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Why U.S. Broadband is So Slow
- blahedo 15y agoHaving just moved (and thus done my shopping for a new internet connection), I found it pretty galling that I was pretty much expected to either get a $30 land line or a $50 cable-TV package if I wanted to get internet. Technically I didn't need to get the bundle, but they didn't even list prices for an internet-only connection. I have line-of-sight to our local water tower, though, so I was able to get a wireless internet connection and bypass everyone else. It's not super-high-speed, but I have 2.5 down and 1.5 up, and that's not too bad... and I have the moral satisfaction of not paying anything at all to either the cable companies or the telcos.
- prpatel 15y agoTelco's don't usually advertise "naked DSL." If you search hard enough it's out there.
- paul9290 15y agoSame goes for cable companies here in the states. For example Comcast you can buy your own modem then pay $42 a month for Internet when u subscribe to local cable channels for additional $15. You can also just subscribe to Internet for $60 sans local cable. Further if you live in apartment complex an open wifi access point is the cheapest!
- nitrogen 15y agoFurther if you live in apartment complex an open wifi access point is the cheapest! Be careful with this one, since a combination of some recent court cases could be used to argue that accessing an open access point is a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and result in penalties more serious than if you'd stolen a gift card and used it to buy Internet access (IANAL).
- gcb 15y agoI could get naked dsl from ATT only after i found this phone number in an old blog comment! spread it 1-800-288-2020
- nantes 15y agoHey, as a WISP employee myself, thanks. It is really frustrating sometimes that potential customers have been trained that the duopoly the article mentioned is reality. In truth, there is a vibrant, resourceful, and outspoken group of entrepreneurs out to take all of the incumbents marbles. But, like the article says, we have to fight at every turn for access that telco's and cable co's take for granted.
- chc 15y agoIt is a reality in most places. I've looked for smaller ISPs in several areas where I've lived, and there is nothing. It's basically AT&T or Cox/Time-Warner or jump in the lake.
- nitrogen 15y agoI'd love to support an independent ISP, but there is none serving my area with 50+mbit/s speeds.
- magamiako 15y agoExcept wireless ISPs don't come close to the offerings of a copper connection, let alone the connectivity provided by a fiber connection. Harp all you want about how "awesome" wireless is, but until it can push 40ms across the US and back consistently at high bandwidths, you're screwed.
- magamiako 15y agoYou think 2.5Mbit is "not bad"? This is what's wrong with the country. 2.5Mbit is dogshit slow. Your freaking bluetooth wireless mouse is faster than that. Now think about that for a minute.
- makecheck 15y agoThe conclusions are interesting, although I think they give government intervention way too much credit. If other product lines are any indication, people can become pretty content pretty quickly; they may not demand more even if they might achieve it. I suppose life is just too short and people move on to more pressing concerns. If tomorrow all TVs in the world stopped working and shows could only be watched online, I think customers' attentions would shift and demand for high speed would see a new life. That's just the way these things work. Incidentally, I hate the use of the term "Republican led FCC" in this article when "FCC" would have sufficed. I'm no Republican, but these kinds of loaded phrases invite ad hominem arguments. Readers should be able to learn about the actions of an organization such as the FCC and judge them as good or bad based on relevant facts.
- prpatel 15y agoBait taken. What exactly has the FCC done recently (seeing as how it's a gov't agency) to protect the interest of consumers?
- Bo102010 15y agoI might even strike the "recently" from that question. (I'm not being facetious)
- aaronblohowiak 15y agoThe regulation of spectrum benefits consumers by specifying who can broadcast under what circumstances/conditions/amplitude. This prevents interference, which enables surprisingly reliable communication over such a noisy technology.
- Bo102010 15y agoYes, but what of the charge that the FCC has consistently given preference to well-monied lobbyists (e.g. the National Association of Broadcasters vs. Low Power FM radio operators) when handling spectrum rights? Is there a way of managing spectrum that is more efficient for businesses and more beneficial to consumers? We don't know, because the FCC is governed by increasingly antiquated rules.
- ary 15y agoThe last line stood out to me. > ... passing by along the way the idle fiber infrastructure that the FCC set aside nearly a decade ago. Can anyone elaborate on what exactly they mean? Is this dark fiber sitting around somewhere? Did the FCC sanction the deployment and private companies built it out (and then ignored it) or was government money spent to lay the wires?
- sliverstorm 15y agoI'm not sure what they mean by "set aside", but back in the 90's there was a huge buildout of fiber as part of the dot-com bubble. It's refereed to today as "dark fiber"; fiber optics that are not active. However, I don't know that using that dark fiber would improve our internet. The backbones are already extremely fast; it's the downlinks and uplinks that are slow, and I'd guess most dark fiber is not routed to homes.
- Xlythe 15y agoIn exchange for less regulations, the FCC had private companies build out fiber networks in the 1990's. Most of it was never used, though, as companies instead focused on increasing bandwidth in copper wiring.
- qeorge 15y agoActually, yes. Tons of it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fibre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fibre
- yummyfajitas 15y agoThere is tons of dark fiber, due to the economics of laying cables. Digging a ditch is expensive. The fiber you put in the ditch is cheap. So if you are already digging a ditch, you load it up with 100x as much fiber as you imagine yourself ever needing in the future. This is vastly cheaper than digging a second ditch 5-10 years down the line.
- mbreese 15y agoYeah, but aren't we talking about the "last mile" problem, not about dark fiber? I thought that most of the dark fiber was in long inter-city/state runs, not running down my neighborhood street. I thought he was referring to dormant fiber that the telco owns that used to be available to third-parties at wholesale rates.
- jdelsman 15y agoSeriously? Move to China, then we'll talk about slow broadband...
- techsupporter 15y agoOr, you could do what Verizon did: Build a large fiber optic-based network in several metropolitan areas and, for the first time, give Comcast, Charter, and Time Warner a run for their money. Then, turn around and dump several "second-tier" markets (Portland, Redmond/Kirkland/Bellevue, most of North Carolina, etc) onto a company that is actively trying to persuade customers not to use that network. Sometimes large telcos just baffle me.
- baltcode 15y agoWhy doesn't another big company step up and lay down its own copper/fiber into homes? Sure, it will be a BIG investment but the return should be awesome. I am sure it will be worthwhile in at least some areas like NYC, Bay Area, Boston etc.
- cooldeal 15y agoCan you fathom how much it will cost to dig up the streets, lay fiber and fill them back in? Will cities even allow that, due to the impediment to the traffic?
- nitrogen 15y agoIt's been managed before for fiber deployments in northern Europe. I remember seeing a perspective on Ars Technica from Amsterdam, with a photo of a sidewalk tiles neatly removed and replaced without damage: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/03/how-amsterdam-was-wired-for-open-access-fiber.ars http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/03/how-amsterda... So, it can be done.
- tomgallard 15y agoIn the UK there've been some pilot deployments of fibre using sewers ( e.g.http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7202396.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7202396.stm ). Avoids the need to dig up roads and keeps the cost of deployment low
- loungin 15y agoIt's a small drop in the bucket, but at least a start somewhere. Google: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fiber http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fiber
- soult 15y agoBecause as soon as a new player wants to connect a town with fiber (or the town decides to lay fiber on it's own) suddenly the big telcos are very interested in also laying fiber in that town, ruining any chance of profitability. There are even cases of telcos suing towns that tried to lay their own fiber.[0] I know this is an unpopular view in the United States, so please do not downvote me for stating my opinion, but I believe that phone/internet service should not have been privatized in the first place. 0: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/09/telco-to-town-were-suing-you-because-we-care.ars http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/09/telco-to-town-wer...
- bane 15y agoThe interesting bit is that I'm not sure in many cases it matters. I'm lucky to have FiOS (25down/5up), and I have many times the bandwidth I can manage. I can be downloading a couple torrents, my wife and I can both be streaming a movie, our phones can both be updating, I can forget I left Pandora running, and a friend can be in another room doing goodness knows what, and web sites still load more or less the same as normal. I'd don't think I've ever come close to saturating my connection mainly because the sites I'm connecting to...even major sites...can't serve me data fast enough. For example, I routinely wait for youtube to buffer (though oddly 720p appears to load faster and more smoothly than any other resolution)...often I'll watch something on hulu while a videoclip buffers on youtube. I've been on 100mbps connections in East Asia and didn't notice any perceptible difference...I did about the same amount of stuff in about the same amount of time...the sites I was connected to simply weren't servicing me any faster.
- asharp 15y agoPlease note that most of the bw in Asia is to other parts of Asia. There is lots of peering and lots of fibre. Trying to get to the US, on the other hand, and you have a few, very expensive (comparatively) cables. This is why you find cloud companies in korea doing live disk replication into japan. The fibre in the region is just so cheap that it just doesn't matter anymore. You would probably notice that if you were using local (or even localish) sites, that there would be a dramatic improvement.
- shmageggy 15y agoUnfortunately, due to the duopolies described in the article, most of the rest of us are stuck dreaming of such a fibery heaven. Verizon has said explicitly that they won't be coming to my area. Ever.
- bane 15y agoI should have probably been more clear. There are consumer level DSL and cable connections that are >5mbps. Except for very very heavy usage, I doubt that somebody on a ~5mbps connection would see an appreciably different Internet than I do. Or look at it another way, I wouldn't consider it a major penalty to move someplace without FiOS and "only" a 5mbps connection. My day job has 2 paired T-1s and I only notice a slight slowness compared to my fiber home connection. Either way, I wait about as long for a youtube video to queue up, and I can watch hulu without problems in the meantime. I supposed it'd really matter if I wanted to stream 1080p HD. But there's really not a ton of that sort of content on the web anyway that's streamable.
- asharp 15y agoI do find it strange that you can go and get wholesale bw in the US for $1/mbit or less, yet residential ADSL tails, sold with contention ratios in the order of thousands:1 can be sold for like $60/month....
- ck2 15y agoNot sure what people are going to do with 20mbps+ broadband when they will certainly set caps that will be used up within the first few days of your billing cycle? Sonic apparently has no cap but that's virtually unheard of today. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/05/BUFD1K6GF7.DTL http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/05/... Which would you rather have, unlimited speed with a 150gb cap or 6mpbs with no cap?
- jbri 15y agoI'm not sure if you missed it, but this article is actually written by sonic. You know, the people providing 20+mbps without any cap.
- watty 15y agoFirst off, caps are not "virtually unheard of". Secondly Comcasts cap is 250GB/month. Who would use that in a few days? The biggest bandwidth eater I can think of is Netflix and a user would have to watch 108 movies in the best quality to reach that number.
- sp332 15y agoI think your Netflix number must be wrong, because I work at an ISP and there are a lot of subscribers going over 250 GB/mo on Netflix. Anyway, one movie a day (or 3 TV episodes) on 4 computers is 120 movies/month.
- danieldk 15y agoMy guess is that bandwidth caps are only used when there is virtually no competition. Because in practice, most people will only saturate there connections for very small amounts of time. But it's a nice way of squeezing more money out of your customers. I have had 20MBit downstream for at least six years and now 120MBit, with no bandwidth caps (The Netherlands). There is a lot of competition in this area, with at least a dozen DSL ISPs, plus cable. Mobile internet is completely the opposite. We only have three major carriers. My previous phone subscription had no caps for mobile internet, my current subscription has an 1GB cap, and the caps are now being lowered. It's an oligopoly, so they can force caps down everyone's throats.
- gcb 15y agoWhen choosing internet service 4 months ago for my new place, i made a decision that my next job hunt will be around areas were walking distance from the office are covered by sonic. Startups think about mentioning this as a benefit. seriously.
- kqueue 15y agoHong Kong is small country which makes it faster / cheaper to adopt new technologies compared to adopting it in 50 states where some states are magnitude bigger than Hong Kong.
- lr 15y agoSwitched to Sonic.net about 2 months ago and love it! Twice the speed (getting over 6 megabit now) of AT&T and for 1/2 the cost ($40/month vs. almost $80).
- nostromo 15y agoHmmm, is that considered fast? On Comcast in SF I get about 20Mbps down and I never really thought of it being particularly speedy. edit: Someone should create a website that both tests your speed, but then also shares that result with the world (anonymously). I'd love to pop up a list of ISPs in a specific city and see exactly how accurate their listed speeds are before buying.
- pbh 15y agoI'm on sonic.net and get 20mbps down, 2 mbps up. You need bonded Fusion service to get those sorts of speeds though. dslreports.com has speedtest results, down to zip code, though they don't include things like what service product and/or whether the service has some bandwidth cap.
- nitrogen 15y agoDoes Speedtest.net not do this for you? There is the small problem that the local Speedtest.net server was moved from a high-quality independent ISP to Comcast, so all Comcast speed tests are now completely unrealistic.
- brainsik 15y agoOokla — the folks who run speedtest.net — have interesting displays of the data they've collected: http://www.netindex.com/ http://www.netindex.com/ Top download speeds by country: http://www.netindex.com/download/ http://www.netindex.com/download/
- rimantas 15y agoJust tested my connection (fiber): Download Speed: 54.13 mbps (6.8 MB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 51.97 mbps (6.5 MB/sec transfer rate) The price? $20/month. But I am not in USA.
- jeffool 15y agoPotentially silly question: Why did we dig ditches and bury cable? Why didn't we dig ditches and bury pipes that you can snake cable out of and into as needed? This makes our Internet seem less like a problem of feasibility, and more like a complete engineering fuck-up.
- elithrar 15y agoCost. I would also say that most of the 'cable' is laid inside conduit, but conduit with limited space and owned by a particular carrier who has no incentive or regulation dictating that he share that conduit.
- jeffool 15y agoNow i can't help but wonder, would it be wise for the government (likely local) to lay pipe and license room in it to ISPs? Much of it could even be done when working on sewers and roads, I'd imagine. (Cue complaints of government interfering with business.)
- sapphirecat 15y agoYou might find your answer in the history of municipal network projects. But I'm strongly biased against the incumbents, so I'll avoid leaving any details here.
- cageface 15y agoThe Western capitalist dogma is that state-run economies like those of China are inherently inefficient. But it seems to me that more and more recent evidence suggests that it may be that the partisan gridlock of Western democracies, dominated by monied interests and their lobbies, is more detrimental.
- nitrogen 15y agoWhen Utah's municipally-sponsored fiber optic ISP project looked poised to become the fastest, most consumer-friendly option for Internet and TV in the state, the cable and telco companies got the state to pass a law that indirectly but effectively shut the project down. So on one hand it looks like governments can do some things right, but on the other hand regulatory capture results in the kind of deadlock you describe. Decades from now when I near the end of my useful lifespan, I would not be in the least bit surprised to see that technological progression in the United States follows an S curve over time, with increasing life expectancy just giving even more inertia to the status quo.
- arethuza 15y agoThere are state-run organisations that are fairly efficient - the UK NHS, which is pretty much the epitome of a large socialistic undertaking, is actually pretty economically efficient. The fact that it has problems being largely because we don't spend much money on it, not because it isn't efficient in using what money we give it (at least in comparison with other healthcare systems). http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/aug/07/nhs-among-most-efficient-health-services http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/aug/07/nhs-among-most...
- giardini 15y agoThe "Western capitalist dogma" to which you refer applies to competitive situations. But cable and phone companies are not competitive in the U.S.A., they are monopolistic. Read that section of a western economics text that explains monopolies for further enlightenment.
- niels_olson 15y agoSoooooo ... hate to point it out, but basically the Republicans gooned this up to?
- jeffool 15y agoMy favorite article on this topic, by Robert X. Cringely in 2007, on the Telecommunications Act of 1996: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_0026... "The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen."
- tobylane 15y agoIn the UK the main speed factor is the line between you and either your cabinet, or your exchange. You're sold packages that are probably either 8 or 24 MB/s, and you get what you can. I'm 1.1 miles from the exchange directly with no fibre in the road, so I get 6.5 while paying for 24. When fibre comes any nearer, it will be free. How is it in US? Is fibre to the street/cabinet common?
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]