Slashdot Mirror
We're Number 9! US Broadband Speeds Rise, But Slower Than Many Other Countries'
curtwoodward writes "The United States of America: The greatest country in the world, the last superpower, born of divine providence. Unless you're trying to connect to the Internet. The latest State of the Internet Report from network optimization company Akamai shows that the US has slipped in the global rankings of average connection speed, despite nearly 30 percent of yearly growth. That puts ol' Uncle Sam behind such economic powerhouses as Latvia and the Czech Republic. Oh, and we pay more, too. Is it finally time to shake up the ISP market and make Internet connections a public utility, on par with electricity and water? Or will edge projects like Google Fiber make a dent soon?" For those who favor the idea of Internet service as a government-run utility, what do you see as the best-case scenario for such a system?
I'm in one of the areas that is served by both cable and FIOS, and my service is nothing like the average 8 or so.
I'm on Cablevison, which recently bumped their Boost tier to 120 Mbps down and 37 up. This tier is only $5 a month more than the base tier.
There are no caps either.
The main thing you need is to get rid of the competitive restraints. No franchises please!
Before somebody without much of a clue mods the parent down, please allow me to point out that 9! = 9 factorial = 362880.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
When the last New York power grid failure caused a cascade effect that dragged down parts of 13 state's grids, the wave of failures stopped where TVA's grid starts. Stopped cold. There was a point where TVA systems were regulating the entire national grid, spinning up idle hydroelectric turbines as fast as possible to keep stable power flowing all the way to the west coast and down into Mexico. If your lights went out when New York went down, but came back on in a minute or two, that was TVA Hydro and your local grid was very probably being remotely controlled by TVA engineers. If you got power back in a day or two, that was probably TVA nuclear (it takes time to ramp nuke power up - sorry, but it just does). If you got power back faster than New York itself, ask your local sources if a bunch of TVA engineers were involved. If you live west of Chicago, and you didn't see an outage, most of the pros agree you would have if TVA hadn't been able to hold the line - an outage in all 48 contiguous states and probably affecting all of continental North America.
But it's a US Federal program, begun by Liberals such as FDR, so, you know, it's Eeevilll!!!
Who is John Cabal?