European ISPs Exaggerate Performance; US ISPs Slower But More Honest (itworld.com) 113
itwbennett writes: New studies of broadband Internet access across Europe and the U.S. published by the European Commission have found that European broadband Internet access providers advertised download speeds of 47.9 Mbps, but only delivered 38.19 Mbps, while U.S. providers delivered more or less what they advertised. But if you want fast fixed-line Internet access, you're still better off in Europe than in the U.S. Average DSL, fiber, and cable Internet speeds in Europe were all ahead of U.S. average speeds, and at lower prices.
The magic words being (Score:5, Insightful)
"up to"
ISPs can get away with pretty much any speed that way
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This. I have 160 kbps DSL in Seattle that is advertised as up to 12 Mbps. It sucks paying over $70/month for something not much faster than ISDN.
Re: The magic words being (Score:5, Funny)
I've been to Seattle, and it's probably better for everyone if they don't get faster internet.
I mean, five dollar coffee, utilikilts and grunge. Don't nobody need Seattle on the information superhighway.
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That's not true. I happen to know that there are five dollar hookers in Vancouver.
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I'm in Seattle currently. I've got Comcast 105/12 Mbps (I seem to get about 120 Mbps) for $53/month. CenturyLink rolled out fiber recently and that's available (the prices seemed to have varied over time, you might check for a mailed flier for lower prices).
Re:The magic words being (Score:5, Interesting)
In a sense these speed tests do not really measure the important factors. I don't have a direct comparison, but I'm convinced that the network access is generally way faster for Americans than for most Europeans, even when we (=the Europeans) have nominally faster download speed. The reason is simply that most interesting servers are located in the US.
As an example, I have a 100 Mbps download / 10 Mbps upload fiber link for 40 Euro/mo., but in reality my download speeds tend to max out at 8-45 Mbps. In speed tests to nearby servers I do get near 100 Mbps, but I rarely need anything local anyway. (We also got an option of 200 Mbps in our country and I wonder what one would need this speed for, especially if the upload speed is not as high as well so it can't be used for bidirectional links.)
Re:The magic words being (Score:4, Interesting)
> even when we (=the Europeans) have nominally faster download speed.
Been there, done that. It's the students wandering from nation to nation, providing cheap laber but also buying Terabyte USB drives and saturating them with Bittorrent. I spent a few years working in the EU recently, and in *every flatshare* or B&B or cheap hotel I stayed at, there was always at least *one* idiot sucking all the available bandwidth with Bittorrent.
Re: The magic words being (Score:1)
Sorry buddy, you're the idiot. You expect public wifi to be reliable.
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Interest is relative, I was speaking about the servers that are interesting to me.
Re: The magic words being (Score:1)
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And just what is on what servers? "US content"? I'm sure my local CDN can serve it up plenty fast. I think you may be surprised to find how little of your US data actually comes from the US.
Me I have no problem maxing out my internet connection, not when downloading common content, or using peer to peer.
Re:The magic words being (Score:4, Informative)
I can only speak from the view of my small european country. The ISPs got a lot of bad press from their "up to" claims. I don't know if there's actually laws against that sort of advertising now but their sales pitch here in DK has changes, at least with my ISP and they have stopped advertising "up to", I think they only will guarantee 20/5.
I got a chance to test it just last week were I was about to upgrade my line. Now they only sell what they know I can get. last year(before I cleaned up my installation and removed a lot of wireing), they would only sell me a 40/10, but connects at 45/12.
So I called them to change the plan and they tested my line and saw that they now could run 50/10 on it and when I asked into it(that I got 45/12 when instead of 40/10) he said that most likely I would get 55/12, but they clearly would not promise it and I had to drag that answer out of him, and they didn't sell me a 60/10. I later tried their online form for changing my line and it seemed to do a new connection test and even though the order page had selections up to 100/20, I could only select 50/10 in the order form.
But apparently this is not how all ISPs across the EU operate yet. :)
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Had the same experience in the Netherlands a few weeks ago. The first thing the ISP checked was my possible connection speed before telling me which plans they could offer me. The guy behind the counter was blown away (500/50, brand new building with fibre node out front), the customer next to me was pissed he could "only" get 100/20.
Me, I move here from Australia this year. Anything faster than about 16/1 is a bonus.
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I didn't get a minimum guarantee - but they did do a line test when I ordered it, so the claimed "up to 16 Mb/s" turned into "about 12 Mb/s", which I'm happy enough with as it's remained consistently at that level for the 3+ years I've been here...
Content (Score:1)
Ironically, if you want legal content for your blazing fast internet connection you are much better off in the US. The european versions of HBO and Netflix is not even close to make an high speed internet connection interesting, most other services are not even available..
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Not really ironic.
In the US. We have the last mile problem. Compared to Europe the US is very sparsely populated, leading to a good portion of the population far away from infrastructure, and it takes a lot of money to get such infrastructure to a person. because you can use a 10 kilometer of cable just to reach one household. So we don't always get the fastest network connection.
However this slower average speed, makes it promising for media delivers. It is more or less at the same speed it takes to watch
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Re: Content (Score:2, Informative)
Really it should be population density vs number of internet connections, not available land. As well you would want it broken down by city density as well to get a more granular metric. Europe doesn't have the complete sprawl of a city like Dallas. Since a much greater majority of Sweden's population is concentrated in a small space than in the US, the swedes get better internet access.
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This is a silly game. (Score:5, Informative)
A part of Sweden called Norrland [wikipedia.org] is about the same size as Kansas and has half the amount of people living there, and I still have 1 Gbps in my summer cabin there. But avarage population density has little to do with it, I think Svalbard would win that category though.. :-)
Backbone investment to remote places has just been very high priority in Sweden.
Re: This is a silly game. (Score:1)
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They are 3 Factors which makes US unique and difficult for Massive infrastructure projects.
1. Population Density (50th world wide)
2. Area (3rd or 4th largest depending on China claims of land ownership)
3. Population (Distant 3rd)
So we have a lot of people far apart with a long distance to connect them.
That is why we are closer to Russia in infrastructure than europe.
Also of a side note, about 80 years ago, we didn't have our infrastructure bombed to the grown, so we have a lot of older infrastructure that i
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Re:I've been saying this (Score:5, Funny)
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I am in Europe and have a 50Mb line. Measuring on large downloads where the provider has the capacity - Youtube for example - I have seen over 4MB a second. No false advertising there. It is some time since I last checked the speed simply because I hardly ever download anything large enough for 4 Megabyte/Sec to make a significant difference.
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4 MB/s isn't great. I get 6.1 MB/s from a local university not affiliated with my ISP. That's 48.8 Mb/s, which I think is quite close to the theoretical max. I get between 5 and 6 MB/s from most big download sources further away etc.
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I miscounted/misremembered, it was more than 4 back then.
I just retested my 50Mb line, it now runs at around a third of that.
I'm happy with my european ISP (Score:2)
I'm getting billed around 18€ monthly for 15/15Mbps internet and VOIP. I've never had any big issues with the advertised speed (Upload is actually 19Mbps sustained for some reason, means I can max out upload and download simultaneously and using fq_codel to track connections it's still manageable on the latency side).
More importantly, I use 1 - 1.5~TB of bandwidth a month, and have done so for the last 3 years. That's what I'd rather know. How many of these ISPs have monthly bandwidth limitations and h
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Download Speed: 43173 kbps (5396.6 KB/sec transfer rate)
Upload Speed: 9731 kbps (1216.4 KB/sec transfer rate)
I got from http://speedtest.usiwireless.c... [usiwireless.com]
The U.S. has tariffed rates. (Score:5, Informative)
The U.S. has tariffed rates.
If they don't meet specs on their connection compared to what they contracted the connection at, then they will be crucified.
This is why, when I lived in an apartment 10 feet too far away from the LATE, the wouldn't give me DSL, and would only offer ADSL. This was in Silicon Valley, where presumably, we'd have good Internet connectivity. They simply weren't willing to risk the legal ramifications, should the sell it to me, and it be 1% too slow, and me taking them to court over it, and them losing their regulatory approval everywhere because of it.
It looks like Europe is either under-regulated, or under-litigious, compared to the U.S..
The slow U.S. rollout of higher speeds has more to do with 20 year amortization on equipment, which is standard practice in the telecom industry, and the fact that you only have to be better than the competition to lock up all the consumers in a given market, and there is little competition.
That, and the U.S. is *big* and sparsely populated for the most part, and Europeans have absolutely no clue at the distances involved, which is why they totally fail on the "public transportation in the U.S." and "Internet access in the U.S." and "Taxi service in the U.S." arguments (you can get a Lyft in Alta, UT -- population 389 -- but if you expect a taxi, don't hold your breath, or expect to pay for it to come out from Salt Lake).
Re:The U.S. has tariffed rates. (Score:5, Interesting)
That, and the U.S. is *big* and sparsely populated for the most part, and Europeans have absolutely no clue at the distances involved, which is why they totally fail on the "public transportation in the U.S." and "Internet access in the U.S." and "Taxi service in the U.S." arguments (you can get a Lyft in Alta, UT -- population 389 -- but if you expect a taxi, don't hold your breath, or expect to pay for it to come out from Salt Lake).
For some reason a small cadre of Americans believe that they're different and special.
Let's ignore the sparsely populated areas for the time being.
Many of the big cities are as dense as European ones so there's just no excuse for stuff sucking in the cities. But it does.
Now let's get on to the sparsely populated areas. The USA has a higher population density than Sweden, and Sweden's internet is excellent, so it can't just be a population thing.
So what about land area? The USA is undoubtedly larger. In fact, the USA is about 20x the area of Sweden. But wait, the USA has 50 states! Looking that up... If Sweden was a US state, then it would be the third largest behind Alaska and Texas. So why do the remaining 48 suck? They are mostly smaller!
But what about the population density of the states?
Well if Sweden was a state, it would be the third largest and the joint 16th most sparsely populated.
So let's take Sweden as the example. It's on average larger and has a lower population density than most of the US states. So based on those, why aren't most US states individually better than Sweden?
And if you're arguing that it's harder in aggregate then you're literally arguing that economies of scale don't work.
The US is not particularly exceptional compared to Europe for the majority of it's population. There are some large, exceptional areas like Alaska, but they hardly count to wards the average stats because the number of people there is quite small.
And if you go state-by-state then it's really not all that different at all, because here are European countries that are harder to wire up than the majority of states yet have better internet access than the majority.
You have a severe case of Stockholm syndrome with your ISPs. They're crap, and it's their fault.
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The real answer is competition from wireless internet providers. There is good unlimited 3G and 4G service even remote parts of sweden, cable/dsl providers are forced to compete with wireless providers. Why wireless providers are better in the sweden, I have no idea.
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No, the 3G and 4G providers are forced to compete with the cable/fibre/DSL providers in many of the remote areas too. Thanks to a favourable loan plan, even many of the most remote villages have fibre access for example. One example I've brought up before is Karesuando in the far north of Sweden: roughly 300 live there, but thanks to the municipal network investment, they have access to 100/100
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3G for mobile is shit, due packet loss and ping. Its not a good experience.
4G for mobile still has the same issue. And neither of them compete with 50/50 MiB/s broadband
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I can tell you definitely for Japan: plenty of cities do not have very fast internet, even though some of the largest do.
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I do not believe the internet is as fast in those sparsely populated areas.
You do not believe? How about you find out instead? You'll be surprised.
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I do not believe the internet is as fast in those sparsely populated areas.
As someone who has lived in Norway, Sweden and Finland and been hiking in the Northern, really, really sparsely populated areas I can assure you that you couldn't be more wrong. The reason why is the way ISPs are regulated: If you wish to provide internet access in the lucrative high density areas, you must provide the same quality of service in the unprofitable areas.
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Enough of the silly Sweden to U.S. comparisons. The vast majority of Sweden's population is concentrated in a few dozen tiny regions [imgur.com] (Sweden is the one in the middle). It is not like the U.S [coopercenter.org]. The cities in the U.S. tend to be more spread out instead of tightly grouped, and there are a helluva lot more of them. Economic viabilit
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Unfortunately, this interactive map is only available in Swedish, but with a bit of looking up words etc via Google or another search engine, you can browse your way around it, it's a better way to educate yourself than the attempt you've made so far. You can filter by counties, municipalities or even the smallest analytical unit we use, the 250m by 250m square, you can filter by connection type, bandwidth etc
Also, make a note of the fact that Sweden is slightly larger than California, i.e, Sweden would be
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Ok, for some reason the link was eaten...
Attempt number 2: http://bredbandskartan.pts.se/... [bredbandskartan.pts.se]
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And yet in Sweden, Karesuando, pop 300 isolates in the far north has 100/100. It's hard to argue that's in a high population density area near many big cities.
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Re:The U.S. has tariffed rates. (Score:4, Insightful)
by all means, let's ignore half the U.S. population.
I think the basic problem is you're an idiot. You couldn't even be bothered to read the rest of my post, instead making snarky comments because my argument doesn't address al the points in the precise order you want them addressed in. Come back when you've grown up a little and are interested in having a proper debate and discussion among adults.
I did read your entire post. (Score:1)
I think the basic problem is you're an idiot. You couldn't even be bothered to read the rest of my post, instead making snarky comments because my argument doesn't address al the points in the precise order you want them addressed in. Come back when you've grown up a little and are interested in having a proper debate and discussion among adults.
And you are ignorant.
You made a bunch of incorrect statements about population density, and you made a bunch of incorrect statements about population density by state with an exception for Alaska, even though 6 *other* states have the same population density as Alaska. I pointed out that the population density was *vastly* biased by averaging the numbers over about 14 states, several of which have 1000+ people per square mile (that's about 20X the average population density of Sweden, which is 54/square mi
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even though 6 *other* states have the same population density as Alaska.
Not sure if moron or liar... though the effect is much the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
And here's an excerpt:
Rank 50: Alaska (1.6 people/ sq mi)
Rank 49: Wyoming: (6.0 people/sq mi)
Rank: 48: Montana: (7.0 people/sq mi)
I'm not sure why I'm bothering to argue with someone who will loudly state completely false and easily verifiable facts.
I pointed out that the population density was *vastly*
And completely ignored the bit where
I'm always skeptical of claimed performance (Score:3)
Particularly since many of the places I see that get talked about for having super-fast Internet seem to post speedtest results for a short distance, on network. That's not really useful because that can just mean that you basically have a big WAN with fast access to your own stuff, but no backhaul to support it. To really have a connection that you can claim gets the speeds advertised, you need to be seeing that speed to a server that is off of the ISP's network, and a few hundred miles/km away in another state/country. If you can get your speeds with tests like that, then you are actually getting what is advertised. If you see great results on the ISP's speedtest server that is 10 miles away but crap to everywhere else, they've sold you a fast link with no backhaul.
I'm real happy with my connection for that reason. It's 300mbit for $100/month but it really gets that. I see those speeds not just to my ISP's server, but to servers all over the US. Steam downloads go at like 40MB+/sec. So it is expensive to an extent, but I really get the speed I pay for, and I get it to anywhere that can handle it (when you start to talk fast lines the other end is the problem sometimes).
A fast last-mile means nothing if there isn't sufficient backhaul and peering at all level to support it.
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I can't say what it's like everywhere but I live in a fairly rural area and have 20Mbps that works at least to that level 95% of the time. It costs me 80 dollars a month but at least it is very reliable and always fast. The US has a population density of around 35 people per square kilometer while Germany and the UK have over 200 people per square kilometer. High speed averages are harder to achieve when you have people spread out. Of course a lot of it is the way we handle internet providers. In this
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They should be public utilities for sure (at least the actual lines that go to people's houses) but that wouldn't necessarily solve the problem. The issue is that it can just be very expensive to run infrastructure. In cities, not a real big deal. While the cost per mile is more you have plenty of people so it is worth it. However rural costs more. Of course this is an issue for a public utility. People will get mad if their tax dollars are paying for really high dollar runs so someone out in the sticks can
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Euro internet exchanges can be sort of thought of very cheap, pan-continent WAN. Thousands of smaller ISPs agree to meet at few central dark places in a datacenter, and plug their links to ethernet switches in there. And BGP peer through this (ridiculously fast) LAN.
Which means pan-european peering is essentialy free if you can get your dark lambda to 3
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I think the study seems to be suffering from this problem. Reading the methodology section, they basically measured whatever speeds the users encountered whilst just 'doing their thing'. The problem being that this isn't really evidence of ISP dishonesty: it's measuring the overall speed of the internet and assuming there are no bottlenecks beyond the last miles.
I suspect what's happening here is that people in Europe are more often connecting to websites that are far away and have to transit many networks
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A fast last-mile means nothing if there isn't sufficient backhaul and peering at all level to support it.
That depends entirely on how much of your stuff is on the last mile. While I was in China last year I was appalled at the internet speeds but the locals didn't know what I was talking about. Their internet was blazingly fast. A great example of how a language barrier has effectively created a local monopoly on content so very little data actually needs to come from peers or international cables.
CDNs to a great extent help that too, and when content is delivered form a local CDN it doesn't matter so much wha
Mine was honest. (Score:2)
Mine was honest.
I'm in a crappy DSL area and they said as much. They said give the best they could but it'd probably be around 4mbit/s. It's more like 4.5 sometimes 5.5, probably depending on the level of crosstalk from neighbours.
So mine was honest, but then they lost all my customer data to thieves because it's Talk Talk.
You win some, you lose some.
Sweden has been pretty good (Score:4, Informative)
Meaningless comparison to US (Score:3)
They compare European speeds collected in October 2014 using their own methodology with a report published by the US FCC in April 2014. The US data was probably collected a year earlier than the European data and likely measured the speed differently.
The report itself notes that speeds in Europe increase by about 25% between 2013 and 2014:
The average download speed across all countries was 38.19Mbps during peak hours, a 25.7% increase from the previous year, slightly lower than the 39.69Mbps observed during the 24-hour measurement period. Average download speeds have therefore increased by nearly 10Mbps since October 2013, when the figures were 30.37Mbps and 31.72Mbps during the peak and 24-hour periods respectively.
Cost (Score:2)
>Internet speeds in Europe were all ahead of U.S. average speeds, and at lower prices.
But is that based on a simple exchange rate or as compared to average disposable income? Comparing prices from different economies/countries is not simple.
Answer (maybe): First they only considered prices in CA, NY, and CO. With the former two being likely some of the (if not the) highest pricing in the whole HUGE USA.
Then, they supposedly used a percentage of income instead of just "price", but it was TOTAL income, n
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In my own experience, being a person who lives on three continents, Europe is cheaper than the USA and ahead in online technology, by a wide margin. While taxes are lower in the USA, one gets better service, better health care and most things are cheaper in Europe. One cannot even say that the USA is less crowded - just go east in Europe, if you want wide open spaces with thousands of miles of nothing at all going on. The main difference is that European houses are smaller on average, but a small apartme
Down to (Score:2)
When will we see the establishment of mandatory MINIMUM speed guarantees (based on 5 9's uptime - 99.999%)?
Speed monitoring is trivial. Let's all advocate for this basic change.
Compare urban to urban, rural to rural? (Score:2)
What do the speed-comparisons look like if you compare urban areas (say, an urban/suburban area with over 50,000 people in it) in the US to urban areas in Europe?
What about rural areas to rural areas, counting only those areas within, say, 30 minutes of non-rush-hour drive-time of an urban area.
What about more distant rural areas?
--
Why "30 minutes of drive time"?
If there are roads that can get you to a city in 30 minutes or less, I would expect there is a not-horrendously-expensive way* to run fiber to your
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If there are roads that can get you to a city in 30 minutes or less, I would expect there is a not-horrendously-expensive way* to run fiber to your general vicinity [...] *Assuming of course that regulatory burdens or private landowners who ether refuse access outright or who see the fiber-operator as their personal gold mine don't make running fiber too expensive to put in.
Not just too expensive, but legally impossible, because they granted a monopoly on the right-of-way to one telco or cable company. In the case of my county, that monopoly was granted to AT&T. It's actually cheaper for my WISP to buy fiber access from AT&T in a different county and bounce it in across four mountaintops than for them to get a line from AT&T locally.
Local Cable company honest. (Score:3)
The local small-town-midwest cable company, Mediacom, has always been honest about speeds. In fact, you always get slightly faster speed than what your supposed limit is.
For example if you had a 10/1 connection, you got something closer to 15/1.5. Now with a 50/5 connection it's more like a 53/7.
What you don't get is fairly priced TV services. Mediacom's internet and phone services are a good bang for the buck, the TV service....not so much. The situation locally is such that one of the Satellite services has a bundle where the internet is supplied by Mediacom. The other satellite service bundles with the local crap-DSL provider, Frontier. With them you're lucky if they offer you a 6Mbps connection.
fuck you (Score:2)
Inadequate sample sizes (Score:3)
One massive problem with the SamKnows study linked is the fact that the sample sizes are ridiculously small(less than 200 testers, broken down as 136 Fibre, 23 cable and 34 xDSL in Sweden, for example, which is nowhere near representative of actual distribution etc.). There's also no differentiation between various fibre methods. For example, in Sweden, the most common variant is FTTP+ethernet, while in the UK, FTTC+VDSL is very common, yet in this test they are lumped together, which helps skew the numbers for fibre overall.
samknows but you might not (Score:2)
You can get some insight into your own performance by joining Samknows- a worldwide survey of internet performance from various ISPs ( https://www.samknows.com/ [samknows.com] ). You'll receive a monthly report with data & charts that shows your up/down speeds and averages for every day that month as well as latency, packet loss, and disentropy for your setup. Actually I don't think disentropy has been discovered until this moment.
Additionally as a subscriber, you can see the big picture data at their web site as disc
It's all a con in the UK (Score:2)
Let's see how honest is Comcast's speeds. (Score:3)
I've stayed at my brother's place when his connection to Comcast High-Speed Internet (originally) had 50 mbps download speeds, now 100 mbps download speeds. Using Speedtest.net, I was getting around 44-47 mbps under the old setup and 90-92 mbps under the new setup.
But now, Comcast is preparing to roll out DOCSIS 3.1 service by 2017; they're converting all of their HD channels to MPEG-4 compression to free up bandwidth space to allow DOCSIS 3.1 service. In theory, DOCSIS 3.1 is capable of around 1 gigabit download speeds; just how fast Comcast will the new service be is still a major unknown, though I think at least 350-500 mbps download speeds is possible.
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