US broadband is scarce, slow and expensive. 'Great!' says the FCC Fifteen million Americans don't have access to broadband internet. For those that do, the United States has close to the slowest speeds among advanced economies. And for that, Americans pay more than almost anyone else. Those are what should be the main findings of the annual broadband report from the Federal Communications …
Are you my next door neighbor? That sounds like my ComCraptastic level of incredibly shitty service.
On a *very good* day I might get a whopping 3MiBps out of my theoretical 3MiBps service, but most of the time every download I monitor tops out under 2MiBps. I don't bother to try & upload anything anymore, it makes 300Baud dial up on a joystick port mounted accustic coupler attached modem feel fast by comparison.
All for $50+tax per month. I shaved off $10 by buying my own Aris modem & it took beating them with their own compatibility devices page to get them to allow it to connect to their network. They tried to claim it was only a Docys 2 device even though their own page & the modem specs say it's Docsys 3. Then they claimed I needed to download a firmware update from the manufacturer, but there is no updates available. The last straw was them trying to blame random interruptions on my equipment, even though my gear was newer than the shit they wanted me to rent from them. I told them to connect me & stop fucking with my signal or I'd inform my state Attorney General's office of the extortion & fraud.
Suddenly I'm getting a full 3MiBps for a whopping week, then it all goes back to shit.
If anyone claims American's have choice & adequate speeds of internet service I'd like a chance to strangle them with their own lying tongue...
*Deep breath*
TL;DR: Pai is full of shit & so are all his Republican asslickers. May they all be forced to use 300Baud dial up over a flakey line with a wonky modem for all their internet needs.
May [Pai and all his Republican asslickers] all be forced to use 300Baud dial up over a flakey line with a wonky modem for all their internet needs.
You sound as if that would be some sort of purgatory for them. I doubt they can use the internet at any speed. Using the internet requires the intelligence of an average 7 year-old, and the ability to read. You seen any evidence of either skill in these asslickers? Didn't think so....
Something seems off with some of these complaints. I had 3Mbits download back in 1999 from our cable provider (which is one of the big national companies). I live in the rural suburbs of a North Carolina town of about 60k people, and I currently get 100/8Mbits for around $55/month from the same provider. The speeds are actually faster than advertised and the uptime is excellent. At my work in the downtown area we have fiber running at 1Gbit up/down, again from the same cable provider and it runs about $1,500/month. In both cases I'm pleased with the speeds and the price seems fair. Is there that much disparity in the quality of service* between smaller towns and big cities? Is that because the networks are so oversubscribed in densely populated areas? I thought that pricing and packages from the big cable companies were the same nationwide, but it sounds like it may vary from market to market.
Also thought I should add that today one of my clients, who is in an extremely rural town (population is 1,500) about an hour away asked me to quote an upgrade for their firewall because their coax provider is upgrading them to 200/25Mbits. In my opinion that's pretty good considering where they are.
* Not to be confused with QoS for my fellow networkers out in Reg-land
> Something seems off with some of these complaints ... Is there that much disparity in the quality of service between smaller towns and big cities?
Can't talk of the US, but it's certainly the case in the UK. I live in a suburb, and get 21Mbps via DSL (and have the option of 80Mbps fibre). Someone I know lives literally 3 miles away, in a very rural area (farms) - they do not have the option of fibre, but can get the same DSL package as me, at the same cost (£20/month), except that they never see speeds faster than 200Kbps (kilobits, not bytes)*.
* Yes, their provider have confirmed that the limitation is the line ...
"Meanwhile, 24 million Americans – more than seven per cent of the population - don't have broadband internet"
IIRC, UK coverage of FTTC has only just reached 95%, meaning that 5% still don't have "broadband" by a similar definition.
And of those 95%, that just means they are connected to an FTTC-capable cabinet. They won't get 24M if they live more than about 1.2km from it.
My sister lives in a small town, and is served by CentryLink (big company).
I did a speed test a few days ago her download (WiFi) was ~8Mbps.
I then repeated the test on my LTE IPad (same machine) it was ~56Mbps (T-Mobile).
Paying ‘big cable’ to fix the problem is a waste of time. They’ll take the money and do nothing.
People need to know there are better options.
What the govt needs to do is make LTE available in all laptops, so people have options.
Sounds like you're using AT&T. :-(
Look, lets put this in perspective.
Back in 1994, if you wanted internet connection, you needed at a minimum a 56KB leased line which would cost you roughly $400 a month. (one class C subnet network) If you had a T1, the minimum cost would be $1,000.00 USD per month (Both on a 24 month minimum contract)
Moving forward a decade... that 56KB moved up to a T1 for the same price.
Moving forward another decade, you can get 'broadband speed', 5 static IPs , for less that that $400.00
The point is that you can get faster internet today for relatively less than you would have had to pay 20+ years ago.
Is the US lagging? for sure.
Comcast has been telling me that they've upgraded the service that I am contracted to use. Ok great.
(BTW, I'm Comcast Biz because I need static IPs and 24/7 'support'. )
If I were in a rural area... I would be SOL because my farm is too far out for cable and modem speed would be too crappy. I'd have to erect a 75ft to 100 ft antenna and set up a point to point connection to the local telco in town. Not cheap, and I'd have to see how to get it subsidized from the local telco which collects rural broadband fund taxes from everyone.
So its a mixed bag.
Please correct me if I am wrong here.
The two main political parties are not acting especially out of character.
I suspect that this may be democracy in action.
Those states that voted primarily Democrat have reasonably good (if expensive) Internet provision and want to keep their good services as regulated as possible (i.e. pinko liberals).
Those states that voted primarily Republican don't have this and don't want regulation at all.
Knowing full well that the Republicans will deregulate what they can, those that voted Republican voted for a continuation of poor service because they live in areas where it is not economically feasible to supply them with Internet services.
So the Republican voters got what they voted for. This seems fair to me.
Or at least, hard cash gets you connected. But there are places in the U.S. where you can't get broadband of an kind.
When I had to setup rural health centers with remote connections about ten years ago, a shared dial-up modem was the best they could get. It hasn't improved much. Outside of the major cities, ISPs don't put anything into infrastructure but own all of the possible connections. That situation doesn't seem to have changed for anyone outside of a city of over 100,000 population. There just isn't enough money in it for the major corporations that monopolize the ISP providers.
The TV cable companies own the one-connection-per-neighborhood cabling that keeps the speeds uneven as the kids get hone and start streaming anything and everything. The former phone companies own the right-of-way for all other cabling and will only put in fiber where there are enough customers to gouge for the new service fees on DSL. Then there are the bundling fees for services that nobody needs but allow the ISPs to perpetually add ever increasing charges that are pure invention.
There is an alternative satellite internet provider in the U.S., but it's run by a government defense contractor and its prices double in rural areas. So, it's either pay more or don't pay at all and remain off the grid.
Assuming even that's an option. I can get satelite service *IF* I convince my neighbors to chop down all their trees. Their trees block the line of sight I need to let a dish "see" that part of the horizon they need to receive a signal.
I've got a better chance of winning a trillion dollar lump sum prize in the Nigerian lotto.
*Sigh*
There is an alternative satellite internet provider in the U.S., but it's run by a government defense contractor and its prices double in rural areas.
Are you referring to Hughes Communications (formerly HughesNet)? They were bought by EchoStar in 2011. My impression was that they're pretty much all consumer satellite ISP and entertainment, not anything in the defense industry. But perhaps there's another significant satellite ISP in the US?
I had a friend who had Hughes - it was a miserable experience. Latency is bad with satellite, of course; but the main problem is bandwidth throttling, which was vicious. Her connection was basically usable for email and light web browsing, nothing more. There are a lot of anecdotes online from people with Hughes who have to go to some trouble to schedule things like software updates.
After trying for 15 years to get any kind of internet-- short haul wireless, cell (cell companies "sell" unlimited data plans until you actually try to use it, the pipe mysteriously chokes), satellite (latency? data cap? Oh, look, a cloud, what data?), and landline (had to call a few times a year just to keep the dial tone, so even DSL was out. As long as the line provided 9600 baud (!) Verizon said don't call us all is good.). Even considered far out schemes such as a 30M tower to rise above the local hills to see a distant short haul network.
The local government had a sole source with the cable company. Only problem: customer had to pay for the infrastructure. So, it was either sell the house and move or pay for the infrastructure. Spouse beat them down from 17K to 13K, and that was several years ago, at which point it was either a long hard haul with the local Public Service Commission or pay up or move out, so we paid, since living in a 3rd world pocket in metro NY wasn't an option and there were impediments to moving like a poor economy (have job, reluctant to move).
The connectivity is excellent and reliable, the neighbors along the path to our house loved it (cost them very little later to get connected...), and the cable company after the first shock of paying for the buildout, has behaved well with correct billing.
Any housing unit without a fat pipe broadband connection has lost a huge chunk of value. Cue: dueling banjos. Yeah, your children will be like that without a fat pipe. Thanks FCC for your support. And before you readers decry America, just remember we have more bombs and bullets than you do, and a bigger redder button on Trump's desk! He said so himself, on the Internet if you can get it!
...at which point it was either a long hard haul with the local Public Service Commission or pay up or move out, so we paid, since living in a 3rd world pocket in metro NY wasn't an option and there were impediments to moving like a poor economy (have job, reluctant to move).
You must live in the Mid-Hudson Valley. And my brother's DSL in the Catskills is even worse. For his system I can't even find any statement from Verizon what their claimed throughput *should* be, but he's getting *0.7mbit* throughput. Don't know if it's an old modem (even the new one **from Verizon** won't work on his line) or piss-poor lines.
"Reboot into safe mode and do a clean install - it's the only way to be sure."
Not even that's guaranteed. Remember that the Andromeda Strain would've grown on nukes. Meanwhile, we recently voted against a Beast and ended up with the Smiler. IOW, saying what could be worse can be a case of tempting fate.
I had a long talk with my cable provider back in June of last year trying to figure out why having a phone that I never use is supposed to be cheaper than internet alone.
They gave me some BS about "bundle pricing" etc.
What is funny is that I escalated to a supervisor and the supervisor told me that my price for my service would NEVER change as long as I didn't make any changes myself or remove any of the "features" such as the phone that only scammers call to tell me my Windows computer has a "virus".
It was on a recorded call and I made sure that the supervisor was being clear about my rates never increasing and I even gave scenarios and told him that I would be calling back and referencing the call and his employee ID if it did increase but he stuck to his words.
Of course in January they increased the price of my 50 Mbits + scam phone to $68/month.
I called them on Saturday and told them they need to listen to the recorded conversation and return my price back where it was.
Awaiting their response.
(I don't think I will get to have the same price for life like the supervisor told me on the recorded call but I do enjoy busting their ballz over it)
Generally telcos will bundle a phone service with Internet for less than Internet on its own. The telco is taking a gamble that you'll make or receive a few calls which will be extra revenue for them. If you don't take the phone service the chance of that extra revenue is zero, so they increase the price of the Internet. This is pretty standard all around the world. Take the phone service and don't plug a phone in.
We have a right to demand better service for less prices, same as in any other "free" market.
Except in this case, the market is certainly not "free" since the supply is usually very limited.
It's just frustrating as a consumer that the offerings aren't better and cheaper compared to other countries. If they can do it, why can't the US?
We're not looking to screw anyone over; just getting tired of BEING the ones screwed over. We'd all gladly pay -- even current prices -- for something better: faster, more reliable, etc. Or cheaper for the current products.
(Naturally, yes, profits might drop, and this is -- technically -- at someone else's expense. Is THAT what you refer to? Because it's a common thing across all markets to want better, cheaper, or both, and usually it's made up in increased sales volume. Build a better mousetrap. Should be the same story here; all parties can win in the end if you actually try to satisfy your customers.)
"It's just frustrating as a consumer that the offerings aren't better and cheaper compared to other countries. If they can do it, why can't the US?"
Geography, for one thing. Unless one of the country higher than the US happens to be Canada (which is one of the few countries that has more burden than the US in all categories--more and more complicated land mass, lower population, and sparser distribution), then there's going to be some excuse for every other country out there: in particular, countries like South Korea are much smaller than the US so have less ground to cover and usually have denser populations which make it more worthwhile to string out to the population in general. On the other hand, the US has such sparse areas as Nebraska, Wyoming, and Montana, who nonetheless have populations that may be interested in wiring up. Then you have cities like New York that have multiple complications (an underground made of bedrock that's already heavily built-down).
"Geography, for one thing."
While that would be a good reason if we were trying to reach the last mile in North Dakota, this is NOT the problem. I live IN a major metro area, 40 miles from the exact center of a 5.7 million person metro area. Not exactly outer Ontario. I can't even purchase more than 12MBPS, and sometimes that drops to such a pitifully slow rate that it is unusable. I pay $88 U.S for that connection. Geography is not the problem. Its PROFIT. They want X number of people in Y square miles before they deem to upgrade anything, and that is not going to change. They want to be guaranteed a huge profit, else they are not interested.
1. Roads generally have been viewed as a government function. (Telecommunications have not been so viewed in the US).
2. A significant and I think increasing number of roads, bridges, and tunnels are, in fact operated based partly on collection of tolls, so not "at the expense of all" at least entirely.
3. There is some activity in the US to sell toll roads to private sector businesses, who certainly will run them on a toll basis.
Some places they don't. In many places, including the part of Utah where I live, garbage and trash collection is a paid for by a separate and specifically identifiable assessment, billed quarterly. If I want them to pick up yard waste beyond the normal garbage, I can opt for the extra service, at a higher cost. As far as I know.I could arrange to have it handled by a private collection service if I wished.
Sewage disposal also is separately billed by a different commission; I doubt I could change that, however.
Living in the UK (Huddersfield) I am lucky, I have access to Cable via Virgin (200mb) I have been using them since they first laid the cables in out road. (15 years at least)
Started with Dual ISDN, then eventually to 500k broadband.
I can ONLY speak for myself, and I know other Virgin customers have issues but the service has always been good, Maybe not the cheapest but I have always got the speed i paid for.
If I ever moved house I would not even consider anything that could not get at least 100Mb.
Ditto here in Tyneside. I was one of the first to get 512k BB when it became available from BlueYonder as it was then (a Telewest brand name after they bought out the local United Artists franchise). Being pre-registered as interested, they did actually phone up to say it would be available "next month" and was I still interested. It was then installed and activated as promised and has barely had a problem ever since. 512k was amazingly fast back in those days, web pages loaded so fast you barely had time to release the mouse button before the page was loaded. But that was in the days before 250 analytics links and 450 off-site java script snippets per page.
This article is an opinion piece and not a news article. Hopefully discerning readers noticed the difference.
What this article does not take into account is the huge geographical area and smaller density that ISP have to serve in the U.S. Distances from the central office or head-end to the subscriber are on average much larger than most of the countries that are above us. The result is that the cost to reach the average subscriber is higher than in most other countries like the U.K. This is why are costs are so high. The business case to reach those additional 24 million subscribers is more challenging than in urban areas even with fixed wireless when dealing with this cost structure. Labor costs for putting the fiber/coax in the ground are a large part of the expense.
All in all the U.S. is doing an adequate job when you see that only 7% of our population still needs to be reached compared to 5% in the U.K. We could do better though and I know of many companies trying to do just that. With the rollback of Title II regulation we are seeing larger companies invest further out in their network, and smaller companies investing in covering rural areas with fixed wireless systems. It will take time but it will happen.
With less regulation, companies and municipalities can create creative business models that promote competition. This is what the FCC is trying to do.
@milliman
What your comment does not take into account is the huge taxpayer subsidies that have been paid to the telcos and cable companies for the express purpose of expanding broadband deployment to rural areas.
These companies have simply pocketed the funds and done SFA to improve rural broadband.
"Could you go on to explain why electricity was rolled out perfectly fine to this same far-flung addresses?"
Yes, a big, fat piece of governmental investment called the rural electrification project of the 1930s. Also, the Tennessee Valley project, and other "unwarranted intrusions into the realm of industry" Otherwise, there are areas of the south that still wouldn't have electricity except off-grid.
Plus note the timeframe: the 1930's. This was happening during the Great Depression, so there was a political and moral motive to raise the standard of living in general as lots of the population were living in poverty, plus a lot of this was happening during the FDR (as in New Deal) administration.
6 mb/s down, 768 kb/s up. 11k wire feet from the CO, so that's what I get when I pay for 8 mb/s. No competing provider in the area, so no options.
And the best part... The Telco charges me a "Broadband Cost Recovery Fee" which is supposed to go for improvements in the system. Yeah, right.
The fact my friends in Jamaica can get faster, more stable internet for less money than a good chunk of the US? Hilarious!
Challenging infrastructure? Try a mountainous island in the Caribbean Sea!
Even a lot of the smaller islands are getting FTTP, it is pricey but it puts a lot of connections in the US/UK to shame in terms of reliability and stability.
Australia is about the same size as USA, waaaay less people, most living on the coast. By the looks of it USA is trying to reach the same level of crap Internet we have here. Usually it's the other way around, Australia importing all the worst ideas USA has. I'd laugh, but most of my Internet travels via USA to get to the rest of the world.
"advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion"
Given that rural areas often require long cable runs/trenching, it is to be expected that rolling out broadband runs into some ROI-issues. At a commercial cost of about $30 per foot (~$90 per meter) of trenching/cabling it is easy to see how reaching a cluster of a couple of houses miles away from the nearest node can be hard to justify from an ROI-perspective. In addition, trenching is a time-consuming endeavor. To make it worse, ISPs often run into government-induced delays when they apply for permits.
Therefore, one could argue that broadband is in fact being rolled out at a reasonable pace.
However, for Pai to jump from "reasonable" to "timely" is, well, an unreasonable leap. Timely infers that people will have access to broadband in the foreseeable future. However, for many families in rural areas it is not unlikely that their elementary-school age children will be graduating from high school long before broadband is available to them.
I'm not sure what the solution is. In my case I'd have to come up with $72,000 to get Comcast to extend cable to my house. The next neighbor would be another 1,000 feet or so. It would take a rather long time before I and my neighbors ever became profitable customers.
Satellite isn't an option because of the latency. Perhaps WiFi or LTE.
Now, having said all that, I'm not sure 20 Mbps is a necessity. It's mainly in place so people can watch TV. Not exactly a necessity, and arguably not good for a thriving society. Time to read a book. I recommend "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman. Even on my 3Mbps connection that shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes to download to my Kindle.
This is all sounding rather like the bit I heard on the radio this afternoon. It was about the American car industry in the 80's being so sh*t they lost of to Japanese imports, leading to violence against anybody looking a bit Asian or buying Japanese cars. I wonder how this will turn out for US ISP's? Chinese quantum encrypted satellite internet services being used by everybody and people getting thumped for being able to watch streaming video because they must be using an evil foreign service to get it?
Exaggeration I know but they do seem to be digging themselves into the stupid pit. To think it wasn't long ago we in the UK thought US internet was so much better than ours. Won't be long before UK's half-arsed internet infrastructure is actual is better than the US, the UK government isn't in any rush actually do much about improving our infrastructure but it's improving slowly.
I currently pay 60 a month for 40 down/5 or so up. I of course like all cable do not get that all the time, but in the last week our cable company has been saying on TV commercials that they are raising the minimum speed to 100Mb for everyone with proper equipment. I am hoping that gets to my area soon as I am paying extra to get the 40/5. I do not live in a big town, so maybe some companies really are trying. Mine used to be Time Warner (now spectrum) personally I will believe it when I see it. Though when Time Warner was in charge 50 was the absolute max you could get and it was almost 100 a month, so I personally see it as an improvement.
With the end of Net Neutrality, providers can charge companies like google more for all their usage. This arrangement should eventually be replaced by a revenue sharing deal like Apple does with its partners in its App Store. This would make the most sense as it would be free for startups and less expensive for companies that need more data, but make less money(like Wikipedia). Companies like Facebook use the most bandwidth, but also make the most money. So, charging them a slightly higher rate(comparable to a 10-18% increase in bandwidth fees), whether based on bandwidth or revenue, would barely be noticed by Facebook due to the insane returns they see each year. There are dozens of companies like Facebook that will eventually become excellent revenue sources propelling America forward into 5G!!!
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