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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."
It's the slow inevitable decline of a failing empire.
No one is to blame.
Everyone is to blame.
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.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
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.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
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...
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.]
We live, as we dream -- alone....
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.
This space available.
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.
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.
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.
'For we walk by faith, not by sight.' II Corinthians 5:7
That and pirating tv shows... What?! At least I'm honest about it...
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.
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)
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
Boredom is bliss.
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.
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
O.o
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.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
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".
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.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
Some countries in Europe have it better than others. Lumping Europe as one entity is a little silly.
640k ought to be enough for anybody.
No OS on the planet can protect itself from a user with the admin password. - Yvan256
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."
SSC
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.
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 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.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
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!
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
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.