Just how rigged is America's broadband world? A deep dive into one US city reveals all A deep dive into internet access availability in one US city has revealed – again – that competition for broadband is dreadful and far below what official figures claim. In a report [PDF] put together by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, investigators looked at real-world internet offerings within a 30-mile radius of …
If you have to relocate, you can see where in the US has the best bandwidth. Some are major cities like Chicago, NYC, SFO, etc ...
But then there's Lenexa KS, Columbus OH, and other smaller cities.
This is a stark contrast to the rural areas where they can't string cable (too expensive) and unless the household makes a considerable investment... (100ft mast to house PtP microwave) ... you won't see it.
This is the largest irony in that many tout high tech, IoT farming, but don't realize the costs of setting up the communications...
Some would love to have something better than dial up or 3-4G (LTE) data plans for connecting house holds.
"100ft mast to house PtP microwave"
Which will be a tornado and lightning magnet for 200 miles in any direction....
LEO satellite broadband _should_ act as a wake-up calls to these monopoly providers but they'll either not care, try to get it made illegal or it'll be swamped by 10,000 times the anticipated demand.
Last flat had 100/40mb NBN (and at one point Netflix said it was off-lining files at 120mb/s during peak times whilst the flatmate streamed the footy = \ ) and new flat has 100/40mb NBN and again performs admirably even at peak times.
Prior to NBN the ADSL was total shite: couldn't get it in my first flat (I moved here five years back) as the exchange was over subscribed, next I got 1.5/0.5, that double to 3/1 a year later as I moved again and then got up to the heady heights of 6/1 before I moved to a wireless broadband box that had a capped speed 10mb/s down and 1mb/s up but worked at that regardless of where I lived (and had unlimited data).
All of these cost more than the $60/m I pay for NBN - all located in the surrounds of the populous city of Syndey (I've lived in Bondi, Bondi Junction, Pyrmont, Brighton-le-Sands, Ultimo and then three different flats in Surry Hills) where ADSL should've been at it's best.
So, there's lots of problems with the NBN rollout, Turnbulls attempts to kneecap it, but, that the actual product in my experience is a vast step forward on the Telstra monopoly of ADSL lines before it.
I want a "heat map" of *the planet* for internet availability, the speed delivered, & if any & how much competition is available at a 1 Foot/1/3rd Meter resolution. In real time. No fucking around, no fudging, no bullshit, just an accurate real time map of global coverage. That will show *exactly* where the trouble spots are located, where the fraud spots are (ISP claims coverage but there isn't any, or claims $SpeedX but only delivers $SpeedY, etc), so we can take that fact to court & start forcing the changes we need to Make It Right.
$ISP wants to claim they cover $Location with $SpeedX, fine, let's check the map. Oops, it looks like you don't cover that area at all, much less with the speeds you claim. Care to fix that before we find all the C-level execs criminally liable for fraud, extortion, & Crimes Against Humanity?
*Deep breath*
And while I'm having this fantasy, I'd like that cute engineer from FireFly to ride Lady Godiva style on a pony...
You don't even need to go that far. Make it a federal crime to file false reports on this (Oh wait, it probably already is) and then go around doing spot checks all over the country to enforce it. Go to one of those nice ISP websites and check if broadband from them is available at 'your' address by filling in random addresses in the regions those ISPs claim they are available.
Then go around some of those places, knock on doors or make appointments to come by and test their actual connection speed.
After a few billion dollar fines and some execs jailed for this bullshit, the situation will rectify itself. Good luck getting the government to go that far though.
"Oh look : a speed test is being done!" *routes that traffic via superduper hi priority megafibre* "WOW, AMAZING RESULTS, your broadband is fine at 45MBps"
"Oh look, they are back to netflix" *hits the Nobble Button* "Jeez this sucks chunks, its like 3Mbps now"
The absence of net neutrality permits the above not so jokey scenario.
Yes, I'm a confirmed skeptic when it comes to monopoly telco assholes.
Lovely dream SS, I hope that someday (in our lifetime would be welcome) that it will actually happen. Given the current FCC's attention to the population instead of the big ISP's, there's a snowball's chance in hell of it coming to pass. Even if the FCC started mandating change and forcing competition it just seems doubtful that it's even possible.
At the rate the big guys have been sucking up any competition, we'll soon only have one company in the whole country that owns everything. The board and the shareholders will love it. The rest of us, not so much.
Send the lady on the horse my way, I can use a nice fantasy about now cause reality sure does suck, doesn't it?
Having Moved in the US from "fibre to the house", to "Cable to the house" to 6.0mb/s "DSL to the house" I am feeling the pain.
Access is no longer a fun pastime, it is now a utility and should be regulated as one. Makes you pine for the mindset that gave us the Rural Electrification Act of 1936 to "to give rural Americans a 'fair chance.".
"REA crews traveled through the American countryside, bringing teams of electricians along with them. "The electricians added wiring to houses and barns to utilize the newly available power provided by the line crews."
Doesn't it just make things a blur?
Not that some of the vintage/retro stuff* is already blurry. So my mate tells me.
*fair do's though, often taken from well used VHS and Beta tapes. But hey, can't complain, it's available and they even have a story line.
"They don't seem to mind financing the $600bn spent on defence every year."
It's a _lot_ more than that. The US Army managed to mislay 4 times that amount in one year alone due to accounting mishandling, according to a report from the GAO.
Then again, another US government department mislaid $1tn in one year in the early 2000s.
Part of the reason the USA is so hellbent on exporting its weapons to other countries (apart from making them dependent on US weapons systems) is simply because they make so much that they don't know what to do with them and stopping making the things would cause mass unemployment. if you factor in the industries dependent on the military spend and the industries dependent on those industries you find that the entire thing is a worse mess than the creaky state of the USSR prior to its collapse.
Militaristic empires spending themselves into oblivion isn't a new phenomenon but it usually takes a couple of centuries.
Priorities, priorities. $3.5B worth of smart bombs are blown up by the Pentagon in hardly any time at all. It's getting to the point where there's not going to be much worth for the military to be defending other than the mansions of the fat cats who own the companies making the smart bombs.
"Makes you pine for the mindset that gave us the Rural Electrification Act of 1936"
_That_ was part of the "New Deal", which was "Socialism" and that is no longer allowed in the New AmeriKKKa of the right wing snowflakes.
The good thing is that the louder and more visible that mob are, the more people are taking notes for when mob members start hiding under their rocks again.
They're that loud and visible because they feel themselves backed into a corner and outnumbered - and the narrative is slowly making it clear not only that they _ARE_ outnumbered, but that ordinary decent people are starting to have had enough of the shenanigans of the right-wingers. There's not going to be any quiet acceptance of martial law emergency declarations, nor any letup in exposure of dodgy deeds.
I'd add one more thing to the definition of broadband availability - cost. I couldn't care less that 25Mbps is easily available in my area if it's only available bundled with TV and even more useless VoIP crap (increasing already from already overpriced 50$ to 100$+ ripoff per month). I can bet that 1Gbps can be had almost everywhere if cost was not an issue but if the service is not affordable for majority of residents it's not much different from not available.
I've settled at 3.7Mbps exactly for this reason.
I totally agree; cost limits actual usefulness.
That's why I won't upgrade past 6 Mbps down, 1.5 up. (My own testing shows I get more like 7 and 1.2). I've made many a post whinging that uploading a bunch of photos takes all day and/or all night and don't even try video.
The worst part is when I signed up for THIS tier (from 1.5 down / ??? up) they said it was 6 both ways. Flat out lie. Wish I had a recording of that phone call; I would have had my state's attorney general on them quick to give me this tier for free or a higher tier for the same price.
But sorry to whinge again.
I have this uncomfortable feeling that there is a large gap between what our American politicians think they are regulating and what is actually available. 100Mbps for everyone? My guess is that if someone went out and measured actual speeds -- not claimed, not what is paid for, but what is actually delivered to customers, access would be substantially worse than even what this depressing report suggests. Maybe things are better in other countries. ... or maybe not.
I wonder about drug usage.
I live on a boat, in a marina, in a swamp. My internet provider is the lowest rated of the top 24 or 25 in the entire US. I pay $50 a month for 50/10, which speed-test always shows 60/12 or 65/15.
The management at this marina (unlike most) provides no free internet, wired or wi-fi. I therefore let 7 boats close to me, some with multiple people, all with multiple devices, share my router. Works fine.
For what possible reason would "everybody" need 100 to their home?
"For what possible reason would "everybody" need 100 to their home?"
.... what reason? .... The decision makers at "content providers" are clueless and assume that all users everywhere -- even in remote mountain hamlets -- has bandwidth similar to what they have on their desktop PCs. AND, they think "latency" (a separate and also serious issue for many applications) probably has something to do with milk.
For what possible reason would "everybody" need 100 to their home?
Off-site backup, for one. I mean, I'm hoping you're not going to lose everything if your boat sinks?
Also, latency goes up fast on low-bandwidth connections if someone starts downloading or streaming video. If you do anything latency-sensitive (VoIP, gaming, etc.) it becomes noticeable problem fast. It's also a bit awkward when Microsoft's latest patch takes hours to download. Basically, no one needs 100 mbps all the time, but the ability to burst at higher speeds is very useful.
My sister who lives in the eastern part of Oregon state (200 miles from Portland) has nice fiber into the house. The speed is AWESOME. Sometimes over 1 gig. I live here in sillycon valley, and the local modem test command yields something around 5 up/1 down (and that isn't Ghz!).
Maybe someone will string up fiber, but I'm not holding my breath!
Well, after doing some basic research, I have decided that this is yet another advocacy group providing misleading information to counter the government’s misleading information. As usual, neither side tells the whole truth.
Read ILSR’s entire report, and see if you can find the words, ‘satellite internet service’. They seem to omit that option. Both Hughes and Viasat cover the entire country. Specifically, a check of Ostrander, MN, shows Viasat offering 25 Mb/s downstream, 3 Mb/s up (didn’t check Hughes). Where is Ostrander? Right in the middle of ILSR’s ‘no broadband coverage’ area. Hmmm...
Perhaps a clue to their omission lies here:
“We excluded all fixed wireless service from the second and fifth maps because the technology, though often superior to DSL, is not as reliable as fixed wired services in most areas and usually cannot serve the same volume of customers in a neighborhood. Wireless service is often unable to guarantee coverage of all homes in a region due to variations in topology, tree cover, and building materials. Because of this, fixed wireless providers may not be able to provide the maximum advertised speed to everyone within their service areas. The reviews for the fixed wireless providers near Rochester suggest that some of the services are unreliable, though we have also heard quite positive reviews on HBC’s wireless service from subscribers in the RS Fiber Cooperative territory.7“
Nice way to bias a study.
BTW, Rochester has a population of less than a quarter of a million people, and this study incorporates an area within a thirty mile radius. That puts you into some very remote, rural areas.
"see if you can find the words, ‘satellite internet service’. They seem to omit that option."
I'm unaware of any satellite internet service that provides anything comparable to actual broadband service. Both the Hughes and Viasat service are better than dialup but inferior to real broadband. Excluding them seems reasonable to me.
With good LIDAR data, predicting wireless coverage is pretty accurate. Uptime of solar powered wireless sites is measured in years and unless fiber somehow makes its way to a farm miles from any town I can't see any other economically viable way of delivering fast broadband out to the sticks.
That will replace my slow fiber that gets 5Mbps/0.8Mbps for the base/cheapest version now. I think I could pay for faster now, but the telco web page only shows what the new fiber speeds are and no prices listed. The upgrade started in 2017 and will be done in 2019. Being out of town has it's disadvantages. :-(
Oh, I'm on an acreage like 2.5 miles out of town in rural Iowa. As far as I know, our local town telco has wired fiber to all the farms around here (they sell cable TV running on the fiber to to make $). And now they are redoing it with the max 1 Gbps/500Mbps fiber. And this is a tiny local telephone company serving about 8,000 people in two small towns plus the surrounding farms. On the map in the story, we are east of the "Y" at the end of the blurry Sioux City, Iowa.
So if my little phone company can do 1 Gbps fiber. I think most US towns and surrounding area's could do better than they are now. Certainly all of Rochester, MN should have good service from at least one provider. Now if you're in the middle of Montana 100 miles form any town. That would be different.
* To save money I'll probably stick to the low cost plans of 25 Mbps /10 Mbps or 50 Mbps /25 Mbps when the new fiber gets here. I don't have a 4K TV to feed so Netflix does fine with what I have now.
"unless fiber somehow makes its way to a farm miles from any town"
If you have a copper phone line, you should have fiber at some point. It's the same price to install (in labour), cheaper than copper, less likely to be stolen, less prone to interference and FAR lower maintenance.
Most telcos have already run fibre to rural concentrators that backhaul your voice calls to the switch somewhere else (most rural "exchange" buildings ceased to have any switching in them a very long time ago. I was one of the people who went about removing them 30 years ago when pretty much the entire world moved away from such things) . The next step is to run fiber the last few miles when the copper finally rots out.
Some concentrators are only about the size of a beer crate and fan out 24-30 lines (T1 or E1) for a few miles, on the end of a 20 mile fiber run. With 90% of faults being on the copper side, Telcos have been eyeing up getting rid of that for years.
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