US Lagging In High-Speed Internet Service

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Just when you start feeling content with your broadband service, another article like this pops up to remind us how bad your service really sucks. ;)

San Antonio is the seventh-largest city in the United States, a progressive and economically vibrant metropolis of 1.4 million people sprawled across south-central Texas. But the speed of its Internet service is no match for the Latvian capital, Riga, a city of 700,000 on the Baltic Sea.
 
Not all area's are lagging in speed, but we sure are being taken to the cleaners cost wise.
 
Paying $70/month for 70mbps.

Enjoying every minute of the targeted throttling and data caps.

250GB/month is a pathetically low cap for a 4-person home when you're streaming TV/Movies and gaming.
 
The issue usually isn't the top speed, but what the provider is selling. Most people with Comcast can order "business class" and within 5 minutes are cruising at hundreds of MPS. The catch is that it's extremely expensive. The capability is there, but their normal packages are artificially capped much lower so they can sell different tiers.
It's not always the infrastructure (although sometimes it is), but the pay structure.
 
This is what happens when you allow monopolies.

No reason to provide faster speeds, cheaper prices, etc because the consumer has no choice in the matter.

Also they have allowed them to (over the years) help create laws that actually work AGAINST the government being able to offer such services , the same as say electricity/water, etc.

The few place that have gotten this (such as Chattanooga, TN) had to fight in courts to do so, and now they offer 1gb (yes A GIGABIT, not MB) for 70 bucks a month.

I pay 70 bucks for just 50mb.
 
The issue usually isn't the top speed, but what the provider is selling. Most people with Comcast can order "business class" and within 5 minutes are cruising at hundreds of MPS. The catch is that it's extremely expensive. The capability is there, but their normal packages are artificially capped much lower so they can sell different tiers.
It's not always the infrastructure (although sometimes it is), but the pay structure.

Just blew through 850GB for December on Comcast. I wonder if they will complain.
 
I don't even know where to begin with these articles. They are comparing apples and oranges and trying to make some kind of story out of it. The best tidbit though is this statement:

"There is ample evidence that faster broadband spurs economic growth. The White House cites a study of 33 of the largest national economies; it found that from 2008 to 2010, doubling a country’s broadband speed increased gross domestic product 0.3 percent."

Economic growth...of .3%? Seriously? That is the main concern today, getting an increase of less than 1/3 of 1%?
 
If you lived where I live and had comcast with 350gb caps, you would have had to pay an extra $100 for the extra 500gb of data you used. Enjoy it while it last, comcast said they are going to start rolling out the caps everywhere. Whats even more fked up is that they have a 350gb cap for every tier, so my 100mb download tier has the same as the person with the 3mb download speed. And they warn you 3 times before they bend you over. I got called twice already saying "i have reached my monthly data limit blah blah blah, and if it happens again, I will get charged $10 per 50gb overages" . Seriously is the biggest joke ever. I basically had to stop streaming in 1080p, not use the highest netflix settings, and seriously watch my game downloads in certain months, and if I have a few games I want to try out in a certain month, NOT GONNA HAPPEN.
 
If you lived where I live and had comcast with 350gb caps, you would have had to pay an extra $100 for the extra 500gb of data you used. Enjoy it while it last, comcast said they are going to start rolling out the caps everywhere. Whats even more fked up is that they have a 350gb cap for every tier, so my 100mb download tier has the same as the person with the 3mb download speed. And they warn you 3 times before they bend you over. I got called twice already saying "i have reached my monthly data limit blah blah blah, and if it happens again, I will get charged $10 per 50gb overages" . Seriously is the biggest joke ever. I basically had to stop streaming in 1080p, not use the highest netflix settings, and seriously watch my game downloads in certain months, and if I have a few games I want to try out in a certain month, NOT GONNA HAPPEN.

We have the 250GB cap that is not enforced. 120down 20up. When the caps come, I will have to switch to business class. CenturyLink is not fast enough and since it's DSL, the uploads are not remotely close to what I need.
 
I don't even know where to begin with these articles. They are comparing apples and oranges and trying to make some kind of story out of it. The best tidbit though is this statement:



Economic growth...of .3%? Seriously? That is the main concern today, getting an increase of less than 1/3 of 1%?

Pretty hilarious, basically proves that bandwidth has no effect on GDP
 
We have the 250GB cap that is not enforced. 120down 20up. When the caps come, I will have to switch to business class. CenturyLink is not fast enough and since it's DSL, the uploads are not remotely close to what I need.

I get threatening letters every time I cross the 250GB cap.

Something like "If you do this three months in a row we will cancel your service and you will be banned from signing up again"

1080p Streaming eats up most of the data and a huge steam library does the rest. BF4 alone was 40GB+ the multiple updates and map packs. I definitely exceeded the limit in December, 2nd month in a row.

Fuck da police (well, the ISP Police)
 
Synopsis of the soon to be 10 page thread

Companies need to build the infrastructure, is the government going to give out grants to do it?
They'll only build/expand if it's in their best interests, which means rural people are out of luck.
They will charge what the market will bear, seems to be one of those topics where everyone becomes a "socialist" in how the companies are over charging.
Wireless is the direction companies want to go, laying wire to everyone's houses is expensive, wireless is relatively cheap, and you get the added bonus of being able to charge up the ass for tiny data allowances.
 
This is what happens when you allow monopolies.

No reason to provide faster speeds, cheaper prices, etc because the consumer has no choice in the matter.

Also they have allowed them to (over the years) help create laws that actually work AGAINST the government being able to offer such services , the same as say electricity/water, etc.

The few place that have gotten this (such as Chattanooga, TN) had to fight in courts to do so, and now they offer 1gb (yes A GIGABIT, not MB) for 70 bucks a month.

I pay 70 bucks for just 50mb.

Bingo. 53 bucks for 20mbps, in Silicon Valley. Comcast has us by the balls. That's not including the basic TV my condo association pays for, and just bills through to us anyway with fees. I don't even want cable TV, I'd have better quality with an antenna.
 
CenturyLink is not fast enough and since it's DSL, the uploads are not remotely close to what I need.
Funny, since in my area, CenturyLink's 20Mbps uplink is the fastest you can get - Comcast's max is 15Mbps! (Although I hear they're increasing it to 20Mbps soon)
 
That nobody mentions anything about Competition or Regulation

The big problem isn't on the Federal level, like most regulation issues. These are entirely on the local level. Denver, for instance, has had a dozen other companies request permission to install their lines and supply their service from the city council over the last 15 years, and all were turned down for the ridiculous reason of "not confident they could meet demand." So, we're stuck with 50Mb Comcast, which performs at about 15Mb in practice, or Century Link (where Century Link is just the service company supporting Qwest's DSL lines, which perform at a peak of 7Mb with more than double the latency of Comcast.) We're being charged too much, and getting service that is slower than average. Granted, we're not as bad off as some other areas in Colorado, such as areas of Pueblo, where they're either stuck with 10Mb Comcast or 1.5Mb Century Link, but it still sucks.
 
I saw this happening as far back as the mid 1990's when broadband was first coming in to the major areas. Think like a capitalist. That is what CEOs are paid to do. How can you maximize profits? Simple, piecemeal bandwidth out to your customers in terms of speed and quotas while citing "high infrastructure costs" as the reason you can't drop prices or increase bandwidth. Or, similarly don't expand to every area claiming nearly the same thing. I understand it might not be profitable to drop infra in to Podunkville, USA but no telecom CEO these days has an iota of credibility as they are all corrupt greedy liars.
 
Funny, since in my area, CenturyLink's 20Mbps uplink is the fastest you can get - Comcast's max is 15Mbps! (Although I hear they're increasing it to 20Mbps soon)

Depends where you are. CenturyLink where I am is crap for consumer, but that is because Comcast and FIOS have the majority of the lines. Although here you can get upwards of 200Mbps as a consumer. I was upgraded to 50Mbps recently for free (well what they, being FIOS, calls free). Theoretically there is some cap in place, but I have never received any warnings for going over it. And from what I heard from individuals working there, they mostly just use it to weed out bandwidth abusers who are hosting businesses streaming content up and down on their lines. Personally I have had months at upwards of 500GB and not received a warning. But its rare I get up that high. Caps really suck though, I know a few people hit by then through Comcrap.
 
So internet is cheaper and faster on average in Riga which has about twice the population density and 1/4 of the land area to cover of San Antonio. It is still all about the infrastructure and the cost associated with it. Same old terrible comparisons against dissimilar demographics and geography.
 
Depends where you are. CenturyLink where I am is crap for consumer, but that is because Comcast and FIOS have the majority of the lines. Although here you can get upwards of 200Mbps as a consumer. I was upgraded to 50Mbps recently for free (well what they, being FIOS, calls free). Theoretically there is some cap in place, but I have never received any warnings for going over it. And from what I heard from individuals working there, they mostly just use it to weed out bandwidth abusers who are hosting businesses streaming content up and down on their lines. Personally I have had months at upwards of 500GB and not received a warning. But its rare I get up that high. Caps really suck though, I know a few people hit by then through Comcrap.

Verizon has, in past sent notices out to the heaviest use offenders. But those users were using 10+ TB a month on a residential service.
 
I don't even know where to begin with these articles. They are comparing apples and oranges and trying to make some kind of story out of it. The best tidbit though is this statement:



Economic growth...of .3%? Seriously? That is the main concern today, getting an increase of less than 1/3 of 1%?

In the US, 0.3% would be about $500,000,000. If we all suddenly had access to Google Fiber that would more than double bandwidth. At the time of that study we were also dealing with a global recession. There has been a lot of growth in online services since 2010.
 
Funny, since in my area, CenturyLink's 20Mbps uplink is the fastest you can get - Comcast's max is 15Mbps! (Although I hear they're increasing it to 20Mbps soon)

CenturyLink is 8Mbps down and 700Kbps up where I am. I haven't heard of them using caps though.
 
<sarcasm>
But I don't understand. US cable companies charge the most for high speed access so they can expand our services to be the best possible.
</sarcasm>
 
Comcast has been pretty good for me here in Denver...at least performance-wise. I get 60/12 as part of the 2nd best non-business package.
I've also never gotten any letters and my wife is a streaming video fiend.
I think because we pay for the extra channels they cut us some slack.
 
The big problem isn't on the Federal level, like most regulation issues. These are entirely on the local level. Denver, for instance, has had a dozen other companies request permission to install their lines and supply their service from the city council over the last 15 years, and all were turned down for the ridiculous reason of "not confident they could meet demand."

Yeah at least two companies in San Francisco that offer affordable service have requested to install fiber, one via microtrenching, the other via poles and using street boxes similar to AT&T Uverse service, the later actually offers prices that mimic those of GoogleFiber! Well haven't seen much headway movement on either of these, meanwhile all the AT&T boxes seem to be popping up all over the place.
 
ISP's need to offer both choices of speed and data.


Comcast needs to offer 25Mbps with 250, 500, and unlimited caps. $10 per 50GB is not unreasonable if they send you an e-mail notifying you that 95% of your data usable for the month has been reached.

A better idea is to throttle bandwidth hogs for the remainder of the billing period. And even better idea is to give the customer a choice....be throttled or pay for overages.

Throttled would lower 25Mbps to 3Mbps or something like that for the remainder of the billing period.
 
ISP's need to offer both choices of speed and data.


Comcast needs to offer 25Mbps with 250, 500, and unlimited caps. $10 per 50GB is not unreasonable if they send you an e-mail notifying you that 95% of your data usable for the month has been reached.

A better idea is to throttle bandwidth hogs for the remainder of the billing period. And even better idea is to give the customer a choice....be throttled or pay for overages.

Throttled would lower 25Mbps to 3Mbps or something like that for the remainder of the billing period.

So, you are ok with ISP over-provisioning their bandwidth in hopes that their scare tactics of charging for overages will keep people from using the bandwidth they pay for? :rolleyes:
 
In the US, 0.3% would be about $500,000,000. If we all suddenly had access to Google Fiber that would more than double bandwidth. At the time of that study we were also dealing with a global recession. There has been a lot of growth in online services since 2010.

Im sorry, I don't understand what point you are trying to make here? Are you suggesting that if we doubled bandwidth everywhere in the US it would result in a noticeable increase in our economy? Because one, this study is about domestic bandwidth, not corporate. So even mentioning that study was laughable in the context of the article. Next, increasing bandwidth has not had a noticeable impact on the economy, because quite frankly, companies have been greatly increasing their bandwidth for the last decade. And while it certainly has helped increase productivity in companies, it has not led to a noticeable increase in our economy.

Also if you are suggesting that increasing network bandwidth for consumers will help boost the economy based off their streaming purchases, that is also not a direct correlation. Since it suggests we should get more bandwidth for less money, the money for bandwidth is going to US companies, where the services people would be paying to stream may or may not be US companies. So there could very well be a negative impact on the economy as well having more US currency flow out of the country rather than in.

Overall I think overhauling our infrastructure and finding a better, more efficient, faster way to not only deliver, but upgrade our bandwidth for the future is just good practice. The long term effects will outweigh the minimal short term gains. Actually in the short term there will probably be a drop in the economy based on the upfront expense of the overhaul. That is nothing new as it has been done by many nations before. The difference being, most of those nations are far smaller in both population and land mass, and most of their population centers are far closer together and not as spread out as the US.
 
When our town got some nice connections (nice fiber going through town), we were able to get a couple data centers and a couple local businesses got some good connections. But, it doesn't trickle down to the consumer. We have the infrastructure to do it, but no company wants to invest in the last mile ISP stuff to bring a decent connection to a town of 3,300 people. So, we're stuck with 10Mb DSL from CenturyLink for $80 or 7Mb wireless for $60 a month.

I don't think it would increase any spending, nor do I think it would really make much of an impact other than happier consumers. I'd pay $100 for 50Mb, and I'm sure 20 other people would. But, that would definitely not cover the costs for the ISP. It's just not profitable for them to increase. There is no competition, so it'll sit like this for another decade or more.

I would like to see more business network upgrades, though. The few cities I've seen where they bring fiber to main business areas (city center, etc), they do amazingly well. 100Mb business connections for $250 a month? Hells yea.

If the government (well, your guy's tax money) wants to pay to bring rural areas faster connections, I'm game. Bring 50+Mb, low latency connections to these small towns. Watch the GDP jump! :D
 
I just got a new cable modem (I think an SB6141) and bumped up my service with Cox this week. I'm in a newer subdivision just south of Tucson, AZ so the infrastructure is newer. I'm paying for 150mbps down/20 up but get about 200mbps down/30 up. I'm paying $99.99 a month though (too much!) and although I can manage it just fine, I hate the seemingly low 400GB monthly cap. I downloaded some new steam games over the weekend though and OMG fast. Downloading at nearly 25 megaBYTES per second is just crazy. I remember when 1.5megaBITs was like holy shit only 15 years ago. I pay because I like the speed, we have a ton of connected devices and we don't pay for cable TV, just Netflix/Hulu so it's still kinda worth it to me.
 
Out of all the companies I have had, Cox is the worse for price vs speed and their data caps are very unrealistic :/

Glad FIOS I have now has no caps and speed vs price is decent, not good but decent.
 
I don't even know where to begin with these articles. They are comparing apples and oranges and trying to make some kind of story out of it. The best tidbit though is this statement:



Economic growth...of .3%? Seriously? That is the main concern today, getting an increase of less than 1/3 of 1%?

Pretty hilarious, basically proves that bandwidth has no effect on GDP

0.3% is 47,040,000,000 (15.68T 2012) - I don't think you people realize how massive the US GDP is, and how massive of a number .3% of that is, so there you go. .3% is MORE than worth the cost of upgrading infrastructure - 47B/year is worth doing something for.

To say otherwise is foolish - the investments would be paid back in GDP increases within 5-10 years, very likely MUCH sooner.
 
I'm dreading the day Comcast introduce that 300GB limit in my area and $10 for an addtional 50GB...
 
Over here, it's easier to find a cheap rental apartment with an rj45 jack in the wall hooked up to a fiberoptic station in the basement than an expensive home with a bathtub.

We've got competition. We made laws to enable competition. We saw the former state-owned telecomms company beat hard and disowned, to create competition and a healthier market. We still see that former state-owned company take on punishments from above if they break any rules that other companies stick to, to ensure that there will be competition. Things are pretty great.
 
Bandwidth caps? pfft.

internets_zps12e6c2e8.png


However, my problem is I need 2 SB6120 modems and a Peplink to get 60/6. (30/3 each) for a lovely $140 a month. :eek:
 
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