We're Number 9! US Broadband Speeds Rise, But Slower Than Many Other Countries' 355
curtwoodward writes "The United States of America: The greatest country in the world, the last superpower, born of divine providence. Unless you're trying to connect to the Internet. The latest State of the Internet Report from network optimization company Akamai shows that the US has slipped in the global rankings of average connection speed, despite nearly 30 percent of yearly growth. That puts ol' Uncle Sam behind such economic powerhouses as Latvia and the Czech Republic. Oh, and we pay more, too. Is it finally time to shake up the ISP market and make Internet connections a public utility, on par with electricity and water? Or will edge projects like Google Fiber make a dent soon?" For those who favor the idea of Internet service as a government-run utility, what do you see as the best-case scenario for such a system?
It's about competition (Score:5, Informative)
I'm in one of the areas that is served by both cable and FIOS, and my service is nothing like the average 8 or so.
I'm on Cablevison, which recently bumped their Boost tier to 120 Mbps down and 37 up. This tier is only $5 a month more than the base tier.
There are no caps either.
The main thing you need is to get rid of the competitive restraints. No franchises please!
Re:My rating... (Score:4, Informative)
So the local government forced them to lobby for the municipal monopolies? They only exist because of the actions of the cable companies and telecos basically demanding that they be created or else they weren't going to provide the city with service. To then act like they are entirely complicit in creation of such monopolies is to insult everyone's intelligence.
Re:Government efficiency (Score:4, Informative)
Clearly, they don't.
They have incentive to keep the networks exactly as they are, gradually charge us more over time, oversubscribe their services, and do nothing until they're forced to and then directly charge us for network improvements -- because that's pretty much what they do now.
If they were expanding capacity and bandwidth, we'd see the price of telecom services going down -- instead over time, it's been going up and hasn't really been improved.
Re:We're number 9! ? BS. (Score:5, Informative)
Before somebody without much of a clue mods the parent down, please allow me to point out that 9! = 9 factorial = 362880.
Re:TVA (Score:5, Informative)
When the last New York power grid failure caused a cascade effect that dragged down parts of 13 state's grids, the wave of failures stopped where TVA's grid starts. Stopped cold. There was a point where TVA systems were regulating the entire national grid, spinning up idle hydroelectric turbines as fast as possible to keep stable power flowing all the way to the west coast and down into Mexico. If your lights went out when New York went down, but came back on in a minute or two, that was TVA Hydro and your local grid was very probably being remotely controlled by TVA engineers. If you got power back in a day or two, that was probably TVA nuclear (it takes time to ramp nuke power up - sorry, but it just does). If you got power back faster than New York itself, ask your local sources if a bunch of TVA engineers were involved. If you live west of Chicago, and you didn't see an outage, most of the pros agree you would have if TVA hadn't been able to hold the line - an outage in all 48 contiguous states and probably affecting all of continental North America.
But it's a US Federal program, begun by Liberals such as FDR, so, you know, it's Eeevilll!!!
Re:TVA (Score:4, Informative)
Sorry, you don't know much about how power generation works. All your points are valid, but there are market incentives in the system to provide the redundancy you talk about.
Basically a regional grid authority asks each power plant what their marginal cost is (there's separate consideration for fixed costs). This all gets put on a graph of capacity vs marginal cost - i.e., hydro and wind is lowest (negligible marginal costs), followed by nuclear, coal, gas, etc all the way to "peaker" plants. Everybody is paid the "clearing price" - the marginal price for providing the last megawatt of capacity requested (determined the night before, broadly)
- There's tons of excess capacity. Some is a hot-spare and ready to take on load at a moment's notice in case a plant goes offline, or some other fault. Some just is sitting around because they don't think they'll need it that day (peakers [wikipedia.org] are usually unused, gas plants are usually unused overnight, etc).
- There are economic incentives involved to power plant operators, in the form of premiums for things like black start [wikipedia.org] capability, that address exactly the sort of "redundant" excess capacity (over the unused capacity from above) that's sometimes necessary.
The blackout in question was a transmission issue. A line failed, load was shifted to another one, that took on too much load and sagged and died, power couldn't go anywhere, grid goes kaboom. That's completely separate from generation - the problem was too much generation, not not enough.