Americans Paying More For Worse Internet

[Sigmund Av Volsung]

And here's me sitting on a big fat SIX Mb/s. I'd complain, but even that's twelve times the speed I had just four months ago.

Why yes, I do live in Australia.

Actual speeds=/=promised speeds.

My broadband is supposed to be 20Mbit, but in actual fact, it peaks at about 2-3Mb/s.

Hell, there was even an investigation recently into how dishonest those companies are when talking about broadband speeds, as they advertised the highest possible speed without notifying people that the speed is in fact the highest recorded, and not the avg. you will get.

 

[CriticalMiss]

I'm suprised that they haven't already put in some kind of law to force higher internet speeds, if only to allow the NSA to gather more information on people.

 

[Shamanic Rhythm]

And here's me sitting on a big fat SIX Mb/s. I'd complain, but even that's twelve times the speed I had just four months ago.

Why yes, I do live in Australia.

Actual speeds=/=promised speeds.

My broadband is supposed to be 20Mbit, but in actual fact, it peaks at about 2-3Mb/s.

Hell, there was even an investigation recently into how dishonest those companies are when talking about broadband speeds, as they advertised the highest possible speed without notifying people that the speed is in fact the highest recorded, and not the avg. you will get.

Is your connection fibre or DSL? I have fibre, and one of the best things about it is the reliability at which it stays at the advertised speed.

 

[Zipa]

I thought this was pretty much common knowledge even though I don't live in the USA.

 

[vxicepickxv]

And NOBODY is surprised.

It amazes me how often Americans think of themselves as 'exceptional', but ignore the reality that they're not even in the Top 10 of the 'good lists'.

America is exceptionally lucky that they were too far away from Germany to get bombed during WW2. That's what we've been coasting steadily downhill on ever since.

As for the government solution, well, it didn't work out so well last time, and unless we do it very differently, it wouldn't work again if we tried the same way.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html

It wasn't news five and a half years ago, and it's not news now. It's just more and more infuriating.

 

[idarkphoenixi]

And to think I just upgraded to 60Megabit unlimited broadband.

This is pretty much what happens when a couple of companies have total domination over any given area. They call the shots and they squeeze you dry.

 

[1337mokro]

Any companies' wet dream. Provide an increasingly shittier product and charge people more for it. Usually only drug dealers get away with that stuff because drugs are illegal, but corporate america is slowly catching on to how to sell weed with iron shavings in it.

 

[Mothhive]

Actual speeds=/=promised speeds.

My broadband is supposed to be 20Mbit, but in actual fact, it peaks at about 2-3Mb/s.

Just to clarify, do you have a 20 Megabit connection and you're getting 2-3 Megabytes per second downloads? If so, you're getting exactly what you're supposed to.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Americans need to wake up from their media induced coma. The only thing the US ranks first is the number of incarcerated citizens per capita and the number of school shootings. Everything else is almost as shitty as a third world country. Not quite there yet, but almost. There's just a lot of makeup on it to make it look pretty.

 

[Charli]

Yeah UK has this monopoly problem too. And it's BT (Sky and Virgin customers sorry to burst your bubble but BT still owns most of the lines, they are merely rented at a price to stick into the other companies cute little packages)strong arming the government, plans to increase infrastructure are continuously pushed year after year. And the prices seem to continue to rise for a glorious 4mbps.

Also the USA is huge, it's not a surprise to me that the average is pretty low still, since there's millions of rural places where better cabling and access to internet has yet to receive funding and attention.

The tiny little ol' part of England can't even recable it's villages and some towns. If you want good internet you kinda have to be in London or Birmingham, or a decently sized town that isn't run by dinosaurs who are content if the landline phones work and divert funding to goddamn plaques for bridges that were alleged to have been built in some year that apparently meant a thing.

So yeah. News. Unsurprising. Even in the rural parts of Sweden Internet is shaky. As great as it is if you even step close to a village. If your spending is as fucked up as it looks on charts, then surprised, we are not.

 

[Roxas1359]

I'm suprised that they haven't already put in some kind of law to force higher internet speeds, if only to allow the NSA to gather more information on people.

Perhaps we could sell that idea to Congress. I mean, we could tell them that if they were to force the other ISP to not be such dicks then they could "catch terrorists faster". XD

 

[proghead]

Just thought I'd put a counterpoint into the discussion here: Ever consider the differences in landmass? The US is the fourth-largest country in the world. Now, compared to the landmass covered by Latvia, how much more fiber would be needed to adequately to give the US the coverage equal to Latvia's? The answer should be easy to guess, and that's one of the reasons we have to pay more.

You'd have a point, if internet access didn't suck in big cities, too. At least that's what I've heard.

 

[Remus]

Americans need to wake up from their media induced coma. The only thing the US ranks first is the number of incarcerated citizens per capita and the number of school shootings. Everything else is almost as shitty as a third world country. Not quite there yet, but almost. There's just a lot of makeup on it to make it look pretty.

Again, loudest /= majority. Just because red state reps like to say we're the greatest country in the world does not mean that's what we all think.

 

[SpinFusor]

Yeah... I can't even get cable out where I live. Which is maddening, since I'm like 2 minutes away from a neighborhood that has had it for years.

Best I can get is jittery 1.5mb DSL. Which is a huge improvement over the dial-up we had a few years prior.

 

[Dark Knifer]

I'd be happy with a megabyte per second...

 

[Sigmund Av Volsung]

And here's me sitting on a big fat SIX Mb/s. I'd complain, but even that's twelve times the speed I had just four months ago.

Why yes, I do live in Australia.

Actual speeds=/=promised speeds.

My broadband is supposed to be 20Mbit, but in actual fact, it peaks at about 2-3Mb/s.

Hell, there was even an investigation recently into how dishonest those companies are when talking about broadband speeds, as they advertised the highest possible speed without notifying people that the speed is in fact the highest recorded, and not the avg. you will get.

Is your connection fibre or DSL? I have fibre, and one of the best things about it is the reliability at which it stays at the advertised speed.

Fibre.

Maybe I just got dicked, but in my experience the advertised speed is never the actual speed.

 

[Trivun]

Yeah UK has this monopoly problem too. And it's BT (Sky and Virgin customers sorry to burst your bubble but BT still owns most of the lines, they are merely rented at a price to stick into the other companies cute little packages)strong arming the government, plans to increase infrastructure are continuously pushed year after year. And the prices seem to continue to rise for a glorious 4mbps.

Also the USA is huge, it's not a surprise to me that the average is pretty low still, since there's millions of rural places where better cabling and access to internet has yet to receive funding and attention.

The tiny little ol' part of England can't even recable it's villages and some towns. If you want good internet you kinda have to be in London or Birmingham, or a decently sized town that isn't run by dinosaurs who are content if the landline phones work and divert funding to goddamn plaques for bridges that were alleged to have been built in some year that apparently meant a thing.

So yeah. News. Unsurprising. Even in the rural parts of Sweden Internet is shaky. As great as it is if you even step close to a village. If your spending is as fucked up as it looks on charts, then surprised, we are not.

That's perfect for me then, I live just outside Birmingham, in one of the larger towns attached to the place, so my internet is fairly speedy. Virgin Broadband here, by the way. Though I have to mention that the news writer decided to mention that the USA created the Internet. That's true insofar as DARPA created it, but I always love how Americans 'conveniently' forget every time that the thing that the Internet requires to work in the way it does (the most important part of the whole shebang), the World Wide Web, was created by a British guy at CERN. Yep, love how no-one ever mentions him despite the fact that without the British dude (a knight, no less) they wouldn't be using this site at all. Because it wouldn't exist.

Anyhow, someone else has mentioned in the Facebook comments comparing Japan and the USA as a more accurate case. Japan has a relatively similar population (in fact, more people per city than the USA, the population density in Japan's cities is a lot higher than most US cities), a very similar eceonmy, and a reasonably similar average salary, so is a much closer fit to the USA than Latvia for the purposes of this excercise. And yet, people in Japanese cities can get, on average, around 30 times faster broadband than the average American. So yeah, I'm inclined to agree with the stats here. The USA has crap internet as crap prices. Not that the UK is much better, but even so, I reckon the news writer and his sources are right on that at least...

 

[CriticalMiss]

I'm suprised that they haven't already put in some kind of law to force higher internet speeds, if only to allow the NSA to gather more information on people.

Perhaps we could sell that idea to Congress. I mean, we could tell them that if they were to force the other ISP to not be such dicks then they could "catch terrorists faster". XD

It's a proven fact that dial-up connections cause terrorism. And do you know who else had dial-up internet? Hitler!

 

[redknightalex]

I'm more than happy that I don't have to live with this bullshit that America doesn't want to care about (Duck Dynasty is so much more important it seems). I live in one of the few cities in America that has true fiber-optic infrastructure and I get a constant, what I paid for, 20 mb/s symmetrical up and down. They offer plans that go around 1Gb/s, still symmetrical, but I can't afford it, nor need it, right now.

And this is really the problem: infrastructure. America, as Crawford has pointed out in interviews and in her own book on the subject (great read, btw), lacks the fiber-optic backbone that can get to the inner cities not only because it has yet to build it but also because these companies don't want to spend the money to offer their customers better service when they have a monopoly anyway. The whole system is ridiculous, fixed, and yet completely fixable. With speeds on a single backbone connection running at 100Gb/s there is no excuse, other than pure greed on a companies part, to not have better service in America.

Plus, if we actually got around to caring and working on the infrastructure set up in the 70s or earlier, we could create new jobs and boost the economy. Why is this such a hard thing to figure out?!