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Mobile Carriers Impose Handicaps On Smartphones
Nrbelex writes "A team at the University of Michigan and Microsoft Research has uncovered, for the first time, the frequently suboptimal network practices of more than 100 cellular carriers. By recruiting almost 400 volunteers to run an app on their phones that probes a carrier's networks, the team discovered, for example, that one of the four major U.S. carriers is slowing its network performance by up to 50 percent (PDF). They also found carrier policies that drained users' phone batteries at an accelerated rate, and security vulnerabilities that could leave devices open to complete takeover by hackers."
I might not be able to get First Post.
What is the world coming to!
Why the hell would they do that?
How does this help me without naming names?
Can somebody please do this for Orange in the UK, and publish their results? They're unbelievably bad in central London. I can walk around Soho for 15 minutes and find what I'm looking for before maps load on my iPhone4. I had better service using the phone whilst on holiday in Greece last October... problems with network performance and timeouts returning when I was on the Tube from Heathrow.
I dont care about any of that, all I want to know is I can still access my facebook and tweet about it while I am updating my friends list?
...about it either.
I moved out on the countryside, thinking that Sweden was one of the most developed & connected countries in the world, well...turns out it's something of a fad.
Tried 3 different operators, Telenor, 3-Sweden and Comviq (essentially Tele2 on the cheap), Turns out that Telenor shares Cellphone-Relay point (antenna) with 3-Sweden, and Comviq has their own (again, owned by Tele2)...getting confusing yet?
The thing is, I tried all of these without any good results, oh...the signal was at FULL capacity...full power (all 4 bars lit), but the oh-so-known 404 Error turned up every 2nd web page or so, sometimes I had to wait 10 minutes for the 6mbit connection to load one single web page.
Then I got savy and tried a trick like "Kick-the-other-users-off-the-carrier"...how does that work, you ask? Simple...just disconnect to the network (3G!) and connect again. This logs you on at full speed, well...people found out about this and a storm of complaint came on, denied by all the telecompanies...of course.
And then I called support, and they finally called back and told me - twice (two different technicians calling each time) - that your cellphone carrier is OVERLOADED.
Then I asked them, well...will you expand this capacity since it's as you say ...overloaded? The answer was NO. From BOTH of them.
The town of 13.000 people is too small to add another 1 Mill SEK (Swedish currency) cellphone antenna relay carrier...so we won't do that.
BUMMER.
Turns out they solved this by simply "sharing" the speed amongst the users, by limiting it. Not admitting this of course...but the results amongst our neighbors and me tells it's own story.
Needless to say, I switched to LandLine based internet, good ol'l ADSL (or VDSL...as it's called now) and the speed blazes off a steady 13-14 Mbit without as much as a hickup. Despite this, the door-to-door sellers, claim that we all should DITCH the old wired connection because the new wireless one is MUCH BETTER and MUCH CHEAPER...
Yeah ...riiight...we've experienced that... O__O
Furthermore people are actually dumb enough to fall for it, and the masterplan from all the telecompanies is to DITCH the LANDLINES because ...in their own words...are too expensive to maintain.
Goodbye reliable internet...People...please start protesting against this in YOUR neighborhood!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Since we have basically four major carriers, that means AT&T, Verizon, Sprint or T-Mobile.
The sky is blue!
Imagination drew in bold strokes, instantly serving hopes and fears, while knowledge advanced by slow increments...
Here in the US, DSL rarely gets more than 2Mbps, and cable is retardedly expensive for the service you get. Additionally, because the carriers all use different technologies and spectra, they're physically unable to pull shenanigans like that.
This means that the carriers are their own interests at heart and not those of their customers! I'm shocked! Just Shocked!!
"...the team discovered, for example, that one of the four major U.S. carriers is slowing its network performance by up to 50 percent (PDF). They also found carrier policies that drained users' phone batteries at an accelerated rate, and security vulnerabilities that could leave devices open to complete takeover by hackers."
Uh, a team "discovered" this?
Telcos are screwing with us and not delivering what they advertise. Yeah, wake me up when there's actual news to report instead of wasting time and money proving the painfully obvious.
Oh, and where the hell are these "more than 100" carriers?!? I think I can name five off the top of my head. I thought the giants pretty much bought everyone else.
Oh.
At least it would have been if my cell carrier didn't slow my connection down.
This must be the kind of app that the carriers meant when they said that it would be a problem if they allowed "Unauthorized Applications" on the network. See, they were right all along.
Yeah, I'm in the UK and my upload is only 3Mbps (so a little faster, but still painful to use!). Not good.
In Victoria BC when near the waterfront I wind up hooking up the towers from Port Angeles. And getting kicked off the local towers for freakin' 3g. Then the schmucks charge LD to the states to make my local calls and refuse to give me credit on the calls! Bell you can go to hell...I now use my laptop with Google Talk at Starbucks for telephony in that area and shut my phone off! When my Bell contract is up they can stick the phone up next year their ass!
For those of us in the US, this works out to slightly over $12 a person.
the real reason they don't tell you which carrier is which is to protect themselves from massive lawsuits
You can thank government for that. Only the elite at the top of the power pyramid hold the keys to making unjust lawsuits work (and work they do, to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars per year).
They also found carrier policies that drained users' phone batteries at an accelerated rate, and security vulnerabilities that could leave devices open to complete takeover by hackers.
Could this be interpreted as tampering? I'm fairly certain that AT&T doesn't need to ping my phone every 5 minutes when I'm just sitting still (I know, I can hear the squawk on my radio). Its one thing to throttle your own network (ostensibly to preserve bandwidth), but this sort of behavior goes beyond that. Now, find a state with a law that only requires a "reckless or negligent" act. And one with no minimum monetary loss to qualify as a felony.
Then, sit back and watch the antics ensue.
Have gnu, will travel.
Teleco's are worse that lawyers and snake oil sellers. for example it does not cost then anything to move an SMS but they charge 10-30p.
I know for a fact that AT&T TCP timeout is set to 2 minutes. I have a bunch of tracking devices and had to set the keepalive to that value in order to keep a constant IP.
I have recently switched to using Jasper Wireless services and they have an 8 hour timeout but then they are a specialized service that resells major carriers services for Machine 2 Machine use.
Jasper is great for this as they are partnered with many different carriers around the globe and my trackers will switch to whatever network is available without any type of roaming charges.
I'm pretty sure they did. Mostly in the comments section for the story where he announced his resignation. It seemed appropriate in that time and place. Less so in a completely unrelated story about shitty telcos being shitty.
I hope that clears up your confusion.
Try not to take me more seriously than I take myself.
...for the carriers to cry foul and ask that the researches be prosecuted for 'hacking' their networks. Oh wait, they have Microsoft behind them...maybe not.
There is plenty of available bandwidth. All they want to do is throttle you so they can sell you back the thing they just took away from you.
Stop hanging around with "devs" that work for `Tard Mobile. With friends like that, what did you expect?
Telco's have been ruining phones for some time.
When i upgraded a few years ago, i did a bit of research on the phones available, and picked one out that had the features i wanted.
Turns out Rogers, a big Canadian telco, crippled numerous aspects of the phone.
For example, the ring tone. I could *barely* get my own custom ring tone after jumping through several technical loops. How about 'message' tone (ie, txt message alert) - nope. I have to use one they have, or BUY a new sound.
On my previous, totally basic phone, i could at the very least use the 'Record' feature to record a sound, and then use that as a tone (ring or message.) Not on this one. I can record audio, but can't use it as a ring tone.
The list goes on and on, but the most asinine 'feature' is that with Rogers you can't email or sms a photo (off my device at least). When you 'send' a pic, it goes to Rogers, who then saves the pic on their server, and then sends a NEW message with a link to the pic on the server. How insane is that? It renders things like TwitPic useless. (Although somehow Facebook managed to make *most* of it work, there is still 'code' that appears in the text of the upload.) The 'message' that Rogers sends contains about a dozen images (their own logo, graphics, etc..) so if uploading to Twitpic, it's some bizarre graphic.
Am i the first to 'discover' this as well? Gaah...
The carriers don't want to spend the money for NAT boxes, firewalls, deep-packet-inspection boxes, etc. with multiple open connections per subscriber--it eats up memory for connection information.
Soon to be AT&T, Verizon and Sprint.
And after that AT&T and Verizon.
And after that AT&T.
Resistance is futile.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
HA! Thank you.
This is precisely the sort of thing I've tried to argue about in the past and was repeatedly shouted down and told that I'm just an ignorant American and don't know anything.
The awesome connectivity and speeds has more to do with population concentrations than anything else. America's a huge place, and not a very old place, so our population centers are, er, not very centered or contiguous. New York City is huge, Philly is huge, and the Baltimore/DC metro area is huge, but there's about 2 hours of driving through nothing to get between them (and baltimore/DC are about 30 minute to an hour apart, depending on traffic). Travel a half hour east from any of those places and you're either in affluent suburbs, or straight-up rural areas, with farms, and cows.
A glance at a population density map is really all anyone needs to figure that out, but some people just don't get it. The cool thing to do is to consider anything Europe or Asia to be better than anything America, and that the sole reason for it is simply American incompetence. So frustrating. Impossible to actually ever discuss or improve anything when you're dealing with people like that, completely divorced from reality.
'course your landlines are faster, but that's also tied in to land area and population density.. and also WW2 actually. Infrastructure upgrade cycles! 'course we missed out on our last one! Fucking US Gov't gave the telecoms god knows how much money to lay fiber, to build modern high speed backbones across the country. Good luck finding where that money ever went to, that was coming up on 20 years ago now iirc..
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
They're just shutting down the connection and forcing the phone to re-establish it. Annoying, but I doubt it's illegal since every firewall and NAT box on the net has the same timeout mechanisms...they're just set for longer delays.
Evidently, not enough drama has been made over this because the problem continues.
I was one running the App. I have seen both problems, and that's why i installed it.
Yes. Mod me down.
I didn't read TFA article and my above post is full of fail.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Where in the US? I've only lived one place where I couldn't get at least 6Mbps DSL, so there I switched to cable at 15-30 and saved $20/month.
The US did have poor broadband, but it's much better than it was.
Sig is on vacation
To see a list of the 100 carriers...!
Michael
http://s1.sfgame.us/index.php?rec=58163
TFA states "Due to security and privacy concerns, we anonymize their names and label them as Carrier A and Carrier B."
I'm guessing that's in fact BS, and the real reason they don't tell you which carrier is which is to protect themselves from massive lawsuits, or possibly because Microsoft Research can't offend the carriers because their corporate overlords want to have deals to sell Windows-based smartphones to them.
Yes, it is for security reasons - the researcher's own security.
They are clearly afraid of those behind the names.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Prohibit any carrier - wireless or not - from advertising "Internet" unless they mean pure, unfiltered, unadulterated Internet.
Let them advertise and sell "AT&T Data Access to the parts of the Intertubes we think you'll like at a speed we think you'll pay for" if they want to, just don't let them call it "the Internet."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
How to submit a leak to Wikileaks
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Technically speaking, the speed sharing happens automatically. This because wireless (and cable broadband, heh) is a shared medium. Each active connection takes up a slice of time nobody else can use.
Luckily they keep coming up with ways to make the slices thinner and thinner, but once there are enough users on a given cell there will be a drop in speed pr user.
Then again, the advertized speed for any wireless system is for a single user on the cell under ideal (laboratory?) conditions. No way will you see those in the field.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Not quite, as the arument about speed is most often about wired net connections, not wireless.
Note that while the wireless of his area was saturated, his wired connection in a town of 13000 was 12-14Mbit/s via DSL. My understanding is that even in the densest of US cities your lucky to get 1/100 of that without fios.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
We don't care!
We don't have to
We're the phone company.
...the signal was at FULL capacity...full power (all 4 bars lit), but the oh-so-known 404 Error turned up every 2nd web page or so, sometimes I had to wait 10 minutes for the 6mbit connection to load one single web page.
FYI, a 404 error indicates that you have successfully connected to the remote web server, and it responded that the file you requested does not exist. Everyone and their brother knows this.
Not if it's a misconfigured proxy giving the error.
Interesting. to quote: "To gather data on so many networks, the researchers released their testing tool, NetPiculet, on the Android app marketplace." You would figure they would have used Microsoft Phones also.
Paul: Father... father, the sleeper has awakened! - Dune
Huh? On the east coast, in small town PA, I paid $45 for cable access, 15/5. DSL was available, but I didn't use it because I knew the quality of the telephone lines in the apartment complex. On the west coast, in Phoenix, I pay $30 for cable access, 15/5. I used to have DSL, 20/.7, and I was paying $20 for that. I've been using the same cable modem for years, it's standardized. Additionally, my iPhone has no problem grabbing T-Mobile's network when AT&T service is bad, and worked quite fine in 3G mode in Europe on Vodaphone, O2, and T-Mobile. In fact, I got a text from AT&T as soon as I got off the plane telling me that my phone was quite operational.
How the hell do you get to DC from NYC in 2 hours?! Just ram all the cars out of the way on I95?
Well they did have 400 test subjects remember... So they did need a user base greater than 400 to start with I presume.
Even the 'basic' cable packages I have used have easily done 100-200 kilobytes/second downloading, so you are rounding off a Martian or something with that 1/100.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Err, I frequently get 2MB/s, during the middle of the day, no problem. Cable, not DSL -- the DSL in this area was.... less than reliable.
The argument carries over, though -- it's infrastructure. Infrastructure is infrastructure, wired or wireless.. more or less.
In Europe, you've got these INCREDIBLY dense population centers that extend, well.. the whole damned continent, really. The only sparsely inhabited areas of Europe are in the far north, up near the Laplanders. That's roughly analogous to America's "fly-over country". Except it's less than half the size, and it's at the very edge of the continent. Here in the US, it's a majority of our land area, and it's between our population centers. Even our population centers aren't as densely populated as Europe's, nor do the high density areas extend as far and as contiguously as they do in Europe.
Er, oh, and I'm giving speeds in MBps, not Mbps, soooooo actually that 2 MBps would be 16 Mbps. It's not half as bad as people make it out to be.
'course, I'm fortunate. I'm 2 hours north of Baltimore/DC, 3 hours south of NYC, 2 hours west of Philly, 3 hours east of Pittsburg. There's decent infrastructure surrounding me, but I'm not in such a highly populated area that everything is oversaturated and I'm not so far away from the major population centers that there's nobody willing to lay down the Last Mile to get here.
Now, you get a place like Japan or Korea? You get the same number of people in a smaller area, and the same thing as is the case in Europe is the case there but to an even greater degree. To reach 99% of the people with a connection of X speed, you've gotta put down big fat pipes over.. what, a few dozen miles maybe? Here in the states if you did that, you'd cover *maybe* two large cities, and tough balls to people living several hours away. America is a big, big, big place. People from Europe and Asia tend to not realize how large and expansive this country is.
We're not Canada, with almost all our population in a thin ribbon stretching east to west. Or, for that matter, Australia, with their population only really living around the edges of the ocean. The population distribution of the United States actually is more close to that of sub-Saharan Africa. Yeah... yeah.
Of course, that's just one excuse. The upgrade cycle is another -- Europe had to rebuild their infrastructure following WW2. We didn't. Most of ours was done in the 50s/60s/70s.. its life cycle wasn't far enough along to justify tearing it all up, whereas Europe's infrastructure needed replacement sooner.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
2 hours from NYC to Philly, and then 2 more to DC! Wasn't entirely clear about that was I hehe
although, I do like this "ramming all the cars on I-95" idea of yours. Do you have a newsletter that I may subscribe to it?
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Heck, just about anyone on at&t's network could have told you that, and saved you a bunch of time & money LOL. Unless you have an iphone, your data rate gets squashed to 300k upload, unless you know the script to over ride it.
The free market will take care of this issue! Pretty soon AT&T will own T-mobile, and the next logical step is for Verizon to buy Sprint, which only leaves us with two choices. We'll get screwed no matter which carrier we're with, but since there won't be anyone else to compare it to, we won't even know we're getting screwed! See? Free market corrects all problems.
giggity
Did you miss the part where he got a 10MBit+ landline that worked flawlessly instead? If you can get that on the Swedish countryside then that shouldn't be a problem in a small town in the U.S. right?
Ah, but how much per shareholder?
Everybody providing broadband or wireless internet connectivity does the same thing: overstate the capacity of their network as a selling point, then oversell the capacity to maximize profits. I could go into business as a broadband provider and claim "Up to a TERABIT per second downloads!" and it's not false advertising because I said the two magic words "up to". Never mind that I'm overselling the network capacity by 100 times and that if everybody got on and downloaded high-def movies at the same exact moment, crashing the whole network; I said "up to", I didn't claim a guaranteed minimum throughput, so I'm not lying; tough shit.
Everybody needs to know this, and understand it. Once that happens then everyone can get together and force them to change. Until then they'll claim whatever they want in order to get our money, and they'll get away with it.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Actually, he was using Mbps, not MBps. I live in the suburbs. Nearest 'city' is the state capitol of roughly 50k people, and that's ~45 minutes away. My town's got about 7k people. The connection I'm on right now -- it's cable -- I can typically count on to deliver 2MBps downstream. I've seen it higher, but that's what I assume it will be -- that's roughly what my cable modem's capped at, that is. Not sure what my upstream speed is because frankly, I don't really give a damn and haven't ever had reason to test it. Not really an upstream type of guy.
2MBps is 16Mbps.
There's your math. It's very comparable. Thus, it ISN'T a problem in small town USA. :)
Now, flyover country is a different matter -- but flyover country USA is more analogous to the northernmost reaches of Sweden. I don't know what sort of internet connection the Laplanders get but I suspect it's not much better than what Corn Farmer Dave gets in Nebraska.
Of course I could be wrong. He could have a 10MBps connection, which would be ridiculously fast no matter what country you're in.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
But of course! In fact, in the latest issue, I've expanded my driving tactics due to a move to Arizona. Subscribe now to learn such techniques as "Yield-less Yielding," "Causing Traffic Jams On Roads With Empty Lanes," and "Rain on the Road: DRIVE LIKE SHITCOCK!"
Then why do speeds suck in the city?
but there's about 2 hours of driving through nothing to get between them
You insensitive clod, I live there!
There is some truth to what you say, but I think you may be overestimating the population density of Asia. For example, I live in Japan and the other day a nice salesman from NTT (the state run telephone company) showed up to tell me that fibre was available in my town. For less than 5000 yen per month (about $60?) I can get a 200 Meg connection. I live in a small farming town with a population of about 25K. My prefecture (Shizuoka) has a total population of 3.7 million and a population density of 485 people per square km. The largest city in my prefecture has only 800,000 people. The terrain is mostly mountainous and we have regular earthquakes greater than 6.0 in magnitude. To top it off we also have several typhoons every year.
In contrast New York state has a population of over 19 million and a population density of 408 people per square km. Its largest city has more than 8 million people and has a population density higher than that of Tokyo. The terrain is similar to that of where I'm living, but there are rarely any large earthquakes and hurricanes mostly blow themselves out before they get that far north.
The thing is, I have no bandwidth caps and if I am to believe the nice salesman's charts, they actually have enough bandwidth to supply the connection they are giving me (i.e., they *aren't* over subscribed). I've had 3G on my Android phone for the last year as well and tethered to my laptop I can always get 400K download rates on FTP. And like I say, the only thing around here is surfers, and tea farms.
I don't doubt that trying to hook up all of America is going to be way more expensive than hooking up all of Japan. But there really is no excuse not to have decent service in at least *some* places in the US.
I live in the US. I have consumer cable and get burst speeds of 30Mbps and sustained 12Mbps down. My upload clocks at 6Mbps sustained.
Like this comment? I accept Bitcoin! - 153sc8UUBXyp12ofQqfAWDmJrzyiKCYC1x
A ha! And there's the thing.
Just looking at the numbers, New York state and your prefecture are comparable.. but the numbers don't tell the whole story. That population density for NY is based on the whole state. New York is a *large* state. New York is 1/3 the size of Japan.. with ~1/6 the population. And, as you said, they've got NYC.. which totally skews the numbers so far as population density for the state is concerned.
Most of NY state is.. well. Here, just take a look..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:New_York_Population_Map.png
Most of the state has less than 100 people per square mile..
of course, it certainly could be better here, and Japan's really really good about that sort of thing (200Meg? Is that Mbit or MByte? Either way.. goddamn..) but honestly? It's not half as bad in the States as people make it out to be. Where I'm living, the town's got 7,000 people and the population density for this area is *low* -- for the whole county, it's only about 370people/sq.mi. If you exclude the county seat, and just are talking about my town and the surrounding area? It's closer to 100, or less. I've got a 2MByte/sec connection, have seen it over 4, rarely goes under 1.5. For about as much as you're paying.
I'd have to drive 2 hours to find a city with 800,000 people.
Asia isn't as completely covered with people as I make it out to be (I've.. done this before), but that's only because where I'm from is way more empty than anyone not from this sort of place would suspect. I could walk out my front door right now, walk for maybe 20 minutes, and punch a cow.
Cultural differences, really.. as much as Americans love getting up-in-arms defensive about America, they also love to exaggerate and dwell on everything negative about it. It gives people a bad impression. And of course we do have sections where you just can't get broadband yet, STILL.. but that's mostly flyover country (and boy do they not like being called that).
But hell, if you're living in an area where you can buy an acre of land for 1-2 grand... I can understand wanting to not be excluded but I think when moving that far away from civilization you maybe should expect to not maybe be on the cutting edge of things. ... 200meg connection? damn..
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Before "people just don't get it" you should realize the density of "big three" Nordic countries is much lower than the US... (land area not being the same kind of factor, what matters in the end is how many people pay for each proportional part of infrastructure). Sweden has 2/3 the population density of the US, Finland 1/2, Norway 2/5.
...but mostly along one filament of course, usually at most with very few short branches along the way; not a grid needed to be covered throughout), sometimes even enough for municipal lights
You should realize how different they are from the rest of Europe (not the least because of separation by a sea...); and developing their infrastructure very much independently, the populations very much paying for it - as one of the most prosperous places in the region, they contribute much more to the European structural funds than they receive
Yes, one look at population maps (vs. NY map you provide nearby) is also revealing.
If anything, those two maps might as well suggest lower concentrations, lower emphasis on top-density urbanism (though that is also how the lowest administrative divisions of the maps seem to be different; anyway, the four countries at the table here have fairly similar rates of urbanization). Also not particularly centred and contiguous at large (but remember, with a mere ~half the overall population density), Yours likewise concentrate near water, plus they display much more of the desirable "beads on a string" layout.
Generally, people everywhere concentrate in population centres. Most importantly, those who do are a proportionally dominating group in connectivity stats - if the stats are poor, that's who they mostly reflect; not the few secluded ones.
Surely you don't think Europe lacks rural areas, with farms and cows? (not so much "affluent suburbs"* though...). Also, nearby you say you live in suburbia* of a 7k city and... could walk out your front door right now, walk for maybe 20 minutes, and punch(?!) a cow.
I live in an apartment block virtually in the centre of a 20k city, and would need to walk for maybe 15 minutes before I could do that (not like there's any good reason?)... but here's the thing, I would be already out of the city and on a dirt road after 5 minutes.
All in all, you probably focus on the wrong administrative level; what makes the real difference probably isn't visible on a county (or whatever the local "city+ or ++" terms are) level, isn't about huge / structural differences due to geography. Heck, the US does seem to have a very decent backbone... (and that's where the billions were supposed to go, right?) But something seems to break down at a local level.
Some would point out less-checked greed; well, maybe. Perhaps the major difference (*and one which I hinted at) is the suburban sprawl (and you choose such travesty), at the scales and issues of local interchanges; a layout actually sort of more contiguous and centred (radiating relatively uniformly around it). That's not particularly conductive to many kinds of public infrastructure, "corridors" often work much better, lower the costs, if you don't want to go with full-blown city blocks. Heck, they seem to be typical even in rural areas in my (larger) region - where it's hard to not stumble on houses densely packed, nearly connected, along the road (not the nearest one with cows that I mentioned, just suitable Gmaps shots from other (nearby) minor villages; overall, possibly at least as close as in your "city suburbia"?
One that hath name thou can not otter
Probably a large part of Americans grossly overestimate the scales of their country (second section of the text in lower left corner)
...where do you get that from? (heck, and after implying in parent post it's all about population concentrations)
And no, Europe is not ""these INCREDIBLY dense population centers that extend, well.. the whole damned continent, really. The only sparsely inhabited areas of Europe are in the far north, up near the Laplanders"
There are population gaps even in the very heart of the continent. "Real" desolate wilderness wouldn't spoil the stats anyway, they have by definition very little people; and are not very unike crossing a sea (also probably not completely unlike borders; it's not a "single market" but "common market", many things being loosely integrated, a lot of our network layouts and routes are weird - for example, this comments of mine probably will do two hops across the Baltic for no particular reason...)
Two nearest cities comparable to the behemoths that you mention are at least 5 hours away, probably 6 (I don't really ever check by car). In other countries, two different ones (both cities sucking into a fairly small area up to 1/3 of the population of their whole country or major subregion, leaving the rest with very modest population densities; bordering some extensive forests on my side)
Your population distribution is nowhere like sub-Saharan Africa, you're not anywhere near that rural.
(and again, first wave of our telecom infrastructure is more a case of 60s/70s; before that, countries tried to figure out how to stop people from starving and from whole families sharing one room, while experiencing population boom)
One that hath name thou can not otter
Nrbelex:
You could help the hacking community by correcting the article's English in your repost by quoting as such - near the end "...open to complete takeover by" crackers; rather than perpetuating the lie that all of us who write code and hack computers are somehow now criminals. You of course don't have to do this, but it would be helpful.
Richard
Actually, the AC was using MBit+, not MBps...
As usual, depends which Laplanders... from what little I've heard, Kiruna is decent. Solitary farmers anywhere (or reindeer herders?) barely influencing the stats, anyway. But considering how the Finnish part falls under "everybody must have 1mbit" (with supposedly much more in a few years being a goal, IIRC), or how the region had reasonably bearable mobile coverage 2 years ago - and at least the PL and CZ parts are grossly outdated, for example (click "Play Online - internet mobilny" at the top); and yes, this is one of the stupid carriers adopting "4G = HSPA+" marketing, but their network is good otherwise.
One that hath name thou can not otter
I did pick up on the B/b difference ;) everyone else missed it. The speeds the swedish dude got with his land-line internet are pretty much exactly what I have here in the states, once you convert from bits to bytes -- and for roughly the same cost. I'm paying a bit more.. but then, he said 10-14 M(bit)/s, and I'm getting ~2M(Byte)/s, so I'm willing to throw the small difference in cash into the small difference in speed (yep, if he was right and that was 10-14Mbit, I'm at 16Mbit and have seen up to 32Mbit.. worth an extra 20-30 USD a month, that's debatable, but it's still more for more).
Kinda shocked about the Laplanders though. I knew the Fins were trying to hook everyone up, but couldn't (can't) comprehend how they can reconcile that with a native nomadic population. 'course not all the laplanders still wander all over, but last I'd heard I thought some still did and freely crossed borders?
Oh well. Let's just all agree to sigh and shake our heads at the 4G standard.. that is, the "we want to call it something new but not actually do anything new" standard. I think the States should adopt that more broadly. Convert to metric? SIMPLE! Feet and pounds are now metric! Damn that was easy!
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
I'm well aware of the size of Africa... and I think it's significantly less rural than you're giving it credit for. There's an awful lot of people living in sub-Saharan Africa.
regardless.. I've been trying and failing to find a way to illustrate the difference between Europe and America. honestly, until you've seen first-hand what good old fashioned American suburban sprawl looks like, I don't think you'd understand. It's... not really like anything you'd find in Europe.
I'm 20 miles away from the nearest "major" city (~50k people..). My town's 7k. In between, along the highway, it's pretty much 20 miles of low-density suburban towns.. the whole damn way. You'll catch one, then drive a mile or two, and there's the next, and then a mile or two, and then another.
Ever since WW2, that's really been the form of American population migrations. Everyone wants their quarter-acre (or half-acre, or acre) lot of land and a nice little single-family home sitting on it. Which is why everyone needs a car.. which is why LA's traffic is so godawful.. which is why large-scale public transit in America is unpopular (which makes it bad, which makes it more unpopular).
And then each of those little towns, well.. now it's not as bad as it used to be, but it's still pretty bad. Some of them only have one player in town for your phone, one for cable, etc etc. The agreement being that this company lays line but is granted exclusivity in that area. That's *getting* better, but honestly the only reason for that is because technology rocks and the only-player phone company and only-player cable company have become competition for each other for phone, cable and internet.
I did reverse the infrastructure timeframes, though :| ours was 40s/50s, y'alls came later. In 20 years we'll be ahead once we get around to replacing things, that's just the nature of upgrade cycles (except not, because ours is being handled in a super-shitty way -- the telecomms basically convinced everyone that they're not public utilities, and while that might be OK, the damn cables SHOULD BE considered public utilities just the same as our sewage, but I'll stop before I turn this into a completely different rant).
Long story short: You really just need to see America. Not just the big cities, and not just the big skies in the midwest. Honestly, most Americans don't even understand what their own country looks like (ugh, *especially* the urbanites.. for some reason they're all convinced that they're more knowledgeable and intelligent and worldly than anyone not living in a large city, it drives me up the wall).
Hell, I and my friends and family are all fairly well-traveled, and there's still quite a few places I've not seen even in the contiguous 48 (namely the, er, majority of flyover country. i've only flown over it. shhhhh)
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Okay, since the redesign, slashdot makes it hard to see followups to posts. So you probably won't even read this. But, based on the info you provided, I think you live in Palmyra, PA. How'd I do?
That's just a guess based on the geographic clues. I suppose I could do more research to see if my guess at a town offers cable with 2 MB/s. Etc. But why bother.
From what you are describing, it sounds like you are in or very near the Harrisburg, PA area, which I am quite familiar with myself, having lived there for 20 years.
Also, another reason our infrastructure sucks:
Why upgrade when you can pay yourself fat bonuses, bribe politicians, and pay exorbitant sums buying Super Bowl ads on television?
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
Everything is shared, it just depends on where the choke points are. Cable and DSL are the last mile, others are not. Cable has plenty of bandwidth. Fios is shared too. (Look it up!)
But consider the difference in throughput of a switched network vs a hub network. Yes, the techniques used in cable and such are a bit more complicated than that, but in the end it comes down to that when one talk, all others need to be silent on a shared medium like cable, passive fiber (fios) or wireless. DSL, active fiber, and other non-shared (in terms of last mile) allows the individual user connection to talk as fast as i can, and whatever box is at the other end is the limiter on the actual throughput (and much easier to subdivide then having to roll a whole new cable or set up a new cell).
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Modern cable has multiple channels available for upstream, and use TDMA for bus contention. And even then, the coax is just neighborhood-wide. It turns into fiber relatively locally. I'd rather share a firehose than have my own drinking straw.
Well bits (or Bits) are much clearer to everybody else...
Kiruna itself is very decent also for "external" reasons (ESA spaceport, sat tracking station, university, that sort of stuff); which are still secondary to how residents have it decent. But "hook everyone up" doesn't have to mean wired - for example, at my place such rural areas (and there are quite a rural ones - say, with rather vast swaths of primordial forest or swamps) are often served by the wireless spectrum freed some time ago by NMT switch-off, used now by Qualcomm/evdo CDMA variant and dedicated to bridging the "broadband divide".
One that hath name thou can not otter