Slow Internet In America

Hulk

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How come the United States has such slow internet? I heard that such countries as South Korea, Japan, Switzerland, France and Romania have internet that is 8 times faster. And those countries pay 1/10th of what we pay for out internet. Why?
 
How come the United States has such slow internet? I heard that such countries as South Korea, Japan, Switzerland, France and Romania have internet that is 8 times faster. And those countries pay 1/10th of what we pay for out internet. Why?

France is the size of Texas; the other countries are even denser. Density has a huge affect on infrastructure.
 
^^^

That and political will. For whatever reason we like to coddle our telecom companies here in the US.
 
8,080,464.3 km2 is the primary reason, yeah and money which of course always equals politics.
 
I can get gigabit and I live in a shithole town in Maine with two stop lights. I’m on 400/20 for now... certainly seems things are improving, my max available speed has gone from under 100 mbps to gigabit in less than two years with network upgrades.
 
Where I live now they want to "preserve" the historical aspect of the city. Where I used to live new developments and fiber buried everywhere but only cable\dsl available. I used the have the Fiber Optic cable buried here sign in my front yard before fios was every even known to exist.
 
It really does depend where you live. I live in the hills in a pretty rural area but was lucky enough they ran fiber through the back roads to reach another town. Awesome being able to get 100 mb/s at least, I thought I was bound to DSL when I was looking at buying.
 
Also, those countries subsidize the infrastructure.

So does the US (and various state and local governments) in various ways. Many times exclusivity agreements in municipalities make for one hell of a subsidy...
 
It's unfortunate Google cut building out their fiber program. How is there still no residential fiber in much of Silicon Valley?
 
it's all been bought and paid for several times over it's just ISPs couldn't help themselves and spent all the money on everything but building the promised infrastructure.

sorry guy greed is the reason.
 
It's unfortunate Google cut building out their fiber program. How is there still no residential fiber in much of Silicon Valley?
Google stopped building out because they discovered its expensive to build and they couldn't meet their financial return objectives. Like duh!,

As to why there is no residential fiber in the Silcon Valley - that falls almost exclusively to the local jurisdictions making it really hard and far more expensive than it needs to be. When you can't get FTTH in Silicon Valley don't blame the Telco's & ISPs - look to the idiots you've voted into the city, county and state government.
 
How come the United States has such slow internet? I heard that such countries as South Korea, Japan, Switzerland, France and Romania have internet that is 8 times faster. And those countries pay 1/10th of what we pay for out internet. Why?
Because a lot of time here in the US we only do the right thing at the very last minute and only when forced to. But then when we do, we typically do it right. I think we're in the middle of making it right as I have 500/50 at one of my sites in a town of 40k and that same site actually has 2 connections by 2 different isps, so 500/50 and 100/10 simultaneously. Not even 5 years ago, 60/5 was the tops.

Bay area doesn't seem to bad depending on where you are. Wife just got 1G for $60 for a single month and it's literally just an ethernet jack she has to plug into.
 
I didn't even have access to the most basic DSL package until late 2009. Things even today aren't much better in my hometown, happy to see 800kbps down on a good day. Speeds are getting better in the US but I've been to deserts in the middle east with faster speeds than this.
 
Yep, there are still some places that don't have the infrastructure updates. :(

And with how bandwidth-heavy being online has become, it's got to be absolute torture to try to do anything online. :eek:
 
Wait for 5g wireless. This should improve things but price will not be great. I have 150/150 fiber and it's plenty for me. Pay 55$ a month all taxes etc...
 
Wait for 5g wireless. This should improve things but price will not be great. I have 150/150 fiber and it's plenty for me. Pay 55$ a month all taxes etc...
It's going to be a wait for sure. The number of towers will need to double to have the same coverage there is now. And we all know how long that buildout took...
 
I would say Geography would be one of the biggest hurdle.

Simple math from one of the countries given by OP:

Japan: 145936 square miles
USA: 3531905 square miles

USA has 24x larger land mass

if Japan spent 50B (for example) to build and lay down its fiber infrastructure, then it would cost USA 1.2T. I know you have to take into consideration the the livable areas, geopolitics, etc... ; but this is just some rough math to illustrate how tougher it is in the US to implement the same infrastructure that smaller countries have.
 
Many countries are order(s) of magnitute poorer than US although smaller. Yet the gig internet is about 10 times cheaper.
So I guess politics and will are more of a factor. Or just there are more important things to spend money for. Just thinking.
 
Another factor is a lot of the neighborhood 'data' infrastructure in the US dates from the 30s for phone and the 80s for cable. Both the phone and cable companies spent decades trying to use their existing wiring for high speed data. Something it really wasn't designed to do. With the resultant mess of slow unreliable ISP service. Only when they started running new fiber, in no small part to compete with Google fiber, did the price/service start to approach what a lot of other countries get. As others have pointed out, the US is a really large country and even a lot of what we in the US consider dense is fairly spread out by other country's standards.
 
How come the United States has such slow internet? I heard that such countries as South Korea, Japan, Switzerland, France and Romania have internet that is 8 times faster. And those countries pay 1/10th of what we pay for out internet. Why?


South Korea, Japan, and Switzerland are very small. Switzerland also houses some extremely high tech scientific grounds as well as very high end finance. These drive extreme internet connection speeds as they need the networks. South Korea has been extremely high tech for a long time as they are home to both Samsung and LG, as well as some of the most advanced fabs in the world. That drives fast internet in the area. Japan has been high tech for decades as is really only recently falling behind to Korea in this area. They have always had faster mobile and landline based networks than pretty much anywhere on earth until just recently.

France is not typically known as being a high tech place to most people, but they do collaborate with Switzerland quite often so really they are very high tech. They also have a great advantage, in that they are located central to Switzerland, the UK, Germany, Italy, and Spain. That means networks flow through France to all these countries and given that they border Switzerland it is no surprise they have high tech networks and share scientific data and teams. Lets also not forget that France is the leading area doing research into fusion power, even if many teams are international for that.


As for the US, sure we do good scientific research, and sure we do have both Intel and GF fabs. But by and large we are not the high tech manufacturing place like Asia has become, nor are we the incredibly advanced scientific research place that they do in Europe. Combine that with being 2x the size of both the main Europe countries + Japan +Korea combined, and it is a wonder we have as good of internet that we do. Really the only thing the US has going for it is cloud storage and online companies (Amazon, MS, Google). The issue here though is that those companies all have private internet nertworks. They have INSANE speeds. Im talking terabits of bandwidth connections. They are private company networks though, and they are not general internet networks so we dont see them or hear about them. I would bet you, America has the fastest networks in the world, with China being a very close second. We just dont have access to them for general internet. Google for instance has 4 undersea cables right now, is currently installing in another 3 (they are nearing completion), and will have another 4 in the future. The 3 they are putting in now will do 160 terabits per second, each (that's 160,000 gigabit internet). Honestly it is quite good that we have significant portions of the US able to get or becoming available with 1gb internet, and areas of both Tennessee and Utah with 10gb internet.
 
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Slow internet? WHATCHUTALKINABOUTWILLIS?!
speedsux4.jpg


There's no reason I should be seeing this when I pay for a 150Mbps plan
 
Another factor is a lot of the neighborhood 'data' infrastructure in the US dates from the 30s for phone and the 80s for cable. Both the phone and cable companies spent decades trying to use their existing wiring for high speed data. Something it really wasn't designed to do. With the resultant mess of slow unreliable ISP service. Only when they started running new fiber, in no small part to compete with Google fiber, did the price/service start to approach what a lot of other countries get. As others have pointed out, the US is a really large country and even a lot of what we in the US consider dense is fairly spread out by other country's standards.
And to add to this point, as the newer nations implemented their infrastructure, they simply skipped copper altogether and went straight fibre so the speeds are fast since there is no legacy wiring to deal with.

I saw this in India--even though the power infrastructure has frequent outages, the water is unsafe to drink, and there's no sort of planning or rules with regards to buildings or even the roads, the 50Mbps internet was 50Mbps and was priced 1/2 of the US. (It still had this stupid 12hr 'log out' issue so you had to log back in even if you had a ping running, and then there's the data cap and all the shady billing around that which makes our shady isps look like saints.)
 
Slow internet? WHATCHUTALKINABOUTWILLIS?!
View attachment 136694

There's no reason I should be seeing this when I pay for a 150Mbps plan
Yeah, that's an issue for sure that they should remedy or you should disconnect and use another provider. Even a cell phone hotspot will do better than that today. I haven't seen a speedtest result like that since like 2008. :eek:
 
WHAT?!? Where exactly? First I've heard of this outside of Europe. :eek:
Chattanooga, TN has 10gb.
and U.T.O.P.I.A. services a decently large area of Utah: https://broadbandnow.com/UTOPIA

edit: that web page showing utopia service area must be out of date as it only lists 1gb. However I saw a member here asking for help setting up his 10gb connection from them and if you go to their website they tell you about their 10gb service.
https://www.utopiafiber.com/2018/01...unch-states-first-residential-10-gig-service/

Looks like cost is a dirt cheap $200 a month for 10gb
 
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Oh look at poor America with it's slow speeds! Meanwhile in Australia MOST people with internet have 10Mbps or LESS.



But for real, I do feel you, I recently moved to a place with fibre 100/40 and while I'm a lucky one, many people simply don't have the choice.
 
Chattanooga, TN has 10gb.
and U.T.O.P.I.A. services a decently large area of Utah: https://broadbandnow.com/UTOPIA

edit: that web page showing utopia service area must be out of date as it only lists 1gb. However I saw a member here asking for help setting up his 10gb connection from them and if you go to their website they tell you about their 10gb service.
https://www.utopiafiber.com/2018/01...unch-states-first-residential-10-gig-service/

Looks like cost is a dirt cheep $200 a month for 10gb
Wow, that's pretty killer. That's an ungodly amount of bandwidth too. :eek:
 
Oh look at poor America with it's slow speeds! Meanwhile in Australia MOST people with internet have 10Mbps or LESS.



But for real, I do feel you, I recently moved to a place with fibre 100/40 and while I'm a lucky one, many people simply don't have the choice.
And that sucks with the current size of websites getting bigger and bigger. If it wasn't for optimization for mobile coming along because of smartphones, I bet sites would be at least twice as heavy as they are now.
 
Wait for 5g wireless. This should improve things but price will not be great. I have 150/150 fiber and it's plenty for me. Pay 55$ a month all taxes etc...

Everyone says this & this is my hope too.

However, cellular data caps are going to make 5G pretty much a non-competitor to traditional landlines. I don't think you'll see 1TB cellular 5G caps in the short term....
 
Everyone says this & this is my hope too.

However, cellular data caps are going to make 5G pretty much a non-competitor to traditional landlines. I don't think you'll see 1TB cellular 5G caps in the short term....
Verizon 5G Home has no data caps. Since they do not, ATT most likely will not have data caps either when they release their products.
 
How much is 5G home service? Speeds?
Verizon says anywhere between 300mbps and 1gbps depending on how close you are and how well the signal can get through house walls. Cost is $50 if you have a Verizon wireless plan, and $70 a month if you do not. No data caps with either cost plan.
It is just rolling out, so coverage areas are extremely small. But as with all prior tech it is expanding and will eventually reach most places just like 4G LTE did. Verizon also says that those prices currently have no extra fees attached on top like cell plans do, no equipment costs, and no contract.

If all that stays true as the network expands then it really is a compelling service that seems to outdo most internet we currently have.
 
Everyone says this & this is my hope too.

However, cellular data caps are going to make 5G pretty much a non-competitor to traditional landlines. I don't think you'll see 1TB cellular 5G caps in the short term....
You are 100% correct but just maybe we all might be wrong(would not bet on it)
 
Verizon says anywhere between 300mbps and 1gbps depending on how close you are and how well the signal can get through house walls. Cost is $50 if you have a Verizon wireless plan, and $70 a month if you do not. No data caps with either cost plan.
It is just rolling out, so coverage areas are extremely small. But as with all prior tech it is expanding and will eventually reach most places just like 4G LTE did. Verizon also says that those prices currently have no extra fees attached on top like cell plans do, no equipment costs, and no contract.

If all that stays true as the network expands then it really is a compelling service that seems to outdo most internet we currently have.
These almost sounds like introductory offers, so I wouldn't be surprised if the service or price (or both) change as the service gains traction.
 
These almost sounds like introductory offers, so I wouldn't be surprised if the service or price (or both) change as the service gains traction.

Introductory offers are that Verizon gives you a free Apple TV 4K and Youtube TV subscription for a year :eek:
 
I just got off Hughs net gen 3 as the local WISP got service to my house. Only getting about 1.5 mbps up and .8 down where it's advertised at 10/2 but I'm not paying for it while they tweak the service.
 
Edit:
In reference to 5G:

It's great until you need to open a port for something to work correctly. And, then you realize you don't have access to control anything.

No control over the network gateway is a killer for me. I realize it won't be for 97% of consumers.
 
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