U.S. Ranks 28th in Internet Speed Among Industrialized Nations | Hacker News Reader

U.S. Ranks 28th in Internet Speed Among Industrialized Nations

chicagotribune.com

19 pointscallmeed23 comments

As a guy living in one of the small countries which does reasonably well on internet speed rankings, let me tell you --- high domestic speed is useless if your country only has a tiny pipe to the places that have all the content you'd actually want to watch.

The in-country content I browse is primarily textual --- the local newspaper, classified/auctions sites, etc. You only need high bandwidth for those if you want to watch all the stupid flash video ads they attach to everything.

The video content producers are all in the US, S. Korea, or China. In the evening when everyone's trying to get on the same overseas sites, it doesn't matter if the "last mile" into your apartment is all built from fiber-optics. So instead of sitting around waiting for Youtube to load, plenty of people choose an alternative method to get 150 megabits/second bandwidth --- walk fifteen minutes to the bazaar, buy ten pirated DVDs, and walk back home. Horrible latency, massive packet sizes.

This article, and the so called 'study' is about as useful as a Facebook poll.

A couple of key points:

"Every American should have affordable access to high-speed Internet, no matter where they live. This is essential to economic growth and will help maintain our global competitiveness,"

This is utter crap. There is no reason to run fiber to rural areas where providers lose money. If you care that much about your network speed move to an area that supports the speed you need.

They talk about so called gains. But their study is non-scientific so comparing their numbers from year to year is meaningless.

They included some territories and not others. Something those territories have in common is that they are islands. It costs alot more to run cable to them, therefore they are naturally going to have slower network speeds.

The so called data comes from 'Speed Matters, a site that promotes greater Internet speeds', so the author is basing this article on numbers that come from someone with an agenda and no science. Nice bit of writing.

If I were this guy's editor I'd fire him for being to lazy to go out and track down the real numbers and come up with a real story.

Nobody ever mentions the relative geographical area of a country in relation to internet speed. In countries with a high GDP proportional to the area of the country and/or population, infrastructure is much cheaper to build out, so they can move much faster.

Nobody ever mentions the relative geographical area of a country in relation to internet speed

Nobody? If anything, I see this mentioned dozens of times every single time this discussion comes up, despite the fact that it's completely wrong.

Sure, the US is a big place, but if that argument were correct, I would be able to get Japan-level internet speeds in big cities, since the population density there is so high. The costs of running fiber between big cities is minimal compared to the gargantuan last-mile costs, so one cannot claim that it's because the cities are farther apart than in other nations, either.

In reality? With the exception of FIOS, most places in the US, urban or not, have atrocious internet speeds.

I was going to reply with some nice analysis, but then I realized how angry your response sounded, and it made me want to stop visiting Hacker News since this seems to be part of a growing trend on here lately.

This is a place for thoughtful and friendly debate, not some arena for trying to rip people apart.

HN may be a smarter version of what Digg used to be, but it has become just as unpleasant and nasty.

Quote from the article: "The study is not scientific"

Whatever the actual number is, I'm pretty sure we still suck. A component of this is that we have so much land, but that's not the whole story.

I think a more interesting statistic would be the median internet speed. Considering the rural populations in the US which have terrible speed, an average is not a very reliable statistic.

28th is not bad for something as ultimately trivial as internet speed.

(Compared to healthcare, human rights, carbon emissions, adult incarceration, child mortality etc. etc.)

That's down there too. http://miscellanea.wellingtongrey.net/2008/10/26/were-not-nu...

Well, what the heck are we #1 at? I need something to hang my USA hat on :)

Thanks, I was looking for that image to go with my post.

True, but seeing as broadband speeds are (or should be) pretty much completely dependent on market forces (unlike most of the others you mentioned), there's no reason a country with our GDP shouldn't be closer to the top of any list.

I think this stat is a pretty clear indicator that whatever the government is doing with the ISP industry, it isn't working.

Are you kidding me?

Internet speed is trivial? I just find that ridiculous. The internet is an essential service for most businesses in the world today.

No, I am not kidding you. Compared to child mortality (USA: #33) the difference between 4MB broadband and 8MB broadband is trivial.

A more interesting list would be for say ranking countries by there fastest internet available at say under $100 a month. I'd say the US would be very competitive on offerings? Just that the vast majority of the population probably wouldn't want to pay the extra or don't have the option in remote area?

I wonder what the U.S. ranks in terms of median income? The United States has a much larger unskilled work force than most countries- something which over the past 100 years has been a blessing, but over next 100 may be a curse.

It will be the downfall of the country. The numbers of unskilled are increasing as a result of immigration from the poorest parts of the world and from the offspring from those people who migrated here from those poorest parts of the world. There's a large imbalance of people who pay the taxes and the people who consume the taxes. It's fracturing now, and soon, it'll all come down.

Wow.

I don't live in the US, but I've traveled around... your comment about immigration comes out of left field. If there's any generalization to be made, it's that immigrant families tend to be more motivated to achieve something.

Maybe my view is just as skewed as yours, but I wouldn't look at immigrants as the main source/cause of unskilled labor in the US.

Currently, the US immigration policies are skewed to accept unskilled immigrants. Read about the difficulties with the H1 visas and the near impossibility for skilled workers to get a green card. Immigration could be an amazing source of skilled labor, if the USA played it's cards right. Historically, it was one.

Sure, many immigrant families often are more motivated, but many of the ones that the process are skewed towards still come with few marketable skills, and, unfortunately, poverty tends to breed poverty. It's harder to pull yourself out of the bottom of the heap.

One approach I've been long-interested in is cooperative ownership of local infrastructure and private ownership of inter-city infrastructure. This would mean that, rather than infrastructure representing a single-provider monopoly in a given area, and a high barrier to entry, the local community could open its infrastructure as a market to all providers or to those who offer the most appealing services.

Seems this could make the difference between slow, monopolistic progress of the status quo and dynamic competitive progress.

"...[A] study by a labor union for telecommunications workers"

"Of course, when the U.S. spends some of the $7.2 billion allocated to broadband development in the federal stimulus package, the union's members would benefit from job creation."

This should be setting off some alarm bells. I'd be curious to know how the data was collected and interpreted.

The average person is going to find a "rank" for internet speed meaningless.

This is better promoted as:

"The U.S. has slower internet than Iceland, Poland, and Korea."

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