>>>A big thanks on behalf of the tens of millions of people who don't live on the east or west coast for calling their states and homes "a whole lot of nothing." >>>
Well I've worked in Salt Lake and Oklahoma City, and while there's a lot of people living around those cities, in between the cities there's a whole lot of nothing. Let's suppose I lived in southeast Idaho. There's not really much there except rolling hills and cattle. How are you going to run a 1 Mbit line to my house out-in-the-middle of noplace?
Well it's certainly possible, but it will cost a small fortune, and if you asked me "Are you willing to pay $1000/month to get DSL or Cable internet?" my answer's going to be no. So that hookup won't happen.
Nor do I think I should make others pay for my hookup via heavy taxation.
>>>Cable is shared, but DSL!?!?!? What the hell are you smoking?
I'm not smoking anything. I understand how things work whereas you apparently do not. The DSLAM is shared by multiple users, therefore if the DSLAM or its trunk line is only 10 Mbit wide, but you have twenty neighbors all trying to download at the same time, you're going to run into problems. There will only be 500 kbit/s available to each.
I don't know why you keep focusing on Sweden. It's just ONE of 30 member states inside the European Union. The rest of them are rather slow compared to the American states:
- Netherlands (slower than Delaware and Washington States) - Germany (slower than Rhode Island,New Jersey,Massachusetts,Virginia,New York,Colorado,Connecticut,Arizona) - and so on.
If you live in one of these states, the odds are you'll have faster connections than your Dutch or German or Italian or French cousins. And then you mention New York City. I couldn't find any information about NYC's average speed, but I did find several surrounding suburbs with excellent connection:
New York City's top ISPs: WBS 51 Megabit/s ANS 43 Mbit/s RCN 36 Mbit/s
New York State's fastest cities: Greenvale 22 Mbit/s Westhampton 21 Lynnbrook 17 Sayville 17 Carmel, Bellporte, Woodmere, Bethpage, Sound Beach, Wellsville 16
>>>Gore said, "...I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
That's quite a trick considering the net was created in 1969, and Al Gore did not join the Congress until 1977. Maybe he borrowed an Omni from Time Voyager Phineas Bogg and zipped back to the 1960s.
Here's another fullscreen "video" from around 1985. It took all of the Commodore 64's 1 megahertz and 16 color power to generate this gem. Presumably she removes her top after you press the spacebar. (no nudity) http://girls.c64.org/a_anime-tion_02.gif
I still remember my first downloaded porn "video". It was about 64 kilobytes, took about 10 minutes to download, was a grainy 320x200, and only lasted 1/2 a second. It looped repeating the same "action" over-and-over which I'm sure you can guess what that was.
$1000 for an Apple II isn't that bad. Certainly cheaper than the first Macintosh at around $4000. Hmmm. I guess that's why most home hobbyists owned the cheaper $400 Ataris and $200 Commodores.
Milestones:
Killer App (circa 1993) - The hypertext web browser. Prior to its invention few people had a reason to get internet. They were satisfied to just keep using local bulletin boards, but once they saw the Mosaic web browser running on their friend's or their college's IBM or Mac or Amiga, they immediately wanted it.
Carterphone decision (circa 1981) - It eliminated the monopoly AT&T had on the modem and brought competition. People always ask why is competition is needed? This is a perfect example. From the 1950s to the 1980s the only speeds available were 110 bit/s and 300 bit/s. The monopoly caused stagnation. After the breakup of AT&T multiple companies began a "speedwar" that rapidly moved speeds from 300 to 56000 in only ten years time. If AT&T still had a monopoly over 300 baud modems, the 90s's web explosion would have been impossible (too slow).
Usenet/Fidonet (circa 1982) - They weren't originally part of the internet, but they helped set the standards. Most of the emoticons;-) and abbreviations (ROTF-LOL) we use today originated on these early text-only forums. And they allowed people to communicate not just locally, but all around the world like today's web. And it was free (no long-distance charges).
DSL/cable internet (circa 2000) - Allowed people to escape the 56k barrier and download videos, as well as streaming TV shows.
That's about all I can come-up with. Most of the advancement has been gradual.
Ooops I forgot. There was the Q-Link graphical service, which eventually evolved into America Online. Its drawback was that it only worked with Commodore's CASCII set, not IBMs or Apples or Ataris. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Link
I've been using the net since 1987 (shortly after Star Trek TNG premiered). It's been a fun ride going from 1.2k bit/s and pure text. There were a few graphical bulletin board services added in 1989, but they were little more than vector-based graphics and took several minutes to load! None of them had music or video like we have today.
>>>USPS is a monopoly? So it is the exclusive commercial means of sending post across the country?
As a matter of fact, yes it is. I get about 5 bills each month from the electric, phone, credit and other companies. I pay them and put them in my mailbox where it's picked up by..... UPS? Nope. FedEx? Nope. The government mail picks it up. Why? Because they have a monopoly over your mailbox, just the same as Comcast (or Cox or Time-Warner) has a monopoly over the cable lines leading to your home.
Now is that a bad thing? No not in the case of mail because we wouldn't want to have 3 different trucks driving down the street every day to make mail pickup/delivery. It makes more sense to just have 1 truck do all the work, but at the same time we shouldn't call the USPS or Comcast "competitive" when they very clearly have government-granted monopolies.
I believe in calling a spade a spade, not something else.
READ THE CONTEXT of the post/thread. I was talking about extinction-level impacts, like the one that killed the dinosaurs. In the entire existence of not just human beings, but the mammal kingdom, not one has hit. We're wasting resources on an unlikely problem when there are more pressing concerns... like self-annihilation, or starvation, or overpopulation.
So if Mall of America learns that one of their kiosks is selling counterfeit watches, they are obligated to shut it down? Or else be fined by the government? Hmmmm. That's something I never knew before.
Why not? I ran speedtest on my 56k connection a few months ago. It came-up with 5k down and 3k up as expected, and that stat was added to their overall database.
>>>The united states has roughly 1.5 times the population density
Alright.
If population density is not a factor, how come the fastest U.S. states are those with the densest populations (the Northeast I-95 corridor) while the states with the slowest speeds are those with the sparsest populations (Wyoming, Montana, Utah).
If population density is not a factor, how come the fastest E.U. states are those with the densest populations (France, Germany, Netherlands, UK, Italy) while the states with the slowest speeds are those with the sparsest populations (Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal).
Except that a lot of your outlying neighbors probably have nothing faster than dialup. Which drags-down the average to 5.8 Mbit/s... that's 3rd place in Canada (behind MB and BC)...... and somewhere around 25th place compared to the other U.S. and EU states/provinces.
Please don't shoot the messenger (or as Sophocles said, "No one loves the messenger who brings bad news.").
Here's some informative reading for you - Example: "Paula says the umpire made the correct call, but this can't be true, because Paula is a stupid idiot." Assuming the premise is correct Paula's evidence is valueless, but the umpire may nonetheless have made the right call. I may be a "troll" (which is undefined), nonetheless my previously provided data may still be accurate.
>>>I have a max of 10MB on my line, and my neighbor has a max of 5MB, do we assume that the average speed is 7.5MB, even though the ISP might only have 12MB total >>>
No. A lot of studies do exactly what you suggest - work with the *advertized* speeds. But the place where I got my stats, speedtest.net, uses ACTUAL speeds from a wide range of tests all around the world .
>>>how many speeds are there in Arizona to add up?
I have no idea for that specific state, but worldwide the site says "over twenty million tests taken every month", so that would be about 1/2 billion connections tested over the last two years. The top continents are:
Europe 6.4 Mbit/s N.America 6.1 Australia 4.8 Asia 4.3 S.America 2 Africa 1.1
Contrary to what is often said, the North American continent is not "falling behind". In fact the updated U.S. stats now read 6.8 Mbit/s and therefore higher than Europe.
That thing only plays music? Bah. MY record plays 2-hour long movies. True it's not portable but it's still fun with cool Disney movies like Parent Trap and The "Love" Bug:
>>>must be working their hardest to put together a great deal
Oh absolutely. I just have one question - Will this streaming service come with DJs? They are like surrogate friends who also happen to play cool music. Having nothing but song-after-song gets kinda boring.
Yes but you just said "explanations needed to understand the data" which means you'll have interpretations. For example I think "military spending" means tanks, planes, et cetera. But other people say it should also include payments made to Saudi Arabia's kings and nobility to protect the oil supply to run those tanks and planes. Who's right?
I have no idea. And even if you write unbiased, the bias and preconceptions will still sneak-in.
Nope. The Firefox tabs are still on the bottom, where they can quickly accessed with minimal mouse movement. Moving them to the top above all that other crap seems bass-backwards to me.
>>>symmetrical bandwidth to be included in the definition. You can't really have cloud-based services,
Many of us don't care about cloud-based services because we prefer to keep our word processors and spreadsheets on our c: drives where it's secure. So NO the FCC should not demand symmetrical down/up speeds. Leave it as is. I'd rather have 9 Mbit down and 1 Mbit up, than 5 down and 5 up. The latter is better than the former for my style of internet usage.
If you really want symmetrical service, just buy yourself a dedicated line.
Slashdot Mirror
>>>A big thanks on behalf of the tens of millions of people who don't live on the east or west coast for calling their states and homes "a whole lot of nothing."
>>>
Well I've worked in Salt Lake and Oklahoma City, and while there's a lot of people living around those cities, in between the cities there's a whole lot of nothing. Let's suppose I lived in southeast Idaho. There's not really much there except rolling hills and cattle. How are you going to run a 1 Mbit line to my house out-in-the-middle of noplace?
Well it's certainly possible, but it will cost a small fortune, and if you asked me "Are you willing to pay $1000/month to get DSL or Cable internet?" my answer's going to be no. So that hookup won't happen.
Nor do I think I should make others pay for my hookup via heavy taxation.
>>>Cable is shared, but DSL!?!?!? What the hell are you smoking?
I'm not smoking anything. I understand how things work whereas you apparently do not. The DSLAM is shared by multiple users, therefore if the DSLAM or its trunk line is only 10 Mbit wide, but you have twenty neighbors all trying to download at the same time, you're going to run into problems. There will only be 500 kbit/s available to each.
I don't know why you keep focusing on Sweden. It's just ONE of 30 member states inside the European Union. The rest of them are rather slow compared to the American states:
- Netherlands (slower than Delaware and Washington States)
- Germany (slower than Rhode Island,New Jersey,Massachusetts,Virginia,New York,Colorado,Connecticut,Arizona)
- and so on.
If you live in one of these states, the odds are you'll have faster connections than your Dutch or German or Italian or French cousins. And then you mention New York City. I couldn't find any information about NYC's average speed, but I did find several surrounding suburbs with excellent connection:
New York City's top ISPs:
WBS 51 Megabit/s
ANS 43 Mbit/s
RCN 36 Mbit/s
New York State's fastest cities:
Greenvale 22 Mbit/s
Westhampton 21
Lynnbrook 17
Sayville 17
Carmel, Bellporte, Woodmere, Bethpage, Sound Beach, Wellsville 16
>>>Gore said, "...I took the initiative in creating the Internet."
That's quite a trick considering the net was created in 1969, and Al Gore did not join the Congress until 1977. Maybe he borrowed an Omni from Time Voyager Phineas Bogg and zipped back to the 1960s.
Here's another fullscreen "video" from around 1985. It took all of the Commodore 64's 1 megahertz and 16 color power to generate this gem. Presumably she removes her top after you press the spacebar. (no nudity) http://girls.c64.org/a_anime-tion_02.gif
>>>By that definition, the Internet started on January 1, 1983
Ahhh. So we're actually celebrating ARPAnet's birthday. The internet is still only 26 years old.
>>>thx for the porn
I still remember my first downloaded porn "video". It was about 64 kilobytes, took about 10 minutes to download, was a grainy 320x200, and only lasted 1/2 a second. It looped repeating the same "action" over-and-over which I'm sure you can guess what that was.
I then upgraded to a 4000-color 7 megahertz Amiga so I could get something more realistic-looking. ;-) Anyway here's that original movie that I downloaded ~25 years ago (porn) http://girls.c64.org/a_porno_movie_02.gif . And if for some strange reason you want to download it, you can find it here (porn) http://girls.c64.org/a__show.php?squery=&sfield=&cat=ani&style=&offset=41
$1000 for an Apple II isn't that bad. Certainly cheaper than the first Macintosh at around $4000. Hmmm. I guess that's why most home hobbyists owned the cheaper $400 Ataris and $200 Commodores.
Milestones:
Killer App (circa 1993) - The hypertext web browser. Prior to its invention few people had a reason to get internet. They were satisfied to just keep using local bulletin boards, but once they saw the Mosaic web browser running on their friend's or their college's IBM or Mac or Amiga, they immediately wanted it.
Carterphone decision (circa 1981) - It eliminated the monopoly AT&T had on the modem and brought competition. People always ask why is competition is needed? This is a perfect example. From the 1950s to the 1980s the only speeds available were 110 bit/s and 300 bit/s. The monopoly caused stagnation. After the breakup of AT&T multiple companies began a "speedwar" that rapidly moved speeds from 300 to 56000 in only ten years time. If AT&T still had a monopoly over 300 baud modems, the 90s's web explosion would have been impossible (too slow).
Usenet/Fidonet (circa 1982) - They weren't originally part of the internet, but they helped set the standards. Most of the emoticons ;-) and abbreviations (ROTF-LOL) we use today originated on these early text-only forums. And they allowed people to communicate not just locally, but all around the world like today's web. And it was free (no long-distance charges).
DSL/cable internet (circa 2000) - Allowed people to escape the 56k barrier and download videos, as well as streaming TV shows.
That's about all I can come-up with. Most of the advancement has been gradual.
>>>little more than vector-based graphics
Ooops I forgot. There was the Q-Link graphical service, which eventually evolved into America Online. Its drawback was that it only worked with Commodore's CASCII set, not IBMs or Apples or Ataris. - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Link
When did that transition happen? Late 70s?
I've been using the net since 1987 (shortly after Star Trek TNG premiered). It's been a fun ride going from 1.2k bit/s and pure text. There were a few graphical bulletin board services added in 1989, but they were little more than vector-based graphics and took several minutes to load! None of them had music or video like we have today.
>>>USPS is a monopoly? So it is the exclusive commercial means of sending post across the country?
As a matter of fact, yes it is. I get about 5 bills each month from the electric, phone, credit and other companies. I pay them and put them in my mailbox where it's picked up by..... UPS? Nope. FedEx? Nope. The government mail picks it up. Why? Because they have a monopoly over your mailbox, just the same as Comcast (or Cox or Time-Warner) has a monopoly over the cable lines leading to your home.
Now is that a bad thing? No not in the case of mail because we wouldn't want to have 3 different trucks driving down the street every day to make mail pickup/delivery. It makes more sense to just have 1 truck do all the work, but at the same time we shouldn't call the USPS or Comcast "competitive" when they very clearly have government-granted monopolies.
I believe in calling a spade a spade, not something else.
READ THE CONTEXT of the post/thread. I was talking about extinction-level impacts, like the one that killed the dinosaurs. In the entire existence of not just human beings, but the mammal kingdom, not one has hit. We're wasting resources on an unlikely problem when there are more pressing concerns... like self-annihilation, or starvation, or overpopulation.
So if Mall of America learns that one of their kiosks is selling counterfeit watches, they are obligated to shut it down? Or else be fined by the government? Hmmmm. That's something I never knew before.
>>>Grandma won't be running speedtest on her 56k
Why not? I ran speedtest on my 56k connection a few months ago. It came-up with 5k down and 3k up as expected, and that stat was added to their overall database.
>>>The united states has roughly 1.5 times the population density
Alright.
If population density is not a factor, how come the fastest U.S. states are those with the densest populations (the Northeast I-95 corridor) while the states with the slowest speeds are those with the sparsest populations (Wyoming, Montana, Utah).
If population density is not a factor, how come the fastest E.U. states are those with the densest populations (France, Germany, Netherlands, UK, Italy) while the states with the slowest speeds are those with the sparsest populations (Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal).
>>>According to your chart NS should be #1
Except that a lot of your outlying neighbors probably have nothing faster than dialup. Which drags-down the average to 5.8 Mbit/s... that's 3rd place in Canada (behind MB and BC)...... and somewhere around 25th place compared to the other U.S. and EU states/provinces.
Please don't shoot the messenger (or as Sophocles said, "No one loves the messenger who brings bad news.").
>>> ...is a well-known troll
Here's some informative reading for you - Example: "Paula says the umpire made the correct call, but this can't be true, because Paula is a stupid idiot." Assuming the premise is correct Paula's evidence is valueless, but the umpire may nonetheless have made the right call. I may be a "troll" (which is undefined), nonetheless my previously provided data may still be accurate.
LINK to more useful examples - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem_attack
>>>I have a max of 10MB on my line, and my neighbor has a max of 5MB, do we assume that the average speed is 7.5MB, even though the ISP might only have 12MB total
>>>
No. A lot of studies do exactly what you suggest - work with the *advertized* speeds. But the place where I got my stats, speedtest.net, uses ACTUAL speeds from a wide range of tests all around the world
.
>>>how many speeds are there in Arizona to add up?
I have no idea for that specific state, but worldwide the site says "over twenty million tests taken every month", so that would be about 1/2 billion connections tested over the last two years. The top continents are:
Europe 6.4 Mbit/s
N.America 6.1
Australia 4.8
Asia 4.3
S.America 2
Africa 1.1
Contrary to what is often said, the North American continent is not "falling behind". In fact the updated U.S. stats now read 6.8 Mbit/s and therefore higher than Europe.
That thing only plays music? Bah. MY record plays 2-hour long movies. True it's not portable but it's still fun with cool Disney movies like Parent Trap and The "Love" Bug:
http://www.cedmagic.com/selectavision.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc
>>>must be working their hardest to put together a great deal
Oh absolutely. I just have one question - Will this streaming service come with DJs? They are like surrogate friends who also happen to play cool music. Having nothing but song-after-song gets kinda boring.
Yes but you just said "explanations needed to understand the data" which means you'll have interpretations. For example I think "military spending" means tanks, planes, et cetera. But other people say it should also include payments made to Saudi Arabia's kings and nobility to protect the oil supply to run those tanks and planes. Who's right?
I have no idea. And even if you write unbiased, the bias and preconceptions will still sneak-in.
Snake-bummers? Asp-enders? You could just say "asshole". This is slashdot; we don't have censorship here.
(turns on location bar and bookmarks bar)
Nope. The Firefox tabs are still on the bottom, where they can quickly accessed with minimal mouse movement. Moving them to the top above all that other crap seems bass-backwards to me.
When you add-up all the speeds across the Russian Federation and Arizona, you get an average equal to 7 Megabit/second.
>>>symmetrical bandwidth to be included in the definition. You can't really have cloud-based services,
Many of us don't care about cloud-based services because we prefer to keep our word processors and spreadsheets on our c: drives where it's secure. So NO the FCC should not demand symmetrical down/up speeds. Leave it as is. I'd rather have 9 Mbit down and 1 Mbit up, than 5 down and 5 up. The latter is better than the former for my style of internet usage.
If you really want symmetrical service, just buy yourself a dedicated line.