US Broadband Speeds Jumped 90% In 2020. But No, It Had Nothing To Do With Net Neutrality. (techdirt.com) 90
An anonymous reader shares a report from Techdirt: Last last week, a report out of the UK topped the trending news items at Hacker News. The report found that U.S. broadband speeds -- historically the poster child for mediocrity -- jumped roughly 90% during the COVID-19 lockdowns. The improvements weren't consistent geographically, and the report was quick to note that by and large, the U.S. remains relatively mediocre when it comes to broadband speeds (in large part due to limited competition): "The US stills lags behind many European and developed nations worldwide, and its major cities also often lag behind their European equivalents. That said, there is cause for celebration in Dallas, Seattle and Austin, after our analysis has shown that these cities are performing extremely well relative to most European capital cities."
I spoke briefly to study author Thomas Buck after he reached out to note that folks were misinterpreting his study. Yes, the study shows U.S. broadband speeds jumped 90% in 2020. But Buck also notes this likely isn't because of policy decisions at the FCC, or because ISPs did much of anything differently. It's most likely because when consumers were forced to stay home to work and attend school during COVID lockdown, they were simply willing to pay more money for already available, faster speeds because they realized faster broadband was essential. Buck put it this way: "... the findings are more likely to suggest increased consumer spending on high-speed plans for working from home than anything else...speed test data is fascinating and helpful, but using it as proof that net neutrality was bad is a giant stretch by any means. When looking at broadband data, I think it's more important to discuss the dark spots (subscriber data, full capacity testing at scale, same-year fiber build data) than what we have (hundreds of thousands of speed tests, most of them showing results a fraction of what ISPs advertise)."
Yet a number of folks (including commenters at Hacker News) set to work trying to claim that this sudden boost in speed was courtesy of the FCC's decision to kill net neutrality and effectively self-immolate at telecom lobbyist behest. It's part of a fairly relentless attempt to proclaim that because killing net neutrality didn't immediately result in a rainbow-colored explosion, the repeal itself must have somehow been a good thing. [...] Yes, many activists and supporters of net neutrality were hyperbolic in trying to explain the very real, very negative impact the net neutrality repeal would have over the longer term. That doesn't mean it wasn't a terrible idea done in exclusive service to telecom monopolies.
I spoke briefly to study author Thomas Buck after he reached out to note that folks were misinterpreting his study. Yes, the study shows U.S. broadband speeds jumped 90% in 2020. But Buck also notes this likely isn't because of policy decisions at the FCC, or because ISPs did much of anything differently. It's most likely because when consumers were forced to stay home to work and attend school during COVID lockdown, they were simply willing to pay more money for already available, faster speeds because they realized faster broadband was essential. Buck put it this way: "... the findings are more likely to suggest increased consumer spending on high-speed plans for working from home than anything else...speed test data is fascinating and helpful, but using it as proof that net neutrality was bad is a giant stretch by any means. When looking at broadband data, I think it's more important to discuss the dark spots (subscriber data, full capacity testing at scale, same-year fiber build data) than what we have (hundreds of thousands of speed tests, most of them showing results a fraction of what ISPs advertise)."
Yet a number of folks (including commenters at Hacker News) set to work trying to claim that this sudden boost in speed was courtesy of the FCC's decision to kill net neutrality and effectively self-immolate at telecom lobbyist behest. It's part of a fairly relentless attempt to proclaim that because killing net neutrality didn't immediately result in a rainbow-colored explosion, the repeal itself must have somehow been a good thing. [...] Yes, many activists and supporters of net neutrality were hyperbolic in trying to explain the very real, very negative impact the net neutrality repeal would have over the longer term. That doesn't mean it wasn't a terrible idea done in exclusive service to telecom monopolies.
A few points (Score:4, Insightful)
1) Faster speeds are not essential beyond a certain point. Can the kids be online with their zoom classes at the same time? Then it's fast enough, and "more" speed won't do anything for anyone. I realize this runs counter to the narrative, but those selling the narrative are trying to sell something so that should have been suspect to begin with.
2) The fact that faster speeds WERE available, but folks chose not to utilize them, speaks volumes about the crying about bandwidth we've been hearing for years, and is in fact an entirely different argument than we've heard up to this point ( folks couldn't get the speeds they wanted, not that they couldn't "afford" it ). Perhaps the problem is that, as in my first point, there simply wasn't a need? Maybe that's what the panic has been all about?
I know for myself I get the lowest package available from comcast in my area. No need to spend more, I wouldn't use it.
Re: A few points (Score:3)
My 25/5 package stopped cutting it.
5 up made working from home undoable. In the past I would drive to the office when I needed to send people large files, but now i can't and it was seriously lacking. I actually would just use my phone as a hotspot and pay for the data if I needed to send over a few GB of files in a month. My 4G is 50/50, to get 50 up with Comcast is quite a bit.
The 25 reliably gave me 30, so it worked for 4k streaming even (I live alone), but I just got a S
Re: A few points (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop.
Don't pretend the digital divide is between those that can quickly upload 4K videos to YouTube and this stuck with 1080P - if that's the digital divide, we have no digital divide.
I'm so tired of the digital divide goalposts changing - remember when the issue was access to the dial-up internet? Then it was DSL Internet, then it was high-speed broadband, and now the divide is defined by the ability of a social media influencer wanna-be to upload their high-def content quickly?
Re: A few points (Score:3)
1) learn
2) participate in the culture of those that have
As long as there is a divide, there is divide, and as technology and culture changes it's place will move.
Re: A few points (Score:2)
I doubt one could even attend school now in that situation (now as in remote). Having internet in a computer vs a phone is a big deal too.
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Can confirm. Because of the Covid, both my wife and I are working remote, and earlier this year we decided that if we're working remote we should work remote from somewhere else. We drove to Oregon to visit family and hang out there for a couple months. Part of that time we were at my parents' house where they still had what I would have called a shitty DSL connection in 2006, and until my father called the telephone company to see what options were available to increase it, that telephone company would
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Of course the goalposts are changing. In the dial-up days 30 person video chat didn't exist because the bandwidth wasn't available, and nowadays people use it regularly for meetings.
The whole point of the digital divide is that some people can't access modern services because their internet connections are too slow or unreliable. Businesses can't grow because slow broadband holds them back and reduces their competitiveness. It's all relative to what other people have today, not 20 years ago.
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The goalposts are going to change any time you are talking about a "divide" because the state of that divide changes with progress.
Shockingly, broadband speeds are not the same as they were 10 years ago, thus the "divide" has also changed over those 10 years. What hasn't changed a whole lot over those 10 years are the people with the fuzzy end of the lollipop - they've got the same shitty barely-broadband services available to them they had 10 years ago, where others now have gigabit services offered. And
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I just got a Stadia, and it's not quite enough for that (I assume it's a higher nitrate for the sake of lower latency).
No, a lower bitrate would give lower latency, because there would be less data in a given frame, and therefore it would be decoded faster. But it would be irrelevant compared to the network latency, which is orthogonal to the bitrate.
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My network latency to google (8.8.8.8) 20-50ms (just pinged, 26, 18, 16, 15). I'm wired here, and my wireless has a little more jitter (about every 10th ping adds 9-12ms, still, a delay of a single frame is relevant). Network latency is definitely a factor, but it's not so HUGE that other little things make no difference.
1 frame of latency at 60fps is 17ms, I don't think 85-30% is irrelevant. If I have a smooth best case latency at 60fps, the network itself tak
Re:A few points (Score:4, Interesting)
You're doing a lot of mixing and matching here.
"Faster speeds are not essential beyond a certain point." True, but that doesn't address the issue.
"Then it's fast enough, and "more" speed won't do anything for anyone. I realize this runs counter to the narrative..." No, because you're cherry-picking elements of the narrative to make it seem to say something entirely different.
"The fact that faster speeds WERE available, but folks chose not to utilize them, speaks volumes about the crying about bandwidth we've been hearing for years..."
And here we have the part where you throw away context to bend the message to your will.
On one hand, in certain cases you're correct -- at a certain point, for most people, "faster" has diminishing returns. But the real issue is that most people don't get those choices. The article is pointing out that large portions of the country are un-served or under-served. ISPs and phone companies don't want to cover lightly-populated areas because the ROI is lower than densely-populated areas. So the big cities get the most coverage, the suburbs less so, and so on until we end up with large rural areas with zero coverage.
Covid comes along and forces people to work and school from home. Those people in the cities with their awesome coverage say oops, I need more bandwidth, let's upgrade. Suddenly there's an increase in the AVERAGE bandwidth across the country because the densely-populated areas see a huge increase. Meanwhile Phil Farmer still can't get any connection at all, people getting dial-up speeds are still getting dial-up speeds, and so on.
Then people like you say that if the average speed is higher, that ipso facto must mean that speeds are up uniformly, and therefore nobody should be complaining about the fact that they weren't using all the available bandwidth because Phil Farmer obviously was buying the cheapest connection and not the best he could get.
The narrative the article is pushing is that people whose job it is to make it look like we aren't a third-world country are, in fact, doing their jobs; but to do their jobs they are lying and misrepresenting the data instead of actually, you know, providing coverage.
You're conflating "folks" who are in a position to get excellent connectivity -- albeit at some of the worst prices in the world -- with "folks" who have little to no connectivity. These "folks" aren't the homogeneous mix that you're implying.
The narrative that YOU are pushing is that everybody is connected, everybody has all the bandwidth they need with plenty of reserve on tap, and nobody should be complaining because the world is unicorns and rainbows. Because one study shows that the average went up.
You have high-speed cable if you want. Good for you! Not everybody is in the same situation.
Re: (Score:2)
Meanwhile Phil Farmer still can't get any connection at all,
Phil Farmer should sign up for StarLink.
Re: A few points (Score:2)
Speed increases without ISP plant improvements proves the issue wasn't ISP investment, it was customer reluctance that held back network speeds.
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Or that it was value that was missing from the higher speeds, either because the speeds weren't required before, or the telecom was charging way too damn much for it because of a complete lack of competition.
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Faster speeds are not essential beyond a certain point.
While true, that "certain point" continues to rise at a staggering pace. In the 1980's, I had a 300 baud modem. The vast majority of my content came through the line at about the speed I could read it, as the majority of content at the time was plain text. My friends with 1200 baud modems (rather uncommon for the time period) had more bandwidth than they knew what to do with. They complained that they had to pause their downloads because the text was scrolling too fast to read.
Then images were introduced, a
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This is a very disingenuous argument. Sure those speeds were available, but they were MASSIVELY expensive. When we were using 33.6 modems, 1.5 mb T1's were available. My friends and I wanted to start an ISP, but a FRACTIONAL T1 was ten thousand dollars to purchase and install, and a few thousand dollars a month to operate.
And that was one of the points of TFA, that this is no longer an accurate mental model.
Apparently, for a large number of people, higher speeds are available at a price people can afford, given a strong enough use case. That really wasn't the case in the T1 days. And up to a year ago, people seem to have preferred other things to higher speed internet.
Takeaways? On the one hand, it's really good news that the US had sufficient capacity deployed to upgrade many, many people to higher speed networks. We should
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1) Faster speeds are not essential beyond a certain point.
Ahh yes. I remember reading that about the 56kbps modem, and ADSL, and ADSL2+, and Cable, and people are still saying today about fibre.
Can the {example from today because I lack imagination of what tomorrow looks like} Then it's fast enough
FTFY.
2) The fact that faster speeds WERE available, but folks chose not to utilize them, speaks volumes about the crying about bandwidth we've been hearing for years
Ahhh yes. The old appeal to the lowest common denominator. I know someone who still had ADSL even though faster technologies are available. I think that's good enough reason to disallow you to stream 4K Netflix or force you to wait for days while your 100GB game downloads. In fact I found this community of people who don't even have electricity, based on that you don't
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Some places just give everyone super fast broadband at the same low cost. In Japan everyone gets fibre, DSL is no longer for sale, and the base speed is 2,000 mbps symmetrical.
It's of great benefit to the country as a whole, as it opens up huge new markets for services that rely on high speed broadband, and means you can live pretty much anywhere and be sure of getting good speeds.
That's the end goal, everyone has fast internet, so why take the long way around? Just skip right to it, fibre everywhere like y
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Great, then go ahead and rip all the wiring out of your house, because you don't "need" electricity. Humanity got along without it for millenia, and you can too.
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The internet isn't a "need" in the first place.
It wasn't a need until March 2020. It became a need when many offices closed and remote work became many people's only means of support. And funny, that's when a lot of people seem to have decided higher speed internet was worth paying for (possibly aided by their latte/bar/live events money burning a hole in their pocket).
Society isn't even a need.
Interesting take. I'm not sure what you mean by "society". If you mean "engaging in commerce", it most definitely is a need. Without commerce and trade something like 6-7 billion people w
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You presume to know why people weren't subscribing to higher speeds, when there could be a multitude of reasons behind it:
- customers didn't know higher throughput was available in their area
- customers had no need for the higher throughput until it became their primary link to society through a pandemic
- customers weren't willing to stomach the price of higher throughput until it was basically compulsory because of a pandemic
These are just a few of the possibilities. Probably you s
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There certainly are people who want faster internet than is available where they live. (There are places where the best non-satellite option is 3 Mbps or 6 Mbps ADSL.) It's mostly likely to happen in remote rural areas, but there are some underserved city neighborhoods, small cities, and suburbs as well.
There are also plenty of people who don't subscribe to the fastest package available to them. For example, Comcast/Xfinity typically charges somewhere in the $80/month range for service in the 200-300 Mbps r
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No it's more like this. I have to spend 3 times what I normally would for internet because both my kids need to attend classes over zoom while I also work from home. I can't really afford it, but I have to work and my kids need to learn so what do I do?
Net neutrality (Score:3, Funny)
If the market should decide, why does Trump get mad when twitter puts a notice alongside his tweets?
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You consider it "free market" to allow companies to take advantage of protections of one nation, then bypass all their regulations and laws by offshoring the labor off to another country where they can pollute and use near-slave labor, then siphoning profits off to another foreign entity to avoid paying for any of the protections they're receiving?
If it were truly free market, these types of companies would get no protections at all.
Re: (Score:2)
Pretty big talk for someone who probably has a house filled with cheaply made goods, manufactured in another country where they can pollute and use near-slave labor.
Re:Net neutrality (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't answer your question but I look at it like this... You can stand on the public sidewalk and say just about anything you want for as long as you want. But I will not allow you to do the same while you are standing on my private property. There is nothing wrong with exercising my property rights, it is private property after all. Twitter and other internet destinations are not public property. It is reasonable for private internet sites to manage their property as they see fit.
Trump should start a public, government funded, social media network where the first amendment applies - then he can say whatever he wants on it.
Re: Net neutrality (Score:4, Interesting)
And then the next issue is when you buy up enough property that if anyone wants to speak and be heard they HAVE to use your property. It gives you the Power to effectively Censor public debate.
Re: (Score:2)
"If you don't want to be liable for what they say then you ought to allow anything which is legal."
--- That's impossible, it means you will have to allow spam, trolls, and offtopic discussions.
"If you're going to curate what is said then you're responsible for everything which is said."
--- Very very few sites will take on that level of responsibility.
"And then the next issue is when you buy up enough property that if anyone wants to speak and be heard they HAVE to use your property. It gives you the Power to effectively Censor public debate."
So are you against or in favor of free market capitalism?
Re: Net neutrality (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem comes when you start letting other people use your property. If you don't want to be liable for what they say then you ought to allow anything which is legal. If you're going to curate what is said then you're responsible for everything which is said.
This “everything or nothing” notion is a false dichotomy that makes no sense and has no basis in law or fact.
For instance, nearly every business allows people on their property, yet almost none of them are legally bound in the way you suggest. Businesses can and do enforce rules of their own choosing, and virtually always have in modern society. Restaurants will kick out patrons that are being extremely obnoxious to others, even if they haven’t crossed the line into anything illegal. Stores routinely say “no shirt, no shoes, no service”, even though neither are legally required in public. Opening a business to the public does not mean giving up your rights, and that’s only more true when you’re talking about private property owned by real people.
Re: (Score:2)
I think you are confused all of those are examples of business 'taking responsibility' for the accounts of people on their property. The responsible action they take is to give others the boot who won't follow their rules.
If I get hurt or sick in your restaurant because you permit other patrons to engage in unhygienic behavior, you bet I could sue you and hold you responsible for their actions. Why do think congress had a debate about covid-19 liability protections? Because there was/is a concern that if
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If Twitter et al want that gift though society should get to attach free speech strings.
So what you're saying is that if we want free speech we should destroy twitter's shareholders' free speech rights?
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If Twitter et al want that gift though society should get to attach free speech strings.
So what you're saying is that if we want free speech we should destroy twitter's shareholders' free speech rights?
If you want special privileges, there is generally a price to pay for that.
These are usually called a license, such as a drivers license, a hunting license, a food service license, a catering license, a concealed carry license, etc.
It is *very* common to require a company to acquire a license if they want to provide specific types of goods or services, and those licenses almost always come with restrictions(hunting season, speed limits, no trucks allowed roads, one-way roads, health inspections, hand-washin
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If you want special privileges, there is generally a price to pay for that.
If you have to pay to get them, they are not rights.
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If Twitter et al want that gift though society should get to attach free speech strings.
So what you're saying is that if we want free speech we should destroy twitter's shareholders' free speech rights?
If you want special privileges, there is generally a price to pay for that.
I just...wow. The right to free speech is not a “special privilege”. I wish I could say that your post simply started on the wrong foot or that you maybe misspoke, but then it went downhill from there—fell off a cliff, really—with your suggestion that free speech should be licensed in a manner akin to driving a car or serving liquor.
No.
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And then the next issue is when you buy up enough property that if anyone wants to speak and be heard they HAVE to use your property. It gives you the Power to effectively Censor public debate.
That's not applicable to the internet .. internet domains are not of finite quanity like land, anyone can have a website. It's not up to anybody to market your site for you extra just because twitter exists.
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Uh. No, if curating one message requires curating and being responsible for all messages, that opens the door to massive fines and lawsuits for every time you make a mistake or are perceived to make a mistake.
Twitter gives a platform for people who want to speak. It's allowed to fact-check messages if it wants; but if somebody else wrote the message, then responsibility for the message belongs to the poster, not the platform.
Twitter started putting up notices on the president's tweets because they were tryi
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The problem comes when you start letting other people use your property.
No it doesn't. That's an imaginary problem you made up and not one supported in any way by law. Not by current law (section 230) and not by any previous laws as applied to publications before the internet. Reminder: Section 230 was created specifically to nullify a stupid legal decision in a single case that got before the court. Oakmont v. Prodigy. which incorrectly decided that moderation = curation.
The whole basis of the law is that simply applying some control to what happens on your property does not m
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You don't have rights to other people's shit that supercede those people's rights to govern how their shit gets used. Why should the rules change because "internet" ? You wouldn't say the same thing if someone came over to your house and started spewing racist hate language through a bullhorn standing in your driveway, would you? I would hope you'd tell them to fuck off or get fucked off by the police for trespassing because they are unwelcome, as is their racist hatred.
And that's the end of it. When yo
Re: Net neutrality (Score:1)
If Twitter (for example) chooses to review/approve what posted on its site - that's fine - but they give up any protections for posted content. They have Section 230 protections because they said they would never review/approve content, and with that promise they were absolved of responsibility.
Essentially, Twitter is choosing to edit the content of its website, and that exposes them to liability for anything that's posted. As Twitter becomes more like a magazine or newspaper, their protections disappear.
Se
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You really should actually read section 230 instead of listening to politicians. Here is a copy, https://www.law.cornell.edu/us... [cornell.edu] it is actually short and readable, pay attention to the civil liability part. The only obligation I see is informing users that parental control protections are commercially available if someone is worried about what their kids might read/see on a platform, as well as the usual criminal and IP law stuff.
Remember, if a politician says something, expect that it is the opposite of
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But that would be SOCIALISM and we can't have that because FREEDOM.
I always find it ironic when people bitch about their freedom to use someone else's bought and paid for property in spite of the freedoms of the people who bought and paid for the development, stand-up, scaling, maintenance, and operation of it, which they feel they have some kind of manifest destiny to use because "the Internet."
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If the market should decide, why does Trump get mad when twitter puts a notice alongside his tweets?
Trump has never believed in free markets.
He is a populist, not a free-market libertarian.
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The market also decided they didn't want Trump, and he got mad about that too. Perhaps "the market will decide" is just a convenient euphemism used to dodge responsibility?
the rent is too damn high (Score:3)
The rent is too damn high.
stupid ISP 'plans' (Score:2)
I had been month-to-month with my ISP for a while, the speed was fine, enough. Then my kids all had to be in different video conferences at the same time, plus working from home. I was able to get on a new month-to-month plan for the same price that offered 4x the bandwidth. My bandwidth went up more than 90%, for the same price. Those bastards were getting over on me for a while, couldn't be bothered to let me know there was a better offer now.
Re: stupid ISP 'plans' (Score:4, Informative)
Re: stupid ISP 'plans' (Score:3)
I was doing that alone, BEFORE I got a 4k TV. I leave a lot of background TV on though.
I did 450 last month, and I expect it to go up again (I got a Stadia).
The 1.2TB cap they're imposing is going to cause me to need to throttle some video if other streaming services start offering 4K, and more content is produced in it.
It's only about 2 hours/day of streaming 4k, which isn't a lot IMO (that's music videos in the background, random youtube podcasts, a little intentional TV, background n
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New games are coming in at 120 GB a pop now. The new consoles are starting to deprecate discs in favor of downloads, so it's not necessarily just PC games anymore. If you've got multiple kids, or they want multiple games, that adds up quick.
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I leave a lot of background TV on though.
I hate to say this but maybe the problem is you are trying to use what is a limited resource in a wasteful fashion. Unicast bandwidth on our networks is not unlimited. If you were watch OTA that broadcast is happening and the bandwidth is used even if you don't tune in, but that just isnt how the internet works.
Perhaps the answer is you should not be streaming content you are not actually watching, especially if you are doing it at high bit rates. You could listen to a nice comparatively low bandwidth web r
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Like if I'm watching something on a Sunday afternoon does it really cost something?
Sure, you have a point that between 7 and 11 PM (prime time) it may have an impact, and I'd be totally content if only those hours applied to the cap (even if it was much lower), but the cost to Comcast, or my neighbor, of me streaming the rest of the time is effectively zero.
Comcast's internet earnings didn't crater with COVID-19, so I'm very skept
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Isn't internet one of those things that only really matters during peak usage?
Depends on how stable peek time is. I would love to see some data on how peek time has moved with work from home expansion etc. Sure though I agree they could do what the electric utilities do in a lot of markets and change less for off peak time or maybe not meter in those hours.
Re: stupid ISP 'plans' (Score:3)
You are streaming 40 Gigabytes/day? WTF, turn off your 4K streams when you leave the room or sleep.
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I don't use a tb, but last month I used around 423gb (I suspect my highest month), up from closer to 250-300gb being more normal, but it seems credible that as the amount of 4k content increases that doubles to triples each hour, and the Stadia uses more bandwidth than the services, isn't in the last month number. If that 423 goes up significantly
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High quality 4k HDR Atmos streams are around 7-8GB/hour, e.g. The Mandalorian on Disney Plus. That's for 24p, if you want 60p streams you can double it.
TV shows tend to be at least 30p, Disney decided to give The Mandalorian a cinematic feel. YouTube is usually 60p for the popular channels.
Could be multiple users too. You do the maths, it's only a few hours a day of streaming.
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>"4k content isn't universal, but it's more and more."
And will be pushed more and more to the 95% of people who can't notice any difference between 2k and 4k but think they need it. 4K really eats up a lot of extra bandwidth for very little return. I have TESTED quite a few people at normal distance from my 75" 4K TV, with 4K vs 2K upscaled. Only one could tell any difference, and yet even he said it really didn't matter. I bet maybe even half the population wouldn't even notice 1K vs 2K vs 4K. Gran
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I agree that aside from video games (where I sit a good bit closer), or low bitrate for 1080p content, 4k doesn't make much of a difference (if at all), but for darker scenes HDR definitely does. I suspect a 1080p HDR signal would make me much happier than a 4k non HDR except for the worst of compression. Of course the T
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>"They could say 400gb limit 7-11 (1-2 hours 4k content * 20 weeknights) and actually charge the people costing them the most money, free up bandwidth for the people that really needed it net"
Really, they could just charge a connection fee and then a small amount for every GB. Find what the average user uses and set the amount based on that for their normal plan. They would make the same money as before, it would be more "fair" for everyone, and it would put some incentive for not wasting bandwidth. T
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Data is basically free unless the network is congested. Charging heavy users more is a heavy handed way to solve the problem the heavy user causes no more expense (slight hyperbole, very little more expense) compared to the moderate user that does all of their use during prime time.
The data doesn't cause a cost of its own like a car driving down a road, or electricity being generated
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My router has been up for 503 days. In that time inbound on the Wan port I see 65.6 TiB. You do the math. I also use my house as an offsite backup location, where there is a nailed up VPN to the office and constant data flow from office to home.
We got conned (Score:4, Funny)
Nice Zoom-connection you have there, it would be a shame if something happened to it while you're pleading for a raise with your boss.
"Willing" is an interesting way to spell (Score:3)
Paid more (Score:2)
Perhaps. But this should be easy to track. Number of subscribers, revenue per subscriber and a bunch of other data is key financial information that needs to be provided in quarterly reports.
Re: It is quite obvious that killing NN helped (Score:2)
Providers did nothing - customers simply chose faster plans. The issue was customer reluctance to pay for better service, not a lack of better options.
More worried about data caps than speed options... (Score:2)
I see a couple of huge issues looming with broadband in America today:
1.There's a tendency to sell asymmetrical connections where no matter how much "speed" you pay for, they limit the UPLOAD bandwidth severely. I can get 1 gigabit download speeds from Cox, Comcast or Charter/Spectrum right now and all of them pretty much restrict the upload speeds to 40mbits/sec on those plans. Any plans slower than that cut upload bandwidth to around 15mbits/sec.
2. COVID has caused more people to use more data per month t
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Many if not most home internet connections are inherently asymmetrical. The equipment cannot support symmetric connections at high speeds. In the case of DOCSIS for example there is simply far more bandwidth on the outgoing channels than on the return.
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I would say that for 80-90% of Internet users there is no need for symmetric connections. Most users are downloading large files and uploading smallish files. The only time that an asymmetrical connection runs into problems is if you are saturating your upload channel which will affect your download channel as well (even if download channel isn't being maxed out).
Re: More worried about data caps than speed option (Score:2)
You are confusing asynchronous with asymmetric.
Lack of Net Neutrality has caused...nothing (Score:2)
On the other hand, the lack of Net Neutrality has not lead to any of the bizarre conspiracy theory disaster scenarios that people had dreamt up...
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WTF? (Score:2)
Seriously? The metric we're using to measure broadband speeds in America isn't the speed that's AVAILABLE, instead it's what people are willing to pay for?
So all this gnashing or teeth and rending of clothes over low broadband speeds in America wasn't because the ISPs suck, it's because their subscribers CHOOSE slower speeds, unwilling to pay for better broadband service.
With this report I lose all interest in debating broadband speeds in America - the issue isn't what ISPs offer, the issue is what subscrib
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How many people have the option for a higher speed for a reasonable price? I'm in Canada, outskirts of town and pay cdn$80 a month for a connection that in the evenings won't stream 480 video.
First, I'm not that wealthy and if I got the advertised speeds in the evenings (most of the day since the pandemic), I'd stick with the $80 plan as it is good enough for 3 of us to watch TV at 720, play games and such.
Second, with how shitty the speeds are, I probably would spend somewhat more to get maybe a consistent
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subscribers CHOOSE slower speeds, unwilling to pay for better broadband service
I don't equate better service with faster speeds. Better service to me is all about reliability. The speed I choose to pay for should not affect that.
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"...the U.S. remains relatively mediocre when it comes to broadband speeds (in large part due to limited competition): "The US stills lags behind many European and developed nations worldwide, and its major cities also often lag behind their European equivalents."
Read the article some time. Moron.
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Seriously? The metric we're using to measure broadband speeds in America isn't the speed that's AVAILABLE, instead it's what people are willing to pay for?
Welcome to America, home of Advocacy Journalism. Your job is to Make A Point, not inform and especially not to confuse the issue with nuance and context.
This is made easier by most Americans not being able to hold two statistics in their heads at the same time.
"willing to pay more money" (Score:2)
When people return to work and choose take-away coffee, hot lunch and bus-fare over 'mid-level' internet service, will everybody shout "yay, capitalism" again?
Re-write the title (Score:2)
That's what the author wrote.
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I think it also shows that lack of competition in the market is/was keeping speeds low and prices high.
Faster in Dallas ? (Score:2)
Faster in Dallas ? Maybe smack down-town. In the Dallas AREA, the only things increasing in the last year were the prices for the same speed. I got 2 price hikes from Spectrum this year "because of Covid-19"
COVID speed boosts (Score:1)
Verizon FiOS upgraded everyone to 1 gbps up/down for several months during the pandemic. I pay for 50 mbps up/down. While it was 'cool' - it wasn't necessary. You only need 5 mbps for most HD content. Even with a family of 4 - 50 up/down is more than sufficient for everyone to watch Netflix at the same time. That and just because your ISP gives you say 100 mbps - doesn't mean that's what you'll get from whatever website you're on.
So that goes to show that a.) I always had a 1 gbps connection to the ISP
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Just proves that we don't have a competitive market. In a competitive market, prices would either come down or speeds would go up naturally. Obviously that hasn't been the case a prices have only gone up while speeds have not despite the fact that apparently the networks could handle higher speeds.