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US Adoption of 10 Mbps+ Broadband Nearly Doubles In a Year
darthcamaro writes "We all know that the U.S. doesn't have the fastest broadband in the world, but it is gaining 'fast' (pun intended). The latest Akamai State of the Internet report pegs U.S. adoption of High Broadband, that is, broadband with access of 10 Mbps, at 15 percent. While that number may not seem high, it's 95 percent higher than it was this time last year." Broad-stroke averages, though, mean less than whether your neck of the woods gets better Internet service.
I tend to doubt the numbers, but have nothing to base it on but my gut feel and conversations with people I know. I personally have access to "High Broadband", but am perfectly happy with my average 5Mbps as my typical use case doesn't involve a lot of video download. I'd much rather have symetrical 2Mbps for backing up purposes. 10Mbps would have very little benefit for me, and certainly not another $360/yr benefit.
YMMV and probably does.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Our U.S. average is still tied with the EU average (13 Mbit/s). We're still # 2, just behind the Russian Federation, and way ahead of Canada, Mexico, Brazil, India, China, and Australia. (Countries of comparable continent-spanning size.)
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It won't take millions of connections at 100x the average to bring that average up.
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10 mbps isn't enough. I want a gigabit!
I was reading about this on another site, and the average was reported as 6.7 Mbs, but 60% of users were 4 Mbs or below, which means that the median user is getting around half the speed of the average user.
The average is a poor statistic for measuring bandwidth. It's like putting 9 hobos and Bill Gates in a room and saying that on average everyone is a millionaire.
In the big city.
I am curious how much of this availability is due to high speed cellular, which while perfectly fast is pretty much useless due to ridiculous data caps. My choices at home are cellular, dial-up, or satellite. Satellite latency sucks, cellular latency is fine but the 5GB data cap is horrible and dial-up is well.... dial-up. I would hardly consider myself as connected to high speed broadband, but does this study count me as such?
Get a web developer
Whatever gets me Netflix in high res is fast enough. As for general use, 384k DSL was fast enough. Everything else is just a marketing game between Verizon and Comcast, as far as I'm concerned.
I would like it to be cheaper. Any way you slice it, it's over $100/month for high speed internet. That's IF you can get it. I know a lot of people who are still stuck with Dialup, even in the Washington D.C. suburbs.
:wq
People are cancelling/renewing their broadband/cable packages every 6 months when the 'introductory' rates expire and their monthly bill doubles.
New speeds offered, price stays the same...
Is that 'adoption' or just being shoehorned?
Akamai posts another widely skewed report, based on their own crap infrastructure, where they are subpar for some regions.
In the Nordic countries, Akamai is a brake on everything, no matter what time of day you have to download anything via their infrastructure. I currently have a 100Mbit/s symmetric connection, and I get HIGHER download rates via Akamai if I use a US proxy than if I try a straight download. Same thing with any update services or games etc that use Akamai, Nordic countries get the shaft there too. I have a feeling that they are also underdeveloped in the asian regions, which would skew the results too.
Some ballpark figures:
Downloading an ISO via Akamai: Peak out at 16Mbit/s and averaging 11.3Mbit/s going straight, peak out at 29.5Mbit/s and averaging 15.4Mbit/s proxying to the US.
Downloading an ISO via Limelight networks at Swedish prime time: Peak out at 97Mbit/s, average at 94Mbit/s.
Downloading an ISO from SUNET's FTP at swedish prime time: Peak out at 98Mbit/s, average at 96Mbit/s.
Some of my norwegian friends and colleagues are reporting similar experiences in how crap Akamai is for them, both privately and professionally.
Well, nearly all. I got a surprise 100 dollar bill from ATT a few months ago for using more than my alloted 150gb. What good would 10Mbs do me?
It's 2012. Broadband has been commonly available for fifteen years and the best we can manage is only 15% of us have service faster than 10MB?
I wish the people who were creating all the make-work projects for the economic stimulus a few years back had been a little more forward-thinking and put people to work running fiber to as many homes as we could as a public utility. Lease bandwidth on it to anyone who wants to provide service, and use the proceeds to maintain and build out the network. If we did that, maybe come 2025 we won't be reading an an article about how awesome it is that all of 15% of us have service faster than 15MB.
I've lived in the mid-west all my life, and over the past 10 years we've gone from dial-up only to 20Mbps download speeds at $45/month. It isn't just the big cities that are improving. Heck, they've dug up half my city (city by mid-west standards) over the past 2 years laying new cables.
and last time I checked the US packages were usually included in horrible and expensive bundles :(
This is good news, but it's also pretty shameful. First, that only 15% of people have this kind of access, but also that 10Mbps is considered some kind of achievement. I'm assuming that this means 10Mbps download, and most of the upload speeds are still under 1Mbps. I suspect the numbers would be much better if they Baby Bells hadn't mismanaged our infrastructure for decades.
You live 30 minutes outside the middle of no where, what did you expect?
It's enough for me, but I live alone. As long as internet radio, HULU, and the like work well at the same time it's fine with me. Of course, if I were still a gamer I'd have to move to St. Louis where they have 30 MBPS from Charter.
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50% increase over a few thousands in USA id not the same as 50% increase over 60M .
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Speak for yourself, I have a Galaxy Nexus and 25/25. I bet more than half the posters are doing something similar. We just have a lot of vocal cheap bastards.
I'm paying about 70 bucks for Comcast's slowest internet and basic-basic cable TV. Dropping TV would save me about 5 bucks. It's ridiculous.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
A number of large universities are rolling 100 Mbps or more to surrounding neighborhoods and cities, actually.
Wake me when you realize that.
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Great to have, but with that much bandwidth it's more an advantage with torrentting or any other multithreaded downloaded. I'm more psyched about the upload bandwidth for setting up a server. If Google ever runs to my neighborhood, I'd definitely be on it. And, I'm sure all those Google Fiber users helped out the average.
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People who point out their puns should be put to sleep
Google has installed fiber to everywhere. The "slow" speed is free and the "fast" speed costs $70.
'who has the fastest broadband' comparison by population density?
Comparing the entire US to smaller countries seems like just bad statistics. If a country has similar population and density to New York, then it should be compared to New York, not the US as a whole.
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Here in the capital city of the state of california (go ahead and look it up, i'll wait), I have three choices for internet: comcast, comcast and comcast.
Who this year decided they could raise rates and not offer any existing customer promos, so I had to pull the plug. Wife went into bestbuy the next day and signed up as a new customer. Since they were willing to offer promos to people with cable tv (I have directv), I'm guessing they're squeezing the cord cutters by raising their internet costs to make up for the lost cable tv revenue. Seems its a zero sum game after all. Five years from now instead of a $50 cable bill and $50 internet bill, you're going to have a $100 internet bill. Maybe $110 in my neighborhood.
Speed is fine, but cost and choice are another matter that I think calls for a little more attention. Still way too many places in the US where you have a single, often expensive choice.
30 minutes from a city of 225,000 inhabitants is nowhere? For comparison I get 30meg cable speeds in said nowhere town of Tacoma.
But unless I'm willing to spend lots of money per month, I'm happy with my 6/1 connection
I hadn't looked into it in awhile. When I signed up for internet service 18 months ago the fastest plan was 6 Mb/s. Looked at it just yesterday and saw the fastest plan is now 50Mb/s.
If you can quell the hackers, P2P holds great hope for large scale war video games.
:) At 1 mb/s up/down, you're looking at the ability to hold like 5000 melee players in the same zone in current technology. If you get to 1 gb/s up/down, you can have millions in the same zone with an action oriented melee game like Zelda or Tekken...
You can do 64 players at once in a shooter with 1 mb/s internet, and with guns, this is reasonable. You can get more than 64 players at once if you have a main server which costs a lot, but this is not a feasible long term solution for most people because even if your game can sustain it, for how long?
P2P with some tricks to not update players who are out of your range could probably do 10,000 players at the same time in a zone in a FPS at 1GB/s p2p without having a server that needs any more work than managing logins(aka most any computer can handle it with a static IP). I have an interesting melee algoritm for games with no or limited range attacks: You don't send attacks to players who are out of range of you, and you don't even update movement if someone is so far away, they can't get to you in the rate between updates
But just as I started off, you gotta be able to quell the hackers in non traditional ways, otherwise they'll just ruin your game.
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7Mbps is super mega premium golly gee whiz you can watch every Twilight movie simultaneously I can't fucking believe what a great deal you're getting right now, sir, service.
AT&T is mostly stuck at 6Mbps so they aren't close but Time Warner is conveniently hovering at 8 Mbps on most of their standard plans. Just a month or two ago they upped it to 10Mbps but didn't retroactively apply it to any customers, as far as I know, just did it for new ones. So that definitely throws off the numbers.
The article doesn't talk about how they're actually measuring the speed of a "connection". Is it all the concurrent bandwidth to a unique IP address? If so, they're not necessarily measuring my bandwidth, but that of me and a few dozen of my nieghbours, thanks to CGN.
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By the standards of large cities, 225,000 is a suburb. a small one, at that. A suburb of a city like that is not likely to score very high on the list of targets for broadband development.
It'll happen eventually, but probably not very quickly. I live in a suburb of a metropolitan area (22,000 in my town, the greater metropolitan area passed 1 million in the last census), and only last year did we get VDSL/DSL speeds over 5mbit. Cable was available with faster advertised speeds, but even that still caps out at 20mbit on a network that's horribly oversold, and where you'd actually see about 5mbit on average. They are rolling out a faster network, but slowly.
For certain definitions of video.
But these standard definitions (480p) are just fine for a lot of people.
I set up everything over the phone, since I didn't have any existing service so it would have been pretty difficult to do it online :)
Then how'd you set up your phone service in the first place?
I get 25/25 for $40 a month.
Plus how much of a "setup fee" to relocate a family to an area where 25/25 for $40 a month is offered?
I work from home
Then we can assume that your employer is compensating you for a business-class connection.
Except building a road where you'll have to add new utilities in 20 years is just like building the dam you suggest. Not planning ahead is the fault of the city, which owns the roads under which conduit can be buried. If the city hadn't mismanaged its damn rights of way, the fiber company would be able to pull fiber to the home.
The setup fee for that is however much it costs to move a family to Kansas City. How much is that?
Finland has half the density of the USA (source) but still better broadband offerings, I'm told.
My "City" is fewer than 20k people and we're getting symmetrical fiber internet 30/50/100/200 for $60/$100/$200/$300. No hidden fees, listed price is what you pay.
Even a county in Minnesota got 30/30 fiber internet for $100/month, and they have an average population density of 5/mi^2. The ISP covers slightly over 1,000mi^2 and the area has slightly over 5,000 total people(Under 2,500 families?). They did this fewer than 8 years ago and have already paid off the fiber install and are now making profit.
Incumbents are just trying to milk money from their old infrastructure. Seems to me that these small ISPs in the middle-of-no-where are supplying faster+cheaper internet.
I have noticed that Cablevision out on the east end of Long Island has boosted average speeds to many from the 7-13Mbps range(which already was decent) well upwards, with many seeing over 20Mbps over the past year. This is the sort of change that DOES help support the numbers getting better overall. While not every access provider is boosting speeds, there has been an effort out there to boost speeds, and to improve capacity on networks.
What many forget is that to offer increased speeds, ISPs need to have excess capacity to handle bumping the speeds, and that is why progress has been so slow for many. How much does it cost to add more fiber in a suburban town so that speeds can be improved without hitting capacity limits on the main connection to that town? How about replacing older equipment, and do you increase speeds in just one neighborhood once the work is done to ALLOW for increased speeds, or do you wait until all the old equipment is replaced, and then turn on better speeds for everyone?
I remember that back in 2002, Cablevision was still offering speeds of "up to" 10Mbps, which was boosted to 15Mbps in 2003-2004 as a part of the normal service. While not all areas have seen the increases we have seen out here on the east end of Long Island, the EFFORT to improve speeds can not be denied.
Not living in the middle of nowhere.
It might be (edge case #1) that someone moved to the middle of nowhere before a decade ago when broadband started to become a necessity and a factor as to where one might live. Or it might be (edge case #2, example from my extended family) that someone is not the head of household, and the head of household moved the whole household. So if one happens to have been living in the middle of nowhere other than through one's own informed choice to move, how does one find the resources to move out of the middle of nowhere? As I have made clear before, I know next to nothing about moving and therefore need help.
It would be like complaining about the long drive to buy groceries.
Or the lack/high cost of fresh produce in the city.