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Comment by TulliusCicero | Hacker News Reader

> That’s why America, the birthplace of the internet, has some of the slowest, most expensive broadband in the rich world,

You see this repeated everywhere, but is it actually true? At least for speed, the data I've seen recently indicates the answer is "no". The Wikipedia page with charts from speedtest.net and speedtestnet.io has the US actually doing very well, not at the very top, but close to it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Interne...

The US is in the #11 spot in both charts, with speeds of 192 Mbps and 171 Mbps, respectively.

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Access is what matters.

Consider two groups of ten people. Group A consists of ten people, who each have a Ferrari. In this group, the average car is a Ferrari. But in Group B there are also ten people, one of them has ten Ferraris, nine others own a 2CV. In this group the average car is also a Ferrari.

But Group B's cars suck. 90% of people in Group B do not have access to the "average" of a Ferrari.

There are two elements to access and the US doesn't do great at either of them. One element is: Can you actually get a decent service? If the best service you could actually buy is a 2Mbps ADSL connection then, "No", you can't, even if your best friend has 1Gbps symmetric. The US is almost inevitably going to suck in this respect for some of its most rural residents, but nobody in a suburb let alone inside a city ought to be suffering this under a rational approach. Second element is: Can you afford decent service? Maybe 1Gbps is technically on offer in your neighbourhood, for the same price as your rent. Obviously you won't buy that. In some cases this is going to be impacted by other economic decisions. If your country's idea of a "living wage" doesn't include paying for Internet service then that's maybe a problem in 2021.

The best way to handle all these issues is to use the median rather than the mean. If most people have no Ferraris, then the median person has no Ferrari. If most people can't afford gigabit, then the median person has no gigabit internet.

And yes, the US has much lower median speed (Speedtest.net reports an "average" of 191 Mbps in 11th place, and FairInternetReport reports a "median" of 30 Mbps in 23rd place)

https://fairinternetreport.com/research/internet-speed-by-co...

The US's median speed doubled during the pandemic, though – it was apparently much lower before that.

Interesting about the pandemic. So that suggests the access problem was less bad than I had thought, since presumably lots of people were able to buy better Internet service, once it was important to them.

30Mbps seems fine to me. I only have slightly more than that here, and I have never felt the need to buy more even though I could afford it. Of course that's for one person, the median US household size is considerably more.

I've only given the following a cursory glance, but it doesn't look like consumers had much to do with the speed increase. Instead, Comcast was concerned with being called out on price gouging in Baltimore [0]. Or they increased their minimum speed without increasing the price [1,2] - which I'd think implies Baltimore had a point about the price gouging.

So while some people may have been able to buy better internet before, the data doesn't support that it was affordable, if it was even available at all.

[0] https://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2021/02/02/comcast-internet-s...

[1] https://corporate.comcast.com/press/releases/internet-essent...

[2] https://philadelphia.chalkbeat.org/2021/2/4/22266246/after-p...

>speedtest.net and speedtestnet.io

From what I've heard, many ISP's either host their own Speedtest servers or prioritize this traffic to make numbers seem better.

No ISP on the planet can guarantee speeds across the internet. They can only guarantee speeds on their own network. I suspect most people that use speedtest.net understand this as it quite literally shows that your ISP is hosting the test (assuming your ISP has one).

Really? I've never seen my ISP listed on that site or seen in any obvious way that my ISP is hosting the test. Maybe it's there but if it is, it's either hidden, or done in a way such that it's non obvious your getting "fake" speeds compared to the rest of the internet. There's no disclaimer that because it runs on their servers you'll get higher than normal speeds in the test. And in my experience where I live the average consumer has no idea those tests are bullshit.

If it's actually a test of internet speed, why are they choosing to run it in a way that does not reflect the true speed you will see when using the internet. I remember reading a reddit post where a person said he noticed that the speed tests were ridiculously faster and thus decided to proxy all his internet through that address. Anecdata but it was stated it _vastly_ increased his internet speeds until the ISP caught on and stopped it somehow. The question was how they might continue to get around it.

It's obvious the ISP are not providing even a fraction of the advertised speeds to an advanced user but average people tend to really believe they will see those speedtest speeds throughout the rest of the internet.

"the true speed" isn't a thing for internet. All speedtest services just measure speed for specific server.

fast.com is notable speedtest service because it measures between Netflix' server, I recommend it. It reflects real usage. If your use case is torrenting, just download popular Linux ISO.

I don't know what the reality is but I doubt something just a bit technical (as running a speedtest) shows the average speed for everyone. My guess is it is worse than it appears but that the people with some technical expertise is better off in the US than in many other countries but that the average user is worse off. I can't prove that either way though.

The average user will not be visiting speedtest.net, they will be visiting "whatever internal site their ISP tells them to"

Birthplace of the Internet?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

It was a collective effort by many people (of varying nationalities) across many countries (US, UK, France, etc../).

But I digress, Arpanet was the first WAN and so I guess I see your point.

> It was a collective effort by many people (of varying nationalities) across many countries (US, UK, France, etc../).

What are you talking about? The internet started with Arpanet. Later, other countries built their own TCP/IP networks and connected the.

There is no ambiguity and no collective effort across many countries except for the fact that many countries later built their own parts of the network. The internet began in the US.

TCP/IP is just one part of that system.

Arpanet as a project built upon existing ideas to create a wide-area network. Yes, this project began in the US and it built upon the work of others.

I wasn’t there and I’m not a historian, but when I try to understand the facts I see many nationalities and countries having contributed to what we ultimately call the Internet.

> ideas to create a wide-area network

Having ideas to create something is very different from actually building it.

Everything is built on existing ideas. It is meaningless to reference this.

> I see many nationalities and countries having contributed to what we ultimately call the Internet.

We aren’t talking about ‘what we ultimately call the internet’. This discussion is about the birthplace of the internet which is unequivocally the US, and which you denied.

The birthplace of the internet was the US. The birthplace of the web was Switzerland. It’s complete bullshit to pretend otherwise.

I don’t recall any denials on my part, and for a fact I know my first post was a question.

You don’t recall writing this?

> It was a collective effort by many people (of varying nationalities) across many countries (US, UK, France, etc../).

It’s a denial that the US was the birthplace of the internet, as it is you answering your own question.

That’s not a denial.

Yes it is, when you contradict something, you deny it.

I’ll assume you didn’t intend it as a denial and that this made an unintentionally ambiguous statement. We can clear this up easily with a clarifying question:

Do you agree that the US was the birthplace of the internet?

Funny, I've now lived long enough to see people attempting to openly deny the US its central credit for creating the Internet.

It was a collective human effort! Comedy gold.

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