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?
US Post Office (Score:2, Insightful)
That's your best case scenario.
My rating... (Score:4, Insightful)
Is very slow because AT&T doesn't see any reason to invest. They're already getting money. Now, if Google came to town, they might see things differently. I'm only a couple blocks from the switch, but the wire is 1970s copper.
Re:Eff yeaahh (Score:5, Insightful)
The United States of America: The greatest country in the world, the last superpower, born of divine providence.
Unless you escaped from being indoctrinated with patriotism.
Re:It's about competition (Score:4, Insightful)
lt and cz are small; us is big (Score:5, Insightful)
See subject. Of course compact nations are going to have better connectivity than sprawling ones.
I don't often cheerlead the US, but it's impressive that they're in the top ten. Sweden only just pipped them, and it tries awesomely hard to provide its citizens with good 'net access.
Government efficiency (Score:5, Insightful)
As a socialism-loving liberal, I have to say that I find the idea of an ISP utility ludicrous at best.
Social services are appropriate where there is an absolute goal. We don't want houses on fire, we don't want criminals running around uncaught, and we don't want roads to decay, just because such services are unprofitable. Civilization has an absolute need for those civil services. However, we don't need fast Internet connectivity... Yes, maybe some cities will get government-built fiber downtown, but the rest of the state will be too busy fighting politics to actually improve any infrastructure. We'll mostly just be stuck with whatever minimum service the politicians find acceptable, and the infrastructure budget will go toward filling the requisite layers of bureaucrats.
On the other hand, ISPs have a clear business incentive to improve their speed and capacity (not that they've been actually doing so). By being faster, they can claim an edge over their competitor in a market. Unfortunately, we seem to have hit an impasse where the only options in a region are "crappy cable" or "crappy DSL", thanks to government-granted monopolies in communities.
So why not both? I say we void all community monopoly agreements, and require private ISPs to provide fixed-bandwidth service to a government ISP. The government ISP can be a fallback. If my community's ISP options are too slow or too expensive, I can instead pay some standard rate for government service, which would go over the ISP's lines anyway. The local ISP still has to carry my traffic, but they don't get my money. The downside is that I'm stuck with whatever basic service the government decides is suitable.
Re:My rating... (Score:4, Insightful)
What a dumb article. It's the cable companies and telecoms that asked for the municipal monopolies. So we aren't supposed to blame them for the very monopolies they asked for?
How about MEDIAN rather than AVERAGE? (Score:4, Insightful)
Much like fuel mileage ratings on vehicles, we get a lot more benefit by getting people with the lowest numbers up to more reasonable numbers (eg., dial-up to 1Mbps DSL) than we do by giving a select few a very high speed connection to bring up the "average" speed, while many people suffer with dial-up speeds...
Perhaps it would be best to measure MEDIAN speeds, rather than AVERAGE. Or better yet, a percentage of people in the country with available speeds below XYZ.
And where does the whole EU rank? I'm sure if we broke the US down into individual states, some would come out higher than average as well, putting them ahead of most EU member nations. And there are clearly a number of EU member nations falling well behind the US average, which would bring the EU average down. The other comparable countries, like Russia, China, India, etc., all are far behind the US average. So even with these numbers, it doesn't look all that bad for the US.
TVA (Score:2, Insightful)
LESS government, NOT more! (Score:2, Insightful)
Hasn't the government caused enough problems with granting monopolies to telecom companies. The whole industry needs to be totally deregulated. With deregulation comes competition and with competition comes better service and lower prices. The total over-regulation of telecom is the reason we have such lackluster service and higher costs. Telecom companies who have limited competition don't fear raising prices and don't need to improve service in order to attract new customers. Costs to business can be prohibitive. I still have clients that are still using ADSL (1.5 down and .5 up) because that's all they can get and that costs about $60/mo. Another has cable at 5/1 for $80/mo in a second office while the home office has decent cable from a different provider gets 50/4 which costs $200/mo and runs a VPN link between offices which is almost useless but at least they can get Terminal Services in the satellite office but the users complain a lot. Their only other choice is ADSL from AT&T which in a small town is only good for some light surfing and email assuming you have a lot of time.
Because governments limit the choices and regulate prices in a lot of cases we have crappy service. Can you imagine what it would be like if internet service were socialized? This country is already bankrupt. Can you imagine what a cluster f**k ObamaNet would be like? How about in Detroit?
Are you for real? Give me a break!
Remember, any government powerful enough to give you everything you want is powerful enough to take it all away!
Edwin
Re:My rating... (Score:5, Insightful)
No one has downmodded them. Go play the victim card elsewhere.
Oh and the big cable companies being defended in that article basically demanded that the municipal monopolies be created or they wouldn't provide service. They are not saints or innocent. They are complicit in what happened.
Re:My rating... (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I think over regulation is the problem. Wired agrees:
http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-just-cable-companies-and-blame-local-government-for-dismal-broadband-competition/ [wired.com]
Google (or somebody like them) would be more likely to come if it weren't so hard to.
Completely wrong. Even if all the regulations were changed, even if they were completely eliminated, we would still be in the same situation we are today. The person who wrote that article demonstrates that they have no understanding of the issue when they say:
Deploying broadband infrastructure isn’t as simple as merely laying wires underground: that’s the easy part.
Running wire to every home in the country is difficult, expensive (even without all the regulations) and very time consuming. That's why Verizon abandoned their rollout of fiber and why Google will do the same after they connect a couple of cities.
Running all new wiring is a waste of time and money when we already have the infrastructure in place to give people decent speed. If I wanted, I could get 50Mbps from my local cable company. It's not fiber speed but its fast enough for me - and most everyone else. But it's ridiculously expensive, and, it's rendered worthless by monthly bandwidth caps. We know what the problem is -- lack of competition. But having a dozen different companies all running their own wires all over the place is neither practical nor desirable.
We've already wired the entire country. Twice. Running more wires is not the answer. Until we break the broadband monopoly and force the existing companies to open up their networks this problem will remain and everyone reading Slashdot today will be dead and gone long before Google or anyone else wires the entire country with fiber.
Re:Q&A (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the government for you; An epic cluster fuck you wind up paying through the nose for. I prefer to stick with private ownership, thank you very much... it's an epic cluster fuck I wind up paying through the nose for but I have my choice on how to be screwed.
The fatal flaw of all of the libertarian nonsense is that the failure or corruption of certain governments can only be replaced with privatization. The correct answer to ineffective government is effective government. Let me provide you with a concrete example:
In Washington State, in areas where fiber is provided by the state, I can get a 100x100 connection for $59 per month. No contract. From a private entity. How is that possible?
Multiple private organizations, who have an incentive to screw each other over and no incentive to work together to cover different neighborhoods, cannot provide the best plan for modern infrastructure. Even in the face of overpriced (point given: has to be relatively non-corrupt) government costs, it's still cheaper because there is no marketing department, legal department, or endless stratification of middle managers doing fuck-all in a building somewhere. Rent-seeking necessary infrastructure services don't work well with privatization, because they have the upper hand on pricing and will stuff their organization with so much bloat it would make a bureaucrat blush. When it's a government entity, there is at least some chance of oversight and cost control. When it's privatized, the inefficiency and price hikes are all but inevitable, unless there is real competition.
In modern societies the basic physical plants are installed and run by the government and funded through equitable taxation. A similar analogy is that of the road system: multiple private roads would never work, because you couldn't depend on the pricing or the availability, depending on whatever juvenile contract disputes the private corporations were engaged in at the moment. But when those costs are socialized and the infrastructure is available to all responsible parties at a low cost, you can have true competition on common infrastructure.
Let's say I want to ship something: I have an address, provided by the state, a road provided by the state that will absolutely connect me to any other address also provided by the state. So I can choose between Fedex, DHL, UPS, or even a startup like uShip. Imagine if you had a fiber connection to your home, which would cost you less in taxes than you pay for coffee every month, which was available to Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, etc. They're going to listen to customer demands, because there's actually a chance you might switch. Right now I have no choice but to deal with Comcast's endless bullshit, because I don't have any other choices available. They happen to be the provider to my location.
So, keep the libertarian fantasy going. Dog-ear that copy of Atlas Shrugged for the nth time. When you're ready to discuss solutions, consider reality.
PS: Google, Microsoft, Verizon, Comcast, and AT&T have all gladly handed over your data to the government. Being held by private corporations didn't change a damn thing, did it?
Re:US Post Office (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that snail mail is dated technology and our reliance on it is waning.
Re:TVA (Score:5, Insightful)
Last year at Christmas time I had to replace a string of lights cause one went out and rather than search for the one of 150 I just purchased a new set, can I thank TVA engineers for that?
Unless someone who happens to work for the TVA was helping you out personally, no.
That said, the grid isn't a string of christmas lights. It's much more complex than that because you've got long transmission lines arranged in a mesh and many sources of power. Oh, and you critically need to keep the phases of the power sources synchronized or you cause even more damage. That makes your analogy suck. Sorry.
The principal reason the TVA has a better ability to respond to a cascading failure situation is precisely that they're not very efficient. The spare capacity meant that they had the capability to increase power output when the shit hit the fan when nobody else did. For the overall stability of the system, a public good that you clearly benefit from, not running everything as close to the edge as possible is required. But that in turn means that the short-term profit of the power producer is not maximized; if every producer is being forced to maximize short-term profit over everything else, that's most strongly enabled by pushing everything into the domain where nearly any unexpected problem causes total collapse. Think of it like cooling a liquid so that it becomes supercritical; the tiniest speck of dust can cause it to flash-freeze. You see similar effects in public transportation networks, road traffic, financial systems, etc. Focus too strongly on optimizing for the case where everything is doing fine and you'll get catastrophic failures more frequently as the system will have reduced ability to absorb random shocks (which happen all the time, even if most go unnoticed).
Which isn't to say that power production has to be government-run. It clearly doesn't. What it does have to be is somewhat over-provisioned so that the extra load of a squirrel self-immolating in a backwoods substation doesn't cause total systemic failure, and that over-provisioning has to be paid for somehow. Oh, and the regulator has to force this on providers; letting the shit hit the fan just to get one more quarter of increasing profits is too damaging. (Alternatively, you could regulate by lawsuit, but that also sucks...) Welcome to complex systems; the real solutions aren't always the ones you want.