Americans Paying More For Worse Internet
- Thread starter StewShearerOld
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Yeah, but does the study say anything about usage caps? Judging by the complaints I read on Internet forums, the US seems to be just about the only country in the world where you can actually get wired Internet without any cap on monthly usage. Who cares if it's blazing fast if that just means you end up using it all up faster?
I dunno, even here in the states a lot of people can't get that. Sure, we're not as taken advantage of as Canada, but many people nationwide can only get uncapped internet if they go with DSL or another slower internet access type.Steve the Pocket said:
P.S. Thanks
Hint: start from the bottom of the list. The UK barely qualifies as a "post-industrial nation" when it comes to connectivity.Akichi Daikashima said:
The Netherlands and Scandinavia just called. They want to know what this "cap" thing is you're speaking of.Steve the Pocket said:
I'm quite happy with what we pay for our internet/cable and our speed which ranges from 25-30 megabits depending on the site. Average 8 megabits on Steam which is awesome for sales time. But I do feel lucky as there are areas within spitting distance that don't get the same service. Granted its a different county...
Ehh, could be worse and I'm not complaining. I lived in the dialup era and had it for a lot longer when other areas were getting DSL and cable. I did also happen to live on an island at that time. Later though I made friends with a guy who owns an independent ISP in that area, so if I needed bandwidth I could just hang out at his home/office with my PC for a few hours. Dude also taught me a lesson in knowledge, mostly that when you think you know stuff, someone else comes around and blows your ass out of the water. He was 15 when he started the ISP, to give you a clue on how smart the fucker is. Good guy too.
Ehh, could be worse and I'm not complaining. I lived in the dialup era and had it for a lot longer when other areas were getting DSL and cable. I did also happen to live on an island at that time. Later though I made friends with a guy who owns an independent ISP in that area, so if I needed bandwidth I could just hang out at his home/office with my PC for a few hours. Dude also taught me a lesson in knowledge, mostly that when you think you know stuff, someone else comes around and blows your ass out of the water. He was 15 when he started the ISP, to give you a clue on how smart the fucker is. Good guy too.
Agreed, and of course this is the problem with journalism today, it's only sensationalized. How about explaining why this may be? One of the "problems" the US faces, is it was one of the first countries to build it's infrastructure. So it's not very easy to just say tear up every copper wire, railroad track, road, etc. and replace it with the latest. Take a country like South Korea, very small and didn't have the type of infrastructure in place we had. So when it built it, it started with better and over a small area. Notice other countries like UK and Australia have similar problems. IN the 80s we had the internet, and phone lines everywhere, how many countries could say that. We deal with the same thing at work. The new guy get's the newest laptop, I work on a 4 year old laptop, because it gets the job done, at some point I will have the newest. It's tough though to say, go spread fiber or glass or towers everywhere, when the majority of people won't pay for it.. yet. I think the next advancement will have to come from a very low infrastructure base, i.e. wireless. Why do we have to be 1st anyway?Dr.Awkward said:
Yes it's awful living in the US. You've apparently never been to a 3rd world country. They would love to have "slow" internet issues to deal with.Adam Jensen said:
It reminds me of baseball stat pickers. Would you rather have the guy that was 1st in home runs, but 20th in everything else, or the guy who finished in the top 5 of everything. Maybe too simple of an analogy, but it's when people pick one thing out and don't compare it against everything else. I could have the best car, but no house, so am I the "richest". If only there was enough time and money to put everything at the top of the list. Though I certainly wish we would divert funds from silly things to more important things, not everything is that easy.
While I agree that speeds are slower than they should be due to lol capitalism.
Personally I work for my isp (twc) and have the 50/5 speed and I get 57/5.7 all hours of the day so I can't complain too much. And it's uncapped as well, ice downloaded 1.4TB this month.
Personally I work for my isp (twc) and have the 50/5 speed and I get 57/5.7 all hours of the day so I can't complain too much. And it's uncapped as well, ice downloaded 1.4TB this month.
Yeah know shit. This is my interenet right now.
And I can't get better, because nothing is offered here, because it's rural Vermont.
Oh wait no there is one company bringing fast internet here. They set it up, and the lines are seven telephone poles away from my house. I just can't get it because instead of going up my street, they went left to go a few miles down the road to another town. Fast internet, so close, and I can't get it.
And I can't get better, because nothing is offered here, because it's rural Vermont.
Oh wait no there is one company bringing fast internet here. They set it up, and the lines are seven telephone poles away from my house. I just can't get it because instead of going up my street, they went left to go a few miles down the road to another town. Fast internet, so close, and I can't get it.
I fully believe it. I'm at a "high demand" resort in Florida right now and the internet is so slow and awful that I can hardly connect here. (That's why I've mostly disappeared since Christmas.)
I work part-time for a large Cable Company. We recently upgraded our speed to our service are at no-cost to the customers, and are slowly replacing equipment for the next upgrade. For anyone who knows about Internet through DOCSIS, we are almost at the DOCSIS 3.0 standard today. The extreme discount people get 10-15Mbps, Normal Customers get 20-25Mbps, and the Fast Customers get 30-50Mbps. We can achieve speeds of up to 100Mbps in certain areas. We even double our Upstream, but our equipment is still pretty slow on that. It an extremely complicated and expensive problem on upgrades, our company does not have the financial backing to upgrade everyone at once. We were losing money about 5 years ago, and now we are barely making profits. This goes for most of the Cable companies in the United States. I know in about 5 years we'll be closer to DOCSIS 4, which is guessed at around 5Gbps Down, 1Gbps Up.
I want to wager money though that Riga ISPs do have some sort of Bandwidth limits, I know they are the norm outside the United States, as where the US is unlimited.
I want to wager money though that Riga ISPs do have some sort of Bandwidth limits, I know they are the norm outside the United States, as where the US is unlimited.
Oh Google, I'll forgive you for your butchering of YouTube if you can just spread your Fiber to my city! Our world is that of darkness and despair; You're our only hope!
I'm pretty sure this is because of how rural America is.
I live in a wide open neighborhood, and my family's only options are Dial Up (cheap but ungodly slow) and satellite (getting decently fast, but ungodly expensive).
I imagine that all these people living out in rural neighborhoods severely fucks with the statistics, unlike poorer countries, wherein people living away from civilization probably can't usually have any internet at all!
I live in a wide open neighborhood, and my family's only options are Dial Up (cheap but ungodly slow) and satellite (getting decently fast, but ungodly expensive).
I imagine that all these people living out in rural neighborhoods severely fucks with the statistics, unlike poorer countries, wherein people living away from civilization probably can't usually have any internet at all!
Careful with that kind of thinking, you sound like some kind of communist! Don't you be interferin' with a corporation's God-given right to provide the shittiest product people will pay for at the highest prices they can charge and rake in profit!redknightalex said:
You do realize that those 2 sentences are contradictory right?Tanis said:
As far as being on the "good lists": we have lots of embarrassing flaws as a country, but we still have the world's largest GDP, by far the most powerful military, we're the center of the global economy, and we've been the most technologically innovative nation for close to a century. English is now the most widely spoken language in the world, and you can thank us for that.
Normally I wouldn't be defending my home country but I'm getting sick of all the comments on this site ripping it apart like America is some kind of dystopian hellhole. It just gets old after awhile.
In cities monopolies keep competition from being created.
In the rest of the country (and the US is pretty damn big) the cost of building a network is too high for more than one company to bother I grew up in rural northern New York state, we only had Time Warner for a high speed provider. Even now FIOS is still only 3 Mbps max (pretty sure it ain't really FIOS).
Where I am now I have the option of real FIOS or Comcast. I went with the cheaper option and have been treated well by Comcast, but don't want to think about what will happen when my introductory rate ends. Thankfully I am not locked into a contract.
I'd like to think that in the future cellular data might be fast and reliable enough to take over for landlines, but data limiting, tethering limiting, and stupid high prices make me rethink that daydream.
Captcha: i saw that
But I was only itching my balls for a second!
In the rest of the country (and the US is pretty damn big) the cost of building a network is too high for more than one company to bother I grew up in rural northern New York state, we only had Time Warner for a high speed provider. Even now FIOS is still only 3 Mbps max (pretty sure it ain't really FIOS).
Where I am now I have the option of real FIOS or Comcast. I went with the cheaper option and have been treated well by Comcast, but don't want to think about what will happen when my introductory rate ends. Thankfully I am not locked into a contract.
I'd like to think that in the future cellular data might be fast and reliable enough to take over for landlines, but data limiting, tethering limiting, and stupid high prices make me rethink that daydream.
Captcha: i saw that
But I was only itching my balls for a second!
*cough* You can thank the British Empire for that, actually.OlasDAlmighty said:
The "most powerful military" is not something to be proud of, either. GDP means nothing if the people are not happy, sheer productiveness for the sake of being productive is only good for the ruling 0.0001%, and "technologically innovative"? That's rather up for grabs. Technologies that are fundamental to modern life have come from all over the world. America's primary reason for becoming such a world power is simply the fact that they had by far the largest and most intact industrial base and economy at the end of World War 2. You have gradually squandered that massive head start and Europe has certainly caught up, while China is coming to get you.
Yup. It's all thanks to the ISP monopolies. It really isn't any more complicated than that.
Years back, the biggest ISPs figured out how to keep their market shares just under the FCC's anti-trust limit, and have spent their following years making deals to remap their little empires specifically to avoid competing to keep rates high and to drip feed upgrades. Just as with cell phone providers, the game is "Overcharge for the longest period of time possible."
It's why the biggest internet provider in my region has changed three times in the last 8 years. I don't mean small or middling ISPs getting bought up or moving, but regional giants like Comcast and Frontier, moving completely in/out in the span of just a few years. The only way that's possible is if they're just changing ownership of the infrastructure and not the infrastructure itself. They certainly aren't improving it. Locally (for me) rates have gone up but speeds have stayed the same in the last 5 years.
Cable was a rarity in my neighborhood back when it cost 40USD/month for 3.5Mbps (2003).
Now it's sitting at 130/month for ~10Mbps(2013), but is everywhere because there is literally NO OTHER OPTION for cable.
I was on fucking 56k until 2009, because of this; now I'm on DSL which ironically COST LESS THAN THE 56K RATE back when it was new. That is how profoundly fucked up ISPs are in the US, and I know it's not just my region.
Big Media has deep pockets and lots of connections in Washington;, which is why they've been allowed to keep their litle empire of monopolies going for as long as they have; it'd take a remarkable effort to uproot them on the part of the public.
Years back, the biggest ISPs figured out how to keep their market shares just under the FCC's anti-trust limit, and have spent their following years making deals to remap their little empires specifically to avoid competing to keep rates high and to drip feed upgrades. Just as with cell phone providers, the game is "Overcharge for the longest period of time possible."
It's why the biggest internet provider in my region has changed three times in the last 8 years. I don't mean small or middling ISPs getting bought up or moving, but regional giants like Comcast and Frontier, moving completely in/out in the span of just a few years. The only way that's possible is if they're just changing ownership of the infrastructure and not the infrastructure itself. They certainly aren't improving it. Locally (for me) rates have gone up but speeds have stayed the same in the last 5 years.
Cable was a rarity in my neighborhood back when it cost 40USD/month for 3.5Mbps (2003).
Now it's sitting at 130/month for ~10Mbps(2013), but is everywhere because there is literally NO OTHER OPTION for cable.
I was on fucking 56k until 2009, because of this; now I'm on DSL which ironically COST LESS THAN THE 56K RATE back when it was new. That is how profoundly fucked up ISPs are in the US, and I know it's not just my region.
Because just as it was with the oil industry, amazing profits for investors is far more valuable than helping the rest of the economy.redknightalex said:
Big Media has deep pockets and lots of connections in Washington;, which is why they've been allowed to keep their litle empire of monopolies going for as long as they have; it'd take a remarkable effort to uproot them on the part of the public.
Why is this surprising? America has a huge infrastructure and a large population - it makes sense that we'd have a harder time getting internet than other, smaller nations.
It also doesn't surprise me that we pay more. Americans pay more for lots of stuff. Not video games (that's the Aussies), but many things.
Does it suck? Sure. Would I like it to be different? Hell yeah. But I'm not surprised.
Edit: Oh, FYI - I'm using DSL (because it was half the price of Road Runner). As I write this post, I'm watching streaming video (via my PS3) on my television and browsing the internet. I realize my connection is probably too slow for online gaming, but I hate online multiplayer so I don't care.
It also doesn't surprise me that we pay more. Americans pay more for lots of stuff. Not video games (that's the Aussies), but many things.
Does it suck? Sure. Would I like it to be different? Hell yeah. But I'm not surprised.
Edit: Oh, FYI - I'm using DSL (because it was half the price of Road Runner). As I write this post, I'm watching streaming video (via my PS3) on my television and browsing the internet. I realize my connection is probably too slow for online gaming, but I hate online multiplayer so I don't care.