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America's slow Internet infrastructure

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davexnet

Member
Anybody have any thoughts about this? I'm not that surprised when you
look at the relationship between the government and business.
Other countries have asked the big businesses to find a better balance between
their pure profit taking and the infrastructure relating to their business and
the public they serve.

I remember moving to some suburbs in the Chicago area; every time there was a moderate
storm, the flimsy wires carrying the power came down, resulting in outages of an
indeterminate time. I asked one of the locals why the power infrastructure is so
third-world, and he responded that the power companies don't want to spend the money
to improve it. Other countries have seen plans between business and government
where programs have been undertaken to make the infrastructure competitive, safe,
reliable and modern.

I don't see that in the USA; it's too easy for certain businesses to have a monopoly;
people may moan about it, someone writes an article from time to time, but that's it.

http://theweek.com/article/index/257404/why-is-american-internet-so-slow
 
Its kind of a pathetic situation. I lived in a town of about 25,000 65 miles from the nearest large city. My 30+ year old subdivision only has copper wires and there's no plans from ATT to upgrade them. My only other choice is Comcast which I refuse to do business with (we've had history). I'm stuck with 3 Mbps DSL and while it was fine ten years ago, it really doesn't do the job anymore.
 
The Comcast/Time Warner merger should fix everything. Along with throttling bandwidth speeds and making content providers pay more to deliver content faster which means that the consumers won't have to pay as much for their internet access. I figure once you whittle everything on the internet down to a handful available websites (similar to what you have on subscriber TV), you'll reach a point to where internet speeds will either meet or exceed that of other countries.

It goes to show you that we don't need the government to step in because the free market always has the best solution.
 
"The new head of the Federal Communications Commission, Tom Wheeler, is a former lobbyist for two sets of vested interests: the cell-phone operators and, you guessed it, the cable companies."

One of the biggest dissapointments of the Obama administration is their adherence to the status quo in appointed positions. The economy tanked because the wall street crowd f'ed up and what does Obama do? appoints wall street cronies to oversee the clean up. This is just another example here. Lobbyists should be automatically excluded from ever working in government.
 
It's the same in Canada. There's a few regional players, but two national companies control the majority of the market. Caps have always been a reality and it's expensive, especially if you don't bundle with other services.

One silver lining is the CRTC (equivalent to the FCC) does force the big players to allow smaller players to piggyback on their networks. They require the big players to allow indie ISPs to buy bandwidth from them and resell it. I with an indie ISP. It's a DSL service that operates on Bell Canada's lines. I get 15mbps but unlimited data.

The really scary thing is the US Supreme Court's irresponsible decision to end net neutrality. The only people that benefit from that are big cable. It's bad for both consumers and business.
 
davexnet said:
Anybody have any thoughts about this? I'm not that surprised when you
look at the relationship between the government and business.
Other countries have asked the big businesses to find a better balance between
their pure profit taking and the infrastructure relating to their business and
the public they serve.

I remember moving to some suburbs in the Chicago area; every time there was a moderate
storm, the flimsy wires carrying the power came down, resulting in outages of an
indeterminate time. I asked one of the locals why the power infrastructure is so
third-world, and he responded that the power companies don't want to spend the money
to improve it. Other countries have seen plans between business and government
where programs have been undertaken to make the infrastructure competitive, safe,
reliable and modern.

I don't see that in the USA; it's too easy for certain businesses to have a monopoly;
people may moan about it, someone writes an article from time to time, but that's it.

http://theweek.com/article/index/257404/why-is-american-internet-so-slow
Click to expand...
AC044516l.jpg


Mine.
 
It's so valid and meaningful to compare America to Hong Kong and Singapore.

Does anyone who writes on these topics actually get how large this continent is? How about comparing us to other continents, on average? How would that work out?

Some of the countries we get compared to in studies like this are smaller than New York City. It's just not a meaningful exercise. According to Akamai in a report last summer the global average was 3.x, and we were at 8.x nationwide.

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.ph...eeds-climb-to-3-1mbps-as-uk-tops-7-9mbps.html

The countries above us are all much smaller places. If you're going to measure averages speeds then the U.S. is always going to be dragged down by huge expanses of rural territory that just can't be covered with fast Internet using today's technology, or at least not at a cost anyone wants to bear.
 
I work in the ISP industry. Trust me- we would like nothing more than to have an infrastructure in place that provides high speed access to every corner of the US. However, because of the sheer size of the US and the different terrains involved, blanketing the entire country with an average attainable speed of even 20Mb/s would bankrupt every bandwidth provider around.

This is why you're seeing fiber pop up slowly- it's expensive as hell to implement (you're looking at a 7-20 year turnaround on your multimillion dollar investment).
 
Markbnj said:
It's so valid and meaningful to compare America to Hong Kong and Singapore.

Does anyone who writes on these topics actually get how large this continent is? How about comparing us to other continents, on average? How would that work out?

Some of the countries we get compared to in studies like this are smaller than New York City. It's just not a meaningful exercise. According to Akamai in a report last summer the global average was 3.x, and we were at 8.x nationwide.

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.ph...eeds-climb-to-3-1mbps-as-uk-tops-7-9mbps.html

The countries above us are all much smaller places. If you're going to measure averages speeds then the U.S. is always going to be dragged down by huge expanses of rural territory that just can't be covered with fast Internet using today's technology, or at least not at a cost anyone wants to bear.
Click to expand...

Except most of the landmass is rural where hardly anybody lives, and the population density in most of the cities is exactly the same as in HK, Singapore, or even eastern Europe, all of which have higher average speeds than US. I can understand the density arguments when you're talking about boonies, but I cannot and will not accept it when we're talking about metro areas.
 
I don't think comparing the size of the USA to smaller countries and using that as
an excuse holds much water. The country is broken down into independent states;
the can administer there own area and work with others states as necessary.

Neither do I believe the free market is always the best answer - not when there is a
massive monopoly. That's the way it's been, and the civilian infrastructure in the USA,
is probably 10 years behind other advanced countries.
 
Internet access isn't profitable... that's the reason really. Big Cable only upgraded their infrastructure so they could deliver HD/OnDemand, and they are definitely not going to upgrade it so you can watch Netflix in 4K. So caps and throttling are going to be needed to keep the nodes from getting overloaded.
 
jpiniero said:
Internet access isn't profitable... that's the reason really. Big Cable only upgraded their infrastructure so they could deliver HD/OnDemand, and they are definitely not going to upgrade it so you can watch Netflix in 4K. So caps and throttling are going to be needed to keep the nodes from getting overloaded.
Click to expand...

Interesting perspective - you're quite happy that the USA is 10 years behind other
advanced countries. I never realized, but your point is valid - just extremely
narrow minded. Head in the sand jumps to mind.
l
 
davexnet said:
I don't think comparing the size of the USA to smaller countries and using that as
an excuse holds much water. The country is broken down into independent states;
the can administer there own area and work with others states as necessary.
Click to expand...
Singapore
274.1 sq miles

Texas
268,581 sq mi

Sup?
 
Markbnj said:
It's so valid and meaningful to compare America to Hong Kong and Singapore.

Does anyone who writes on these topics actually get how large this continent is? How about comparing us to other continents, on average? How would that work out?
Click to expand...

Our backbone infrastructure is pretty solid, because big businesses use that. It is that so called ‘last mile’ to your house that is laughable. That is the same here as it is in Hong Kong or Singapore.
 
fleshconsumed said:
Except most of the landmass is rural where hardly anybody lives, and the population density in most of the cities is exactly the same as in HK, Singapore, or even eastern Europe, all of which have higher average speeds than US. I can understand the density arguments when you're talking about boonies, but I cannot and will not accept it when we're talking about metro areas.
Click to expand...

What is the avg download speed in the metro areas of our country? I am in Minneapolis and avg around 60Mbps down and 11-12Mbps up. Which puts me above Singapore.
 
Fritzo said:
I work in the ISP industry. Trust me- we would like nothing more than to have an infrastructure in place that provides high speed access to every corner of the US. However, because of the sheer size of the US and the different terrains involved, blanketing the entire country with an average attainable speed of even 20Mb/s would bankrupt every bandwidth provider around.
Click to expand...

There is no reason whatsoever why it can't be done in urban areas. Other than, of course, that ISPs see no profit in doing so given that there's no real competition.
 
Genx87 said:
What is the avg download speed in the metro areas of our country? I am in Minneapolis and avg around 60Mbps down and 11-12Mbps up. Which puts me above Singapore.
Click to expand...

You're comparing apples to oranges. On one hand you have individual plan that is available to you, on the other hand you have an average download speed of all subscribers. I highly doubt everyone in the metro cities is subscribing to 60MBps+ plans, they're too damn expensive in the US.
 
SMOGZINN said:
Lets also just gloss over the fact that about 90% of the population of Texas lives in 4 large cities and the rest of the land is mostly empty...
Click to expand...

DFW
385.8 sq miles
Density 634/sq mi (245/km2)

Houston
627 sq miles
Density 3,603/sq mi (1,391/km2)

Singapore
274.1 sq miles
Density (people per sq. km) 7252.43

edit: Singapore is almost 30 times the density of DFW and 5 times Houston, since we're not glossing over facts. 😛
 
fleshconsumed said:
Except most of the landmass is rural where hardly anybody lives, and the population density in most of the cities is exactly the same as in HK, Singapore, or even eastern Europe, all of which have higher average speeds than US. I can understand the density arguments when you're talking about boonies, but I cannot and will not accept it when we're talking about metro areas.
Click to expand...

So you feel those numbers are not skewed by U.S. rural populations who have slower access speeds? There are enough really slow connections in the major metro areas to drag the numbers down without factoring in rural locales? It seems off to me, because I'm 45 miles from NYC and I have 30mbps broadband and a pretty reliable 15mbps 4G. I don't know anybody anywhere around here that is below 20 mbps as a baseline service promise, anyway. How many connections in the major metro areas are slow enough to drag us down to 8.1?
 
SMOGZINN said:
Our backbone infrastructure is pretty solid, because big businesses use that. It is that so called ‘last mile’ to your house that is laughable. That is the same here as it is in Hong Kong or Singapore.
Click to expand...

Well, the last mile is always tough, but the numbers say that the high average in the rest of the world is around 14 mbps. I'm personally 16mbps above that, with electric company levels of reliability.

Does that really suck? I'm seriously perplexed here, because these numbers really _have_ to be skewed down by our rural areas, and once you throw our rural areas in the whole comparison, on which the "Our internet sucks" mantra is based, looks silly.
 
fleshconsumed said:
You're comparing apples to oranges. On one hand you have individual plan that is available to you, on the other hand you have an average download speed of all subscribers. I highly doubt everyone in the metro cities is subscribing to 60MBps+ plans, they're too damn expensive in the US.
Click to expand...

I have a very basic plan with Comcast. That said you are also comparing apples and oranges when you compare Singapore, a city to the entire United States. I suspect if you can find the data about avg speeds within the metro areas of this country it will look a lot more favorable.
 
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