68% of US Broadband Connections Aren't Broadband

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68% of US Broadband Connections Aren't Broadband

Posted by samzenpus on Monday December 13, 2010 @01:04AM from the time-to-measure-up dept.

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."

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Meanwhile, in Japan by Pikoro · 2010-12-13 01:05 · Score: 5, Informative

We have 1Gb fiber to the home. :)

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1. Re:Meanwhile, in Japan by pecosdave · 2010-12-13 01:10 · Score: 5, Funny
  
  Bet the streaming tenticle porn is great!
  
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2. Re:Meanwhile, in Japan by Chrisq · 2010-12-13 02:25 · Score: 4, Funny
  
  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.
3. Re:Meanwhile, in Japan by chrb · 2010-12-13 02:41 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  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.
4. Re:Meanwhile, in Japan by Albanach · 2010-12-13 03:04 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  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.
5. Re:Meanwhile, in Japan by commodore64_love · 2010-12-13 03:09 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  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) :-)
  
  --
  "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
6. Re:Meanwhile, in Japan by Dorkmaster+Flek · 2010-12-13 03:11 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  One could argue that labelling 256k "broadband" was a joke to begin with, and thus you never had broadband in the first place.
  
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  I like to think of online DRM as something akin to a college -- you pay for lessons until you learn something.
7. Re:Meanwhile, in Japan by Chowderbags · 2010-12-13 03:27 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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).
8. Re:Meanwhile, in Japan by interkin3tic · 2010-12-13 03:42 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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!
9. Re:Meanwhile, in Japan by saleenS281 · 2010-12-13 03:50 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
10. Re:Meanwhile, in Japan by IICV · 2010-12-13 03:57 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  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?
11. Re:Meanwhile, in Japan by BrokenHalo · 2010-12-13 04:02 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  256K is not broadband, it's fraudband.
12. Re:Meanwhile, in Japan by MozeeToby · 2010-12-13 04:38 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  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.
13. Re:Meanwhile, in Japan by commodore64_love · 2010-12-13 04:47 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  >>>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.
  
  --
  "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
14. Re:Meanwhile, in Japan by SETIGuy · 2010-12-13 06:04 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  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.
  
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Broadband != Speed by grahamm · 2010-12-13 01:10 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
1. Re:Broadband != Speed by martas · 2010-12-13 01:38 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
  
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  weinersmith
2. Re:Broadband != Speed by jps25 · 2010-12-13 01:49 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Aha, words mean what people want them to mean.
  No, they don't. Words mean what they mean. Ignorance doesn't change that.
3. Re:Broadband != Speed by SomeKDEUser · 2010-12-13 02:55 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
Words have meanings by DarkOx · 2010-12-13 01:11 · Score: 4, Informative

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.

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The US is not having a "hard time." by erroneus · 2010-12-13 01:13 · Score: 5, Insightful

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?
1. Re:The US is not having a "hard time." by AntEater · 2010-12-13 01:26 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
  
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2. Re:The US is not having a "hard time." by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-13 01:35 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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?
3. Re:The US is not having a "hard time." by Attila+Dimedici · 2010-12-13 01:54 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
  
  --
  The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
4. Re:The US is not having a "hard time." by crunchygranola · 2010-12-13 01:56 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
  
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  Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
5. Re:The US is not having a "hard time." by MadKeithV · 2010-12-13 02:27 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  The main problem with the invisible hand of the free market is that no-one can see it's giving us the finger.
Re:Does it address what ports are open? by Anonymous Coward · 2010-12-13 01:20 · Score: 5, Interesting

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". by John+Hasler · 2010-12-13 01:21 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

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1. Re:I could have "real broadband". by glwtta · 2010-12-13 01:38 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  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.
  
  --
  sic transit gloria mundi
US Carriers are not having a hard time. by kurt555gs · 2010-12-13 01:22 · Score: 3, Informative

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!

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* Carthago Delenda Est *
So what are they going to do about it? by dkleinsc · 2010-12-13 01:36 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

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By choice or just because it isn't available? by CastrTroy · 2010-12-13 01:36 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

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Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Re:Keeping up with who? by hairyfeet · 2010-12-13 01:37 · Score: 5, Informative

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.

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Re:Does it address what ports are open? by Ephemeriis · 2010-12-13 01:39 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

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"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
In my day we used 14.4kbps dial-up modems... by digitaldc · 2010-12-13 01:55 · Score: 3, Funny

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

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He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Total Price Gouging Strategy by adosch · 2010-12-13 01:58 · Score: 5, Insightful

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? by cbope · 2010-12-13 02:02 · Score: 4, Informative

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? by rjstanford · 2010-12-13 02:04 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

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Re:Does it address what ports are open? by dkf · 2010-12-13 02:10 · Score: 4, Insightful

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?)

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Re:Does it address what ports are open? by swrider · 2010-12-13 02:34 · Score: 5, Interesting

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? by Totenglocke · 2010-12-13 03:08 · Score: 3, Insightful

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.

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Re:That MAN analogy is also accurate in other ways by symbolset · 2010-12-13 05:12 · Score: 3, Informative

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.

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Re:Does it address what ports are open? by cbope · 2010-12-13 08:12 · Score: 3, Insightful

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...