14 ms·

ISP announces 86% slowdown “in line with others”

215 points by smackay 5y ago

j-krieger 5y ago
> The surging anti-monopoly movement has been greeted with skepticism from the left, some of whom suspect the whole thing is merely fetishizing competition for its own sake I wish it would become less common place on HN to share articles that a) are hidden behind paywall and b) start with a loaded sentence antagonising some abstract unknown political entity (who even is "the left"?). The entire article is about lacking broadband in the US. Why even include some random rambling about US politics when the subject matter is not even political to begin with?
- phtrivier 5y ago
  I think CD claims that the lack of broadband in the US is political.
- itsibitzi 5y ago
  Lack of access to public services, in this case broadband, is absolutely a political issue.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- resoluteteeth 5y ago
  Honestly the title tells you everything you need to know here and the article doesn't really provide any additional information anyway.
  - unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
    The carpenter analogy was creative! Market-only economists are like carpenters with a religious fixation on screw fasteners and abhorence of nails.
- unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
  There was not a paywall in my case. The issue may be a selective restriction, which also explains why it was upvoted on HN.
- freshdonut 5y ago
  This is poor writing for sure.
- atoav 5y ago
  I'd argue this is because: 1. A big part of the political spectrum believes a free market will lead to the best resulting infrastructure 2. Internet infrastructure is one of these things where the "shape" of the incentive structure can make or break how things develope Therefore if your goal is getting fast broadband for as many people as possible as soon as possible, political or organisational interventions will get you there quicker than just waiting and hoping. And getting their could be key for the future economic development of whole nations. Gladly we have many regions and a few decades of network infrastructure building, so seeing which approaches worked and which didn't is just a matter of looking carefully and trying not to lie to oneself about this. That being said: so far the "free market" approach didn't really keep its promises if we are honest.
  - least 5y ago
    There hasn't been a free market approach with regards to internet in the United States in any sense of the word. From municipal to federal government the market has been captured by regulations that results in many places in the United States only having one available ISP that provides broadband internet. This was pretty evident when you see Google's efforts to roll out fiber internet all around the United States being stonewalled left and right. I will concede that even if the market were free, there'd be plenty of edge cases (a lot of last-mile infrastructure) that'd reduce access, and I think those cases are where the government can excel. But realistically it seems more likely that Starlink is going to be available sooner than any movement from local governments.
tobr 5y ago
> To keep reading this story, get the free app or log in. How can someone write this sentence and not even try to address the obvious follow-up question: Why? I can imagine a few reasons, and none of them makes me want to do what Medium is asking me to do, ”free” or not.
- eloisius 5y ago
  Also annoyed. Turning a freaking blog platform into a walled garden is an absolute farce. What value exactly does Medium add over WordPress? It's trendy and newer? Has a more "minimal" design? The gimmicky inline comments? I've added Archive.is' Firefox addon and my default is to read Medium (and many other sites) as archives. I really wish that search engines would start indexing these sites as humans see them. Maybe Brave can take a stance like that.
  - zo1 5y ago
    I avoid medium by default these days. Problem is more and more of these pay walled sites are "oddly" starting to appear near the top of search results. Even though that same data or news exists on non pay walled sites/blogs. TowardsDataScience is another one. I know it's not the same but the rise of "Axios" feels just as artificial or pushed. Like all of a sudden it popped up and everyone is "what do you mean you've never heard of them, they're a top news organization." Yet the first time I heard of them was watching an interview they did where the journalist was interviewing a major politician whilst holding a look of absolute disgust on their face.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  They cut the article by 86% to be in line with others!
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  You can only use your new Boulangism toaster with approved, compatible groceries. Please hold your Boulangism approved food item in front of the Boulangism toaster to let it scan it. Your Boulangism toaster will open when it recognizes compatible food from producers from its partner program. Paraphrased from Doctorow's excellent novella Unauthorized Bread.
Aardwolf 5y ago
Meanwhile, in Switzerland, 25 Gb/s fiber (symmetric) is rolled out around Zurich. Is this slow broadband in US a country wide thing or only certain areas?
- gizdan 5y ago
  Not a US citizen so take this with a grain of salt, but it seems to be mostly country wide. A US colleague of mine lives less than 10 mins from our office (which is close to many other offices), and he is struggling to get anything beyond 20mbps.
  - 1123581321 5y ago
    Median download speeds in the US are generally 50-70mbps with a few outliers. Here’s a state map. https://www.pcmag.com/news/state-by-state-the-fastest-and-slowest-us-internet https://www.pcmag.com/news/state-by-state-the-fastest-and-sl... Cities will of course be higher, typically ranging from 100-900 for non-gigabit. Rural is more frustrating, and will hopefully be alleviated by the new satellite ISPs coming online.
    - mistrial9 5y ago
      you must not live in a city -- older homes and older sections of a city are very late to get physical upgrades.
      - 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
        Used to live in Philly. Had fiber gigabit in old building. Please stop making assumptions.
      - 1123581321 5y ago
        I’ve lived in many kinds of places. But please focus on the data I provided. There are of course exceptions to the general trend of speeds being higher in more densely connected areas.
      - 5y ago
jedimind 5y ago
ISPs get away with too much BS nowadays and lobbying[0] is one of the main reasons why. The US is not even in the top 10 of countries ranked[1] by internet speed. I honestly think that if we changed a few rules around lobbying many problems would be solved pretty quickly and not only regarding the internet. [0]https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/verizon-communications/summary?id=D000000079 https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/verizon-communications/summ... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_connection_speeds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_...
maltalex 5y ago
How is this not investigated as an antitrust violation? North America has some of the highest telecom prices in the world with some of the slowest speeds and worst service. There's clearly something very wrong with the market.
- pydry 5y ago
  IIRC anti-trust is only violated when you use an existing monopoly to muscle in on new markets. Also because political donations.
  - boomboomsubban 5y ago
    Antitrust laws are incredibly vague. Here's the relevant part of the Sherman Act as an example. >Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony,
    - giobox 5y ago
      You can’t begin to understand anti-trust law in US without looking at the extensive body of case law too - like any common law system, just reading the statute doesn’t tell you the whole story.
      - throwaway2037 5y ago
        The same is true for environmental law.
- andromeduck 5y ago
  The market failed because of how difficulty it is to establish last mine given municipal regulation, permitting and other bullshit. If we want to fix broadband and cellular, decouple utility pole ownership/permitting from retail providers.
TulliusCicero 5y ago
> That’s why America, the birthplace of the internet, has some of the slowest, most expensive broadband in the rich world, You see this repeated everywhere, but is it actually true? At least for speed, the data I've seen recently indicates the answer is "no". The Wikipedia page with charts from speedtest.net and speedtestnet.io has the US actually doing very well, not at the very top, but close to it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_connection_speeds https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Interne... The US is in the #11 spot in both charts, with speeds of 192 Mbps and 171 Mbps, respectively.
- Dah00n 5y ago
  I don't know what the reality is but I doubt something just a bit technical (as running a speedtest) shows the average speed for everyone. My guess is it is worse than it appears but that the people with some technical expertise is better off in the US than in many other countries but that the average user is worse off. I can't prove that either way though.
  - ev1 5y ago
    The average user will not be visiting speedtest.net, they will be visiting "whatever internal site their ISP tells them to"
- adreamingsoul 5y ago
  Birthplace of the Internet?
  - Reason077 5y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
    - adreamingsoul 5y ago
      It was a collective effort by many people (of varying nationalities) across many countries (US, UK, France, etc../). But I digress, Arpanet was the first WAN and so I guess I see your point.
Proven 5y ago
Yet another anti-free market rant by CD. They say they made their service plans less generous to be in line with others. If there's no "others", they might be a monopoly. CD doesnt' challenge the claim there are others, but also calls these guys a monopoly. Which is it? I've also seen no explanation what makes this 86% slowdown so terrible. You may need 10 minutes rather than 75 seconds to upload your YouTube tutorial, but so what? If you upload 1 video a day, who cares? If you upload a lot more, it's a for-profit activity. Surely you can afford to pay for a better package than the basic "Web & email" type of residential service? Nothing entitles you to these services. If you don't like the service, cancel your subscription. Most laughable is his idea that government can somehow improve competition. He could write for another 30 years and still not write anything useful or insightful.
deadalus 5y ago
https://outline.com/mUNVS7 https://outline.com/mUNVS7
rbut 5y ago
> So why is Altice slashing upload speeds? To be “in line with other ISPs.” In other words, “The rest of the industry is fucking awful, so why should we be any better?” Wouldn’t the real reason with DOCSIS be so they have more downstream channels and less upstream? Giving them more downstream bandwidth to sell. Why didn’t the article mention this?
- zekica 5y ago
  This is only an issue when providers use a configuration called low-split, which majority of providers do use. The main issue is that changing the network to support higher upload speeds is that they need to replace most of the splitters in their network, but it is doable and there are providers that already did that.
hytdstd 5y ago
It's nice to have a symmetric connection, but for most people outside of tech, upstream is only stressed when uploading photos. It's rarely advertised outside of fine print. I personally love symmetric connections, but in some way the average consumer is subsidizing the costs for me.
- iptrans 5y ago
  This isn’t about symmetric connections. It’s about Altice lowering the upstream from 35 Mbps to 5 Mbps. Going from 35 Mbps to 5 Mbps is ridiculous. It effectively lowers the quality of the broadband by bottlenecking connection. You need upstream bandwidth to use your downstream. Having only 5% upstream of your downstream means the connection is at risk of congestion merely from return packets when downloading. Once you saturate your upstream your downstream will become laggy and slow down. Even ignoring headline downstream speeds, 5 Mbps of upstream bandwidth is a piddling amount of bandwidth. It is trivial to exhaust that amount of bandwidth just by normal Internet usage and a video call. The whole thing is just a money grab from Altice by forcing customers to upgrade to more expensive packages just to get working broadband equivalent to what they had before.
- blacksmith_tb 5y ago
  Surely video calls must be the most common upstream killer these days? I am often in calls where coworkers turn off their cameras to avoid dropping off.
- ev1 5y ago
  > but for most people outside of tech, upstream is only stressed when uploading photos Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, all of these make this untrue. Even GDrive/Dropbox of projects, videos is extremely common these days. It is important that users be allowed to produce in addition to being spoon fed ads at maximum download rate.
Dah00n 5y ago
It's cheaper per capita to roll out fibre to 50 million people than to 5 million; no-one can seriously argue otherwise. This alone shows how broken the system is. Not only broadband but also healthcare and other services should be extremely cheap and well tested in the US in locations with a high density of people. That it is often as broken in high density areas as in rural areas baffles the mind. As a Scandinavian I'm often chocked how the US isn't number one. It really should be.
- iptrans 5y ago
  > It's cheaper per capita to roll out fibre to 50 million people than to 5 million; This assumes an awful lot of things. If the average number of linear feet constructed grows when going from 5 million to 50 million then the cost per capita isn’t going to decrease. What going from 5 million to 50 million enables is averaging high cost builds over a larger subscriber base resulting in affordable prices for more people. Note that this will not however decrease costs overall.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Living in sparsely populated fenno-scandinavian country I really never understood how badly others can do things... Like Germany and USA? Germany has no excuses, and USA does have some large areas, but outside those?
jokethrowaway 5y ago
It's a bit disingenuous to think they're just aligning their offering to competitors. This is the usual trick to impede p2p protocols like torrent on their network, without outright saying so. A friend of mine runs an internet provider (in Europe though) and he's flooded by all the takedown requests of warez content on his network. Luckily he's not in Germany, so people don't get fined or sent threatening lawyers letters so he just notifies customers. Other providers just swallow them. TL;DR Most providers do limit uploads for various reasons, reading it as a monopolistic measure is far fetched. The problem with internet in the USA is the same as most problems in the USA: a huge population scattered across a huge country. Good luck with serving fast internet to everyone, it's not Europe. As a proof of this, metropolitan hubs in the USA are fine internet wise. Looking at how well public services are run in general, I doubt a public monopoly would be better than this "private" monopoly: last mile providers in the USA have a hard job.
- doikor 5y ago
  > The problem with internet in the USA is the same as most problems in the USA: a huge population scattered across a huge country. Good luck with serving fast internet to everyone, it's not Europe. The population density here in Finland is half of USA and we still got 1gbit fiber available in pretty much any city. Nobody is expecting to have fiber into every farm but any city/town with more than 10k people can have fiber installed in a profitable way just fine. This is possible due to rules/laws that encourage competition not stifle it. (Mainly centered around forcing renting out the last mile infrastructure to your competition at reasonable rates)
  - _-david-_ 5y ago
    >The population density here in Finland is half of USA and we still got 1gbit fiber available in pretty much any city. In the US any new development has 1gbit fiber as well. Older developments are starting to get it rolled out as well but it is a bit slow. >Nobody is expecting to have fiber into every farm but any city/town with more than 10k people can have fiber installed in a profitable way just fine. This is a major problem in the US. A lot of towns are very small. In fact the vast majority are under 10k people (16,410 out of 19,502) https://www.statista.com/statistics/241695/number-of-us-cities-towns-villages-by-population-size/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241695/number-of-us-citi...
pydry 5y ago
If you're interested in other markets where this dynamic occurs, there are quite a few: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/02/private-equity-crapification-housing.html https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/02/private-equity-crapi... https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/01/the-crapification-of-mattresses-and-retail-therapy-and-an-iran-aside.html https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/01/the-crapification-of... https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/02/james-surowiecki-promotes-myth-consumer-empowerment-face-crappification-almost-everything.html https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/02/james-surowiecki-pro... It's a mirror image of "shrinkflation" - the process whereby hiking of the price of chips gets partially disguised by reducing the number of chips in a bag rather than increasing the sticker price.
xondono 5y ago
Claiming that America has slow connections compared to Europe without acknowledging the obvious differences in infrastructure cost is ridiculous. Europe is way more dense than America, just look at any light pollution map and compare. Europe has also a LOT of previously built roads that make deployments way cheaper. Once you take that into account, the ISP market in the US is not that dysfunctional, it’s just that economies of scale matter too much.
- iptrans 5y ago
  This appeal to American exceptionalism does not stand up to scrutiny. A lot of European countries have far lower population densities that the US, but still better infrastructure and broadband. The US just is that dysfunctional.
  - xondono 5y ago
    Some places in europe have lower population densities because of low population, not because of massive distances. The problem in the US is that distances are way longer.
    - iptrans 5y ago
      The US has a well developed and competitive national backbone market. When building networks the geographical extremities of the nation do not matter, only the distance to the closest point of presence. Europe and the US are not that dissimilar in geographical extent or population density, so neither of these can be used as convincing arguments for American exceptionalism. The fact remains that the US is just that dysfunctional compared to Europe.
- undfg 5y ago
  It's really funny to read "I live in the middle of no fucking where and I all I have is a shitty DSL. Why won't the ISP pay $100k to deploy a cable just for me?" They think it's any better in Europe? In the places where it is better it's because the government has given the isps a lot of money. Money that would be much better spent elsewhere, as I believe if you want good services you have to move to the cities - you shouldn't ask the rest of the country to subsidise your lifestyle.
1ncorrect 5y ago
Normalising the dimensioning data links by arbitrary fractional throughput rates is an anachronism which needs to be challenged and eradicated from the entire industry.
luke2m 5y ago
Great article. But can’t he find some other place to blog?
vijaybritto 5y ago
Whenever Google's web performance engineers talk about slow internet speeds we should realize that they are talking about themselves too.
raptor99 5y ago
Just to add another anecdote, I live 30 to 45 minutes (miles) outside of a major US city, just at the cusp of the metropolitan area. I live in a county, not in any city limits, etc. We have access to at least two different providers offering gigabit service, along with many different speed services below that. We also have various satellite and cellular data options as well. As stated many times before in various comments, articles etc: Sure, ISPs can definitely do better, but considering the landmass of the US and the different population densities, I think things are going pretty well. If you want to move rural enough, then a lot of things are going to become an issue utility wise, including electric, gas, water, internet, etc. The saying goes that you can't have your cake and eat it too. From prevailing comments and articles online it seems people want to be able to blindly pick literally anywhere on a map to live and also expect 100 Mb to gigabit service, not considering any sort of infrastructure that is around the area they have picked to live.
Scoundreller 5y ago
It's strange as Altice is a French company (or partly owned by a French company by the same name) which owns/operates SFR in France. I guess their French services are inline with French competition, except that means increasing speeds at lower prices, because competition. The 1yr 'teaser rate' is ~US$19/month for 500/500, 160 TV channels and a home phone with unlimited calls. After a year it goes up to ~US$45, but because competition, you can threaten to leave or actually leave and get promo prices again. And it's europe, these prices include a 20% sales tax. And that's kinda expensive, you should probably go with free.fr instead. https://www.sfr.fr/offre-internet https://www.sfr.fr/offre-internet It wasn't always like this is in France. Telecom used to be quite terrible actually, so the government opened up everything. That's why you rarely see a case study on French telecom policy elsewhere in the world, nobody in industry wants to talk about it.
shadilay 5y ago
I'm saddened that there is no 'best practices' toolkit for the enterprising folks in rural America who have the skills to install their own fiber. The real pervasive monopoly is interconnection.
- iptrans 5y ago
  There are a lot of (high level) resources online, but on a practical level you will have to deal with local permitting and right of way issues, so there really can’t be an ultimate mater plan. Interestingly interconnection, or more precisely Internet capacity, isn’t really an issue. If you have enough subscribers, it is fairly straightforward to purchase wholesale bandwidth from one of the many commercial providers.
cashsterling 5y ago
I live in Longmont, CO which has municipal fiber optic broadband. 50 USD per month for 1 Gbit symmetric internet... it's great.
- ta988 5y ago
  Is that your final cost or do you have taxes, ONT rental and so on?
apeace 5y ago
If you want more ISP competition where you live, I suggest getting active in your town government. A while ago, I called up the town hall of the suburb where I grew up, and asked for a copy of their contract with Comcast. It technically doesn't grant them a monopoly -- that would be illegal -- but in effect it does. The contract says Comcast must serve any resident within two business days of the request. It also says the town can't give a better contract to another ISP (I forget the exact legal terms, this was years ago). That means a startup ISP can't launch neighborhood by neighborhood. In order to provide service in the town, you need to build out connectivity everywhere, upfront. That is a multi million-dollar construction project which stands no chance of being paid back within a time period any investor would be comfortable with. Even another large ISP wouldn't want to take this risk, which is why they still haven't done so in my home town. Best case is that you get around 5-10% of residents within a couple years. Even if your service is much better than the incumbent's, it can be hard to educate consumers. Most people won't know what they're missing, they'll be too lazy to switch, etc. So, if you want to attempt to solve this problem in your town, there are a few things you can try to do: - Make it so that startup ISPs can build out neighborhood by neighborhood. Yes, this means the hardest-to-reach/least profitable areas will be served last, but it's better than nothing. - Get your town to fund construction. There are plenty of ISPs who would jump at the opportunity to serve your town if they didn't have to pay the capex. Have your town reach out to every startup ISP you can find and work on a deal. - Build a municipal ISP. It's not that hard, more and more towns are doing it.
throwaway890u 5y ago
Years ago when I travelled in rural Tibet the phone signal was better than what I have now in Silicon valley. I didn't have phone signal today in a hospital in mountain view.

215 points by smackay 5y ago

> The surging anti-monopoly movement has been greeted with skepticism from the left, some of whom suspect the whole thing is merely fetishizing competition for its own sake I wish it would become less common place on HN to share articles that a) are hidden behind paywall and b) start with a loaded sentence antagonising some abstract unknown political entity (who even is "the left"?). The entire article is about lacking broadband in the US. Why even include some random rambling about US politics when the subject matter is not even political to begin with?

phtrivier 5y ago
I think CD claims that the lack of broadband in the US is political.
itsibitzi 5y ago
Lack of access to public services, in this case broadband, is absolutely a political issue.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
resoluteteeth 5y ago
Honestly the title tells you everything you need to know here and the article doesn't really provide any additional information anyway.
- unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
  The carpenter analogy was creative! Market-only economists are like carpenters with a religious fixation on screw fasteners and abhorence of nails.
unyttigfjelltol 5y ago
There was not a paywall in my case. The issue may be a selective restriction, which also explains why it was upvoted on HN.
freshdonut 5y ago
This is poor writing for sure.
atoav 5y ago
I'd argue this is because: 1. A big part of the political spectrum believes a free market will lead to the best resulting infrastructure 2. Internet infrastructure is one of these things where the "shape" of the incentive structure can make or break how things develope Therefore if your goal is getting fast broadband for as many people as possible as soon as possible, political or organisational interventions will get you there quicker than just waiting and hoping. And getting their could be key for the future economic development of whole nations. Gladly we have many regions and a few decades of network infrastructure building, so seeing which approaches worked and which didn't is just a matter of looking carefully and trying not to lie to oneself about this. That being said: so far the "free market" approach didn't really keep its promises if we are honest.
- least 5y ago
  There hasn't been a free market approach with regards to internet in the United States in any sense of the word. From municipal to federal government the market has been captured by regulations that results in many places in the United States only having one available ISP that provides broadband internet. This was pretty evident when you see Google's efforts to roll out fiber internet all around the United States being stonewalled left and right. I will concede that even if the market were free, there'd be plenty of edge cases (a lot of last-mile infrastructure) that'd reduce access, and I think those cases are where the government can excel. But realistically it seems more likely that Starlink is going to be available sooner than any movement from local governments.

tobr 5y ago

> To keep reading this story, get the free app or log in. How can someone write this sentence and not even try to address the obvious follow-up question: Why? I can imagine a few reasons, and none of them makes me want to do what Medium is asking me to do, ”free” or not.

eloisius 5y ago
Also annoyed. Turning a freaking blog platform into a walled garden is an absolute farce. What value exactly does Medium add over WordPress? It's trendy and newer? Has a more "minimal" design? The gimmicky inline comments? I've added Archive.is' Firefox addon and my default is to read Medium (and many other sites) as archives. I really wish that search engines would start indexing these sites as humans see them. Maybe Brave can take a stance like that.
- zo1 5y ago
  I avoid medium by default these days. Problem is more and more of these pay walled sites are "oddly" starting to appear near the top of search results. Even though that same data or news exists on non pay walled sites/blogs. TowardsDataScience is another one. I know it's not the same but the rise of "Axios" feels just as artificial or pushed. Like all of a sudden it popped up and everyone is "what do you mean you've never heard of them, they're a top news organization." Yet the first time I heard of them was watching an interview they did where the journalist was interviewing a major politician whilst holding a look of absolute disgust on their face.
fallingknife 5y ago
They cut the article by 86% to be in line with others!
Freak_NL 5y ago
You can only use your new Boulangism toaster with approved, compatible groceries. Please hold your Boulangism approved food item in front of the Boulangism toaster to let it scan it. Your Boulangism toaster will open when it recognizes compatible food from producers from its partner program. Paraphrased from Doctorow's excellent novella Unauthorized Bread.

Aardwolf 5y ago

Meanwhile, in Switzerland, 25 Gb/s fiber (symmetric) is rolled out around Zurich. Is this slow broadband in US a country wide thing or only certain areas?

gizdan 5y ago
Not a US citizen so take this with a grain of salt, but it seems to be mostly country wide. A US colleague of mine lives less than 10 mins from our office (which is close to many other offices), and he is struggling to get anything beyond 20mbps.
- 1123581321 5y ago
  Median download speeds in the US are generally 50-70mbps with a few outliers. Here’s a state map. https://www.pcmag.com/news/state-by-state-the-fastest-and-slowest-us-internet https://www.pcmag.com/news/state-by-state-the-fastest-and-sl... Cities will of course be higher, typically ranging from 100-900 for non-gigabit. Rural is more frustrating, and will hopefully be alleviated by the new satellite ISPs coming online.
  - mistrial9 5y ago
    you must not live in a city -- older homes and older sections of a city are very late to get physical upgrades.
    - 0x0nyandesu 5y ago
      Used to live in Philly. Had fiber gigabit in old building. Please stop making assumptions.
    - 1123581321 5y ago
      I’ve lived in many kinds of places. But please focus on the data I provided. There are of course exceptions to the general trend of speeds being higher in more densely connected areas.
    - 5y ago

jedimind 5y ago

ISPs get away with too much BS nowadays and lobbying[0] is one of the main reasons why. The US is not even in the top 10 of countries ranked[1] by internet speed. I honestly think that if we changed a few rules around lobbying many problems would be solved pretty quickly and not only regarding the internet. [0]https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/verizon-communications/summary?id=D000000079 https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/verizon-communications/summ... [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_connection_speeds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_...

maltalex 5y ago

How is this not investigated as an antitrust violation? North America has some of the highest telecom prices in the world with some of the slowest speeds and worst service. There's clearly something very wrong with the market.

pydry 5y ago
IIRC anti-trust is only violated when you use an existing monopoly to muscle in on new markets. Also because political donations.
- boomboomsubban 5y ago
  Antitrust laws are incredibly vague. Here's the relevant part of the Sherman Act as an example. >Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony,
  - giobox 5y ago
    You can’t begin to understand anti-trust law in US without looking at the extensive body of case law too - like any common law system, just reading the statute doesn’t tell you the whole story.
    - throwaway2037 5y ago
      The same is true for environmental law.
andromeduck 5y ago
The market failed because of how difficulty it is to establish last mine given municipal regulation, permitting and other bullshit. If we want to fix broadband and cellular, decouple utility pole ownership/permitting from retail providers.

TulliusCicero 5y ago

> That’s why America, the birthplace of the internet, has some of the slowest, most expensive broadband in the rich world, You see this repeated everywhere, but is it actually true? At least for speed, the data I've seen recently indicates the answer is "no". The Wikipedia page with charts from speedtest.net and speedtestnet.io has the US actually doing very well, not at the very top, but close to it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_connection_speeds https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Interne... The US is in the #11 spot in both charts, with speeds of 192 Mbps and 171 Mbps, respectively.

Dah00n 5y ago
I don't know what the reality is but I doubt something just a bit technical (as running a speedtest) shows the average speed for everyone. My guess is it is worse than it appears but that the people with some technical expertise is better off in the US than in many other countries but that the average user is worse off. I can't prove that either way though.
- ev1 5y ago
  The average user will not be visiting speedtest.net, they will be visiting "whatever internal site their ISP tells them to"
adreamingsoul 5y ago
Birthplace of the Internet?
- Reason077 5y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
  - adreamingsoul 5y ago
    It was a collective effort by many people (of varying nationalities) across many countries (US, UK, France, etc../). But I digress, Arpanet was the first WAN and so I guess I see your point.

Proven 5y ago

Yet another anti-free market rant by CD. They say they made their service plans less generous to be in line with others. If there's no "others", they might be a monopoly. CD doesnt' challenge the claim there are others, but also calls these guys a monopoly. Which is it? I've also seen no explanation what makes this 86% slowdown so terrible. You may need 10 minutes rather than 75 seconds to upload your YouTube tutorial, but so what? If you upload 1 video a day, who cares? If you upload a lot more, it's a for-profit activity. Surely you can afford to pay for a better package than the basic "Web & email" type of residential service? Nothing entitles you to these services. If you don't like the service, cancel your subscription. Most laughable is his idea that government can somehow improve competition. He could write for another 30 years and still not write anything useful or insightful.

deadalus 5y ago

https://outline.com/mUNVS7 https://outline.com/mUNVS7

rbut 5y ago

> So why is Altice slashing upload speeds? To be “in line with other ISPs.” In other words, “The rest of the industry is fucking awful, so why should we be any better?” Wouldn’t the real reason with DOCSIS be so they have more downstream channels and less upstream? Giving them more downstream bandwidth to sell. Why didn’t the article mention this?

zekica 5y ago
This is only an issue when providers use a configuration called low-split, which majority of providers do use. The main issue is that changing the network to support higher upload speeds is that they need to replace most of the splitters in their network, but it is doable and there are providers that already did that.

hytdstd 5y ago

It's nice to have a symmetric connection, but for most people outside of tech, upstream is only stressed when uploading photos. It's rarely advertised outside of fine print. I personally love symmetric connections, but in some way the average consumer is subsidizing the costs for me.

iptrans 5y ago
This isn’t about symmetric connections. It’s about Altice lowering the upstream from 35 Mbps to 5 Mbps. Going from 35 Mbps to 5 Mbps is ridiculous. It effectively lowers the quality of the broadband by bottlenecking connection. You need upstream bandwidth to use your downstream. Having only 5% upstream of your downstream means the connection is at risk of congestion merely from return packets when downloading. Once you saturate your upstream your downstream will become laggy and slow down. Even ignoring headline downstream speeds, 5 Mbps of upstream bandwidth is a piddling amount of bandwidth. It is trivial to exhaust that amount of bandwidth just by normal Internet usage and a video call. The whole thing is just a money grab from Altice by forcing customers to upgrade to more expensive packages just to get working broadband equivalent to what they had before.
blacksmith_tb 5y ago
Surely video calls must be the most common upstream killer these days? I am often in calls where coworkers turn off their cameras to avoid dropping off.
ev1 5y ago
> but for most people outside of tech, upstream is only stressed when uploading photos Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, all of these make this untrue. Even GDrive/Dropbox of projects, videos is extremely common these days. It is important that users be allowed to produce in addition to being spoon fed ads at maximum download rate.

Dah00n 5y ago

It's cheaper per capita to roll out fibre to 50 million people than to 5 million; no-one can seriously argue otherwise. This alone shows how broken the system is. Not only broadband but also healthcare and other services should be extremely cheap and well tested in the US in locations with a high density of people. That it is often as broken in high density areas as in rural areas baffles the mind. As a Scandinavian I'm often chocked how the US isn't number one. It really should be.

iptrans 5y ago
> It's cheaper per capita to roll out fibre to 50 million people than to 5 million; This assumes an awful lot of things. If the average number of linear feet constructed grows when going from 5 million to 50 million then the cost per capita isn’t going to decrease. What going from 5 million to 50 million enables is averaging high cost builds over a larger subscriber base resulting in affordable prices for more people. Note that this will not however decrease costs overall.
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Ekaros 5y ago
Living in sparsely populated fenno-scandinavian country I really never understood how badly others can do things... Like Germany and USA? Germany has no excuses, and USA does have some large areas, but outside those?

jokethrowaway 5y ago

It's a bit disingenuous to think they're just aligning their offering to competitors. This is the usual trick to impede p2p protocols like torrent on their network, without outright saying so. A friend of mine runs an internet provider (in Europe though) and he's flooded by all the takedown requests of warez content on his network. Luckily he's not in Germany, so people don't get fined or sent threatening lawyers letters so he just notifies customers. Other providers just swallow them. TL;DR Most providers do limit uploads for various reasons, reading it as a monopolistic measure is far fetched. The problem with internet in the USA is the same as most problems in the USA: a huge population scattered across a huge country. Good luck with serving fast internet to everyone, it's not Europe. As a proof of this, metropolitan hubs in the USA are fine internet wise. Looking at how well public services are run in general, I doubt a public monopoly would be better than this "private" monopoly: last mile providers in the USA have a hard job.

doikor 5y ago
> The problem with internet in the USA is the same as most problems in the USA: a huge population scattered across a huge country. Good luck with serving fast internet to everyone, it's not Europe. The population density here in Finland is half of USA and we still got 1gbit fiber available in pretty much any city. Nobody is expecting to have fiber into every farm but any city/town with more than 10k people can have fiber installed in a profitable way just fine. This is possible due to rules/laws that encourage competition not stifle it. (Mainly centered around forcing renting out the last mile infrastructure to your competition at reasonable rates)
- _-david-_ 5y ago
  >The population density here in Finland is half of USA and we still got 1gbit fiber available in pretty much any city. In the US any new development has 1gbit fiber as well. Older developments are starting to get it rolled out as well but it is a bit slow. >Nobody is expecting to have fiber into every farm but any city/town with more than 10k people can have fiber installed in a profitable way just fine. This is a major problem in the US. A lot of towns are very small. In fact the vast majority are under 10k people (16,410 out of 19,502) https://www.statista.com/statistics/241695/number-of-us-cities-towns-villages-by-population-size/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/241695/number-of-us-citi...

pydry 5y ago

If you're interested in other markets where this dynamic occurs, there are quite a few: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/02/private-equity-crapification-housing.html https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/02/private-equity-crapi... https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/01/the-crapification-of-mattresses-and-retail-therapy-and-an-iran-aside.html https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/01/the-crapification-of... https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/02/james-surowiecki-promotes-myth-consumer-empowerment-face-crappification-almost-everything.html https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/02/james-surowiecki-pro... It's a mirror image of "shrinkflation" - the process whereby hiking of the price of chips gets partially disguised by reducing the number of chips in a bag rather than increasing the sticker price.

xondono 5y ago

Claiming that America has slow connections compared to Europe without acknowledging the obvious differences in infrastructure cost is ridiculous. Europe is way more dense than America, just look at any light pollution map and compare. Europe has also a LOT of previously built roads that make deployments way cheaper. Once you take that into account, the ISP market in the US is not that dysfunctional, it’s just that economies of scale matter too much.

iptrans 5y ago
This appeal to American exceptionalism does not stand up to scrutiny. A lot of European countries have far lower population densities that the US, but still better infrastructure and broadband. The US just is that dysfunctional.
- xondono 5y ago
  Some places in europe have lower population densities because of low population, not because of massive distances. The problem in the US is that distances are way longer.
  - iptrans 5y ago
    The US has a well developed and competitive national backbone market. When building networks the geographical extremities of the nation do not matter, only the distance to the closest point of presence. Europe and the US are not that dissimilar in geographical extent or population density, so neither of these can be used as convincing arguments for American exceptionalism. The fact remains that the US is just that dysfunctional compared to Europe.
undfg 5y ago
It's really funny to read "I live in the middle of no fucking where and I all I have is a shitty DSL. Why won't the ISP pay $100k to deploy a cable just for me?" They think it's any better in Europe? In the places where it is better it's because the government has given the isps a lot of money. Money that would be much better spent elsewhere, as I believe if you want good services you have to move to the cities - you shouldn't ask the rest of the country to subsidise your lifestyle.

1ncorrect 5y ago

Normalising the dimensioning data links by arbitrary fractional throughput rates is an anachronism which needs to be challenged and eradicated from the entire industry.

luke2m 5y ago

Great article. But can’t he find some other place to blog?

vijaybritto 5y ago

Whenever Google's web performance engineers talk about slow internet speeds we should realize that they are talking about themselves too.

raptor99 5y ago

Just to add another anecdote, I live 30 to 45 minutes (miles) outside of a major US city, just at the cusp of the metropolitan area. I live in a county, not in any city limits, etc. We have access to at least two different providers offering gigabit service, along with many different speed services below that. We also have various satellite and cellular data options as well. As stated many times before in various comments, articles etc: Sure, ISPs can definitely do better, but considering the landmass of the US and the different population densities, I think things are going pretty well. If you want to move rural enough, then a lot of things are going to become an issue utility wise, including electric, gas, water, internet, etc. The saying goes that you can't have your cake and eat it too. From prevailing comments and articles online it seems people want to be able to blindly pick literally anywhere on a map to live and also expect 100 Mb to gigabit service, not considering any sort of infrastructure that is around the area they have picked to live.

Scoundreller 5y ago

It's strange as Altice is a French company (or partly owned by a French company by the same name) which owns/operates SFR in France. I guess their French services are inline with French competition, except that means increasing speeds at lower prices, because competition. The 1yr 'teaser rate' is ~US$19/month for 500/500, 160 TV channels and a home phone with unlimited calls. After a year it goes up to ~US$45, but because competition, you can threaten to leave or actually leave and get promo prices again. And it's europe, these prices include a 20% sales tax. And that's kinda expensive, you should probably go with free.fr instead. https://www.sfr.fr/offre-internet https://www.sfr.fr/offre-internet It wasn't always like this is in France. Telecom used to be quite terrible actually, so the government opened up everything. That's why you rarely see a case study on French telecom policy elsewhere in the world, nobody in industry wants to talk about it.

shadilay 5y ago

I'm saddened that there is no 'best practices' toolkit for the enterprising folks in rural America who have the skills to install their own fiber. The real pervasive monopoly is interconnection.

iptrans 5y ago
There are a lot of (high level) resources online, but on a practical level you will have to deal with local permitting and right of way issues, so there really can’t be an ultimate mater plan. Interestingly interconnection, or more precisely Internet capacity, isn’t really an issue. If you have enough subscribers, it is fairly straightforward to purchase wholesale bandwidth from one of the many commercial providers.

cashsterling 5y ago

I live in Longmont, CO which has municipal fiber optic broadband. 50 USD per month for 1 Gbit symmetric internet... it's great.

ta988 5y ago
Is that your final cost or do you have taxes, ONT rental and so on?

apeace 5y ago

If you want more ISP competition where you live, I suggest getting active in your town government. A while ago, I called up the town hall of the suburb where I grew up, and asked for a copy of their contract with Comcast. It technically doesn't grant them a monopoly -- that would be illegal -- but in effect it does. The contract says Comcast must serve any resident within two business days of the request. It also says the town can't give a better contract to another ISP (I forget the exact legal terms, this was years ago). That means a startup ISP can't launch neighborhood by neighborhood. In order to provide service in the town, you need to build out connectivity everywhere, upfront. That is a multi million-dollar construction project which stands no chance of being paid back within a time period any investor would be comfortable with. Even another large ISP wouldn't want to take this risk, which is why they still haven't done so in my home town. Best case is that you get around 5-10% of residents within a couple years. Even if your service is much better than the incumbent's, it can be hard to educate consumers. Most people won't know what they're missing, they'll be too lazy to switch, etc. So, if you want to attempt to solve this problem in your town, there are a few things you can try to do: - Make it so that startup ISPs can build out neighborhood by neighborhood. Yes, this means the hardest-to-reach/least profitable areas will be served last, but it's better than nothing. - Get your town to fund construction. There are plenty of ISPs who would jump at the opportunity to serve your town if they didn't have to pay the capex. Have your town reach out to every startup ISP you can find and work on a deal. - Build a municipal ISP. It's not that hard, more and more towns are doing it.

throwaway890u 5y ago

Years ago when I travelled in rural Tibet the phone signal was better than what I have now in Silicon valley. I didn't have phone signal today in a hospital in mountain view.