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Millions In US Still Living Life In Internet Slow Lane (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Millions of Americans still have extremely slow Internet speeds, a new Federal Communications Commission report shows. While the FCC defines broadband as download speeds of 25Mbps, about 47.5 million home or business Internet connections provided speeds below that threshold. Out of 102.2 million residential and business Internet connections, 22.4 million offered download speeds less than 10Mbps, with 5.8 million of those offering less than 3Mbps. About 25.1 million connections offered at least 10Mbps but less than 25Mbps. 54.7 million households had speeds of at least 25Mbps, with 15.4 million of those at 100Mbps or higher. These are the advertised speeds, not the actual speeds consumers receive. Some customers will end up with slower speeds than what they pay for. Upload speeds are poor for many Americans as well. While the FCC uses 3Mbps as the upload broadband standard, 16 million households had packages with upload speeds less than 1Mbps. Another 27.2 million connections were between 1Mbps and 3Mbps, 30.1 million connections were between 3Mbps and 6Mbps, while 29 million were at least 6Mbps. The Internet Access Services report released last week contains data as of December 31, 2015. The 11-month gap is typical for these reports, which are based on information collected from Internet service providers. The latest data is nearly a year old, so things might look a bit better now, just as the December 2015 numbers are a little better than previous ones.
Try looking at what we're getting up north.
That's Canada, for the geographically-impaired.
It's fine. Not long ago I had a connection of 7Mb/sec, and I really had no issues doing normal browsing, streaming netflix, etc. I've streamed Netflix as low as a 1Mb/sec connection (which honestly was fairly bad whenever you needed to download anything over a couple hundred megabytes).
These days I have a 40 megabit connection, and it's great. But I'm quite certain I could easily live with a 10 megabit connection. The vast majority of people really don't need anything beyond say 5-10 megabit, which easily allows you to stream HD movies. It wasn't really that long ago that "slow" was considered perhaps 1 megabit or below.
I have ATT in metro-Altanta. 1.25Mbps/0.25Mbps. The field guys say that the fiber is in place for UVerse and has been for months but they are just waiting for "government approval to offer it to us."
Now, Conca$t is also in the neighborhood, but internet only is $49 + equipment fees + additional charges that they won't state and they can increase the rate to anything they want. Oh, and that's the new customer rate.
But that's it - just those two for ISPs.
And that $200 BILLION that was supposed to build that up? Crony Capitalism for ya!
Where's Trump? He should be twittering about this at least.
A better question is what percentage of customers have slower speeds because they have no viable alternatives, versus how many (ie: my Mom) are still on relatively ancient DSL (or other) services that haven't quite kept up with the times.
I don't understand why they set the bottom speed they're reporting on so high. CenturyLink says my street here in Seattle has "up to 1.5 Mbps":
http://imgur.com/WgSvnA5
But I'm currently getting only 192 kbps. That's 0.192 Mbps!
http://imgur.com/a/okOCD
The thing they always gloss over in these "the Internetz is SLOW!" articles is where the slow internet is.
"there are still many parts of the country where slow DSL or satellite is sadly the best option"
Yeah, like way out in the boonies, where a lot of people move to get away from the "fast lane." That's where a bunch of the slow satellite connections are.
See subject: Hardcoded favorites & adblocking (40% of webpage size = ads). Best hosts file creator = APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit https://www.google.com/search?...
Ads rob speed, security (malvertising) & privacy (tracking).
Hosts add speed (hardcodes/adblocks), security (bad sites/poisoned dns), reliability (dns down), & anonymity (dns requestlogs/trackers) natively.
Helps vs. bandwidth caps
Avg. page = big as Doom http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
Hosts != ClarityRay blockable (vs. souled-out to admen inferior wasteful redundant slow usermode addons)
Less power/cpu/ram + IO use vs. DNS/routers/addons/antivirus (slows you) + less security issues/complexity.
Compliments firewalls (blocking less used IP addys vs. hosts blocking more used domains) & DNS (lightens dns load).
Gets data via 10 security sites.
APK
P.S. - Safe https://www.virustotal.com/en/... (Verified by Malwarebytes' S. Burn "seen the code & it's safe" http://forum.hosts-file.net/vi... )
it's crap, many don't understand you need good infrastructure for a functioning modern society. But oh no, that would require more evil gubbermint to do all that. Leave it to private companies (yay capitalism), yeah sure and look what we got for internet. Yes, I bitchy today. What really gripes me is telco companies lobby legislation preventing cities and towns set up their own high speed internet (essential for businesses)
mfwright@batnet.com
That's utterly ridic
Table-ized A.I.
Making America Great! No More American's in the "Internet Slow Lane"!*
* - Pesky FCC demanding 25Mbps. We'll make it so 1Mbps is fast, thus everyone with 1Mbps or better is in the "fast lane"! #FIrst100Days
(Yes, this post is sarcasm, and completely made up)
What's new? The senior executives of every single large American telco are thieves; they've been robbing Americans blind for decades. Now, with Trump, they will have even more of their way. America has reached the tipping point of pure insufficiency relative to the provisioning of broadband. In fact, it appears that the telco executives that have been robbing us blind have done everything they can to collude on price; deceive people with billing; provide pathetic customer service; meter out broadband like it's pure gold (even though spectrum is free, from nature), and many other thieving activities.
Years ago I tried to make a few things happen with local broadband in my small city; nothing happened - city officials were afraid of getting sued by broadband companies.
Last, I think telco senior executives are *literally* American traitors, because their policies discriminate against people in more rural regions and their pricing policies keep a lot of otherwise innovative people from using broadband for innovation - i.e. these thieves are PURPOSELY disadvantaging America, to line their pockets. They are crimping the potential of America, and many even go so far as help our government spy no us, without even telling us. Comcast, Dish, AT&T, etc. are thieves. Period - call a spade a spade!
People live life in the Internet Parking Lot, known as CenturyLink.
My dad could care less about the internet and doesn't see the value in it. Only reason he has it is so he can check his work email and keep his wife happy. He thinks the idea of having it be a regulated utility is stupid and unnecessary as people don't need the internet. He's 63 years old. I doubt he's the only person that thinks like this.
Since when is a connection capable of reliably streaming Netflix in HD 'extremely slow'? //extremely slow Internet speeds// //While the FCC defines broadband as download speeds of 25Mbps//
*extremely* slow! hold that thought while we dig into the number just a little...
3.0 Megabits per second - Recommended for SD quality
5.0 Megabits per second - Recommended for HD quality
source: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306
So yeah FCC 'broadband' probably isn't what you think it is...
We should judge speeds by the things they allow us to do not by arbitrary labels of 'broadband' or 'extremely slow'.
Meanwhile, in Australia..........waits for comments about the dismal speeds us Australians face!
Where do they get this seemingly arbitrary figure of 25Mb/s, anyway?
I know the point of this is that there is a significant cost to not having reliable high speed access. However some of us remember the days when your computer connected by a modem at 300 baud and that was pretty good. I recently found myself trying to explain a modem to a high school student... that is one exercise guaranteed to make you feel old. I could have just as well given up and said we sent everything by certified pterodactyl.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The slowest speeds listed in this report are far better than what HUGE swaths are of U.S. are relegated to: dial up.
Broadband rollout is so poor in the U.S., due mostly to corrupt relationships between providers and lawmakers, that most of the country's geography is not served by anything better than dialup or satellite, both of which are horrible.
it must suck being a peasant
I think they already used that trick once.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
You aren't a REAL programmer unless edited a COBOL program on line with a 1200 baud dial up.
Puzzies!!!
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
With the foulup of the NBN it now looms like most will never get more than 25M / 1M except perhaps during offpeak 1am to 7am.
Prices here are ridiculous (higher than the US last time I checked) and everything is capped unless you pay a premium for uncapped data transfers during the night or a much larger one for unlimited options, typically only available for connection speeds of 10mbps or less.
Upload speed is even worse, you can't get parity of upload and download speed, you have to pay up for an expensive plan of 50-100mbps+ download speed if you want to start getting options for more than 1 or 1.5mbps up.
Kids these days. With dial up the struggle was real.
Just got google fiber installed today woohoo!
Here in washington state, many rural areas only have dialup, because they don't have the money to run high speed microwave to the small towns. Some islands on the west coast have many retired millionaires, so they have high speed due to point to point microwave.
The small town my family is in, has a small point to point microwave, that Verzion and comcast rents off a small ISP, so they can bring in service. 80 homes have comcast, but only the town library has a 5meg wifi for the town. People drive up just to check mail. Verizon coverage is helpful, but gsm has no coverage.
They don't sell sat internet in Washington state due to over subscribing. Everyone waiting for the new viasat 2 to launch (already delayed) till Q1 2017, and viasat 3, so rural areas in the US can get high speed (but limited) internet.
I'm a network administrator for AT&T and my network connection ( which is shared with four other employees ) at my office is. .
Wait for it. . .
A T1.
1.5Mbps of blistering 1990 speed.
It is a rather sad reality in 2016.
See subject: Hardcoded favorites & adblocking (40% of webpage size = ads). Best hosts file creator = APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit https://www.google.com/search?...
Ads rob speed, security (malvertising) & privacy (tracking).
Hosts add speed (hardcodes/adblocks), security (bad sites/poisoned dns), reliability (dns down), & anonymity (dns requestlogs/trackers) natively.
Helps vs. bandwidth caps
Avg. page = big as Doom http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
Hosts != ClarityRay blockable (vs. souled-out to admen inferior wasteful redundant slow usermode addons)
Less power/cpu/ram + IO use vs. DNS/routers/addons/antivirus (slows you) + less security issues/complexity.
Compliments firewalls (blocking less used IP addys vs. hosts blocking more used domains) & DNS (lightens dns load).
Gets data via 10 security sites.
APK
P.S. - Safe https://www.virustotal.com/en/... (Verified by Malwarebytes' S. Burn "seen the code & it's safe" http://forum.hosts-file.net/vi... )
5.8 million of those offering less than 3Mbps
Is that surprising in a country of ~4 million square miles that ~2% of the population has to deal with 3Mbps? Sounds pretty darn reasonable to me.
The real story is the ripoff of American's who were promised fiber upgrades to old infrastructure which never materialized. The providers did a bait-and-switch and only upgraded certain backbone lines with fiber, but leaving the critical -to-home endpoints with the outdated copper. My d/l speeds are far less than 1Mbps over DSL and upload is appalling. My ISP will allow me to use a second copper wire for double the price which is an absolute rirpoff.
For people who believed that all of our old copper lines were eventually going to be replaced with shiny new fiber, that is a complete lie and the providers basically perpetrated large-scale fraud.
Everyone likes to champion the speeds in Japan, South Korea, Europe, England etc, compared to the USA. Granted, the ISP's in the USA aren't what you would call consumer friendly by any means, but, look at the build out costs associated with running FTTH in the USA? Hell, you can fit the entire countries of Japan, South Korea, England and Europe INSIDE the land area of the USA. Just Texas for example. You have two cars parked at the North Texas/South Oklahoma border. One Driving north, the other south. The one driving north will get to Canada, before the one driving south will get to Mexico. In other words...the USA is SPREAD OUT.
In early 2013 I got a nasty notice from CenturyLink for exceeding 250 GB in a month. And yet, they still send me ads asking me to pay for faster service. Why would I accept that offer? You'll just kick me off!
There's no point in going faster, when I can reach the monthly cap only a fraction of the way into the month anyway. If they'd increase the cap, maybe I'd do it, but none of the ads mention that.
Classify the internet as a utility.
Set a minimum required standard with revocation of license and monetary penalties for substandard service.
> Is that surprising in a country of ~4 million square miles...
What _is_ surprising is that in urban and sub-urban areas of the country, you don't see the same sort of internet access speeds and prices that you see in similarly dense European or Asian areas.
In fact, the only places where you see anything close to those sorts of Internet access deals are places where either:
* A local municipality has run optical fiber throughout the municipality, provides access to the fiber to everyone within the municipality, and provides non-discriminatory access to that fiber to any ISP who wishes to provide Internet service.
* Google Fiber has successfully navigated and/or torn down the legal roadblocks put in place by the incumbent national ISPs and telcos and started to provide service to non-trivial portions of a metro area.
The _really_ poor value that most urbanites get on Internet access is a strong indicator that population density is a _tiny_ part of the Internet access quality problem in the US. If population density were actually the major factor, uncapped and unmetered 1000mbit/s symmetric service would be available to everyone in _every_ major city and most major and minor metro areas and would cost significantly less than 40USD per month.
We already paid for this through tax breaks to the providers. I have a choice to have or not have a connection, one DSL provider (Frontier), 3Mb is top tier, is really 1.5 at best and I have seen it as low as ~386k at peak times. It is infuriating. Sadly, there is a waiting list for that crappy service because they are the only provider and won't even expand the COs for new customers. Spectrum just strung all new lines along the main road, 400 yards away. And there is an older service line that passes from there to less that 100' of my house. But the new cable is for 'infrastructure or some such because they service no one in my vast rural service area; even thought the coax service line is strung through more than half of the community. it is abandoned and rots in place, and we all get shit service. They already paid out the "tax breaks" as dividends...
To use another company requires stringing in another set of wires (fiber) which is expensive. This is a form of infrastructure that could indeed be taken over by government/ public utility (just the wire not the service)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There might be educational content on youtube. My kids choose annoying orange, fail videos, and PewDiePie.
Facetime, or other video conferencing, means that people can see you naked. OK, no problem, but they might record a copy and share it with people who have a problem with that.
I live 1.1 miles outside of the city limits of an Austin, Texas metro suburb. AT&T only provides 1.5Mb DSL (1.5Mb down, 384Kb up) here - too slow for my regular video conferencing/presentations (I often work out of my home office). The local cable company won't provide service at my address. I have to settle for line of site Internet access at 9Mb down, 1Mb up - it works okay for me, but it also costs a fairly steep $106/mo. I'd love to have "broadband" service at 25/3, but that's probably another 10 years away from me...if I'm lucky.
The _really_ poor value that most urbanites get on Internet access is a strong indicator that population density is a _tiny_ part of the Internet access quality problem in the US.
Poor value and access are different issues. The US may (does) have a problem with choice and value in most markets, but the fact that ~2% of the US populace either can't or doesn't want to pay for dual HD video streaming capability isn't a societal problem as far as I'm concerned (or a problem at all). Consumers will always want more for less, but no one is denied opportunity in life because they can't stream HD video.
If people in the US choose to live in rural areas ... that's it. It's a choice. You get the good with the bad. I have reasonably fast internet in an urban neighborhood but I also pay ridiculous property taxes, the price of my home was outrageous and I hear the freeway at night. If home owners in rural areas had access to the same services that I do their home would cost more, they'd have more neighbors, and their property and local taxes would be higher. That's how it works.
Slow Internet For Slow Intellects: scaled perfectly for Trump's new Amerikkka
In other words, 47.5 million have internet connection speeds under an arbitrary speed picked by the government, and 54.7 million have internet connection speeds greater than an arbitrary speed picked by the government. So what?
Ken
> ...but the fact that ~2% of the US populace either can't or doesn't want to pay for dual HD video streaming capability isn't a societal problem...
If dual HD streaming capability (You might be surprised to hear that this actually means ~10mbit/s, asymmetric. What _I'm_ talking about is 1000mbit/s, symmetric.) cost less than $40 per month, you bet your ass that those folks would pay for it. (Unless there was a half-HD video streaming plan that was 35% of the price, of course.)
_That's_ my point; population density has little to do with the state of the Internet access "market" in the US. Legislative capture brazenly perpetrated by the entrenched players is the problem in everything but the most rural areas of the country. (And even _those_ locations could get much more than they have for much less than they currently pay.)
The home I live in is literally surrounded by people with cable TV as close as 100' away in some places and 200' in others. But because the wire to feed our house is too long Charter Cable is too darned cheap to serve us. They screwed up laying out their network. I'm stuck with Frontier DSL at a whole 7 Mbps. Getting Fiber in here, despite over a decade of ads implying availability, I can't get that either.
{^_^}
I only need enough bandwidth to connect to work and to watch two streams of netflix at the same time. I don't actually care that it is 10Gbps.... I care that it is enough for me, unlimited at my rate and _cheap_!
I live 4.4 miles from the DSLAM. Now by Centurylink rule this is .4 miles further than they would ever run this service again. I asked the local centurylink tech how I could get any faster speeds. His response was two-fold. Move closer to town or pony up a million dollars.
The issue I see is that Centurylink has no financial incentive to bring DSL any closer. The population density is too low to ever make a return on their investment. The only way the infrastructure will improve is for another huge stimulus to come. Unfortunately that stimulus only worked for Rural Co-op phone companies that are publicly owned. My inlaws have a summer home in a very rural area of North Carolina. They have a Co-op phone company and they have FIOS. It doesn't work because the local co-op ran out of stimulus money and they don't have the funds or more Gov't stimulus to blow on finishing the infrastructure.
I choose 6 Mbps because it's the cheapest plan and I don't care about high definition.
This space intentionally left blank
uh... Google internet speed test tells me that I get about 15 Mbps down:
Your Internet connection should be able to handle streaming an HD video. If multiple devices are streaming video at the same time, you may run into some slowdowns.
and yet... this is not "broadband"??? seriously, FCC, who is paying you to define these words? Verizon?
Might makes right irrelevant.
If you applied this same logic to electricity and phone service, rural America would still be without power and phone service. This country has managed to get 20th century technology out to rural areas, we can do the same with 21st century technology. I'm sure you recognize that high speed internet is used for much more that HD streaming. If rural areas had high speed internet their homes would be worth more, property taxes might actually go down since it would be easier to establish a business base and quality of life would be enhanced for many.
You're not the first user to suggest moving. But several other users think "only a raving lunatic" would "live like a nomad chasing ISPs".
Something that the FCC is completely missing is latency. Even if you get faster speeds like satellite, or cellular/wireless, you end up with high latency which removes a lot of capabilities. Working remote on high latency connections is terrible, and gaming is out, just to name a couple things.
That doesn't even begin to include the crazy small data caps on those kinds of services.
I live within 20 miles of downtown Denver and have as my fastest option 3 Mbps DSL from CenturyLink. About 6 years ago we were upgraded from 1.5 to 3 Mbps. This pathetic situation has remained the same over the approximately the past 20 years despite letters of complaint to CenturyLink and the FCC. I have no other options other than slower and data-capped services like satellite or cell service. I don't live in "the country." CenturyLink has no plans to upgrade the service in the immediate future. They have a monopoly in our neighborhood and charge broadband prices for non-broadband service. There is no cable in our neighborhood, so again, no reasonable alternative. I just wanted to make the point that people with poor internet service don't all live in the middle of Death Valley.
Sig expected Real Soon Now.
Well, at least outside of Cook County, there is no support for their copper, no dedication to improvements. I had to bite the bullet and jump to comcast just recently, because 900k-1.2m down was just terrible.
See subject: Hardcoded favorites & adblocking (40% of webpage size = ads). Best hosts file creator = APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-4 32/64-bit https://www.google.com/search?...
Ads rob speed, security (malvertising) & privacy (tracking).
Hosts add speed (hardcodes/adblocks), security (bad sites/poisoned dns), reliability (dns down), & anonymity (dns requestlogs/trackers) natively.
Works vs. caps & PUSH ads.
Avg. page = big as Doom http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
Hosts != ClarityRay blockable (vs. souled-out to admen inferior wasteful redundant slow usermode addons)
Less power/cpu/ram + IO use vs. DNS/routers/addons/antivirus (slows you) + less security issues/complexity.
Compliments firewalls (blocking less used IP addys vs. hosts blocking more used domains) & DNS (lightens dns load).
Gets data via 10 security sites.
APK
P.S. - Safe https://www.virustotal.com/en/... (Verified by Malwarebytes' S. Burn "seen the code & it's safe" http://forum.hosts-file.net/vi... )
Then they can't spread their dung as efficiently.
Yes, better to stay where you are and complain...
Ken
How much does it cost to move, especially given land value differences between rural and urban areas?
Lorelai (from Gilmore Girls): Well, we like our Internet slow, okay? We can turn it on, walk around, dance, make a sandwich. With DSL, there's no dancing, no walking, and we'd starve. It'd be all work and no play. Have you not seen The Shining, Mom?