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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.
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.
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
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!