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Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

I forget where the link was (I think somewhere on yc), but it showed a chart of internet access speed through a few years, rated by countries. Most of the large-nation world had grown by 10%+, many over 50%, in a few years, while the US had dropped by a couple percent. This is in addition to most of those countries being higher already, so it's not merely a 5kbps -> 8kbps jump. My price for internet access not going down, and speed not going up (personal experience) in several years implies the ISPs are gouging because they can.

Proper competition is essential in every industry. If Google can provide it, good for them. This is an area where only the big players can compete, but nobody's stepped forward to fix things. Maybe this will be it.

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The problem is that cable companies were given monopolies by the local governments when the setup.

Here's a chart: http://lifehacker.com/5451127/seems-like-everyones-getting-f...

Yup, that's it. While clicking around something like that site, I also found one that covered a couple years, and the trend is roughly the same (with a couple more spikes).

edit: another, related chart, from a quick Google: http://www.marketingcharts.com/?attachment_id=781

I'll grant that median is likely not a good measuring point, but it is still revealing. Hell, Canada is out-doing us, so you can hardly argue it's because we're more spread out.

Just as a side-point, although Canada has a large land area for a small population, it is actually much more urbanized than the US.

There is the possibility that the providers aren't intentionally gouging their customers. Even though the market is small, there is enough of a market to drive prices down. I think it's much more likely that those companies are just so horribly inefficient that it really does cost them a lot to provide you with high-speed access.

Several years ago my family got cable internet from Time Warner. The modem/router they provided was one of the first models to support DOCSIS 3.0. We stayed with Time Warner for at least 2 years, and they never rolled out DOCSIS 3 support at their end. The maximum speed we could get from them was 6Mbps. We're now using DSL, and the maximum we can get is 6Mbps, though with more reliability than from cable.

The nearest cable box is next to our neighbor's driveway. The phone company has fiber to their box in our other neighbor's yard.

There's enough competition to keep price inflation mostly at bay, but there clearly isn't enough to convince the ISPs to invest in the equipment that would be able to give us connections that are four times faster. Efficiency doesn't have a lot to do with it. For all practical purposes, our local ISPs aren't spending any money to improve service in areas that already have some service.

Non-growth (negative growth!) despite significantly more paying users and far more fiber lines than a few years ago? What have they been rolling all that fiber out for, if not to crank up the speed? Oh, wait. To sell the same speed to more people for the same price to make way more money.

I don't buy inefficiency. They're selling it at this speed for this cost because they can, just like cell phone companies. Which from a business standpoint makes perfect sense, but it's at the cost of screwing everyone else. Since significantly better businesses / strategies clearly exist if it's just a sign of business incompetence, why haven't the successful ones, say in Japan or Korea, migrated over here and decimated the market?

Average access speed is dropping because of the increased penetration of wireless access in the US lately.

Then what's the excuse for Japan being so much higher? They've had a lot of wireless access for quite a while, and web browsing on their phones for much longer. If that's taken into account, they should be significantly lower.

It's not an issue of wireless penetration, it's about maturity. Obviously the first rollout in the USA is going to be slower than a mature infrastructure like Japan's.

Surely when you roll out new wireless, you should roll out the fastest stable technology? Wouldn't Japan be held back to some extent by wireless infrastructure that hasn't yet been upgraded?

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