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

[Calydor]

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

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[BrokenHalo]

256K is not broadband, it's fraudband.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[MozeeToby]

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

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[commodore64_love]

>>>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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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."

[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."

[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."

[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."

[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."

[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."

[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."

[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."

[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."

[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: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.

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".

[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!

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!

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.

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:Keeping up with who?

[hairyfeet]

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

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

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[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: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).

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

[digitaldc]

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

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: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.

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: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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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: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: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.

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...