just had computers on the Internet. There wasn't a whole lot of distinction between clients and servers. Yes, some people had beefier hardware than others. And lots of software was built with a client/server model. But there wasn't anything inherently different between my connection at home and the connection to some website out there.

That's what made a PPP connection so awesome, instead of a shell account. Your computer was genuinely on the Internet. You could run your own webserver, or IRC node, or whatever. You weren't just a client on somebody else's machine.

What changed the nature of the Internet was NAT and consumerism.

Folks got the idea that people should just be consuming content on the Internet. You got some big companies running some big servers, and everybody else just reads what they put up. The average individual doesn't actually produce any content. The whole web 2.0/blog/self-publishing thing is just a tepid version of the true peer-to-peer nature the Internet originally had.

And then ISPs got stingy with their IP addresses and everyone had to NAT everything, which made it far more difficult to host your own content even if you did have a static IP address.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Biotech9]

So I guess all the cities with large buildings or subway routes with total perfect coverage are just magical?

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[D Ninja]

It it were that bad, there would be no roads / freeways across the USA, and there would be no railroads either

This is actually part of the problem. Because the United States already has a built up infrastructure, it can be very difficult to work around or with the individuals/government who own that infrastructure so that the fiber can be updated. As a small example, I can't get Fios at my home, even though it's available one block away, because the township I am in (right at the border) refuses to allow Verizon to dig up part of the street (even though it would be repaired, of course). My friend has a problem like this as well, but, in his case, it's his HOA who refuses to let Verizon dig up the lawns.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Iskender]

The nothing you drive through doesn't need broadband. At worst it needs transfer cables to get the net across it. If it's actually (sparsely) populated then that problem has been solved better in places like Finland with lower population densities.

And well, if large desolate areas were a problem there would be no way to get past the oceans.

Fiber has been pulled through much larger expanses of wilderness than those in the US successfully.

Countries with lower population density than the US have faster and better broadband.

Urban areas of equivalent size and density in other countries have faster and better broadband.

Countries with smaller per capita GDP than the US have faster and better broadband.

How about making US broadband better instead of making excuses?

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[RightSaidFred99]

Business lines should be about reliability and extra features like trunked lines, not about something as basic as having all ports available.

Says who? What are you basing this "should" on?

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[vux984]

In my extensive experience with multiple IPs Port 25 is almost invariably blocked for OUTGOING connections only, except to the ISPs smtp servers.

Setting up a mail server is as simple as:

a) setup your mail server, it receives mail on port 25 just fine
(this allows your mail server to receive mail from the rest of the word.)
b) configure your mail server to relay out going mail through your ISPs outgoing server
(this allows your mail server to deliver mail to the rest of the world.)
c) configure your mail server to accept authenticated connections on the submission port (e.g. port 587)
(this allows you to send out bound mail to your own mailserver from anywhere in the world, your mail server will in turn relay out it out to your ISP for delivery, unless its addressed to one of your own domains...)

d) finally - if you use SPF, be sure to include your ISPs smtp servers as authorized for your domain(s)

You can run a small business/soho setup on that configuration.

And really, who the hell uses the ISP's email service? If you change providers *poof* no more email your you. Talk about Vendor Lock In, this is ridiculous.

How is using gmail or anything else any better? Unless you have your own domain you are locked in to a provider. And if you have your own domain, than its pretty easy to do whatever and go where ever you want.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[cayenne8]

"Since the article and discussion is about providing high speed broadband access, then I assume the point of your statement is that because you have running water you should also have 1GB internet access?"

Why not?

They both use tubes after all, right?

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[NotAGoodNickname]

Its not magic at all. They put repeaters in the subways. Very few cities have as many buildings with the height AND density of Manhattan. And those cities that do have the same problem. Sweden/Finland/Norway don't have cities like Manhattan/Tokyo. Its easy to deliver wireless to a mountaintop in Sweden. Its hard to deliver it in the canyons of Manhattan. Its not magic, its not due to lack of effort, its just a hard problem to solve technically.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[pecosdave]

That's sort of what they're doing. Concentrating on the easy to get stuff, providing reasonable and half assed stuff to the next tier, then occasionally throwing a bone to the next.

Makes the numbers look good.

I'm all for local co-op systems. Can't have the local government involved in the slightest though, it upsets the oligopolist.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[tgrigsby]

Absolutely correct. If you could pick up Japan and fold it in half, you could drop it into North and South Dakota with a little room to spare. With Finland, you'd have to use the Dakotas, Kansas, and Oklahoma. The U.S. is a pretty large, sprawled out place. You have to account for that when planning out the 'net architecture and the problem domain of providing ubiquitous fiber service.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[coaxial]

For my next trick, I'll show how letting two gay men get married to each other shouldn't cause millions of straight people to get divorced.

Pshah! Everytime I read about queer marriage, I wonder why I got married. I only did it to flaunt it at homosexuals, and now I can't even do that.

What's the point anymore?

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[tgrigsby]

These days I cannot use those ports. I know for a fact that 3389 and 80 are blocked. And any time I run RDP on a different port it'll wind up blocked again after two or three connections.

Not to get off the point of your post, but if you can't use those ports it's time to call your ISP.
I'm on Comcast and I run a small web server and FTP server, and I use VNC or Remote Desktop all the time.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Vegemeister]

120 millibits per second. Impressive.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[cbope]

1 square mile, are you fucking kidding me or what? More like 130,596 square miles and the 8th largest country by land mass in the EU with the sparsest population density. It is roughly half the size of the sate of Texas.

What word in "population density" do you not understand? It makes no difference the total size of the land, the metric is population DENSITY. As in, the number of people per sq. mile, kilometer, inch, meter, etc.

And don't tell me I don't know the size of the US, I'm American-born and raised, living abroad, and I've been to at least 40 US states and hundreds of cities and towns, not to mention over 20 countries around the world.

I hate to say it, but if I compare both the broadband and mobile phone markets of the US to Finland (or Sweden, or Japan or South Korea, or...), you guys are still in the dark ages. Why you still accept it is beyond me.

I've got karma to burn...

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[fikx]

I'm not talking about peering agreements either. That's just contracts between companies that sell connections. I'm talking about what it meant to be part the internet. And PPP was not "on" the internet. It was a client connection and traffic had to be specified and forwarded just like ISP's do now.
The requirement for being "on" the internet is having your machine (router, computer, whatever, it's all the same) being reachable by two or more physical routes and playing nice by passing on traffic that is bound for machines other than your own. Like you said: PC's who are clients cannot route since they only have one connection. PC's are speaking internet protocol to the internet, but are not "ON" the internet as peers.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Dahan]

But again, this doesn't explain why Dallas, Austin, Houston, etc don't have any real high speed Internet options. ... Yet the best broadband options in most of those cities are 15/1.5 or worse.

I haven't checked other cities, but I live in a suburb northwest of Austin and could get 107/5 (I don't though; I'm fine with the 6/1 I have).

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[sznupi]

a majority of the land mass in the U.S. is difficult to give proper broadband to since there such low population density over such a large area

US has 1.5x higher population density than Sweden, two times higher than Finland, and 2.5x higher than Norway. Around 10 times higher than Iceland or Canada (the last three actually have less than the planet, including oceans)

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[sznupi]

Finland has almost exactly half the population density. And Norway ~2.5 times lower (it's BTW fascinating to me how the other Nordic places are still very nice despite not having tons of oil (or mostly gas, IIRC? Either way...) - that almost suggests Norway is horribly wasteful ;) )

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[LordLucless]

These days there's a very clearly defined producer/consumer relationship. It isn't just a matter of bandwidth or anything... I simply cannot host a website on my home connection. I am barred from doing that.

Only in the US. And really, only because you resisted paying as-used, rather than a flat rate for bandwidth. As bandwidth use grew, ISPs couldn't deliver on their flat-rate plans, and they couldn't start charging for data used without causing an uproar. So they looked for other methods to restrict the amount of bandwidth used, and they were generally more disruptive than simple scaling pricing. It's a natural outcome of trying to have your cake and eat it to. I'm in Australia, and the only port that's blocked by default is outgoing 25, and that can be opted-out of by logging into your ISP preferences - it's purely a malware control mechanism.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Darinbob]

You can drive for hundreds of miles in Finland and see nothing as well.

I suspect that if you get out of the 4 largest cities in Finland that the availability of broadband goes way down, because that's where 90% of the population lives. In the US you can cover 90% of the populace without leaving the cities as well.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[sznupi]

That doesn't fit well with how the broadband and wireless situation basically mirror each other in the US. With wireless being essentially rebuilt few times; and at least GSM and UMTS installations not first in line - which apparently doesn't matter much for wireless anyway, because places which were among the first have fabulous coverage, also as a function of population densities.

(more for highways than is already the case would mean more subsidies for car and oil industries BTW)

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[sznupi]

And, you know, they need to connect with the rest of Europe (and the world) - via an undersea cable to boot.

And generally it doesn't matter - proportionally lower population (not only of lower density) has to pay for said infrastructure.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Stiletto]

Um, I don't know what part of Silicon Valley you live in and see a "competitive ISP market" but where I live in Sunnyvale, it's: Comcast (and AT&T if you live in just the right spot). I've lived all over the country, and when it comes to broadband availability and competition, Silicon Valley is as bad as or worse than most places. It's really an embarrassment, and it's inexcusable.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[penguinchris]

1 square mile, are you fucking kidding me or what?

Yes, he was kidding :)

Why you still accept it is beyond me.

We "accept" it because there's no choice. There's nothing we can do about the carriers being greedy assholes, not building out new infrastructure, and providing poor service on the existing infrastructure. It's either this, dedicated business lines for hundreds of dollars a month (if you can get the carrier to give you one), or nothing.

They're government-mandated monopolies, and the government apparently doesn't care that they took billions of dollars from the taxpayers meant for upgrading the infrastructure and put it into bank accounts on the Cayman Islands (or whatever).

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[sznupi]

I'm genuinely curious - nobody at your place figured out yet (and during urban road works spanning last few decades) how it is good to place cables of various kinds inside flexible plastic pipes of small diameter? Heck, nobody noticed that there are machines able to, more or less, drill horizontally when some cable needs to cross road surface without damaging it? (and where mentioned previously pipe is not available prior to it)

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[sznupi]

It would be an embarrassment if you COULDN'T fully cover a country that tiny.

A country in which there is 2 times less people to pay for each proportional part of the infrastructure. What do you not understand in the concept of "lower population density"?

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Totenglocke]

Population density means nothing if you're not covering much land - and obviously the "1 square mile" thing was hyperbole, something you're not familiar with.

It's not a major cost to run 100 miles of cable to get to a remote town in Finland when compared to running THOUSANDS of miles of cable through empty plains to get to remote towns in the US.

Population density is only one part of the equation. Sheer cost of laying all that cable to connect the towns / cities is a much, much bigger part of it.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Totenglocke]

And what do you not understand about the concept of "distance between cities"?

There's utterly massive costs involved in laying cable to connect all the different cities / towns due to the sheer distance between them. It's not just population density, but the fact that where Finland is the size of one or two states, the US takes up most of a fucking continent.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[sznupi]

All cities in Finland are clustered, no population centers in the north of the country, really? Plus - what do you not understand in the concept of internet as an international network? (which for Finland means any notable connections are across the sea) And, again, in the concept of population density - one of two parts of it is area being covered.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[sznupi]

You really don't get it how, with lower population density, proportionally smaller number of people pays for each of those miles? (kilometers in the case of Finland, more likely ;) ) And FYI it's not "thousands" when there are people in between, too (which also pay their share)

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[lowlymarine]

Oh ok, so they actually cover somewhere between 3-10% (we know for a fact that it's 3% by subscribers; they say they cover 10% but this is a telecom we're talking about). That's still a fair bit below your "there is enough of this faster broadband for anyone who wants it" statement, unless you're suggesting that everyone should move to Tampa, New York, or LA just to have access to decent broadband.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[morari]

That's exactly what I'm saying. I wouldn't be denied access to electricity, water, or telephone services. Why should I be denied broadband service?

Most people around here only have dial-up or satellite as an option. It's not because the terrain is difficult either. It's because there's nothing to force Time Warner to get off of their asses.

You know where the best internet in the county is? A tiny village in the middle of nowhere that decided to co-opt its own telephone company and run DLS to the entire area code.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[pecosdave]

I wish the self unblocking of ports was an option here. Typical US ISP doesn't educate their helpdesk staff on port blocking and their support staff are asked to lie about it. If you call about blocked ports they typically don't comprehend what you're talking about and will escalate the call to someone who will lie about it.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[gmhowell]

The other alternative is that people aren't clamoring for it. A third one is confusion. There are so many bundles and configurations of voice, tv, and internet that it becomes impossible to compare the offerings of two or more companies.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[WoLpH]

It's based on history. Every original internet provider provided you full access to the internet. So everything after that is unneeded degradation.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[lavaface]

Chatanooga has 30 mbps service for less than 60 bucks. Yet they are a small town on mountainous terrain

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[masterwit]

But one place it didn't go, was to fund upgraded infrastructure.

Sad, but your absolutely right.

On another note, throwing money at problems rarely works it seems, but people were really intent on throwing money at the economy problem a while back so I figured investments in our infrastructure would have been less of a waste.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[sznupi]

1 Mbit/s access at any home is a legal right in Finland... (apparently with plans to increase it to 100 Mbit/s by the middle of the decade)

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[sznupi]

Oh, you were almost on track of noticing how Manhattan != NYC...

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[sznupi]

That just seems like more excuses. I have a hard time believing that US is the only place in semi-developed world where nobody figured out (during public works in last 3 decades or so; coax would be probably within that timeline) how you can...put...cables...inside pipes (small diameter one, typically made from moderately flexible plastic); which can be "laid", as a last resort, by a machine capable of mostly horizontal drilling (under a road, for example)

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.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[martas]

Aha, words mean what people want them to mean. That may have been the origin of the term, but for the majority of people, that is not the primary meaning.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[jps25]

Aha, words mean what people want them to mean.

No, they don't. Words mean what they mean. Ignorance doesn't change that.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[martas]

According to who? God? The word fairy? Oxford-English dictionary? Words existed long before any such pseudo-authority was created. You use words so others can understand you, period.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[martas]

Oh, and the same applies to grammar -- I can say "what did you step on" all I want, and the entire English-speaking population of the world will know what I mean. No grammar Nazi will make me change the way I speak/write if it serves my purposes just fine.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[Anne_Nonymous]

I thought broadband was like the Indigo Girls, or the Go-Gos, or the Spice Girls or something.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[SomeKDEUser]

So your argument is that automatically when a technical term becomes common, it should stop meaning what it means?

You probably also complain that people in technical fields abuse jargon. GP is right: words mean what they mean, and meaning attributed through ignorance is irrelevant. Except of course for politicians, who get to never make nor break promises, because the people have been told that words mean what they want by people like you.

Ignorance has never been and will never be a valid opinion.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[arkane1234]

The definition of broadband from dictionary.com is: pertaining to or denoting a type of high-speed data transmission in which the bandwidth is shared by more than one simultaneous signal.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/broadband

The term has evolved really, as it used to mean what you said and only that. It's going to continue evolving, just as disturbing as the word 'sick' means tight/cool/rad/knarly/def now.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[SomeKDEUser]

It is not wrong as such: just terrible style. This has nothing to do with words changing their meanings because some arsehole from marketing though it would be a good idea, and swaths of ignoramuses gobbling it up. Which is a very real problem in today's world: ignorance is a condition easily cured, it is not something in which one should glory.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[arkane1234]

By very definition, a living language evolves and changes.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[martas]

Do you even try to understand what I'm saying, or do you want to stick your fingers in your ears and keep repeating that nice-sounding, haughty mantra about ignorance? There must be some [near-]absolute truth for one to be ignorant of it. So I'm asking, who gets to decide what the true meaning of a word is? You? Some authority nobody gives a crap about? Or perhaps the millions of people who attribute a certain meaning to a word? Who says your opinion is more valid than theirs? And, who cares what the origin of a word is? You think you don't use any words today that meant something completely different two centuries, or even a few decades ago?

Re:Broadband != Speed

[LordLimecat]

So if i start a movement to make the word "CPU" mean "the tower next to my screen", youll have no objections, then?

Re:Broadband != Speed

[SomeKDEUser]

What do you think would happen if suddenly texts of laws meant what the general public thought they meant (mostly nothing at all) ?

The opinion of an expert is always more valid than the opinion of the public. Obviously. Otherwise, instead of funding science labs, we should just organise polls on which theory is more likely.

The origin of a word, its etymology, tells you what it means, even if you never heard the word before -- particularly if you know some Greek and Latin. And yes, meanings evolve. Being aware of that allows you to read and understand texts of centuries past. But clearly, you think knowing this is a bad thing, and that one should never encourage people to educate themselves. Because only the current meaning is relevant.

Never mind that the current meaning is a marketing ploy.

Never mind that terrible knowledge of their own language is probably the one thing that most keeps people from being effective citizens.

Well, sorry, but it is useful and important to keep telling people what they said does not actually means what they think it does.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[JustOK]

but, they're trying to KILL IT!!!!

Re:Broadband != Speed

[martas]

... clearly, you think knowing this is a bad thing, and that one should never encourage people to educate themselves. Because only the current meaning is relevant.

When did I EVER say that???

What do you think would happen if suddenly texts of laws meant what the general public thought they meant (mostly nothing at all) ?

OK, now you're just trying to infuriate me, just so I give up and stop arguing. But I'll give it one more shot -- ALL language has a purpose. Purpose defines context. Context determines how a word/sentence/text should be interpreted, which also means context suggests how ideas should be encoded into text to be communicated with maximum efficiency. This means different things in different contexts -- efficiency in academic texts largely means lack of ambiguity, with ease of understanding being only secondary. In news, it's more balanced -- it's important that people be able to understand a news article without too much effort. In novels, efficiency means, well, pretty much anything.

Uh... I was going to start explaining how there is a difference between the contexts in which people use the term "broadband" to mean "fast connection" vs. the one where the term still has its original meaning, but frankly, if you don't get that yet, I won't even bother.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[martas]

Congratulations, you managed to completely miss the point.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[SomeKDEUser]

Yes, yes, language is context-sensitive, I know that. However, what people think their words mean does not mean they do. Just that if the listener is nice he'll go along, and if not, well...

Your argument is that words mean what people think they mean. I believe this is wrong: a conversation/sentence means what is agreed between the writer/speaker and the recipient. And this is completely orthogonal to the actual meaning of the words.

Saying the words mean what to the majority they mean is just wrong. It means you have given up on educating your fellow Humans.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[martas]

I see your point, but I still don't see what alternative you propose. How do I figure out what the true meaning of a word is, so I can start educating my fellow humans? Who do I ask? 'Cause if I happened to ask those fellow humans that need to be educated, then I couldn't educate them, because I myself would be mis-educated. I'm stuck in a dependency loop. Resolve it for me, please.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[SomeKDEUser]

Oh, and this is slashdot. Home of the technically inclined.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[SomeKDEUser]

Sometimes, we don't know, and don't know we don't know. However, we might know, because it is our area of expertise, or because simply we looked into it.

Simply, if I don't know something, and become aware of that fact, I try to correct that. Also, if someone is wrong, I don't shrug and say "not my problem". Because it is my problem (or will end up being my problem). And I expect people who know better also to correct me.

Stupid example: computer screens have become crappy, with stupid aspect ratios and less pixels than they used to have. Because some enemy of humankind realised that "fullHD" sounds better than 1920x1200, despite it being significantly smaller. And because of the attitude of "oh, I am not going to correct people, for fear of sounding like a smartass", we get technology to regress.

Education, the love of knowledge, and of spreading knowledge is the problem of everyone. It is more effective than voting with your dollars. It is more powerful than any amount of lobbying. It is tragically underrated.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[Kjella]

"To steal a kiss" is not ignorant of the legal definition of stealing, we just choose to use it to mean something else. "Broadband connection" now has a casual meaning different from the formal telecom/IT definition of broadband. Many words have left their etymological roots, you can choose to take the normative high ground and say "they shouldn't" but those of us that try to be more descriptive simply say "well, they have". For example, one of the things that make me want to tear my hair out is that "lol" is now a Norwegian word. As in, many people below 30 use it as a spoken word. "You want me to do that? lol" And they pronounce it like L-O-L. Language is changing, and it doesn't follow the rules.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[Chowderbags]

This frere bosteth that he knoweth helle, And God it woot, that it is litel wonder; Freres and feendes been but lyte asonder. For, pardee, ye han ofte tyme herd telle How that a frere ravyshed was to helle In spirit ones by a visioun; And as an angel ladde hym up and doun, To shewen hym the peynes that the were, In al the place saugh he nat a frere; Of oother folk he saugh ynowe in wo. Unto this angel spak the frere tho: Now, sire, quod he, han freres swich a grace That noon of hem shal come to this place? Yis, quod this aungel, many a millioun! And unto sathanas he ladde hym doun. --And now hath sathanas,--seith he,--a tayl Brodder than of a carryk is the sayl. Hold up thy tayl, thou sathanas!--quod he; --shewe forth thyn ers, and lat the frere se Where is the nest of freres in this place!-- And er that half a furlong wey of space, Right so as bees out swarmen from an hyve, Out of the develes ers ther gonne dryve Twenty thousand freres on a route, And thurghout helle swarmed al aboute, And comen agayn as faste as they may gon, And in his ers they crepten everychon. He clapte his tayl agayn and lay ful stille.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[martas]

Do me a favor please -- read my last post (GP), then read your reply, and tell me, do you think you answered my question? I'm asking 'cause I honestly don't think you did...

Re:Broadband != Speed

[SomeKDEUser]

But I did. Meaning is not context-sensitive. Only interpretation is. Communication requires guessing what the other guy was trying to say. That doesn't mean you can't also tell him what he actually said.

Iterative processes can converge, you know. Otherwise, we would never learn to speak in the first place.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[Wildclaw]

What do you think would happen if suddenly texts of laws meant what the general public thought they meant (mostly nothing at all) ?

You get the exact situation we have now, where law texts aren't keeping pace with actual changes in language, making them near unreadable to anyone but a trained lawyer. So your point is null and void.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[DrgnDancer]

Words can, and often do have more than one meaning. "Broadband" means one thing to a network engineer in the course of his work, another thing to people in general. Indeed, if the network engineer wishes to communicate about the matter with "people in general" he must be able to switch contexts, and understand that what $randomperson on the street means when they say "broadband" is not what $colleague means. Much like many technical terms ("Virus" is a good one, "Hacker" one that particularly infuriates some people here) "broadband" has a slightly different definition to most people than is does to subject matter experts. Because you *are* a subject matter expert it behooves *you* to understand both definitions and be able to use the word as appropriate in different contexts.

If you go around telling random people on the street that they are misusing the term, all you're accomplishing is looking like a pedantic ass to those of use who both understand the both the technical and common definition of the term. I'm sure your mom, or that guy at your neighbor's party are thrilled to learn that "broadband" actually refers to whether or not a network transmission is digital, and will find this incredibly useful when calling their cable company to get Internet service.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[Skidborg]

So I hear you went to a gay party last week...

Re:Broadband != Speed

[SomeKDEUser]

No, sorry, the texts mean exactly what they mean, and if you cannot understand them, study more.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[SomeKDEUser]

So much for people saying the US constitution should never be changed/updated/revised, he?

Re:Broadband != Speed

[RightSaidFred99]

Sadly, you're wrong.

Did you know "literally" can now mean "figuratively"? Look it up, and next time you correct someone for saying "It was literally raining cats and dogs", know that you're wrong now.

"Irregardless" - same thing. Now a word.

There was another one that has changed due to common usage over the last few decades that annoyed me recently, but I don't remember what it was.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[magus_melchior]

Who or what dictates what words mean? I think you're severely underestimating the number of words in any language that change over time.

It wasn't too long ago (2-3 generations) when "gay" didn't mean "homosexual", for example. If you want a technical example other than "broadband", how about "bandwidth" (communications/physics) or "yam" (botany/culinary)? How about "calculus", which differs according to context? In math it means one thing, in dentistry another, in politics another, and in internal medicine yet another.

You can insist on strict pedantry with technical terms in stuff like documentation or academic publications, but beyond that, I don't see how one should expect people to be so strict with their use of terms-- especially marketing folks or middle managers who love to sound technical but have no clue what they're talking about.

Or, perhaps ranting about this on Slashdot isn't very effective, and we technical-oriented people should focus on educating our coworkers and managers (within reason) of the importance of using accurate words.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[Charliemopps]

Broadband in DSL is exactly as the name describes. It uses a broad range of frequencies to deliver higher speeds. The broader the range, the more speed you get out of the signal. Baseband is an unfiltered line used only for 1 thing (data or voice) where as it's opposite, passband, is used when you install a filter to separate the lower frequencies for something (usually voice) and the upper frequencies for something (usually DSL other data services) Your use of the term isn't relevant to the subject of the article. "Broadband" is a descriptive term, and the FCC as a regulatory body is well within their scope of authority to declare that the range of frequencies used in a 3MB connection is to narrow to be considered "Broadband."

Re:Broadband != Speed

[Lemmy Caution]

Everything is context-dependent (Yes, even so-called context-free languages, though that's not what we're talking about.). Not just context-sensitive: context-dependent. Meaning-production relies on an interpretation of the shared context between speaker and audience; in reception, the audience tries to reproduce that interpretation.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[Lemmy Caution]

Except it isn't bad style. Ending sentences with prepositions is absolutely fine in Germanic languages - it was artificially deemed bad style by Victorian grammarians and teachers applying the rules of Latin grammar to English. (Until the 19th century, english wasn't even taught as a subject.) It is an artificial proscription we are growing out of.

So, ironically: you are ignorant of the history of the terminal preposition, even in a post in which you rail against ignorance. Consider yourself cured.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[SomeKDEUser]

Although I did not know the history of the terminal proposition (which, come to think of it, makes a lot of sense), terminal propositions still sound odd/have been considered wrong for nearly a couple centuries.

But then if there ever was a bastard child of Germanic and Latin languages, English is it :)

Re:Broadband != Speed

[LordLucless]

Yup. And what happens then is that the words lose all meaning. "Broadband" is an absolutely meaningless term now. It connotes nothing, unless you provide an additional definition of what *you* mean by broadband. Once it lose it's true, technical, meaning, it simply became another word for "fast". And it's now impossible to talk about "broadband" in the technical sense because the word that's used to describe it has been hijacked.

That's why grammar nazis continually crop up to defend stuff like "begging the question" - once that term is hijacked, there becomes no way to invoke the meaning that term once had. Our language loses accuracy and flexibility, and accretes simply another synonym. Like we didn't have enough already.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[sjames]

You might be really amused then to know how words have changed over the years. At one time, a plumber was just the guy who made things plumb. It just happened that the most common reason to do so was for indoor water.

An incredibly ugly cabinet with splinters was still "nice" if the angles were exact. Swearing, cursing, and spouting vulgarities were distinctly different.

Is it still television if you're watching an animated movie or a DVD?

People rarely mean remove 1/10th of when they say decimate. Even in audio processing, it's rarely exactly 1/10th.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[gmhowell]

Christ, is there any bit of modern day asshattery that can't be traced back to the Victorian era?

BTW, got a link on that? I'm curious to read a bit more on the subject.

Re:Broadband != Speed

[Grieviant]

No. An information bearing signal may be either baseband or bandpass depending on whether it is transmitted directly or used to modulate a high frequency carrier. It may also be either narrowband or wideband, which, in the proper technical sense, is defined with respect to the channel. If the signal bandwidth is wide enough to cause distortion in the form intersymbol interference then the signal is deemed wideband (typically, an equalizer is needed to deal with this).

The term broadband is very much technology independent and carries with it an implication of high data rate. That's still quite vague because there's no reference to a standard non-broadband speed, but then again it's not a very technical term to begin with.

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.

Re:Words have meanings

[imashination]

Because "Hi-Speed USB" was a real winner in explaining what it does.

Re:Words have meanings

[uglyduckling]

Actually, I've always presumed it meant a modulated signal - baseband would still be using symbols, not just shifting DC on the wire, in fact variations on FSK I think. Broadband uses a carrier signal and is much more like transimitting a radio signal using the phone line as a wire. I guess I don't understand the technology all that well, but using 'broadband' as a term for data rate is definitely wrong. Even worse is 'narrowband' which just makes me want to cringe.

Re:Words have meanings

[fche]

Broadband = Wide Band.
Wide = Large Width.
Ergo, broadband = high bandwidth.

Re:Words have meanings

[teh kurisu]

I'm torn. On the one hand, I remember when 512 kb/s down and 256 kb/s up was considered to be 'broadband', and seemed pretty damn fast. The idea that a connection can be broadband one day, and not broadband the next, because a bureaucrat somewhere changed a definition seems absurd to me.

On the other hand, coming up with a new name for each bump in speed also seems absurd to me. (I can't wait until super-duper-even-broader-band internet comes to my area!)

Re:Words have meanings

[gmack]

Think of phone line as roughly the same as speaker wire. Narrowband and is narrow because it is restricted to the narrow part of the frequency range that the phone company cares about for encoding voice data. Broadband transmits a range of frequencies that are outside the narrow range that the phone company uses for voice data that extends from just inside our hearing range to well outside of it.

To make the whole thing more fun there is an ADSL 2+ mode designed for dedicated date lines that uses the entire frequency range but it only adds around 64k to the overall transfer speed.

Re:Words have meanings

[arkane1234]

In much the same wasy as some words translated from language to language would be just as bastardized, yes.

Re:Words have meanings

[Sir_Dinky]

The gentleman your post is referring is right. Broadband has nothing to do with pulse shape, which is what you are referring to with symbols. Symbols are always used to transmit data. An on-off binary signal uses a symbol. Every signal has highs and lows. Baseband refers to nothing more than the base frequency band at which a signal is normally contained, with no modulation. Broadband implies a larger bandwidth, meaning more data can be sent down the channel. That can be confused for higher speeds, but it might also imply more users on a single channel. What I really want to know is, when will they stop advertising in BITs per second (bps)? Every program I've ever used for download management uses BYTEs per second (Bps). This can lead to a lot of confusion, since some people think their 15Mbps connection means 15MBps.

Re:Words have meanings

[MBGMorden]

I don't know. It seems like ANY definition that refers to speed of a computer-related concept would have to shift over time. Things move way to fast to set just one definition that essentially boils down to "fast enough internet" and leave it there.

That said, I'm at 3Mbps, and I don't really feel that held back. Truth be told I probably would have still been happy at 1Mbps but my ISP bumped that price tier up to 3Mbps at no cost. Guess I'm just not that picky. I'm about to close on a new house though which will let me upgrade to 10Mbps for the same price I'm paying for 3Mbps now, so I guess that's nice :)

Re:Words have meanings

[Hognoxious]

Yo mamma's ass band?

Re:Words have meanings

[teh kurisu]

Heh, right now I have yo mamma's ass band. I.e. cheap and readily available.

Re:Words have meanings

[ironjaw33]

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...

In that case, if you really want to eliminate confusion, you mean high throughput. Bandwidth also has another definition in EE circles.

Re:Words have meanings

[Anonymous Coward]

Close but not quite.

Broadband means sending two discreet signals to represent bits. This allows for asynchronous connections (those without a "heartbeat").

Baseband means sending a signal (any signal) to represent a bit and NOT sending a signal to represent the other. This requires synchronous signalling and a timekeeper.

Re:Words have meanings

[tgrigsby]

Sorry, I know this is off-topic, but perhaps you can explain why I would want to repeal my ability to directly elect my Senators?

Re:Words have meanings

[uglyduckling]

ADSL 2+ isn't just to for dedicated lines, I have it on my voice line. What you're describing as narrowband is called 'base band'.

Re:Words have meanings

[gmack]

Normal ADSL2+ isn't for dedicated lines but the Annex I mode is only for dedicated lines since it renders DSL filters completely useless. It is an optional mode that both the DSL modem and DSLAM need to have working and enabled for it to work.

Top 3 searches for "narrowband" on Google also allow for it be used in an audio context and so does dictionary.com:
"Narrowband can also be used with the audio spectrum to describe sounds which occupy a narrow range of frequencies." -Wikipedia

I've also had the technicians at several DSLAM manufacturers refer to it that way.

Re:Words have meanings

[10101001 10101001]

What they should call this is High Bandwidth, or High Speed Internet something along those lines.

High Speed Internet like High Speed USB? No, leaving it up to ambiguous prefixes/words like "Broad" and "High" won't do the job. Nor will "DSL" or "Fiber" do it since that's a pretty meaningless measure. LoCs would actually almost work, presuming the provider didn't effectively cheat the benchmark like some Australian telcos sort-of do (ie, cache a fast local copy and have low bandwidth caps and slow access for anything non-local).

No, the most sane thing is to actually give actual values of average available bandwidth (not simply "up to" values). Anything less and you're just opening yourself up for more marketing spin. Of course, then websites could actually advertise the average bandwidth they need for various things and people would have a notion of what service they want and need to buy. But, then, that just wouldn't sit well with a lot of people to find out their local telco sucks.

Other than that, I agree with the whole conflating thing. But your solution is just as guilty of the same thing, just at a subjective level instead of an objective one.

The US is not having a "hard time."

[erroneus]

To say the US is having a hard time keeping up would imply that it is difficult to do that for US companies. It's not. It simply goes against their desire to get money for nothing. They want to put nothing into their infrastructure and so nothing improves. This is in sharp contrast with other businesses in other parts of the world. The difference isn't the technology or the scale of deployment. It is the mindset of the people making decisions.

For the love of GOD won't they please declare that internet service is a "utility" and regulate it as such?

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[Registered Coward v2]

For the love of GOD won't they please declare that internet service is a "utility" and regulate it as such?

Oh yea, you really want politicians to decide how internet access is provided and who subsidizes whom. The plus side would be we'd get huge investments in infrastructure so the utility gets it's 10% or so return.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[AntEater]

To say the US is having a hard time keeping up would imply that it is difficult to do that for US companies. It's not. It simply goes against their desire to get money for nothing. They want to put nothing into their infrastructure and so nothing improves.

Don't worry, the invisible hand of the marketplace will exert it's influence opening up more options for us. As soon as a competitor sees the opportunity to.... Oh, wait... Nevermind.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[QuoteMstr]

California only had power problems after deregulating its utilities.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[fche]

... and thank GOD for that.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[Anonymous Coward]

California deregulated how much you could charge for wholesale electricity.
While locking how much you could charge consumers.
While banning any new power plants.
Hmmm
What could go wrong?

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[bev_tech_rob]

You might want to read up on Enron and their shenanigans in regards to brownouts. That occurred AFTER deregulation was implemented...

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[mlts]

You hit the nail on the head. Other than 1-2 cities, there is zero increase in bandwidth in the US, but fees are going up. Essentially most people are paying more for their cable or DSL for the same amount of bits flying across per time period as they did when the services were introduced more than a decade ago.

Take mobile bandwidth for instance. In '06, my mobile phone (although EDGE only) was more than happy to tether. Push a button, and the phone now became a modem. Now, if you want tethering, you pay $10 a gig to AT&T, or you hack your phone and hope Sprint or VZW doesn't catch on and put the boot to your connection. The only "free" cellular provider for this is T-Mobile, and who knows how long they will allow it to continue.

The ironic thing? Take South Korea or Japan. You can watch any TV show ready to be streamed to you at any moment. The ISPs there have no bandwidth caps, and speeds to a mobile device faster than most cable/DSL speeds. Korean ISPs handle far more data than American ISPs, and they don't whine and wring their hands in front of the National Assembly or the Diet of how the poor customers are using their services forcing them to upgrade.

While bandwidth for the average American has been stagnant for the past decade unless one is lucky enough to live in an area with fiber to the door, every other country's ISPs are not whining, but rolling up their sleeves, laying fiber and buying the Cisco equipment needed to do the task at hand.

Will this change anytime soon in the US? Doubtful in today's political climate.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[KiloByte]

Free market is a wondeful cure for most problems, it just has one weakness: it breaks down once a single company (a colluding cartel counts as one) corners a majority of the market. Thus, you need the government to stay away except for a vital duty of breaking monopolies -- instead of nurturing "too big to fail" crap.

Oh, and in the case at hand, instead of fighting the monopolies, the govt is actually creating them.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[sunderland56]

The US does seem to be having a hard time enforcing laws against false advertising.

4G is not really 4G, broadband is not really broadband, and if I remember correctly a 56kb modem only went 53kb max.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[Attila Dimedici]

California never deregulated the electricity market. They only deregulated the wholesale market for electricity, while maintaining a cap on how much you could charge the enduser, and requiring that the companies that delivered electricity to the enduser not produce any electricity. Those companies that before "deregulation" had both consumer electric divisions and electric generation plants were required to either sell their electric generation capabality or split it off into a separate, unrelated corporate entity. What happened was entirely predictable.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[crunchygranola]

For the love of GOD won't they please declare that internet service is a "utility" and regulate it as such?

Oh yea, you really want politicians to decide how internet access is provided and who subsidizes whom....

It is certainly preferable to having the corporations make those decisions.

The only reason rural America can send and receive mail at a reasonable cost (the same cost as everyone else, and the cheapest rates in the world) is that the USPS is a government regulated "utility". The only reason rural America got electrical power and a phone system was also due to government regulation and "interference" via the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) which was abolished in 1994 after completing its job of bringing those service to all Americans.

A corporation is only interested in its bottom line (they are compelled to do this by law in fact) not the national interest. So raking in large fees for service that is far below international standards is perfectly fine for them. If you believe that the Internet is important and that new industries and productive activities can grow out of state-of-the-art high speed data access then the U.S. is at a competitive disadvantage. You cable company doesn't care about this but national politicians should.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[Lumpy]

You nailed it.

Comcast, AT&T, all of them do NOT want to upgrade infrastructure to deliver real broadband, because they make far higher profits by letting it simply sit.
Plus without Govt regulation or real competition, they can tel the customer, "Stuff it in your pie hole" if you call to complain.

Honestly, they are doing what us as consumers ask them to do. IF you happily pay your bill month after month and do not complain to the FTC and FCC on a regular basis, then you ENJOY your service and LOVE your service company.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[MadKeithV]

The main problem with the invisible hand of the free market is that no-one can see it's giving us the finger.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[characterZer0]

The US does seem to have a hard time enforcing laws against corporations that donate to political campaigns.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[arkane1234]

The FTC & FCC is not the customer relations department of corporations.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[SomeKDEUser]

It is in fact entirely good and reasonable that production and transport of electricity be from two separate entity. It is not good to allow monopolies on production and transport...

And if they are required for technical reasons, they ought to be state monopolies.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[AltairDusk]

Sometimes it seems like you can get away with saying anything in your commercial so long as the practically unreadable text at the bottom of the screen contains the right legalese...

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[Reziac]

Which is why the best I can get (in SoCal no less) for less than $50/month is 1.5Mbit down and 256k up... well, nominally that. In practical terms it's about half that.

As to cost, my provider is a one-man band and he likes to talk about his business. He tells me that AT&T (his upstream) charges 5 CENTS PER GB for upload but NOTHING for download (this is so the backbones don't wind up billing one another into oblivion over downloaded data). Of course there's also some infrastructure cost, but nowhere else other than printer ink do they get away with such a lopsided cost shift onto the end purchaser.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[Reziac]

Not only that, but I now pay TEN TIMES as much for using 1/3 LESS electricity, compared to before "deregulation". The same situation occurred in Montana when it "deregulated".

Deregulation, as presently used, is simply a golden exit strategy for infrastructure owners, and a golden opportunity for foreign investors who then get to gouge without limit.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[Ash Vince]

The main problem with the invisible hand of the free market is that no-one can see it's giving us the finger.

This is probably the best comment I have ever seen on slashdot.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[erroneus]

Yes. Yes I do. Here's why.

A "Utilities Commission" enforces minimum distribution and quality of service. Without that type of requirement, we wouldn't have the power infrastructure we have today. Without that type of requirement, we wouldn't have telephone service everywhere in the form it is in today. Guaranteeing and enforcing minimum standards is what is required. The FCC is nearly powerless with currently interfering politics as they are today.

As it stands, we don't have "broadband" everywhere in the U.S. As it stands, the areas where service is available are "cherry picked" where certain areas get service and other do not. Perhaps you feel the way you do because you don't live in an under-privileged area and don't know anyone that does. But let me ask you -- have you ever driven through an area where your mobile phone gets crappy coverage? How would you like to live there? Now imagine living in a place where services simply aren't available.

Most people's initial reactions are "well? move! Don't live there!" In part, I agree. I always try to scout out an area before I relocate -- I check broadband availability, how close I am to a hospital (you get better power service when you are close to a hospital... better water and other services too) I do this because I recognize that companies do not deliver good service without motivation. Usually, good service is only delivered when it is required of them to do so -- otherwise, they will deliver "the worst service that the market will bear."

Most of us live under this backward belief that free market means everyone competes to deliver the "best" of anything. That's simply not true and I am not sure it ever was. Business competes with other businesses. That's true. But it's usually a race to the bottom to deliver the bare minimum without losing business. They get MORE business through marketing (specials and advertising), not through quality and good reputation -- that's so 40 years ago.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[StopKoolaidPoliticsT]

The problem is, those of us on Slashdot are different than most people. To the average American, the current offerings are good enough for them, so there's little demand at this point for something faster. Most people can stream Youtube or Netflix fine, they can send their kids' pictures to grandma fast enough, etc.

Nobody is going to expand their infrastructure at high expense until there is demand for it. I'm sitting at my ISP's standard 15/1 rate and I find it adequate enough for me about 99% of the time.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[pureallstar3482]

The biggest problem is the lack of options. Companies don't want to improve their infrastructure because they don't have to. There are regulations in place that make it almost impossible for a start-up ISP to come into an area where large ISPs reign (ie Verizon, Comcast, TimeWarner, etc.). I work for a small to moderate ISP in Maine. The main reason we have been able to prosper is the fact that we are a 100 year old company. We started with phone service and expanded from there. We only just started blowing up our last 10 years.

We take pride in taking customers from TimeWarner and Fairpoint because they can't compete with what we offer. Our biggest limitation is the fact that our footprint is so small. When we think about expanding, we have to weigh how much business we will get. Any new areas we put physical plant in is run with all fiber. Gone are the days of copper backbones and DSL / Cable links. We offer FTTP connections for less than Fairpoint charges for DSL and our customers get 10 times the downstream bandwidth.

You are always going to run into the large providers that don't change because they don't have to. If they lose 10% of their customers in a given area, they are still making more money than they know what to do with. The only way a company will change is by public outcry. If you don't want to pay high prices for low bandwidth, your option is to switch providers (if you can), or drop internet completely, which all of us know is almost impossible in this day and age. Just pray for small start-up ISPs in your area. They will work with you and against TimeWarner. Believe me, we take no greater pride than cutting into TimeWarner's or Fairpoint's market share. While we are no where near theirs, we are steadily increasing while they are steadily decreasing. You have to look at it from the standpoint of return on investment. If a company is only going to profit pennies on the dollar of investment, they aren't going to invest in it. Capitalism is a great thing, but its also a bad thing. As the old saying goes, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[SuricouRaven]

It's cyclic. The utilities provide a poor service under government operation and suck up tax money, so people then demand they be privatised - but then they start screwing people over for profit, providing the cheapest service and putting prices up as high as they can when they have a natural monopoly. So regulation is applied, the local government sees it as a vital service... and so it goes.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[SuricouRaven]

They were also assymetric. 56k one way... 33.3 the other. And yes, 56k was the upper limit, 45 was more realistic for me.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[beakerMeep]

If they had deregulated consumer price the same thing would have happened, it just would have cost more. Let's not forget it was Enron et al that were out to screw over people to make a buck that caused so many problems in California. It really didn't matter if they screwed over the distributors or the consumers. Deregulating distributors would have just added another layer corporations out to get theirs.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[Jawnn]

For the love of GOD won't they please declare that internet service is a "utility" and regulate it as such?

Oh yea, you really want politicians to decide how internet access is provided and who subsidizes whom. The plus side would be we'd get huge investments in infrastructure so the utility gets it's 10% or so return.

Uh..., hell yes? Because in all those places where it''s better than the crap we're served here in the U.S., internet access is, ZOMG!, regulated. The free-market fairy is a myth. Time to grow up and face the reality about how things work in any market where there exists a "natural monopoly".

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[Kjella]

No, competition is a wonderful cure for most problems. The free market is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Also, competition is not a protection against fraudulent marketing nor abusive companies. Many companies operate under the policy that are happy to take your money once, then disappear and reappear under another name when complaints and bad reputation crop up. Or they know they're an effective oligarchy, each may have their dissatisfied customers but they only rotate a little. It's also important that the government steps in early and hard against methods used by a dominating actor to gain monopoly, otherwise you end up with the monopolist paying pennies in damages many years later but more than making up for it in monopoly profits.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[oh_my_080980980]

Yeah except that did not happen. Residential utility rates went through the roof! Rates spiked at a time when demand was low.

The Enron tapes clearly show market manipulations.

Do some research before posting!

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[phlinn]

I think you will find that in almost all cases abusive monopolies have benefited from government intervention on their behalf. Copyrights and patents, eminent domain, zoning laws, etc. It's really not limited to the case at hand. Even regulations supposedly created to fight monopolies also serve to increase startup costs.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[Attila Dimedici]

That's fine but you can't regulate the maximum price that the transport company charges while allowing the production companies to charge whatever the market will bear (especially not if you do so at a time when energy prices are rising to record levels). There were other things that California did as part of its "deregulation" that were actually increased regulation. California completely restructured its regulation of the electricity market and called it "deregulation". It didn't actually deregulate its electricity market.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[SomeKDEUser]

On the other hand, California is the "we want more money for teachers and less taxes" state. So it's not like they have a long history of being extra-consistent...

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[PrimaryConsult]

Time Warner out here just rolled out "extreme" internet, which for $10/month more gave me 30/5 instead of 15/1. This is a fairly recent development, too. Maybe other ISPs have stagnated (even FiOs has no plans to expand into our area), but Time Warner seems to be decent enough.
As I'm fairly certain my city of pop 100,000 is not one of those two cities you are speaking of, so perhaps other places have seen improvement as well?

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[Hognoxious]

It is in fact entirely good and reasonable that production and transport of electricity be from two separate entity.

Why? Given that both are necessary to the end result it doesn't help the consumer at all, especially if there's only one of each. There'd be more competition with two (or more) vertically integrated companies.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[sorak]

To say the US is having a hard time keeping up would imply that it is difficult to do that for US companies. It's not. It simply goes against their desire to get money for nothing. They want to put nothing into their infrastructure and so nothing improves. This is in sharp contrast with other businesses in other parts of the world. The difference isn't the technology or the scale of deployment. It is the mindset of the people making decisions.

For the love of GOD won't they please declare that internet service is a "utility" and regulate it as such?

Mod parent up!

It's the countries that have to upgrade their infrastructure on a regular basis who are having a "hard time keeping up". Saying that about the US is like pointing at a fat woman eating Cheetos in a mobility scooter and saying "Boy, she's having a hard time staying thin".

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[SomeKDEUser]

No, because in practise, you do not want to have five cable to your home, just so you can switch providers.

And even if you did, the redundancy clearly represents some loss for society.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[Attila Dimedici]

Yes, Enron was a company that did a lot of bad stuff, but if the government of California had actually deregulated the market instead of setting up the worst of both worlds (all the problems of deregulation combined with all of the problems of regulation and none of the benefits of either) they would not have been successful at what they did (of course what's fun is that the same people who are quick to point out how evil Enron was are often the same people who are pushing one of Enron's worst--or best, if you are a crooked company like Enron--idea: CO2 Cap and Trade).

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[Attila Dimedici]

I think this last election sums up the state of California. "Our state is bankrupt and has no idea how to come up with the money to meet its obligations. Let's elect the guy who started this whole thing as governor, surely more of what got us into this mess will get us out."

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[LaissezFaire]

The USPS had to change how they operated for next-day mail service when FedEx and UPS came into the market through a loophole in the postal monopoly laws. Heck, USPS contracts with those two for some of their air transportation. And I don't know if you can count REA as a government success. The first commercial US nuclear power plant was built in 1958, and it only took the government 36 more years to string power lines in all the rural areas. Success!

Before commercial companies got into building the Internet infrastructure, the 'net was "for me, not for thee." The Department of Defense and the universities didn't bring the Internet into homes. Commercial companies did, because they thought they could make a profit at it.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[Solandri]

Don't worry, the invisible hand of the marketplace will exert it's influence opening up more options for us. As soon as a competitor sees the opportunity to.... Oh, wait... Nevermind.

The free market isn't working in most markets because the municipal governments have selected one cable provider and one phone provider to service the area. It's illegal for a competitor to enter the market. Get rid of those exclusive contracts with the city and things should improve. When I was living in a Boston suburb, the city approved a second cable company to provide service in the area. I didn't switch, but my cable/internet bill dropped by $10/mo, and service improved (wait times on customer support and for scheduled service both decreased, and the window for what time the cable serviceman would arrive narrowed from a half-day block to a 2-hour block).

There are a lot of places where a truly free market has screwed things up, but this isn't one of them. The blame in this one rests at the feet of government.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[DragonWriter]

To say the US is having a hard time keeping up would imply that it is difficult to do that for US companies.

No, it wouldn't.

"The US" is not "US companies". The US can have a hard time doing something that would be easy for US companies to do if they were inclined to simply because the US does very little to make US companies want to do that thing.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[DragonWriter]

California deregulated how much you could charge for wholesale electricity.
While locking how much you could charge consumers.
While banning any new power plants.
Hmmm
What could go wrong?

This is false in several respects, and misleading in areas where it isn't outright false.

First, the deregulation affected not only the wholesale end but also the retail side (which is why alternative retail suppliers emerged under deregulation in areas that were formerly single-utility monopolies.)

Second, California didn't ban new power plants.

And, finally, the problems that did emerge weren't primarily related to any gap between wholesale and retail regulations (the primary problem wasn't that retail sellers got squeezed), it was that available capacity was deliberately shut-off at peak demand period by generators to cause artificial shortages (and that distributors like Enron caused artificial congestion and shortages by other means, such as by deliberately reserving capacity on key lines and then not supplying power.) The incentive to do that would have been exactly the same had there been simple pass-through pricing of minute-to-minute wholesale price fluctuations to consumers (in fact, the earliest symptoms of the problem that caused the first state complaints to FERC, the federal commission responsible for overseeing interstate energy transmission, were retail price increases in 2000 in San Diego, an area of the State where retail prices did follow the increases in wholesale costs.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[Solandri]

It is certainly preferable to having the corporations make those decisions.

Not in this case.

A corporation is only interested in its bottom line (they are compelled to do this by law in fact) not the national interest. So raking in large fees for service that is far below international standards is perfectly fine for them. If you believe that the Internet is important and that new industries and productive activities can grow out of state-of-the-art high speed data access then the U.S. is at a competitive disadvantage. You cable company doesn't care about this but national politicians should.

The politicians had their chance and blew it. They awarded cable and DSL contracts to a single provider and made it illegal for other companies to enter the market. That's what's causing the slow rate of broadband improvement. Get rid of those exclusive service contracts. All they do is allow ISPs to get away with spending as little money as possible by greasing some palms at city hall. Open up the ISP market to some real competition and companies will start caring more about providing the most bandwidth for the lowest price, instead of how they can game the system to make the most money while offering the least service.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[Corbets]

It simply goes against their desire to get money for nothing. They want to put nothing into their infrastructure and so nothing improves. This is in sharp contrast with other businesses in other parts of the world. The difference isn't the technology or the scale of deployment. It is the mindset of the people making decisions.

Wait, you think people over here work for FUN???

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[RightSaidFred99]

Right, because the US doesn't have any different geographic or population density constraints compared to other countries, right? And those businesses in other parts of the world are altruistic infrastructure builders while US companies are evil capitalists, right? You make me laugh. At you. Not with you.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[ErikZ]

Your logic doesn't make sense.

Are you saying that Infrastructure is invested in and kept up in the US? Because if you are, that's an incredibly wrong statement.

http://pennysleuth.com/free-reports/investing-in-infrastructure/

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[RightSaidFred99]

Some organization or other coming and redefining terms retroactively does not create false advertising.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[demonbug]

Yes, Enron was a company that did a lot of bad stuff, but if the government of California had actually deregulated the market instead of setting up the worst of both worlds (all the problems of deregulation combined with all of the problems of regulation and none of the benefits of either) they would not have been successful at what they did (of course what's fun is that the same people who are quick to point out how evil Enron was are often the same people who are pushing one of Enron's worst--or best, if you are a crooked company like Enron--idea: CO2 Cap and Trade).

While the deregulation would have kept regulation of the transport side of things, it was basically the large power companies in California that caused the failure. Enron and the like certainly helped, but they just took advantage of the situation created by the major power companies here in California. These companies (PG&E, Southern Edison, a few others) collectively decided they hated the idea of any deregulation, and during the peak periods of demand following deregulation took unusually large portions of their power generating facilities off-line for "scheduled maintenance". Something like 25% of power plants in California were taken off-line at the same time, not in response to any emergency but in order to create a scheduled shortage. This lead to the famous rolling brownouts, which were their goal - scare the public into thinking that deregulation would cause the power supply to fail. This semi-backfired for them, as they were then forced by the state to purchase large amounts of power to alleviate the shortages - which again, they knew was likely to happen going in. What they didn't count on was the manipulation by Enron and the like to massively increase the rates they had to pay for importing power to make up for their self-inflicted shortages. Instead of the perhaps tens of millions they expected the stunt to cost them in the short-term, it ended up costing billions and all of a sudden they were in real trouble.

Yes, there were clear shortcomings in the way "deregulation" occurred that probably should have been foreseen. However, if you look into what actually happened during that period it is pretty clear that the major California power companies manipulated the market in order to discredit deregulation (which they saw as hurting profitability in the long-run as it opened them to competition), then got gut-checked by another company manipulating the market at their expense.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[Attila Dimedici]

I was not aware of the gaming of the system by companies that were trying to make deregulation fail, but it doesn't surprise me. One of the things that most proponents of government regulation don't realize is that big companies generally favor government regulation of their industry as well. Government regulation always favors big companies at the expense of smaller companies (it is easier for a big company to absord the costs of regulation than it is for a small company).

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[Rockoon]

It should be pointed out that California did this "deregulation" because their large energy companies were facing bankruptcy and needed to be bailed out with an absurd amount of money from the tax payers.

Those price caps were there both before and after the "deregulation" and were ultimately the cause of both the first and second California Energy Crisis.

California was screwed over by the California politicians that promised the people an energy utopia, while in actuality they rigging the game on paper so that the people of that State were inevitably going to get fucked over *again* due to that very promise.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[PRMan]

Second, California didn't ban new power plants.

Go ahead. Try to build a power plant in California. I'll be back in 20 years to see if you succeeded in convincing them to let you use some rare spider's habitat and were able to pay all the fees to reimburse the environment...

Don't you remember when Governor Terminator was fined like $18,000 for trying to use alternative fuel?

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[DragonWriter]

Go ahead. Try to build a power plant in California. I'll be back in 20 years to see if you succeeded

There wasn't a ban as part of (or concurrent with) deregulations. There were very few applications and no approvals of permits for new plants for a number of years before deregulation, though several permits were issued after deregulation and before the peak of the crisis.

And, while this may have been -- while not a ban -- a bad thing for other reasons, it wasn't the source of the crisis: there was never a real shortage of supply, their were deliberately engineered carefully arranged delivery cutbacks or oversubscription of power lines by suppliers that wanted to make it impossible for other people to supply power to increase spot prices.

Don't you remember when Governor Terminator was fined like $18,000 for trying to use alternative fuel?

Even if that is an accurate portrayal of a real event that isn't omitting key information (which I doubt) it has no relevance to the claim that California banned new powerplant construction as part of, or even around the time of, the "deregulation" process for electricity.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[haruchai]

And that was only possible because the telephony and electrical infrastructure was already built. If the Internet needed some other kind of newfangled tech that couldn't work with what was already out there or what was on the near-term roadmap, we wouldn't have the level of residential access we have today.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[sznupi]

"Creating" them would be only the result of not managing to protect itself from their influence. Not proactive enough.

Remembering how, ultimately, the prevalent style of governance and its interaction with businesses is a reflection of their society.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[sznupi]

It's just businesses enjoying really free (even if in an informal way) market...

And BTW, from where do you think people in the "government" come from? Values of which society do they reflect?

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[Registered Coward v2]

For the love of GOD won't they please declare that internet service is a "utility" and regulate it as such?

Oh yea, you really want politicians to decide how internet access is provided and who subsidizes whom....

It is certainly preferable to having the corporations make those decisions.

The only reason rural America can send and receive mail at a reasonable cost (the same cost as everyone else, and the cheapest rates in the world) is that the USPS is a government regulated "utility". The only reason rural America got electrical power and a phone system was also due to government regulation and "interference" via the Rural Electrification Administration (REA) which was abolished in 1994 after completing its job of bringing those service to all Americans.

Actually, you mean the only reason we have "cheap" mail service is because the government forces them to run a money losing business; if they had to be fully self sustaining rates would rise. Of course, we could let the USPS run broadband and bring us plenty of cheap spam er bulk rate email to help keep costs down and provide a service to the consumer. Of course, only the USPS could deliver email to your inbox. Once a day. Not on Sundays.

You could, of course, cross subsidize broader broadband rollouts by charging more for the easily accessed areas to cover the cost of hard to service areas; as well as providing companies low cost service that ultimately is paid for by consumers.

All the while allowing a fixed return on assists; encouraging the building of large capital bases to ensure the largest possible cash flow to pay out to investors

Or, you could take the airline model and charge by distance or usage.

In fact, a regulated utility would probably tier charges as well simply "brownout" service when demand exceeds bandwidth.

A corporation is only interested in its bottom line (they are compelled to do this by law in fact) not the national interest. So raking in large fees for service that is far below international standards is perfectly fine for them. If you believe that the Internet is important and that new industries and productive activities can grow out of state-of-the-art high speed data access then the U.S. is at a competitive disadvantage. You cable company doesn't care about this but national politicians should.

It is, but a government regulated utility won't be any better and may be far worse.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[Registered Coward v2]

For the love of GOD won't they please declare that internet service is a "utility" and regulate it as such?

Oh yea, you really want politicians to decide how internet access is provided and who subsidizes whom. The plus side would be we'd get huge investments in infrastructure so the utility gets it's 10% or so return.

Uh..., hell yes? Because in all those places where it''s better than the crap we're served here in the U.S., internet access is, ZOMG!, regulated. The free-market fairy is a myth. Time to grow up and face the reality about how things work in any market where there exists a "natural monopoly".

First off all, it's not a natural monopoly - it's an artificial one created by, surprise, government regulators. The problem is not that we have crappy service, it's that people want first class service at cut rate prices. You want fast internet - pay for it. I don't want my rates to go up to pay for extra speed that I do not need. Forcing 90% of the users to subsidize the 10% that want T1 to the home is not an efficient use of resources.

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[Registered Coward v2]

Yes. Yes I do. Here's why.

A "Utilities Commission" enforces minimum distribution and quality of service. Without that type of requirement, we wouldn't have the power infrastructure we have today. Without that type of requirement, we wouldn't have telephone service everywhere in the form it is in today. Guaranteeing and enforcing minimum standards is what is required. The FCC is nearly powerless with currently interfering politics as they are today.

You have a very naive view of a Utility Commission - they exist to ensure a utility gets it fixed rate of retune on its capitalized assets; and to provide preferential rates to whatever corporation politicians want to help.

Most of us live under this backward belief that free market means everyone competes to deliver the "best" of anything. That's simply not true and I am not sure it ever was. Business competes with other businesses. That's true. But it's usually a race to the bottom to deliver the bare minimum without losing business. They get MORE business through marketing (specials and advertising), not through quality and good reputation -- that's so 40 years ago.

No, a free market does not guarantee a"bets" - it simp;ly provides the level of service people are willing to pay for; if you want "best" you simply must pay the cost of best. Most people want "best" while paying for cheap; and when they can't get it they whine about the "failure of the free market."

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[Jawnn]

Wrong. It is patently absurd to suggest that telecom is not a natural monopoly. Logistical, as well as economic reasons make it impossible for more than a very few to enter the market. Indeed, telecom and railroads are the very textbook definition of the natural monopoly.
As for the crappy service we get, how is it then, that in so many other places, service well in excess of your "T1 to the home" yardstick is delivered for far less than we pay for the same thing here? If, that is, we can get it at all?

Re:The US is not having a "hard time."

[Registered Coward v2]

Wrong. It is patently absurd to suggest that telecom is not a natural monopoly. Logistical, as well as economic reasons make it impossible for more than a very few to enter the market. Indeed, telecom and railroads are the very textbook definition of the natural monopoly.

You clearly do not understand the concept of "natural monopoly" as evidenced by your use of two examples that relied on government action to create their positions.

As for the crappy service we get, how is it then, that in so many other places, service well in excess of your "T1 to the home" yardstick is delivered for far less than we pay for the same thing here? If, that is, we can get it at all?

Some clues; population density, government subsidy

I could have "real broadband".

[John Hasler]

I don't need it. 1.5Mb is fast enough. I know others for whom even lower speeds suffice. Not everyone watches television over the Net.

Re:I could have "real broadband".

[glwtta]

So, who says that everyone must have broadband? The article only points out that a good majority of the people who pay for broadband don't receive a service that can be justifiably called that.

Re:I could have "real broadband".

[Triv]

Glad you're happy with the service you have, but that isn't the issue. The issue is that ISPs are advertising their services as "broadband" where the FCC has a definition of "broadband" that the providers are failing to meet - if I'm paying for 4mbps downstream and I'm getting 1, that's false advertising.

Re:I could have "real broadband".

[houghi]

I have friends whose speed is 10 times what I have. They all laugh about my speed when we compare and then I tell them that I have this all the time 24/7 and no need to buy extra bandwith because I exceeded some random number in down/up load.
Also I have no ports blocked, fixed IP and no P2P throttling. Things they don't have. Price is about the same.

Yet even though they complain all the time about the data limit, none wants to change. They happily buy extra, even though the company advertises that there is no limit. The limit is decided by 1.5 times the average usage of users. And nobody knows what that will be at any moment. Fun. (Oh, it is per area, so if you live in an area with lots of students, you can download more then if all are retired people.)

So speed is not the only factor.

Re:I could have "real broadband".

[khallow]

Glad you're happy with the service you have, but that isn't the issue. The issue is that ISPs are advertising their services as "broadband" where the FCC has a definition of "broadband" that the providers are failing to meet - if I'm paying for 4mbps downstream and I'm getting 1, that's false advertising.

Why should ISPs use the FCC definition? Wikipedia has this to say:

Different criteria for "broad" have been applied in different contexts and at different times. Its origin is in radio systems engineering, but became popularized after MediaOne adopted it as part of a marketing campaign in 1996 to sell their high speed data access. The slogan was "This is Broadband. This is the Way". The term has never been formally defined, even though it is used widely and has been the subject of many policy debates, and the FCC "National Broadband Plan".

Re:I could have "real broadband".

[ArsonSmith]

Of course they are, that's the way the FCC works. Make a definition that everyone can follow then change it and put out a report that says 2/3rds of the vendors are wrong. Standard government regulation encroachment tactic.

Re:I could have "real broadband".

[bsDaemon]

Good thing they advertise speeds "up to ${SPEED}", which is just weasel-y enough to skirt the laws with regards to false advertising then, isn't it?

Re:I could have "real broadband".

[Bert64]

Work out the address ranges allocated to your local area, and arrange for some ddos attacks to saturate most of their connections all month, then the average will be extremely high...
Or just pool resources with your neighbours, if you all download huge amounts that will push the average up too.

Re:I could have "real broadband".

[natehoy]

Honestly? It doesn't matter. I have "broadband", but I can't come close to actually using it.

With the introduction of bandwidth caps, Comcast could give me 1 trillion gigabytes to my home via magic faerie fiber, and I'll still be limited to a monthly allotment of 250GB (and consider myself lucky, because of the capping ISP's at least Comcast has the highest cap!). That means that if my combined upload and download over the course of the month exceeds an average of about 100 kilobytes/second, I'm screwed.

Comcast recently upgraded my connection so it technically qualifies as this new definition of "broadband" (without any prior notice, without my consent, and at the tune of another $10 a month bringing me up to $65 for Internet access ONLY - no cable and no phone, thanks Comcast, if you weren't a complete monopoly here I'd kick you out, but you know you got me between the cheeks with the sandy vaseline!). Of course, with the new speeds and the new increased pricing came.. the same monthly cap.

Great, now I can burn up my monthly allotment in 7 days instead of 12. Woo-freaking-hoo. Party time!

Re:I could have "real broadband".

[oldgeek49]

Broadband... what is that? I live in a gated community in central VA.... ok Caroline County. Which has DSL in only a very small portion of the county. The majority of us are limited to Verizon WiFi, Satellite internet, or dial-up. No, we have no large industrial base to draw the providers, but you would think that with over 2500 potential subscribers in our community alone, someone like Verizon would take mercy on us...... Alas, I live in sloooooooooww-web hell. Comcast is here, but will not upgrade their analog service to digital..... bastards!

Re:I could have "real broadband".

[arkane1234]

We didn't ask you if you wanted it. It's a majority that want it, as a majority DO watch television over the 'Net.

If you were happy driving a 70's Pinto (and say not everyone drives a 2010 car), life would continue advancing as usual also...

Re:I could have "real broadband".

[Stormy Dragon]

Likewise, I'm apparently being put upon since I only get 3mbps, even though that's all I'm paying for and am pleased with my service. Of course, I could get 20+ Mbps if I wanted, but I don't see that being worth the additional expense. Perhaps it would be better to find out what percentage of people have the maximum possible bandwidth available in their area and desire more rather than comparing them to some arbitrarily defined standard that doesn't reflect what many people actually need or want.

Re:I could have "real broadband".

[Reziac]

Except that now even the most "basic" websites think 300k worth of scripts, stock images, and other crap constitutes a "plain" page. On one forum I've been using for about 3 years now, I've watched the "blank page" size grow from 40k to over 160k, and that's before anyone adds comments (ten small comments brings it to over 300k per page!) and not counting any user-added images or site-added advertising. This is becoming the rule rather than the exception, so that even slower broadband (like my paltry 1.5Mbit) is becoming painfully slow, and now often feels like I'm back on 14k dialup.

Stream TV online? Not with any reliability (and I have NO over-the-air reception). Whether it's a congestion problem upstream or what I don't know, but often I can't even listen to a 128k online radio station, because the connection is slow enough to make it choppy.

Re:I could have "real broadband".

[stewbacca]

That's not the point. The point is that "broadband" has a specific technical definition and if your service doesn't meet that definition, you can't call it that.

Re:I could have "real broadband".

[John Hasler]

Get your association to put out an RFQ for service for the whole community.

Re:I could have "real broadband".

[saleenS281]

Nobody said you need broadband. However, if they upgrade the node, it means your price should drop dramatically since they can fit more people on a node, and you're consuming less of their resources.

Re:I could have "real broadband".

[Sax Maniac]

Netflix works very well over a 1.5M line. I brought my Wii over a friend's house who has a much faster cable modem, and couldn't see any difference in quality. The difference would be trying to stream multiple things at once, I suppose.

Re:I could have "real broadband".

[LynnwoodRooster]

Broadband - to me, the consumer who buys it - is fast enough access to get what I need, when I need it. For me, that's a 1Mbps DSL line that I pay $15.99 per month for. It's broadband for me; higher speed doesn't get my anything more - I can check e-mail, use SVN, stream Pandora, watch Netflix, and post on /. - all with a cheap, "non-broadband" connection.

Re:I could have "real broadband".

[vlueboy]

Not everyone watches television over the Net.

Unfortunately everyone's going to change that; even companies like Netflix are pushing content creators to provide more shows, quickly. Everyone using flash has moved away from permanent MPEG files to prevent files from going to your "My music" and "My downloads" folders... and those of your friends, who have no downloader or player installed.

Let me digress, to state how even dis-advantaged communities have the power to increase bandwidth statistics in favor of online distribution: unlike mainstream Americans today, an immigrant Joe User in his fifties fears MP3 lawsuits and lacks time, resources and language skills to learn computing for the first time. He lacks our ubiquitous digital media stash, and has no webTV interest due to language and homeland-exclusive TV interests.

Pressure to join Facebook (which offers his choice of language interface) comes with the "educational brain damage" of sharing "files" the wrong way. He's "saving" music by receiving and re-sharing Facebook posts. These are links to ephimeral Youtube clips of his favorite songs with inspirational slideshows or live-performance footage to appease Youtube's "video site" status. These videos get taken down*, but Joe user will do another Youtube search and find his song track with different animations. Meanwhile, each stream is wasting orders of magnitude more bandwidth per CD audio track, over and over again every time Joe refreshes the page. By his usage, even if not a single Ep of Lost is watched, his advertisers will see heavy video consuption, and aggregate him with those guys who aren't the parent poster's conservative downloader type.

Eventually, we'll come to a point where everyone will be forced to blindly mimic tech-savvy friends' alternative distribution techniques. Or, back to "reality," they'll learn to live unable to "userfriendly-ly" store a single bit of content on their future multi-Terabyte hard drives.

* not as rapidly as English language Youtube links, though.

Re:I could have "real broadband".

[DocSavage64109]

Of course they are, that's the way the FCC works. Make a definition that everyone can follow then change it and put out a report that says 2/3rds of the vendors are wrong. Standard government regulation encroachment tactic.

Yes, how dare they strong-arm ISPs into releasing faster service!

Re:I could have "real broadband".

[thegarbz]

Please try surfing the net on a 56kbps modem. I ask this because I get the feeling you would have said exactly the same thing 15 years ago. 15 years ago at a time where the average Geocities page was around 200kb. These days your average slashdot page spends 200KB just making the damn site functional and the content is a further 800KB on top of that.

I challenge you, print out your comment and put it somewhere at the very bottom of some drawer, at the very back of some cupboard, somewhere where it will only be found again in 10 years. When that time comes reflect on it. Are you still at 1.5mbps? If you are, are you waiting painfully long for a page to load? Are you longing to have a high-def video chat with your father in his home but can't because your daughter is attempting the trivial task of loading her 30MB facebook page?

When was the last time you came across a page on the net which offered you the choice of surfing broadband or 28.8k? Think about that when in 10 years you CAN'T get fast internet even if you want to because ... well fuck it was good enough for everyone at the time.

Re:I could have "real broadband".

[ArsonSmith]

Exactly, that should come from customer request.

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:US Carriers are not having a hard time.

[VortexCortex]

Yep, and when you finally get fed up and decide to switch make sure you read the fine print.

Re:US Carriers are not having a hard time.

[dogmatixpsych]

Blame Congress, not the Presidency. You'd still get to blame Republicans (unless the changes happened after 2006). Congress is the legislative branch of government.

Re:US Carriers are not having a hard time.

[RightSaidFred99]

Your post is informative and insightful, and I never would have expected it to appear on SlashDot. Corporatism, you say? Why, I thought corporations were our friends but I now see I am completely wrong!

Yes, I'm mocking you.

Re:US Carriers are not having a hard time.

[jonaskoelker]

They have a monopoly

Epic Oligofail...

A definition I am envious of

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in the UK we decided a number of years ago to define broadband as being >2Mbps downstream, which at the time was in my option at least quite ambitious and forward thinking decision (I think I was on 0.5Mbps at the time and that was about as fast as you could get). What we neglected to do however was place any sort of requirement on upstream, and thus I am languishing on a 10Mbps cable connection with 512k of upstream (although it tends to be more like 400.) Anyone seen complaining about upstream on broadband forums is immediately met with a barrage of insults and accusations, asserting that only someone pirating movies 24 / 7 (the same people who get the blame for any sort of network congestion / usage restrictions)could want more than a token upstream speed. Yet uploading large videos to youtube, hosting some high upstream utilisation online games, attempting to make HD video calls on skype, all these things and thousands more are verboten to the average UK consumer and his "broadband" internet connection.

Re:A definition I am envious of

[ledow]

It has to be said - most UK broadband is ADSL, and there the "asymmetric" is in the name of the protocol. And most people genuinely, honestly, don't need that much upload and if they do, it's a small, rare burst compared to their overall usage (yeah, it would be good to have 8Mb down AND up, but to be honest you're very unlikely to get a constant average measured over 24 hours where upload is anywhere NEAR download). Even back in the days of modems you were lucky to see 14.4 or 28.8 up even on a 56K down (and in fact upload was ALWAYS less because of the technology).

The cable companies are offering upload speeds on a 10:1 ratio with the download - e.g. Virgin media has a 10Mb / 1Mb or a 50Mb / 5Mb and that maps across to the ADSL providers pretty well too. It's not a conspiracy - most people genuinely don't need anywhere near as much upload as download and every byte in either direction counts against their data tariffs (e.g. over BT's ADSL infrastructure), and almost all technology from modems to DSL to 3G is heavily biased to support higher download than upload (most "8Mb" ADSL routers can't actually do anything past 1\Mb for upload, most "24Mb" ADSL2+ routers can't do more than 1.4 Mb up) - it's not just the particular setup, it's the technology and protocols. Look at the tech specs of ADSL2+, which is what we have deployed in the UK - it's 1.4Mb up MAXIMUM.

If you want more upload, it's there - go look at the prices for SDSL, for instance. It's ridiculous, and that *probably* is the price-gouging. But who, at home, needs more than 5Mb up? Or who needs 5Mb up for any purpose where they CAN'T buy themselves a decent symmetric connection? When you word it like that, it pretty much is only the pirates who are left and you could be reasonably sure that if Torrents demand upload as well as download, they wouldn't want more upload either.

There are cases of huge upload, but I can get a decent sized upload on a £5.99 / month contract, or a 5Mb upload on a not-prohbibitive home contract. That's way before you ever get into business services, SDSL, leased lines, etc. I maintain several websites. Yeah, a better upload would be nice but it's really not worth the money except for that one day every five years where I have to restore a remote server from an FTP backup. And even then, it's quicker to just send the host a DVD to slot into the machine. And such rare usage means it *does* become more expensive just because few people actually complain about their upload being too low, so ADSL2+ etc. technologies become the norm and anything higher is "special".

A school I work for has 450 students and dozens of staff, online with everything from iPhones to netbooks to laptops to desktops. They upload photos, I manage the websites from on-site, they share videos with other schools, do video-conferencing, and upload a huge backup of the main school database to a remote server every night. We have two 1Mb uploads on two lines giving 24Mbps each. It's never been seen as "limiting". Hell, when our last ISP cut us off (ironically for "using more than a residential broadband line") we ran on 3G sticks for a fortnight. Upload *is* different - it's rarer, the technology doesn't aim at it, it's smaller bursts than download and it's generally somewhere between 10:1 and 2:1 in terms of down/up ratios. Most people don't need it higher, so it costs you more to MAKE it higher. And a simple package upgrade can get you to 5Mb up in even a bog-standard cable-serviced area.

Re:A definition I am envious of

[mikechant]

and thus I am languishing on a 10Mbps cable connection with 512k of upstream

Assuming you must be referring to Virgin Media cable, you should find your upstream doubled to 1Mb/s shortly (if not already). It came as a pleasant surprise to me when I did a speed test a few weeks ago since I didn't know it was happening. I think the whole country's supposed be done within the next few months.
See http://shop.virginmedia.com/help/discover-broadband/broadband-speed/upload-speeds.html

Re:A definition I am envious of

[TheRaven64]

And the 100Mb/s service that they're starting to roll out this month will have 10Mb/s upstream. I rarely need more than 10Mb/s downstream, but I'd happily pay more for 10Mb/s symmetric, so I'll probably upgrade. Note, however, that the page that you linked to says that these upstream speeds are part of a rolling upgrade. If you are in one of the network areas that have not yet been upgraded, then you'll see the slower speed.

Re:Imagine that...

[Corporate Troll]

Yeah, according to the definition I don't have "broadband" (read "high speed Internet", because that's what they mean). I have 5Mbps downstream and 512kbps upstream. It costs me 33.80€/month and fulfils my needs perfectly well. Heck, back when they started to roll out ADSL in my country it was 256kbps/64kbps and that was already the greatest thing since sliced bread (compared to ISDN, and per minute costs)

This is just a change of definition, which means nothing about actual usability about Internet connections throughout the US.

Depends on how you test?

[ThunderBird89]

Okay, this is part comment, part question.

The comment: speeds seem to depend on the location of the test server. For example, my connection at university has more than 50MB/s upstream to the server in Hungary (I'm in Hungary myself), but only 1-2MB/s to a California server (as tested by Speedtest.net), so it gives ISPs an opportunity to cheat the tests, like my home provider does: advertises 8MB/s download, with a minimum of 1MB/s at any time, provides ~5-6MB/s to the Hungarian server, and 1MB/s to a US server.

The question: why is it like this? Can someone please explain to me why speeds drop rapidly as the test server moves farther and farther away from my physical location? Is the lag in routing this significant?

Re:Depends on how you test?

[lingon]

Your ISP probably has really bad peering with other ISPs or (more likely, considering it's a university) Hungary has bad connections to other countries and/or doesn't buy enough bandwidth on the transatlantic cables. Physical location really doesn't enter much into it.

Re:Depends on how you test?

[ThunderBird89]

Thanks. Both the uni AND my home connection (T-Online) do this, so it seems it's just a matter of being stuck in Hungary.
I didn't know countries had to buy bandwidth on the backbone for themselves...

Re:Depends on how you test?

[TheRaven64]

Off-network traffic. Your ISP has a flat cost for operating its infrastructure. It doesn't matter how much bandwidth you use to a machine on their network - as long as you're not saturating all of the intervening connections it doesn't cost them any extra (it doesn't if you are, but it might degrade other customers' connections, which they will try to avoid). They probably have peering agreements with other networks in the same country, so they don't pay anything for using them.

To get packets out of the country, they need to use someone else's network, and they probably have to pay for this. The amount of foreign bandwidth that is available depends on the physical connections to other countries and how much they are willing to pay. Generally, this kind of agreement means that you pay for traffic imbalance, so they subtract the number of bytes leaving the network from the number of bytes entering and your ISP pays this much. That's why it's possible to get very cheap hosting in Russia - they have a lot of consumers on the network and putting some high-volume servers on the network actually makes their peering cheaper.

Re:Depends on how you test?

[Cimexus]

Countries don't, but ISPs do. Your ISP has to buy capacity on peering/transit trunks to get in and out of the country. If they don't buy enough, you'll get slow international speeds.

Note also that this is why comparisons to countries like Japan and South Korea are a bit unfair. Countries like that will have 99% of their traffic being local, because people are mostly going to be downloading Japanese/Korean language content, which will be hosted domestically (since those are the only countries that use those languages natively). ISPs in those countries can therefore afford to spend less on international transit and more on local infrastructure. Those gigabit connections in Japan aren't going to acheive anywhere near their rated speed to somewhere in the UK, for instance. But they will be blazing fast for local content, which is all that really matters to most people.

Note also this is why bandwidth caps exist in countries like Australia: they are an English speaking country a LONG way from where 98% of English speaking content is hosted (the US). In fact Australia (and New Zealand) have by far the highest proportion of their Internet traffic bound for overseas of any other Western country. Something like 90% of traffic in Australia is to hosts in the US, 15,000 km away via undersea cable. That's damn expensive for ISPs to cope with, and thus they must cap usage. In the past these caps have been restrictive due to a monopoly on capacity to the US - now that several new cables have come online, caps are becoming huge (e.g. 1 TB is available for the price that 100 GB was only a year or two ago).

Re:Depends on how you test?

[Dog-Cow]

My understanding is that the top tier ISPs have peering agreements, in which each side agrees to carry the others traffic for free. However, when the amount of traffic in each direction is unequal, some kind of financial remuneration will usually be part of the contract.

I suspect that there's a lot more traffic coming into Hungary than is going out.

6 down isn't broadband?

[p51d007]

I guess my 6 down 712 up isn't broadband then? Oh well, it's fast enough for what I use it for.

So what are they going to do about it?

[dkleinsc]

That's the real question. Because if 'broadband' is a term with a real official meaning, it would be possible to go after any ISP selling 'broadband' that isn't 'broadband' for false advertising. Alternately, if their contracts and the like say that they're selling 5 Mbps and they're actually selling 1 Mbps, that could also be actionable.

Either way, without some sort of legal liability, this is going to become standard practice.

Re:So what are they going to do about it?

[eth1]

That's the real question. Because if 'broadband' is a term with a real official meaning, it would be possible to go after any ISP selling 'broadband' that isn't 'broadband' for false advertising. Alternately, if their contracts and the like say that they're selling 5 Mbps and they're actually selling 1 Mbps, that could also be actionable.

Ha! I've never seen (and probably never will) a residential internet service contract that doesn't say "up to X, but we don't guarantee shit."

IMO, the phrase "up to" should be completely banned in advertising.

Re:So what are they going to do about it?

[stewbacca]

When is the last time there has been a high profile case of false advertising in this country? Advertisers are free to make any ridiculous claim they wish--armed with their battalions of attorneys. And with their special interest dollars lining the pockets of the chicken-shit politicians too afraid to take on business in a frail economy, it can only get worse.

Re:So what are they going to do about it?

[Lumbre]

All companies will do is take away the word 'broadband' from everything. People will still buy with commercials saying "$19.99/mo*" and "10x faster than dial-up**". Haven't you learned anything from your company's management? The * and ** will be too small and too fast to read on an 18" TV, 1 foot away.

These companies will still advertise speeds UP TO 5 Mbps. Those words mean zero to me. A cheetah can run up to 70MPH. Does that mean I'll always see it running at 50MPH? They're empty words, though numbers should be generally close to what they imply, or at least have an "ideal" location where a customer actually gets at or very near the maximum speed.

Personally, I'd force them to advertise their median (or mean/"average" if you must). Have them be accurate within x standard deviations or x%.

Re:So what are they going to do about it?

[Renraku]

You pretty much won't ever get a guaranteed speed unless you sign a service level agreement (SLA) which are quite a bit more expensive than regular 'broadband.' The reason is because if you're getting 3.5 down instead of 4 down, they don't want to be pretty much forced to spend thousands of dollars trying to get you that next .5 down. This is still a legal gray area, though. It's like selling a car that gets 'up to' 120 horsepower. Meaning that if you run it with the right fuel, right oil, with no tires, in a test environment, you'll get 120 horsepower. Any other time you'd get about 80 horsepower. This is flat out illegal for car manufacturers, and it should be illegal for 'broadband' providers.

Re:So what are they going to do about it?

[SeaFox]

...And with their special interest dollars lining the pockets of the chicken-shit politicians too afraid to take on business in a frail economy, it can only get worse.

I don't see what the economy has to do with it. They wont take on big business either way. When the economy is good those businesses become more powerful politically through lobbing. When the economy is bad, they provide jobs to constituents so bothering them will rile up the political power of their employees and their families.

It's sort of like college tuition rates. When the economy is good, the rates go up because people are doing well financially and the schools know they can milk another thousand or so out of mom and pop. When the economy is bad, a degree is seen as an edge in a tough job market, so tuition rates go up because the value of a college education has gone up.

Re:So what are they going to do about it?

[stewbacca]

The bad economy makes it unpopular for a politician to try to regulate an industry, because to the common buffoon, regulation is done --not in the interest of all of us consumers-- but in the interest of "taking down Big Business".

It's the typical under-educated masses who always vote against their own best interests because they listen to too much talk radio.

By choice or just because it isn't available?

[CastrTroy]

I personally only have 3 Mbit internet (256 k up). So I don't have broadband either. But I could get up to 50 Mbit, I just don't want to pay for it. 3 Mbit is fast enough to stream videos, netflix included (if SD is good enough for you). It fulfills all my needs. Sure it would be nice to have 50 mbit, and download a Linux distro in 10 minutes, but it's really hard to justify the cost for the number of times you have to do that in a year. Sure people don't want to be running on dial up speeds, but not everyone needs 10 mbit internet.

Re:By choice or just because it isn't available?

[CFBMoo1]

"but not everyone needs 10 mbit internet."

You must have a really awesome ad blocker program. :)

Re:By choice or just because it isn't available?

[arkane1234]

netflix included (if SD is good enough for you).

Funny, I didn't know Netflix offered SD streaming... last time I checked (just now), they offer netflix on-demand and that's your choice.

Re:By choice or just because it isn't available?

[radish]

And if your connection is low speed you get SD, and if it's faster you get HD.

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.

T1 is not "broadband" then

[Alex Belits]

While I agree that oversubscribed consumer DSL and cable should be judged by different standards, by this definition T1 (1.54Mbps up and down) is not "broadband".

Birmingham, AL ...

[smpoole7]

By that definition, this entire area isn't "broadband." We can get decent downstroke (6 Mbits is common), but it's very difficult to get anything more than a 768 Kbit upstroke.

We had to move our mail server to a co-location at the ISPs office just to get 1.5/1.5.

Re:Birmingham, AL ...

[RocketJeff]

I assume you're only talking DSL - there are several other options in most of the Birmingham area. Charter cable offers 1 Mbps up with 8 Mbps down and AT&T U-Verse has 1 Mbps upstream speeds at the 3 Mbps downstream (both offer higher upstream rates with higher downstream rates).

Re:Birmingham, AL ...

[Cimexus]

The sad thing is, standard DSL technology is capable of up to 24 Mbps downstream (ADSL2+), and 1 Mbps (Annex A) or 2.5 Mbps (Annex M) upstream. In most of Europe, Asia, Australia/NZ etc, ADSL2+ is the 'standard' DSL technology and thus customers can enjoy these speeds (dependant on distance from the DSLAM/CO/exchange). Given the prevalence of DSL in the US, it's surprising to me that virtually the whole country is stuck on ADSL1 (up to 8/1 Mbps, and it seems most ISPs cap it at 6Mbps/768kbps for some God-unknown reason).

A minor software/config change by the ISP to uncripple DSL back to its standard 8Mbps down / 1Mbps up capacity would be sufficient to allow it to satisfy the definition of broadband in the US. All current DSL modems are capable of this speed: it is only at the ISP's end that these speeds are being restricted for some reason...

Re:Birmingham, AL ...

[smpoole7]

Thanks. I'll check the Charter offering again. Maybe they have something new, or will be able to provide service to our location. As of April of last year, they couldn't.

A lot of people don't want that

[MikeRT]

It may come as a shock to a lot of Slashdot readers, but a lot of Americans don't have any need for more than that. If the price is right, it's a good bargain. My dad helped an elderly friend switch over to $15/month DSL because she's at that season of life where most of the things that need much more than DSL are just outside the scope of what she wants to learn and do. She really isn't losing anything. In fact, she's gaining Internet access that's pretty good at a price that she can actually afford without cutting her budget or dipping into the government's pocket.

Where's the loss there? Availability is one thing, but personal choices are a non-issue.

Re:A lot of people don't want that

[jthill]

That service amounts to me using my bandwidth to sit down and have a video chat with my son every morning.

We know what a fair price for that is. People run the numbers, see they could make a good living providing good service, and try to start a company doing it. In other countries, we see that this works. Here, people who try that get sued into oblivion. Note: they are not left to fail on their own.

And the big isp's are openly angling to refuse to offer that at all: note that if BigCorp wants to charge Netflix for video-stream access to BigCorp's customers, those customers must be unable to get enough bandwidth otherwise. What the big ISPs say they want to achieve does not match what they're proposing as a means to achieve it. What they're proposing as a means to achieve it will not work at all unless they can also refuse to reliably deliver even 10Mb/s from any other source.

Re:A lot of people don't want that

[Almahtar]

I think the point of contention is not what bandwidth most people need, it's the fact that what is being promised doesn't match up to what's delivered.

it's part of the plan

[Nyder]

This is what I think is going on.

The internet providers have been slow to give us the 'broadband' speeds that a lot of world is enjoying. On top of that, they are trying to get tiered service, putting caps on how much you can download, etc.

What they are going to do, is bargin with the fcc/gov.

They'll up the speeds/lay the last "mile" of fiber, but to do that, they will need the tiered/limited allowed.

Then they'll rake in the money on all the people who go over their limits because they can actually download/upload stuff fast.

Re:Never seen anyone offer even 1MBPS

[AntEater]

I'd be happy if I could get any service at all where I live. For many of us satellite is the only option and it sucks (just not as bad as dialup).

SA

[garatheus]

The US doesn't have anything to contend with (or worry about really) in terms of broadband... In SA our monopoly-provider, Telkom, advertises "blazing fast Internet" at a lowely 384kbps... And anything after that comes at an exorbitant price (don't forget we're capped here - so their "cheapest offering" only really includes 1GB international and I think around 10GB local-only). While there's a new wave of competition in the access-to-bandwidth arena (Telkom still charges around R70 a GB while you can get it from most other places at around R10-R25 /GB) you really can see just how badly we're affected by it. Oh yeah, and we have to pay for an analog line - even if we're not going to actually connect it to a phone. Interestingly enough, I've looked at one of our mobile providers, Cell C - and their HSDPA is actually fairly good priced when you factor in things. Its about time - really wish ICASA would get onto Telkom's case and regulate them further...

In my day we used 14.4kbps dial-up modems...

[digitaldc]

...while waiting for a home page to load, and we LIKED IT!

Re:In my day we used 14.4kbps dial-up modems...

[ChefInnocent]

14.4k? Ha! Such luxury, I still have a 300bps in the closet from my Vic 20 and the upgraded 2400bps modem for my Amiga.

Re:In my day we used 14.4kbps dial-up modems...

[Binestar]

Your UID says you're lying. =)

Re:In my day we used 14.4kbps dial-up modems...

[VortexCortex]

Why would anyone need more than a 300 baud modem?
Hell, that's just right for reading speed!

I still have all my old modems too. I still use my 56K modem. When telemarketers call I open the terminal running "minicom -o console" and enter "ATA" (Hayes compatible: Attention, Answer Incoming Connection).

Re:In my day we used 14.4kbps dial-up modems...

[LynnwoodRooster]

Fucking kids and your luxury... When I was young, we had to carve out individual zeros or ones on stone tablets, tie them to a passing brontosaurus or triceratops tail and herd them down the valley to Thag's house, just to send an LOL message!

Re:In my day we used 14.4kbps dial-up modems...

[antdude]

Back in my days with 300-9600, we liked watching texts type out and screen scroll with texts and characters. Also, ANSI music! :P

Re:In my day we used 14.4kbps dial-up modems...

[BancBoy]

Your UID says you're lying. =)

I'm not going to weigh in on whether they are lying or not.

I would like to point out that there are many people on Slashdot that have lengthy geek pedigree, but didn't get a /. account for many years (or can no longer access their original account.)

I used to log on to The Source with a 300 baud modem. Does my /. ID tell you I'm lying?

Re:In my day we used 14.4kbps dial-up modems...

[Binestar]

Ahh, I love when people completely miss the joke, especially when it is advertised with a smiley.

*I* had an obsolete at the time 8088 in the late 80's that I used to call into a local BBS at 300 baud. My UID was created when 56K modems were all the rage. Slashdot started in the 28.8 timeframe if I remember correctly, so no one could have a UID that supports then having used a 300 baud modem.

Re:In my day we used 14.4kbps dial-up modems...

[StormReaver]

In my day we used 14.4kbps dial-up modems...while waiting for a home page to load, and we LIKED IT!

By the time our porn finished downloading, so had we.

Re:In my day we used 14.4kbps dial-up modems...

[skine]

You act like you have to be old (and had to have been aware of /.) in order to have had 14.4kbps.

I'm 23 and I remember being ecstatic to upgrade to a 28.8kbps modem.

Also, I've been here for less than two years.

Total Price Gouging Strategy

[adosch]

I'm happy with my 1.5Mbps cable broadband speed, but let's face it, it's a total price gouging tactic to squeeze more money out of the end-user consumer. If I wanted to even upgrade my cable service from 1.5Mbps to 2.5Mbps, it's an easy US $30/month dent for a measly 1Mbps extra bandwidth and for what? So I can download that , depending on size, handfuls of minutes faster than I could before? Even more so, I'll go on the high mark to say it also has a lot to do with what they know you're going to do with that bandwidth and they make you pay for it (a la against net-neutrality). Almost all wired broadband companies in my area are coupled with television access, so you can buy your internet package separately or as part of a bundled set. Why would they want to give you cheap bandwidth so you can drop their cable television service and use NetFlix/Hulu/Vudu/BD-Live, ect.?

Re:Total Price Gouging Strategy

[Renraku]

They're simply protecting the interests of their company by making it more difficult for people to find competition. What if you had a car that wouldn't let you drive into another car dealer's lot? Or a cell phone that blocked the numbers for all other cell phone providers? Or an OS that wouldn't accept games from other companies other than the OS manufacturer? Do any of those sound fair?

Re:Total Price Gouging Strategy

[mkintigh]

I hear what you are saying. Around the area I live the cable company penalizes you for not having all of their services. I have a dish and am very happy with it compared to the lousy and very expensive services that the only cable company here offers. If I wanted to upgrade my DSL to cable they would charge me $30 more than if I was a cable subscriber, thus taking my bill to x4 of what I am currently paying, for 6Mb -- an increase of 5Mb. The problem: the local cable company has a strangle hold on the area, no other company can get in to give it competition.

Re:But the free market!

[Attila Dimedici]

Two points, the first is that a principle of free market economics is that you're not allowed to lie about what you provide. The second is that broadband has a definition related to network communications that has nothing to do with speed (well ok, broadband will almost always be faster than baseband, but that is a result of what broadband is, not part of the definition of broadband).

Meaningless definition

[vlm]

The definition of broadband is constantly changing

The definition is meaningless in two ways:

1) Its a monopolized and mostly unregulated unfree market which means that the definition doesn't matter. You can argue the definition of a good hamburger if there are a hundred different local and franchise restaurants, general and specialty food stores, farmers markets, and online shopping to select your burger and/or its ingredients. However, in a prison cell you eat whatever the warden decides to serve or you starve, so arguing the definition of bread as in bread and water is kind of pointless, you gonna eat it or not?

2) The only thing that matters is the end user experience and usage patterns and technology have not changed in AT LEAST half a decade, although the fad website of the month obviously changes each month. Who cares how often they change a definition that has no impact whatsoever on user experience?

Re:Keeping up with who?

[geegel]

Holy crap that's expensive. I have a 100 Mbs metropolitan/ 20 Mbs international, no cap connection for roughly 14 dollars a month.

Perhaps I should mention, I live in Romania.

Broadband vs. Capacity

[s31523]

I agree that few people have true Broadband, but I think the important issue to look at is capacity. Most people, which jives from what I see in other posts, are fine with 1.5 - 3.0 mbps down and 128K-256K up. Where the problems lie now and in the future is being able to give everyone these speeds all the time. Usually, I run into bandwidth contention and I do not get my "non-broadband" speeds. I attribute this (perhaps incorrectly) to lack of capacity and having many more people online than the provider can serve. In the future, I think more people will be more concerned about getting lower speeds consistently than they will be for getting higher speeds...

Does everyone need 4Mbps connection?

[jzarling]

If all you are doing is a little web surfing, online shopping, and email a 768k connection is just fine. Not everyone will be streaming Netflix, or demanding HD Content.

Re:Does everyone need 4Mbps connection?

[stewbacca]

Doesn't matter. Not everyone needs 250 horsepower, but if the car that is being advertised as having 250 horsepower only has 200, that's bullshit.

Re:But the free market!

[KarmaMB84]

I think he meant selling people 6mbit cable that will almost never see 6mbit and will often be about as reliable as a 56k modem during peak hours.

Re:Keeping up with who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exact question I was thinking of. It's like someone saying to me that Jeffrey Dahmer murdered 17 people and have I been keeping up. Wait a minute, when did this become something that there ought to be a competition over? And what basis does anyone have for their chosen entity for comparison?

It sounds like we're being nudged in a certain direction, where we'll soon be expected to accept the notion that some level of broadband is a "basic human right".

Well Europe is cutting spending and implementing austerity measures. Is the U.S. "keeping up"? No because it's not what Marxists here want, and they're in control in the U.S.

By choice

[operagost]

My connection is a symmetrical DSL: 1.5 Mbit in both directions. It may be substandard in that regard, but this is the only way I can get a static IP, unblocked ports, and no rate caps. I guarantee I would not be able to run my own web server anymore if I switched to Comcast to get the 6x speed upgrade.

Re:Never seen anyone offer even 1MBPS

[arkane1234]

Are you being serious? I've had 4Mb/s through Cox Communications.
Cable modems aren't DSL, but then again we're talking about Broadband here and not one transport technology in particular.

Lessig on Broadband policy

[beakerMeep]

http://blip.tv/play/lG2B1fgbAg

This has been posted before and apologies for the tentacle porn thread hijack, but this is well worth the watch in any broadband policy discussion.

Reflection, digital infrastructure impovershment.

[Silpher]

I think the people who are saying that 3mbit or 512k upload sufices are right when it really is enough to fulfill their needs. But it might also be a reflection of the digital infrastructure impoverishment thats going on in the US. I mean I live in the rural nothern parts of the Netherlands my neighbor is living 200 meters next to me, our village counts 400 people still we have a 60mbit internet connection, even here.

A small dirtroad might be enough for a 3 doors hatchback but not for a massive 60-ton truck. Internet usage will very likely increase not decrease the next century meaning that in the time the world is getting prepped up for even increasing bandwith demanding constructions the US stays behind.

What if a new and very succesfull digital invention knocks on the door 2 years from now demanding at least a 10 mbit connection. The other higly technological countries will have a easy time incorporating this new technology whereas the US will be facing a very, very costly effort to clear the backlog.

Spiffy

[Mystiq]

For those of you saying, "That's nice, I'm good with my current speeds and don't need more", that's also nice, but there are others in the US, like me, who appreciate faster speeds, and it's been quite stagnant while prices have gone up. It shouldn't be a wonder why ISPs in the US are among the most-hated companies in the country. My current ISP seems to be creeping speeds up, however slowly. I can sometimes, though very rarely, get 2 MB/s downloads, but my connection still strains when one person is playing videos on YouTube and I'm trying to play Starcraft. When you've got multiple people using it, upload and download speeds are both key.

Lies

[NotAGoodNickname]

I would just like to mention that 1Gb to the home is a lie. They may ADVERTISE 1Gb/s to the home but the connection isn't 1Gb/s. It is called "Marketing". It is common to claim high speeds but not deliver.

Re:Lies

[siddesu]

I live in Japan. At the moment, I don't have a 1Gbps connection because I don't need one; I have a 100Mbps instead. I've been on broadband since maybe 2001, when broadband was still 1.5Mbps. I'm a pretty heavy user, I host several sites that exchange large files, and I test the connection periodically, just to be sure.

So far I've never had a situation, outside of announced planned maintenance (or the 3 unplanned outages I've experienced since 2001) where I wasn't able to get the maximum speed out of the connection, really. Most of the time I test with sites outside of Japan.

I've used ftth from both the biggest fish - NTT (they only provide the fiber, then you have to sign up with a provider, and you can choose from may options), and from a smaller ones - USEN. The experience is pretty much the same.

Make of it what you wish.

Re:Lies

[NotAGoodNickname]

You don't have 100Mbps either. Be honest. They just tell you it 100Mbps, but all that means is that they maybe have deployed a 100Mbps port somewhere in your neighborhood. When it gets to your residence it is a shared resource. In Japan it may be PON technology but it is backed by a 100Mbps shared port upstream. And there is no way you are getting 100Mbps from any site even if you really had a full 100Mbps connection. Even in a lab a 100Mbps connection won't get you 100Mbps speeds.

Re:Lies

[siddesu]

Well, there was this guy from a small village, who went to the big city once, and was taken to the zoo.

So, he sees the cage of the giraffe, stops in front of it, takes a long, hard look and firmly says: "There ain't no such animal".

Re:Lies

[Vancorps]

I'm sorry, that's very ignorant, there are tons of us with faster than 100Mbps access, I'm even in the U.S. I have a SONET link here with a gig pipe and you can be sure that I'm pulling around 850meg which is about as fast as you can go on a gig interface. If I want to go 10gig I can easily get it. Granted you gotta pay quite a bit for it but in a lab you most certainly can get 100Mbps speeds and then some.

There's no need to make apologies for the yachts that the telecom companies were famous for buying with our tax dollars that congress decided not to attach any strings to. We gave them more than 200 billion dollars to build fiber infrastructure to our homes and that was almost 20 years ago. We're just not getting some limited fios options and it is in no way acceptable the speeds we are forced to endure. I'm in a great area for broadband in the U.S. getting 50meg cable at home but a great many out there are in terrible shape. I put on a show in Florida every year and the best I can get there is 3meg DSL, I buy 10 of them and bond them just to get something usable. Everywhere else I go I get 150meg or more of bandwidth.

Residential Internet is in sorry shape, commercial options are better but given the costs still not that great. I deal in California, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida, the southwest seems to do fairly well although Cali is worse than Nevada and AZ from my experience.

Did they take cost into consideration?

[kannibul]

For me, I find it crazy that internet costs $35/mo+ for my service (AT&T u-Verse) - and that is for the cheapest 3MB internet. I'd go cheaper if I could...I use it maybe 1hr a day at home during the week days and maybe 2-3 hours TOPS during the weekend - that's basically $3.18/hr that I'm paying out for internet access to do my home banking, watch a few youtube videos, do a little online shopping, and browse some forums. I've considered many times going without internet at home - simply because it's a cost that outweighs the gain. I feel the same way with TV.... ....and I work in I.T. - I find the majority of the consumer electronics nothing more than toys to distract people. Facebook, cell phones w/ internet...it's laughable that someone gets excited about the new iPhone, when they have a perfectly good one - one of my coworkers was giving everyone in the department a shipping update...twice a day. I perfectly understand the tech, I know of the advantages, but, really it's fairly pointless for the home consumer to have more than the minimum unless they are doing something that requires it...and by that, I mean like they are actually saturating their pipe and need more. Some people are into the mistaken belief that more bandwidth means less latency for gaming - which isn't the case...like my neighbor - top-tier internet by a competitor and plays online with his x-box, and he still complains of lag...but he keeps that fast internet thinking that if he downgraded, that it'd be worse.

Re:Keeping up with who?

[Reziac]

And while Romania is a lovely country, it isn't exactly the hotbed of industrial or economic development of eastern Europe. Which goes go show that our American providers really have no excuse -- if Romania can do it, and charge such reasonable rates, why can't we?

(I'm paying twice what you are for about 1% as much bandwidth. :(

US Advertising

[stewbacca]

We need stricter control about what advertisers can claim in this country.

The most egregious example I've heard lately is "the Leo diamond is the first diamond certified brighter".

Brighter than what?

Seriously, and not every product can be "the best" anything. Any time an advertiser says their product is "the best" they should be sued into oblivion or regulated out of business.

You Can Pay for Higher Speed Tiers

[geoffrobinson]

At least with Comcast, I know customers have the option of upgrading to faster speed tiers. Things such as how fast the server you are trying to hit may limit the speeds you see. Or congestion on the network at peak times. All that should be in the fine print.

So if people aren't upgrading for faster speeds, maybe they have decided they don't need it. Sure if it was free they would take it, but they aren't willing to shill out extra for it.

The US is not having a hard time keeping up.

[DragonTHC]

Last mile ISPs are refusing to spend on infrastructure.

Comcast promised DOCSIS 3.0 a year ago. It won't matter much with a 250GB cap.

Re:Keeping up with who?

[geegel]

It might have something to do with the structure of ISP's here. The most common type is the neighborhood company, which serves roughly 1000-2000 customers each on average. They basically serve only specific areas, they develop the local infrastructure as needed and there's intense competition between them. Right now I have 6 ISP's to choose from, each with its own infrastructure. When one ups the offer, the others usually follow.

They keep using that word...

[itsdapead]

...I don't think it means what they think that it means.

because they fall below the agency's most recent minimum requirement: 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream

Presumably, anybody who thought they had broadband back in the day when ADSL was 512Kbps/128Kbps (and we was grateful!) was just deluded.

Alternatively, maybe somebody who's never used a dial-up "analogue" modem can't quite grasp that even 512Kbps, always-on, unmetered is a bloody luxury by comparison, and more than enough as a minimum standard to avoid "disenfranchising" people in terms of access to online commerce and information.

As others have pointed out, contention levels, usage caps, filtering and firewalling, static IP addresses vs. NAT, etc. would be more useful features to "stickle" over.

...or do the FCC want to make sure everybody can stream full broadcast-quality HD television so that they can auction off the UHF spectrum to the mobile operators? The phrase "mission creep" springs to mind.

Re:They keep using that word...

[samwichse]

Or perhaps usage patterns have changed, and what was formerly broadband, is now not.

Somehow I don't think you could sell a Cray I as a "supercomputer." My desktop is faster, and I couldn't sell it as a supercomputer either.

Or for a car analogy...

A car built in 1961 is certified by the government as meeting all existing safety standards. Now it's 2010, that same car wouldn't be considered safe compared to a new car, which meets standards required to call it "safe."

How is this any different?

Re:They keep using that word...

[itsdapead]

A car built in 1961 is certified by the government as meeting all existing safety standards. Now it's 2010, that same car wouldn't be considered safe compared to a new car, which meets standards required to call it "safe."

...but, that 1961 car is still recognizably a "modern" car: if its still in good working order you'll be able to hop in it and do whatever you'd expect to be able to do in a modern car. C.f. a 1900 car which would have completely unrecognizable controls, wouldn't go far enough on a tank to make it from one gas station to the next and wouldn't be fast enough to take on a freeway. One is still viable as a means of personal transport*, the other isn't.

Likewise, 512Kbps broadband is still a viable way of accessing most internet services, whereas what came before (ISDN or modem) are definitely Model-T Fords.

How is this any different?

You won't end up impaled on the steering column of your 512K ADSL line, nor does it kill 3.5 baby polar bears every mile or emit enough lead to re-roof a church: the only serious arguments for not driving a 1961 car.

* disclaimer - my first two cars were Citroen 2CVs, and I still pine for them (the last one dissolved in about 1996) so I may have a distorted view of what a "viable means of personal transport" comprises.

The FCC has defined broadband

[tepples]

Words mean what they mean.

Another Layne's Law issue. If a government agency defines "broadband" for the purpose of its own study, then discussion of the study should use "broadband" in the way that the agency has defined it. Wikipedia's article about baseband appears to claim that the opposite is passband, not broadband. Broadband means only greater bandwidth, and since 2010, the U.S. FCC has defined broadband Internet access as 4000 kbps down and 1000 kbps up. I'd love to be proven wrong with reliable sources stating the contrary.

Re:The FCC has defined broadband

[gmhowell]

I think you are getting to the crux of the matter. It's much like how 'monopoly' has a different meaning to the lay person, an economist, and a lawyer. Heck, if we are counting the legal sphere, dozens of words and phrases have meanings that are in no way related to their common usage.

Of course, I could care less. ;)

Please see replies to grahamm

[tepples]

For the sake of not being redundant, please see replies to grahamm's comment. Gist: The opposite of baseband is passband, and the FCC has defined broadband.

Purchased or available?

[Stewie241]

Is this comparing what subscribers are purchasing or what is available in a given area?

Not in the US, but in Canada. I have an 8Mbps connection.

I could an extra $20 a month for a 25Mbps connection, but I just can't really justify it.

The ISP has a lite package that is 256/256kpbs and another that is 1024/256kpbs, which for many users may adequate. Why pay for something you don't need?

That MAN analogy is also accurate in other ways

[Sycraft-fu]

Something I've noticed with broadband in many places, Japan and Europe in particular, is that you get a bigass pipe to your house or apartment. However it is setup in a big WAN configuration like you might find in a company, where you heavily share bandwidth at every level, and where your ISP's connection is nowhere near enough to serve things. So if you go to a Speedtest server on your ISP, you get wonderful rates. If you go to another ISP near them they peer with, you usually get good rates. You go to the rest of the Internet... well your connection isn't special anymore.

I've played with testing this sort of thing and some of the ISPs with the most amazing Speedtest numbers just can't bear them out to other locations. For example Latvia rates extremely highly. So ok, I find a server in Riga and test it from work. We have massive bandwidth here, that I've verified with transfers to various locations, and I can access the network stats to make sure it is available. The server shows an upload rate (which would be download to them) between 3-5mbps depending on when I test it. Fine, but not the 30-50mbps that the results form there usually show. Turns out they've a big MAN, without a ton of bandwidth to the rest of the world.

That's one of the reasons when evaluating my connection at home I don't test on the same ISP (which is fine they don't run one) or even the same state. My question isn't how fast my line is getting to them, it is how fast it gets to the world. It does, in fact, deliver the speed promised.

Geeks get far too much envy of the big lines that some ISPs in some countries have, without considering how well that really gets delivered in total. I can get you 1gbps to your house, that's easy. Just run an ethernet cable to a switch somewhere. You now have a gigabit to something. The hard part is getting you that kind of bandwidth such that it is usable to most of the Internet.

Re:That MAN analogy is also accurate in other ways

[NotAGoodNickname]

This is exactly right. Think about it: if everyone in your 1000-unit apartment block was getting 1Gbps what would be the upstream bandwidth required to service that 1000-unit building? Basic math here tells you that no reasonable configuration could support that. No one is is deploying thousands of top-line switches and aggregators on the edge. Most countries have the same rates. The difference is in the US they know they would get class-action suits filed if they claimed 1Gbps FiOS connections.

Re:That MAN analogy is also accurate in other ways

[TheLink]

My guess is most users in Japan and Korea don't really download that much stuff from outside their country.

Whereas say in NZ, Australia, Singapore, many of the users just might be downloading stuff from the USA.

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.

Definition is important

[Mr. Underbridge]

Aha, words mean what people want them to mean. That may have been the origin of the term, but for the majority of people, that is not the primary meaning.

Considering the subject of this article is providers advertising a service that does not meet a shifting definition of a word defined by the FCC in a manner inconsistent with its technical nature...I think we need to do better than ad-hoc operational definitions.

Re:Definition is important

[martas]

Uh-huh, which we do, when the FCC/other regulatory bodies come around and fix a definition, then force those they have authority over to remain truthful under that definition. That's a given, and that's the way things should work. But this says nothing about how the meaning of a word should be determined at the time when the definition is being fixed. Do you see what I mean by that?

Re:Definition is important

[Mr. Underbridge]

But this says nothing about how the meaning of a word should be determined at the time when the definition is being fixed. Do you see what I mean by that?

Of course. However, the term 'broadband' is not new and predates the internet era. The definition was established by signal processing people. The 'band' portion refers to spectrum, and the 'broad' part means you take up a lot of it. You'll also note that there is no inherent notion of speed.

The term was ultimately adopted by the technical illiterate to be a measure of connection speed, which is incorrect. It can correlate with speed in that using a lot of spectrum can effectively create more tubes (thanks Ted) through which to pour traffic, but it's not a given.

We are now in the position where one can use a term in a manner that is technically correct and, what, ruled to be falsely advertising if the bitrate isn't high enough?

Considering that there are legal ramifications for use of words, having people who don't understand them determining their legal definitions is bad.

Re:Definition is important

[martas]

Well, the problem is that when it comes to advertising, the regulatory body can't just close its eyes and pretend that it's not their problem if most people interpret a word in a different way than its technical meaning. To protect consumers, they need to recognize the new meaning the word has taken on, and regulate advertising accordingly, instead of digging in their heels in the name of "the truth!"...

And in other news

[rossdee]

11.1% of the planets in the solar system fall below the official definition (IAU) of planets

Thats what happens if you keep changing the definition. If they keep raising the bar, then it won't matter if we have broadband or not, since we won't even be living on a planet any more.

Pretty heavy definition...

[Kjella]

I just checked the same numbers for Norway, and slightly less than half our "broadband" connections fall short of the 4 Mbit download mark, the mean being 4.1 Mbit (graph). There's no similar statistics for the upload speed, but I see Telenor (our biggest ISP) offer 5000/500 and 16000/800 kbps so many more will fail the 1 Mbit upload requirement. However these numbers are typically actual values, I'd be interested to know how much is claimed speed and how much is BS "up to", 5000/500 isn't so bad if you actually get it.

Yes they can

[Sycraft-fu]

This changing the definition of the word is disingenuous. Broadband just means "not baseband" more or less. Ethernet, despite all its speed, isn't broadband, it is baseband. The entire bandwidth of the line is used for Ethernet signaling. 100% of a pair of wires is for one purpose, which is why you need different pairs for transmit and receive. Broadband is where you use multiple different frequencies for different things. On a cable line you may have some frequencies for analogue TV, some for digital, some for Internet download, some for Internet upload, some for phone and so on. That is broadband.

Also as a practical matter I don't know where they pulled the 4mbps figure from. Why is that the magic number that is "good enough"? Personally I'd say 1mpbs is good enough. It isn't perfect, Id' say 10mbps is the point where it is "really good" but 1mbps is good enough.

Re:Yes they can

[glwtta]

All my foes are spelling or grammar Nazis.

How do you feel about semantics Nazis?

Also as a practical matter I don't know where they pulled the 4mbps figure from. Why is that the magic number that is "good enough"?

I think it's meant to be "good" rather than "good enough".

What's in a name...

[Glasswire]

If we won't call anything that's faster than dial-up broadband, then we need some new names. The difference to the user, between any kind of 'high-speed' internet access that is always on, is not excruciatingly slow and doesn't tie your landline and classic PPP dialup is much more significant to e user than the difference between 3MB vs 6MB down. I propose we create following gradations with level of urgency that it is available (for North America - connections elsewhere will generally be higher)
                                      Download
Type Speed Urgency
Dialup 56k Absolute minimum -all should have
ISP Basic 1MB Minimum -all should have
Broadband 4MB Most should have this.
HighS Bband 10MB Best Cable DSL
Fiber 12MB Good connectivity
HighS Fiber 24MB+ Best

Re:Keeping up with who?

[Hognoxious]

Comparing raw prices in different countries is invalid. What's 14 bucks as a percentage of a typical salary, for example?

Generally things are cheaper in countries where people earn less.

Re:Keeping up with who?

[MooseTick]

It seems unlikely that 99.99% of users would move more than 36GB/month and therefore not unreasonable to charge extra for them to have to provide and support an infrastructure to move that kind of traffic.

I bet the average user doesn't move over 2GB/month. Most people read email and surf the internet at home. They want fast surfing and don't need any more. Netflix surely adds to the traffic, but again, I suspect most people don't stream more than 1 movie per week.

No valid excuses

[symbolset]

Generally speaking, even the folk in very rural areas generally live in clusters. This notion that because there are solitary family farmhouses surrounded by miles of open fields, that fiber can't be delivered to the metropolitan areas is just nonsense. In fact, there are so few homes like that statistically that the cost of digging their trench could be consumed in the general mass without significantly altering the cost for everybody else.

The ISPs aren't giving the broadband for a different reason: they don't have to. They lobbied congress and the state legislatures and so on to put up barriers to competition. They sue municipalities who try to run their own fiber.

More of the wrong thinking that goes into the prevention of broadband can be found in this pdf. Particularly dire is the notion that paying the incumbent telecoms vast sums to provide broadband to schools and libraries as "anchor tenants" will somehow translate to the availability of broadband for homes in general. That's just absurd. Also ridiculous is funneling more money to the incumbents by subsidizing broadband for the poor. The notion that engaging the telecoms in a "public - private ventures" will result in anything but a bonfire of public dollars ignores the history of such ventures.

All this in a state where two of the most rural counties offer gigabit fiber to the home at reasonable cost through the county government owned power utility district, and a fair-sized city offers both cable and broadband to 100mbps through the city-owned power utility. One county had a 2000 census of 11 people per square kilometer and the other was at 14. And they turn a profit doing it.

We will not have broadband that competes on a local, state, national or global level until we build it ourselves. The telecoms will not build it for us, no matter how much we pay them. We've already paid them billions for the empty promise.

Re:No valid excuses

[pecosdave]

You have the most valid answer. The government needs to stay out of business all together, broadband isn't the only thing regulated beyond reason. The greatest thing a large business can hope for is government regulation, it keeps the little guys down.

That doesn't however completely invalidate my point, it just changes the magnitude of each.

I'm constantly confused by things like net neutrality and the recent TV commercial volume thing. I really don't want the government making that happen, but they are things I want to happen.

Deregulating to the point of allowing cowboy competition would be an incredible game changer. Of course then you start having to look at trust and Microsoft of the 1990's style business practices.

The reality is if someone can fuck it up by being an asshole the asshole will appear and seize the oppertunity.

Re:No valid excuses

[sznupi]

You have cowboy competition right now. Owners of biggest ranches make the rules.

Systems of governance are largely just a reflection of that (and of societies, generally)

Considering Caps...

[DarthVain]

Make bandwidth speed largely pointless who cares. One step forward and two steps back for telecommunications.

I mean I have something like 14mb/s now (though I doubt I would ever hit that theoretical limit), but even say getting 7 mb/s, that's 420mb/m, or 25.2GB/h.

Now consider that my bandwidth cap is 60GB.

Which means I can operate at peek bandwidth for approximately 2.3h and then I will run out of cap space and not be able to use my internet for the rest of the MONTH, unless I wish to pay 1.5$/GB.

I would like to close with as summary of the situation: Retarded. Thank you.

Anecdotal experience...

[BrokenHalo]

Every now and then I get frustrated by my connection (ADSL2+ with a major Australian ISP), but when I actually take the trouble to check it out, I usually find I'm just being unreasonable.

My checking process, though, usually amounts to nothing more sophisticated than downloading a Linux ISO file (nice and big, allows plenty of time to crank up to maximum speed) from the command line directly out of my ISP's FTP mirror site in order to get the best possible result. I usually get an average of 15.7 Mib/s, which I suppose is more or less acceptable. I'm very unlikely to end up in the catchment of the proposed fibre-to-the-home network, so that's probably as good as it will get for the forseeable future.

So I guess my frustration arises partly from the way bandwidth is allocated through the pipes from Australia to the rest of the world. On the other hand, though, downloads from (say) kernel.org, Adobe or Apple tend to be quite fast, while others (Slashdot in particular) are glacially slow, so subjective experience seems to depend on the grunt of the originating servers.

Population density

[symbolset]

Grant County, Washington has a population density of 32 per square mile. 32. THIRTY TWO! They have gigabit fiber to the home through the public utility district at reasonable rates. If that doesn't thoroughly debunk your position I don't know what will.

The density was lower when they put it in, but apparently broadband is good for growth.

Re:Population density

[khallow]

Grant County, Washington has a population density of 32 per square mile. 32. THIRTY TWO! They have gigabit fiber to the home through the public utility district at reasonable rates. If that doesn't thoroughly debunk your position I don't know what will.

Why would that debunk my position? They're sitting on massive internet bandwidth which passes up the Columbia River Gorge. Also there are considerable public funds available for such projects. Stevenson, Washington, which is further down the Gorge did something similar in 2003-2005 and I believe there was somewhere around $10 million available for the project.

Spend enough money and you can put gigabit internet anywhere, even on other planets.

Re:Keeping up with who?

[Reziac]

Sounds a lot like the old rural phone and electric co-ops that used to be common in America, but are now almost extinct. :(

Re:Umm, how is that supposed to work?

[LynnwoodRooster]

You should have more choices, such as AT&T, Charter, and Verizon...

We have DSL

[sjonke]

And we aren't even close to this spec. I think I measured it at 2.6 Mbps or some such number, downstream. Upstream doesn't even break 1 Mbps. However, it seems pretty fast to me. It is true that the Xbox 360 does some hiccuping with HD video streams (Netflix and ESPN 3), though, so perhaps that's part of the definition. I do want to get FiOS, but as far as just normal use of the internet, the DSL connection seems pretty fast, and it's $20 less per month. Thus the waffling on getting FiOS.

I've been saying it for years

[dontmakemethink]

Considering the hugely lopsided ratio of female pr0n versus male, 'broadband' is a very inappropriate term, it should be called 'dudeband'.

Want broadband?

[frank_adrian314159]

As provisioning cable is a natural monopoly due to most people's desire not to have ten or twenty cables strung past their house, you'll never have more than one or two providers, ensuring that the level of competition will be low. And this means that there is no profit in the carrier providing more than the minimal service necessary to avoid major complaints (note that this is unless the provider also sees benefits in providing other "value added" services on the network for which he can charge - Hello, Comcast! - leading to network neutrality issues). The corollary is that, if the government wants increased broadband to our country's home, it is going to have to do one of two things: it's either going to have to (a) do it itself or (b) mandate same for the carriers with proper incentives for them to "do the right thing". Sorry Libertarians.

The problem is local barriers to competition

[jjo]

The reason for pitiful internet performance in the US is lack of competition. Good infrastructure is expensive, and a rational corporation will not spend money to upgrade infrastructure unless it sees a need to do so. An effective monopoly has little incentive to upgrade.

One of the biggest barriers to broadband competition is local zoning and franchising restrictions. Once the local government has a juicy deal with one provider, it has little motivation to rock the boat and allow others in. The federal government has it within its power to fully pre-empt these local restrictions and allow broadband competition to flourish wherever it is economically feasible. So far, the political influence of local governments has precluded such action, and we are stuck with largely non-competitive and expensive markets for broadband.

All the hi speeds?!

[Nichole_knc]

OK I must live in the "dark age" area of access speed... Oh wait that's right I have about 150 feet of copper between me and the fiber trunk and can see the teleco central switch through the trees off my back deck so I should be grateful for my 1.9mbps hi speed connection here in Atlanta. Customer no service states that is as fast as the fiber can go here in this area.. I am like WTF? as I know better. Before Bellsouth was consumed by ATT my speeds were an average of 9mbps - after ATT came the throttle down and was told as such by a neighbor employed there. I would love to have the speeds many of you posted. Buffering gets old fast.

It's not "our" government

[SteveFoerster]

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!

If you're still calling it "our" government, then you've missed the lesson here. Political power flows to those with the money to buy it. The only longterm solution to this is for there to be less political power to be bought and used against everyone else.

Re:Burst vs. sustained

[NotAGoodNickname]

And thats what those ISPs do, except they don't specify any fine print. There isn't anyone, anywhere on the planet that is really getting 1Gbps or 100Mbps to the home. The ISPs will be happy to keep adding zeros to the marketing material though if it makes you happy.

Solution!

[guspasho]

This is unacceptable! The FCC needs to do their patriotic jobs and redefine broadband by putting an upper limit on it, so that the US reclaims it's rightful place at number one. We're number one! We're number one!

So which is harder

[ThatsNotPudding]

Building an entirely new system in a far-flung small city in a big square state west of the Mississippi, or running fibre/cable to even just one mega-city block, where you have to deal with numerous (and often turf-warring) state/city departments, two or three unions not known for their friendliness or blazing-fast work ethic, the hazard of theft (up to and including entire trucks), and working with physical infrastructure that might predate the US entry into WWI?

Where do I sign up?

[lullabud]

I live in California and have moved more than five times in the last nine years between three cities and have never been able to get fiber. Do you know something that some of us do not?

Re:Keeping up with who?

[sycorob]

"I suspect most people don't stream more than 1 movie per week."

For now, maybe. But it seems like viewing video online is definitely here to stay. I actually watch much more than 1 movie per week from Netflix, since I like to watch old TV shows pretty regularly. Ideally, I would like to cut the cable completely and watch Netflix/Hulu/etc. Do you think the ISPs could handle it if we all were watching videos that way? If they started upgrading the networks right now, how long would it take them to get to that level?

Just because current speeds are arguably "ok" for most people's current usages doesn't mean the ISPs should stop trying to make it faster. Just getting to the speed that allows medium-quality videos resulted in a bunch of great innovations like YouTube, Hulu, and of course ChatRoulette. If it was even faster, what else could be invented, that we can't even imagine right now?

Can anyone say class action?

[triceice]

Maybe we should start to look at legal options to get ISP's to actually provide what they advertise.

Re:Can anyone say class action?

[triceice]

Maybe we should start to look at legal options to get ISP's to actually provide what they advertise.

Of course I prefer competition to lawsuits, but in this case I might get more bandwidth for free!!!!

In other news...

[J'raxis]

...the U.S. Government has defined sky to be red. People were shocked to wake up this morning to discover that what they see above themselves for 98% of the day isn't really "sky."

What about equivalent area of US then?

[Alok]

Finland is 3.44% the size of the US and your population is 1.73% of the size of the US. It would be an embarrassment if you COULDN'T fully cover a country that tiny.

Pick a region of the US which is less than 3.44% of the total size, and has more than 1.73% of the population - like say, New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles etc. To paraphrase your post, isn't it an embarassment that someone can't fully cover a region that tiny? ;)

What will change for those on the edge?

[n_djinn]

I have an offgrid place 8 miles from an ATT tower and that's the best there will ever be. Not only is my area zoned AG3 (agriculture lots, not less then 3 acres) I am surrounded by forest reserves, the closest paved road is 5 miles away. I can get 1 meg down on ATT's 3G but the options for even a simple network off the shelf are almost none. I have read about ATT's MiFi service that offers a wireless router at 2G but it's not available.

Virtually all US connections 6 Mbps are Cable

[scgops]

I took the time to download the FCC reports. One has clear statistics and charts of connection types by speed category.

As of June 2009, there were 36 million households with download speeds of 6 Mbps or higher. Of those, only 3% were using DSL.Over 88% were using cable.

The traditional telco providers in the US aren't providing broadband connections over 6 Mbps to any significant percentage of the population.

Seriously...

[kenh]

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.

Key phrase "most recent minimum requirement" - IMHO we've never really worried about upstream speed on US broadband offerings, and I suspect that is where many/most of the 68% of broadband customers fail to meet the "most recent minimum requirement"...

Re:Meanwhile, in Britain

[Rhodri Mawr]

Oh dear, after all that effort you stopped concentrating at the end and called two different connections "ultra cool home internet connection" by name and three UCHIC by acronym.

More interestingly hardly anyone has1Mbps upstream in the UK. I haven't searched for figures but it would be much smaller than 68%.

Re:Meanwhile, in Britain

[mysidia]

More interestingly hardly anyone has1Mbps upstream in the UK. I haven't searched for figures but it would be much smaller than 68%.

Seems to be a serious deficiency. High upstream throughput is crucial to certain peer to peer applications, especially streaming video, High-Definition Video Conferencing, and Peer to Peer content distribution.

I am glad the FCC is spending my money on this

[takane]

Because defining the definition of words is very important. Obviously the definition of this is going to change as time goes on. I always though that non-POTS dialup was broadband(well other than ISDN).

So what else is new?

[lsatenstein]

Sometimes, the old generation of managers, who lived with land-line and dial up modems, won't retire. Therefore, they look at the economics of sustaining an infrastructure that is the noose around progress to create better networks. If the Government suddenly provided the high-speed backbone, then we could see many ISPs arriving on the scene, and with good competition, prices and service would increase. The last mile, could continue to be fibre, and with fibre, one should expect at least 8mbytes/sec bandwidth download, and at least 1 to 2 mbytes/sec upload. My son lived 3 years in Riga Latvia (Ask Sahara P if she knows where that is), and when I visited 3 years ago, his phone connection was VOIP, and 8 megabytes download rate for the net. The result was the ability every day, to watch Movies, or to stream and record them for later watching. One has to appreciate though, that Latvia is a small country, so building an infrastructure for high speed communications was not a costly venture. However, if we assume the USA is made up of many states, each with the ability to emulate Latvia, then the information highway becomes a reality, rather than a dream.