U.S. Internet Speeds Causing Digital Divide?

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My upload is poo.
 
Central NY (near Syracuse)
Time-Warner........Internet Alone is 30 dollars a month, unlimited



They never tell us what we are "guaranteed" as far as service.
 
Chiplg said:
They listed South Korea, Japan, Sweden, Latvia, Portugal, and Liechtenstein.

Well, I looked up each nation on Wikipedia and put their population and area into a spreadsheet. The US has 3,794,006 square miles vs 418,882 square miles for ALL OF THOSE countries combined, or NINE TIMES the area.

All of those countries have a TOTAL population of 198,161,209 vs the US at 307,230,000. So, the US has 1 1/2 times the population.

Considering that, the US has done well to get the score it has. I'm not saying it should not be better, but the cost to get broadband to the masses is significantly higher in the US based on area alone.

Come on. Liechtenstein? They have 62 square miles and a population of 35,000!
Click to expand...

Fixed more errors.
 
Wow, even Steve in Alaska has a better connection than I do in Puerto Rico... Sad. I pay $60 for 2mbps / 512kbps, DSL with the local telco. Used to pay $40 for 1mbps / 512kbps.

The cable company has decidedly better speeds (5 mbps / 1mbps IIRC for $40-50) BUT they started implementing a 40GB bandiwth cap per month about a year ago when I was on the verge of switching... That and the fact that I've heard of more service outage on cable than DSL lately are the reasons I stick w/DSL for now. My ping's pretty decent too and I know that's one of the first things that suffer when they oversell cable service in any one area.
 
The cable co's service is acutally rated t 6 mbps and it's $55 if you don't pay for cable, I seem to recall it being as cheap as $35 if you bought certain cable packages though. Still, it's pretty ass compared to most of what's available in the US, particularly the 40GB bandwith cap and the overage charges, makes Comcast's 250GB caps look downright fair.
 
We have two offerings here in a little town outside of Sioux Falls SD.

Cable internet is 15 down and 1 up for $20 a month

Fios 20/20 is 25 a month, which we are going to try next week...
 
We've got fat pipes through Europe, because the countries paid for it. States object to laying new pipes between each other unless they transfer oil?
 


we get tv and internet. i believe cost is 40.00 dollars a month for just internet. 6 megs download and upload.
 
What Steve fails to add is you also have to pay $92.99 for $hitty cable service and home phone service.
So for me Internet is over $170 a month!

Sorry Steve, I really HATE GCI!!!!!!

Steve said:
GCI.net
Alaska
$69.99
Advertised speed is 10mbps / 1Mbps

I used speedtest.net to test (1400 miles):
http://www.****************************/netspeed.jpg
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$50.00 10Mbit down, 1Mbit up
$75.00 20Mbit down, 2Mbit up

Charter Communication in Tennessee, there DNS servers are so messed up and always down or just perform so poorly most people including me use OpenDNS.

They have had problems in areas where people were not getting the speeds they was paying for and they send people out to your house that barely know how to hook up a cable box let alone understand routers or what power level upstream....

Comments from there techs include and not limited to, thats over my head, I dont know what your talking about or I'm sorry but I dont understand and cant fix this they gonna have to send someone else out.

It usually takes calling them 2-4 times and them sending someone out 2-3 times to actually fix any real problems on their end.

The latest thing that happened for Charter was the backbone dns server in Chicago went down, I doubt they have recovered from that and pity anyone using their dns servers, a quick google or browse of dslreports shows just how bad their service is across the country and how flakey the dns has been for the past 4-6yrs.

/end rant
 
gkanakis said:
What Steve fails to add is you also have to pay $92.99 for $hitty cable service and home phone service.
So for me Internet is over $170 a month!

Sorry Steve, I really HATE GCI!!!!!!
Click to expand...

The same for Charter, you have to get the package deal to actually save any money, and that savings only last 1yr if you're lucky... then they jack the price up, they have been doing more deals and special package rates lately thou so maybe it wont be so bad for new suscribers.

I'm getting my cable tv, internet and phone through charter and paying around $175-210 with taxes right now. I was getting it all for $100 but that only lasted 1yr.
I do have all the channels so thats one reason the price is so high right now.
 
Comcrap
60 month
Atlanta, GA
12/4 advertised speeds?? Not really sure.

 
Chiplg said:
They listed South Korea, Japan, Sweden, Latvia, Portugal, and Liechtenstein.

Well, I looked up each nation on Wikipedia and put their population and area into a spreadsheet. The US has 3,794,006 square miles vs 418,882 square miles for ALL OF THOSE countries combined, or NINE TIMES the area.

All of those countries have a TOTAL population of 198,161,209 vs the US at 307,230,000. So, the US has 1 1/2 times the population.

Considering that, the US has done well to get the score it has. I'm not saying it should not be better, but the cost to get broadband to the masses is significantly higher in the US based on area alone.

Come on. Liechtenstein? They have 62 square miles and a population of 35,000!
Click to expand...
While I question the inclusion of Liechtenstein in the comparison (you're right, it's pretty ridiculous), the US has 2.14 times the GDP of all those countries combined. I'm not so sure that it's purely a cost issue.

We've traversed the ocean in fiber, there's satellite connections that span the globe. I just downloaded a file from Taiwan at 1.4Mb / sec... from Taiwan.

Perhaps it's more about where these countries (some... really little countries), states, and companies, have decided to put their resources.

In case nobody actually checked, the report is on this website which has a pretty slick flash applet that will show you by state, then by county, then by zip code within the county, average speeds and number of tests done from each area.
 


$43/month - Comquack
Advertised at 15/3, *shrug*
I thought it was powerboost only at first, but seeding for several hours in the 900KB/s to 1MB/s range put that thinking to an end.
 
TWC Turbo $50/Mo and increasing more and more every year along with proposed caps to boot...
Rochester NY

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Yea when compared to some places like Japan the US is way behind... when compared to others, (from what I've read our Ausi-friends get boned), we are ahead...
 
Lawrence, KS
Sunflower Broadband
$49.95 21Mbps/786Kbps 50GB Cap What I have
$29.95 7Mbps/256Kbps 15GB Cap
$17.95 1.5Mbps/128Kbps 3GB Cap
$2.00 for every GB over Cap. If I download more than about 1GB my speed is limited to 4Mbps for several hours. Sucks

They are in the next month or so offering a new plan for $49.95 that is advertised as variable speed and unmetered. I'll end up getting that because as it stands, my service is variable and the extra bandwidth will be nice.


 
3Mbps/486kbps
$30 (I think)
Pacbell/SBC/AT&T/Yahoo
San Francisco, CA

Someone is keeping track of this right? :D
 
What doesn't seem to be talked about in this report, is how many people are using a slower internet connection than is available to them. If the report is assuming that everybody that took the speed test is using the fastest connection available to them, then there are going to be people that skew the results.

Example: I have access to 20Mb down through U-Verse (and who knows what through Comcast) but I don't use it because I don't want to pay the associated costs. It would be interesting to see how the results change should the report include everybody that has access to higher speed internet. I'd be curious to see if the overall rankings changed.

Endnote 4 (pg 5) deals with information from the FCC about average line capacity and mentions that 60% of all lines can deliver information at 2.5 to 10Mbps down but doesn't mention if that figures in to overall results. If the goal (as stated on website) is to make sure that 100% of people get 10 down, then we are clearly a little behind.
 
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