What is fascinating about the utter failure of our duopoly of two parties is how they have failed to even do the little things rights. You would hope that, while wasting hundreds of billions, the two parties could at least offer a modicum of help for citizens. This week’s report from Ookla Speedtest offers one clear example. The United States ranked behind Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Uruguay. We are 31st in the world.
So here is a no-brainer. Faster Internet is better for citizens and businesses. It is offered free in many countries or at low cost. In the United States, it is subject to endless charges and differing speeds. Due the utter failure of Congress to deal with this issue, cities are now trying to move to supply high-speed Internet.
To give you an idea of how bad we are in this study, the best Internet services are found in Hong Kong with a download speed of 72.49 Mbps. We are 20.77 Mbps. It is fighting that we are behind Slovakia since that country also recently ranked higher than the United States in press freedoms.
The reason is simple — lobbyists from the telecommunication companies are one of the most powerful groups in Washington. Few members dare to resist them. Companies Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon, and AT&T have controlled different areas of the country to maximize profits and resist improvements. These lobbyists — and their pocket members — passed the 1996 Telecommunications Act with the promise that it would foster competition. Instead, it allowed them to divide markets and merge into effective monopolies — imposing higher charges and lower quality services. For example, fiber optic infrastructure which is a priority in other countries have been largely abandoned by most companies to avoid the costs. Then again, no one seriously expects us to compete with Estonia and Uruguay on technology, right?
When I lived in Chicago under the original Richard Daley, everyone would acknowledge that the machine was ripping off everything that was not nailed down but at least they kept the streets clear of snow. I never thought I would look back to that period as an example of good government. However, we have too many politicians who place the public interest well below party and personal interests. They cannot even guarantee the most basic public programs that clearly would benefit not only citizens but the economy. There is just no advantage in our political duopoly in confronting our business monopolies.
Source: The Week
samantha,
Beg to differ on what you call “bandwidth hogs.” If the ISPs would allow the spigot to be turned on to capacity, bandwidth becomes a non-issue. I went to pay my cable bill the other day, and got to the service center just as they were closing. No one in the place except a manager type who took my payment and was in a chatty mood. My TV cable and ISP are the same company; everything comes into the house on a single cable.
I had just run a speed check on my computer, so asked him what speed I was paying for. He looked at my account on his screen and told me I was supposed to be getting up to 30Mbps. So, I told him that morning when I checked I was running at 50Mbps. He said that happened with some customers, and if the company simply unblocked the net, everyone would get 100Mbps or more. They already have the capability and it is a matter of turning a switch.
I just now did a speed check. My download speed is 35Mbps and upload 4.2Mbps at this moment in time.
‘Bandwidth hogs’ was what Senator Ted Stevens was trying to explain when he gave his infamous, “The internet is a series of tubes,” speech on the floor of the Senate. The term was a strawman fallacy then, and is a strawman now.
That manager said something else interesting. He said that it would not be too many years before there is no such thing as cable television. Everything will be internet-based, like Netflix and streaming video is now.
buckaroo, Great quote. Now there are Royal Families and that is their line of work. None of the Royal fams are worth a shit.
“In America there are so many ways to make a living that a man usually doesn’t turn to politics until he has failed at everything else.”
— Alexis de Tocqueville
U.S. Internet Users Pay More for Slower Service
Dec 27, 2012 6:30 PM ET
By Susan Crawford
BloombergView
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2012-12-27/u-s-internet-users-pay-more-for-slower-service
Excerpt:
Terry Huval is a large, friendly man with a lilting Southern accent who plays Cajun fiddle tunes in his spare time. He is also the director of utilities in Lafayette, Louisiana. “Our job is making sure we listen to our citizens,” he says.
In recent years, the citizens of Lafayette have been asking for speedier Internet access.
In 2004, the Lafayette utilities system decided to provide a fiber-to-the-home service. The new network, called LUS Fiber, would give everyone in Lafayette a very fast Internet connection, enabling them to lower their electricity costs by monitoring and adjusting their usage.
Push-back from the local telephone company, BellSouth Corp., and the local cable company, Cox Communications Inc., was immediate. They tried to get laws passed to stop the network, sued the city, even forced the town to hold a referendum on the project — in which the people voted 62 percent in favor. Finally, in February 2007, after five civil lawsuits, the Louisiana Supreme Court voted, 7-0, to allow the network.
From 2007 to mid-2011, people living in Lafayette saved $5.7 million on telecommunications services.
Since Lafayette went down this path, other communities have followed. According to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a group that advocates for municipal fiber networks, these community-owned networks are generally faster, more reliable and cheaper than those of the private carriers, and provide better customer service.
City Fiber
It’s not free. Fiber connection costs $1,200 to $2,000 a house. It can take two to three years for revenue from any given customer to offset the upfront investment. But then the fiber lasts for decades. Municipal networks are seeing more than half of households adopt the service. And scores of communities are discovering that the networks bring new jobs.
Since the city utility in Chattanooga, Tennessee, began offering fiber-to-the-home, some businesses in Knoxville — a hundred miles to the northeast — have been adding jobs in Chattanooga. Yet when the utility tried in 2011 to expand its fiber services to towns outside Chattanooga, the area’s private carriers initiated a lobbying assault and defeated a bill in the state legislature that would have allowed the expansion.
Also in 2011, six Time Warner lobbyists persuaded the North Carolina legislature to pass a “level playing field” bill making it impossible for cities in that state to create their own high-speed Internet access networks. Time Warner, which reported $26 billion in revenue in 2010, donated more than $6.3 million to North Carolina politicians over four years. Eighteen other states have laws that make it extremely difficult or impossible for cities to provide this service to their residents.
Apart from low-cost availability for everyone, my bigger issue with the Internet is bandwidth hogs, both bloatware and pages, alike. My laptop, for example, uses four times the bandwidth then does my jack-be-nimble smartphone. Web sites and advertisers exploit consumers who pay for their own internet access and equipment. It’s one thing to pay for 5 GB of bandwidth to watch movies (advert-free), and another thing to pay for 5 gigabytes of bandwidth to read articles, the text of which requires a mere 1 percent of the bandwidth, the adverts 99 percent. One is a good deal, the other is a royal screw job. It is akin to a radio enthusiast who gets 1 minute of content for every 99 minutes of adverts.
Bandwidth hogs slow down the internet, in the same way too many vehicles slow down the freeway.
What ever happend to the United States Antitrust Laws?
@bigfatmike “Seems a bit presumptuous to assume the only reason for faster internet is content piracy. As a start, some families have more than one user.”
I said “extraordinarily fast.” The 20.77 mentioned in the article is plenty for 3D gaming. If you want more, just pay for it. I never said extraordinarily fast speeds shouldn’t be available for purchase. Sharing services within a household is an issue for more than just the internet. How many breakers have been flipped or fuses blown by a teenager plugging in a high powered amp in his bedroom?
The real problem is getting a basic level of service to everyone. By basic, I mean at least 3 to 6Mbps. You can’t do 3D gaming at those speeds but you can sign up for healthcare, surf the internet and even watch video online. When people can’t sign up for health care or students can’t get their work done without the internet, then its time to consider internet service a right, not a privilege.
As Charlton Stanley pointed out, the ISPs are trying to limit local governments making internet service available to the public. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-already-won-limits-on-public-broadband-in-20-states/ The ISP’s are doing this by having state legislatures in their pockets. There are groups fighting this, and winning in some cases, but we are way behind the rest of the world.
The NSA folks have some slow readers, that’s why.
MB/s = megabytes per second
mbps = megabits per second
For an eight-bit byte, for example, the difference is 8 fold, at minimum (6 MB/s = 48 mbps).
Speeds will come up when network architects undo the failure of the ISP, where all the spying, throttling, and mayhem occurs. HIgh-speed meshnets are coming. The NSA and American greed have seen to it/
Internet speed is a symptom of much greater problems. For two I phones, one cheap, and internet from AT&T we pay almost $250 a month, no TV hook up, just high speed DSL. The service is good but this amounts to a small car payment.
You mention three problems:
-Only two political parties (by the way that is one more than in Russia-most Western Nations had two parties, one liberal and one conservative, fifty years ago but evolved into at least four. France, perhaps has the best example of how a country should be represented: far left, far right, center left, center right-each party has a national newspaper-sometimes to get a few members in the government the extreme left or right has to temper it down to attach itself to the centrist position-sometimes both left and right centrist parties work together. However, never do the extremes have the control that they do in the US. The average and ignorant response from the average American is that what do they know, we saved their sorry asses in WW2. No real choice develops complacency and then ignorance.
-The issue of oligarchs. We point our fingers at Russia where individuals have become rich and powerful since the breakup of the USSR. Everybody knows this there. They don’t lie to themselves. Here in the US we bury our heads in the sand and refuse to admit that as an oligarchy we are well more developed than Russia. Monopolies were broken up in the past by strong Presidents. Today, the oligarchs simply buy the politicians through contributions to their campaigns or threats of contributions against them. There is no difference between the Koch brothers buying the governorship of Wisconsin to crush the unions than what goes on in Russia. We seem to include it in the flag of liberty we wave. The NRA consistently, with less than 5 million members, stops advances in gun safety and regulation that the majority of Americans want.
-The third problem, the one you open with, regarding services such as the internet is the result of the other two. We spend several times as much to build our infrastructure because of weak central governments and corrupt and stupid politicians. Compare and contrast major public service projects like the Oakland-San Francisco bridge with the Millau bridge in France. The Millau bridge is the highest in the world and an engineering marvel. It was designed by a British architect but build entirely by the French, employing the French, and benefiting French industry. The Oakland-SF bridge, as with the port facilities and so many other projects in the US was built in China and shipped in pieces to the US. The savings disappeared as the bridge ended up costing four times its projected amount. Thousands of US workers who could have been working were not. China with it strong central government and supposed lower cost workforce gets the projects, employes its citizens, but the price tag comes out the same as if the whole thing were built here. It looks good when proposed. It makes political hay. It gets people elected. However, it doesn’t do a thing for the US citizen who could be working, buying stuff, and paying taxes.
The stupidity we endure is only offset by the incredible power of this nation. The power of this nation has been and continues to be eroding our middle class and enriching the top five percent. So, the next time you laugh at the French, Russians, etc. take a good look around the US. It should make you cry.
” I have no trouble streaming Netflix or anything else. Businesses need more speed, but then you should be paying for a business connection. The only reason I can think of for needing extraordinarily fast personal connections is that you are doing massive illegal downloads. In that case, just stop it.”
Seems a bit presumptuous to assume the only reason for faster internet is content piracy. As a start, some families have more than one user.
It seems pretty clear that many areas are served under conditions that approximate monopoly. How else do we explain internet and cable cost that rise above the rate in inflation year after year. Limited competition might not be so bad if consumers were getting the best possible service – but they are not. Maybe it is time for regulation that encourages competition in the cable and internet markets.
Satellites, yes, some of the earlier ones, but the most recent ones and all of the ones we are using today have been paid for by communications companies, and they paid the government for the launch. All of the cables, wires and fiber optics were installed and paid for by communication companies. Governments have never been in that business, except in the Tennessee Valley Authority days, and that was for electrical power, not communications.
I’m not saying cable and internet should not be faster and less costly. They certainly should be, but let’s keep our arguments based on facts.
And to think the US and state originally funded the cost of construction of the cables and satellites….. It should be free for out use….
Online gaming needs good speeds. When connections around 10mbps like I often get, there is often lag. On faster connections, this becomes not an issue.
Also, at 10mbps, I often get poor quality streaming. So yes, there are reasons for it.
And what if more than one person wants to do these things at the same time? On my 10mbps connection, if somebody starts watching Netflix while I’m playing an online game, my latency goes from 50-100ms to 300-500ms as a norm. If two people wanted to watch Netflix (and they allow two as basic service), none of it would work properly.
Simm,
My point was to point out the artificial barriers put up by the big ISPs that keeps our internet capability no more than many third world countries, not just speed alone. After Katrina, NOLA was rebuilding its infrastructure destroyed by the storm. There was never a more perfect time to set up city-wide Wi-Fi. Didn’t happen. Special interests blocked it. Even during the emergency, the city had to keep speeds within the state-wide ban on anything over 128kbs. Politicians had caved to the demands of Earthlink and other ISPs to impose the speed limit on free WiFi.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2006/10/8052/
I don’t think that speed should be the test. The test should be whether we have made the internet available to all for a reasonable cost, and in that we have failed miserably.
If we are just talking personal use, 20.77 Mbps is more than adequate. I get 12 Mbps on a relatively low cost fiber optic (well, the fiber optic comes to the edge of the neighborhood, the rest is basic phone line) connection. I have no trouble streaming Netflix or anything else. Businesses need more speed, but then you should be paying for a business connection. The only reason I can think of for needing extraordinarily fast personal connections is that you are doing massive illegal downloads. In that case, just stop it.
We need to focus on making basic internet connections available to everyone. Today you can buy a Chromebook for $200 or a basic Windows laptop for $300 or less. All that’s missing is the internet connection.
Slowing down the internet is in the interest of the big corporations, so they can gouge for a few extra bucks. “Pay more in advertising or user fees and we won’t bottleneck your connection.”
In truth, we are nowhere near our own capability, and there is no excuse at all for slowing down connections. As was pointed out in the original PowerPoint presentation “Did You Know” by Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod, we can push almost unlimited amounts of data down a single strand of fiberglass, and are only limited by the switches at either end. How about 10Gb/s (10 Gigabits per second). Your average network runs at 100Mb/s (100 Megabits per second).
Most Internet speeds in the US are no more than 6Mb/s (6 Megabits per second). Fiber can handle speeds over 1666 times that! The big internet providers are still trying to sell the meme that Senator Ted Stevens used that high volume users are clogging up the “tubes.”
Young people are finding free Internet by going to public places to use their Wi-Fi. The public library closes at night, but the Wi-Fi is not shut down, and can be accessed from a car parked outside. Same for the hospital, fast food restaurants, motels and other places. Just to jog some memories, here is the original “Did You Know — Shift Happens,” slide show by Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod back in 2006. Substitute Facebook for MySpace in the slides. According to stats, there are now 1,310,000,000 registered Facebook users. That is 1.31 billion users, which is one-fifth the population of planet Earth.
Americans are fed a steady diet of faster, bigger, and better than while the rest of the world sits by and laughs at us.
And 46th in press freedom …
One wonders if the slow Internet is intentional.
Intended to slow down the growth of citizen journalists.