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
bill mcwilliams, I sure had noticed Isaac’s comments, as I noticed yours right now. A third party has no chance in a system where the Ds and the Rs have been entrenched for such a long time. Better candidates are needed in both the Democratic and Republican Party. Had the Tea Party, for example, started out as a third party, rather than infiltrating the Republican Party, it would have faded away the same as the Wayseers had. The Tea Party profoundly changed not just the Republicans but the Democrats, too, after they were thrown out of the House. Vote every single incumbent out. However unqualified all the new candidates might be, the outcome would be far far better than what we have now. As it is, complaining about cuts to welfare does nothing to help the nation when so many roll over and play dead to special interest welfare. Children are better at playing give-and-take than the buffoons in Washington, much less some who comment here.
ISAAC IS THE MAN. Right on the money. But no one else even ackowledged the prescience of your remarks. Why? Because they all vote mainly for
Democrats…even the few who know that the only solution to having things
become better for ALL Americans – and the illegals here that they support – is to vote for the Green Party’s candidates or some other reasonable 3rd party.
ELAINE M: Thanks for your very informative comment.
United States Ranks 31st in the World on Internet Speed
Are we still exceptional?
Gee Jonathan, you can chalk one thing up for the Daley Machine–snow plows! I do agree lobbyist and telecommunication companies have a choke hold on our society. We also pay through the nose for telecommunication services. I was mentioning to my husband that the lowest cost for phone services alone is around 45.00, whereas, when we only had regular phones, the cost averaged 15.00-30.00.
About 1972, Nixon and the DOJ brought anti-trust acts against AT&T/Ma Bell. The monopoly was supposed to be allow others to enter the market place. A lot of companies sprung up, but only the big honcho’s survived as listed in the article. Now we have a new monopoly of big daddy companies, including AT&T. Instead of the government stepping in to stop big business from raping the public, they do nothing. No we don’t need more government–they work too closely with big business. Give government back to the people.
Well, heck! That’s the exact opposite of private enterprize! Now THAT should be blocked & reversed, if Simms is saying what I think he is.
A key reason that citizens turn to government is that the market does not offer a satisfactory solution.
At this point the internet gives every appearance of becoming essential for commerce and government in the future.
We frequently turn to government for sewers, roads and other essential services. Why not the internet?
@traveling limey “Since some towns like Elko, Nevada have made the whole city have internet, why not all towns?”
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-already-won-limits-on-public-broadband-in-20-states/
Since some towns like Elko, Nevada have made the whole city have internet, why not all towns?
Simms, I know what you’re talking about as far as controlling data usage. When it comes to radio streaming, I try to find a bit rate of 24 (entirely satisfactory for voice), not 128 or 196, which can mean the difference between 50 megabytes or up to 1 gigabyte of daily usage. For YouTube, I select the lowest resolution, again, using a small fraction of what it would be for the highest resolution. I don’t do embedded videos because I can’t control the resolution. In these ways I win the battle against the bandwidth hogs, who, if they have their way with me, would use up my monthly allotment in one week. Bandwidth hogs are a recent phenomenon, as Darren noted, beginning with the geniuses at Flash, which Apple boycotted, and others should have followed, but didn’t — all for the almighty dollar chased by Madison Avenue. The book, Predatory Nation, says it all. Everything about the US economy is about forcing consumers to bend over.
I may have unintentionally contributed some some confusion in my previous remarks. I suppose I am dating myself, but there was a time when bandwidth hog referred to users who spent hours and sometimes days downloading files. They were called hogs because they used a large amount to the capacity of the communication channel or data pipe. That kind of hog can affect speed of other users but not the amount of data they download or their budget. They could be especially annoying for users who get their internet via cable where many users may share the same data pipe.
In this conversion bandwidth hog is used to refer to web sites and content providers who lard their data stream with items such as graphics and adds that are frequently of little interest to users. Used in that sense, bandwidth hogs can have a very undesirable and expensive effect on users and their data budget because they directly affect the amount of data the user transfers to his device.
@bigfatmike “I am no expert, but I think there is some confusion, here, between the quantity of data transferred and the rate at which data is transferred.”
You’ve made a very good point. Sometimes on this site, apples argue against the points oranges make. We need to get better at actually reading each others posts.
Stanley, your comment is well taken. My radio app dominates my data usage, making it possible for me to choose a radio station anywhere in the world, listening to news, music, opinion, even text-to-speech essays — all in the background while driving, hiking, working, cooking or even reading, whatever. Without a smartphone to satisfy my curiosity, I’d be tethered to the laptop at home, a shut-in if you will. I’m a long ways from being old enough for that, though I understand many who arn’t, are.
I have to agree with Samantha on the bandwidth hog issue. There was a time, around twenty years ago and longer, where most of the internet consisted of text. In fact several browsers were text only such as Lynx. Text only browsing of webpages is exceptionally fast. One of my biggest gripes about default behavior of Internet Explorer is it is architected to display text content nearly last. There is a mode to mode to not download images unless specifically user requested, yet much of the advertising has been configured to bypass this functionality. I wish there was a registry hack to display text first but I have yet to find one.
In fact, what is rather ironic is under earlier versions of the HTML standard, there was a tag named <blink> which made text blink but it was later removed because it was claimed to be irritating and distracting. Then, advertising took over websites and it is orders of magnitude more distracting and greatly annoying.
The text content is generally about one or two percent of the bytes of a typical webpage. The amount of bytes allocated to advertising has grown markedly as video adverts are increasingly frequent.
samantha,
I understand your concern. I have a thought on that, but let me say first that I don’t have a smartphone, and never use a laptop or other portable device. My cell phone does exactly two things: It makes and receives phone calls. I started to get one, but looked around the office at my associates and saw them spending more time fiddling with the latest and greatest apps than working. Just the cell phone alone is more of an electronic tether than I really want. It is just a necessary evil so that I can conduct business away from the office. So…I have trouble relating to the wireless part of your problem.
The main issue I was getting to is the fact the internet…in all its forms…has far more capability than we are allowed to use by the providers. Doesn’t matter if wired or wireless. Any gadget can be made as fast and powerful as you want. It is the damn connections you are allowed to have, not what they are able to provide you.
That cell phone of yours, or your tablet, has far more computing power than the entire mainframe computer I used to process my dissertation data. That computer occupied the entire second floor of the engineering building. As Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod pointed out, it is just a matter of making the switches on either end of the connection faster.
Roland
thanks for the broadband link.
bigfatmike, I’m aware of the distinction you are making between quantity and speed. My comment was directed to Stanley, so to stay in context, you’ll have to read what he said, first.
In the same way that 50 percent compression doubles throughput speed, so does trimming bandwidth hogs by 50 percent, increase not just speed but also doubles monthly allotment, virtually. If I’d use my laptop all the time, rather than my smartphone, I’d use up my monthly allotment every week.
If all this makes sense, we’re on 100 percent common ground here. –sammy
samantha,
If I’m not home I usually have access to wifi, but sometimes I end up having to tether my phone and use my limited data allotment. I know the predicament you describe very well.
The most useful things I’ve found to limit data usage are good adbocking apps and browsers that compress data. Using Opera in the Off Road mode for instance can reduce my data consumption by more than 50%. On my Chromebook, I have to use an older version of Opera with Turbo, but that works pretty well too.
Using a site’s mobile version helps a lot too, but some sites just won’t cooperate. For instance, the New York Times mobile site works great on my laptop or Chromebook, but if I go to the Washington Post mobile site on my laptop or Chromebook, it immediately redirects me to its classic site. I wish someone could tell me why.
For those of us, Stanley, who are connected wirelessly, bandwidth hogs are the scourge of the internet, pissing away our monthly allotment, forcing us to pay more, even double. It’s why web pages now serve classic and mobile pages (high and low bandwidth). No one with a smartphone is going to stand for classic pages using up monthly bandwidth allotment in a week or less. Not only that, bandwidth hogs slow down the internet for everyone using wifi hotspots. Halving internet hogs would save money in the same way doubling auto mileage halves fuel costs.
“who are connected wirelessly, bandwidth hogs are the scourge of the internet, pissing away our monthly allotment, forcing us to pay more, even double. ”
I am no expert, but I think there is some confusion, here, between the quantity of data transferred and the rate at which data is transferred.
In most situations, users consume their data budget as they transfer data from the internet to their device. That data may be the bits to write a screen or the bytes in a large file.
But the critical point is that a 100mB file is still only 100 mB regardless of whether it takes a few seconds, a few minutes or many hours to transfer to the users device. The speed of transfer does not change the amount of data transferred.
Bandwidth hogs do not influence how much data other users transfer to their devices, either computers or smart phone, only the connection speed. Therefore, bandwidth hogs don’t affect charges to other users – no matter how infuriating it may be to be stuck on a slow connection.
If bandwidth hogs have the same contracts that most of us have which charge for the amount of data transferred each month, then halving the connection speed of bandwidth hogs would have not have any effect, none, on their monthly charges.
The only situation I can think of where connection speed would influence the charge would be at businesses that charge for the length of time the connection is used. Those businesses, typically, charge for the use of the computer and the connection to the internet. In that situation the speed of connection would determine the time necessary to transfer a particular amount of data and the time would determine the charge.
Thanks for pulling me back into reality Roland. I was almost beginning to hate this country a tiny tad less – but you stopped me! Boy, just when you think you peeled the last layer of the onion – more layers just keep coming!
I’m surprised nobody has linked to this yet:
$200B Broadband ripoff
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html