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Why Is US Broadband So Slow?
phantomfive writes "Verizon has said they will not be digging new lines any time soon. Time-Warner's cash flow goes towards paying down debt, not laying down fiber. AT&T is doing everything they can to slow deployment of Google fiber. How can the situation be improved? Mainly by expediting right-of-way access, permits, and inspections, according to Andy Kessler. That is how Google was able to afford to lay down fiber in Austin, and how VTel was able to do it in Vermont (gigabit connections for $35 a month)."
Competition... From the government, if necessary. Let's put our tax dollars to work for us for a change.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Answer: corporate greed.
Comcast does everything it can to charge more for less service. Why does Comcast want to give less service when through periodic updates that it could give faster service? Well Comcast also wants to sell television packages, and people can stream movies and television on their computers easily if the rates are high enough. Comcast just successfully extorted Netflix. It doesn't do a lot, but tweet support for Google Fiber, and tell your elected representative you want it in your area.
Comcast doesn't cover all of the city, Frontier only offers service in a few tiny areas far away from the city, and CenturyLink suffers with mostly 40+ year-old wiring and equipment in most of the city, so those of us that can get 1 Mbps reliably here are better off than many. I'm right at the edge of service, so some of my neighbors down the street can't even get DSL. Dial-up is their only option. Because the city government is anti-Internet, they will not allow competition or even easy upgrade permits for even the Comcast or CenturyLink monopolies. Comcast has been blocked for years from burying new cabling on my street. As long as you have obstructionist city governments, you'll never have good Internet access. The situation was made worse recently when we elected a socialist that is very anti-Internet.
Cut down the biggest branch of our government - the lobbying industry.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
as it is now, you have to ask every hick town for permission to lay cable and allow them to extort you via yarn museums and other costs
george bush tried to pass national franchise rights but it was fought by all the hick towns who keep taxes artificially low and leech off everyone else. and when telecoms refuse to pay, people there whine how they are underserved
and contrary to populist belief, the telecoms spend billions of $$$ every year in capital expenses. and they borrow to do so. comcast is $44 billion in debt. Time warner is $25 billion in debt. AT&T is also carrying some insane debt from its idiotic shopping spree almost 15 years ago to become a cable company. back then it cost almost $100 billion. its all in the public financial statements they file. they might not have FTTH, but cable and telecoms have spent tens of billions if not hundreds of billions of $$$ over the last 20 years building out their networks and the bill is now due. meanwhile newcomers like google have no debt and lots of cash and can invest a lot of money into FTTH and other ventures.
not being evil, just a fact of life. it has happened before and it will happen again. wintel beat IBM. and now IOS/Android/ARM/Qualcomm is beating wintel. AT&T and then the baby bells built out an amazing PSTN network and the cable companies came in with unlimited local and long distance calling to steal the customers. railroads built out a national rail network and the airlines and cars came in to steal their profits as well
Didn't we give the telecoms a shitload of money during the Clinton years to build out high speed internet?
you seem to have a chip on your shoulder about Government.
I have issues with them, too; but I'd rather a non-corporate entity build out and even own our infrastructure than profitmongers!
roads, water, electricity, bridges: all were started by government and that was the major funder. we would not have postal system and roads 'to everywhere' if the decision was left to the profiteering ones.
infrastructure is one of the things goverments do best.
as for your bullshit distraction about how well congress works, that's neither here nor there nor part of any thread on this topic. sheesh.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
This has been covered 2-3 times in the last year already, and the answers aren't going to change.
Corporate greed is the overwhelming reason.
Lack of necessary infrastructure is the other. But then that's because there is no system upgrading being done because of -- corporate greed.
Instead of having the same discussions about the problem, a more productive discussion would be about how to solve the issue and steps people can take to actually realize those solutions.
The best way is to allow cities and counties to create municipal fiber utilities that provide uniform and universal access of its citizens to ISP's. Municipalities can require multiple ISP's to service the city providing service level and price competition. The capital outlay for the fiber infrastructure is born by the city/county and is capitalized in use fees. Cities would set SLA standards for customer service response and repair times. Penalties for non-compliance and the right to replace ISP's that don't perform.
We would get the fastest and most robust internet connections available on the planet. We would get TV and phone service bundled on one wire. We would get lower monthly bills.
Where I live is in the midst of a moderately dense residential area a few miles from downtown. We have a single high speed provider available, and our current plan is about $65/month for "up to 12/2 Mbps". And, indeed, on speed tests and the occasional Linux ISO torrent, I actually see those kinds of speeds. However, for practical applications, such as streaming videos on Hulu, we're lucky to have things play smoothly at the 0.5 Mbps resolution even at off-peak hours.
I don't think we necessarily need faster rated connections, but ones that can actually perform to their specifications under average usage conditions.
The New York City web site says that's incorrect. According to the city government, they grant franchises to specific companies to serve specific parts of the city. Here's the map of authorized service areas:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/doitt/...
I have issues with them, too; but I'd rather a non-corporate entity build out and even own our infrastructure than profitmongers!
I have news for you: local governments are incorporated, too.
And don't think for a second that the people involved in local government aren't interested in making decisions that personally profit themselves and their friends.
that's about average. nyc i was paying time warner cable $65 for 20/1 for a while. 15 years ago internet only for 1mbps cable would cost you close to $100
and i really can't believe tech people can be so dense. the internet is not your ISP. its not some magical one entity. its hundreds of networks connected together via different business agreements. just because you pay for 12/2 doesn't mean the server or network your linux iso sits on can support that for all their users at once. if you do a traceroute and your linux iso is a dozen hops away across 5 different networks it's not your ISP's fault that its slow.
the concept of CDN's has been around for almost 20 years. positioning content close to the users, and the content people have to pay for it. otherwise having hulu transit over different backbone networks you will never see 20/2. that's the internet. just because you pay 20/2 to comcast or someone else doesn't mean cogent or level 3 can support that for everyone at the same time. and hulu is owned by every big media corporation there is so they should have enough money to buy CDN access. this is why my apple TV rentals look blu ray quality and play without a hiccup on time warner cable. Apple is a huge akamai CDN customer and the content is already on time warner's network for me.
i'm 40 and have seen the internet grow up and settle for the cheaper plans. i'm at 20/2 now
why do i need to pay for super fast internet?
The point is that the super fast Internet is way too expensive. You're fine with 20/2 now, but if you could have 100/100 for the same price, would you stick with 20/2?
Not everything is publish-subscribe. I want to be able to set up storage boxes in friends' houses or the cloud or whatever, so I can have off-site backups of my data. I want to be able to play with various decentralized communications programs. Some people your age are starting to have grandkids. It would be nice to talk to them in HD, like those science fictions of the 21st Century were saying we would be able to do.
Don't worry about what you'd use the bandwidth for. If you have bandwidth, eventually you'll find a use for it.
Have a nice time.
To get from where I live to Chicago I'd take I-80 to I-90.
Massive infrastructure with no obvious monetization plans?
Yes. Government.
There were many years between when we had cars and when we had a major national highway system. Plenty of time to let a private enterprise get in that space.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Of course they'd find a way to blame government regulation and interference for the problem, rather than abuse of government power to form and support monopolies.
They're two words for the same thing: government failure in the form of regulatory capture. Granting a monopoly privilege certainly qualifies as "regulation and interference".
Yes, as with the "tradgedy of the commons" the network is by it's very nature a shared resource which means everyone wants to use it but nobody wants to pay for it. In the early 90's, many western governments (eg: UK/AU) sold their public phone networks to private investors. Here in Oz that resulted in the two major telcos rolling out two fibre (pay TV) networks covering the profitable suburbs of the major cities and nowhere else.
I had both hooked up and several months of free pay TV since they were both running at a loss to attract customers with "free trials", I also tripled the money I paid for 1000 shares in the initial government prospectus. The major telco who inherited the copper from the government was forced to split the business into wholesale and retail companies. The retail end was supposed to compete on a level playing field with other retailers, ( which going by the plethora of independent ISP's we have today is one part of the sell off that seemed to work rather well). Now we have gone full circle and are building a single publically funded fibre network under the banner "NBN" which started off as "FTTP for everyone" but has now been trimmed to "FTTN for most". The NBN basically owns and maintains the network and will charge retailers a usage fee.
In other words, after a 20yr lead, private enterprise has failed to deliver the infrastructure that the government is now attempting to build. For now most people outside the middle class suburbs (or living in a flat/unit) are on DSL over the original (government built) copper network. My hope for the next 20yrs is that they can claw back that taxpayer investment from the private companies who will profit from the new "free market" that the infrastructure will provide.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I think that the problem here is that there's no differentiation between the fiber itself and the service carried by it.
If a town lies down dark fiber and then lets the end customer choose operator using that fiber, then it wouldn't be a big problem.
As for putting fibers on utility poles - that's stupid for several reasons - risk of damage is high, complex arrangements on poles means high risk of conflicting wiring and it really destroys the general view of a small town having the air filled with wires crossing all over the place.
Compare Westford, MA, USA with Kållered, Sweden.
It may be more expensive to bury the wires, but it will lower the costs in the long run.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I don't really care how "slow" my internet access is... Hulu streaming works at 500kbps, and I can't find any broadband providers that offer service speeds lower than that in the past decades. Just give me CHEAP!!!
I don't want to pay $65/mo to get bottom-tier FIOS speeds that I won't use. Yet FIOS deployment means I can't get cheap Verizon DSL anymore.
I don't want my cable company to eliminate their bottom tier, upgrading everyone to 15Mbps and doubling the monthly price. What does my mother need with 15Mbps internet access to read her e-mail? I know she'd rather have her $20/month back.
Where are all the cheap broadband packages going? I just checked due to another commenter, and see that Time Warner (not in my area) offers 2/1Mbps service for $15/mo... That would be pretty good, except they're about to get bought by Comcast, which doesn't offer anything below 3/1Mbps for $40/mo.
Screw your HighDef streaming video... Where's my entry-level internet service? When CELLULAR in cheaper, something has gone horribly wrong.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Basically the inertia of massive infrastructure across a large, non-homogeneously settled area.
The insane costs and regulatory nightmare of laying new infrastructure.
Oh yeah, and the greed and apathy of the few major providers, standing atop their government authorized monopolies.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Or more likely, lack of competition. The dl speed increases at a glacial pace because there are only 1 to 3 decent internet providers in any city. Why invest in improvements when you can make money doing nothing new?
20 mbps/$76mo. Steadily increases. It started out $20 for first 6 mos, then $50 something after that, 5 years later in the same apartment it's ~$76 with nothing but internet.
When I was in the US last time, I was appalled. I saw phone wires and electricity wires hanging everywhere, phone distributors (I don't know the technical term in English for them, where a few wires from various households come together) that are a fire hazard, at best (that they're working was a veritable miracle), I've even seen hemp insulation.
Honestly, I thought I was somewhere in the USSR, somewhere behind the Ural, in the 60s.
Why is it in such a state? I can only assume it is, funny enough, for the same reason it was in the USSR, but for a different underlying reason: It worked. In the USSR it was not improved because of shortage. In the USA it is not improved because of profit. In either case it would have required investment that was not warranted. It's good enough for the customer. In the USSR, it was good enough for the comrade because they delivered the bare minimum of what was necessary. In the US, you get delivered the bare minimum of what is necessary to keep you paying.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Very simple answer.
Pure Greed. AT&T, Comcast,Etc... they care more about profit margins than quality of service. If you will swallow paying $60 a month for paltry speeds then that is what they deliver. Plus they work hard to keep competition out so they dont have to lower prices or increase speeds.
It's greed, The companies hate you for even wanting more.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The company I work for has a few dozen branch sites in the south east US. Lately we've been looking at increasing the broadband Internet service used to provide WiFi access to guests. When we rolled out the first broadband circuits there 5-7 years ago, our options were typically cable service at maybe 5-10Mb/s and DSL service at usually 3Mb/s. Now, most of these sites have 100Mb/s cable internet service available. Granted, it typically runs ~$200/mo for business class 100-150Mb/s internet service, but still, at least the options fucking available at this point.
I really feel like in the last couple years there has been an actual improvement in broadband speeds with the real push for DOCSIS 3. It's the one real improvement we'll see without replacing (too much of) the copper in the ground. Maybe I'm crazy but I really believe Google Fiber may have played more than a small part in this. Not actually being available everywhere, just the threat to the existing duopoly of cable/dsl providers that they may move in and provide some real competition.