While it is all well and good to say that Apple is not evil, Apple is more like the Chinese Government than Microsoft EVER was. Microsoft never put limits on what you can or can not install or run on a Windows based computer, and the only reason there is any sort of lock-down on the Xbox 360 is primarily due to copyright enforcement reasons.
Apple on the other hand, has been doing things like saying, "We will not allow Adobe Flash on our mobile devices", not because of any true technical reasons, but because Apple does not like Flash. Flash allows applications on web pages, which means that Apple does not get an automatic cut of any revenues from said applications. This is a VERY monopolistic policy, and Microsoft would have had thousands of lawsuits if they tried to do something similar. Even back in the days of the browser wars, Microsoft never BLOCKED the installation of Netscape. Apple has also started to force content publishers into going through the damned App Store, where Apple gets a 30 percent cut.
So, you may not call it evil, but I'd say that Apple is using tactics that INVITE people to call them evil, or monopolistic in its policies. Looking to improve profit is normal in business, but doing it while screwing your customers is generally frowned upon. It is like Best Buy increasing prices on products that are in short supply in their warehouse.
It all comes down to use of the word, not about if a word can be used or not. Apple can not name a PRODUCT "Windows", yet it can use the term "windows" when talking about a GUI element. On the flip side, an "Application Store", or "App Store" should be seen as a generic term for anywhere you can buy applications. There is no real competition here, since the APPLE App store does not offer products for other platforms, the Android "app store" would be for Android devices, etc. App store is really a convenient label, so it shouldn't be something that can be trademarked...the next thing you know, they might try to trademark the name "store".
We are also not talking about a product that is sold here, or a company name. The Apple App store is there as a supporting element of Apple products, in the same way that any other "non-competing" app store for other platforms is there to support that given platform. Is there anything really unique about the Apple App Store since no competing sources of applications are even allowed on the iDevices?
Many older low end systems do not provide enough power to the USB ports to handle the demand by USB devices during the POST process, and this will cause the problem. I have seen it where just unplugging the USB cable to the printer is enough to work around the problem. Low end Intel based Dells are the systems I run into that have had this problem.
...can run unattended for years. So, they set these things up and don't bother paying close attention. The Chinese government has no problem with pollution, so when there IS a problem with one of these plants, I guess we will see all the people wearing masks over their faces in public replaced by radiation suits.
I agree that the USA needs to put more effort into nuclear power generation, but I seriously hope that proper monitoring and precautions are in place, no matter how safe the system is. We need more power generation in this country, BEFORE we have too many people that switch to EVs and put an extra load on the power grid.
There is nothing that says that the laws of the USA automatically apply to people in other countries. Seriously, we are talking about the Internet here, and in the same way that international spammers are difficult to prosecute due to the laws of one country not necessarily applying to people from other countries, there is nothing that says that someone from another country should be able to use the US court system for a BS lawsuit like this. If anything, the US government should charge the guy for the right to use the US legal system for this stupid claim.
The problem here is that you have the difference between the speeds the ISPs can run at and the speeds from the customer to Netflix. I am using the normal Cablevision 15Mbps service, and I DO see speeds up at around 11Mbps. Now, if I have to go through 5 other ISPs to get from Cablevision to the Netflix servers, the problem is the connections between ISPs is where the limits are, not Cablevision itself. The same may apply to the other ISPs out there, where you get the speeds, and you can get to many web sites at the high speeds, but getting to Netflix is where there could be problems.
Back in April, it seems that Netflix moved to the Amazon hosting....could it POSSIBLY be that they are not seeing great speeds due to Amazon?
The effort to construct each new ship is in itself a learning experience. As a result, even though each new ship would be that much better, it would take far longer to try to skip generations. Taken another way, if Intel waited until they could make a 16MHz chip, they would have gone bankrupt, so making the 4.77MHz 8088 was well worth the investment. While these ships may not be commercial vehicles, the technology that emerges as a function of building each ship(due to R&D) can help other projects, and will help mitigate the costs.
Now, you also have to consider that while 100 years may seem like nothing when you are looking at the complete flow of time, look at how far science and technology have come in the past 110 years, from the automobile becomming something common, to flight, to rockets and satellites, and then to landing on the moon. From that perspective, the past 100 years have been fairly eventful when it comes to science and technology. I fully expect that in the next 100 years, we WILL have bases on The Moon, and possibly Mars.
Historically, 3D has been the stupid crap that "flies off the screen", which of course is very limited and does nothing to really enhance the movie experience. What many people have not been thinking about is when the entire film is done in 3D, there is a greater depth of field in all scenes, which DOES enhance the potential enjoyment of watching the movie. Without going into "how real does the 3D look" issue with people being very crticial of the current 3D implementations, one thing I noticed when I watched Avatar at an IMAX was that the scenes in the movie had a far greater field of depth to them than your normal non-3D movies.
Now, as was the case with the move from mono to stereo, and then to surround sound, this enhancement in the field of view should be seen as a positive improvement overall. Did we NEED stereo sound when it came out? What about surround sound? Just adding that depth will act as a positive improvement, and let the "objects popping off the screen" garbage die.
I can see it now, you have the kids that are non-agressive and withdrawn suddenly being encouraged to play violent video games in the hopes their increased agression will be better than having them be withdrawn. Considering how poorly many children are raised, I can see this being done by parents who hear about this and want more outgoing children.
Government sponsorship of broadband deployment is your answer. A national backbone that is paid for by the government and that is continually upgraded to meet the demands tends to solve this sort of problem. In the USA, the government is dominated by non-technical people with a legal background that have ZERO interest or desire in seeing technology thrive.
Do you have any evidence of this, or is this just a conspiracy theory? There is a difference between when an ISP is already serving an area, and then tries to block competition via legal channels and an ISP blocking the development of Internet connectivity in areas that have no access. Objecting to an ISP blocking competition is one thing, but if you think a town without broadband is having broadband access blocked by an ISP that does not provide service there, then please provide some examples.
Most people see technology as the future source of jobs, and around the world, countries have been giving incentives to businesses when it comes to technology development....EXCEPT here in the USA. Now, ISPs are just one side of the technology sector, you also have software development, chip fabrication development, chip design, plus other pieces of equipment that lead to growth in other areas. Just because manufacturing may be cheaper in China does NOT mean that the development of the technology should be left to those in Asia, Europe, or other places in the world.
Now, when the telephone system was deployed, with a lot of government money, AT&T really was a government sanctioned monopoly. Since we do not have any true NATIONAL monopoly, rather than just give the money to one company, the government can actually go back to the original design of the ARPANET, where the government has a national backbone that towns and other ISPs can tie into. That national backbone would be there to provide access to those small towns in the middle of nowhere when it would not be commercially profitable. Since the government would be the one setting it up, that is where the idea of Net Neutrality can come into play, since there would be nothing on THAT backbone that gets a higher priority than anything else.
To add to your response, the distance of each neighborhood from other neighborhoods also comes into play. If many of these small towns are 50-75 miles away from a larger town/city, that is a VERY different situation than you see in most of Europe. So getting the service to the town is more expensive in many situations than connecting the homes into a local network.
Do you know how many thousands of small towns with less than 2000 population each we have here in the USA? All of those small towns add up, which is why you see politics shift back and forth from Democrat to Republican and back again. Most of the midwest consists of small towns, with a few larger "towns" here and there. Individually they may not be all that large, but added together, it really adds up.
That is caused by ISPs not having enough bandwidth on their backbone to handle the demand. Cable modems can handle over 100Mbps, but if the backbone can't handle EVERYONE constantly running at a given speed, then it will bog down. Your local ISPs have a good reason to be against P2P traffic if their backbone can't handle the demands of the local users. This is why most cable providers set the speed to 10Mbps or even less, because their network can't handle going faster without upgrades.
We have the problem where the governments(Federal, state, and local) are broke, so doesn't want to fund helping the ISPs lay more fiber to handle the issue. Unreliable is a function of how well protected the cables are from both natural disasters, as well as the stupidity of humans who cut the wrong cables or just make mistakes like road workers digging in the wrong place and cutting through cables. The need for MORE redundancy is there, but in general, you just have a LOT of people who CONSTANTLY download, and no backbone could satisfy that demand, unless they have enough bandwidth for EVERY user to use 100 percent of their bandwidth at all times.
It is all based on what is expected when it comes to content. With a high speed connection, clicking to go to the wrong web page isn't a big deal, you just hit the "back" button on your browser and go to the right one...only a few seconds are lost. On a slower connection, it can be minutes wasted(as it was back in the days of dial-up). All the advertisements, and animations, and videos that are just embeded in web pages are ONLY there because the people who design the web pages expect people to have DSL or Cable connections here in the USA.
Now, in Africa, you may not go to many web sites that are based here in the USA, so you may not see/feel how slow they would be on a slower connection. If the pages that you go to had as much garbage cluttering the screen as the ones we have to deal with here, 512Kbps wouldn't seem acceptable, even if it is faster than dial-up.
Streaming a video at what quality? There is a difference between streaming a 320x200 video and streaming a 1920x1080 video. Having people with slow connections means that there will be less of a push to increase the quality of streaming video clips.
Back when the World Wide Web first got started, even having pictures in a web page was limited, because people were on 2400 and 9600 baud modems for the most part, with only those in college/university and military having a fast enough connection for it to be useful, and even then, you would wait for a while for the pictures to load. Netscape was far better than NCSA Mosaic, even with version 0.8. As modem speeds increased, more and more pictures were added to web pages, but even then, you didn't have streaming videos, you had to download videos to watch them. The higher the "expected" speeds are of others, the higher the quality of what you will see on the Internet, and that is what you are missing.
Many people have monitors that are 1920x1080 these days, and in the next ten years, we will probably see the end of 4:3 displays(which are slowly fading out as those old CRTs are retired or just die). Streaming video will go from 320 lines of resolution up to 720 lines once the majority of viewers can actually make use of it, and that is why people need higer than 5Mbps connections. There is talk about broadcast TV eventually fading away with streaming content replacing it, but the general public will not make that switch if the quality of streamed programming is not at least at the level they get from current broadcast TV. That means you would need to have streaming of 1080i or 720p programming, and THAT is something the current Internet infrastructure just can't handle just yet.
Now, as far as you not feeling "left out" with your 4Mbps connection, before you had ANY high speed connection, you might have been satisfied with 53k(regulated max speed for dial-up here in the USA). Now that you are at 4Mbps, could you REALLY go back to dial-up? If you were up at the 10Mbps range, going back to 4Mbps really does feel like a much slower connection.
Population density is a key to this. Even the smallest towns in Holland have a higher population density than many places in the USA, and houses are not spread out for miles and yet considered a part of the same "town". This makes it far easier and more cost effective to run the wires. The Dutch people also have a different mindset than most people in the USA since the PEOPLE do not feel they are entitled to EVERYTHING that other people have, and it leads to fewer problems. People may want more, but that is different than feeling like the government owes it to them, and as a result, you get fewer PUBLIC complaints.
The people in this country seem to feel that just because someone else has $1 million in the bank that they should too, without feeling like they should have to work at it to get there. This is different than wishing they could, but knowing that they should aim to improve their own lives in the hopes of eventually getting to where they want to be.
Back to the topic at hand... If everyone in these small towns had their homes in neat little towns, rather than small homes spread out over 20 miles, it would be far easier to provide Internet service with some government assistance to run the wires TO that small town. Instead, it costs several thousand dollars worth of cables and labor to run the wires to each home, and the home owners may not have the money to pay for it. It all comes down to how towns were founded in the USA. Towns founded before the invention of the automobile tend to have homes closer together(and in Europe that is what you see), and here in the USA, we find towns with the populations spread out, and some that don't even have a town center and are just homes and neighborhoods spread out without a business district to act as a core. When most people live over 20 miles from where they work, that leads to a very different culture when it comes to getting services.
If there is no profit in providing service to a town, why should a private corporation spend the money to provide that service? Seriously, there is a difference between charity, which can be written off on your taxes, and losing profitability by providing service to a small town that will NEVER bring in enough revenues to even meet the maintenance costs. Seriously, are businesses in the business to make money? For cellular, at least when people with the service travel, they will be able to make use of that service in the middle of nowhere, so it can be seen as good for ALL customers to add towers in new places, but for home broadband, what use does someone in Chicago have if someone from a 1000 population town in West Virginia has fast Internet access?
It really comes down to Government needing to provide that access in places where no other company can afford to provide it. Remember the telephone system? That was pushed by the US government too, otherwise the same towns that have no broadband today would not have telephone wires, because there is NO profit in running those wires in the first place.
The government did the highway system, not private companies that decided that they had enough extra money to run the roads through the middle of nowhere. The US government has focused on funding companies that provide technology to the military, but has not done anything to encourage technology in the private sector. Startup tech companies have really died off since the tech crash of 2001-2002, and there has been very little recovery since then to ENCOURAGE people to go into the science and technology fields, except of course for medicine...where you find drugs to improve your skin, but it may cause heart attacks, strokes, kidney and/or liver failure, anal leakage, and other problems.
When the government either pays for the deployment of fiber, or helps, that is a big part of the problem. The US Government doesn't do much to help ISPs when it comes to fiber deployment or helping companies provide access, so if it won't be profitable, why should an ISP run the cables? Seriously, look at West Virginia....do you really see the potential for profit in providing high speed Internet when many people can barely afford $20/month? The same applies to the cellular networks, if the population density is too low to get enough paying customers to even break even on the project, it takes a well financed company that can afford the LOSS of money to provide access there.
The government needs to jump in and pay for the fiber and maintenance to connect these small towns before a private company will be able to jump in to provide the service to the individual customers, and even then, it is hit and miss if some of these small towns even have enough people to make THAT profitable.
There are several things here that you don't take into account. First, the population density issue. Do we know that all rural areas even have an Internet connection? If someone does not have an Internet connection, they don't get counted, so if you don't have ANY dial-up, then 100 percent of people connected to the Internet are on a high-speed connection. The size of the USA DOES matter, since bringing high speed access to towns with a population of under 1000 isn't terribly cost effective. You also have the issue of WHO provides the Internet connectivity. If you leave it to private companies, then you won't see a push to get high speed broadband into homes.
Now, what I have not heard recently is if the US government is helping "broadband" providers get their backbones up to speed. If a provider does not have the money to lay more fiber and add more connections to different ISPs, it would be worse to raise the speed of the connections to individual users since the backbone can't handle it. In general, the US Government has done very little over the past 20 years to help promote technology or innovation in the private sector(outside of the military support industry). Yes, research universities get government financing, but when the tech sector ran into problems in 2001, the government did NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING to help keep good technology companies from either going out of business, or being sucked up by the large players. The result was a drop in innovation, since it became very difficult for good IDEAS by individuals to get funding to start new businesses. Without innovation, new technologies for broadband won't come out nearly as fast, and you end up with great ideas that get squashed by the large companies that don't value innovation as much as "will it make us a huge amount of money in the next six months?".
Evidence....I worked for Netcom in their operations group, and that was one of the reasons for not getting an IPv6 block from what I heard at the time.
While IPv6 has been known about for over a decade, the problem is that in order for an ISP to get a block of IPv6 addresses, they would need to give up their block of IPv4 addresses. Now, back in 2000, what ISP would be willing to give up their static block of IP addresses for something virtually no one else was using, and which would cause customer outages for MONTHS while the IPv6 stuff was tested and people figured out how to work with it?
This was the reason for not going to IPv6 early on, and it was a stupid policy. If ISPs were given a full year to migrate to IPv6 before having to give up their IPv4 addresses, then there wouldn't have been an issue. Instead, it was a "you get IPv6 addresses, you must give up your IPv4 address block NOW" type of situation.
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While it is all well and good to say that Apple is not evil, Apple is more like the Chinese Government than Microsoft EVER was. Microsoft never put limits on what you can or can not install or run on a Windows based computer, and the only reason there is any sort of lock-down on the Xbox 360 is primarily due to copyright enforcement reasons.
Apple on the other hand, has been doing things like saying, "We will not allow Adobe Flash on our mobile devices", not because of any true technical reasons, but because Apple does not like Flash. Flash allows applications on web pages, which means that Apple does not get an automatic cut of any revenues from said applications. This is a VERY monopolistic policy, and Microsoft would have had thousands of lawsuits if they tried to do something similar. Even back in the days of the browser wars, Microsoft never BLOCKED the installation of Netscape. Apple has also started to force content publishers into going through the damned App Store, where Apple gets a 30 percent cut.
So, you may not call it evil, but I'd say that Apple is using tactics that INVITE people to call them evil, or monopolistic in its policies. Looking to improve profit is normal in business, but doing it while screwing your customers is generally frowned upon. It is like Best Buy increasing prices on products that are in short supply in their warehouse.
It all comes down to use of the word, not about if a word can be used or not. Apple can not name a PRODUCT "Windows", yet it can use the term "windows" when talking about a GUI element. On the flip side, an "Application Store", or "App Store" should be seen as a generic term for anywhere you can buy applications. There is no real competition here, since the APPLE App store does not offer products for other platforms, the Android "app store" would be for Android devices, etc. App store is really a convenient label, so it shouldn't be something that can be trademarked...the next thing you know, they might try to trademark the name "store".
We are also not talking about a product that is sold here, or a company name. The Apple App store is there as a supporting element of Apple products, in the same way that any other "non-competing" app store for other platforms is there to support that given platform. Is there anything really unique about the Apple App Store since no competing sources of applications are even allowed on the iDevices?
Many older low end systems do not provide enough power to the USB ports to handle the demand by USB devices during the POST process, and this will cause the problem. I have seen it where just unplugging the USB cable to the printer is enough to work around the problem. Low end Intel based Dells are the systems I run into that have had this problem.
...can run unattended for years. So, they set these things up and don't bother paying close attention. The Chinese government has no problem with pollution, so when there IS a problem with one of these plants, I guess we will see all the people wearing masks over their faces in public replaced by radiation suits.
I agree that the USA needs to put more effort into nuclear power generation, but I seriously hope that proper monitoring and precautions are in place, no matter how safe the system is. We need more power generation in this country, BEFORE we have too many people that switch to EVs and put an extra load on the power grid.
There is nothing that says that the laws of the USA automatically apply to people in other countries. Seriously, we are talking about the Internet here, and in the same way that international spammers are difficult to prosecute due to the laws of one country not necessarily applying to people from other countries, there is nothing that says that someone from another country should be able to use the US court system for a BS lawsuit like this. If anything, the US government should charge the guy for the right to use the US legal system for this stupid claim.
The problem here is that you have the difference between the speeds the ISPs can run at and the speeds from the customer to Netflix. I am using the normal Cablevision 15Mbps service, and I DO see speeds up at around 11Mbps. Now, if I have to go through 5 other ISPs to get from Cablevision to the Netflix servers, the problem is the connections between ISPs is where the limits are, not Cablevision itself. The same may apply to the other ISPs out there, where you get the speeds, and you can get to many web sites at the high speeds, but getting to Netflix is where there could be problems.
Back in April, it seems that Netflix moved to the Amazon hosting....could it POSSIBLY be that they are not seeing great speeds due to Amazon?
The effort to construct each new ship is in itself a learning experience. As a result, even though each new ship would be that much better, it would take far longer to try to skip generations. Taken another way, if Intel waited until they could make a 16MHz chip, they would have gone bankrupt, so making the 4.77MHz 8088 was well worth the investment. While these ships may not be commercial vehicles, the technology that emerges as a function of building each ship(due to R&D) can help other projects, and will help mitigate the costs.
Now, you also have to consider that while 100 years may seem like nothing when you are looking at the complete flow of time, look at how far science and technology have come in the past 110 years, from the automobile becomming something common, to flight, to rockets and satellites, and then to landing on the moon. From that perspective, the past 100 years have been fairly eventful when it comes to science and technology. I fully expect that in the next 100 years, we WILL have bases on The Moon, and possibly Mars.
Historically, 3D has been the stupid crap that "flies off the screen", which of course is very limited and does nothing to really enhance the movie experience. What many people have not been thinking about is when the entire film is done in 3D, there is a greater depth of field in all scenes, which DOES enhance the potential enjoyment of watching the movie. Without going into "how real does the 3D look" issue with people being very crticial of the current 3D implementations, one thing I noticed when I watched Avatar at an IMAX was that the scenes in the movie had a far greater field of depth to them than your normal non-3D movies.
Now, as was the case with the move from mono to stereo, and then to surround sound, this enhancement in the field of view should be seen as a positive improvement overall. Did we NEED stereo sound when it came out? What about surround sound? Just adding that depth will act as a positive improvement, and let the "objects popping off the screen" garbage die.
I can see it now, you have the kids that are non-agressive and withdrawn suddenly being encouraged to play violent video games in the hopes their increased agression will be better than having them be withdrawn. Considering how poorly many children are raised, I can see this being done by parents who hear about this and want more outgoing children.
Government sponsorship of broadband deployment is your answer. A national backbone that is paid for by the government and that is continually upgraded to meet the demands tends to solve this sort of problem. In the USA, the government is dominated by non-technical people with a legal background that have ZERO interest or desire in seeing technology thrive.
Do you have any evidence of this, or is this just a conspiracy theory? There is a difference between when an ISP is already serving an area, and then tries to block competition via legal channels and an ISP blocking the development of Internet connectivity in areas that have no access. Objecting to an ISP blocking competition is one thing, but if you think a town without broadband is having broadband access blocked by an ISP that does not provide service there, then please provide some examples.
Most people see technology as the future source of jobs, and around the world, countries have been giving incentives to businesses when it comes to technology development....EXCEPT here in the USA. Now, ISPs are just one side of the technology sector, you also have software development, chip fabrication development, chip design, plus other pieces of equipment that lead to growth in other areas. Just because manufacturing may be cheaper in China does NOT mean that the development of the technology should be left to those in Asia, Europe, or other places in the world.
Now, when the telephone system was deployed, with a lot of government money, AT&T really was a government sanctioned monopoly. Since we do not have any true NATIONAL monopoly, rather than just give the money to one company, the government can actually go back to the original design of the ARPANET, where the government has a national backbone that towns and other ISPs can tie into. That national backbone would be there to provide access to those small towns in the middle of nowhere when it would not be commercially profitable. Since the government would be the one setting it up, that is where the idea of Net Neutrality can come into play, since there would be nothing on THAT backbone that gets a higher priority than anything else.
To add to your response, the distance of each neighborhood from other neighborhoods also comes into play. If many of these small towns are 50-75 miles away from a larger town/city, that is a VERY different situation than you see in most of Europe. So getting the service to the town is more expensive in many situations than connecting the homes into a local network.
Do you know how many thousands of small towns with less than 2000 population each we have here in the USA? All of those small towns add up, which is why you see politics shift back and forth from Democrat to Republican and back again. Most of the midwest consists of small towns, with a few larger "towns" here and there. Individually they may not be all that large, but added together, it really adds up.
That is caused by ISPs not having enough bandwidth on their backbone to handle the demand. Cable modems can handle over 100Mbps, but if the backbone can't handle EVERYONE constantly running at a given speed, then it will bog down. Your local ISPs have a good reason to be against P2P traffic if their backbone can't handle the demands of the local users. This is why most cable providers set the speed to 10Mbps or even less, because their network can't handle going faster without upgrades.
We have the problem where the governments(Federal, state, and local) are broke, so doesn't want to fund helping the ISPs lay more fiber to handle the issue. Unreliable is a function of how well protected the cables are from both natural disasters, as well as the stupidity of humans who cut the wrong cables or just make mistakes like road workers digging in the wrong place and cutting through cables. The need for MORE redundancy is there, but in general, you just have a LOT of people who CONSTANTLY download, and no backbone could satisfy that demand, unless they have enough bandwidth for EVERY user to use 100 percent of their bandwidth at all times.
It is all based on what is expected when it comes to content. With a high speed connection, clicking to go to the wrong web page isn't a big deal, you just hit the "back" button on your browser and go to the right one...only a few seconds are lost. On a slower connection, it can be minutes wasted(as it was back in the days of dial-up). All the advertisements, and animations, and videos that are just embeded in web pages are ONLY there because the people who design the web pages expect people to have DSL or Cable connections here in the USA.
Now, in Africa, you may not go to many web sites that are based here in the USA, so you may not see/feel how slow they would be on a slower connection. If the pages that you go to had as much garbage cluttering the screen as the ones we have to deal with here, 512Kbps wouldn't seem acceptable, even if it is faster than dial-up.
Streaming a video at what quality? There is a difference between streaming a 320x200 video and streaming a 1920x1080 video. Having people with slow connections means that there will be less of a push to increase the quality of streaming video clips.
Back when the World Wide Web first got started, even having pictures in a web page was limited, because people were on 2400 and 9600 baud modems for the most part, with only those in college/university and military having a fast enough connection for it to be useful, and even then, you would wait for a while for the pictures to load. Netscape was far better than NCSA Mosaic, even with version 0.8. As modem speeds increased, more and more pictures were added to web pages, but even then, you didn't have streaming videos, you had to download videos to watch them. The higher the "expected" speeds are of others, the higher the quality of what you will see on the Internet, and that is what you are missing.
Many people have monitors that are 1920x1080 these days, and in the next ten years, we will probably see the end of 4:3 displays(which are slowly fading out as those old CRTs are retired or just die). Streaming video will go from 320 lines of resolution up to 720 lines once the majority of viewers can actually make use of it, and that is why people need higer than 5Mbps connections. There is talk about broadcast TV eventually fading away with streaming content replacing it, but the general public will not make that switch if the quality of streamed programming is not at least at the level they get from current broadcast TV. That means you would need to have streaming of 1080i or 720p programming, and THAT is something the current Internet infrastructure just can't handle just yet.
Now, as far as you not feeling "left out" with your 4Mbps connection, before you had ANY high speed connection, you might have been satisfied with 53k(regulated max speed for dial-up here in the USA). Now that you are at 4Mbps, could you REALLY go back to dial-up? If you were up at the 10Mbps range, going back to 4Mbps really does feel like a much slower connection.
Population density is a key to this. Even the smallest towns in Holland have a higher population density than many places in the USA, and houses are not spread out for miles and yet considered a part of the same "town". This makes it far easier and more cost effective to run the wires. The Dutch people also have a different mindset than most people in the USA since the PEOPLE do not feel they are entitled to EVERYTHING that other people have, and it leads to fewer problems. People may want more, but that is different than feeling like the government owes it to them, and as a result, you get fewer PUBLIC complaints.
The people in this country seem to feel that just because someone else has $1 million in the bank that they should too, without feeling like they should have to work at it to get there. This is different than wishing they could, but knowing that they should aim to improve their own lives in the hopes of eventually getting to where they want to be.
Back to the topic at hand...
If everyone in these small towns had their homes in neat little towns, rather than small homes spread out over 20 miles, it would be far easier to provide Internet service with some government assistance to run the wires TO that small town. Instead, it costs several thousand dollars worth of cables and labor to run the wires to each home, and the home owners may not have the money to pay for it. It all comes down to how towns were founded in the USA. Towns founded before the invention of the automobile tend to have homes closer together(and in Europe that is what you see), and here in the USA, we find towns with the populations spread out, and some that don't even have a town center and are just homes and neighborhoods spread out without a business district to act as a core. When most people live over 20 miles from where they work, that leads to a very different culture when it comes to getting services.
If there is no profit in providing service to a town, why should a private corporation spend the money to provide that service? Seriously, there is a difference between charity, which can be written off on your taxes, and losing profitability by providing service to a small town that will NEVER bring in enough revenues to even meet the maintenance costs. Seriously, are businesses in the business to make money? For cellular, at least when people with the service travel, they will be able to make use of that service in the middle of nowhere, so it can be seen as good for ALL customers to add towers in new places, but for home broadband, what use does someone in Chicago have if someone from a 1000 population town in West Virginia has fast Internet access?
It really comes down to Government needing to provide that access in places where no other company can afford to provide it. Remember the telephone system? That was pushed by the US government too, otherwise the same towns that have no broadband today would not have telephone wires, because there is NO profit in running those wires in the first place.
The government did the highway system, not private companies that decided that they had enough extra money to run the roads through the middle of nowhere. The US government has focused on funding companies that provide technology to the military, but has not done anything to encourage technology in the private sector. Startup tech companies have really died off since the tech crash of 2001-2002, and there has been very little recovery since then to ENCOURAGE people to go into the science and technology fields, except of course for medicine...where you find drugs to improve your skin, but it may cause heart attacks, strokes, kidney and/or liver failure, anal leakage, and other problems.
When the government either pays for the deployment of fiber, or helps, that is a big part of the problem. The US Government doesn't do much to help ISPs when it comes to fiber deployment or helping companies provide access, so if it won't be profitable, why should an ISP run the cables? Seriously, look at West Virginia....do you really see the potential for profit in providing high speed Internet when many people can barely afford $20/month? The same applies to the cellular networks, if the population density is too low to get enough paying customers to even break even on the project, it takes a well financed company that can afford the LOSS of money to provide access there.
The government needs to jump in and pay for the fiber and maintenance to connect these small towns before a private company will be able to jump in to provide the service to the individual customers, and even then, it is hit and miss if some of these small towns even have enough people to make THAT profitable.
There are several things here that you don't take into account. First, the population density issue. Do we know that all rural areas even have an Internet connection? If someone does not have an Internet connection, they don't get counted, so if you don't have ANY dial-up, then 100 percent of people connected to the Internet are on a high-speed connection. The size of the USA DOES matter, since bringing high speed access to towns with a population of under 1000 isn't terribly cost effective. You also have the issue of WHO provides the Internet connectivity. If you leave it to private companies, then you won't see a push to get high speed broadband into homes.
Now, what I have not heard recently is if the US government is helping "broadband" providers get their backbones up to speed. If a provider does not have the money to lay more fiber and add more connections to different ISPs, it would be worse to raise the speed of the connections to individual users since the backbone can't handle it. In general, the US Government has done very little over the past 20 years to help promote technology or innovation in the private sector(outside of the military support industry). Yes, research universities get government financing, but when the tech sector ran into problems in 2001, the government did NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING to help keep good technology companies from either going out of business, or being sucked up by the large players. The result was a drop in innovation, since it became very difficult for good IDEAS by individuals to get funding to start new businesses. Without innovation, new technologies for broadband won't come out nearly as fast, and you end up with great ideas that get squashed by the large companies that don't value innovation as much as "will it make us a huge amount of money in the next six months?".
My information is probably a bit outdated, since it has been over 10 years since I worked in that side of the industry.
Evidence....I worked for Netcom in their operations group, and that was one of the reasons for not getting an IPv6 block from what I heard at the time.
While IPv6 has been known about for over a decade, the problem is that in order for an ISP to get a block of IPv6 addresses, they would need to give up their block of IPv4 addresses. Now, back in 2000, what ISP would be willing to give up their static block of IP addresses for something virtually no one else was using, and which would cause customer outages for MONTHS while the IPv6 stuff was tested and people figured out how to work with it?
This was the reason for not going to IPv6 early on, and it was a stupid policy. If ISPs were given a full year to migrate to IPv6 before having to give up their IPv4 addresses, then there wouldn't have been an issue. Instead, it was a "you get IPv6 addresses, you must give up your IPv4 address block NOW" type of situation.