Two-Thirds of US Internet Users Lack Fast Broadband

jbrodkin writes "Two-thirds of US Internet connections are slower than 5 Mbps, putting the United States well behind speed leaders like South Korea, where penetration of so-called 'high broadband connectivity' is double the rate experienced in the United States. The United States places ninth in the world in access to high broadband connectivity, at 34% of users, including 27% of connections reaching 5 Mbps to 10 Mbps and 7% reaching above 10 Mbps, Akamai says in its latest State of the Internet Report. That's an improvement since a year ago, when the United States was in 12th place with only 24% of users accessing fast connections. But the United States is still dwarfed by South Korea, where 72% of Internet connections are greater than 5 Mbps, and Japan, which is at 60%. The numbers illustrate the gap between expectation and reality for US broadband users, which has fueled the creation of a government initiative to improve access. The US government broadband initiative says 100 million Americans lack any broadband access, and that faster Internet access is needed in the medical industry, schools, energy grid and public safety networks."

Comments

The way of things

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the slow inevitable decline of a failing empire.

No one is to blame.

Everyone is to blame.

Re:The way of things

[zeroshade]

You seem to be missing a few: (in Mbps)

1. South Korea: 36.90
2. Lithuania: 29.49
3. Latvia: 26.19
4. Republic of Moldova: 24.13
5. Romania: 23.65
6. Sweden: 23.31
7. Aland Islands: 23.08
8. Switzerland: 18.54
9. Portugal: 18.19
10. Germany: 17.58
11. Japan: 16.91
12. Iceland: 16.31
13. Bulgaria: 15.94
14. Singapore: 15.81
15. Denmark: 15.62
16. Belgium: 14.65
17. Finland: 14.50
18. Luxembourg: 14.14
19. Hungary: 13.73
20. France: 13.57
21. Ukraine: 13.08
22. Andorra: 12.37
23. Russia: 12.32
24. Norway: 12.30
25. Estonia: 12.13
26. Liechtenstein: 11.47
27. Austria: 11.10
28. Slovakia: 10.32
29. Czech Republic: 10.28
30. United States: 10.16
31. United Kingdom: 10.10

.... and so on

Sure, we're 31 out of 168. Still, why are we so far down the list?

Re:The way of things

[dave420]

Average download speed is a terrible metric, as it only takes a few well-connected metropolitan areas to skew the bigger picture.

Re:The way of things

[c6gunner]

If that list took bandwidth throttling and monthly transfer caps into account, Canada and Australia would be FAR lower. Not to mention that - at least in Canada - the "rated speed" is rarely the actual speed, unless you live in the middle of a major city. Even in the suburbs you often see problems with 7mbps connections having to be "downgraded" to 4mbps or lower, just to stop them from crapping out because of the poor line quality. They don't downgrade your bill, though.

Considering the kind of service we get here, it always makes me smile when Americans complain about their connection speeds.

Re:The way of things

[gravis777]

Well, I remember living in Austria 10 years ago, and many places charged per megabyte. Broadband penetration at the time was EXTREAMELY limited. Why? Because its freakin hard and expensive to run fiber through those mountains.

However, the entire country of Austria is the size of the state of Maryland, with half its population living in Vienna. Germany is the size of Montana, and Switzerland is just slightly bigger than Austria, but not as big as Germany. Germany, Austria, and Switzerland can all fit inside the state of Texas, and still have room for Luxemburg and a few other small countries.

Shoot, the entire CONTINENT of Europe is only 2/3rds the size of the CONTINENTAL US, yet the population is about equal to Italy, Germany, Austria and Switzerland combined.

What does this mean? The population of the US is way more spread out than the rest of the world.

Shoot, remember how I said that Germany was the size of Montana? Look at the population difference, Germany, roughly 80 million in 2000, Montana, roughly 500,000 in 2000.

Remember those costs that I mentioned earlier about Austria complaining about the costs of running fiber through those mountains? I wonder what the cost is to run fiber out to Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska and the Dakotas, and how much it would cost to run broadband to each of those users homes. Pretty sure it won't be offset by paying $19.95 a month for service.

I am sorry, but there is a perfectly good reason that the AVERAGE speed of broadband in the US is not the same as the AVERAGE speed of broadband in the rest of the world.

In our defense, Russia is just barely above us, China, Canada, Mexico, India and Brazil are below us. What a concept - big countries with a lot of area rank low on the list! Gee, I wonder why?

Re:The way of things

[hedwards]

I live in Seattle and the fastest I can get is 5Mbps. Qwest maxes out at 5Mbps and Comcast is a complete non-starter as they can't even provide a stable connection.

Considering that I live within mere miles of an Internet Exchange Point, it's absolutely ridiculous that they can't do any better. And I'm lucky, other parts of the city have significantly lower speeds.

Re:The way of things

[i_liek_turtles]

I live in a major metropolitan area, and I still get terrible speeds for inflated prices.

Re:The way of things

[thetoadwarrior]

This is bullshit. In previous topics on slashdot about this (I believe it was about Swedish or Finland broadband) and they had a better spread for broadband coverage. Believe it or not, not everyone in Europe lives beside each other. There are mountains and rural people and in fact there are naturally fewer people in these rural areas yet they're more likely to have decent broadband.

You can then compare that to any one state and it will generally be worse no matter how densely populate. In fact as I recall PA broadband is a bit shit despite even in more populated areas.

Everyone in the US does not live a mile apart from each other. The mid-west is pretty spread out but the vast majority of the population live much closer together and on the coasts.

My parents live less than a mile away from the last house with DSL. It's been that way for ages so they like everyone else are stuck with dial-up and on lines that verizon isn't all that bothered about maintaining so people can have reasonable dial-up connections.

It is purely about commercial interest and if that's what the US that's fine but don't be surprised when you keep falling behind the rest of the world.

Re:The way of things

[gravis777]

You do realize that you are emphasizing, not contradicting my point.

n previous topics on slashdot about this (I believe it was about Swedish or Finland broadband) and they had a better spread for broadband coverage. Believe it or not, not everyone in Europe lives beside each other. There are mountains and rural people and in fact there are naturally fewer people in these rural areas yet they're more likely to have decent broadband.

how is this different from me saying:

Well, I remember living in Austria 10 years ago, and many places charged per megabyte. Broadband penetration at the time was EXTREAMELY limited. Why? Because its freakin hard and expensive to run fiber through those mountains.

However, the entire country of Austria is the size of the state of Maryland, with half its population living in Vienna.

1) That was 10 years ago, 2) where do you think the other half of people in Austria live? The population of Austria is 8 million, half live in vienna. I can guarentee that the population of Innsbruck, Salzburg, Graz and Linz (sp?) do not make up the other 4 million.

My parents live less than a mile away from the last house with DSL. It's been that way for ages so they like everyone else are stuck with dial-up and on lines that verizon isn't all that bothered about maintaining so people can have reasonable dial-up connections.

EXACTLY my point, unless they live in the suburbs. I am sure that if your parents wanted to cough up several grand, Verizon would be happy to upgrade the lines in their area. Of course, at that point, it is much cheaper to just get HughesNet, although it looks like they cap out at 2mbps.

Re:The way of things

[s73v3r]

I don't see why Verizon shouldn't be made to maintain those lines. They don't have to run FIOS through there, but they should be made to maintain the lines such that decent connectivity can be had. Otherwise sell it off.

Re:The way of things

[s73v3r]

Because 640K ought to be enough for anybody, amirite?

Re:The way of things

[Meeni]

While the overall density is low in the US, there are many completely empty places, and far more 1M+ cities than in Europe. Or said differently, Europe is populated more or less equally in all areas, with a low overall density, except for the few megapoles (London, Paris, Madrid, ... ). In the US, some places are plain empty, and most of the population is gathered in cluster around million sized cities. Something like 80% of the US population is urban, hence it should be easier to have 80% of broadband access in the US than it is in Europe, but it is not the case. There are many explanations, among them, the US have pioneered broadband with the vast deployment of cable technology. This infrastructure is aging and obsoleting, but it is still usable. In the rest of the world, investments have been far more recent (mostly in the 90s), hence better and more recent technology.

Re:The way of things

[thetoadwarrior]

The thing is they do have to maintain them but to a minimal level so basically you call up and the guy is like you can hear me therefore you can make phone calls so it's good enough.

AFAIK al their responsibilities came well before the internet so you're probably lucky they do anything for you in relation to the internet.

Re:The way of things

[csubi]

It's fine arguing that the population is spread out but the population of Montana is negligible compared to the entire US population and should not pull down the average too much.

Real broadband penetration is crappy because it is expensive. I would understand paying $30/month for 1.5Mbit/s access in the heart of Montana but I sure don't understand why it costs so much 15 miles from the White House, right in the middle of the Washington DC metro area?

Btw, saying that Russia is barely above the US justifies your theory does not hold route :

Russia /capita GDP : ~$16K, area : ~17million km2, population: ~171million
US /capita GDP: ~$46K, area: ~~10million km2, population: ~308million

So : 1.8 times more people on 1.7 seven times smaller territory = US is roughly ~3.0x more densely populated than Russia and even though people living the US earn ~2.8 times more on average than their Russian counterparts, they are slightly ahead in broadband penetration.

You still think all is fine?

Re:The way of things

[zeroshade]

When people had 28kbps, they said "that's fast enough for anything I want to do" and then they got 128k. Then 128k was "fast enough" until faster was available cheaper. You have 6mbps which is "fast enough" but what if you could get 20 mbps for the same price? Then you found a use for the extra bandwidth, whether you can do more things at once, run a server, get higher quality streaming, etc. Soon, you'll decide that 20 mbps is "fast enough". If no one had ever decided that the current speed wasn't fast enough, we'd still be running 28k.

Re:The way of things

[thetoadwarrior]

My point is that despite the US' size most states aren't that different from European countries in regards to population. Again take for instance Pennsylvania. They have a population of 12 million vs Austria's 8 million. Austria's is 32,383 sq mi and PA is 46,055 sq mi. PA's density is 289 people per sq mi and Austria is257 people per sq mi. Yet Austria's average speed is almost double that of PA. From what I can tell Austria is anywhere from an average of 8 meg to 10. PA seems to have an average of 4 meg but some stats say that 51% of the population have 4 meg or less so it could be worse.

PA has received money to help improve their broadband infrastructure. It will be interesting to see if anything actually happens but for a country that prides itself on supposedly being the best place to live it is lacking in areas that are quickly becoming necessities.

Telekom Austria stated they've gone from covering the main cities in 2001 to nearly 97% of the country's households. So from just one DSL provider it would appear that nearly anyone can get broadband in Austria. http://www.telekomaustria.com/presse/news/2010/0419-broadband-customer.php

Where as PA is looking at 52.5% penetration and an average speed of 746.8 kb according to this page which claims that data came form pa.gov as of 2008. So that said if they did manage to get up to an average speed of 4 megs rather than it being the average that people have 4 meg or less then they've actually improved. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2335740,00.asp Though I believe the average, if it has gone up is mainly from people having super sweet fiber broadband in a few key areas. Either way Austria has grown faster and I've not even covered their mobile broadband which apparently is or should be 3.5G with speeds up to 21 megs.

In the UK, I've lived here from 2002 until now and I'm not even in a densely populated area and my options have gone from 2 megs to 20megs as of last year. I could get even higher if I were in a town with cable.

Think about what sort of countries you picture if you were to talk about countries little or no phone access. Is unwise to restrict your citizens to communication. The government recognised that when they enacted the communications act which should be updated to include broadband.

Other countries are recognising that broadband is very important and quickly giving people options. The US seems to be either claiming it's impossible or too expensive when in reality that's not true. The US as a whole is bigger but most states are comparable to other countries and it's up to the states to do something about it as it appears PA is doing. Therefore the problem isn't that big.

You have to ask yourself is it more expensive to just lay the fiber now and create jobs or fall behind and not be able to compete with the rest of the world or even have to maintain numerous ways to get information to people because large swathes of the country have been left behind.

No, verizon won't be that happy to lay it even if you pay for it. One of the phone lines were cut in an accident and people complained to them for ages to fix it properly and their reply was not to cough up cash but instead that you can hear people on the other end so you can make calls and it's fine. My parent's neighbourhood could go with local cable co-op deal and pay to lay the lines. You're talking about a little under a mile for that option. Most people seem keen on waiting until someone else pays out so they only have to pay to hook up to the line up to the end of the road so basically it'll never happen due to selfishness.

I'm sure eventually some half assed option will come about but if they get something basic in 5 to 10 years then they're still behind everyone else and that will increasingly make areas like that less attractive which will have a knock-on effect on housing costs and local economies. States, like European countries, need to realise that.

Re:The way of things

[thenewt]

This infrastructure is aging and obsoleting, but it is still usable. In the rest of the world, investments have been far more recent (mostly in the 90s), hence better and more recent technology.

This. The more recently a country has updated their infrastructure, the more likely it is to be zippy. I think that accounts for a lot of the discrepancy. This does NOT, however, end the discussion. What are America's current telecom corporations doing to stay relevant? When they expand to new areas, are they using contemporary tech? I'd love to see a rundown of numbers like this.

Re:The way of things

[Anonymous Coward]

What does this mean? The population of the US is way more spread out than the rest of the world.

No, it does not.

Seriously, why do people believe that population density has anything to do with it? If the USA somehow annexed a huge piece of uninhabited land tomorrow (ignoring the question where that'd come from), its population density would go down immediately, but that doesn't mean squat.

Another example? Iceland. The population density there is about 8 times lower than in the USA, but they have an extremely high Internet/fast broadband penetration. That's because most of the place is uninhabited wasteland and thus doesn't count.

So stop spreading this myth, please. I know that it's difficult for people in the USA to accept they're not #1 at everything, but the proper response is to roll up your sleeves and work on it, not stick your fingers in your ears and go "lalala I can't hear you". Seriously, when did you turn from a nation of do-ers into a nation of whiners?

Re:The way of things

[commodore6502]

I was only looking at CONTINENT SIZED FEDERATIONS. Comparing a nation like the US (or Canada or Australia) which spans everything from oceans, to Piedmont, to forests larger than Benelux, to deserts to mountains to beaches..... against tiny countries that you can drive across in a single day...... makes no logical sense.

So if we eliminate all the countries that are smaller than one single US state (like california or texas), you get:
Mbit/s
1 12.9 Russian Federation
2 10.7 USA
3 10.5 EU
4 10.4 Canada
5 9.1 Australia
6 8.7 UAE
7 4.9 Brazil
8 4.4 China
9 3.8 Mexico

Or if you prefer to look on a state-by-state basis, well most US States are faster than many whole countries. The world's fastest average may be Korea, but the second fastest lies in Delaware and Washington (tied).

Re:The way of things

[Grishnakh]

PA has received money to help improve their broadband infrastructure. It will be interesting to see if anything actually happens but for a country that prides itself on supposedly being the best place to live it is lacking in areas that are quickly becoming necessities.

The USA is a great place to live, if you're a multimillionaire CEO.

Other countries are recognising that broadband is very important and quickly giving people options. The US seems to be either claiming it's impossible or too expensive when in reality that's not true.

It IS too expensive. Putting so much money into broadband takes profits away from corporations, and means less bonuses for CEOs.

You have to ask yourself is it more expensive to just lay the fiber now and create jobs or fall behind and not be able to compete with the rest of the world or even have to maintain numerous ways to get information to people because large swathes of the country have been left behind.

Who cares about getting information to people? All this infrastructure costs lots of money, and that's bad for the quarterly financial statement and stock price. It's better to spend as little as possible on infrastructure and customer service, while charging customers as much as possible (maybe slipping some money to the government regulators so they'll approve some nice fat rate hikes), so that profits will be bigger and the CEO can buy a new yacht.

Obviously, those Europeans have a totally screwed up sense of priorities.

Re:The way of things

[thenewt]

I think we'll find in the coming decades how sorely the U.S. population will end up paying for all the privatization and deregulation we've allowed to occur. Private corporations are fine with socialist government subsidies, but don't seem to want socialist government regulations after receiving that money. It's a sick, sick system perpetuated from bottom to top (with average U.S. citizens basically fighting for the rights of the rich to exploit them) under some auspice of fair Capitalist idealism. We're headed towards making a first-world GNP with a second-world standard of living.

Not clear in TFA..

[splutty]

It isn't made really clear whether this is 'availability' as in people have the option, or actual people having the actual connection.

Considering the pricing schemes I've seen in the US, the former option seems to be much more likely than the latter.

Re:Not clear in TFA..

[Anonymous Coward]

By that reasoning Nigera has a very good availability, as long as you are willing to pay for digging fibre long distances.

Re:Not clear in TFA..

[devxo]

Of course it's not just 'availability'. If you have the money I'm sure you can find someone do the cables and deliver you whatever speed you want.

Re:Not clear in TFA..

[Mad Merlin]

Hey, either way, at least they won't have to upgrade to play Game!.

Re:Not clear in TFA..

[Anonymous Coward]

Most anyone not occluded by terrain in the USA can get satellite internet.
But that's not the whole story, Hughesnet has advertised service with the following:
$60/Month for the slowest tier, $110 for highest, horrible 2 second ping times and a very low 200-400 MB/day limit.
It seems those restrictions eliminate any reason to have high speed satellite internet.
I'm still using dialup at 45.5 Kb. and download over 500 MB/Month
I've been waiting for DSL for 15 years,
Centurytel and previously Sprint have promised it since.1996. A sprint tech to finally told me that without
50 customers inside a service area, No Chance.
The phone companies stole the Gov money and pocketed it.

Re:Not clear in TFA..

[Chrisq]

By that reasoning Nigera has a very good availability, as long as you are willing to pay for digging fibre long distances.

I took up your suggestion and while digging the trench I came across $1 billion in unmarked bonds, belonging to the late General Fornitsum Fornus. Unfortunately i need the assistance of a foreign bank account to get this money out of the country to his widow and starving children .....

Re:Not clear in TFA..

[Darinbob]

The only option I see to get that speed for me is cable. And I don't want cable. But the speed I get on DSL is very good, as long as you're not pirating movies and songs, and occasionally I need to let things run overnight to download an MMO's patches. Really, if the web pages are opening about as fast as they do at work, why would 2/3rds of the US need anything faster?

Re:Not clear in TFA..

[Svartalf]

Oh, it's pretty much the connection side of things. Forget pricing. Many of the areas you've got a choice of 3G (700kbps-ish down, 128kbps up...) or Satellite (which is as much of a joke...). I'm operating off of a Virgin Mobile dongle right now...and they're changing it from unlimited to "unlimited" and you may not get that service anymore either. The "4G" stuff's not everywhere yet and it's not in all the areas of the markets they've rolled it out into.

Even if you're willing to pay the prices...they don't have it for you.

Re:Not clear in TFA..

[hazydave]

I have Hugesnet. Yeah, it's expensive, relatively slow (1.5Mb/s down), and with my SOHO plan, I get 500MB before the cap kicks in. Although the meter is off between 2AM and 7AM... at least that's something.

There is wired cable with 2 miles or less in all directions. But there's no requirement to support more rural folks.... I'm sure, if not for the former regulated phone company rules, I wouldn't have wired phone lines, either.

Even cellular is not much of an option. My house is near center of a 26 acre wood, so higher frequency carriers (T-Mobile, Sprint) don't reach. AT&T and particularly Verizon do, but they have no support for stationary ISP service, and so far, Verizon doesn't seem to be planning this, even given their coverage plans and 700MHz band suggest that LTE would be a huge win over satellite, sometime in the next two years.

You'll probably keep waiting for DSL. I can see my local telco node from my mailbox. I've spoken with one of the techs (when my phone service fails, and it will again, the first guy they send can never fix it, so I get the second tier guy, who actually understands this stuff). He told me that node will absolutely support DSL boards... he even knew the board set and software revision needed. And he promised that Verizon would NEVER support DSL "out here". They look in DSL as a dead end, and FiOS as their future, because that's what allows them to compete with Comcast and other cable providers. You can still get DSL where it's already active, but don't expect new hookups.

Usual Excuses

[ultranova]

Cue the usual excuses about it being simply too difficult to offer broadband in such a big country as the United States.

Somewhere far beyond a bunch of ghostly settlers are looking at their descendants very, very ashamed.

Re:Usual Excuses

[somersault]

It's not that difficult, it's just expensive.

I like in the UK btw. Even in rural areas here connection speeds lag behind a lot, so it must be a nightmare in small towns in the US.

Re:Usual Excuses

[guruevi]

And as brought out time and again, there are much less dense countries in the world that have bigger pipes and even metropolitan areas in the US don't get all that great of a broadband. Look at individual states and I would say most of the East Coast and West Coast is pretty densely populated but still many don't have broadband or very fast broadband. I don't think there are any providers in the US that provide more than 10Mbps other than those that can afford a business package.

Re:Usual Excuses

[Anonymous Coward]

Ironical isn't it? How the "can do" country has now become a "can't do" country. Same thing with high-speed trains. Just excuses about how it can't be done in the US even though Europeans and Asians have done so for years.

Re:Usual Excuses

[Targon]

There are several things here that you don't take into account. First, the population density issue. Do we know that all rural areas even have an Internet connection? If someone does not have an Internet connection, they don't get counted, so if you don't have ANY dial-up, then 100 percent of people connected to the Internet are on a high-speed connection. The size of the USA DOES matter, since bringing high speed access to towns with a population of under 1000 isn't terribly cost effective. You also have the issue of WHO provides the Internet connectivity. If you leave it to private companies, then you won't see a push to get high speed broadband into homes.

Now, what I have not heard recently is if the US government is helping "broadband" providers get their backbones up to speed. If a provider does not have the money to lay more fiber and add more connections to different ISPs, it would be worse to raise the speed of the connections to individual users since the backbone can't handle it. In general, the US Government has done very little over the past 20 years to help promote technology or innovation in the private sector(outside of the military support industry). Yes, research universities get government financing, but when the tech sector ran into problems in 2001, the government did NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING to help keep good technology companies from either going out of business, or being sucked up by the large players. The result was a drop in innovation, since it became very difficult for good IDEAS by individuals to get funding to start new businesses. Without innovation, new technologies for broadband won't come out nearly as fast, and you end up with great ideas that get squashed by the large companies that don't value innovation as much as "will it make us a huge amount of money in the next six months?".

Re:Usual Excuses

[ewhenn]

And as brought out time and again, there are much less dense countries in the world that have bigger pipes and even metropolitan areas in the US don't get all that great of a broadband. Look at individual states and I would say most of the East Coast and West Coast is pretty densely populated but still many don't have broadband or very fast broadband. I don't think there are any providers in the US that provide more than 10Mbps other than those that can afford a business package.

That's funny. I'm writing this from my 30x5 mbit connection ( here is a link I just took so you know I'm not just blowing smoke: http://www.speedtest.net/result/1126878052.png ). Oh, and I don't even live in a major metropolitan area. I live in a mid income suburb (avg home value is about $120K).

Re:Usual Excuses

[zach_the_lizard]

It can be, depending on the area. My town has FiOS in some areas, even though the whole county is 30-40k people or less. Cable Internet is available outside of the town limits too, in some areas. However, I've lived in some remote areas (thanks, Dad, for the hour long drive to school!) where dialup is the only option. Satellite Internet wasn't even an option.

Having lived all over, it seems to be that if your road isn't even paved, give up broadband. You probably won't get it for a while. If you have to drive for an hour to buy meat (any meat), give it up forever, unless people migrate there en masse. Do your kids a favor and move, too.

Re:Usual Excuses

[Jaysyn]

I quite literally live in the middle of a swamp in northern Florida & my DSL does 6mb down / 1mb up according to the tests & DLSreports. I'm probably the exception since I live in a county that *isn't* "owned" by a large telecom.

Re:Usual Excuses

[somersault]

Well, it is a lot easier to lay a cable in a swamp than over or around mountains :P

Re:Usual Excuses

[spamking]

That's a bit like complaining that if you live in Antarctica it's a bit cold at night. Either accept your situation or move.

Really?

Rural homes have both electricity and telephone service. Why would including broadband be such a huge issue?

Re:Usual Excuses

[zildgulf]

I think the real excuse is the way America has set up an "open market/right-of-way monopolies" situation that are preventing the distribution of wired high speed internet.

It boils down to the facts that very few companies are allowed to create high-speed residential infrastructure via "right-of-ways" and that these few companies would have pay lots of money for these infrastructure improvements.

I think the future is not more in ground copper and fiber to support high-speed internet but in 4G and possibly better WiMax technology. If we were building a phone system in America today do you think we would have millions of miles of under ground copper and fiber and every phone requiring a wired connection? No, we would have cell towers everywhere and almost all phones would be cell phones. High-speed internet will go the same way within the next 10 years. America has a chance to build a high-speed internet infrastructure that is more flexible and adaptable than in Europe via WiMax.

Re:Usual Excuses

[tophermeyer]

Utilities and telco's are required to string power and telephone lines to rural homes. It's still super expensive though. They diffray that cost through 'rural surchages' to other users, but they still take a loss. AFAIK none of the States in the US require telco's provide broadband acces to the home.

Re:Usual Excuses

[RicktheBrick]

Necessity is the mother of all inventions. I have cable internet with 5mps speed. I download about a half of a gigabyte of date everyday. I also upload more than a hundred million bytes of data each and every day. I have been doing this for years now without any problems. I am not constrained by the speed of the internet. I am a 62 year old widower and I want to see more services from my internet. For instance I want smoke detectors with temperature gauges to be connected to the internet. So that in case of a fire the local fire department could be notified after an attempt was made by the ISP to contact me by either phone or the internet. There are times when I am not feeling all that great when I want to go to my computer and instruct it to demand that I type in a word that the computer displays for me every 10 minutes. It would do this until I instructed it that I was feeling better. If for some reason I am unable to type that word in, the computer would assume that I am in trouble and send help. I want the ISP to poll my computer at least once a minute and if no response is given, than by polling other computers determine where the problem is without any help from me. I would assume that this would greatly help in case of natural disasters. When the internet is capable of saving lives than the demand will grow to the point where it can not be ignored any more.

Re:Usual Excuses

[KingMotley]

10Mbps? Seriously? I think you dropped a 0 at the end, and even then you'd still be wrong.

You can get cable internet to 50Mbs easily here. You can get 100Mbs on cable if you talk to the right people. You can get FiOS to 150Mbs.

Re:Usual Excuses

[c6gunner]

Don't you just love the excuses? Imagine if in the 60's everyone was saying "go to the moon? That's impossible!"

It would have taken a couple decades longer, been safer, gotten better value for the money, and maybe resulted in a space program which actually established a base there instead of just collecting rocks?

Yeah, that would have sucked ...

Re:Usual Excuses

[KingMotley]

http://www.speedtest.net/result/1127149169.png

or

http://www.speedtest.net/result/1127154522.png

Re:Usual Excuses

[hedwards]

It's inevitable when a large bloc of voters believes that we're the best at everything despite clear evidence that we're not always the best. They tend to put their fingers in their ears and go lalalalala whenever the subject comes up. Also they seem to uniformly vote Republican the party of obstruction and regression.

Re:Usual Excuses

[BradleyUffner]

Utilities and telco's are required to string power and telephone lines to rural homes. It's still super expensive though. They diffray that cost through 'rural surchages' to other users, but they still take a loss. AFAIK none of the States in the US require telco's provide broadband acces to the home.

And there lies the problem. They SHOULD be required to provide it. They took public money and / or make use of public rights of way. Not to mention to government granted monopoly right to be the sole provider of service for an area.... Like it or not, broadband internet service is starting to become a requirement for effectively taking part in our society...

Re:Usual Excuses

[aztektum]

My usual response is "This country put a man on the moon and built the interstate system... But it can't run some fucking wires a few thousand miles?"

Re:Usual Excuses

[ultranova]

It would have taken a couple decades longer, been safer, gotten better value for the money, and maybe resulted in a space program which actually established a base there instead of just collecting rocks?

Or, more likely, it would still be the realm of science fiction. Or do you really think you're going back there anytime soon?

Re:Usual Excuses

[c6gunner]

Well, I've never been, so it would be hard for me to go back. However, I'm sure that someone will go there within the next decade or two. Whether they'll be American, Japanese, Chinese, Indian .... that's an open question.

Re:Usual Excuses

[s73v3r]

Even among the seaboards, the places where that ISN'T available dwarf the places where it is.

Re:Usual Excuses

[s73v3r]

Why the fuck would you want to do that? That idea is just retarded.

However, connecting San Diego, California, to Vancouver, BC, with high speed rail, stopping in the major points along the way, that would make sense. As would connecting many of the other regional areas like the Eastern Seaboard, the Upper Midwest, and the South West.

Re:Usual Excuses

[mrman18766]

I don't think there are any providers in the US that provide more than 10Mbps other than those that can afford a business package.

I have a Verizon FIOS residential connection and just took a speed test. I have their middle tier. Many people are not fortunate to have it available in their area though.

Speed Test #94783492 by dslreports.com
Run: 2011-01-25 17:32:02 EST
Download: 24299 (Kbps)
Upload: 4612 (Kbps)
In kilobytes per second: 2966.2 down 563 up
Tested by server: 54 java
User: 2 @ dslreports.com
User's DNS: verizon.net
Compared to the average of 663 tests from verizon.net:
* download is 111% better, upload is 21% worse

Re:Usual Excuses

[kbrannen]

...Having lived all over, it seems to be that if your road isn't even paved, give up broadband. You probably won't get it for a while. If you have to drive for an hour to buy meat (any meat), give it up forever, unless people migrate there en masse. Do your kids a favor and move, too.

Yes and no, because it depends on where you live. I live in a semi-rural area (or the extreme suburbs of a major US city); the paving stops about 100 yards from my property. I think FIOS stops about 1 mile down the road in a subdivision, as I've seen the orange conduit go in there. The local phone company who controls that told me they have no plans to extend FIOS to the rest of us down the road. This really makes me want the line infrastructure to be owned by the government so the ISPs become a true service. Splitting the infrastructure and the service would help a lot, I think (same as it would help with the cell phone industry).

As for me, the best I can do is a radio on the roof pointing at a local water tower (with a DS3 at the bottom). The radio connects with 802.11b and is supposed to give me 1Mb down and 512Kb up speeds -- I usually get about half to three-quarters that for $50 a month. There are 2/4/6Mb down options at higher prices.

I consider myself lucky to get that, as I know that some who live 25 miles further out have even less. Move closer in, you say? Sorry, I really like my acreage, something that's not affordable were I to move closer in. It sucks not to have better speed, but what we have isn't really all that bad. If I need a new Linux ISO, I just download it at work instead of at home.

Re:Usual Excuses

[John Hasler]

Having lived all over, it seems to be that if your road isn't even paved, give up broadband. You probably won't get it for a while.

We've had it for four or five years. It was available for several years before that.

Re:Usual Excuses

[John Hasler]

DSL is, for a number of reasons, a short-range technology. Many rural phone lines are too long for it.

Re:Usual Excuses

[Grishnakh]

It's all about government regulation of utility monopolies. If they weren't regulated, prices for rural customers would be exorbitant, or more likely they might not even bother to offer service at all because they don't want to invest the money.

The whole point of a utility is supposed to be to provide services to citizens, not to make a fat profit, which is why in most places, the local or state government either sets up or allows a utility monopoly, which is tightly regulated. Sometimes, the government even does it itself (this is seen more with water/sewer than anything else), but other times it allows a private company to do it instead so that the government doesn't have to come up with the capital.

Unfortunately, these days, Americans seem to think that everything should be about profit, and that government shouldn't provide any services whatsoever, even though the Founding Fathers clearly never believed in that, which is why they set up a Post Office and required it to serve all addresses in the country at low prices in order to facilitate communications, which the FF knew was vitally important for a democracy. If they were alive today, they would be ashamed of this country, and that high-speed internet service is not considered just as important as the mail back in their era, and either subsidized, highly regulated, or provided by the government.

Re:Usual Excuses

[Grishnakh]

As the other responder said, this idea is retarded.

High-speed rail isn't really for cross-continent travel, as it's quite a bit slower than airplanes. Where it's best for is medium-range, regional travel: Vancouver to Seattle to Portland, for instance, or even a line all the way down the west coast. That would eliminate a lot of airplane flights, with not much reduction in travel time. In addition, this line would make a lot of sense because of all the large cities along the route: SD, LA, SF, Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver. There'd be a lot of travel between these various cities.

But for NY-LA, it's too far, and wouldn't be very economical. The distance is much longer, plus there isn't that much in the middle worth stopping at. There's Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque, maybe St Louis, Chicago, and Philly, but this isn't really a straight line, and a lot of those cities in the middle aren't very big. So eventually, such a line might make sense, but that would be much farther in the future. Near-term, what makes sense is to build shorter regional lines, to gain experience with the system, and bring the costs down and get people used to the idea. Another important route would be the Northeast Corridor, from Boston to Providence to NYC to Philly to DC. Amtrak already has a train doing much of this route, called the Acela Express, but it sucks compared to real high-speed trains.

As for China, they know this, which is why their high-speed rail is only on the eastern side of the country, linking their very largest cities. If you look at a population map of China, most of the population lives on the east side in a comparatively small area, while the entire west side of the country is pretty empty. They have little reason to run high-speed trains out there.

Re:Usual Excuses

[Grishnakh]

My usual response is "This country put a man on the moon and built the interstate system... But it can't run some fucking wires a few thousand miles?"

Wrong. This country used to be able to put a man on the moon. There's absolutely no way the USA could accomplish such a feat again, in the shape that it's in now, even with the much more advanced technology available now.

Re:Usual Excuses

[Grishnakh]

Exactly. There's no way America could ever accomplish a feat like that, the way it is now. The next person on the moon will be from a country that's better managed and has more long-term thinking.

Re:Usual Excuses

[wvmarle]

China currently has 7,431 km of high-speed rail, and is planning to expand this to 13,000 in the next 10 years.

The distance you indicate is about 5,100 km only. And doesn't make sense as there is not much in between; for those distances air travel remains the more economical option. So taking all China's rail you would still have a lot of rail left for various branch lines.

USA could do with two main routes: north-south along each coast, that's where the vast majority of the population lives. Trains need lots of travelers - aircraft not so much. And maybe one or two cross-links to connect oddities in the middle of nowhere like Las Vegas and Salt Lake City. Add some branches to the first routes and you connect most of the people to high speed rail.

China and Europe have their population centres a it more scattered around the area.

Before the inevitable...

[sznupi]

No, it's not because of low population density - for example most Nordic countries have typically much lower ones. And considering how situation with cellular coverage sort of mirrors the broadband one...

Re:Before the inevitable...

[Zouden]

And even if population density was the issue, is that any excuse? The US built a national highway system, but now it can't keep up with the rest of the world on internet speed, something which the US invented in the first place. If things are going to stay that way then the 21st century is going to be very different to the 20th in terms of America's status on the world stage.

We shouldn't have to wait until China gets higher broadband penetration than America, but that might be what it takes before the US realises it's not a world leader any more.

Re:Before the inevitable...

[Gaygirlie]

Indeed. Finland is a great example of that: we have pretty low population density, especially in the north, yet you can get a decent ADSL-connection all the way in the rural Lapland. Though, pretty much the same applies to cellular network coverage too.

AFAIK the problem in the US isn't really the fact that the density is so low, it's rather the fact that when they laid down the wiring they didn't bother planning it for future expansions and just did it as quick and dirty as possible. And now they don't wish to publicly admit that they did that and instead try to point to other directions as the reason for connectivity issues. Of course, I could be wrong, but I've just gotten such an image of their actions and behaviour so far.

Re:Before the inevitable...

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed. Population density doesn't matter, urbanization does, and according to Wikipedia, the USA are just as urbanized as most countries in e.g. the EU:

* UK: 90%
* Denmark: 87%
* Sweden: 85%
* USA: 82%
* Norway: 77%
* France: 77%
* Germany: 74%
* Finland: 63%

There is absolutely no reason why fast broadband shouldn't be available to 82% of US users at the VERY least, rather than the ~33% that can apparently get it.

Re:Before the inevitable...

[sznupi]

Hm, you might be pointing to a solution - promoting (really real... or not, doesn't matter) the military aspect of the issue, how it would be crucial for "defense", might do the trick... ;p

(maybe it would be enough to start reminding how it was a military project all along / adding a twist how it never really ceased to be one; but make damn sure it won't become known how some of its crucial ideas were pioneered in - THE HORROR! - France...)

Heck, maybe even health system and diets could be reformed that way - "assuring America its healthy future warriors!"? ;)

Re:Before the inevitable...

[Kumiorava]

I think rural areas should be left out of this kind of comparisons because their service level is highly dependent on government regulation of minimum level of service. Finnish rural customers are right now stuck with somewhat working 3G connections for broadband, because most of the land lines have been cut away. On the other hand city broadband users are much better off in Finland than in US. US allows each provider to gain almost monopoly access to the area they are serving the customers. Finnish government regulates that "last mile" including electricity delivery has to be shared with fair market price. That allows consumers to pick cable, electricity, phone, and broadband providers from a number of companies that are competing with each other.

Right now I have internet HDTV (fiber) and 10/10mbit connection for 19 EUR per month, all fees and taxes included. It includes network based "TIVO" and possibility to purchase channel packages, rent movies, as a normal cable TV would. In US just to get the cable TV working was much more than that and any internet connection was extra.

Re:Before the inevitable...

[Targon]

When the government either pays for the deployment of fiber, or helps, that is a big part of the problem. The US Government doesn't do much to help ISPs when it comes to fiber deployment or helping companies provide access, so if it won't be profitable, why should an ISP run the cables? Seriously, look at West Virginia....do you really see the potential for profit in providing high speed Internet when many people can barely afford $20/month? The same applies to the cellular networks, if the population density is too low to get enough paying customers to even break even on the project, it takes a well financed company that can afford the LOSS of money to provide access there.

The government needs to jump in and pay for the fiber and maintenance to connect these small towns before a private company will be able to jump in to provide the service to the individual customers, and even then, it is hit and miss if some of these small towns even have enough people to make THAT profitable.

Re:Before the inevitable...

[Targon]

The government did the highway system, not private companies that decided that they had enough extra money to run the roads through the middle of nowhere. The US government has focused on funding companies that provide technology to the military, but has not done anything to encourage technology in the private sector. Startup tech companies have really died off since the tech crash of 2001-2002, and there has been very little recovery since then to ENCOURAGE people to go into the science and technology fields, except of course for medicine...where you find drugs to improve your skin, but it may cause heart attacks, strokes, kidney and/or liver failure, anal leakage, and other problems.

Re:Before the inevitable...

[jedidiah]

So I can be certain that all of those little Fjord villages in "helicopter tours of the coasts of the world" from HDNet all have 10mps internet?

If not, then you really haven't made the point.

The US has large sparsely populated areas larger than most European countries.

Re:Before the inevitable...

[zach_the_lizard]

Those Nordic countries are densely populated in their southern portions (and coasts to an extent), with practically no one in the middle of nowhere. The density per km^2 tells only one part ofthe story; the density map tells another.

Re:Before the inevitable...

[sznupi]

So, just like the US? (which BTW also has notably higher urbanization level than half of those Nordic countries)

Re:Before the inevitable...

[tehcyder]

The US has large sparsely populated areas larger than most European countries.

Yes, but three quarters of your population don't live in such areas, mainly they live in towns and cities: so why do only 24% of Americans have fast broadband?

Re:Before the inevitable...

[sznupi]

What in the concept of "population density" do you not understand?

(BTW, the US has higher percentage of urban population than Norway; and do I have to explain why sparsely populated areas tend to not influence "percentage of households" statistics too much?)

Re:Before the inevitable...

[luther349]

well your right and wrong. usa was the birth of the telephone. meaning we also have the oldest lines. made way before pcs. then pcs came out and even when they made net i dont think they even knew it would grow so fast.

Re:Before the inevitable...

[gnurfed]

I was raised in a county in northern Sweden with just over 3000 inhabitants. The closest city with 50k+ people is 160km away. It's basically just forest, lakes, scattered villages and a small central town with about 1500 people. In town you can get cheap cable up to 30Mbit or fiber up to 100Mbit and in the villages ADSL up to 24Mbit. So no, it's not even about local population density.

Re:Before the inevitable...

[zach_the_lizard]

Djibouti has a higher urbanization level than the US, as does the UK. According to Wikipedia, Sweden and Denmark have a higher rate than the US. Plus, the Nordic countries are very close to the very densely populated regions of Europe, plus it appears their southern regions are more densely populated than much of the eastern United States.

Re:Before the inevitable...

[sznupi]

That's probably why I said half (out of those which make sense to discuss - no point with Iceland really, its numbers are wild in all directions); with Finland having quite a bit lower. And their connections with the rest of Europe are generally across the sea...

(but really, there was no red right involved when you wrote "plus it appears their southern regions are more densely populated than much of the eastern United States" just after checking urbanization levels? And considering population densities / how they do have cities in the north)

Re:Before the inevitable...

[puto]

Actually no you are wrong. Even the original copper system in the states was built for expansion when they laid it down. In the late 1990s to early 2000s during the dot com heyday many companies in anticpation of future traffic, laid down loads of dark fiber all across the country. Expecting bandwidth usage to go through the roof and that they could charge out the ass for it. The planning and laying down of the fiber was carefully done. The price fell out of the bandwidth market, companies went out of business, and the fiber stayed. Or they just didnt want to sell access to it. There was a huge glut of fiber laid. It has all been there, for the last 10 years dormant, just waiting to be lit. There were hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber put down, it is still there.

Re:Before the inevitable...

[zildgulf]

Then I say that the solution to America's lag in high-speed internet development is not in more wired connections but in WiMax and a sea change in the definition of "common carrier" and "universal service".

When the government requires universal wireless coverage equal to that of telephone coverage that is when high-speed internet will reach a bigger percentage of America.

Re:Before the inevitable...

[zeroshade]

but has not done anything to encourage technology in the private sector.

You mean besides giving billions of taxpayer money to subsidize the ISPs to build out more infrastructure and then failing to actually DO anything about it when they didn't upgrade and build infrastructure with the money...

Re:Before the inevitable...

[KingMotley]

You have a highway running straight to your house? Nice!

Re:Before the inevitable...

[gravis777]

That is really a bad example. 1/5th of the population of Finland lives in helsinki. I can guarentee you that not 1/5th the population of the US live in New York City, no matter what Hollywood has lead you to believe. The area of Finland is also 338k square kilometers. The state of Texas alone is 696k square kilometers - over TWICE the size of Finland. That is ONE STATE! So please do not state that population density has nothing to do with it when you are comparing a country that is not even as big as a state to the entire US. I can pretty much GUARENTEE that Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas are about the size of two or three Nordic countries, yet their combined population is not even that of one of your countries.

Re:Before the inevitable...

[myth24601]

To use the Interstate Highways system for comparison think of this:

The highways go across the middle of nowhere but you still need main feeder roads and that "last mile" to get to a person's home. Not everyone is very close to the main roads or the Interstate and it gets expensive to pave and widen roads to every home, especially when a particular road might only have a very small number of homes on it.

Other things to think about:
If you live right next to the Interstate but 10 miles from the nearest exit you are pretty much 10 miles from the Interstate.
Wan traffic can be very distance sensitive so many times the bandwidth is much lower for the guy that is several miles from the Hub vs the guy on the same run but very close to the hub.
It is expensive to put in a road or lay cable so if a road or cable is going to service very few people it might not get updated/re-paved very often. (roads wear over time while network technology improvements effectively make stuff that is state of the art become stale and seem slow within a few years.)

Re:Before the inevitable...

[nine-times]

it's rather the fact that when they laid down the wiring they didn't bother planning it for future expansions and just did it as quick and dirty as possible.

My understanding was that part of the problem-- at least part-- was that we laid our telephone lines out relatively early. We started putting telephone lines all over the place a hundred years ago, which much of Europe never put in telephone lines to the same extent. It has been explained to me (though I have no first-hand knowledge) that this was also part of the reason European cell phone adoption was much faster. A lot of people basically skipped having landlines and went straight to cell phones.

But this meant that we had copper lines all over the place that companies wanted to leverage, but it wasn't laid with the intention of being used for data. If an analog voice line in your house was crossed somewhere, it didn't keep you from having a conversation, but it might keep DSL from working properly.

But that's not really the problem. The problem is that right now, today, Americans don't want to invest in infrastructure. They don't want to pay for roads or trains or busses or airports or data lines. Instead of paying for these things in taxes, we want to hand them off to private companies who will magically come up with the money without taking it from us. Meanwhile those companies are happy to sit on existing infrastructure, milk it for everything they can, and then leave it in disrepair.

What's more, people here don't think that the Internet is important. I don't know if this is true elsewhere, but if you talk to people about the importance of the Internet, they see it as an entertainment service. It's just the service that provides you with porn, music, and movies, and therefore isn't necessary. People don't think of it as vital infrastructure for communication and commerce.

Re:Before the inevitable...

[Targon]

Most people see technology as the future source of jobs, and around the world, countries have been giving incentives to businesses when it comes to technology development....EXCEPT here in the USA. Now, ISPs are just one side of the technology sector, you also have software development, chip fabrication development, chip design, plus other pieces of equipment that lead to growth in other areas. Just because manufacturing may be cheaper in China does NOT mean that the development of the technology should be left to those in Asia, Europe, or other places in the world.

Now, when the telephone system was deployed, with a lot of government money, AT&T really was a government sanctioned monopoly. Since we do not have any true NATIONAL monopoly, rather than just give the money to one company, the government can actually go back to the original design of the ARPANET, where the government has a national backbone that towns and other ISPs can tie into. That national backbone would be there to provide access to those small towns in the middle of nowhere when it would not be commercially profitable. Since the government would be the one setting it up, that is where the idea of Net Neutrality can come into play, since there would be nothing on THAT backbone that gets a higher priority than anything else.

Re:Before the inevitable...

[zeroshade]

I agree completely. The idea of a public backbone that ISPs tie into is the best way of doing it and would also have the result of lowering the barrier to entry enough for there to be real competition.

Re:Before the inevitable...

[Grishnakh]

You mean drugs to improve your sex life. That's the #1 most important problem for pharmaceuticals in the USA.

Internet usage

[SillyPerson]

faster Internet access is needed in the medical industry, schools, energy grid and public safety networks.
Actually, I use mine mainly for porn.

Re:Internet usage

[Kokuyo]

That and pirating tv shows... What?! At least I'm honest about it...

Re:Internet usage

[badboy_tw2002]

If its broadcast over the airwaves I prefer to think of it as "group timesharing"

Re:Internet usage

[badboy_tw2002]

"time shifting."

This fail brought to you by Jack Daniels.

Re:Internet usage

[tepples]

Netflix or your country's counterpart != piracy.

Nordic had to do it

[Ilgaz]

It is all about geography. Nordic had to have best of class wireless/broadband because of weather conditions and gigantic mountains which you can't reliably "wire" or even if you did, you can't maintain.

It is why Ericsson, Nokia kind of companies came from that area.

The issue with the USA is the huge area which has to be covered. Compare USA to entire Scandinavia area.

Re:Nordic had to do it

[Jafafa Hots]

The size of the US really doesn't explain why my only two provider options, cable and DSL, are dirt slow and unreliable... in the most densely populated part of the San Francisco Bay area - net capital of the planet.

Re:Nordic had to do it

[sznupi]

Which is part of another oft-forgotten factor - those living in rural areas are relatively few and far between. With the emphasis on "few" they don't strongly influence the statistics in the first place.

The US apparently has even slightly higher percentage of urban population than, mentioned in TFS, South Korea; and quite notably higher than Japan (though of course those two can't be directly compared, having much higher population densities)

Re:Nordic had to do it

[Anonymous Coward]

say hi to the huge gorilla in the room.... capitalism.

other countries think broadband for everyone is a great idea, and fund it.

in the US, that would get you labeled as a communist.

enjoy your slow intertubes.

Re:Nordic had to do it

[Anne Thwacks]

You under estimate just how dense Americans are!

Re:Nordic had to do it

[klui]

I don't know if you were being serious, but the reason is because the monopolies/duopolies have such a stranglehold on the infrastructure it is difficult for anyone else to effectively compete with them. Municipalities get sued by the incumbent ISPs for setting up their own broadband system and winning, there is no need for the likes of Comcast and AT&T to provide cheap and reliable broadband. And when broadband is more expensive than the rest of the world, your aunt and uncle are "satisfied" with what they have.

Re:Nordic had to do it

[zach_the_lizard]

We prefer using terms like "ruinous competition" (coined by AT&T when they were seeking to become a legal monopoly) and putting franchise monopolies in place, plus having the middle of nowhere county board fight about where that fiber will go.

Re:Nordic had to do it

[Targon]

That is caused by ISPs not having enough bandwidth on their backbone to handle the demand. Cable modems can handle over 100Mbps, but if the backbone can't handle EVERYONE constantly running at a given speed, then it will bog down. Your local ISPs have a good reason to be against P2P traffic if their backbone can't handle the demands of the local users. This is why most cable providers set the speed to 10Mbps or even less, because their network can't handle going faster without upgrades.

We have the problem where the governments(Federal, state, and local) are broke, so doesn't want to fund helping the ISPs lay more fiber to handle the issue. Unreliable is a function of how well protected the cables are from both natural disasters, as well as the stupidity of humans who cut the wrong cables or just make mistakes like road workers digging in the wrong place and cutting through cables. The need for MORE redundancy is there, but in general, you just have a LOT of people who CONSTANTLY download, and no backbone could satisfy that demand, unless they have enough bandwidth for EVERY user to use 100 percent of their bandwidth at all times.

Re:Nordic had to do it

[Targon]

Do you know how many thousands of small towns with less than 2000 population each we have here in the USA? All of those small towns add up, which is why you see politics shift back and forth from Democrat to Republican and back again. Most of the midwest consists of small towns, with a few larger "towns" here and there. Individually they may not be all that large, but added together, it really adds up.

Re:Nordic had to do it

[sznupi]

Yes, the rules of Electoral College, etc., twist the odds a bit ... but what does that have to do with simple comparison of urbanization levels and population densities, after TFA discussing broadband penetration on country-wide scales?

(overall your place is not that unique BTW, getting used to the idea would be a positive development in general)

Re:Nordic had to do it

[rickb928]

This is similar to trying to explain why telephone service is so crappy in some part of the U.S. The Northeast, for example:

1- Weather. Ice and snow cause downed lines. Electricity is most commonly out, because the lines are highest, but phone service follows. Needless to say, when the power is out, all other services fail in a certain period of time.

2- Age. Some parts of New Jersey might have the oldest telephone cable plant in America, but the Northeast in general is probably not far behind. Maine and Vermont in particular may have really old cabling because much of the rural voice cabling is just not being updated. Overlaying it with fiber doesn't fix what is, in those areas, the last 10 miles. I had personal experience with this problem in the 70s and 80s, and some of those areas still haven't seen maintenance.

It's expensive to provide the sort of service South Korea, for example, has in the U.S. South Korea is slightly larger than Indiana with a population almost 3 times that of California. I'd rather wire that, with all the density problems involved, than to wire up the Great Plains and try to break even in the process.

And then there's culture. Wiring Manhattan probably requires skillful negotiation with any number of entities. Wiring Seoul apparently required getting up on the pole and hanging fiber and CAT5 before anyone noticed. Cable systems were not designed in the 70s & 80s to provide DOCSIS, so cable Internet is something of a compromise. ISDN did so well it was ditched for DSL, which is on what generation and still is marginal for many users? In my area, DSL is competitive with cable, but I live literally 30 feet from the DSLAM and can get a hot signal and 25MB up and down if I want to pay for it. My cable service will do it too if I spring for a DOCSIS 3 modem. My friends back in Maine live maybe 3 miles outside of a city and have no option besides the extended cable provider, and they get 2-5MB on a good day, if it stays up long enough to download anything useful. And they pay more.

The problem is economics. Monopolies, geography, marketing. Even wireless is subject to the political machinations that will delay or prevent it from being an alternative.

Re:Nordic had to do it

[Buelldozer]

I'm not the OP but Population Density doesn't tell the whole story. Consider two scenarios, each involving an area of one square mile:

In our first scenario there are 100 users living in that square mile but each user is spaced equidistant from one another. If you want to provide Internet service to those users you are going to have to cable an area equal to that one square mile.

In our second scenario there are 100 users living in a typical neighborhood which is the only thing in that square mile. If you want to provide Internet service to those users you need to cable an area equal to the size of the neighborhood.

It's clear that they both have a population density of 100 people per square mile but it's equally clear that wiring the first scenario will be far more work, far more expensive, and provide a much lower rate of return on the investment.

Now remember that the size of a neighborhood in America is much larger than the size of a neighborhood in other parts of the world with the U.S. having larger homes and larger lot sizes so even "urbanization" doesn't accurately tell the story. An "urban" area in America can still be more "suburban" than an urban area of Europe.

In general I agree with you though, it's shameful and ridiculous that the U.S. won't get this solved and frankly the idea that we are too big is just a poor excuse.

Re:Nordic had to do it

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

say hi to the huge gorilla in the room.... capitalism. other countries think broadband for everyone is a great idea, and fund it.

Actually, it might be responsible press or education that's more important. You see, the US funded broadband here too, to a tune of more money per individual than almost anywhere else. We're just as socialist, just more incompetent. Here the networking companies took a portion of the money we gave them and used it to hire lobbyists who made sure there were no actual requirements they deliver anything for all that taxpayer money. So they just kept it and didn't actually build out high speed networks everywhere. The press mostly ignored the issue and the people are too stupid, lazy, uninterested, and distracted to use the democratic process to solve the problem.

Re:Nordic had to do it

[Targon]

To add to your response, the distance of each neighborhood from other neighborhoods also comes into play. If many of these small towns are 50-75 miles away from a larger town/city, that is a VERY different situation than you see in most of Europe. So getting the service to the town is more expensive in many situations than connecting the homes into a local network.

Re:Nordic had to do it

[Buelldozer]

That too although the distance in between population centers would affect population density somewhat.

Re:Nordic had to do it

[TheSync]

Some parts of New Jersey might have the oldest telephone cable plant in America, but the Northeast in general is probably not far behind.

This reminds me of when I worked for an early dial-up ISP in Greenbelt, MD. The phone lines were cloth-covered and put in around 1940. Most of the pairs we had barely worked, and the ones that did could barely keep up a 14.4 kbps connection. Bell Atlantic/Verizon (I forget who they were then) eventually came in with a fiber to the ISP and then we could do the 56k thing for most of our users, but anyone in the town itself on the other side of the CO switch had the 1940's pairs.

Re:Nordic had to do it

[s73v3r]

If their backend can't handle the demands of the users, who are only using WHAT THEY PAID FOR, then that's solely the ISP's fault, and they need to upgrade their backend.

Re:Nordic had to do it

[s73v3r]

So why aren't those ancient cables being upgraded? Why shouldn't the telco be required to either upgrade the cables, or sell them off to someone who will? Or at the very least, not bitch when the locality decides to tell them to fuck off and lay upgraded cable themselves.

Re:Nordic had to do it

[twebb72]

It is all about geography.

For the Highlanders, there can be only one choice of service providers.

actual speed

[macshit]

I wonder what proportion of "fast" connections are actually fast though...

I live in Japan, and my internet connection is nominally 20mbps -- but in actuality, I usually get less than 3mpbs, because it's a ADSL connection, and I'm just a bit too far from the central office. I understand that in many cases cable internet also has issues with the real speed not living up to what's advertised.

Granted, there are multiple other providers I could use that have their own infrastructure (fiber-to-home, cable, etc), and maybe they're better, but still, I think I'm probably counted as a statistic ("has 20mpbs connection!") somewhere when maybe I shouldn't be ...

[I don't switch because this connection is really cheap, and I just don't care enough; it's "fast enough" for me.]

Re:actual speed

[musikit]

i don't know dude. my guest house upgraded me to a 70mbps connection and my part time job still told me it was "too slow" im thinking here "i'd kill for 70mps in the states"

Re:actual speed

[smchris]

Worse ratio than I have but I'd take it. QWest currently only runs 1.5 mbs to my place. Today it's 600k for the FOURTH time in the two years we've lived here. Last time the tech worked on their box he tacked on an "indoor" charge that I had to have removed -- presumably because he was justifying the over an hour he spent figuring it out.

Re:actual speed

[jedidiah]

No. It just sounds like there's a really wide gap between the advertised speed and what it's actually capable of.

70mbps is getting close to the speed of a LAN for older PCs. The idea that it is too slow for anything is rather absurd.

Re:actual speed

[Rick17JJ]

My Qwest DSL connection is 1.5 Mbps downstream and 576 Kbps upsteam. I live in a small city of about 50,000 people in Arizona.

I have been seeing the Qwest TV commercials lately about Qwest "Heavy Duty Internet." Their web page mentions Internet speeds up to 40 Mbps for $19.99 for 6 months. That is about half of that I pay, per month, for a small fraction of that speed.

So I clicked the availability button on the Qwest web page, and typed in my telephone number. Their web page then said that I could get "Connection speeds up to 1.5 Mbps downstream/ up to 896 Kbps upstream," for $39.99 per month.

I live about 1/4 of a mile from a small windowless building where Qwest has their nearest DSL switch. I am surprised that faster connection speeds are not available this close to their DSL switch. A few years ago, Qwest added that small windowless building and buried a new 3 mile long conduit in a ditch to another similar small windowless Qwest building. It was only after those upgrades that DSL became available. Before that, the local telephone lines were only good enough for 26.4 Kbps dial-up (not 56K dial-up).

I do not have cable or satellite, and am not sure if would be possible for to get cable here or not.

Re:actual speed

[macshit]

But you'll have to read the actual article, ...blah blah...

Welcome to Slashdot!

Re:actual speed

[wvmarle]

Well for such poor service it should be cheap, I hope that little bit what you get of what you're entitled to at least works reliably, not too much downtime. When they sell you a 20 Mb connection isn't it too much to ask to get at the very least 50% of that on a regular basis, and more than that the rest of the time? After all what they sell you is a 20 Mb connection, not a 3 Mb connection. You pay for a 20 Mb connection and get no more than 15% of what you pay for. That's bad.

Now that 3 Mb may be enough for you - I take your word for it, my office has 2M/2M so slower than yours for download. It's enough. But I do get 2 Mb, not less, and 2 Mb is what I pay for. At home I've 8 Mb down, and I actually get 7-7.5 Mb on a regular basis, 8 Mb on a good torrent. That I find an acceptable service level.

Inevitably...

[sznupi]

You do realize you make no sense? Paraphrasing: they had to do it because of hard conditions in gigantic areas (more than in the US, per person / taxpayer / customer) ... which in the USA suddenly becomes the issue?

5Mb OK for most people, surely?

[radio4fan]

I'm on 5Mb and it's fine for me.

I can watch iPlayer/Hulu, download movies and ISOs, I use it for work and listening to pandora and BBC Radio.

I honestly can't think of any time I have thought 'I wish I had faster broadband'. In fact, I could upgrade to fibre for not much extra but I don't feel the need.

I'd worry more about the relatively large number of unfortunate Americans who can't get broadband at all due to being out in the sticks.

Re:5Mb OK for most people, surely?

[loufoque]

I can watch iPlayer/Hulu, download movies and ISOs, I use it for work and listening to pandora and BBC Radio.

But you can't do all of these at the same time.

Re:5Mb OK for most people, surely?

[somersault]

I honestly can't think of any time I have thought 'I wish I had faster broadband'. In fact, I could upgrade to fibre for not much extra but I don't feel the need.

My flatmate upgraded us to a 16Mb-down/8Mb-up line and still talks of improving the speed. I don't see the point right now. He says stuff like "but what if you're streaming a movie and I'm playing Warcraft while also downloading shows on iTunes" type of thing, but I'm happy with our current speeds for my own usage.

I can imagine future MMOs and better quality video streaming would be good uses of fast connections, but right now I think a lot of people will feel the same as us, that online services still need to catch up to the capabilities of our connection speeds before there's any point in upgrading further. I'm happy for early adopters to keep driving connection speeds up, and pay a premium for it, but right now I'm happy with a connection that's fast enough to stream an HD movie or two.

Re:5Mb OK for most people, surely?

[icebraining]

Yes, if you're the only person at home using it to download/stream stuff.

Re:5Mb OK for most people, surely?

[icebraining]

Personally, I'm fine with 10mpbs down, I just wish I had more than 512kb up. Even the 30mb plan only has 1024kb up:|

Re:5Mb OK for most people, surely?

[tomhath]

Absolutely true. When I signed up for DSL I had the option of 3, 5, or 10Mb. The prices weren't much different, but the customer support person I was talking to said there's no reason to get more that 3Mb, I'd never see any difference with the faster speeds. So now I'm one of the luddites without "fast broadband".

Re:5Mb OK for most people, surely?

[Seumas]

I believe you need a *minimum* of 5mbps for Netflix and OnLive to work. I have 22/10 and if it weren't double the price ($200/mo instead of $100/mo), I'd probably jump to the 50/50 plan, right now. I imagine it's even worse when you have several people in your household doing several combined netfix-ish/youtube-ish streams, audio streams, downloads, surfing, VNC/VPN, etc.

Re:5Mb OK for most people, surely?

[tunapez]

You are correct, +5MB won't fix browsing experience. I recently moved from the sticks and upgraded from Verizon Wireless 1MB service to Qwest DSL 5MB service. While I now pay less than half what I used to, my browsers still hiccup and pause loading pages at the same rate as before(FF, AB+, NS). Surfing and loading still seem slow, ***even on friends' 17MB connections***. The only bonus I realize is I don't have to pause/buffer streaming vid nearly as long as I used to or queue up iso downloads before I go to sleep at night. Since I don't stream that much vid, download many apps nor game online, I am not that impressed. Seems to me the BB bottleneck is not the problem for modern browsing.

Re:5Mb OK for most people, surely?

[LynnwoodRooster]

The story is about Internet USERS, not Internet HOUSEHOLDS. A Household with 15 Mbps and 4 people there would qualify - according to this study - as four of those unlucky "slow Internet" people.

Re:5Mb OK for most people, surely?

[r_jensen11]

That's fine for you, but I really appreciate my 10Mb/s DSL connection (although I liked my 20Mb/s most at my previous residence.) I don't notice any difference during my free time, but it makes a significant difference when I work from home (as opposed to driving into the office.)

But the ultimate reason why 10Mb/s means so much more to me than the 5Mb/s connection? The big reason why I notice the difference is on the upload speeds - trying to save larger .xls and .ppt files all day becomes more frustrating at an exponential rate as upload speeds decrease.

Re:5Mb OK for most people, surely?

[tepples]

What about places where more than 1 person uses the internet connection?

They can take turns, just as people took turns on the telephone before cellphones became popular. And if all the kids are grown, they can pool the money that they make working to buy business class service.

Re:5Mb OK for most people, surely?

[tepples]

If I need the occasional Linux distro, I'll start the download around bedtime and get to it the next day.

But how is that feasible if the best available connection has a 200 to 300 MB/day cap, which is common on satellite?

Re:5Mb OK for most people, surely?

[shutdown -p now]

I'll say that my connection is good enough when it can stream 1080p BluRay quality video with no hiccup. That's, what, 40Mbps?

pfffft

[lisabeeren]

Two-thirds of Australian Internet connections are slower than 1.5 Mbps source http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mf/8153.0/ We Win!

Re:pfffft

[lisabeeren]

Sorry, Two-thirds is less than 8Mbps. I guess the US sucks afterall.

Is this a problem?

[Haedrian]

What do you need more than 5 Mb/s for? Surely you can stream a video properly, or browse the internet, or download stuff with a slower connection?

Bit of a non-story isn't it? If they were all on dial up or something, then yes, time to panic. As it is, I have a 4Mb/s connection, and I don't feel left out of the internets at all.

Re:Is this a problem?

[igreaterthanu]

What do you need more than 5 Mb/s for?

With 20mbps it is faster to buy a 4GB game on Steam and download it than it is to drive to the store and get a physical disk. You can also let multiple people use the internet without it going slow because someone else is streaming video, multiple people can stream video/play games online/etc at the same time.

Re:Is this a problem?

[MrMarkie]

Well, I work from home a lot on rather data intensive projects and a 5 Mb/s connection would bring an end to that.
I would mean I would either have to move closer to my office or commute 300 kilmeters a day (round trip) neither is acceptable (I'm at the office perhaps 2-3 days a week).
High bandwidth means freedom of living the life you want to for many people. I live in area where I can see 1 other house and I can actually make out if someone is home if using binoculars and that's just about how crowded I would like my living area to be.
My lifestyle would not be possible for me without high bandwidth.

Re:Is this a problem?

[jibster]

640K should be enough for anyone.

Re:Is this a problem?

[Targon]

Streaming a video at what quality? There is a difference between streaming a 320x200 video and streaming a 1920x1080 video. Having people with slow connections means that there will be less of a push to increase the quality of streaming video clips.

Back when the World Wide Web first got started, even having pictures in a web page was limited, because people were on 2400 and 9600 baud modems for the most part, with only those in college/university and military having a fast enough connection for it to be useful, and even then, you would wait for a while for the pictures to load. Netscape was far better than NCSA Mosaic, even with version 0.8. As modem speeds increased, more and more pictures were added to web pages, but even then, you didn't have streaming videos, you had to download videos to watch them. The higher the "expected" speeds are of others, the higher the quality of what you will see on the Internet, and that is what you are missing.

Many people have monitors that are 1920x1080 these days, and in the next ten years, we will probably see the end of 4:3 displays(which are slowly fading out as those old CRTs are retired or just die). Streaming video will go from 320 lines of resolution up to 720 lines once the majority of viewers can actually make use of it, and that is why people need higer than 5Mbps connections. There is talk about broadcast TV eventually fading away with streaming content replacing it, but the general public will not make that switch if the quality of streamed programming is not at least at the level they get from current broadcast TV. That means you would need to have streaming of 1080i or 720p programming, and THAT is something the current Internet infrastructure just can't handle just yet.

Now, as far as you not feeling "left out" with your 4Mbps connection, before you had ANY high speed connection, you might have been satisfied with 53k(regulated max speed for dial-up here in the USA). Now that you are at 4Mbps, could you REALLY go back to dial-up? If you were up at the 10Mbps range, going back to 4Mbps really does feel like a much slower connection.

Re:Is this a problem?

[tehcyder]

With 20mbps it is faster to buy a 4GB game on Steam and download it than it is to drive to the store and get a physical disk.

That's not exactly a deal-breaker/maker for 99% of the population though.

Re:Is this a problem?

[O('_')O_Bush]

5Mb/s down typically means <1Mb/s up, which can be painful for running a game server. Back when I lived in dorms and we had a fat up pipe, my roommate and I could run 4-5 servers at a time, and they drew traffic because they were some of the fastest on the east coast.

Now I can't host a single one because pings are too high for visitors.

Re:Is this a problem?

[Haedrian]

But is that problem likely to be suffered from by more than 1/3rd of Americans? The general public doesn't need fat pipes to read their email, play ^*ville and look at pictures of cats with captions underneath them.

I understand the need for certain people to have uber-fast connections - but not everyone.

Re:Is this a problem?

[Seumas]

Tell me how well that 5mbps (and that's down -- not up, which is far more restricted) works for you when you're watching HD on Netflix (about 2gb/hr) while downloading an On-Demand game in the background on xbox. Or maybe a game on steam. And maybe all the computers in your house are backing up to an offsite service (BackBlaze, Carbonite, roll-your-own, whatever), and someone else in your household is watching hulu or using VPN to the office and another is streaming audio and downloading HD podcasts or something.

If one is primarily "surfing" and they're the only one in the household doing so, it doesn't require very much bandwidth. However, that's 1998. In 2011, people are receiving almost all content via their internet feed. All of their entertainment -- movies, television, podcasts, video streams, youtube, radio stations, live feeds. All of their backup and retrieval. Much of their work. Much of their shopping. Their telephony.

I imagine "nobody needs more than Xmbps of bandwidth!" comments today are a lot like kids in the 70s or 80s hearing their dad shout at them about "two phone lines?! who in the hell needs more than one phone line?!" or bitching about how nobody needs call waiting or something.

Re:Is this a problem?

[Buelldozer]

Your imagination fails.

There are two online graduate degree seekers in my house and a boy with a penchant for online games. When all three of us are doing are thing at the same time even our 15 Mb/s line starts to have issues.

Try and think about how it might be if you moved out of your parents place and met a girl. I know that's difficult for you but try.

Re:Is this a problem?

[misexistentialist]

Most people would be interested in downloading HD video in a matter of minutes.

Re:Is this a problem?

[aztektum]

If they have a good connection in the sticks, that's less driving to the city for movie rentals/entertainment, shopping (buy online!). Less purchasing of fuel and physical products (why drive in to buy/rent the CD/DVD when you can stream or get it on iTunes*).

There are economic (greats jobs, improve online economy), environmental (see above), but also political dick wagging elements. We didn't NEED to put a man on the fucking moon. It did nothing to put food on the table, but it sure showed the rest of the world what we can do. Granted Internet access would not be anywhere near that kind of feat, but these days, the US needs some good press. ANY good press.

* Yes technically you could do shopping on 56k. But webpages are so bloated these days, I have many relatives in the sticks, nothing but 56k (when the planets are in alignment and the Gods are feeling generous anyway). They download email into T-bird and that's about it.

Re:Is this a problem?

[compro01]

Yeah, no one uses that "netflix" streaming thing. Certainly not 19 million subscribers. And even if they did, what kind of family would want to watch different things at the same time? And what's this "HD" stuff that no one uses?

Re:Is this a problem?

[O('_')O_Bush]

You didn't ask what more than 1/3rd of Americans needed a faster pipe for, you asked what I needed it for.

Torrenting, server hosting, and video chats are all up there on my list.

They might be more common activities with a fatter pipe.

Re:Is this a problem?

[twebb72]

As it is, I have a 4Mb/s connection, and I don't feel left out of the internets at all.

That's the attitude that got us in this debacle to begin with. Is exorbitant prices for bare minimum service ok to you?

Re:Is this a problem?

[KiloByte]

we will probably see the end of 4:3 displays(which are slowly fading out as those old CRTs are retired or just die

What's wrong with 4:3 LCDs? For any serious work rather than watching movies full screen has a significant edge over wide. I personally have watched two or so movies in the last five years (and wish I got that time back), and for anything else you do would want 4:3 or, even better, 3:4 orientation, although support for pivoted displays is generally damn flaky.

Re:Silly comparison

[binkzz]

I think due to its vast size and rural areas the US is always going to be lagging behind smaller countries in the latest network technology.

I'd much rather see a comparison and insight into why Asian countries are so far ahead of the relatively small and well off European nations. There must be some key cultural differences.

I live in Holland, a small and well off European nation. I don't know the numbers for high speed connections here, but I don't know anyone personally who cannot get high speed internet. My father lives in a tiny village in the most rural of provinces here, and even he has a 100 mbit connection.

Looking it up on Wikipedia:

The Netherlands has the highest broadband penetration in the European Union. According to the OECD, in 2009 DSL was available to approximately 100 % of the population,[1] and in 2008 cable Internet access was available to 92 % of the population.[2] Statistics from the OECD also show that in 2008, 73.97 % of Dutch households had broadband access,[3] with approximately 38 subscribers out of 100 inhabitants in June 2009.[4] Several upload and download rates are available, depending on the network provider.

That means Asia isn't ahead of us - we beat South Korea (and all other Asian countries) with our figures from 2008; we probably have an even higher percentage now.

Vast sections stuck with dialup

[Isaac-1]

There are still vast sections of the US that are stuck with dial up, and with the size of typical web pages today, where you find 3-5 minute load times for many commonly accessed pages, this means they are not on the internet for all practical purposes. Sure this does not show up as much of the online population as many of these people once had AOL, Earthlink, etc. dial up accounts, but have given up on them over years as bloated these web pages have rendered them useless, and therefore are not being counted as among internet users today. The sad fact is once you remove the "fake" broadband options with slow/low use caps like Hughes satellite service / cellular based service you find that just about any place in the U.S. that is more than a couple of miles from the nearest traffic light is stuck without any internet option other than dial up.

Does anyone ever get over 2 Mb/s download speeds?

[Edmund Blackadder]

I am supposed to be one of the lucky ones with a broadband connection. When I do Internet tests it says my download connection is over 20 Mb/s. Nevertheless I have never had a download that goes faster than 2 Mbit/s. In fact I have very rarely had one that goes faster than 1 MB/s. Usually I am happy to get 500 Kb/s. The only downloads that go over 1 mb/s are various ubuntu downloads from canonical.

It is amazing to me that someone could get around 5 Mb/s download.

Verizon

[_0rm_]

Enough said. I live in an area that has seen a population burst over the past few years, and yet the powers that be have seen it unfit to get FiOS out here. Houses just down the road can't even get DSL. ISP's are cheap bastards.

Re:Verizon

[soundguy]

I'm in a Seattle suburb full of one-acre and five-acre single-family plots. My immediate neighbor sits on 35 acres. We all have access to 50 mbps FIOS, 50 mbps Comcast, 7 mbps DSL, plus Clear and a handful of other 4G providers. Sometimes it's not density. You may have other issues like your local government. Easement rights on existing poles usually run about $1 per attachment, but some places charge WAY more. You might have local politicians trying to line their pockets for granting construction permits. Years ago, some states (Idaho in particular) charged real estate taxes on EACH PAIR of new wires. There are all kinds of back-room dealings that can keep things from happening and keep competitors out.

Broadband Rollouts are delayed by dirty politicians as often as they are by self-serving corporations.

Re:Verizon

[_0rm_]

Point taken. I may well want to do some research, as there is enough development going on arround here that there is bound to be one DoB in the lot.

Re:Silly comparison

[YeeHaW_Jelte]

"I think due to its vast size and rural areas the US is always going to be lagging behind smaller countries in the latest network technology."

No it's not. See Sweden and Norway for example.

"I'd much rather see a comparison and insight into why Asian countries are so far ahead of the relatively small and well off European nations. There must be some key cultural differences."

Asian countries are not far ahead in comparison to Europe, with the exception of South Korea, which has had internet penetration as a spearpoint in its political policies for the last decade, and is as far ahead of its asian counterparts as it is of its European. The rest of the countries in the top ten are very close in terms of speed and percentual penetration.

http://www.techpark.net/2010/04/15/broadband-internet-speeds-2009-2010-the-top-10-countries/

Europe?

[stoev]

I live 20 km from Brussels - THE Center of EU. The Internet market is a practical monopol - cable TV Telenet (and related companies) offers 30Mbps and Belgacom (and related companies) offer ADSL. ADSL usually runs below 6Mbps. The prices are high - because of the monopol. Technically the situation here is like in Korea 10 years ago.

Re:Europe?

[Kumiorava]

Some countries in Europe have it better than others. Lumping Europe as one entity is a little silly.

Re:Europe?

[sznupi]

Oh come on, you know perfectly well how it's THE Center only because your two large neighbors couldn't agree which of them should host it, so decided to place it sort of in-between ;p (in a country invented as a buffer, to boot! ;) )

Re:Europe?

[LynnwoodRooster]

The US is more than one State and one regulatory district. Lumping the US as one entity is a little silly.

Re:Europe?

[tepples]

Likewise, some states in the United States have it better than others. Lumping the US as one entity is a little silly.

SamKnows

[macraig]

Can we trust that such statistical information is definitive when it originates from a private party that may very well have an agenda that doesn't include the truth or the Common Good? If you'd like some definitive information about the true (United) state of broadband, volunteer with the SamKnows project that was started by the FCC. They'll send you a special router that periodically samples your data rates (not your data). In about three years we'll have some very accurate statistics, and the participants allegedly get to keep the WNR3500L routers as a thank-you.

SamKnows is the crowd-sourced way to answer this question.

Re:SamKnows

[threephaseboy]

From that site:

The requirements we ask our volunteers to meet are as follows: (...) You are not a heavy downloader. We'd classify anything above 30GB per month as being too heavy for us to gather useful results.

That's pretty low, even for most casual users, and certainly for heavy users. I use almost 10x that per month.

I can get faster access than what I have...

[White Flame]

...but honestly I'm not going to pay over ~$30/month for internet access. That gets me around 3mbit down at the moment.

I have "access" to fast broadband, yet this study would say I do not.

Why does this matter?

[Seumas]

According to ISPs, only about 2% of all users do anything more than read their email and look at a couple recipes online. It's only "pirates" and "criminals" that need bandwidth.

Re:Silly comparison

[somersault]

Again I wonder if that's due to cable installation being relatively easy and cheap due to the extremely flat landscape, or if it's driven by demand?

Re:Does anyone ever get over 2 Mb/s download speed

[masshuu]

Make sure your not mixing up Mbps and MBps
Mbps is reported by your isp
MBps is reported by most applications
20Mbps / 8 = 2.5 MBps. which fits with your 2 MB/sec speed

Re:Does anyone ever get over 2 Mb/s download speed

[Kjella]

Are you sure you're not mixing bits and bytes? I have a 25 Mbit connection and the highest actual I've seen is 2.9 MB/s = 23.2 Mbit/s. Up I'm supposed to have 5 Mbit/s but in practice it tops out around 480 kB/s = 3.84 Mbit.

Re:Does anyone ever get over 2 Mb/s download speed

[masshuu]

I actually have it the other way around. I have a 3 mb/s connection, but in practice i have hit 500 kB/s which is 4 mb/s

thats usually on the odd hours when people are not likely to be on the interwebs here in my apartment complex(we have a DSLAM here which then goes over a oc-1 or 3, don't remember what the guy said)

Did they ask how many want it

[Shivetya]

and how much they are willing to pay?

I bet you can find more people like my Uncle and Aunt in Ohio who own a farm. They have dial up internet. That is all they want. They use it for mail, a few government sites, and not much else. Since its a working farm they don't have much time to spend on the computer. I know, broadband would free up more of their time, well not really. When relatives send pictures those can download with no one around and when they use their PC they are pretty much doing what they need to do, not just blindly surfing. Movies, well that is what local stations are for.

They aren't ignorant of the internet, just a lot of features and what others call necessities are not for them. When I tell them they can watch movies on demand over the net it doesn't pique their interest. They get their news and weather from the paper or broadcast TV.

When I tried to bump my parents internet to broad band a few years ago they were like, why pay more for that? It wasn't until a deluge of grand daughter pictures and the like did they see *ANY* value to high speed internet. Guess what, it still is all about getting the latest pictures. All that streaming/etc/whatnot is meaningless in their lives. They are very happy and content as they are.

People on tech sites tend to vastly over estimate the need for, let alone the desire of, many for high speed internet. Hell, you can enjoy life just fine without touching the net for weeks. If anything its made a nation of couch potatoes even a worse syndrome.

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I know a number of farmers who use the internet an awful lot.
From real time weather forcasts at harvest time (don't want to cut the grain in the rain) to spot prices for their products(pork belly futures)
Then there is contacting hauliers to truck their stuff away to ordering all sorts of stuff online like they used to do from the Sears Catalog.

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[cheekyjohnson]

Hell, you can enjoy life just fine without touching the net for weeks.

Except if it's your favorite hobby, you mean. There are people who don't like sports or other such activities, and no hobby is better than another since their value is completely subjective (even though some might be more healthy). Your life may not be ruined without it, but some people would greatly prefer to have a decent internet connection.

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[D Ninja]

People on tech sites tend to vastly over estimate the need for, let alone the desire of, many for high speed internet.

One of the most insightful statements I have read here on Slashdot. We often forget that we are so focused on technical needs that we miss what "real people" really need or want.

Hell, you can enjoy life just fine without touching the net for weeks.

Well...now...that's just blasphemy. :-p

Seriously, though. Excellent post. Technology is fun, but it's not everybody's (most people's) cup of tea.

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[tehcyder]

Then there is contacting hauliers to truck their stuff away to ordering all sorts of stuff online

I work with farmers in the UK, and I can assure you that most of them would rather pick up a phone and talk to someone they know/can haggle with.

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[tehcyder]

If a fast internet connection is of such importance to you , maybe you need to move somewhere where it's available.

If you are obsessed with surfing, you would probably want to live somewhere reasonably near the sea.

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[Chowderbags]

The same could (and has been) said for running water, electricity, telephone, broadcast TV, and cable TV. Now, you'd be hard pressed to find anyone (outside of the Amish) that would seriously say that those aren't important things for people to have access to. Sure, you probably won't get hoards of farmers signing up for fiber optic lines this year, or even this decade (just as large parts of rural US didn't get electricity for decades after the rest of the US), but as more and more gets put on the internet, it becomes more important to build out adequate infrastructure everywhere, rather than leave large swaths of the country behind the times.

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[PseudonymousBraveguy]

When I tried to bump my parents internet to broad band a few years ago they were like, why pay more for that?

That's part of the problem in the US ISP market. Here, broadband is actually cheaper then dialup. Dialup was approximately about EUR 25/month plus 0.05 EUR/minute, now I'm paying about 25 EUR for 16 MBit/s DSL with unlimited traffic (both including a landline).

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[sznupi]

To be fair, such uses don't really need high speed internet; even SMS can do the job, for example

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[commodore6502]

>>>I bet you can find more people like my Uncle and Aunt in Ohio who own a farm. They have dial up internet. That is all they want.

Precisely. I have both dialup and DSL, with a max speed of 0.8 Mbit/s. I CHOOSE that slow speed because that's all I want or need, and it saves me money ($15/month) versus the faster 5+ plan. Before we start shouting "doom and gloom", let's look at the actual numbers for average download speed:

Mbit/s
1 12.9 Russian Federation
2 10.7 USA
3 10.5 EU
4 10.4 Canada
5 9.1 Australia
6 8.7 UAE
7 4.9 Brazil
8 4.4 China
9 3.8 Mexico

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[MoleyGhost]

I'm actually surprised the parent hasn't been modded flamebait.

It has always struck me as an intellectually dishonest argument that "Farmer Joe in Rural Wisconsin doesn't want or need broadband, so we shouldn't expand our infrastructure for him." Uh... sorry, but the era of farmers in rural America who don't need (didn't grow up with) the internet is drawing to a rather rapid close. And even now, why should we not expand the infrastructure to those rural areas when there are obviously people, minority or not, who do want it? Nobody is going to force Farmer Joe to give up his telephone or his dialup, and the quality of life for everyone else goes up -- and yeah, I do think everyone here would agree that the internet does have an overwhelmingly positive impact on daily life.

Blaming it for the US being a nation of couch potatoes is just beyond the pale, especially here.

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[cheekyjohnson]

If a fast internet connection is of such importance to you , maybe you need to move somewhere where it's available.

Because everyone has money to move to another location, correct (and for a hobby or way to kill time, no less)? No. I'd say it would be better if this solution was fixed. Telling people to move elsewhere isn't going to help. Not to mention that even in certain parts of some cities people are still stuck with inadequate internet connections.

Also, if it was just surfing that these people wanted, dial up probably wouldn't be that big of a problem (unless they are extremely impatient). Online games, downloading large files, and practically anything that isn't just loading a few lines of text are all perfectly valid reasons for wanting a decent internet connection. People should not have to move just for that, and there is a serious problem if they truly must.

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[marnues]

For every one of those, there's the same family only decades earlier in life with plenty of children who would benefit greatly from having the interent. Your aunt and uncle are unfamiliar with lifestyles that include the internet, which is fine because their generation does not require it socially. As 26 yro who occasionally facebooks in Montana, I can tell you I am much less connect to my generation. Current farmers may not need the internet now, but they will in the future, especially if they want jobs and the like. I'll be a happy man when I can finally take and offer grain bids online. So much wasted effort having agents traveling all over the country-side, often wasting everyone's time.

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[parlancex]

It is very short sighted to make a judgment in technology based on what you think your users "need". The reality is many "normal" people see a lot of value in services like Youtube, Netflix, Skype (with video), iTunes and other multimedia applications that they may not have become accustomed to using because it isn't usable for them right now anyway, so it is a chicken and egg problem.

That's just today anyway, but I mean, what could people possibly need tomorrow? 640k ought to be enough for anyone right guys?

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[drinkypoo]

The same could (and has been) said for running water, electricity, telephone, broadcast TV, and cable TV.

The Amish have running water in their homes now (most of them anyway) and they use electricity where it suits them. They use some farm machines these days in order to remain financially competitive. And they will use telephones, they just won't have them in their homes, so they have payphones near their communities. Or in other words, they are brainwashed religious hypocrites. On the plus side, they aren't hurting anybody for the most part (Except for occasional rumspringa-related incidents which are very much covered up when possible by the Amish... but which often involve only Amish.)

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[Thud457]

pork belly prices have been dropping all morning, which means that everybody is waiting for it to hit rock bottom, so they can buy low. Which means that the people who own the pork belly contracts are saying, "Hey, we're losing all our damn money, and Christmas is around the corner, and I ain't gonna have no money to buy my son the G.I. Joe with the kung-fu grip! And my wife ain't gonna f... my wife ain't gonna make love to me if I got no money!" So they're panicking right now, they're screaming "SELL! SELL!" to get out before the price keeps dropping. They're panicking out there right now, I can feel it.

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[QuantumRiff]

I live in a subdivision in farmland in Wisconsin. (about 8 miles from Madison) The Local Cable company has no service here.. (cables go to about a mile down the road).. Telco laughs at us.. (litterally.. because of the way the roads are, and that our CO is in the next town over, were 40,000 cable feet away) The state public utilities commission won't do anything to help or encourage, because even though there are about 100 houses out here that really, really want it, their records show that there is already Broadband Service in our zip code.. (that cable line a mile down the road).. Charter said a few years ago they would only bring cable down here if EVERY SINGLE house signed a 2 year agreement..

I've actually been thinking of looking into getting access to a fiber thats about 2 miles away, and setting up a Wimax tower to server my neighborhood, but it is EXTREMELY difficult to get any pricing on equipment to some rough estimates on the number crunching. There are a couple of other neighborhoods nearby, it might just break even..

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[compro01]

They are very happy and content as they are.

People on tech sites tend to vastly over estimate the need for, let alone the desire of, many for electricity. Hell, you can enjoy life just fine without touching electricity for weeks. If anything its made a nation of couch potatoes even a worse syndrome.

My grandmother remembers similar babbling when they were working on providing electricity out to the rural areas in the early 50s. And when they were installing a semi-centralized sewer system for her village in the late 70s. And again when they were running a water line out to the village in the early 80s.

Your argument was stupid then and it is just as stupid now.

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[dcw3]

True, and there are many that just don't give a shit about internet access, like my parents who could easily afford, and get it. I have to borrow the neighbor's wireless whenever I visit them. No matter what I've tried, I haven't been able to get them to get online...gave them a computer, webcam, etc., so they could see their only grandchild live. On the other hand, mother-in-law (73 yrs old) fell in love with it when we got her a laptop. The point being that your mileage may vary...we can't assume that everyone wants it.

All of you complaining that we're "falling behind", thinking it's an excuse that the U.S. is less dense...when you can describe a business model that will provide access to everyone, I'll buy your argument.

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[EvilBudMan]

Are you crazy? Dialup just plain gets spyware and viruses because it's too slow to get all of the security updates every week. One person I know didn't want to pay $5 more per month to fix the problem. Email text only is the only thing that it's good for.

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[s73v3r]

See, the problem is, they haven't tried it. Of course now they think that the current state of affairs is peachy. "Why would I want news on demand when I can get it from the paper?" "Why would I want movies on demand when I can just watch whatever the local station says I should watch?"

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[s73v3r]

Telling people to move is a cop out. Its not like your surfing analogy. Its not possible to move the oceans. However, it is possible to provide high quality broadband to rural areas.

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[s73v3r]

Your numbers are wrong. Well, they aren't incorrect per se, however, you did cherry pick those numbers. You left out a shit ton of other countries. In real terms, we're about 31st on the list.

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[arb phd slp]

My brother is a professional farmer for a big corporate-owned outfit. They just had their entire property (thousands of acres) set up with wireless broadband. He controls and monitors all the irrigation pumps for all the crops and sends/receives GPS map updates to and from their server from a laptop in his pickup. Yeah, I realize that's an intranet, but I know he checks and sends email over that network, so it has to be connected to the outside world, too. Not to mention incorporating the real-time weather into their irrigation planning. Farmers are certainly using the Internet!

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[commodore6502]

>>>You left out a shit ton of other countries. In real terms, we're about 31st on the list.

Since the European countries have voluntarily demoted themselves to "member states" they no longer count. The new country thus formed is comparable to a United States of Europe - i.e. the European Union which I included in my list.

I also left out any other country which is so small, that the US State of Alaska is bigger than them. Like to like. I only listed countries that spanned all or most of a continent, for the same reason you compare yellow apples to red apples, not oranges or grapes or peanuts.

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[Grishnakh]

The Amish have running water in their homes now (most of them anyway) and they use electricity where it suits them. They use some farm machines these days in order to remain financially competitive. And they will use telephones, they just won't have them in their homes, so they have payphones near their communities. Or in other words, they are brainwashed religious hypocrites.

Their religion is pretty wacky, yes, but there's a certain logic to it: the idea isn't that technology is bad, the idea is they don't want to be overly connected to the outside world, and want to be very self-sufficient.

So they won't have power lines to their properties run from the nearest coal or nuclear power station, but if they can generate their own power with solar cells, that's ok by them. And telephones are bad precisely because they're a portal from the outside world, so they limit that influence by keeping them outside the home.

I'll bet you their running water is powered by their own pumps, powered by electricity generated on-site, rather than any connection to the outside world. If it depended on getting it from a government-run water company, they probably wouldn't do it.

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[drinkypoo]

Amish use technology based on what they are told to do by their church leaders. If it has a rhyme or reason to it then it is only by mistake. They have become dependent on machinery that they do not own the tools to repair so it's all a distinction without a difference at this point.

Re:Did they ask how many want it

[s73v3r]

Since the European countries have voluntarily demoted themselves to "member states" they no longer count.

Complete bullshit on your part to make your argument seem the least bit plausible. Ok.

I also left out any other country which is so small, that the US State of Alaska is bigger than them. Like to like. I only listed countries that spanned all or most of a continent, for the same reason you compare yellow apples to red apples, not oranges or grapes or peanuts.

So in a comparison within the US, you'd leave out states like Rhode Island, and New Jersey, right? I mean, they aren't relevant when talking about California and Texas, right?

Re:Does anyone ever get over 2 Mb/s download speed

[cbope]

Short answer, yes it's possible.

I have a 24mbit down, 1mbit up connection over ADSL here in Finland. My gateway reports a line speed of just over 18mbits, which considering the "historical" nature of the copper where I live, is acceptable. If I download from a regional server, I can easily hit download throughputs of 12-16mbit/s continuously. So while I'm not quite reaching peak numbers for an 18mbit connection, I'm getting pretty good utilization of available bandwidth.

This is also enforced by law here. The ISP has to be able to provide a certain percentage of the marketed bandwidth over a 24 hour period. I don't recall exactly the specific details, but I believe they have to deliver something like 80% of the marketed numbers averaged over a day, or the ISP may face fines. Basically, it means they have to deliver what they are selling. Over in the US, you know this as regulation, which everyone seems to be against for some strange reason (regulation = bad). Over here on the other side of the pond, we enjoy our regulated high-speed internet access, which is really fast (regulation = good).

Re:Does anyone ever get over 2 Mb/s download speed

[SeaFox]

I am supposed to be one of the lucky ones with a broadband connection. When I do Internet tests it says my download connection is over 20 Mb/s. Nevertheless I have never had a download that goes faster than 2 Mbit/s.

A file transfer over the internet requires two internet connections: yours, and the connection the server hosting the file is on. Not to mention there's also the limit on how fast the other server chooses to send the file to you. The speed can be artificially limited at either end after all.

This is exactly why you test your Internet speeds on a reputable speed-testing site independent of your ISP, and not judge it from download speeds. It's also why getting personal high-speed internet service over 20 Mbps for general usage is a waste unless you need to share that bandwidth over a large household of users. There is a certain point where web-browsing speed stops being a problem with your connection being slow and becomes "this the fastest the site is going to load from their end".

Re:Silly comparison

[guruevi]

It is being driven by competition. Holland has like 20 providers to choose from for cable, DSL and there are some doing FTTH now. There are also wireless offerings which work really well.

Their neighboring country Belgium has only 2 (major) providers for Internet (cable and DSL) where cable has literally bought a monopoly status a couple of years ago in return of putting down a 200km fiber ring (they didn't even bother doing FTTH even though their offering is called FiberNet) and DSL/phone used to be a government run (and is still government owned) company. They have 10-30Mbps lines with 10-30GB monthly caps. Just recently have there been non-capped offerings because there are 1 or 2 DSL providers that have finally convinced the government that the phone line owner (the government-owned private company) can't gouge the prices for sharing lines.

Re:Silly comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

Again I wonder if that's due to cable installation being relatively easy and cheap due to the extremely flat landscape, or if it's driven by demand?

If it's demand-driven, does the landscape matter? I mean, it's not like The Netherlands has ever used "we're 70% below sea level" as an excuse for anything, not even for flooding-related problems.

Re:Silly comparison

[binkzz]

The flat landscape helps, but it's certainly not driven by demand. We've always been ahead of demand in terms of internet access.

Even now glassfibre is reaching more and more areas when nobody really needs it yet. But when we do, it'll be there.

In Africa...

[ultral0rd]

In America you say that anything below 5 Mbps is considered slow.. In South Africa we consider anything above 512Kbs to be fast. Guessing two-thirds of America aren't as backwards as you might think..

Re:In Africa...

[Targon]

It is all based on what is expected when it comes to content. With a high speed connection, clicking to go to the wrong web page isn't a big deal, you just hit the "back" button on your browser and go to the right one...only a few seconds are lost. On a slower connection, it can be minutes wasted(as it was back in the days of dial-up). All the advertisements, and animations, and videos that are just embeded in web pages are ONLY there because the people who design the web pages expect people to have DSL or Cable connections here in the USA.

Now, in Africa, you may not go to many web sites that are based here in the USA, so you may not see/feel how slow they would be on a slower connection. If the pages that you go to had as much garbage cluttering the screen as the ones we have to deal with here, 512Kbps wouldn't seem acceptable, even if it is faster than dial-up.

Re:only dial up availible

[Churnits]

Well for all I know your parents live in 10 mile isolation in Patagonia. Would you like to add some frames of reference to make your comment even vaguely useful?

annnd why is faster access needed by the medical

[pkbarbiedoll]

industry? Why, I believe it has something to do with telemedicine and the soon to be heard cry from the PTB that American doctors are paid too much (nevermind the ridiculous cost of tuition, student loans, ect). Solution = outsource their asses. Set up a semi interactive TV & PTZ camera grid in front of an examination chair. Hire cheap trained labor to draw blood and perform other menial tasks. The Indian/Taiwanese doctor on the other end of the cameras will examine and collect data via clinic monkey.

Huge cost savings for the healthcare industry. Disaster for those (in America) working in the medical industry who will see their livlihoods and careers be rendered obsolete in a matter of 3-5 years.

The technology already exists, and is already being used in small numbers (rural settings). Keep your eye on the prize.. anyone with a brain sees where this is heading.

Ditto for education.. kids don't need broadband in class, that won't save U.S. education system money. Put a remote instructor on a huge LCD screen in front of the class, with a trained monkey for any direct interaction.. paper? nope.. everything submitted online.

Obviously won't affect 100% of clinical / education jobs, but bet your ass this is what the PTB's envision.

Re:Does anyone ever get over 2 Mb/s download speed

[splutty]

I have a 120Mb/s line into my house. Normally, if you're downloading say a patch or a full game install, etc, it'll not get that speed ever.

However there are programs like JDownload, with which you can take a http downloadable file, and it'll make X connections (you can set X), and generally when I set X to 10, it'll download at just about my max download speed (11-12ish MB/s, yes bytes)

As others in this thread have commented: The 'serving' side also matters for highspeed internet, not only what you can theoretically get.

So to answer your question: Yes. I get 10MB+/s easilly, you just have to tweak things a bit.

Re:Does anyone ever get over 2 Mb/s download speed

[Gaygirlie]

I am supposed to be one of the lucky ones with a broadband connection. When I do Internet tests it says my download connection is over 20 Mb/s. Nevertheless I have never had a download that goes faster than 2 Mbit/s. In fact I have very rarely had one that goes faster than 1 MB/s. Usually I am happy to get 500 Kb/s. The only downloads that go over 1 mb/s are various ubuntu downloads from canonical.

As other have said you are mixing Mbit/s and Mb/s; they are not the same thing. You have a connection of 20 Mbit/s, which translates to 2.5 Mb/s. Thus it's no wonder you so rarely go over 2 Mb/s..Btw, the article speaks of 5 Mbit/s, not 5 Mb/s.

(You can convert x Mbit/s to x Mb/s by doing simple x/8. Or convert x Mb/s to Mbit/s by doing x*8.)

I hope this clears up your confusion.

Re:annnd why is faster access needed by the medica

[vlm]

industry? Why, I believe it has something to do with telemedicine and the soon to be heard cry from the PTB that American doctors are paid too much (nevermind the ridiculous cost of tuition, student loans, ect). Solution = outsource their asses. Set up a semi interactive TV & PTZ camera grid in front of an examination chair. Hire cheap trained labor to draw blood and perform other menial tasks. The Indian/Taiwanese doctor on the other end of the cameras will examine and collect data via clinic monkey.

Already being done with radiologists in non-rural areas. So, you get an xray after a car accident at 2am and the radiologist isn't there in person to evaluate. No problemo, you have the on call guy connect via his home cablemodem, download the immense file, look at it in the viewer, call the ER doc with the results. Why pay an American radiologist $150K/yr when the guy in Mexico does it for quite a bit less?

The part that mystifies me is "schools, energy grid and public safety networks". For schools, I'm not seeing the killer app that devours bandwidth other than filesharing in the residential dorms at university. For energy grid and pub safety, thats a complete WTF moment. I guess you need at least a T3 to post the local top 10 wanted criminals to a website annually. Or maybe in a natural disaster situation, if all 100K people in my suburban city called the cops simultaneously, and they somehow had 100K operators on duty to take the call, then I guess 13 kilobits/sec per call thats about 1 gig/sec, yeah that would be money well spent.

Re:RTFA

[Third Position]

Considering 2/3 of internet users in the US don't do anything with it besides read their email and their horoscope, why is this a problem?

How many people need that much bandwidth?

[damn_registrars]

Really, 5mbps is enormously faster than the 56k modems that were standard for so long. I'm not sure that a large portion of people who are currently "only" able to get up to 5 would pay for more if it were even offered, because frankly I doubt they would care or be able to notice the difference.

Re:How many people need that much bandwidth?

[Seumas]

Why do you need THAT much bandwidth? 56k modems are enormously faster than 300 baud modems. And 300 baud modems are significantly faster than smoke signals and carrier pigoeons.

Re:RTFA

[cheekyjohnson]

Because there's still others who aren't like that who are left without a fast internet connection.

No, scale really is significant.

[Toze]

I just want to emphasize this, because Europeans in my experience often just do not get the scale involved. When Canadians or Americans come to Europe, driving from the south of France to the Netherlands and back is a weekend trip, while Europeans I've met consider the distance a phenomenal one reserved for long vacations. Our major cities are days of driving away from each other, our states or provinces the size of whole European nations. What the Netherlands considers "rural," most Canadians, at least, would consider "a short drive out of the city." So I think possibly you''ve missed the "vast size" part of the GP's statement.

Mind you, that said, the cost of laying fiber is not that great, between 5 and 50 cents a mile, depending on the method used. While not free, and crippling cost for a start-up, it fits within most provincial budgets. In Canada, at least, our net speeds, comparable to post-soviet states, is due more to the predatory nature of ISPs and the carte blanche the "regulatory" agency gives them for pricing models, etc. One of the major ISPs just switched from "unlimited" to "cap and overage" pricing; they made a lot of noise to consumers about how it was necessary to pay for the build-outs, but in their stockholder reports it's listed as profit generation, not maintenance. Our problem is amoral scum, not scale.

Re:No, scale really is significant.

[Anti Cheat]

I must agree here with Toze on both parts. I find that a number of people in the EU just don't understand the scope of our nation. I found one thing that may help. The default km-per-cm on maps in the EU is different than in Canada. It's scaled up. They use a much higher factor there. Care must be taken not to simply place one beside the other, but to understand and convert in your mind's eye how small the Netherlands would be in direct comparison. All of the Netherlands could disappear into just one of our Great Lakes. Now look at just Ontario with that in mind and then scale out to the whole country. Hate to say, but Toronto to Ottawa isn't just a 1 hour drive as more than one EU relative has discovered. Look closer at those KM's again you people.

Secondly and once again Toze seems to have written a large grain of truth regarding the ISP situation here and how they play the game. It has been a long nasty little tradition here to have two sets of books, so to speak. One is departmentally generated FUD fed to the public and Government politicians and the CRTC and the other is to shareholders and management showing the true motives. Bell stands out historically as being one of the most creative twisters of truth ever in this country. Starting with their cost increase to have tone dialing in the 60's excuses. I sometimes look forward to what their spin will be in order to squeeze more profit. Oh and that profit is measured as, if it isn't at least a 200% markup it won't even be considered by their policy makers. This stuff would be amuzing if it was moved from the business section to the funny papers, but sadly it isn't.

There is a problem in Canada where people tend to believe our Mega Corps and it's even more true in the tech field like Bell is in. I remember one PR statement that even today still sticks in my craw. Way back when in the early days of broadband Bell actually told the CRTC and the rest of Canadians that their new PPOE system was to help the customer have a better online experience. That disconnecting the customer regularly so that a new connection must be made was to keep that dial-up feel that customers preferred. A constant online connection was not something the customer wanted in their broadband service. That was the straight up truth as told by Bell. 'Customers wanted that dial-up feel'.

With the success of pppoe, using this kind of manipulation to force the installation of what was essentially a tracking and billing system on the non technical public, has encourage ISP's like Bell to reach for the stars in creative proclamations and interpretations of survey data to their profit benefit. I could sit here and write a page on creative works of ISP's from the last number of years.

What is sad is that Canadian access to high speed internet has gone from being a world leader to what now?, 20th place give or take. Recently India past us by. ISP's in Canada obviously have no real competition and no motive to improve and I say in fact, are seeing just how far they can push an unsuspecting public in paying more for less and "Getting money for nothin and their chic for free...". Sadder more by the fact we have a relatively educated population here and it has been the taxpayer that often foots the bill to build out the network through Government infrastructure project money. It certainly not the ISP's paying for the big ticket items. I also agree with Toze that start-ups don't stand a chance the way the deck is stacked against them, unless they have some very deep pockets. Not the way the rules are set against creating a new on-ramp to the net. The two major ISP's have very high barriers erected that suspiciously seem to be made from the exact same forms and cement. The exact same politico's that support their reasons for 'needed innovation' in the market place.

Amoral scum is an insult to scum everywhere Toze.

640K

[Toze]

640k ought to be enough for anybody.

Recent visit to Korea

[WillRobinson]

I was recently working in Korea for a few weeks, staying south of Seoul, in Kumi. In the hotel I was staying at I did a speed test, and was really shocked, on a wired connection at the hotel I got the following speeds 82.67 down and 18.87 up on my laptop. Also received speeds like that everywhere there. So doing a bit of investigation, I could see they were using wireless to back haul to a mountain point. I dont know what frequency they were using, it would not show up in anything I had to scan with.

Re:annnd why is faster access needed by the medica

[sznupi]

"public safety networks" - somebody wishes for nice video surveillance backbone, probably? (but come on, schools can use good bandwidth)

Re:Silly comparison

[HasHPIT]

I'd much rather see a comparison and insight into why Asian countries are so far ahead of the relatively small and well off European nations. There must be some key cultural differences.

The Netherlands has the highest broadband penetration in the European Union. According to the OECD, in 2009 DSL was available to approximately 100 % of the population.

That means Asia isn't ahead of us - we beat South Korea (and all other Asian countries) with our figures from 2008; we probably have an even higher percentage now.

Hey that topspot is shared with Denmark =), but in fact, according to the OECD numbers from june 2010, the top 30 broadband per inhabitant list, have 22 european and only 2 asian nations (Japan and Korea). Japan and Korea does however have some of the fastest and cheapest internet (advertised, not actual measurements) http://www.oecd.org/document/54/0,3343,en_2649_34225_38690102_1_1_1_1,00.html#Penetration

Re:Basement dwellers had to do it

[icebraining]

Don't you have public roads even in such remote places?

Re:RTFA

[sznupi]

Choice bad! We, the saviors, how perfect approach and everybody should be happy with it! Conform!

Re:RTFA

[zach_the_lizard]

Those people should really consider moving closer to the city. It reminds me of my dad: "I want land! Let's move into the country. What, there's crappy Internet service (and other services) in this area? Why? It's not just me, Farmer Bob lives down the road too."

Re:Quite.

[Targon]

If there is no profit in providing service to a town, why should a private corporation spend the money to provide that service? Seriously, there is a difference between charity, which can be written off on your taxes, and losing profitability by providing service to a small town that will NEVER bring in enough revenues to even meet the maintenance costs. Seriously, are businesses in the business to make money? For cellular, at least when people with the service travel, they will be able to make use of that service in the middle of nowhere, so it can be seen as good for ALL customers to add towers in new places, but for home broadband, what use does someone in Chicago have if someone from a 1000 population town in West Virginia has fast Internet access?

It really comes down to Government needing to provide that access in places where no other company can afford to provide it. Remember the telephone system? That was pushed by the US government too, otherwise the same towns that have no broadband today would not have telephone wires, because there is NO profit in running those wires in the first place.

Re:Silly comparison

[umghhh]

The reasons as always are many but I can imagine that dutch government does something between going to brothels (legal) and enjoying occasional joint (decriminalized) and put some rules on the industry. I know I know not only they are immoral and disgusting abusers of female and male prostitutes, not only they smoke grass (and other drugs and inevitable die of OD soon) - that is the same in US only there it is all illegal - the difference is that they are OMG commies as they are not afraid to regulate sensibly t he markets. You may ask what this has t o do with anything? Well When I lived in NL the broadband did not exist yet. I learned however that telecos were obliged by virtue of the licenses allowing them to operate to provide service to all citizens wherever they would be. Not providing the service could result in hefty fines. Of course it is easier to have a cable laid between a-dam and small village 10km away than between de-industrialized and depopulated centers of say Chicago but the difficulty level is small. I guess if US were not so abusive against any 'community' idea they could have better service and less bureaucracy than they have in many other areas not only broadband. But they are leaders anyway and can send marines to anybody who claims otherwise unless they are in NK, China or Iran (well I do not think you will try Iran again would you?).

I observe the debates in US for quite some time and I cannot avoid an impression that the heated discussions very often if not almost always completely miss the point and the results (if any) are more bureaucracy than in red tape Europe and this all in the country of the free etc with free market and everybody believing in small state etc. This somehow reminds me about Germany - I guess there is a size factor - if country is big enough the fat cats are so fat that they can bribe anybody and there are a lots of them so gov officials have no time for normal people at all. In Holland this seems to stay under control i.e. corruption in high places is limited and they actually do something also for common men.

It can also be that the dutch are just more pragmatic than the rest of humanity. There surely must be a reason why the country is so well off and this wealth is spread to majority of population thus reducing social tensions and allowing for relatively reasonable decision making. Of course signs of decay are all there too - after all this is a western society....

I lived there few years and hated every joint I smoked (but did not inhale - I did not want to offend locals :)

Cost versus Quality

[Sefi915]

I pay 50 bucks (US) a month for my Earthlink DSL. I get 1.5Mb/s down, less than 300Kb/s up. Yes, you read that right - my total downloads never exceed 150KB/s and my uploads never exceed about 36KB/s.

It works for me and my needs (though it's annoying downloading game demos/updates that are larger than a few hundred MBs - takes me multiple days)

I wouldn't mind faster service - but I don't want to pay the 75+ a month that Comcast will eventually charge me (and no, I don't want to spend 2+ hours a month trying to negotiate them down to a "special" price) and the FiOS pricing and availability in my area is kind of stinky, too. Lots of packages that don't last long enough and price ranges that jump up 50+% at the end of the promotional period.

If I could get 10Mb symmetrical service for 50 bucks a month and not have the price change (except to go down), I'd jump on it.

And in the Northeastern United States, it shouldn't be a non-existent option.

Re:Cost versus Quality

[kramerd]

Comcast is offering $10/month for 6 months followed by $35/month for 18 months for 6Mb/down, 1Mb/up for new subscribers.

You aren't willing to spend 20 minutes on the phone (plus whatever it takers to cancel your earthlink) to get them to ship you the setup box to save almost $500 over 2 years?

Re:Cost versus Quality

[FelixJongleur]

I pay 50 bucks (US) a month for my Earthlink DSL. I get 1.5Mb/s down, less than 300Kb/s up. Yes, you read that right - my total downloads never exceed 150KB/s and my uploads never exceed about 36KB/s.

It works for me and my needs (though it's annoying downloading game demos/updates that are larger than a few hundred MBs - takes me multiple days)

I wouldn't mind faster service - but I don't want to pay the 75+ a month that Comcast will eventually charge me (and no, I don't want to spend 2+ hours a month trying to negotiate them down to a "special" price) and the FiOS pricing and availability in my area is kind of stinky, too. Lots of packages that don't last long enough and price ranges that jump up 50+% at the end of the promotional period.

If I could get 10Mb symmetrical service for 50 bucks a month and not have the price change (except to go down), I'd jump on it.

And in the Northeastern United States, it shouldn't be a non-existent option.

I pay just $15 more than that a month for AT&T and get 24Mb/s down which is about 3MB/s and I live in the North Eastern US ....

What will happen

[AntEater]

I can tell you what will happen with this government initiative. They'll do some more studies. They'll have lots of meetings with the telecommunications corporations. They'll form some committees. They'll give some tax money to the industry to encourage the development of improved broadband offerings. The industry will pocket the money and nothing will really change. On the books it'll look like they spent it all on expanding and improving the infrastructure but virtually nobody will see an improvement.

Re:What will happen

[noidentity]

On the books it'll look like they spent it all on expanding and improving the infrastructure but virtually nobody will see an improvement.

No, then they'll alter the way they interpret the data or change definitions (redefine broadband or something, it's the new rage, see 3G/4G for an example) so that it now looks like things have improved.

Re:What will happen

[komode0]

You're almost right. What the corporations will do is spend exactly the same amount on upgrading the infrastructure as they were already planning to spend and pocket all of the extra that they're getting from the government. Then they will use some simple accounting tricks to make it look like the government money led to huge improvements and they will refuse to make any more improvements until they see more government money.

Re:Silly comparison

[Targon]

Population density is a key to this. Even the smallest towns in Holland have a higher population density than many places in the USA, and houses are not spread out for miles and yet considered a part of the same "town". This makes it far easier and more cost effective to run the wires. The Dutch people also have a different mindset than most people in the USA since the PEOPLE do not feel they are entitled to EVERYTHING that other people have, and it leads to fewer problems. People may want more, but that is different than feeling like the government owes it to them, and as a result, you get fewer PUBLIC complaints.

The people in this country seem to feel that just because someone else has $1 million in the bank that they should too, without feeling like they should have to work at it to get there. This is different than wishing they could, but knowing that they should aim to improve their own lives in the hopes of eventually getting to where they want to be.

Back to the topic at hand...
If everyone in these small towns had their homes in neat little towns, rather than small homes spread out over 20 miles, it would be far easier to provide Internet service with some government assistance to run the wires TO that small town. Instead, it costs several thousand dollars worth of cables and labor to run the wires to each home, and the home owners may not have the money to pay for it. It all comes down to how towns were founded in the USA. Towns founded before the invention of the automobile tend to have homes closer together(and in Europe that is what you see), and here in the USA, we find towns with the populations spread out, and some that don't even have a town center and are just homes and neighborhoods spread out without a business district to act as a core. When most people live over 20 miles from where they work, that leads to a very different culture when it comes to getting services.

Re:RTFA

[Moryath]

Even close to the city, you're likely to have a crapass DSL connection run by the local telco monopoly. The definition of "broadband" is something that gets argued about left and right. Back in my old place, the local telco monopoly was still trying to pass off 1Mbit down / 128kbit up as "broadband."

The problem is the US has just about zero competition for ISP service, which means zero reason for the telco and cable monopolies to actually provide a decent service. Instead, they just charge monopoly-extortion rates for shitty-ass service. Hell, if it weren't for prior art, I bet Comcrap would try to patent that as a business model!

Re:RTFA

[CastrTroy]

I remember an article about 2 months back where the government said they were going to change the definition of broadband to 5 Mb Down and 1 Mb up. So currently I would be without broadband. I could have 50 Mbit internet, but I really don't want to pay for it. I'm happy with 3M/256K internet, because there isn't anything out there that requires higher speeds. Netflix streams fine at 3Mbit (is SD). And so what it it takes a bit longer to download a Linux ISO. It's not like they have a new release every 3 days. Maybe the issue is that most people don't care to have 10 Mbit interner, because the added cost doesn't actually get them anything they wouldn't have already. What's the point of having 50 Mbit internet when even a HD movie from netflix will stream on 5 Mbit connection.

Re:Does anyone ever get over 2 Mb/s download speed

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope this clears up your confusion.

Why would it? You're also using Mb incorrectly.

MB/s = Megabytes / second
Mb/s = Megabits / second

Try it in google.
CASE is important.

Re:RTFA

[morari]

Yeah, us country folk shouldn't have access to water lines or power lines either. We should just move into the city with all those yuppies and their smog!

Seriously. Nothing is keeping the cable and telephone companies from running decent broadband. Even [i]inside[/i] of certain parts of the city, your best (only?) option is slow-ass DSL.

BAHAHAahahaha

[RulerOf]

Oh good grief. I'm so glad I decided to troll slashdot before getting my coffee, else I'd have been cursing you while looking for a napkin :-D

Well duh.

[JustAnotherIdiot]

This is going to continue until either a. the government steps in and slaps ISPs like a b**** (which won't happen since they no doubt pass tons of money to politicians under the table), or b. an ISP comes out of nowhere and starts offering amazing speeds everywhere, forcing the current ISPs to be competitive. Since neither is likely...I'd say things aren't going to improve.

It's worse than not having Fast broadband

[flappinbooger]

I live in a semi-rural community that has fairly fast internet options (cable, DSL) and even rural surrounding areas have or are getting DSL and cable internet as well. My cable is at 10Mbps. A small local telco is also fiberizing the whole town. I have unlit fiber near my house already.

But I WORK in a community that is simply in the dark ages. There are places in the US, having paved roads and electricity and running water, that are within 15 miles of a small city and maybe 30 miles of a large city, where a significant number of people have some or all of the following conditions:

1) No "high speed" internet from DSL or Cable. Simply non-existant at any speed.
2) No line-of-sight wireless broadband
3) No cell phone reception from any carrier - in a dead zone
4) The phone lines they do have are crap.
5) Satellite internet is avail but often is approaching $90 a month or more for laggy and inconsistent performance
5) Wireless WAN internet over cellular, if not in a dead zone, is often at 1.5 Mbps, the device costs sometimes $100 or more, contracts if required can be $60 per month and require a 2 year commitment for a max transfer of 5 GB per month. (or, Virgin's mobile which claims unlimited but isn't)
6) The only option is dialup - 56k babeee!

I read on here somewhere that globally a 1.5 Mbps "broadband" connection is no longer considered broadband. Believe me, there are some folks who just want anything more than dialup.

Re:It's worse than not having Fast broadband

[geekoid]

I live in a small city. I personally have 20 Mb.

However I was talking to someone that live 1/4 mile away from me about gift cards. I mention Amazon..she didn't know what I was talking about. She asked if that was a store in the mall. I explained to her is was online, and she said oh, 'the online'.

This person is not stupid. She just has very little need to be online. All her communication needs are met through other means.

OTOH, I was reminded of this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKrUhuLXkIM

Re:RTFA

[rickb928]

And South Korean users do WHAT with their copious bandwidth? Games? Facebook?

Oh, pretty much what WE do with it?

Considering 2/3 of Internet users in the US probably don't use it to read their horoscopes, unless you have a citation to offer that I can't find. That would be one.

Better figure

[operagost]

I could have a FiOS connection at 10s of Mbit, but I stick with my 1.5Mbit symmetrical DSL connection because, besides being cheaper, the ISP gives me a static IP, reliability, and open ports. When I had DSL with Verizon, they blocked some ports and I understand Comcast does as well-- but good luck finding this out from them BEFORE you sign up.

The last mile

[PineHall]

The problem is at the last mile. Lots of fiber was laid, but none of that dark fiber can connect to the homes and businesses that need it.

I have a number of neighbors who dont have it

[voss]

256k-768k is fast enough for their casual web browsing and email checking.

Maybe the actual explanation is Americans are cheap and whenever 5 mbps internet costs $19.95 a month then they will all have it.
However by that time, I expect dsl and cable internet providers to provide low tier internet service for free to keep
people as tv and phone customers.

Re:Does anyone ever get over 2 Mb/s download speed

[Gaygirlie]

Yeah, if we want to be really anal about it we could also include MiB/s too, but that really doesn't help OP much and would only add to the confusion.

Re:Silly comparison

[zeroshade]

All the arguments about population density don't address two things:

1) The countries that have a lower population density than the US but still have better broadband penetration

2) The fact that even in the metropolitan areas, the US gets more expensive but slower internet than other countries

What about latency?

[Retired Spy]

My connection is far below 5m and since I don't watch movies, my download speed is usually adequate. However, what I haven't heard mentioned here is *latency*. I do a lot of remote work over the Internet and the latency I get is *abysmal*. It seems that ISPs have been sneaking the latency up (by refusing to tune for latency and using default settings for packet queue management). This results in behavior which, much of the time, makes remote NX/VNC connections almost unusable. You can forget about Video over IP and VoIP. Connections over the Internet pretty much require saying "over" when you stop talking so the remote party knows when they can start speaking. We need to make people aware that there are *two* parameters which define broadband quality. Speed is just one of them.

Re:What about latency?

[Stenchwarrior]

You are absolutely right. I like to use the water-in-the-pipe analogy when I'm explaining network throughput, as several others do as well, but most people forget to talk about how fast the water travels down the pipe, not just how much. When people ask me "how fast is your internet connection" I usually reply "30 milliseconds, but I can pull Ten Mega Bits per second".

Re:RTFA

[Buelldozer]

You should really consider doing research before you offer your opinion on things you don't understand. I know plenty of city dwellers with crappy Internet. I also know plenty of country dwellers with reasonable Internet. The issue isn't solely one of your geographical location.

Censorship and throttling

[sorak]

So, if throttling becomes a business model, how will this standard need to be changed? Is it really relevant that you have a 6mb connection, but are viewing hulu at severely reduced speed because they didn't pay the ISP tax? What if hulu paid up, but Blizzard didn't? How do you factor in "occasionally gets kicked off of WoW" into this assessment?

For that matter, how are they treating China in the matter?

Size matters.

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

It's great to look at percentage of population, but broadband penetration is a combination of population and geography. Let's play a numbers game to give an alternative perspective. .

• S. Korea: 99,720 sq km - pop 48,636,068 - 72% coverage
  • 71,798 broadband-connected KM
  • 35,018,616 connected people
• Japan 377,915 sq km square kilometers - pop 126,804,433- 60% - connected km
  • 226,479 broadband-connected KM
  • 76,082,660 connected people
• US 9,826,675 sq km , pop 310,232,863 - 34%- 3,341,070 connected km
  • 3,341,070 broadband-connected KM
  • 105,479,173 connected people

Re:Does anyone ever get over 2 Mb/s download speed

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

I am supposed to be one of the lucky ones with a broadband connection. When I do Internet tests it says my download connection is over 20 Mb/s. Nevertheless I have never had a download that goes faster than 2 Mbit/s. In fact I have very rarely had one that goes faster than 1 MB/s. Usually I am happy to get 500 Kb/s. The only downloads that go over 1 mb/s are various ubuntu downloads from canonical.

It is amazing to me that someone could get around 5 Mb/s download.

Simplified slightly: 2MB/s = 2mbit ... 500kb/s = 5mbit ... 1MB = 10mbit 5MB = 50mbit . 100kb/s = 1mbit.

In other words, you're getting between 5-10mbit speeds. Not as advertised, but also not 1mbit.

misuse of language

[buddyglass]

The United States places ninth in the world in access to high broadband connectivity, at 34% of users...

I wonder how many of these users have access to faster broadband but simply decline to purchase it? Based on my experience, the only users with faster-than-modem access that isn't also faster-than-5Mb/s are DSL users with low-end plans. Most standard cable plans start at 6 Mb/s. If someone has a low-end DSL plan then it is most likely the case that they could upgrade to a high-end DSL plan for more money that would put them above the 5 Mb/s threshold.

If it is true that low-end plans explain some of the reason for the low U.S. numbers, one easy (but ultimately stupid) way to juice the U.S. stats would be to forbid providers from selling plans with less than 5 Mb/s bandwidth. This would force all the folks with slow plans to either drop internet altogether or switch to a plan that qualifies as "fast". Of course this would represent screwing consumers just to rig the stats. Which is dumb.

Re:RTFA

[KingMotley]

the US has just about zero competition for ISP service

Complete FUD. Over 80% of the people in the US have a choice of 2 (or more) ISPs. 80% is a far cry from "just about 0".

Re:RTFA

[KingMotley]

Are you willing to pay for it? You are? Great, you and Joe Bob from down the street, start your own internet COOP!

Seriously.

Geography plays a role?

[Stenchwarrior]

Could it have something to do with the fact that the U.S. is so spread out with rural area far outweighing the urban? Places like Korea and Japan are jam-packed full of millions of people in a relatively small space.

Re:Geography plays a role?

[The Moof]

So what's the excuse for those of us who live in heavily populated urban areas and still receive crap service?

Re:Geography plays a role?

[TheSync]

So what's the excuse for those of us who live in heavily populated urban areas and still receive crap service?

US local loop length are still very long in cities. I have a suspicion that during the "voice-only era" there was a lot of consolidation of central offices in the US, and that the technology to support long local loops for voice worked just fine. Now we are kind of stuck with the locations of those COs, but now we want to try to push data over the pairs.

because..

[hackus]

Food Stamps are more important than high speed cable.

-Hack

Re:because..

[geekoid]

Theyn two issues aren't related. Please get off non topic soap boxes. Or stop trolling, whichever

Geometrodynamics is not hard, it's wrong... or more correctly, not even wrong.

Re:RTFA

[hedwards]

I live in Seattle and the connections top out at 5Mbps around here. And I'm lucky. That's the top tier connection available. Comcast is a complete joke being unable to maintain a consistent connection and cheating at internet connection tests.

But is it really?

[Dahlgil]

Maybe this is a tech gap, but maybe its partially due to the fact that some Americans are frugal. When my mother-in-law recently called for Internet service from the same cable company that I get fast broadband service from, the first thing they asked was what what she used it for. They offered different price plans for different speeds, and one of this was a "slow" 1.5MBS. But quite frankly that's all she needs. Really. As a developer, I completely appreciate fast Internet speeds and use them, but if all I did was read email and do light web browsing, why would I pay more? Is my mother-in-law's choice to pay less for lower speed service contributing to the tech gap? Now if she actually *needed* the speed and it just wasn't available, that would be another story, but that's not the case here. Actually, even my service is way over the top 95% of the time. Occasionally, I'll download a large file and I'm happy that it took only an hour instead of overnight (not that it was really worth the extra $20 a month--but I guess I can afford it); and occasionally I'll watch a news clip or YouTube video--maybe even in bit-sucking HD fullscreen (whoohoo!). But really, I could care less about the so called "tech gap". What might be nicer is for all the bandwidth that I don't use but pay for every month) be converted into fuel credits for the needy--hmm, maybe I should switch to 1.5MB too and contribute to the tech gap.

Re:RTFA

[dryeo]

I've got the choice of 7 oil companies gas stations to buy gas from. All have the same price, go up and down in lock step and charge 3 cents a litre less then the next town over which has an extra 10 cents a litre transit tax (and buses). Isn't competition great.
This is Canada which isn't too different from the States.

Everyone keeps saying this...

[sean.peters]

... but there's not much truth in it. The fact is that the US has extremely large swaths with very dense populations - the I-95 corridor from Richmond, VA to Boston, greater Chicago, southern California, etc... each of which has population densities easily as high as Europe. And yet broadband penetration is terrible there too.

Low population density is why North Dakota doesn't have good broadband. The Eastern Seaboard has poor broadband because we've allowed telecom companies to become unregulated monopolies.

Re:Everyone keeps saying this...

[gravis777]

True, but this brings up another issue - population density on over-saturated lines. There is already fiber running down into the areas you mentioned, but the bandwidth is unable to keep up with the total number of users on the network. Now, the question is, does running ADDITIONAL fiber to double or triple the capacity over these distances equal the amount of users needed. While you need longer distances to stretch to North Dakota, you need a fatter pipe to go from New York to Boston or Chicago or DC. This also costs money.

Question is, does a company want to invest billions of dollars to increase bandwidth in these areas to offer 40+mbps speeds to more customers, when the average customer is happy with their $19.95 a month 768k DSL? Yes, if they offer higher bandwidth, quite a few people will jump on it, but will the increase in subscribers to higher speed tiers offset the costs of additional fiber?

Re:Everyone keeps saying this...

[Aqualung812]

the bandwidth is unable to keep up with the total number of user on the network

Citation needed. I've never heard of this issue, in fact, I've heard quite the opposite. The issue is that the lines to the home are too slow to make full use of the backhaul lines.

Re:Everyone keeps saying this...

[onefineline]

Still, I have trouble believing that the low population density of the US is completely unrelated. According to the statistics posted above, Japan's average speed is 66% higher than the USA's. But after doing a bit of Googling, I found that their population density is 960% higher! Are you really trying to say that average population density of a country is unrelated to its average broadband speed???

I'll grant you that the government-sponsored local monopolies that these companies have are utterly obnoxious and it blows my mind that they're legal, but saying "The Eastern Seaboard has poor broadband" is hardly a precise measurement. And without more specific numbers, how do I know whether the average Japanese (or Latvian or Swedish or whatever) person's connection speed is qualitatively better that mine, here in San Francisco?

Re:Everyone keeps saying this...

[s73v3r]

Question is, does a company want to invest billions of dollars to increase bandwidth in these areas to offer 40+mbps speeds to more customers, when the average customer is happy with their $19.95 a month 768k DSL?

Depends. How many of these places actually have offerings higher than 768k DSL, for a reasonable price?

Re:Everyone keeps saying this...

[GonzoPhysicist]

Mod parent up, there is no reason that I shouldn't be able to get a fast reliable connection when I live a few miles from the very heart of the internet in Silicon Valley.

Suuure

[sean.peters]

Of course they do. They can choose between the cable monopoly and the phone company monopoly. Neither of which can be bothered to offer high speed broadband. At least Verizon is starting to shake up the game with FiOS (which has our local cable company hopping to improve their speeds), but FiOS is still not that widely available.

Re:Suuure

[KingMotley]

Or the cellular company monopolies, or the satellite company monopolies.. Oh, that's a lot of monopolies all willing to give you service. Perhaps we should call them, let's see... Duopolies, Triopolies, Quadopolies? How many opolies will it take for you to have enough competition?

I was kind of wondering that too

[sean.peters]

I signed up for the lowest tier of FiOS service a few months ago - 15Mb down, 5 up - and was pretty dazzled by the speeds. Even big files show up quite quickly. But they also offer even faster service - I want to say 35Mb up. I can honestly say that I haven't been tempted to order it, because I'm not sure why I would want it. I guess if we streamed multiple movies or something... but we don't.

Re:I was kind of wondering that too

[JP205]

I wish I could get FiOS service, however my neighborhood is apparently too poor and Verizon refuses to provide that service here.

Re:I was kind of wondering that too

[shutdown -p now]

The next tier of FiOS is 25Mb down / 25Mb up, and it's that second figure that may be interesting - for example, if you backup your data to the cloud in bulk (I use Jungle Disk & Rackspace).

Broadband internet connectivity is a utility

[sean.peters]

Just like electricity and water. Everyone in the US should have access to it, and if they don't, we should set up non-profit co-ops to provide it, just like we did with electricity. The idea that people should have to go without internet service because they don't live in town is ridiculous.

Re:Broadband internet connectivity is a utility

[John Hasler]

Just like electricity and water. Everyone in the US should have access to it, and if they don't, we should set up non-profit co-ops to provide it...

So do it.

Solution

[bobs666]

A Good start to this problem would be to fix the last mile. You remember the "On Ramp"

"Hello -- McFly" (knock knock) "4G".

Yes, Virginia, there is bandwidth, don't let them lie to you. We need radio frienquencys for roof top routers. A five to ten mile range should do the trick. If the FCC can't do it, we need to pass laws. End of line.

That would fix the cell hone problem and texting once and for all. There seems to even be bandwidth for HDTV as well. Although that seems better served with broadcast media and a DVR like mythTV.

There would still be a need for ISP's, Yes. But entry would be no longer barred by the gate keepers of the last mile.

Hundreds of ISP's in local towns would create the proper level of capitalism, and remove the feudalism we have now.

Becasue we have a rich

[geekoid]

infrastructure that is very reliable. SO we ahve many means of communication. It's not surprising that smale countries without the infrastructure adopted a high average bandwidth quicker.

It's a falsely set-up study.

[PortHaven]

Almost all the nations that are being compared have a high population density. The vast majority of their population lives close to the urban centers. (ie: Canada, most all of their population live along the U.S. border).

In America, we have a very distributed population. We have suburbs, semi-rural areas. So to reach those populations we need to run a lot more wire than most other modernized nations.

And this is seldom taken into account with these studies.

Maybe it's not needed?

[LynnwoodRooster]

I have 1 Mbps down, 512 kbps up, and I like it. I could pay more for higher speed, but this works fine for me, and I like the price of $14.99 per month that I pay for the service. It's plenty for surfing, using SVN for checkins/checkouts of code, and streaming Pandora or Netflix, all at the same time... Maybe a lot of people in the US don't have "fast broadband" because they don't want or need it?

Re:Maybe it's not needed?

[Rick17JJ]

I have a 1.5 Mbps downsteam / 576 Kbps upsteam DSL connection from Qwest, for $39.99 per month. That is the fastest speed that they offer where I live, but it is good enough for my needs. I wish that I could get Internet for what little you are paying.

My 1.5 Mbps DSL connection is good enough for surfing the Internet, or for quickly downloading the latest security updates for either my Linux computer or my Windows computer. At least DSL did finally become available a few years ago, where I live. Up until then, the local telephone lines were only good for 26.4 Kbps dial-up (not 56k dial-up).

I live only about 1/4 mile from the small windowless building where Qwest has their nearest DSL switch, so I am surprised that faster speeds are not available here. I am not in a rural area, I live in a small city of about 50,000 people in Arizona. I don't think this is what Qwest is describing in their "Qwest heavy duty Internet" TV ads.

It is interesting that you mention being able to stream Netflix. I had been planning to try the Netflix DVDs by mail option. I do not have cable or satellite, but do not watch much TV anyway. I use an old mid-1990s 13-inch TV set without a converter box. The mountaintop translator between here and Phoenix was not required to make the digital transition, so I am still watching analog TV on an old TV set with a rabbit ears antenna. I will probably just choose the Netflix DVDs by mail instead of streaming over the Internet.

That's fine

[sean.peters]

If private corporations can't make a profit by providing connectivity to certain areas, then they ought to get the hell out of the way and let people set up internet co-ops. But what they do instead is 1) not provide the service, 2) sue municipalities, etc, that try to provide it themselves, and 3) PROFIT!!!!

Re:That's fine

[Targon]

Do you have any evidence of this, or is this just a conspiracy theory? There is a difference between when an ISP is already serving an area, and then tries to block competition via legal channels and an ISP blocking the development of Internet connectivity in areas that have no access. Objecting to an ISP blocking competition is one thing, but if you think a town without broadband is having broadband access blocked by an ISP that does not provide service there, then please provide some examples.

Re:That's fine

[s73v3r]

Obviously you haven't been paying attention these last few years. Google Monticello, MN, and Wilson, NC, and be enlightened.

Re:That's fine

[s73v3r]

Also, it doesn't matter if they have some service there or not. All that matters is if the ISP is currently providing the desired level of service. If they are either unwilling or unable to do so, then they should get the hell out of the way and let someone who can do it.

Not bad actually

[genfail]

Come on guys ninth isn't so bad. At least compared to where we stand on education, health care, median income, disposable income of working class, access to health care, rate of higher education completion or distribution of wealth. Hell ninth in broadband isn't bad at all.

Very simplistic

[sean.peters]

Your analysis is very simplistic - US population density figures are skewed by the fact that we have vast areas in which practically no one lives - for example, you can drive for a couple hundred miles in west Texas and never pick up a radio station. There are huge swaths of the US, though, that have population densities as high as anywhere in the world - the Eastern Seaboard is a prime example. Yet broadband penetration there is nowhere near European or Japan/Korea levels. Why? Because we've allowed our telecom providers to become unregulated monopolies.

Geography is why North Dakota has poor internet service. The DC - Boston corridor? Not so much.

The question answers itself

[sean.peters]

By definition, the fact that rural areas don't have many people living in them means that those places barely affect the statistics at all - they're expressed in connections per person rather than connections per unit area. If the US was doing well in our densely populated urban areas, we'd be doing well overall - because that would dominate the statistics. But in fact we're not doing well there either.

I agree, but 'broadband' is enough

[curri]

I agree the problem is telco monopoly (due to fact that laying cable is expensive, and we don't want 20 cables going to the same place :), but slow broadband is enough for most stuff (not for having your server :)

I have cheap DSL (really cheap now, with more competition :), $15/mo) with (I think) 1.5M down/ 256 up, and it is enough to do netflix and vonage at the same time; do I really *need* more ? (of course, I *want* more :)

Re:RTFA

[nine-times]

What's the point of having 50 Mbit internet when even a HD movie from netflix will stream on 5 Mbit connection.

Well you're still talking about an SD video stream-- maybe you want to watch HD. Physical media is going away, so what happens when people want to watch high-quality 1080p movies? What if they want to watch them in HD? What if they do want to watch multiple streams, e.g. I want to watch TV and my kids want to watch a different show upstairs?

Or what if I'm running a web server that gets hit by a decent amount of traffic? I find it really sad, the degree to which people seem to have accepted that the Internet is a broadcast network were we all download, and the upstream is only used to request the next page. What if I want to stream a 1080p video out of my home for some reason?

There are loads of things that can be done with fast connections. Today, you're saying 3Mbps is good enough. 25 years ago, you'd be saying "640k should be enough for anybody."

Who cares?

[argStyopa]

I know that every /. user is a member of the technoliteri elite who needs at least 50meg T1 connections to keep up with their burgeoning online empire of social "connections", games, movies, etc. but really, is that needed?

I have a 3 meg ADSL connection down, 1 meg up, and I'm absolutely fine. Got a 5-computer LAN and we can have one person playing WoW, another playing flash games, and a third streaming youtube vids - and STILL I get "quality 4" netflix streaming at the TV.

So would I like a 20 meg connection? Academically, yeah. Do I need it? No.
Most people get streaming movies, rss/emails/texts, browse the web, watch youtube, perhaps play an MMO or online shooter. Do you really need a 20meg pipe to accomplish those things efficiently?

IMO that's the glory of capitalism - I can pay for a phat bandwidth, but I don't need it, so I dont.

Re:Who cares?

[shutdown -p now]

You still likely pay more per Mbit of your bandwidth than an average European does.

Re:Who cares?

[argStyopa]

So?
It may be odd, but I don't measure my happiness by relativity.

I also, on average:
- pay less taxes
- get paid more
- have access to more X within 20 miles (X being defined as nearly everything - green space, recreational venues, restaurants, 24-hour stores, movie theaters)
- am exposed to more crime
- have a more expensive health care plan
- work more hours
- take less vacation
- have more churches
- am more likely to have air-conditioning
- am more likely to own my home
- have a bigger living space ...so I pay a little more for internet bandwidth? I'm happy with what I pay, and if I want to access the internet big broadband totally free, I just walk to the public library 2 blocks away.

Re:Silly comparison

[Targon]

Government sponsorship of broadband deployment is your answer. A national backbone that is paid for by the government and that is continually upgraded to meet the demands tends to solve this sort of problem. In the USA, the government is dominated by non-technical people with a legal background that have ZERO interest or desire in seeing technology thrive.

Re:RTFA

[tepples]

Or what if I'm running a web server that gets hit by a decent amount of traffic?

Colo it.

What if I want to stream a 1080p video out of my home for some reason?

Stream the 1080p video to a server in a datacenter, and then have that server stream it to viewers.

Re:annnd why is faster access needed by the medica

[mcgrew]

the soon to be heard cry from the PTB that American doctors are paid too much (nevermind the ridiculous cost of tuition, student loans, ect).

You've got to be kidding. Most of the doctors I've seen in the last 20 years have had heavy accents, and surely got their training elsewhere. Doctors are flocking here from other countries.

Hire cheap trained labor to draw blood and perform other menial tasks

You can have cheap or you can have trained. You can't have both. You need at least an LPN license to draw blood. Most of the "nurses" you see in hospitals and nursing homes are actually nurse's aids who have minimal (six or eight weeks) training and get minimum wage. So your health care nightmare is actually a reality, except that instead of seeing an Indian doctor in India over telemedicine, you see an Indian doctor in person in the doctor's office.

The real cost of health care in the US is the insurance industry, who are more or less unnneeded middlemen that other countries aren't burdened with.

Re:RTFA

[tepples]

Over 80% of the people in the US have a choice of 2 (or more) ISPs.

When the choice is between fixed 3G (5 GB/mo cap) and satellite (7.5 GB/mo cap), how is that broadband in any useful sense?

Two words: Loops Length

[TheSync]

1) Average US local loop length is 13,000 feet.
2) Typical ADSL downlink speeds at that length is 5 Mbps under the best scenario.
3) No surprise that "Two-thirds of US Internet connections are slower than 5 Mbps"

Now I have no idea why average US local loop length is 13,000 feet when the UK and France have average loop lengths of 10,000 feet (gets you 7 Mbps), and Germany and Italy have average loop lengths of 6,500 feet (gets you 14 Mbps). It might be a combination of more detached houses, population density, but I suspect path-dependency on the history of the telephone buildout and central office consolidation during the voice-only era may play a major role.

For info see broadband.gov

[kjcole]

The FCC is at least paying lip service to some of this via their own site http://www.fcc.gov/initiatives.html and the flashier, oh so cool, Broadband.gov site.

Re:RTFA

[tepples]

Satellite and 3G/4G tend to have monthly transfer caps that make them far less useful.

Re:RTFA

[tepples]

Those people should really consider moving closer to the city.

City zoning laws restrict farming to rural areas. So if everyone moved to the city, you would likely have no food to eat.

Re:RTFA

[KingMotley]

I wasn't including those, just cable + DSL.

Re:RTFA

[s73v3r]

The problem is, without that push, its likely your ISP will decide to just let their equipment stagnate, instead of continually investing in their equipment. As more media moves to the internet, and more people have multiple internet connected devices in their house, more bandwidth is needed to take advantage of it. So yeah, you're happy with your service now. But what about 2, 3, 4, 5 years down the road? Would you prefer your ISP started making their improvements now, or after your connection becomes inadequate?

Re:RTFA

[s73v3r]

Why, if his home connection would be fast enough to do that?

Re:RTFA

[KingMotley]

So it's not about competition, you are just upset that you can't get it for cheaper?

Re:RTFA

[s73v3r]

A duopoly doesn't really ensure competition.

Sweden

[high]

Your argument is sound but there is quite a notable exception. Sweden is ranked in the sixth place of countries with the fastest average connection speed. Yet Sweden is about three times larger than Germany and less densely populated with a total population of only 9 million citizens.

OnLive or Gaikai

[tepples]

How many MMOs are going to bet the bank on having enough of their player base having 20mb+ connections to pay off the costs of making the content

Any MMO that partners with OnLive or Gaikai, for one.

Faster Internet is more expensive

[tepples]

Most people would be interested in downloading HD video in a matter of minutes.

But would the difference in price between cheap DSL and premium Internet access capable of HD video downloads be worth it compared to the price of buying or renting Blu-ray discs?

Re:RTFA

[Darinbob]

And the choice of ISPs include:
- dial up
- DSL (speed varies location and provider, even in cities)
- Cable

Really, cable is the only way I know of to get these speeds. And practically every single US resident has exactly one choice of cable, take it or leave it. If you don't want the cable from the local monopoly, you're stuck.

The houses in the US typically have only 3 different infrastructures that could potentially carry information: power lines, phone lines, cable lines. All of them have big problems for residential internet users. Power lines are so bad just cross that off the list as a non-starter, leaving us 2 infrastructures to rely on for the vast majority of US households. There are some other alternatives but they're typically niche solutions or have low accessibility.

Colo it

[tepples]

5Mb/s down typically means <1Mb/s up, which can be painful for running a game server

If you want your server to have good connectivity to the Internet, put it somewhere that has good connectivity to the Internet. Colo it in a datacenter.

Re:Does anyone ever get over 2 Mb/s download speed

[tepples]

here is a certain point where web-browsing speed stops being a problem with your connection being slow and becomes "this the fastest the site is going to load from their end".

This point moves if you have multiple avid Internet users in one household.

Re:RTFA

[tepples]

Because his home connection might turn out not to be fast enough to do that.

Re:Scandinavia

[s73v3r]

[Citation Needed]

Re:Quite.

[s73v3r]

If there is no profit in providing service to a town, why should a private corporation spend the money to provide that service?

The problem isn't that there's NO profit in doing so, its that there isn't ENOUGH profit for them. However, they should be legally barred from interfering with anyone else that chooses to, even if that is the local municipality. The past few years are full of stories where the local telcom was happy to keep people on shitty service, but then went ape shit when those people decided they wanted better and tried to do it themselves.

Re:RTFA

[nine-times]

Colo it.

Why should I have to? I mean, I'm not talking about a huge professional site with loads of traffic. Even now, colocation can get expensive. Again, I think it assumes that the Internet is supposed to be a broadcast network, and people's homes (and small businesses) are just supposed to be receivers. This is unfortunate, and goes against a lot of the promise that the Internet has traditionally held.

Stream the 1080p video to a server in a datacenter, and then have that server stream it to viewers.

How are you going to stream it to a datacenter on a 256k uplink?

Re:RTFA

[dryeo]

Actually I often go to the next town (I live close to the halfway point between them) and pay the extra 3 cents a litre because I'd rather give my money to the government then the oil oligopoly.

First!

[twebb72]

First! Er.. Damnit! - 2mb AT&T DSL Customer

I don't "lack" high-speed broadband.

[John Hasler]

1.5Mb does everything I need and I'm not about to pay for more just because some dork thinks I need it or because some other dork is embarassed that "ZOMG the USA arn't in 1st place!!1!" I know people who are satisfied with dialup. They are not "deprived". They know what they want and they have it.

Re:RTFA

[John Hasler]

Are you seriously suggesting that he do something HIMSELF? Outrageous! What is government for except to see to it that he gets what he wants (free, of course)? Pretty soon you will be suggesting that people should do things without permission!

Not a broadcast network

[tepples]

You compared the split between residential and datacenter upstream bandwidth to a "broadcast network". The Internet is not cable TV. Anyone can start a site by leasing shared/VPS hosting, leasing a dedicated server, or buying a server and leasing colo space, without having to negotiate with DirecTV, Dish, and cable TV operators.

Why 1080p? Why live?

[tepples]

I missed the second half of your post when I composed my first reply. What's the distinct advantage of 1080p over 240p, and live streaming over a recorded, edited piece, from those remote areas where faster uplinks are not available? Even the mighty cable TV news networks occasionally have to drop to heavily compressed 240p for some of their satellite news gathering feeds. If you can't stream at 240p, neither can your neighbor, so you don't have to worry about local competitors. If you don't like it, why haven't you started your own ISP?

Re:Does anyone ever get over 2 Mb/s download speed

[SeaFox]

Yes, I see you didn't the sentence immediately preceding the one you quoted:

"It's also why getting personal high-speed internet service over 20 Mbps for general usage is a waste unless you need to share that bandwidth over a large household of users."

Re:RTFA

[thenewt]

Oh, ok, well that makes it all good, then! Thanks for those helpful tips.

Re:Stuck in Silicon Valley

[willzzz]

They have fiber, it's just not for residential users. That fiber is is probably for the hospital with a multi-gigabit connection. Do you even KNOW how much is costs to terminate a fiber connection (I mean not the FiOS consumer, stuff enterprise data-server DSLAM level)? Yeah, you will have U-verse soon with GbE (1Gbps Gigabit Ethernet carrier grade) back to the CO soon...

Re:Does anyone ever get over 2 Mb/s download speed

[willzzz]

Yes yes and yes depending on peering/IP transit and traffic engineering. But mostly yes especially with the CDN caches (Akamai, Limelight, et al.)

Re:The broadband problem is fake

[willzzz]

You really can't compare bet-ween countries with different wages, standards of living, etc. Also there is IP transit costs and a shit-load of network engineering things. Yes you can get 100Mbps in Japan but the majority of content consumer by the Japanese is WITHIN JAPAN with the packets never leaving the country. Everything is available for a price, that's the beauty of capitalism with smart gov't support...

Almost, but no cigar

[Douglas Goodall]

I live in Santa Maria which, while not a huge city, has quite a few people who live around town. I have a home in a subdivision, and I know there is a pop at the entrance several hundred yards away. Every year or so, I check to see where DSL speed is, and I always get the same answer. Verizon wants $39 per month for a 1.5Mb/sec DSL. I am using Comcast cable high speed internet (so called business service). I had to sign up for their business service to get any fixed IP numbers. Speakeasy Speedtest says I am getting 25.28Mbps downward, and 4.88 Mbps upward. The problem I have is that I am getting my so called "business class internet" over the same cable is the home cable TV users in my subdivision. At peak usage times, my downward can get as low as 2Mbps, when the neighbors are torrenting I suspect. I have about one outage a month, usually lasting eight hours or longer. Every several months I have a complete failure, and I discover that a technician unplugged my cable at the nearby box, because I don't have video service any more, and he doesn't know I have business internet. Recently my downward dropped to modem speeds, and a technical came out and discovered that the previous technician that accessed the local box, put a video filter on my line backwards, again to make sure I am not trying to get video. I pay slightly over one hundred dollars a month for this service, and I had to sign for a three year contract to get the fixed IP's at all. They wouldn't slave the reverse DNS to my server either, something every previous internet service provider had done for me. Although I am on the central coast just north of Santa Barbara, my packets hit the Internet somewhere around Livermore, east of Oakland in the Bay Area. There is no Verizon Fios in my subdivision. And the copper phone lines here are so bad, you are lucky to get a stable 28Kb connection with a quality modem. When my contract is up, I am going to stop paying over a hundred a month. I won't have a fixed IP any more,, but with the poop uptime numbers I get with Comcast, I can't try to operate any serious server based services out of my location. Although this is a so called business class connection I have, there are no committed rates available t me from Comcast at any cost. Getting a T1 in here would probably require me to pay for a quarter mile trench, the cost of which would probably exceed my equity in my home. So I have enjoyed to connection most of the time, as a casual user, but any ideas I had about using it for business went up in smoke when I discovered how unreliable the service was. I can't guarantee my Internet based services to my clients, depending on Comcast business service as my provider.