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!
The United States of America: The greatest country in the world, the last superpower, born of divine providence.
Unless you escaped from being indoctrinated with patriotism.
See subject. Of course compact nations are going to have better connectivity than sprawling ones.
I don't often cheerlead the US, but it's impressive that they're in the top ten. Sweden only just pipped them, and it tries awesomely hard to provide its citizens with good 'net access.
As a socialism-loving liberal, I have to say that I find the idea of an ISP utility ludicrous at best.
Social services are appropriate where there is an absolute goal. We don't want houses on fire, we don't want criminals running around uncaught, and we don't want roads to decay, just because such services are unprofitable. Civilization has an absolute need for those civil services. However, we don't need fast Internet connectivity... Yes, maybe some cities will get government-built fiber downtown, but the rest of the state will be too busy fighting politics to actually improve any infrastructure. We'll mostly just be stuck with whatever minimum service the politicians find acceptable, and the infrastructure budget will go toward filling the requisite layers of bureaucrats.
On the other hand, ISPs have a clear business incentive to improve their speed and capacity (not that they've been actually doing so). By being faster, they can claim an edge over their competitor in a market. Unfortunately, we seem to have hit an impasse where the only options in a region are "crappy cable" or "crappy DSL", thanks to government-granted monopolies in communities.
So why not both? I say we void all community monopoly agreements, and require private ISPs to provide fixed-bandwidth service to a government ISP. The government ISP can be a fallback. If my community's ISP options are too slow or too expensive, I can instead pay some standard rate for government service, which would go over the ISP's lines anyway. The local ISP still has to carry my traffic, but they don't get my money. The downside is that I'm stuck with whatever basic service the government decides is suitable.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Sorry, but that is BS...
"In return, Kansas City got a fiber network it couldn’t possibly afford to build on its own — or maintain. Municipalities like Provo, Utah that thought they could afford to build their own public fiber network found they couldn’t afford to run it. That’s why Provo, Utah sold their fiber network to Google for just $1."
Ok, so the tax payer funds it, and then gives it to somebody else to run for one dollar! Yeah that is the problem! Wow, if we all just did that, fund the thing we want and then give it for free to some private enterprise! Sounds like a bargain to me!
While local government has a role to play, no doubt there, having one company after another dig up the same piece of ground is actually quite silly! Here in Switzerland where we are ranked pretty high the solution has been to allow access to the underlying networks. Competition here is the ability of a competitor to have access to the fiber, or wire that another company has put into the ground. Force the AT&T's to allow anybody to use their pipes for a reasonable fee and very quickly you will get higher speeds and lower costs.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I have a perfect example: I live a half-mile from a major Internet fibre line, which AT&T owns the hardware to access, and I have a max available 3Mb DSL as the only choice for Internet. One of my neighbors would love to get on the same shitty "broadband" that I pay for, but AT&T told him "there are no more ports available" in our area, after multiple attempts to get through to someone with real answers. Same story about copper going away etc.
Taxpayers actually paid for that Internet fibre run that runs nearby, and AT&T somehow keeps anyone from accessing it with their Congress-owning money powers. Fuck those evil bastards.
That's the government for you; An epic cluster fuck you wind up paying through the nose for. I prefer to stick with private ownership, thank you very much... it's an epic cluster fuck I wind up paying through the nose for but I have my choice on how to be screwed.
The fatal flaw of all of the libertarian nonsense is that the failure or corruption of certain governments can only be replaced with privatization. The correct answer to ineffective government is effective government. Let me provide you with a concrete example:
In Washington State, in areas where fiber is provided by the state, I can get a 100x100 connection for $59 per month. No contract. From a private entity. How is that possible?
Multiple private organizations, who have an incentive to screw each other over and no incentive to work together to cover different neighborhoods, cannot provide the best plan for modern infrastructure. Even in the face of overpriced (point given: has to be relatively non-corrupt) government costs, it's still cheaper because there is no marketing department, legal department, or endless stratification of middle managers doing fuck-all in a building somewhere. Rent-seeking necessary infrastructure services don't work well with privatization, because they have the upper hand on pricing and will stuff their organization with so much bloat it would make a bureaucrat blush. When it's a government entity, there is at least some chance of oversight and cost control. When it's privatized, the inefficiency and price hikes are all but inevitable, unless there is real competition.
In modern societies the basic physical plants are installed and run by the government and funded through equitable taxation. A similar analogy is that of the road system: multiple private roads would never work, because you couldn't depend on the pricing or the availability, depending on whatever juvenile contract disputes the private corporations were engaged in at the moment. But when those costs are socialized and the infrastructure is available to all responsible parties at a low cost, you can have true competition on common infrastructure.
Let's say I want to ship something: I have an address, provided by the state, a road provided by the state that will absolutely connect me to any other address also provided by the state. So I can choose between Fedex, DHL, UPS, or even a startup like uShip. Imagine if you had a fiber connection to your home, which would cost you less in taxes than you pay for coffee every month, which was available to Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, etc. They're going to listen to customer demands, because there's actually a chance you might switch. Right now I have no choice but to deal with Comcast's endless bullshit, because I don't have any other choices available. They happen to be the provider to my location.
So, keep the libertarian fantasy going. Dog-ear that copy of Atlas Shrugged for the nth time. When you're ready to discuss solutions, consider reality.
PS: Google, Microsoft, Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T have all gladly handed over your data to the government. Being held by private corporations didn't change a damn thing, did it?
There aren't even 362,880 countries on Earth. How can we be 9!?
I'll take it. The Post Office provides incredibly good, reliable service, despite the way it is micro-managed by Congress, and expected to operate like a private corporation while providing universal service, which no corporation would do, and prefunding retirement benefits for workers, some of whom aren't even born yet.
I (heart) U.S. Post Office.
Last year at Christmas time I had to replace a string of lights cause one went out and rather than search for the one of 150 I just purchased a new set, can I thank TVA engineers for that?
Unless someone who happens to work for the TVA was helping you out personally, no.
That said, the grid isn't a string of christmas lights. It's much more complex than that because you've got long transmission lines arranged in a mesh and many sources of power. Oh, and you critically need to keep the phases of the power sources synchronized or you cause even more damage. That makes your analogy suck. Sorry.
The principal reason the TVA has a better ability to respond to a cascading failure situation is precisely that they're not very efficient. The spare capacity meant that they had the capability to increase power output when the shit hit the fan when nobody else did. For the overall stability of the system, a public good that you clearly benefit from, not running everything as close to the edge as possible is required. But that in turn means that the short-term profit of the power producer is not maximized; if every producer is being forced to maximize short-term profit over everything else, that's most strongly enabled by pushing everything into the domain where nearly any unexpected problem causes total collapse. Think of it like cooling a liquid so that it becomes supercritical; the tiniest speck of dust can cause it to flash-freeze. You see similar effects in public transportation networks, road traffic, financial systems, etc. Focus too strongly on optimizing for the case where everything is doing fine and you'll get catastrophic failures more frequently as the system will have reduced ability to absorb random shocks (which happen all the time, even if most go unnoticed).
Which isn't to say that power production has to be government-run. It clearly doesn't. What it does have to be is somewhat over-provisioned so that the extra load of a squirrel self-immolating in a backwoods substation doesn't cause total systemic failure, and that over-provisioning has to be paid for somehow. Oh, and the regulator has to force this on providers; letting the shit hit the fan just to get one more quarter of increasing profits is too damaging. (Alternatively, you could regulate by lawsuit, but that also sucks...) Welcome to complex systems; the real solutions aren't always the ones you want.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"