US Adoption of 10 Mbps+ Broadband Nearly Doubles In a Year 172
darthcamaro writes "We all know that the U.S. doesn't have the fastest broadband in the world, but it is gaining 'fast' (pun intended). The latest Akamai State of the Internet report pegs U.S. adoption of High Broadband, that is, broadband with access of 10 Mbps, at 15 percent. While that number may not seem high, it's 95 percent higher than it was this time last year." Broad-stroke averages, though, mean less than whether your neck of the woods gets better Internet service.
The numbers (Score:4, Insightful)
I tend to doubt the numbers, but have nothing to base it on but my gut feel and conversations with people I know. I personally have access to "High Broadband", but am perfectly happy with my average 5Mbps as my typical use case doesn't involve a lot of video download. I'd much rather have symetrical 2Mbps for backing up purposes. 10Mbps would have very little benefit for me, and certainly not another $360/yr benefit.
YMMV and probably does.
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Mine is 1 Mbit/s. By choice. That's because I have never spent more then $19.99 for internet, and I don't want to start now. And yes I do stream video over that connection. It works just fine.
A friend of mine didn't have broadband for a long time, and was stuck on dialup, but just got it a year ago. The gaps are slowly being filled in.
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1 Mbps used to be considered very fast, back when the US was mostly on modems. Since when is 1 Mbps considered slow? Might anyone know the proportion of modem users nowadays?
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I had 10/10 in 99.
so 1Mb been slow for about 14 years.
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I have 768k bursting to 1.5Mbps for a short time based mostly on what time it is, and it's just enough for Netflix (no buffering unless I try to do much other stuff at the same time) and not enough for many if not most video services for watching long programs. So 1Mbps is basically just enough to get by today...
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Ever since Netflix started streaming HighDef video...?
I'd be happy with 1Mbps internet service at a reasonable cost, but it's slower than the entry-level ($20/mo) cable/DSL service every where I've looked in the past several years. So, yes, that is a bit slow.
500Kbps would be the bare minimum speed I'd accept, since streaming standard definition video (like Hulu / Netflix) at lowest quality would be out of the question below that speed.
Higher speeds only become terribly
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If by the world, you mean major cities in developed countries, you might have a point. Or then we must be traveling in extremely different areas.
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1Mbps has been slow for at least a decade.
In 2002 I had a 5/1Mbps connection and today 25/25.
I had to switch from 56K modem when pages started bloating up. Ebay was horrible, some listings taking 30 seconds or longer to load. Slashdot is one of the slower sites to load, even at 6Mb/s
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For certain definitions of video.
SDTV (Score:2)
For certain definitions of video.
But these standard definitions (480p) are just fine for a lot of people.
Re:The numbers (Score:5, Interesting)
I just moved into a new apartment in Pawtucket, RI and the SLOWEST internet available to me (other than dial-up...if you can do dial-up via cable or FiOS -- I don't have phone lines...) is 15/5. I decided to go up one level and get 50/25. It's nice on the rare occasion that I'm hitting servers that will actually deliver those speeds, but that's not really all that often.
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I'm envious. Those upload speeds would be awsome. Curious... how much does each level cost?
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The 15/5 is cheapest from the cable co -- it's $52/month plus $7/month if you want to rent a modem. The 50/25 is FiOS, it's $75/month which includes a modem/router combo (that is actually pretty decent, gives full ssh access, QoS tools, and a ton of other stuff I've never seen on a consumer router). Pricing gets a decent bit more reasonable if you want things like TV or phone service, but I have no use for either of those so I'm stuck with the absurd data-only pricing.
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We've got the tv/phone/net bundle, and the 25/25 FiOS portion is $35/month. 1/2way through a 2 year lock in, $125/month total.
If *she* would let me, I'd easily drop the TV portion, and go with an OOMA or similar for phone.
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I have the same data without the voice or cable and it only costs $40/month.
Not sure how $5/month extra is absurd.
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Interesting...they don't offer a 25/25 plan here (if they did I probably would have gotten that instead). The next plan down from the 50/25 is 15/5, and that's $60/month for data only. But from everything I've heard about FiOS it does seem that their pricing varies wildly by location (probably based on the competition...).
But anyway, I can't get the pricing for data alone as part of the bundle, but internet is $75/month, while the same internet with 200-some TV channels is $85/month.
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If you call they generally have more options than online. This is because they don't use their own call centers but contracted out ones that get paid based on sales so they are willing to make special deals. Also they offer better prices on longer term contracts.
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I set up everything over the phone, since I didn't have any existing service so it would have been pretty difficult to do it online :)
Of course, the pricing I gave for a bundle comes from their website...so if you truly do get better pricing and options over the phone that may mean it's even LESS than only $10 extra to add TV, reinforcing my belief that you get absolutely screwed with a data-only plan.
Setting up phone without a phone (Score:2)
I set up everything over the phone, since I didn't have any existing service so it would have been pretty difficult to do it online :)
Then how'd you set up your phone service in the first place?
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cell phone. I don't have phone service through them.
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Odd that they don't have a "grandma" subscription, my choices here are something like 1/1 (or maybe 0.5/0.5, can't find it right now), 25/25 and 60/60 (and up to 400/400 if you're BillG), basically they want you using their system. It's not much but fine if you're only using it to browse, read mail and pay your bills online.
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One of the local Cable companies here (charter) is offering 30M/6M for $30 a month. I think that's a 1 year promotional price.. but not too shabby. Of course, I live out of town a ways, and there is no cable in my neighborhood, so I'm stuck on 1Mb/s rural wireless.
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I called up Charter and asked if I could get on that 30Mb for $30/month and they told me the $90/month($60+"fees") I was paying was a good deal.
Needless to say, I will be
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I have 25/25, it costs $480 a year. Since I do not have cable that is very affordable.
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I'm currently lucky in that I'm in a pretty small part of Cincinnati, OH that is currently served by Cincinnati Bell's fiber-optic service, so I get 10/2 service through them. The place where I find having the extra speed is nice is that I can better "multi-task". Previously, with slower-speed Internet offerings, if I was, say, downloading a large file (like a Linux distro .iso or game download on Steam or Direct2Drive), I could read webpages, of course, though they would load a bit slower, but I couldn't,
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10/2 is probably FTTN, not FTTH. I'm on an FTTN connection (Alcatel 7330 DSLAM) at just shy of 1km right now, so I could probably get 25/10 if I wanted, but I'm currently only paying for 12/1 (grandfathered plan they no longer offer), because it's adequate for my needs.
Not that I'm doubting the possibility that you could be on FTTH, but the speed is incredibly low for FTTH... my provider goes all the way up to 175/175 right now for FTTH ($200/mo at that tier), and it's actually an OC-48 that they're install
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I am in Brookline MA and we share Comcast infrastructure with Boston. I have 22MBs according to my tests, and Comcast promises me even greater speed if I upgrade to a DOCSYS 3 modem. My brother reports the same in New Jersey, and my other brother is getting 12 to 15 MBS from his provider in San Diego. A year ago, my connection was at 7 - 9 MBs, so things have improved greatly. My data bill has stayed the same.
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My ISP reports that 10+Mbps broadband is available in the area, but in fact only 6Mbps if you're just using it for data. Apparently that other stuff is available only for their bundled video package. I don't need that I can stream from anywhere, I'd rather just have the bwidth.
Tied with the EU (Score:3)
Our U.S. average is still tied with the EU average (13 Mbit/s). We're still # 2, just behind the Russian Federation, and way ahead of Canada, Mexico, Brazil, India, China, and Australia. (Countries of comparable continent-spanning size.)
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According to TFA the US is #12 in average connection speed, at 6,7 Mbps. There are just two countries in double digits: South Korea at 15.7 and Japan at 10.9.
So even if you compare only across similar sized counries your numbers can't be correct.
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>>>your numbers can't be correct
(1) Mbps is not an SI standard measurement. Its use is incorrect. (2) Take-up your complaint with speedtest.net. They are the ones who have tested literally billions of connections. I am more inclined to believe people who did ACTUAL up and downloads over actual lines, then this study which appears to pull its numbers out of thin air. (BTW speedtest says Japan is approximately 22 Mbit/s and Korea is # 1 at 26 Mbit/s.)
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Maybe I'm not getting your point, but what does the SI system have to do with this? Granted, if you have to be formal, the correct unit should be "per second" and not "bits per second", since bits are just the result of a counting process and thus adimensional; but 1 Mbps, as commonly used, is 1e6 bits per second and not 1024^2, as is the case of other computer-related units that use the mega prefix incorrectly.
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Since when is Mbps != Mbits/s? Did I miss a boat, or was I misinformed all along?
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Mbps has always been bit, not byte. They're just different ways of writing the same thing. You might make a differentiation between Mbps and MBps where the caps refer to megabytes. But typically, people use that when talking in megabits. Another form like MB/s would be more common for megabytes / sec. Using completely different looking forms is usually a lot easier than relying on caps to guess. We don't always do the same thing so it's always always always better to double check if it's not obvious from th
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Akamai has a bias on where and how well they are deployed, however. In the Nordic countries, they are atrociously bad compared to the competition.
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9 years ago?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003 [wikipedia.org]
Google fiber (Score:2)
Google Fiber? Sonic.net? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Google Fiber? Sonic.net? (Score:4, Informative)
I remember when we got a T1 line at the school of business at my university. That was freaking fast baby and worth the $5,000 or so it cost a month (not sure on the price... I heard it second hand). Now 1.5Mbps is considered slow for residential (though I'd like the symetrical speeds over what cable provides). I cannot even imagine gigabit at home. What would that be for? When you want to get streaming netflix videoes on every TV in your house plus every fridge, oven and toaster?
Re:Google Fiber? Sonic.net? (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to admin at a small college (about 1000 students, 25 classrooms) .. about 5 years ago when I left, we had 4MB of transit to the internet (we had 100MB to other universities in the state, we were all on one big network)
Students would come in, and tell us how fast our internet was, and that their 5Mb cable modems were nothing in comparison.. They were shocked to find out that we only had 4Mb. We had a squid transparent proxy box, but the big difference was latency. A very, very low latency, slower connection will 'feel' much faster than a bigger pipe. People think a 100k web page coming back instantly is because they're on a big pipe. But it can come back just as fast over a 1Mb pipe, latency is the difference.
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When you are trying to move large files you will notice the difference a fat pipe makes. I bet the college kids really thought your connection was fast because they were downloading movies and such from the other universities that you had that 100Mb connection with.
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it was a community (2-year) college.. no dorm rats. Very few people abused the bandwidth (but having a 100Mb pipe to kernel.org was really, really nice) We would have a few people go crazy with the downloads.. a very simple QOS setting on the router fixes that in a hurry.. (they can wait). Myspace was the worst, with all the streaming videos and music. Those that chose to ignore the access agreement and torrent away would usually find me walking up to them (politely) and telling them to stop.. (which was
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That's what kills me. I was recently able to upgrade my internet at home from 1MB down to 12 MB down satellite internet (God bless living in the middle of no-where). The issue now is that the latency went from ~300ms to ~750ms. So, when my family says, "The Internet is slower now, go back" I rage quietly inside and continue downloading like a crazy person.
They only stopped because we had a careful talk about what a bigger, but longer tube would mean.
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It's not like it was gameable in the first place.
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Don't forget about the effects of proper queuing... After upgrading from a T-1 to DS-3 line, people were complaining about the horrible performance, and started yelling at ma
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Well, streaming BluRay would be 54 Mbit/s, if we go to 4K then probably ~200 Mbit/s. So if mum, dad, son, daughter all watch on different TVs + overhead you're probably close but that's not the point. I do have a 60/60 Mbit line, it's not saturated or even close to it, the main difference is that things now finish faster. Download that Linux ISO? ...............done. I'm still going to transfer the same bits, so what does mean for my ISP? Averaged across everyone that probably costs them the same, only the
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How long does it take you to (rsync) backup your 3TB hard drive across the internet to an off-site server? Be sure to include that overhead for encryption...
Average != Median (Score:5, Interesting)
I was reading about this on another site, and the average was reported as 6.7 Mbs, but 60% of users were 4 Mbs or below, which means that the median user is getting around half the speed of the average user.
The average is a poor statistic for measuring bandwidth. It's like putting 9 hobos and Bill Gates in a room and saying that on average everyone is a millionaire.
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For reference:
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Average-US-Broadband-Connection-Now-67-Mbps-120700 [dslreports.com]
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Same here in Norway, average speed is 12.8 Mbps and median speed is 7.2 Mbps. In fact, looking at the full table there's actually many <2 Mbps, few between 2 and 4 Mbps and then many between 4 and 8 Mbps again so there's actually a large fraction that's significantly slower than the median again. On the high side it's as expected a gradual decline.
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The median is a type of average. So is the arithmetic mean, and the mode. When you say "average," I suspect you're thinking specifically of the mean.
Hope this clears up any confusion.
Urban Only. (Score:2)
In the big city.
is that real broadband or cell co broadband? (Score:4, Interesting)
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You need to do some layer 4 traffic shaping to use your satellite connection for bulk download and streaming media and use your cellular connection for browsing and other latency sensitive activities.
Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
I would like it to be cheaper. Any way you slice it, it's over $100/month for high speed internet. That's IF you can get it. I know a lot of people who are still stuck with Dialup, even in the Washington D.C. suburbs.
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$100 a month?
I get 25/25 for $40 a month.
Cost of relocation (Score:3)
I get 25/25 for $40 a month.
Plus how much of a "setup fee" to relocate a family to an area where 25/25 for $40 a month is offered?
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The live olympic streams are pushing about 6.5Mbps for 720p so there's obviously a use for that kind of speed.
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Business-class connection (Score:2)
I work from home
Then we can assume that your employer is compensating you for a business-class connection.
How much is just 6 month contract renegotiation? (Score:2, Funny)
People are cancelling/renewing their broadband/cable packages every 6 months when the 'introductory' rates expire and their monthly bill doubles.
New speeds offered, price stays the same...
Is that 'adoption' or just being shoehorned?
Akamai's widely skewed results (Score:3)
Akamai posts another widely skewed report, based on their own crap infrastructure, where they are subpar for some regions.
In the Nordic countries, Akamai is a brake on everything, no matter what time of day you have to download anything via their infrastructure. I currently have a 100Mbit/s symmetric connection, and I get HIGHER download rates via Akamai if I use a US proxy than if I try a straight download. Same thing with any update services or games etc that use Akamai, Nordic countries get the shaft there too. I have a feeling that they are also underdeveloped in the asian regions, which would skew the results too.
Some ballpark figures:
Downloading an ISO via Akamai: Peak out at 16Mbit/s and averaging 11.3Mbit/s going straight, peak out at 29.5Mbit/s and averaging 15.4Mbit/s proxying to the US.
Downloading an ISO via Limelight networks at Swedish prime time: Peak out at 97Mbit/s, average at 94Mbit/s.
Downloading an ISO from SUNET's FTP at swedish prime time: Peak out at 98Mbit/s, average at 96Mbit/s.
Some of my norwegian friends and colleagues are reporting similar experiences in how crap Akamai is for them, both privately and professionally.
Meanwhile all ISPs ditch unlimited usage (Score:2)
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Nearly all? You mean nearly none?
Time Warner does not, FIOS does not, Comcast does not.
I think you mean just ATT does.
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comcast has a 250gb limit, and centurylink has a 250gb cap
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I believe comcast only has that limit in select areas, those being the areas where they are a monopoly.
Not sure about Centurylink/Qwest.
Pathetic (Score:3)
It's 2012. Broadband has been commonly available for fifteen years and the best we can manage is only 15% of us have service faster than 10MB?
I wish the people who were creating all the make-work projects for the economic stimulus a few years back had been a little more forward-thinking and put people to work running fiber to as many homes as we could as a public utility. Lease bandwidth on it to anyone who wants to provide service, and use the proceeds to maintain and build out the network. If we did that, maybe come 2025 we won't be reading an an article about how awesome it is that all of 15% of us have service faster than 15MB.
who cares about speed ... I care about cost ... (Score:2)
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They normally offer the same speeds without the bundle for about $10 extra.
I have no phone, no cable, just internet and am paying $10 more than I would for internet if I had those, but those add another $50 anyway.
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$40/month. Would be $90/month with cable and phone, by their billing $30/month for each service.
It is a two year contract with FIOS. If I move to an area without fios I get out the deal for free. I am looking at buying a house, but I will not buy one without FIOS anyway.
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Bingo, seems like rates keep getting jacked. (Score:2)
Shameful (Score:2)
This is good news, but it's also pretty shameful. First, that only 15% of people have this kind of access, but also that 10Mbps is considered some kind of achievement. I'm assuming that this means 10Mbps download, and most of the upload speeds are still under 1Mbps. I suspect the numbers would be much better if they Baby Bells hadn't mismanaged our infrastructure for decades.
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I suspect the numbers would be much better if they Baby Bells hadn't mismanaged our infrastructure for decades.
The existing copper twisted pair infrastructure in the US is fine and very efficient - for voice. The US has far longer local loops than most other countries because of efficient consolidation of COs (as well as our low-density suburbs). Longer local loops means lower DSL speeds. No one was thinking of DSL when these decisions were made.
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Not planning ahead is a form of mismanagement.
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Yes, people who take into account technology that hasn't been invented that will be used on machines that haven't been invented when they build big projects.
It wasn't like building a damn where you know you are going to add generators in 20 years. This was not even on the board.
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The existing copper twisted pair infrastructure in the US is fine and very efficient - for voice
I don't know what "Efficient" is supposed to mean in this context, so I'm not even going to go there. But "fine" is something it isn't. In some areas, I'm sure the copper is nice. In former Pac Bell country, the copper is shit. It's been spliced and spliced again until it could be spliced no more and then they just start stealing pairs. They've stolen mine twice so far out here in bumfuck nowhere. At one end of my road you can get DSL, but not where I live, so I get some wacky wireless connection based on C
6 MBPS DSL here (Score:2)
It's enough for me, but I live alone. As long as internet radio, HULU, and the like work well at the same time it's fine with me. Of course, if I were still a gamer I'd have to move to St. Louis where they have 30 MBPS from Charter.
Percentages are not enough. (Score:2)
50% increase over a few thousands in USA id not the same as 50% increase over 60M .
Surewest in KC has 24/24 (Score:2)
Great to have, but with that much bandwidth it's more an advantage with torrentting or any other multithreaded downloaded. I'm more psyched about the upload bandwidth for setting up a server. If Google ever runs to my neighborhood, I'd definitely be on it. And, I'm sure all those Google Fiber users helped out the average.
Nobody cares if your puns were intended. (Score:2)
move to kansas city for 1000/100 mbs (Score:2)
Had anyone daon a (Score:2)
'who has the fastest broadband' comparison by population density?
Comparing the entire US to smaller countries seems like just bad statistics. If a country has similar population and density to New York, then it should be compared to New York, not the US as a whole.
Not here (Score:3)
Here in the capital city of the state of california (go ahead and look it up, i'll wait), I have three choices for internet: comcast, comcast and comcast.
Who this year decided they could raise rates and not offer any existing customer promos, so I had to pull the plug. Wife went into bestbuy the next day and signed up as a new customer. Since they were willing to offer promos to people with cable tv (I have directv), I'm guessing they're squeezing the cord cutters by raising their internet costs to make up for the lost cable tv revenue. Seems its a zero sum game after all. Five years from now instead of a $50 cable bill and $50 internet bill, you're going to have a $100 internet bill. Maybe $110 in my neighborhood.
Speed is fine, but cost and choice are another matter that I think calls for a little more attention. Still way too many places in the US where you have a single, often expensive choice.
Things change (Score:2)
Still waiting on 1 GB/s Up/Down internet (Score:2)
You can do 64 players at once in a shooter with 1 mb/s internet, and with guns, this is reasonable. You can get more than 64 players at once if you have a main server which costs a lot, but this is not a feasible long term solution for most people because even if your game can sustain it, for how long?
P2P with some tricks to not update players who are out of your range could probably do 10,000 players at the same time in
Not if you're Time Warner (Score:2)
7Mbps is super mega premium golly gee whiz you can watch every Twilight movie simultaneously I can't fucking believe what a great deal you're getting right now, sir, service.
dumb value to pick (Score:2)
How are they measuring? (Score:2)
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You live 30 minutes outside the middle of no where, what did you expect?
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By the standards of large cities, 225,000 is a suburb. a small one, at that [wikipedia.org]. A suburb of a city like that is not likely to score very high on the list of targets for broadband development.
It'll happen eventually, but probably not very quickly. I live in a suburb of a metropolitan area (22,000 in my town, the greater metropolitan area passed 1 million in the last census), and only last year did we get VDSL/DSL speeds over 5mbit. Cable was available with faster advertised speeds, but even that still caps out
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Speak for yourself, I have a Galaxy Nexus and 25/25. I bet more than half the posters are doing something similar. We just have a lot of vocal cheap bastards.