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

[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

[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.

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.

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."

[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."

[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: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: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.

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?

[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.