Surprise, Surprise: U.S. Broadband Is Slow. Really Slow.

[Guest]

It's pointless trying to get faster broadband speeds in the US and Canada. It just means you'll hit the bitcap earlier in the month!
Broadband in the US and Canada will always lag behind the rest of the technologically developed nations as long as telco's pocket the money earmarked for infrastructure development.

 

[Guest]

I apologize wrong info about max nominal download speeds in Finland. However according https/nettimittari.ficora.fi/nettimittari/statistics.aspx only TeliaSonera seems to have any significant number of 100 Mb/s connections and those are still minor compared to the lower speeds. DNA also seems to have 100 Mb/s connections but only few.

 

[Guest]

Bandwidth speeds will remain slow as long as TV and Video on Demand companies are the major broadband carriers.

They have no real incentive to increase speeds. All it will get them is consumers using their internet connection to get TV and movies for the cheapest price.

The US broadband providers know this and know a 1Gbe to the home connection will spell the end of the massive profits they make off of TV, VoD, and VoIP services.

Municipal fiber to the home along with paying off the major broadband/TV/VoD/VoIP providers to provide their services over that fiber is probably the only way to really ramp up speeds in this country anytime soon.

 

[spuddyt]

HAH you think tiny places should have fast internet?!? Where I live (channel islands) we only caught up with the UK last month, and UK is behind EVEN the US.....

 

[blackened144]

[citation][nom]usapatriot[/nom]The fastest I can get is 6mb down/3mb up in South Florida.[/citation]

I get 8mb/1mb from Comcast here in South Florida. Who's your provider? The only place I know of, from Martin county down to Dade that cant get faster speeds are the ones serviced by Advanced Cable Communication in Coral Springs and Weston.

 

[Guest]

Ehm old info anyone? Seen so many yank lads on internet and they always use those damn slow cable modems and think they are "fast" lmao on them daily. Currently using that 24mbit crap ADSL and its not enough really, moving on to 100mbit while moving on to other house here in Finland, YEAH

 

[duzcizgi]

[citation][nom]Drez143[/nom]Hey Christian Zibreg, a little tip. If you are going to write an article about networks and what not, please know a little about them first."Japanese users leaves U.S. users behind with an eye-popping 63.60 Mb/s download link." "Japan dominates international broadband speed with a median download speed of approximately 6 MB/s"The conversion is to not just lop off a decimal place. 1 MB = 8 Mb. So a speed of 63.6 Mb is about 8 MB/s. Saying Japan has a 6 MB/s download speed puts it under the 49.5 Mb/s South Korea has.[/citation]

Sorry, in networks, 10 bits = 1 byte. encoding is 8/10

And I have 100 MBit here in Ukraine.

 

[njalterio]

I live in NY and have a 10 Mb/s download speed. This is plenty fast enough. When downloading I rarely see my connection speed hit the 10 Mb/s mark as most servers will not eve come close to matching my downstream speed.

That's great if you live in Japan and get 64 Mb/s, but good luck finding a server to download from that will be able to upload to you that fast.

 

[Guest]

Fair points are made about the vastness of the US vs that of european nations. It is very expensive to build out or upgrade old networks. That is a fact.

I think what should also be considered is that while we have slower connections than that of other geographies, we mostly have unlimited data in those plans. I continually hear about Telcom's in other parts of the world limiting the amount of data you can move in a billing cycle or charging obscene amounts for going over those limits - similar to cell phone carriers today.

So who has it better really? and How much speed does the average user need?

 

[Guest]

right... 8 bits does not equal 1 byte in this case - the actual length can vary but 10 bits per byte is pretty safe.

FWIW... I live in rural upstate NY... from home (a town of about 500 that doesn't even have cell phone coverage it's so far out) I can get 1MB/s download speeds at the right time of day. From work I can get 3-5 MB/s. I've downloaded full sized software dvd's (from msdn) in a couple minutes... which ain't too shabby.

And even if for some reason people DID have 40gb/s fiber to their home (highly unlikely due to equipment cost), there's no consumer PC hardware in the world that could take advantage of more than a tiny fraction of that bandwidth (a single pc is not capable of hitting 100% utilization of even a gigabit ethernet connection, much less a 40gb one). I've got a $10,000 quad processor workstation with a Raid0 15k U320 array... it can hit 600mb/s or maybe a bit more continuous, you're going to do a lot worse than that from the average home PC.

 

[Guest]

Well no kidding Australia gets horrible speeds... it's a huge island thousands of miles away from Europe or the US. Or anything.

The problem in the United States is pretty much what the article said and Bob F iterated: there's no incentive to give the consumer anything more. They don't need to compete globally, just locally. The advertising is equally insulting: "Fastest speeds anywhere!"*

(*This statement applies exclusively to the 48 contingent states of the United States of America, but we know you saps will pay for it). Their philosophy? If you don't like it, move to Japan. It's like the gas/oil companies. The reason why gas is double the price it was a year ago? Because they can. The population of Earth hasn't doubled since then, and I'd highly doubt that the entire world economy that's based on oil has doubled. So why do they do it? Because they can. It's all about money and greed. No one cares about you.

 

[decoppel]

Southern Ontario get's fisted as well, the major players (Rogers/Bell) have a virtual monopoly with massively jacked prices ($50+ a month for decent speeds) and have a bandwidth cap.

 

[invlem]

Rogers in Ontario gives 8Mbps down, not sure what upload is, crappy as far as I can tell, under 1Mbps,60GB bandwidth cap per month for $50 a month.

They have faster but only if you're willing to spend in upwards of $60-100

 

[Guest]

Bandwidth caps are REALLY cheezy... I'd much rather see throttling of high bandwidth users during peak usage periods, but without competition the ISP's aren't challenged to come up with workable alternatives to the knee-jerk simple (and more profitable) solution.

 

[reddozen]

Population density and country size should not be an excuse for slow connectivity.

The technology and proof of concept application already exists in the form of Internet2.

http/www.internet2.edu/lsr/
"an average rate of 9.08 gigabits per second."

Standards need to be developed, and a public sector version needs to be implemented. To say that the telecommunications companies can't afford it is almost laughable. They rob us blind for "broadband" internet services at VERY minimal costs to them with their extremely "speed throttled" networks.

It always pisses me off to talk to my friends in Europe with a 100mbit connection to their hose for about $50usd per month and I'm stuck with a 5mb line with 10mb bursting. It's just unacceptable.

 

[killerb255]

I wonder...how fast are connection speeds in comparatively large countries like Russia or China?

 

[eklipz330]

http/speedtest.net/global.php

look at the global speed results, japan is on top according to these charts

 

[DXRick]

It makes me wonder how the cloud computing thing can work. You need consistently fast speeds to run apps from a net site.

 

[guyladouche]

I live in northern California, and we get 3.5MB (not bit) down and 1.5MB (again, not bit) up. Nothing to brag about, but plenty for anything I or anyone around me does. It is more than I think it should cost (about $50/month), but it's the best speed/price deal around.

Until we upgrade our infrastructure (both home internet and existing cell phone infrastructures), we'll still be slow. And I don't think it'll be changing anytime soon...

 

[gm0n3y]

I live in Vancouver, Canada and I pay about $50/month for internet. I average about 10-12Mb/s max download (not sure what I'm supposed to be getting) and only about 1Mb/s upload (if I'm lucky). I'd gladly pay even $100/month if I could have 1Gb/s download/upload. Especially the upload speed, right now its just stupid how slow it is.

Shaw, my provider, does have a $100/month plan ($93 actually) that provides 25Mb/s download but it still only has 1Mb/s upload.

Also, while my ISP does have month bandwidth limitations of 100GB/month, I generally still download a minimum of 300GB/month and they've never complained to me (though I think they throttle my speed down to 8Mb/s or so after a while).