US internet speeds 91% faster in 2020 according to user speed tests
fairinternetreport.com
fairinternetreport.com
Seattle has some actual competition now, and many (most?) of us can get fiber gigabit to the home for a reasonable rate. It's glorious.
I hope other American cities start courting meaningful ISP competition in their cities -- but I'm not holding my breath. Many American city governments see ISPs as companies they can shake down for fees and concessions, not realizing they're only hurting their own citizens by limiting choice and increasing costs.
Condo was historically only available in a small number of buildings very close to the Westin building downtown (site of the Seattle Internet Exchange). It is slightly broader now, but only slightly.
Here's a big old PDF of Seattle area internet service (2019)[1]. Most of Seattle is CenturyLink + Comcast. The second biggest portion is Comcast-only. Wave covers very little of the city.
[1]: https://www.seattle.gov/tech/initiatives/broadband/gigabit-a...
I'm a Seattle native, down in the bay area now, and JUST got gigabit fiber. Couldn't be happier.
It happened because a former mayor (Ed Murray, who has since left office after a personal scandal) made it easier for ISPs to build out their networks and removed homeowners and neighborhood groups from the process which previously allowed them to block things like communications boxes on sidewalks.
At the time, a bunch of local columnists moaned about this "corporate giveaway"[1] -- but it's pretty clear in retrospect it was the right move.
1. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/mayors-centurylink-giv...
Service has been great, pricing is even cheaper than WaveG (I pay about $50/mo for their gig fiber offering), no contracts or any other lock-in (unless you pick the option to pay for the whole year upfront for a small discount). It definitely does feel like there is a good amount of real competition in Seattle now.
That’s the most options I have ever had in my entire life for an ISP. We’re with WaveG and have no reason to switch but the fact that I have multiple fiber options if I need to makes me really happy.
In Brooklyn, I couldn’t get FiOS in my building even though the building across the street and next door could do it. Something with the zoning and no matter how hard we (and Verizon) tried, nada. The upshot was Cablevision was an exceptional ISP (let me run a server out of the apartment as part of the written TOS, which was incredible), but it was still slower than FiOS.
In Atlanta, my parents’ house was prewired for fiber and gigabit but they have been stuck with not even the fastest available cable because of ISP tie-ups. It’s painful and they have zero choice.
This is no longer the case since Altice purchased cable vision/optimum. They jacked up the prices and Andy reduced quality of service.
Then I moved to a different unit where the absolute fastest option was 20/3 DSL for $70/mo.
Thankfully I’m now on Gigabit cable, but I can’t wait to get off Xfinity for something better.
Accused! Not proven. Murray maintains he has never abused anyone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Murray_(Washington_politici...
However, one should not be saying someone IS a vile thing when they've only been ACCUSED (and not convicted) of being a vile thing.
Seems like maybe 3 years ago when all the cable companies were able to compete without exclusivity by block?
In my condo building of 200+ units we have 5 providers now: - Wave broadband cable - Comcast cable - Wave G (10Gbps connection to the building) - Webpass Google Fiber (microwave to the building) - CenturyLink (DSL maybe?)
The bummer is outside the high-rise towers, there is not much competition in the neighborhoods and single family homes it seems.
Though you are right, even though the race isn't always to the swift, that's the way to bet.
And yet your typical American on the Internet still blames greedy companies for their slow speeds. As if companies elsewhere with faster Internet were less greedy.
[1] https://www.tripsavvy.com/so-just-how-big-is-europe-compared...).
The fastest country on the list, Denmark, has almost no competition in the sector: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Denmark. And it’s been a model of deregulation: https://reason.com/2017/10/24/how-denmark-has-overtaken-the-...
> Regulators around the world took notice and strove to emulate the success of the U.S. approach. Denmark in particular styled its own telecommunications regulations on the U.S. model, slashing its chief telecom regulator altogether and assigning small regulatory functions to other departments.
Denmark is basically the situation where you have a “benevolent former monopoly,” like Verizon here in the mid Atlantic US.
Here in Maryland (which is a small, politically homogenous, rich state, just like Denmark), most of the state has fiber or gigabit cable and broadband speeds are very fast: https://www.webfx.com/blog/internet/fastest-internet-connect...
> In fact, the next state on the list, Maryland, is nearly tied with Denmark for the second-fastest Internet speed on Earth.
It’s especially bad with mobile data caps. I had a 500mb cap in ~2014.
"Countries who jumped on the Internet earlier can't have fiber because of existing competition"
Fiber is actually MUCH, MUCH CHEAPER to deploy for higher speed networks than any high speed copper, because the later almost always implies to deploying a fibre network too to do everything other than the last mile.
1. You have to build your fibre backbone anyways. That's an even bigger trouble in countries with no culture to share fibre. And you would usually have to get much "brainier," and more expensive fibre equipment in this case.
2. You still need to wire the fibre fairly close to premises.
3. High speed copper network equipment costs huge sums, more than commoditised GPON.
4. Copper often needs to be torn, to be replaced with higher grade copper
5. You still need to drill buildings to install niches for copper equipment.
6. You need to put extra equipment into equipment closets.
7. Copper needs more equipment overall
8. Copper has lower reliability overall, and costs more to maintain
So, in the end, you just do the same FTTH, just with copper as the last few tenths of metres. This is so obvious, but people keep dogmatising over "it's already wired with copper."
GPON by comparison does not require anything in the closet, but a piece of glass passive optical slitter.
You can easily have 1024 end-users on a single powerful GePON OLT, covering few square kilometres of 100% passive net.
AFAIU, GP is talking about FTTC (or VDSL), which is moderately faster than typical ADSL via existing phone exchanges or (far away) cabinets, while being much more expensive. FTTC can be cheaper than FTTH, but silly IMO - any increase in bandwidth will be expensive.
This worked too. A small ISP came along (init7, they're awesome https://www.init7.net/) and started offering symmetric gbit at $65 per month, disrupting the ISP market. The big ISPs were scrambling at first, now there's actual competition, with offers like 10git for ~$40 a month (https://fiber.salt.ch/en). Granted that's marketing 10gbit and not real 10gbit, because it's XG-PON [0], so "up to 10gbit/s" and it's a shitty ISP. But still way better than you used to be able to get.
So it would seem to me that many roads lead to rome. Eitherway I'm pretty happy because I don't hate my ISP anymore, something that was unimaginable 10 years ago.
- No bandwidth caps.
- ISPs competing to offer the best service in a system similar to how health care is done in Japan.
- Being able to switch ISPs without issue.
- Being able to run my own hardware instead of being required to use their routers.
- Net neutrality. I pay for gigabit duplex but if I'm not uploading to a fast lane I'm limited to 10mbps, or 1% of what I pay for. This is terrible for VPNing for work, and other work related tasks.
(However, a provider deciding on some kind of 'neutrality' by itself and offering that as a selling point to customers is perfectly fine.0
I don't think it's a reputable source for analysis, their bias is obviously apparent and not necessarily based in reality, it's an ideology.
Having one of the Koch brothers as founder just adds fuel to the fire...
And the article itself points out that it might be important for ISPs to feel the threat of net neutrality regulations.
It's hard to claim that the ISP market, at least in many locations, isn't subject to plenty of market failures that need some kind of remedy.
There are 3 separate 4G networks with very high coverage selling mobile broadband rather cheaply (you can fx get 1 TB a month for approx 36 USD a month).
TDC was also forced to give competitors access to their PSTN, coax and fiber network so resellers can compete on selling on their physical network.
The power companies have also been aggressive in recent years rolling out fiber, so several places people can choose either infrastructure from TDC, their power company or one of the mobile providers.
The most important player indebted itself with ~50k million € and it's basically replacing all the copper coverage with FTTH.
Other HFC players are turning into FTTH too, as HFC won't be able to compete with +600mbps FTTH offerings, and symmetry is more and more valued over time.
Also, I don't have the figures at hand, but the coverage in Spain is extraordinary. FTTH is reaching places that barely had 3mbps ADSL, and it's probably going to cover places that had nothing in the long run.
Public money is paying for capital costs in places that would be impossible to make a profit otherwise, but still the main obstacle are municipalities and nimbys.
I've seen some pretty stupid stuff, like blocking FTTH deployment in historical centers under aesthetic concerns, where they already have ugly copper wires in the facades. In reality what those municipalities expect is ISP to bury the cables and pay for the whole renovation of such streets, which no one in his right mind will. So this people will not have FTTH unless their municipalities change their mind, but they blame ISPs.
The infrastructure is public and leased to private companies, avoiding the tragedy that happens in the US where laying down cables is the most expensive part and which shuns away competition, leaving with oligopolies where each company got their turf and that increases the barrier of entry significantly.
[1] https://www.government.se/496173/contentassets/afe9f1cfeaac4...
They have on multiple occasions tried to force competitors out of the market by making unfavorable pricing models or straight up blocking third parties from using their infrastructure
They are in no way a "benevolent former monopoly" and there's a lot of regulations in place to avoid them exploiting their market position, since they in the past have tried exactly that
Denmark has cheap, fast internet because of the regulations enforced on the market, which makes it possible for me to get a 1gbit symmetric connection from a small provider for 120 DKK (approximately $20) per month
It's best to say that both USA, and EU are very, very bureaucratised, and regulated. It's just one is marginally better at not introducing damaging regulations than the other.
Japan too had 100mb/s since nineties for example, and theeeen..... they stuck. Speeds there not been rising by much since because regulations froze in nineties, and so did the market.
Countries which had near zero telecommunication regulations covering the Internet, or had no Internet as such did advance more uniformly.
I can have a 500mb/s over GPON, or even a symmetric gigabit over 1000BASE-LX even in *stan countries, and Africa these days. Fiberlink has 1Gbs for $30 a month in Lahore. PCTL is starting a 10Gb/s GPON trial in Islamabad.
Single mode fibre based tech is much cheaper to deploy, and maintain than any legacy tech, and properly designed GPON net probably being the cheapest option ever.
https://hothardware.com/news/japanese-10-gbps-internet
You can get 1 Gbps service in Japanese farm towns.
Ah yes, the infamous wired mess in the Japanese media.
There's not much free market in domestic internet in the US nor in Europe.
So what we have now is primarily a copper infrastructure with zero to two fibre backbones to choose from depending where you live. It's a shambles.
The big mistake was not recognising that the physical infrastructure is a natural monopoly and, like any monopoly, should be state owned. Just like sewerage, electricity, water etc. it makes absolutely no sense to have parallel infrastructure. The UK shows that while it is possible, you make great sacrifices in the name of "competition" and "free market".
(My building's apparently an "Xfinity Community".)
The US also used to be able to build infrastructure. People weren't any less greedy back then. Other things changed. Things that are very important to look into.
On the bright side, they're the fastest ISP in the country. On the bad side, they don't offer just the Internet, so I have to pay for cable + Internet, even though I don't use cable TV at all (not plugged into my TV at all).
(1 Gpbs up/down)
Though my friend in Central District still cannot get fiber (stuck on slow DSL).
Maybe I just got lucky?
But Fiber definitely spurned the absolutely shitty incumbents (Time Warner/Spectrum and AT&T) to up their game. Funny how competition works like that. Good article on the topic: https://www.statesman.com/business/20200103/high-speed-high-...
0.1 - 1
1-10
10-20
20-50
50+
And then see how ridiculous quote just the average is in this case..
See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_distribution_functi...
There’s a big difference between a house getting 50down and 5up and a house with a symmetric gigabit fiber connection.
Does this actually matter given that up/down are already prominently advertised?
>with a low latency
Does fiber have lower latency than DSL/cable? Even if there is a speed difference between the two mediums, there probably isn't that big of a difference given the short distance involved (a few miles at most).
>while the cable company will share a 500mbps down 10mbps up connection over 50 houses and sell you 100mbps by throttling everything else for a few minutes and using this burst speed as their advertised bandwidth.
Just because it's fiber doesn't mean the bandwidth isn't shared. eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.984
All bandwidth is going to be shared somewhere, but cable is often heavily over subscribed at the node level, which is going to matter more when you are suddenly given more DOCSIS channels but the node is left unchanged.
Cable companies have an incentive to continue allocating their bandwidth for cable tv channels, and offering the bare minimum (see lack of upload) to internet subscribers since there’s usually no competition. And I’m not an engineer or anything, so while I can’t say for sure if coaxial cable is inferior to fiber optic, the fact that every single fiber connection I’ve used is far snappier and higher bandwidth than coaxial cable leads me to believe it is true, at least for all practical matters.
Thankfully, however, fiber _finally_ became available on my block this year.
https://cca.hawaii.gov/broadband/files/2015/01/Hawaii_Broadb...
https://www.telecomlead.com/5g/att-enhances-capex-to-5-bn-in...
However, it is unfortunately true that many cable carriers are constrained in their channel planning by legacy devices with fixed channel requirements. For example, Comcast has at least historically struggled with planning DOCSIS channels around legacy Motorola STBs that require their on-screen guide information on a specific channel. Essentially, in order for Comcast to switch to full DOCSIS3.1 upstream channel allocations they will need to first get every customer with a legacy STB to swap it out for a new one. This is a formidable task and not one they have so far completed, so in my area upstream remains limited to 35Mbps even with 1Gbps downstream.
I believe most cable channels are reserved for broadcast TV, with just a few for internet data, and most of those for downstream rather than upstream, since DOCSIS 3.1 is half duplex.
Things will hopefully get much better with DOCSIS 4 though which supports full duplex! Comcast claims that they are going to roll it out DOCSIS 4 and FDX (as it is apparently called) next year, so who knows? You might have 1 Gb/s upload or better.
And it will make it a lot easier to quickly reach your monthly data cap.
> use or run dedicated, stand-alone equipment or servers from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises local area network (“Premises LAN”), also commonly referred to as public services or servers. Examples of prohibited equipment and servers include, but are not limited to, email, web hosting, file sharing, and proxy services and servers;
Funny thing is this seemingly contradictory clause has been added at some point:
> use or run programs from the Premises that provide network content or any other services to anyone outside of your Premises LAN, except for personal and non-commercial residential use;
So "dedicated, stand-alone equipment" is prohibited, but if it's just a "program" you can use it for personal non-commercial purposes. What does that mean for a program running on a RaspberryPi?
Anecdotal, but I just checked and the slowest speed I can get for my Stockholm apartment is 250/250, and the slowest speed my dad can get for his apartment is 100/100.
This has got to be some data anomaly. If they're basing their numbers off of tests that people voluntarily do, then maybe in 2019 a lot of people tested their mobile internet, while no-one bothered testing their home internet because it's fast enough?
There's always a lot of discussion around cable companies and monopolies etc whenever internet is brought up so I'll explain how NZ has done so well,
In the 2010s the govt decided they we're going to 'fibre to the home' most of the country.
They did so by public private partnerships allocated by regions. Most of the regions went to one company but that hasn't been too much of a problem. The 2nd largest city went to a competitor etc.
These companies now own part of the fibre network but don't necessarily sell to consumers. ISP's buy time off the fibre due to something that was done in the early 2000s with the advent of DSL called "Unbundling the local loop". This means anyone can setup an ISP and sell to you using the "governments" fibre. This has resulted in plenty of competition and meant that NZ has gone from lagging behind many countries to now far exceeding.
Datacaps were the bane of many 2000s internet consumers 25gb for $x with 256kbs download etc. when USA connections were unlimited 256kbs for half the cost.
Another interesting thing that's happened with the rollout of fibre across the land, business connections are now very similar in price to consumer connections. You can also now get business connections to your home and without any additional infrastructure.
Just a few years ago a business connection might cost you 2000NZD a month and require an expensive install. Now that the only difference is a SLA, you're looking around 150NZD in comparison to a 100NZD "home" connection.
Something I think NZ has done well and could be a good model for other countries.
Australia tried to follow the same model only for a more conservative government to get in, claim that it was too expensive, butcher the plans (fibre to the node instead of to the premise) to "save costs" the country was left with a more expensive half-baked product that still incorporated a lot of copper.
What's worse is that because there was a "government fibre" model it meant that private industry that wanted to lay its own fibre started facing various endless legal issues[0], which, funny enough, is entirely supported by the originally less conservative political groups that pushed for the rollout in the first place. So now we're left with a bad network and legal structures in place to stop it from being privately superseded.
[0] https://www.itnews.com.au/news/tpg-calls-for-nbn-protectioni...
We had a large push from the power companies back in the early 2000’s bringing fiber to homes that was outside the metropolitan areas. This has kept competition going across the country between cable, xDSL, 4-5G and fiber.
For English readers this is in English instead of Danish: https://kviknet.dk/en/
I don't understand why a company like Xfinity with such negative public image wouldn't try to give everyone a speed bump to improve their image.
Also notable is that a lot of countries in the chart they showed had a 50% or more increase over 2019.
I'd guess that is the case for a non-trivial subset of the population.
And I mean I get ~15Mbps to my laptop when my connection gives me 50Mpbs, nowhere near something like gigabit which I'd guess is just an excuse for ISPs to fleece money out of people in all but a small minority of cases where people buy it.
But also I have zero incentive to upgrade my router because the internet is "fast enough" for everything I need, even with only using a small fraction of the available bandwidth.
Edit: Also to the headline of the article, my ISP doubled the base internet rate from 25Mpbs to 50Mpbs this year. So I guess the report lines up with my reality quite well.
The main signal issue is that our router is in the garage next to where our internet comes in.
For a few weeks in the spring I was looking at setting up a wired network since all the phone jacks in our house are actually Cat5e cable that could be upgraded to ethernet jacks pretty easily.
But then I also lost ambition for that idea.
I did spend $20 a couple months ago to get a latest-generation wifi chip for my laptop, which I'd recommend to anyone since it's a trivial thing to upgrade and I never even realized the wifi chips were swapable. That improved my network speed by a factor of two I think.
The advice I give most people is to use whatever the ISP provides, so that when things go south the ISP is on the hook for support.
I had this happen... Bumped to 500/50 with Wide Open West and immediately went "...oh" then grabbed a new modem.
- We have 2 adults working full time from home. We're in the entertainment/technology industry. We're streaming video calls and transferring massive files/repos _constantly_. One uses a remote desktop solution to get to their media workstation in the office regularly, requiring a low latency connection.
- We have 2 children going to school from home (schools haven't reopened here), spending the day on either Zoom or on Netflix/video games.
And then there's all the smartphones and other smart devices around the house regularly eating up bandwidth.
I don't always need all that bandwidth, but when I do, it's crucially important.
Snappy is important. The more that's snappy, the better you're going to feel.
I suppose work video calls with a dozen+ people in them probably take up a decent chunk of bandwidth as well, but I haven't checked closely.
I find that very interesting, given the amount of NN proponents (including academics) claiming internet speed would grind to a halt.
How is that "pretty awful"?
It just seems faster when measured in millibits per second.
I know multiple founders who have 1gbit/s fiber lines to their homes in Berlin. Plus all 3 major providers (1&1, Telekom, O2) offer up to 250mbit/s there.
Also, you expect me to believe that the internet speeds in France and Germany magically went down from 2017 to 2018 and 2019?
BTW, my guess would be that most people stay at around 30mbit because it's good enough for 4K YouTube streaming and still affordable.
Its impressive that so many nodes are better and have more bandwidth now
Just use Onion services, and RDP into another computer and browse the clearnet internet with that.
So yes, the speed is faster, but I kinda want to switch back to Comcast. And don't get me started about the idiotic, mandatory $10/month shitty router they require you to use.
In Milan most people have 1G / 1G unlimited for ~40€ / month, which is not bad.
> Speed test data for cellular connections was excluded from our analysis by using MaxMind's Connection Type database
People are backing up more personal videos than ever (including cloud connected security cameras, etc.). Latency is also very important to lower actual transfer times (since it will allow TCP to take full advantage of the bandwidth available). Latency also will be helpful for new experiences like Stadia and Geforce Now.
(At work I did months of testing on TCP performance for a 900ms rtt high-speed link)
But yes, upload speed is more important than ever. For my work-from-home setup I need to transfer lots of data both ways. And for my "cloud" backup etc. I need to push large amounts of data out of the house. And with fiber I get that, fortunately.
Anyone older people with kids know if schools subsidized parents for high internet connections?
2) Those numbers for EU are incorrect. Look at Stockholm for one. It is at a minimum 2x too low. Even Denmark which is in top is too low. I live in Denmark and even if I pick cable the lowest I can even order is 300Mbit/s. But that would just be stupidity since I can just click on Fiber and get 1/1Gbit/s for US$45.
A little bit annoying to say the least.
Meanwhile I pay 60USD for a 50Mbps asymmetrical connection in Bangkok.
I wonder what other industries have inverse scaling properties like this.
I think if we look at upload speeds, and latency, there's still a lot of room to improve for a large section of the population.
I would love to have the ability to do wireless cloud VR gaming in my home.
Thanks Comcast.
US cellular services have absolutely miserable data caps compared to wired ISPs (yes, even on "unlimited" plans). The increased speeds of 5G are basically irrelevant if you get throttled after downloading 50 GB in a month. This is a problem that cell providers could solve pretty easily -- but they've had that option for years, and it seems like they'd rather not.
Starlink is density-limited. There's a finite amount of satellite capacity available to any amount of ground, and they can't target upgrades to specific geographic regions. They're a great upgrade from existing satellite Internet services, but they aren't going to replace terrestrial services for most people who have that option.
Starlink will eat into exurbs, outer suburbs, and disgruntled customers.
Both will be viable competition at the 200 mbit level, and will drive down Comcast costs.
An example of a weighted population density metric is the local density of the median household. Unfortunately, weighted metrics are rather new and last I looked I couldn't find population numbers using the same metric. The U.S. Census Bureau uses a metric based on census tract as the local area; EU uses square kilometer. For that and other reasons the published data isn't directly comparable (at least not easily). But to a first approximation the U.S. and Europe seem very similar--the U.S. is far more dense than commonly believed, and Europe less dense than commonly believed.
Of course, even with a better metric I presume South Korea is in another league entirely.
Most people in the US doesn’t have fiber internet because the rent seeking monopolies have no reason to make capital investments to provide better internet, not because of the population density.
If anything, you’re more likely to find fiber in more suburban less dense areas with new developments. They will spend to put fiber down on new construction, but for existing urban areas, no one wants run fiber through existing buildings and pavement.
* https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone/
40% of the US population lived in counties on the coast:
* https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/population.html
* https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/07/millions-of-a...
* https://www.livescience.com/18997-population-coastal-areas-i...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korea
Plenty of US communities are higher than that:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
This idea that some countries have better Internet infrastructure because they are "high density" is silly because the places where people live in the US also have the density to support the exact same infrastructure.
The farm land / country side of South Korea is just as low density as the rural areas of the US, and America's cities and suburbs are just as dense as South Korea's.
For anybody who needs the speed, they are transferring large amounts of data. If you can't transfer large amounts of data, what good does the speed do?
The other big problem is, a huge part of the country still has basically no internet. Rural communities stuck with 1.5MBps DSL or even slower can't even have 2 kids in school learning virtually.
Imagine if you had 1 remote parent working from home, and 2 kids trying to do school. Most rural internet just won't cut it. I feel terrible for people having to deal with our shit connectivity in this country.
My ISP doesn't cap at 1-1.2 TB (CenturyLink, Seattle metro area, "gigabit" service plan). Comcast is often a monopoly, but it isn't the only ISP in the US. Your point is certainly valid for Comcast customers, and in other areas where all ISPs cap at some relatively small amount of 'maxBW x hours'.
For $30, you can add unlimited data to your plan. That's not a terrible deal, if you need it.
I'm more bothered by the crappy upload speeds. Fixing that would require switching to a business plan.
There are many regions with hardly any competition, and the lucky few areas with 2 or more usually comprise of another high speed provider that changes in lock step with the local #1, and a bunch of smaller providers on DSL or some other old technology.
Wireless is even more capped, high latency, and, thanks to the FCC, can be more privacy invasive or restricted than land line internet.
It's not all roses in the US.
> Comcast is often a monopoly
I live in Seattle and we had a Comcast monopoly for something like 15 years until 2017 or 2018. I do not mean to suggest that real competition exists in most places or that anything about the situation in general is rosy.
Maybe they'll offer "mobile internet" at a price point somewhere between rural and urban pricing that you can e.g. use in your car. Maybe folks will then hack their parked car and use it as a home uplink, while driving around to keep the "mobile" pricing level.
As for the price in the urban area where density is too big for them to serve everyone, likely it'll be modelled after the price the incumbent ISP has, and be a bit cheaper, but not too cheap as they can't serve everyone in that area. TLDR: nothing much will change.
So in urban areas they likely won't cause any change, but in lightly populated places there will be a big revolution, and people there will be very happy :). At least if Starlink choses to make internet cheap. Maybe they don't want to, and instead want to orient themselves after the local ISP, being significantly cheaper so that almost everyone switches to them, but not being as cheap as they can be. Entirely possible, brings them more money, but is obviously not very nice for customers :).
We'll see a real revolution when we have multiple competing companies in space that try to outbid each other in a fight for market share.
Anyway, it’s really not a question of total bandwidth so much as any meaningful competition stopping the most egregious abuses. Assuming they can reach even 1/2 that it’s still plenty to provide stiff competition in midsized cities, suburbs, and rural areas which are generally the most problematic areas.
At most their aimed to maximize the amount of viable sky not individual satellites. It’s not going to scale to infinite satellites, but 10x their current target should be viable.
Yeah, that's ridiculous. At least some well-known providers allow you to add an "unlimited" option to your internet plan.
> The other big problem is, a huge part of the country still has basically no internet.
That's a difficult problem to solve. There has to be incentives for corporations to bother laying infrastructure. When municipalities try to pitch in and do it themselves, they get shot down by the same players.
I guess the only viable option near term is Starlink.
It saves a lot of time. Having a new update/game or sharing large files in minutes instead of hours matters. Why not just start download earlier? Foresight on a long timescale takes a lot of brainpower and is pretty stressful because cost of miss is high. I will start this download and go get water is a whole lot better than I will queue this update and and it will be done in the morning.
Infrastructure isn't free and while it's hilariously embarrassing to have slow speeds in "rural cities" (i.e. actual cities that just don't happen to be on the coast) simply due to capitalism doing it's worst - living in the middle of no where is an expense on society.
It falls into the same camp as people who live in hurricane areas - the government bailing you out once so you can move is a fine idea (and the government needs to be providing sufficient funds for these people to actually relocate) but living in remote areas and living coastally in the south east come with lots of benefits to you... and costs for everyone else.
I am A-OK with folks who insist on living in the middle of nowhere paying for it.
Oh I'm going to add a big old caveat for people who were forcefully relocated - if you're living on Rosebud Indian Reservation then relocation really isn't an option.
Add to that, telecom companies have been collecting additional "fees" from every user for decades that was supposed to go for expanding infrastructure and never has been.
Incidentally, here's anecdotal data from a family of two adults and two children from today's Comcast thread (where I assume you're participating, given the comment), that shows that they have stayed below the 1.2TB Comcast threshold for over a year, even through the pandemic, while not making any effort to stay under that threshold since they aren't on Comcast: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25200882
Just because there are data caps on some providers is no reason to tolerate unnecessarily slow internet connections. The speed of the connection is an effective and measurable stand-in for the modernity and capacity of the infrastructure delivering internet to that area.
Sadly, latency isn't a popular measure for Internet connectivity, and as my year of testing uncovered, 50mbit down and 5mbit up is more than sufficient for downloading + 4k streaming + zoom all at the same time, as long as your router has smart shaping/queueing capabilities and your connection has stable latency in that scenario.
What? I definitely care how fast my internet is regardless of my bandwidth cap. For most people, internet consistency and speed is a more noticeable metric than data caps. Speed effects video/audio call quality, page load times, etc.
Look, i get annoyed at data caps. I've taken multiple comcast employees to task over it. But the idea that speed is irrelevant when caps are present strikes me as pearl clutching.
I have 50Gig data cap, I am not annoyed by it because I can control it. I might watch yt on lower resolution or skip netflix binge in the weekend, because I need transfer for work.
What I cannot control is transfer speed and glitches. It totally depends on what other people in mobile network are doing. If they all start streaming at the same time or having meetings, bad luck, have to wait it out. It is not making me angry because I understand it, but it is uncomfortable. Where data cap does not bother me that much.
Going to get better internet soon.
If something (like uploading a backup or streaming a movie) is going to run for a long time, I don't care how fast the average speed is as long as it's enough to stream 1080p.
But if my next task demands some info from a 20MB datasheet that I don't have locally, I want that to load as fast as possible. And I'm not going to do that 25,000 times a month.
Also, the US having “shit Internet” is contradicted by TFA. It shows we have faster Internet than the big European countries. Only a handful of small, rich European countries—which are the size of states like Maryland—are faster.
Uh, no? Regular web browsing, email, SAAS, video calls, streaming, gaming – all greatly benefit from faster speeds. Data caps are terrible, sure, but saying better internet is otherwise pointless is stupid.
Riight! Cause Europe is only those countries. Conveniently forget about your king when comes to Europe in terms of internet speed?