Why U.S. Broadband is So Slow

Telco's don't usually advertise "naked DSL." If you search hard enough it's out there.

Hey, as a WISP employee myself, thanks. It is really frustrating sometimes that potential customers have been trained that the duopoly the article mentioned is reality.

In truth, there is a vibrant, resourceful, and outspoken group of entrepreneurs out to take all of the incumbents marbles. But, like the article says, we have to fight at every turn for access that telco's and cable co's take for granted.

I'm not sure what they mean by "set aside", but back in the 90's there was a huge buildout of fiber as part of the dot-com bubble.

It's refereed to today as "dark fiber"; fiber optics that are not active.

However, I don't know that using that dark fiber would improve our internet. The backbones are already extremely fast; it's the downlinks and uplinks that are slow, and I'd guess most dark fiber is not routed to homes.

In exchange for less regulations, the FCC had private companies build out fiber networks in the 1990's. Most of it was never used, though, as companies instead focused on increasing bandwidth in copper wiring.

Actually, yes. Tons of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fibre

There is tons of dark fiber, due to the economics of laying cables.

Digging a ditch is expensive. The fiber you put in the ditch is cheap. So if you are already digging a ditch, you load it up with 100x as much fiber as you imagine yourself ever needing in the future.

This is vastly cheaper than digging a second ditch 5-10 years down the line.

Bait taken. What exactly has the FCC done recently (seeing as how it's a gov't agency) to protect the interest of consumers?

But it's entirely true that the FCC was under the watch of Republicans when the telecom act was defanged and shared access to customer copper was rolled back. Maybe you don't remember, but ten years ago you could get various providers on the copper you had -- I had DSL from a local company over my Verizon-provisioned phone line. My dad had earthlink service over his time-Warner cable line. There was a price difference and most definitely a difference in service. Nowadays the best you can do is speakeasy, and they have to pay covad to roll a truck and use a second pair of copper. This change was courtesy of the FCC, who agreed with an industry assessment that competition was really driving them nuts. And like it or not, the FCC was run by Republicans (Kevin Martin, remember him?) when this anti-consumer change was made. Your comment that "people become content" more accurately describes today's marketplace, where people are faced with a dearth of options for home and mobile broadband and just suck it up, pay the outrageous amount, and get on with life.

My mother lives in a small European 5k residents town, she does not spend much time on the Internet and she watches mostly satelite television. Yet she was interested in choosing the best among 4 or 5 offers -- just because she had a choice. Her offer was much better than everything I've seen in the US, and it still was only medium price to speed ratio, because she does not live in a big city. She does not actually need the amount of bandwidth she bought, but it was cheap, so she got that nevertheless.

It's not the customers demands that drive the prices down, it's the fear that other companies put better offer. If there are no other companies to worry about, they happily retain high prices, and that's what happens in the US.

Cost. I would also say that most of the 'cable' is laid inside conduit, but conduit with limited space and owned by a particular carrier who has no incentive or regulation dictating that he share that conduit.

Hmmm, is that considered fast? On Comcast in SF I get about 20Mbps down and I never really thought of it being particularly speedy.

edit: Someone should create a website that both tests your speed, but then also shares that result with the world (anonymously). I'd love to pop up a list of ISPs in a specific city and see exactly how accurate their listed speeds are before buying.

Just tested my connection (fiber): Download Speed: 54.13 mbps (6.8 MB/sec transfer rate) Upload Speed: 51.97 mbps (6.5 MB/sec transfer rate)

The price? $20/month. But I am not in USA.

I have AT&T U-Verse (fiber to the end of the block, copper to my door), and I get 18mbps down, 1.5mbps up for $55/mo (internet only, no landline). I was paying $99/mo for 15mbps down, 2mbps up with Time Warner (internet only, no TV/phone).

Please note that most of the bw in Asia is to other parts of Asia. There is lots of peering and lots of fibre. Trying to get to the US, on the other hand, and you have a few, very expensive (comparatively) cables. This is why you find cloud companies in korea doing live disk replication into japan. The fibre in the region is just so cheap that it just doesn't matter anymore.

You would probably notice that if you were using local (or even localish) sites, that there would be a dramatic improvement.

Unfortunately, due to the duopolies described in the article, most of the rest of us are stuck dreaming of such a fibery heaven. Verizon has said explicitly that they won't be coming to my area. Ever.

Can you fathom how much it will cost to dig up the streets, lay fiber and fill them back in? Will cities even allow that, due to the impediment to the traffic?

It's a small drop in the bucket, but at least a start somewhere. Google: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Fiber

Because as soon as a new player wants to connect a town with fiber (or the town decides to lay fiber on it's own) suddenly the big telcos are very interested in also laying fiber in that town, ruining any chance of profitability. There are even cases of telcos suing towns that tried to lay their own fiber.[0]

I know this is an unpopular view in the United States, so please do not downvote me for stating my opinion, but I believe that phone/internet service should not have been privatized in the first place.

0: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/09/telco-to-town-wer...

When Utah's municipally-sponsored fiber optic ISP project looked poised to become the fastest, most consumer-friendly option for Internet and TV in the state, the cable and telco companies got the state to pass a law that indirectly but effectively shut the project down. So on one hand it looks like governments can do some things right, but on the other hand regulatory capture results in the kind of deadlock you describe.

Decades from now when I near the end of my useful lifespan, I would not be in the least bit surprised to see that technological progression in the United States follows an S curve over time, with increasing life expectancy just giving even more inertia to the status quo.

There are state-run organisations that are fairly efficient - the UK NHS, which is pretty much the epitome of a large socialistic undertaking, is actually pretty economically efficient. The fact that it has problems being largely because we don't spend much money on it, not because it isn't efficient in using what money we give it (at least in comparison with other healthcare systems).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/aug/07/nhs-among-most...

The "Western capitalist dogma" to which you refer applies to competitive situations. But cable and phone companies are not competitive in the U.S.A., they are monopolistic.

Read that section of a western economics text that explains monopolies for further enlightenment.

I'm not sure if you missed it, but this article is actually written by sonic. You know, the people providing 20+mbps without any cap.

First off, caps are not "virtually unheard of". Secondly Comcasts cap is 250GB/month. Who would use that in a few days? The biggest bandwidth eater I can think of is Netflix and a user would have to watch 108 movies in the best quality to reach that number.

My guess is that bandwidth caps are only used when there is virtually no competition. Because in practice, most people will only saturate there connections for very small amounts of time. But it's a nice way of squeezing more money out of your customers.

I have had 20MBit downstream for at least six years and now 120MBit, with no bandwidth caps (The Netherlands). There is a lot of competition in this area, with at least a dozen DSL ISPs, plus cable.

Mobile internet is completely the opposite. We only have three major carriers. My previous phone subscription had no caps for mobile internet, my current subscription has an 1GB cap, and the caps are now being lowered. It's an oligopoly, so they can force caps down everyone's throats.

Are bandwidth caps really that common? I was under the impression Comcast was the only major ISP in the US that imposed caps.

FWIW I just signed up for Grande's fiber service in central Texas -- 40Mbps/4Mbps (though I have not dropped below 70+mbps down) for $56 a month. They seem to be sticking by their "no caps" policy: https://twitter.com/#!/iansltx/status/94395597351698432