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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.
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.
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
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?
yes my brother in Florida lives in nice subdivision with house less than ten years old, but connects with juno dial-up for $14 a month. Compare that with my mother-in-law in Cambodia where in 1998 they were laying down fiber around her neighborhood, they went from dialup to megabits/sec overnight.
Tell him to stop using it for a month and see what life is like when his work is pissed and his wife isn't happy.
Its not "necessary" in the same way that electricity isn't "necessary," but that's only relevant if you want to live like its 1800 again.
Cars and medicine and flushing toilets aren't "necessary" either but nobody really wants to live like it was the dark ages again either.
The only thing that's strictly "necessary" is for a sufficient number of people to survive to breeding age and pass their genes on to the next generation -- and that's only if you think its necessary for the species as a whole to continue. Everything beyond that is comfort.
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.
I am a geek and a somewhat heavy computer user/downloader (streaming video on YouTube and elsewhere, large file downloads etc etc etc) and even I dont need 25Mb/s to be happy.
The real problem in the US are people stuck with dialup (unusable on today's internet), wireless (slow as hell and very high latency), slow ADSL (ADSL2+ speeds are great if you can get them but many people in the US can only get 1.5Mbps ADSL1 if they are lucky) or slow shared bandwidth options (like cable where the cable companies put far too many people on the one head-end and everyone gets slow speeds all the time).
That and ISPs who have ridiculously low caps (and ridiculously high prices for extra bandwidth if you go over the cap assuming you can even buy more). Wireless providers are the worst offenders here but the big fixed-line ISPs are going in that direction too. Oh and those ISPs who mess with your traffic (e.g. trying to block or restrict BitTorrent or overwriting ads in web pages with their own ads or other scummy things)
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.
Move.
Ken