Many European nations have much cheaper and faster access to the internet with many more ISPs. I don't see a logical reason why US can't have the same.
I think population density is a weak signal for competition in the US market, and that's what you're seeing.
http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Sweden/Unit...
> United States - 30.16 sq km per 1,000 people
Looks like the US is half again more dense than Sweden according to that site.
I pay $75 to AT&T for 12/.75 up in Marin county. Comcast will give me much faster service for just a little more $$, but they haven't connected the building yet, so AT&T is my only choice.
I live on the border of RWC and Woodside, and have talked to neighbors in central Woodside whom Comcast does not serve and would only do so if they pay $20,000 for the wires to be run to their house. They are stuck with the AT&T DSL service. Lack of choice is undoubtedly part of the reason that Comcast can charge so much here. And it's the reason that I bought Comcast stock a few years ago: https://medium.com/@nicklum/how-my-hatred-of-comcast-drove-m...
My parents in Sweden recently got fiber to their house in the countryside. There's a company that owns the fiber and you pay them ~10 EUR a month. Then you pick your ISP, whichever you want.
Oh, and as it turns out, I could also get 300Mbps from Comcast for $80/mo.
So I don't think density is the real issue here. It's like they said in the article, competition. They only reason AT&T started rolling out fiber was because Comcast has the 300Mbps service and they wanted to come out ahead.
If that point held any water, San Francisco would be a bastion of broadband. It's not.
All americans seem to agree the problem with their government is crooked politicians. Why do people keep voting those people into office?
So even with the best of intentions, the system conspires against legislators getting an informed yet neutral viewpoint on how policy will affect the myriad systems that make up our society. As if that weren't enough the anti-intellectual streak in America tends punishes anyone who tries to bring in more nuance and public research to difficult questions.
If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, is it not a duck?
The end result in terms of narrow corporate interest winning out over overwhelming public sentiment is indistinguishable from bribery.
So the US Senate is usually filled with moderate voices (since they have to appeal to millions of voters) while the House of Representatives is filled with crazies who were elected by an order of magnitude less than senators.
Then you have the incumbency effect which makes it pretty hard to lose your next election so long as you have name recognition and a gerrymandered district, unless something really crazy happens with you (sex scandal, fake-news, corruption indictments, going to prison, etc), and even then sometimes the effect is still strong enough to elect you to office before you have to be removed and have the State Governor appoint an UNELECTED replacement who will then have the incumbency effect bestowed upon themselves.
All in all, the US makes it hard to elect people who will "progress" and not just "maintain".
And don't get me started about off-year elections, special elections, primaries, voter ID laws and various other legalized voter suppression (felons, poor people, minorities), and a plethora of other ways that we use to confuse citizens about voting.
Our betters conspire at every turn to give us the choice between Coke and Pepsi. If we thirst for anything else we're welcome to move.
With strict campaign finance limits, lobbyists are far less influential. Candidates hardly think about fundraising, because any money raised over their spending limit is useless to them. A lobbyist might be persuasive, they might provide a lot of compelling evidence, they might make the case that a particular policy would be popular, but they can't offer a pseudo-bribe in the form of a massive campaign contribution.
It's amazing it's got as messed up as it is. Someone really needs to fix that.
Then couple that with carefully crafted lies, usually based on identity politics, that encourage and foment tribalism and division, add in the corrupt primary system, among other spices like blackmail and three letter surveillance of Congress, and you get what we have.
This is why it angers me so much every time someone says "both parties are just as corrupt" and is met with a thousand "ways $theotherone is actually the bad one but $ourparty is the only one looking out for the people" and derision for even stating it out loud.
After years of pondering this issue I have come to the conclusion we need to, over multiple election cycles, focus on getting third parties and independents who are fully transparent about funding into office, and enough to take away the majority from both parties, hopefully under a coalition of some sort, which would force both parties to come to the table in a more adult like manner.
Make no mistake, all three branches of government have suffered similar corruption, but the legislative is supposed to be the closest to the people, so I think it is the place to start (well really the state congresses are)
So many of the unconstitutional things which our gov does that goes unchecked is due to both sides of Congress violating their oaths. If we had a congress worth a damn we could use them to self correct...
But they did the same in France 10 years ago. Then the ISP named "Free" started to sell an offer 3 times cheaper and WOW, suddenly everybody matched the price.
So not only competition on price is possible for ISP, it's actually necessary for the clients. It's wont benefit the existing ISP, obviouly, so it must be done no matter what they say.
Make local people aware that you want to offer the service and this service can only be offered if the government lets you lay cable.
Start laying cable and offer your people service. Offer them a good deal and ask them to protect your cables in return. You'll be amazed how good communities are at protecting their assets, provided they realize the benefit of keeping it in shape.
Then bring those people in front of government to vouch for you.
Fibers are somewhat fragile, but not the complete cable. But the splicing necessary for local distribution will be hard to do on a mast top.
They're 27 out of 31 in Europe as of a year ago, per Akamai's connectivity report. They rank below Russia and Poland, with a 10.8 Mbps average. The US was at 18.7 Mbps, with 48% above 15 Mbps. France only had 18% above that line.
Vietnam came in at 9.5 Mbps by comparison, and Malaysia was at 8.9 Mbps. France has nearly 20 times the GDP per capita of Vietnam.
If you compare it to the situation before and after, it's a huge benefit.
> They're nearly dead last when it comes to broadband in Europe.
First, you assume there is no competition in other europeen countries. There is. Example in Poland: https://rentflatpoland.com/internet-provider-choose/
Then you need to adjust to the cost of life.
Free offers now 1Gb fiber for 30 euros a month. That's 2,5% of the minimum wage (1173 euros)
In Poland, the best I could find is 300Mbps for 60pln, which is 2.9% of the minimum wage (473,27 euros). So more expensive, for something 3 time slower.
And don't get me started on the modem. ISP in France provide crazy setup for you. Like the Free ISP gives you a box with an integrated NAS, a blueray player, a torrent downloader (that you can stream on your TV) and can be configured to use a VPN.
> They rank below Russia and Poland, with a 10.8 Mbps average
Most people in Russia or Vietnam don't have internet. So you are basically comparing a country like France, where even the small countryside towns broadband, with countries where in some remote town you still flaky basic utilities.
Russia seems modern, but it's so huge, covering everything is freaking hard.
Vietnam is very rural.
Poland is getting pretty modern now, but that's nowhere near french level if you get out far from the cities.
People bringing up Vietnam in a perjorative sense don’t understand how good Vietnam internet is.
- Year-long locked in contracts. No trial period.
- Zero guarantees whatsoever on bandwidth and latency.
- No third-party, legally recognized, quality certification/monitoring organizations.
- Little guarantees against traffic inspection, DNS sniffing & so on.
- In some countries it's legal to sell ADSL as "fiber".
- Sharing your uplink with a neighbor can be prohibited by contract.
I know it's nothing new, but that's not an acceptable argument. It's about time we raise our expectations.
Here we get a 14-day trial period.
>- Zero guarantees whatsoever on bandwidth and latency.
Technically impossible to give such a guarantee.
>- Little guarantees against traffic inspection, DNS sniffing & so on.
How do you guarantee something like this? Let anybody in the datacenters...?
>- Sharing your uplink with a neighbor can be prohibited by contract.
That's normal, otherwise they'd lose tons of money. I mean here you can get 300/300 really cheap, that's more than enough for, let's say, 10 neighbours. But then how do you expect them to cover the investment?
> How do you guarantee something like this? Let anybody in the datacenters...?
Spell it in the contract and put people in jail if they break it.
Every other service provides five nines or whatever or your money back…
> Technically impossible to give such a guarantee.
Not at all. You pick the right oversubscription ratios, monitor the network and give guarantees on the 95%/99% percentiles. It's done in datacenters all the time.
>>- Little guarantees against traffic inspection, DNS sniffing & so on.
> How do you guarantee something like this? Let anybody in the datacenters...?
Just like in many other fields: external verification, rewards for employee and customers reporting malpractices and so on.
Also, encourage your customers to use DNS over HTTPS, VPNs, Tor instead of saying nothing or even discouraging it.
>>- Sharing your uplink with a neighbor can be prohibited by contract.
> That's normal, otherwise they'd lose tons of money.
That's not an argument. The large majority of goods and services in existence can be shared and, very often, even re-sold and there are specific laws against contracts for exclusive use.
It's up to the ISPs to find ways to bill people accordingly (and it's easy to look at what carriers and datacenters ISP do...).
The guarantee is that you won't be charged for service outside of the specifications. That is, an SLA.
In UK airlines and train companies are bound to national SLAs such that if your aeroplane (this might be global?) is delayed by a significant amount [as defined by the SLA] or your train is late you get compensated.
No reason not to have that for ISPs.
The government would need to pair it with a requirement that the ISP can't ordinarily refuse service.
Thanks, Citizens United, for making corporate speech so much more powerful than individual speech!
“Cheaper and faster” in some places, more expensive and slower in other places. Not everyone lives in Paris.
The problem is that a lot of the cable infrastructure (traditionally owned by the municipalities or small corporations) has been sold very cheap to companies which have all ended up being bought by Liberty Global. The government has done it completely wrong. They should've kept owning the networks, but leasing access to companies. After all, the government owns infrastructure such as roads and rails as well.