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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.
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.
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.
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)
>Crony Capitalism for ya!
Where's Trump? He should be twittering about this at least.
do you follow who he's been appointing? he's the king of the cronies. Plutocracy to the max.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
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.
Meanwhile, in Australia..........waits for comments about the dismal speeds us Australians face!
Eh, pihole is faster.
Where do they get this seemingly arbitrary figure of 25Mb/s, anyway?
i have 3.5 and netflix works fine
love is just extroverted narcissism
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.
And you get the annoying, never-ending ads on Slashdot for free!
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
I think they already used that trick once.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Pssh. You aren't a real programmer until you've programmed by flipping front panel toggle switches with your reaching stick.
Kids these days. With dial up the struggle was real.
it does not work fine, you need the government to step in and help you at once.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
So far, he's appointing people that seem to want to deregulate everything. So we'll end up with blisteringly fast internet for the 1% who can afford it, and everyone else will be as good as cut off as providers zero-rate their preferred services and blackball basically everything else with slow lanes and whatever other schemes they come up with.
I'm just hoping some of his appointments change their tune once they've seen what things are like from the other side. Trump himself surprised everyone so maybe a couple of his cronies will do the same.
Odd that your upload speed is actually better than your download speed.
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.
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.
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...
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
I live near a guy who brought in electricity from 4 miles away.
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
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 choose 6 Mbps because it's the cheapest plan and I don't care about high definition.
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$49 is reasonable for 25MB/s.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
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.
Hosts files don't block inline spam, such as yours, which also wastes bandwidth.
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.
There is a lot of educational content on youtube for kids, as well as silly stuff, kids needs to unplug too and laugh at silly shit from time to time. My kids certainly do after all the homework my wife and I make them do.
I downloaded as much as I could and put it all in an external drive attached to my smart TV. I ripped all DVDs we own, specially Disney and Studio Ghibli movies and put them also in the drive. We are talking about hundreds of hours of programming. All DVDs are now in storage, and kids do not hog my internet connection anymore.
From time to time they want to watch something else so I borrow from the public library, and I let them stream off Hulu at specific times. If they don't want to watch what I have on the external drive, then I give them the option of doing more homework/housework or shut up and watch it (guess which one they choose, all the time?)
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".
[Kernel-level DNS blocking uses] Less power/cpu/ram + IO use vs. DNS/routers [...] + less security issues/complexity.
Eh, pihole is faster.
You still need to provide power to that Raspberry Pi. And you didn't address "complexity", as you also need to build your Pi (or do they come in cases yet?), install Pi-Hole, configure Pi-Hole, and keep Pi-Hole updated.
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.
Infrastructure buildout is certainly a problem as well, but its not the one I'm referring to.
If Trump's acceptance speech is anything to go by (and given his propensity for blathering on about whatever crosses his mind that day, it may well not be,) he might actually do some good in the realm of infrastructure.. though I imagine he was probably thinking more of highways and bridges than fiber optics. We'll see though.
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?