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Millions In US Still Living Life In Internet Slow Lane (arstechnica.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the loading-bar dept.

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.

8 of 209 comments (clear)

  1. between 3 and 10 Mb/s is slow? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:between 3 and 10 Mb/s is slow? by MikeDataLink · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You obviously don't live in a house with multiple people. Between my Mother-in-law streaming Hulu, my kids gaming while playing Youtube videos, my wife facetiming with the grandkid, and me on a VOIP call with work and 3-5 meg internet connection would be unbearable.

      --
      Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
    2. Re:between 3 and 10 Mb/s is slow? by darkain · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Thank you grandpa...

      Have you looked at the shit programming on TV today? Yes, this is why people choose what to what, and why Hulu and others have such successful businesses.

      Kids watching Youtube? Ever thought about all the amazing educational content on there, again, far better than TV or public education can even imagine to provide?

      Facetime (or other video conferencing) is a fuckton better than telephones. I'm just going to guess you don't even have a family? Some of us would actually LIKE to actually see the people we're talking to who live far away.

  2. Not surprising by Digicrat · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. infrastructure by k6mfw · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
    1. Re:infrastructure by SlaveToTheGrind · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      Baloney. The limited poor choices we have for broadband access today are generally driven by government-protected monopolies -- the exact opposite of free-market competition.

  4. Re:Some folks might not even care by Altrag · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  5. 5.8 million of those offering less than 3Mbps: So? by farble1670 · · Score: 3

    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.