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Global Broadband Speeds Dropped At the End of 2011
darthcamaro writes "A strange thing happened at the end of 2011. For the first time in years, global broadband adoption and speeds dropped. According to Akamai, broadband adoption declined by 4.6 percent and average speeds declined by 14 percent. In a somewhat strange twist, New Jersey now also dominates the top 5 list of fastest broadband cities in the U.S, though Boston is the fastest overall at 8.4 Mbps."
I hate that city!
...I'm not surprised.
Instead of providing superior service (at various levels) on a flat-rate connection, you get a degraded connection(at any level) that is metered.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
its one huge suburb of NYC
Jersey City is right near NYC. wouldn't surprise me if the reason everyone wants broadband is so they can VPN into the office instead of taking the train to work
For those that didn't read the article and were confused by New Jersey's new status as a city, what it actually means is New Jersey cities are in the #2, #3 and #5 spots of the top five list.
It says New Jersey "dominates" the list. One entry can't dominate a list, so obviously they are saying that the list is dominated by cities IN New Jersey. If you RTFA you'll see that 3 of the top 5 cities in the US are all in NJ. It's always such a surprise when people are snarky and dumb on the interwebs.
Maybe people are switching to mobile net?
Hey, Hey! Now you wait just one second. There are a few million that still consider themselves apart of the Philly Burbs.
People seriously need to go back to school and get some reading comprehension.
"New Jersey now also dominates the top 5 list of fastest broadband cities in the U.S"
The phrase "New Jersey dominates the list" means that the majority of cities on that list are in New Jersey.
Oh look (FTA): The fastest city in the US is Boston at 8.4 Mbps; fractionally ahead of North Bergen, NJ for average connection speed. Jersey City, NJ came in third at 8.3 Mbps, Monterey Park, CA fourth at 8.2 Mbps and Clifton, NJ fifth at 8.0 Mbps
3/5 cities on that list are in NJ. Hence, NJ dominates the list.
Take where I live for instance:
The cable company hasn't done much in 4-5 years for increasing bandwidth. However they did put in metering.
The telco, similar. DSL speeds have remained static, while there are now bandwidth charges.
Phones? Yes, that 4G phone might be cool, but it doesn't take much to burn through its bandwidth. Paying half a C-note to transfer a DVD? Bullshit.
It is no wonder why people are seeing this. There is zero incentive to add infrastructure, other than real time monitoring with indefinite log retention. So, the only things added for the consumer are fees.
Wake me up when I can actually pay less than $400 a month for a smartphone and Internet connection combined in a TX metropolitian area, and I am nowhere near a heavy user (no torrenting.)
In a somewhat strange twist, New Jersey now also dominates the top 5 list of fastest broadband cities
This is correct. Cities in New Jersey have three of the spots (2, 3 and 5) on the top 5 list.
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"Freedom" for whom, that's the question. We, the people, who need more network capacity, and could easily get it for pennies if we paid for it with taxes, like our roads, are now paying enormously more for shrinking, monitored, censored communications. And it's going to get worse.
Image what our roads would be like if we had built them with a "free market" model. Constricted, gated, metered, and ten times more expensive. And most of us would walk.
FWIW, my complaint is towards "somewhat strange". NJ has the highest population density of any state in the US. That's pretty much exactly the kind of state I'd expect to dominate this kind of list.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
There's something missing from the report, and that's Metropolitan speeds. The report calculates connections to Akamai, which is a good metric data set, but what about Metropolitan broadband? It's just as relevant.
In-country broadband or city-wide broadband speeds are relevant; it's about how fast local connections are and how infrastructure is handling traffic. When you download stuff (e.g. distros) you usually pick the closest repository and get data from there. Also lots of other files and data are mirrored across the globe and it's very likely there are a couple mirrors in your state or even city (if it's large enough).
My broadband has about 5-10 mbps bandwidth if I transfer something from "general" Internet, but metropolitan speed is 100 mbps. My country-wide connection speed is about 50 mbps, tested with friends; http, p2p and ftp transfers are all equally fast.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Isn't it interesting? That's essentially a megabyte per second, or more data transfer per second than the total amount of computer memory Gates talked about in your homage...
I do think that we're reaching a point where it's hard to actually use all of the bandwidth available to us, just like it's hard to use the CPU power available to us, and to a lesser extent, the memory and the disk space. It's easy to waste CPU power and the rest of the computer's resources though, as programmers don't feel the need to optimize what they write to get as much capability for as little math as possible...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
1. Does New Jersey, as a state, suffer from short man syndrome? Rhode Island doesn't, it just sends you to sleep with the fishes.
2. Broadband speed claims are a little like braggin' on your new spawts cah. Sure, it goes from 0-60 in less then 6 seconds. How's that working out for ya on the Garden State at 5:30. Headed South. The GSP is usually Slashdotted by then, save for holidays and wrecks.
3. And braggin' on your broadband speed is as relevant as braggin on the new BMW. Stuck in traffic. With a detour ahead through Paramus. In the dark.
Speed is nothing without control. Selective caps, overt blocking, treating streams as piracy no matter the source, content, or license, equating imagined piracy with distributing kiddie pr0n, all of these are the real threats to the Internet and its usefulness. Speed is down the list.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Why is it strange? NJ having one of the highest population densities of all states, and even higher than the state-wide density number shows due to about 1/4 of the state set aside as a national park, the pine barrens, where no new houses or developments can take place. This turns the 8,722 square miles really into only 6,722 square miles, and takes the population density from 1011 people/square mile to 1312 people/square mile. That is almost 5.5 times the population density of California!
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
They wouldn't place proxies at the ISP level. They'd place them at the backbone provider level, if they were going to do it at all. Placing them at the ISP level would be stupid, as there'd be way too many people who'd have to know about them in order to keep them under wraps. Backbone providers are already a lot more secretive than ISPs, and there wouldn't need to be nearly as many people to somehow keep silent on the matter, plus there's a lot more access to the total communications in only a few points of contact that way.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Thank you, Miss Fleming, you call me when the shuttle lands...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Would you dorks please get over the "New Jersey is not a city" thing? Now that we all know what was intended in the post, what are your thoughts on the content of the article?
OMG people!!! Reading the article is the first step. Comprehending it is the next and the most important.
I would guess this is the case more and more. Also, new adoption is probably among the poor. The poor can probably only afford cheap setups anyway, hence lower averages.
I think this indicates that broadband is reaching a wider population and we could even be looking at the start of a shift to a cheaper broadband infrastructure if price demands go lower.
I opted for the 20 Mbps VDSL here in Denver (Qwest/CenturyLink's alternative to fiber, the plans for which they dropped in the wake of the 2008 worldwide financial crisis) and restrained myself from splurging on the 40 Mbps VDSL. Even the 20 Mbps is a waste. Most servers only let data out at 10 Mbps tops. I've gotten 20 Mbps only once -- downloading 1940 census images from archives.gov. I suspect people are catching on and are stepping down their last-mile bandwidth choices.
Its the big historic cable stations, New Jersey has a lot of optical and federal interest due to the international traffic that enters/exits the USA from around the world.
A lot of that traffic passes/passed via NJ and to a lesser part Rhode Island. So the area by default would be over served by private telco and NSA interests over many years e.g. TAT-14.
Add in huge loops that span Europe, the Caribbean, and South America and link to parts Middle East - it all gets back to parts of New Jersey.
Would state-wide density really show a bump if everybody was on the same fly over state "old copper, cable or average new optical roll out speeds" vs say massive hardened backhaul?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I'll spare you my thoughts on Newark and why strange might be fair.
One reasonable explanation is that AT&T is based in NJ. It's kind of like Comcast having a big presence in PA.
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Paying $40 for 5mbit is price gouging. I can get 25/25 for $50 here in the USA, and that's high compared to some places. That one Cali start-up ISP is offering 25/25 for $30 and 50/50 for $50 and 1Gb for $75.
The point about tech isn't how much bandwidth people use today, but how bandwidth could be used tomorrow. You get a chicken and the egg issue. Certain services require high bandwidth, like true 1080p BR quality streaming, or weekly cloud back-ups of your 1TB drive.
There are an infinite amount of possible services that we have not yet thought of because we don't have the bandwidth for them. The same thing happened with computers. Pffft, who needs an electronic calculator? Who needs an 8086? Who need a Pentium? Who needs a dual core cpu? We now have quad core 1.5ghz cpus with GPU acceleration and 2GB of ram, packed into a cell-phone.
Build it, and they will come.
It may be almost 5.5 times the population density of California as a whole state, but consider the following, there are 8.8 Million people in NJ but compare with the actually populated portions of CA:
Los Angeles County: 9.8 M people, 2400 per square mile
Orange County: 3 M people, 3800 per square mile
San Francisco County: 0.8 M people, 17200 per square mile!
Alameda County: 1.5 M people, 2000 per square mile.
Santa Clara County: 1.8 M people, 1400 per square mile
Total population of those counties: > 16M people
and that doesn't even consider the portions of those counties that are parks etc (especially significant for Alameda I think)
So the majority of people in California live in a region that is more dense than NJ, and the total number of people involved is close to double the entire population of NJ.
http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?pid=DEC_10_SF1_GCTPH1.US05PR&prodType=table
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i thought the same thing for about a split second, then i realized it was a joke on new jersey, which is always appropriate and funny. what was that about reading comprehension?
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RTFA
insensitive clod overlords obligatory xkcd car analogy russian reversals whoosh pedant fanbois ftfy in 3...2...1..PROFIT
Welcome to /. you must be a Microsoft shill.
WTF Slashdot, why do I have to login 50 times to post?
A couple things to consider, as someone who works in the industry, and lives in New Jersey.
NJ has the highest population density (1189/sq mile). It is surrounded by two major cities (New York and Philadelphia).
AT&T is not based here, but they used to be, before SBC bought and renamed themselves. That company is now based in Dallas. There are still a lot of AT&Ters around the state in large facilities. This doesn't really matter though, considering AT&T probably provides local access to less than 1% of the NJ population.
Verizon is based here. Their actual headquarters is located in New York City, but all of the executives sit in Basking Ridge, NJ. This is important, because almost all of the Verizon employees at a director level and above are now in New Jersey. Different from AT&T, they are the local telco in almost every town.
Comcast is based in Philly. Lots of Comcast employees live in New Jersey. Comcast is a major cable franchise in NJ (as it is in most places).
The state of NJ, a few years ago, granted Verizon a state wide video franchise. This is a big deal. It means that Verizon can offer FiOS everywhere in the state without negotiating with the 566 different municipalities in the state. (566 municipalities for 8.8 Million people - NJ is a a good example of local government gone awry. Compare to 351 for 6.6M in MA, or 482 for 37M in California)
As the result of the above, FiOS is available in most towns, offering 20-50Mbps internet. Comcast Xfinity offers their highest tier service wherever there is FiOS, so nearly everyone in the state can get fast internet if they're willing to pay $30-$60/month. Notice to governments: reducing the amount of regulation (state wide franchise) can create more competition which can yield better results for citizens.
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
Steam
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The early on, Pace Picante salsa commercials, the first one with the cowboys sitting around the fire...complaining that the salsa didn't taste right....then looking at the label saying "This ones made in New Jersey".
The whole group goes "New Jersey"??? And you hear one voice doing..."Get a rope...."
Ok...awhile after that came out...and was established as a funny common commercial...for some reason, they took and re-dubbed it to say "New York City"....and all subsequent commercials along that line always said NYC...never New Jersey again.
i've never been able to find out why they changed that. Did NJ complain? It was much funnier the original way.
Maybe someone in NJ, with the high speed internet can research this better than I, and report back on this....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Comprehension or not, the phrasing is terrible as the sentence was unnecessarily ambiguous. You could legitimately think that there is a city called New Jersey which has an overwhelming lead over the other cities on the Top 5 list and the sentence would work perfectly. There's a city called New York, which might well dominate top 5 lists of many things, so this is not all that hard to believe.
You could have just said "Cities in New Jersey dominate the list," and it would have been crystal clear.
Nah, his UID is too low. Everyone with a UID over two million is a shill. Everyone with a UID under two million is a troll.
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As a resident of Jersey City, I am not surprised we are on that list. They pretty much started ripping up the entire waterfront starting about 15 years ago, and just rebuilt the whole thing from scratch. I actually had fiber running into my last apartment, which was a new building. Multiple data jacks in each room- topped off with a real patch panel in one of the closets, it was a dork's dream...
Many people have never heard of it, but Jersey City is directly across from Manhattan on the other side of the Hudson river, and many financial firms, which have big data requirements, have relocated their technology departments (or their entire offices) there. Verizon Fios is available in most parts of the city, and they offer 150/35Mbps, though the "standard" is 50/20 or 25/25.
So you looked at the most dense parts of California and compared them to the entire state of NJ (less National Parks)? That's not really a good comparison. Consider:
Hudson County (next to New York City): 13,495 people per square mile
Essex County (Newark): 6,211 people per square mile
Union County (Elizabeth): 5,216 people per square mile
Bergen County (NYC Suburbs): 3,884 people per square mile
Passaic (NYC Suburbs): 2,715 people per square mile
Middlesex County (Edison): 2,612 people per square mile
Camden County (next to Philly): 2,309 people per square mile
This list encompassed 4.6M people in NJ, or just over half of the state. Your list includes less than half of Californians. It's hard to figure out how anyone could make the claim that California is more dense than New Jersey, if they were slicing the data in anything resembling a fair comparison. I guess the one claim you could make would be: "San Francisco is more dense than Hudson County."
Other comparisons:
10% of Californians live in a population density of 4,556, (combine SF and Orange Counties). For NJ, 16% live in 8,226 (Hudson and Essex)
To get down to that density for NJ, you'll cover 38% of the state. At 38% of California, you're at 2,785 density.
To get down to that density for NJ, you'll cover 68% of the state (the top 10 counties). At 68% of California, you're at 1,402 density.
1,402 density covers 95% of NJ, which is all but the 4 least dense counties.
By the way, those 4 least dense counties have a population density greater than all but 17 of California's counties. Basically, the least dense part of NJ is still denser than a big chunk (22%) of California.
If I look at it by land size, combining SF and Orange Counties, I get 837 sq miles at a density of 4,556. This compares about equally to NJ which has a density of 4,851 for its top 692 sq miles. (It's tough to compare directly to the 837 - adding one more county goes to 1000+ sq miles.) In summary, if you took Hudson, Essex, Union, Bergen, and Passaic counties and put them on top of San Francisco and LA, you'd have roughly the same population density and roughly the same land covered.
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
These things tend to go in bursts. People think of things to do with bandwidth, which drives demand, and eventually technology reaches it. There was a little peak in the '90s between 56K modems and Napster where internet connections where fast enough, then people started streaming music and they became too slow. For any reasonable quality, you needed at least a 100MHz Pentium to be able to listen to the music in real time. ADSL and cable modems took us past that, and 1Mb/s was fine up until people started streaming video, which again required faster processors. Now, iPlayer HD is 3.6Kb/s, and the quality is fine - noticeably better than DVD. Higher quality video isn't really that interesting and 8.4Mb/s is enough for two concurrent streams for a household.
I suspect for most users now the bottleneck is upstream, not downstream speed. Uploading photos and video clips is still pretty painful because most consumer ISPs are set up assuming that consumers are... consumers.
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I do think that we're reaching a point where it's hard to actually use all of the bandwidth available to us
I know how to use all of a household's allocated bandwidth: a household with multiple computers all trying to download a recently released service pack for the operating system over a single satellite connection. Or is there a version of WSUS designed for home use so that each computer doesn't have to download the service pack separately?
Good luck watching videos or updating PCs' operating systems over mobile net without running into the 5 GB per month data transfer limit of most mobile net plans.
The speed increases and jump in any rankings can be attributed to Fios. Prior to 2007, broadband was pretty lousy in NJ. Comcast was slow crap... ever since @Home imploded back in December of 2001. I had faster service with them back in 1997 then I had from 2001 to 2007! Cablevision's Optimum Online was always the fastest in those days, basically 8/1Mbit service.
No, you couldn't, because it says that Boston is fastest.
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
How much you want to bet this has to do with smart phone and tablet adoption and their 3G / 4G speeds?
I have 6 mbits down, 800 kbit up ADSL, which actually nets 4.98 mbits down and 650 kbits up. It easily keeps up with NHL GameCentre Live, which is my primary use for it during the winter. The only thing it can't keep up with is most 1080p video from Youtube. Almost, but not quite. Even there, if I let it buffer for 30 seconds, that allows 5 minutes of playing before it has to buffer again. The network throughput is pegged at 637 Kbits down.
For 720p videos, my connection can easily keep up. And if I hit an mp4 video, which has more efficient compression for the same quality, then my connection can easily keep up. I could easily get faster speeds, but it wouldn't really make any noticable difference for me. I'm not upgrading soon, unless something unexpected comes up.
I'm not repeating myself
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We don't regulate electric, natural gas, or sewer companies because they are utilities. We regulate them because they are natural monopolies
According to TJ DiLorenzo's "The Myth of Natural Monopoly" (PDF), all the natural monopolies that people ordinarily associate with public utilities originate with the city's natural monopoly on roads and the city's resulting inability to find an efficient price for permits to tear them up to install conduit.
You can squeeze 100 fibers into the space of one sewer pipe. There is no reason why we should be limited to just one company
In that case, why should people be limited to one power company or one wired pay-TV company? How many power lines can one squeeze into a sewer pipe?
Oh man.... can I trade?
My local ISP (slic.com) installed FTTH, and I'm getting 100Mbps to my house, so don't blame me for any drop in speed!
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Your UID is 666, troll.
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Would state-wide density really show a bump if everybody was on the same fly over state "old copper, cable or average new optical roll out speeds" vs say massive hardened backhaul?
God I hate the arrogance of the phrase "fly-over state". Here in Indiana we have a higher average connection speed than the both New Jersey and the US average according to the akamai graph generator on the site.
From the article:
According to the fourth quarter 2011, State of the Internet report from Akamai, the global average connection speed to the Internet dropped to 2.3 megabits per second (Mbps), representing a 14 percent decline from the third quarter of 2011. While the average connection speed declined, the global average peak connection speed was relatively flat, coming in at 11.7 Mbps for a 0.4 percent quarterly gain....
Also dropping were adoption rates -- I would surmise, because people saw no reason to switch to the lower speeds now available....
Lower speeds are not a very compelling reason to adopt. What they didn't mention is the likely price increase that accompanied the 'flat' connection speeds...