Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Let's see, Washington DC has a population density ~10 times that of Japan. Guess which has the faster Internet speeds? As an independent state that have no need to subsidize anyone in low population areas yet the Internet is just not that fast.

Population density is something of a misnomer as for example parks significantly lower population density but there basicly irrelevant when building a network.

View on HN

You can't compare an urban city with a whole country. Japan's landmass includes farm land, mountains and shit.

Washington, DC isn't very dense for the core of a city. There aren't any high rises. Most of the city is single family homes and 3 story walk up apartments.

I live in Arlington, VA which used to be part of DC. I get Verizon Fios. I get 75/75 and cable tv for 80 a month. It's not the dark ages.

I can't think of any place that I've lived in the US which has consistently worse broadband performance than DC and Northern Virginia. This is especially sad given Northern Virginia's density of large tech companies and history as 'internet alley'[1].

[1] http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/internet-alley

If D.C. and Virginia were countries, they'd be in the top 5 in Akamai's data, between Japan and Switzerland.

According to speedtest.net I have a 58 MBit download and 39 MBit upload. Yet, Netflix is basically unwatchable at around 6PM on weeknights. I literally get a better connection on my parents DSL than with Verizon Fios in Northern VA.

Remember Netflix maxes out at 3MBit/second and use useable at .75MBit/second so I am getting ~1-2% of my theoretical connection speed.

That's an issue specific to Netflix, as far as I'm aware, and implicates a wholly separate issue. I'm fully willing to concede that U.S. telecom policy gives infrastructure companies more leverage over content companies.

I have personally had similar issues with youtube and other video sites, but besides that as a customer I don't care. I am paying them ~100$ a month and getting a terrible product. Also, images on some websites often take forever to load, so I think there is some issue with 1 or more CDN networks.

Hell, the battery backup in their fiber > coax box died after 18 months and they want 50$ to replace it. I don't actually care if it works though a blackout as my router is going down anyway, but the damm thing will not stop beeping.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com