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I am genuinely perplexed reading the comments here about how bad US internet is. Knock on wood, I have basically never felt bandwidth or latency constrained in

I am genuinely perplexed reading the comments here about how bad US internet is. Knock on wood, I have basically never felt bandwidth or latency constrained in practical terms once the dial-up days ended. I forget what plan I pay for with my cable provider but I just tested to 200 Megabit down and 18 up. That sounds low compared to numbers people throw around here but in reality my wife and I are able to Zoom or stream at the same time, browse in parallel and basically never feel any impact of latency. Basically, everything we want to do in real time works in real time and anything large I want to download (eg: linux ISOs) takes just a few seconds. Whatever numbers we are throwing around for comparison just don't seem to be practical concerns. We're in NYC. With COVID, my coworkers scattered all over the US - east, west and south. Nobody put in a particular effort to look for places based on connectivity quality and yet everyone is able to WFH fine. Everyone moved to either be close to family, to a warmer client, or to skiing and the mountains. And yet somehow everyone ended up with great connectivity that allows us to seamlessly run a large and successful firm. It's just funny to hear people complain about how bad things are when in reality everything works mainly fine. Like - really - what are you actually unable to do? (I am genuinely curious) My internet bill is $38 in NYC by the way. RCN cable. One final thing - it's nonsensical for people to say "I have X connectivity and I am in a Central European village." Obviously... the us installed its infrastructure before you did and it works well enough so we're not going to tear it out and replace it for no reason. You didn't have connectivity until much later so of course you're currently using newer technology. At some point we'll have to upgrade ours and leap ahead of you again.

noahtallen 6y ago
> We're in NYC Exactly, this conversation is about how terrible internet is when you aren’t in the most densely populated urban areas. Yes, it’s mostly fine in cities and even ok inside some small towns. It’s usually terrible when you live outside of the small-town city limits and not on a state highway. > and it works well enough so we’re not going to tear it out Your 200Mbps connection is definitely not on original infrastructure. For the 50 million plus people living with DSL connections which get barely 6mbps download on a good day, they would not agree that the older infra we have “works fine”. I know many people with this story because I’m from a part of the country like that — drive across America, and you’ll see that nearly everywhere is very sparsely populated. That covers a lot of people! You might be able to experience this yourself eventually if you go on a road trip and stay at a hotel not in a large city. I don’t think it’s nonsensical to suggest that the US could also be building out a nationwide fiber network, and I think we should be striving towards that.

noahtallen 6y ago

> We're in NYC Exactly, this conversation is about how terrible internet is when you aren’t in the most densely populated urban areas. Yes, it’s mostly fine in cities and even ok inside some small towns. It’s usually terrible when you live outside of the small-town city limits and not on a state highway. > and it works well enough so we’re not going to tear it out Your 200Mbps connection is definitely not on original infrastructure. For the 50 million plus people living with DSL connections which get barely 6mbps download on a good day, they would not agree that the older infra we have “works fine”. I know many people with this story because I’m from a part of the country like that — drive across America, and you’ll see that nearly everywhere is very sparsely populated. That covers a lot of people! You might be able to experience this yourself eventually if you go on a road trip and stay at a hotel not in a large city. I don’t think it’s nonsensical to suggest that the US could also be building out a nationwide fiber network, and I think we should be striving towards that.