High-Speed Broadband Making Headway In the US 193
darthcamaro writes "No, the US isn't the fastest nation on Earth, and it's not the most connected. But according to a new report, it sure is getting a whole lot better lately. 'I think the US growth rate is something we expected,' David Belson, Akamai's director of market intelligence and author of the report, told InternetNews.com. 'If you look at the money being spent to build out the fiber to the home infrastructure, and if you look at the competitive deals that are going on, vendors are trying hard to make it affordable and "outspeed" each other.'"
Re:Stupid benchmark. (Score:3, Informative)
I've been on road runner for some time and it seems to have a decent speed and not have a bandwidth limit based on protocol.
I'm aware some companies are doing this, but some companies != all companies.
Last mile (Score:5, Informative)
The town I live in does something similar with electricity: they run and maintain the powerlines and buy the cheapest power at the moment from a number of different sources (with x% being from renewable sources). If power is expensive from everywhere, they fire up their own powerplant (coal, ugh) and generate the electricity themselves. The rates are good, the grid is well maintained, it all works pretty well.
Re:All this proves is that US broadband really suc (Score:3, Informative)
At least yours is planned. Colorado isn't even under consideration [fiostracker.com]. Gotta be east or west coast, apparently. We hicks in the middle of the country apparently ain't good enough for it [dslreports.com].
Re:cities are ok (Score:3, Informative)
"it's the rural areas where the real problems are, telcos are simply not motivated to do anything at all about it."
I agree, but can you blame them?
The telcos couldn't be blamed if they hadn't been given billions of dollars [newnetworks.com] in subsidies to build out broadband, but they did get paid and didn't build out. So yes, they are to blame. They are also to blame when because they refuse to build out, even though they were paid to, they sue local governments for doing it themselves.
Falcon
Re:What about Comcast business connections? (Score:3, Informative)
Two parts of Minnesota, but my primary, most recent experience with Comcast taking over TW-Roadrunner areas, was right here in downtown Minneapolis.
I went from more than a clean MB down to 800KB, with artificial 'boosts' to 1MB down. Under TW I was getting 1300-1400 KBs per second, at night, regularly, for entire files. But Comcast was a serious drop, yet they advertised as being an improvement, but really, the improvement was an artificial boost for the first 5 MB of a file, IF the bandwidth was available. So, what they were actually saying was: Your throughput will be lower than the "up to" number we advertise, but, once in a while, we'll come up with short bursts of speed, that approach the advertised max.
And, as Groucho once said, I don't care how you slice it, it's still baloney, to me."
Some people will be fine with that. And I know a few people, in other markets, (Waterford, CT, for one), who get very good sustained throughput on their Comcast accounts.
The whole 'Powerboost' hype is only when available, and only for the first part of a large file. The TCP window isn't even open long enough to take advantage of it, for normal web surfing because most web servers are specifically set up to NOT saturate every customer's line (which is reasonable, obviously), and, as well, most pages get served as repeated HTTP Requests for every little image, spacer, etc, so, again, no burst window of opportunity. I saw this discrepancy between advertised vs. real life behaviour, all the time, I kid you not.
I don't run Bit-Torrent or any P2P stuff, at all, ever. But I used to. And the presence or potential presence of 'bursts' is not cool for those type of transfers, either. I think part of the reason for that might be the huge 'gap' between download vs. upload width. It's not that hard, with good servers on the remote end (capable of saturating any, multi-tap requesting IP) to actually overwhelm the upload stream, locally, with ACK packets. And when the uploading ACKs fall off, all hell can break loose. That can get messy, and the workaround is usually to self-manage (throttle) the incoming stream, on the User's own end, by user choice.
I saw degradation of real-world use parameters, from the second day after the TW-to-Comcast changeover, here in Minneapolis. It was depressing, but you know we're all troopers out here, and we deal with the situation as is, rather than 'as-wished', or, certainly in Comcast's case, 'as advertised'.
They have a 150 or something dollar a month plan now, that is basically a set bandwidth, with the same artificial 'boost', or doubling of bandwidth, that runs on the same exact principle of irregular, when-available, artificial temporary boosts. It is advertised "Up to 50Mb. Caveat emptor, that's what I say.
There are a lot of co-factors, and, of course, my experience, even very accurately portrayed is only anecdotal. I saw the same issue after a TW-Comcast changeover down South. But again, there are others who would find the same situations tolerable, or even 'transparent' (as non-issues, in other words). But here in the Twin Cities I think it's a sad situation. I'm with Qwest, what can I say? As far as the issue of tech support goes, I never have trouble with ANY company's tech support people, because I see them as being people, like us, who don't need me to play I'm-smarter-than-you, or you're-ruining-my-life games,ever. On the rare occasions where I lose it, I go out of my way to apologize and explain. That, a little patience, and, of course, the ability to 'lower myself' and 'accept' reality, are very helpful in dealing with this stuff.