68% of US Broadband Connections Aren't Broadband

An anonymous reader writes "The FCC has published a new 87-page report titled 'Internet Access Services: Status as of December 31, 2009 (PDF).' The report explains that 68 percent of connections in the US advertised as 'broadband' can't really be considered as such because they fall below the agency's most recent minimum requirement: 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream. In other words, more than two-thirds of broadband Internet connections in the US aren't really broadband; over 90 million people in the US are using a substandard broadband service. To make matters worse, 58 percent of connections don't even reach downstream speeds above 3Mbps. The definition of broadband is constantly changing, and it's becoming clear that the US is having a hard time keeping up."

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[Anonymous Coward]

a majority of the land mass in the U.S. is difficult to give proper broadband to since there such low population density over such a large area

I agree that it is difficult to supply broadband to the few people living in the middle of nowhere, but they don't have much of an effect on the statistics precisely because there aren't very many of them. The USA is actually slightly more urbanized than South Korea. Stop with the excuses already.

So what are they going to do about it?

[dkleinsc]

That's the real question. Because if 'broadband' is a term with a real official meaning, it would be possible to go after any ISP selling 'broadband' that isn't 'broadband' for false advertising. Alternately, if their contracts and the like say that they're selling 5 Mbps and they're actually selling 1 Mbps, that could also be actionable.

Either way, without some sort of legal liability, this is going to become standard practice.

By choice or just because it isn't available?

[CastrTroy]

I personally only have 3 Mbit internet (256 k up). So I don't have broadband either. But I could get up to 50 Mbit, I just don't want to pay for it. 3 Mbit is fast enough to stream videos, netflix included (if SD is good enough for you). It fulfills all my needs. Sure it would be nice to have 50 mbit, and download a Linux distro in 10 minutes, but it's really hard to justify the cost for the number of times you have to do that in a year. Sure people don't want to be running on dial up speeds, but not everyone needs 10 mbit internet.

Re:Does it address what ports are open?

[swrider]

In the 1990's, after the small ISP's had invested their money into purchasing infrastructure and invested their time into fighting with the incumbent carriers to get that infrastructure working the way it was needed for internet access, Congress gave billions (with a 'b') dollars in credits to the cable and large telco providers to upgrade their networks for internet access. Where did that money go? Most likely to fund the consolidation in the telco and cable industries. But one place it didn't go, was to fund upgraded infrastructure.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[chrb]

If population density were really the only issue, then you'd be able to get Japanese-style broadband to the home in every U.S. city that has a population density equal to or greater than that of Japan (337 residents per square kilometer, 873 per square mile). NYC has a population density of 27532 residents per square mile, so average broadband there should be much better than the Japanese national average, no?

U.S. cities by population density [wikipedia.org]
Nations by population density [wikipedia.org]

South Korea = 1,261 people per square mile. So by the reckoning that population density is the significant factor, most U.S. metropolitan areas should have better broadband than South Korea.

Re:Meanwhile, in Japan

[Albanach]

No, you miss the point. Let's compare population density.

Tokyo: 5,937 /km^2

New York: 10,194 /km^2

So, obviously New York residents will have 1GB fiber to the door?

KDDI offer the 1GB connection and telephone service for jsut under 6000 Yen, or about $70US per month.