Why is American internet so slow?

[RKMBrown]

Just an aside - I was browsing this with Firefox with thee tabs open and it was sooooooo slow.
Just switched to Opera with only 1 tab open and it's ten times faster.

Then you are probably short on memory. Windows is a memory hog. Firefox is average on memory. Opera's the best of the browsers when it comes to being a miser of memory usage.

 

[WinterBorn]

Great.

Who pulls the lines? Who installs the backbone? Who buys the switches?

This doesn't happen by magic.

We do. I work for a company that builds fiber optic systems.

The good news is that many power companies and some municipalities are buildingtheir own fiber systems.

Chattanooga has a pretty good one with EPB. It is getting around more and more. We are almost finished with a major rural fiber optic build that was subsidized by some stimulus money. I hope I never work another job under those rules again.

Really..Can you give some examples of the most frustrating issues?

Antiquated rules for dealing with fiber optics, pay scales that are way out of line with the area, and requirements for employment that can cripple production.

 

[Uncensored2008]

Vista is perhaps Microsoft's worst OS ever.
Please, go buy Windows 8.

Ignore that the same Longhorn core powers both...

 

[Uncensored2008]

Which ones. Verizon? Local Cable co. What else?

The problem is that people don't understand the difference between resellers and actual carriers.

 

[Uncensored2008]

Other countries have faster and cheaper internet service...same with mobile phone service.

Some do and some don't.

Yes, Seoul has crazy fast internet, it also has the population of California packed into an area the size Phoenix. England sucks on Internet - still using BRI in most places. Except London, which surprise, has very fast links.

The fact that high density urban population centers have faster links shouldn't surprise anyone. New York City has great coverage and speeds too. average it out with Fargo, ND and the speeds look low.

 

[RKMBrown]

I live in the boondocks. I have access to 3 different "actual" ground based wireless carriers via various towers and frequency bands. I have access to a satellite carrier, as does almost all of North America. I have access to slow dsl, slow because of the distance and the fact that it's only available over two old fashioned copper lines. I live two miles as the crow flies from the nearest fiber trunk, where all the local internet access is being routed from.

What I want is for permission to run fiber that last two miles. I have two "sets" of power lines that run over and by my ranch. Both of them have telephone wire already on them. As of yet neither of them have cable tv or fiber lines. Seems like a natural process to go ahead and put modern high bandwidth pipes over these lines and let the folks patch in every so often down the line.

 

[Uncensored2008]

nope..Not yet. Next up..Fiber.

Fiber is already in use.

People don't understand networks. Claims that 4G or 5G will be the "next thing" reveals that sort of ignorance. The notion that you hit that 4G tower and your signal bounces along from cell to cell until that porn site comes up is absurd.

The 4G tower you hit routs to the closest CO and then rides on the same fiber backbone as everything else does. Fiber is and will remain the means for high speed communication into the foreseeable future.

 

[Indeependent]

FIOS is lightning fast no matter what I throw at it.
We have 4 people watching TV over the Internet.
The actual quality of TV blows CableVision away.

I use Opera even though I have to defragment the tmp files once a day.

 

[RKMBrown]

nope..Not yet. Next up..Fiber.

Fiber is already in use.

People don't understand networks. Claims that 4G or 5G will be the "next thing" reveals that sort of ignorance. The notion that you hit that 4G tower and your signal bounces along from cell to cell until that porn site comes up is absurd.

The 4G tower you hit routs to the closest CO and then rides on the same fiber backbone as everything else does. Fiber is and will remain the means for high speed communication into the foreseeable future.

Both are useful and there are still quite a few point to point microwave towers in use that fiber has not replaced yet. But I'd rather have fiber running to my house and regulate wireless bandwidth for mobile use, and limited use in private environments (limited as in limited amplification so my private use does not interfere with the entire neighborhoods private use). The over air frequency bands are a limited resource, so we need to regulate them.

 

[Uncensored2008]

I have a quadruple boot setup, three are linux based, XP on another partition.

There's your problem. The NT Kernal is outdated and XP doesn't use the graphics hardware directly to render pages. All modern versions of Linux do, as do Longhorn based systems. XP will actually use your CPU to render pages.

All linux distros run video better but only after selecting the right driver. The overhead is much less too, plus I have three (or more) virtual desktops with two monitors. My browsers don't crash, but bear in mind that Ubuntu distros and their offspring are based on Debian unstable.

Linux uses OpenGL, which is inferior to DirectX. For something like rendering 2D web pages that's fine. For 3D it's so far behind Direct 3D that it's not even funny.

And only Firefox crashes. Never had Chromium crash.

I'm on Wheezy (stable) but I didn't have issues with the various Ubuntus, Mint, etc. until I tweaked them into not working. Windows takes a long time to boot so I seldom use it. Maybe they fixed that in 7?

I used to run Mint, but I actually like the Unity GUI, so I've been running Ubuntu for a couple of years.

Back in the XP days, I ran Linux 90% of the time. Since Longhorn came out, I boot into Linux once every couple of weeks.

 

[Uncensored2008]

Both are useful and there are still quite a few point to point microwave towers in use that fiber has not replaced yet. But I'd rather have fiber running to my house and regulate wireless bandwidth for mobile use, and limited use in private environments (limited as in limited amplification so my private use does not interfere with the entire neighborhoods private use). The over air frequency bands are a limited resource, so we need to regulate them.

Yes absolutely. I love 4G. I'm in the Los Angeles area - major metropolitan=good coverage. I get about 30 down and 22 up off of Verizon. I ride a train to work, so this is really nice. My only point was that 4G is a connection technology, not a replacement for traditional fiber backbones.

At work, we are so backwards that I have 11 bonded T1's in an EoC to try and get halfway decent speeds. 2014 and there STILL is no fiber in my area. I have a theoretical 15mbps pipe (I split one off for dedicated VOIP) and generally test out at about 11. 4G kicks the shit out of my hard line.

 

[RKMBrown]

I have a quadruple boot setup, three are linux based, XP on another partition.

There's your problem. The NT Kernal is outdated and XP doesn't use the graphics hardware directly to render pages. All modern versions of Linux do, as do Longhorn based systems. XP will actually use your CPU to render pages.

All linux distros run video better but only after selecting the right driver. The overhead is much less too, plus I have three (or more) virtual desktops with two monitors. My browsers don't crash, but bear in mind that Ubuntu distros and their offspring are based on Debian unstable.

Linux uses OpenGL, which is inferior to DirectX. For something like rendering 2D web pages that's fine. For 3D it's so far behind Direct 3D that it's not even funny.

And only Firefox crashes. Never had Chromium crash.

I'm on Wheezy (stable) but I didn't have issues with the various Ubuntus, Mint, etc. until I tweaked them into not working. Windows takes a long time to boot so I seldom use it. Maybe they fixed that in 7?

I used to run Mint, but I actually like the Unity GUI, so I've been running Ubuntu for a couple of years.

Back in the XP days, I ran Linux 90% of the time. Since Longhorn came out, I boot into Linux once every couple of weeks.

Or you could just turn off the fancy effects like translucency and font aliasing in the OS and Browser if you want to eek out a bit more performance. Would be interesting to see what's faster and more "miserly" of memory turning the toys off on the older XP or vista with the stuff on, or god forbid windoze 8.

 

[Iceweasel]

There's your problem. The NT Kernal is outdated and XP doesn't use the graphics hardware directly to render pages. All modern versions of Linux do, as do Longhorn based systems. XP will actually use your CPU to render pages.

I don't have a problem and what's the giant sized Windows nVidia drivers for if the cpu is doing the rendering?

Linux uses OpenGL, which is inferior to DirectX. For something like rendering 2D web pages that's fine. For 3D it's so far behind Direct 3D that it's not even funny.

HD movies run perfect under my distros so I don't know what an improvement would look like. Windows has far too many other downsides for me. I'm done upgrading Windows. And Microsoft will soon be done with XP.

I used to run Mint, but I actually like the Unity GUI, so I've been running Ubuntu for a couple of years.

Back in the XP days, I ran Linux 90% of the time. Since Longhorn came out, I boot into Linux once every couple of weeks.

Unity was not my cup of tea. I had Macs and like them better than Windows. I only keep it for one program that needs XP, and it won't even run under W7. I can do everything I want, Wheezy reads my usb drives, tablet, phone and cameras. Hopefully I won't need to ever pay for software again or get locked into a stupid upgrade cycle..

 

[RKMBrown]

There's your problem. The NT Kernal is outdated and XP doesn't use the graphics hardware directly to render pages. All modern versions of Linux do, as do Longhorn based systems. XP will actually use your CPU to render pages.

I don't have a problem and what's the giant sized Windows nVidia drivers for if the cpu is doing the rendering?

Linux uses OpenGL, which is inferior to DirectX. For something like rendering 2D web pages that's fine. For 3D it's so far behind Direct 3D that it's not even funny.

HD movies run perfect under my distros so I don't know what an improvement would look like. Windows has far too many other downsides for me. I'm done upgrading Windows. And Microsoft will soon be done with XP.

I used to run Mint, but I actually like the Unity GUI, so I've been running Ubuntu for a couple of years.

Back in the XP days, I ran Linux 90% of the time. Since Longhorn came out, I boot into Linux once every couple of weeks.

Unity was not my cup of tea. I had Macs and like them better than Windows. I only keep it for one program that needs XP, and it won't even run under W7. I can do everything I want, Wheezy reads my usb drives, tablet, phone and cameras. Hopefully I won't need to ever pay for software again or get locked into a stupid upgrade cycle..

For games & specialty graphics applications.

The older windows operating system code was not written to take advantage of the complex rendering functions in graphics cards. Thus, applications using standard windows controls, fonts, etc. were not taking advantage of said function. Back when windows was first written graphics cards were mostly just big bit map frame buffers. Rendering can mean many things. He's talking about the fancy stuff...

 

[Uncensored2008]

Or you could just turn off the fancy effects like translucency and font aliasing in the OS and Browser if you want to eek out a bit more performance. Would be interesting to see what's faster and more "miserly" of memory turning the toys off on the older XP or vista with the stuff on, or god forbid windoze 8.

That's a good point.

Here are work I have an I7 3770K on a Sabertooth mobo with 16GB of DDR3 @ 2100, an OCX SSD and a GTX480 for video.

I love Aero, but I have the hardware to support it. Those who hated Vista were those who were running outdated and under powered machines. Windows 7 didn't "fix" crap, it just let two years pass so that hardware caught up with the requirements of the system.

At home I run a liquid cooled beast OC'd to 5 gHz I'm not concerned with resource usage. I boot in about a second - SSD's rock.

 

[Bumberclyde]

Why is American internet so slow?

The NSA, CIA and FBI are all slow readers.

 

[Missouri_Mike]

Other countries have faster and cheaper internet service...same with mobile phone service.

You're an idiot. Who fucking cares? Based on what? Other countries (99%) of them have slower internet if they have it at all and no cell service.

WTF is your point?

The US doesn't make the top ten in speed of the internet.

Top 20: Where to Find the World's Fastest Internet: The Download - Bloomberg

Check out the mobile phone situation -

An International Comparison of Cell Phone Plans and Prices | NewAmerica.org

11th, up from 14th just last year. Geez you people get all wound up over the dumbest shit in your quest for the government to make you happy. You want to drop out of the top 25 within two years? Turn it over to the government.

 

[Uncensored2008]

I don't have a problem and what's the giant sized Windows nVidia drivers for if the cpu is doing the rendering?

On XP?

For gaming.

HD movies run perfect under my distros so I don't know what an improvement would look like. Windows has far too many other downsides for me. I'm done upgrading Windows. And Microsoft will soon be done with XP.

Movies are a matter of decoding, you aren't rendering anything. Traditionally, the CPU did all the work of decoding MP4 (or whatever) codecs into bitmaps and audio streams. In the last 5 years, a lot of that work has shifted to the GPU - but it is still a general compute operation, it's not setting up triangles, adding textures, and lighting - it's just decoding the stream to map it to pixels on the screen.

Unity was not my cup of tea.

Yeah, a lot of people detest it.

I had Macs and like them better than Windows. I only keep it for one program that needs XP, and it won't even run under W7. I can do everything I want, Wheezy reads my usb drives, tablet, phone and cameras. Hopefully I won't need to ever pay for software again or get locked into a stupid upgrade cycle..

99% of what I do requires Windows or runs better under Windows. I've decided that even the Gimp runs better in Windows - purely subjective, but filters apply faster.

 

[RKMBrown]

Or you could just turn off the fancy effects like translucency and font aliasing in the OS and Browser if you want to eek out a bit more performance. Would be interesting to see what's faster and more "miserly" of memory turning the toys off on the older XP or vista with the stuff on, or god forbid windoze 8.

That's a good point.

Here are work I have an I7 3770K on a Sabertooth mobo with 16GB of DDR3 @ 2100, an OCX SSD and a GTX480 for video.

I love Aero, but I have the hardware to support it. Those who hated Vista were those who were running outdated and under powered machines. Windows 7 didn't "fix" crap, it just let two years pass so that hardware caught up with the requirements of the system.

At home I run a liquid cooled beast OC'd to 5 gHz I'm not concerned with resource usage. I boot in about a second - SSD's rock.

SSDs are great for a boot drive... not so good if used for swap / temp files as they have a limited number of write cycles in them... also they are still so damn expensive.

My main computer (custom) is 5y old now and has only seen one upgrade and that was to the graphics card a couple years back (GTX260, vista64, 4gig ram, 3ghz intel dual core). Mobo's memory subsystem was unable to run with 8gigs of ram, ticked me off but I let it go. It's time for me to build a new box, put this one on the rack as a server.

 

[Harry Dresden]

I have a quadruple boot setup, three are linux based, XP on another partition.

There's your problem. The NT Kernal is outdated and XP doesn't use the graphics hardware directly to render pages. All modern versions of Linux do, as do Longhorn based systems. XP will actually use your CPU to render pages.

All linux distros run video better but only after selecting the right driver. The overhead is much less too, plus I have three (or more) virtual desktops with two monitors. My browsers don't crash, but bear in mind that Ubuntu distros and their offspring are based on Debian unstable.

Linux uses OpenGL, which is inferior to DirectX. For something like rendering 2D web pages that's fine. For 3D it's so far behind Direct 3D that it's not even funny.

And only Firefox crashes. Never had Chromium crash.

I'm on Wheezy (stable) but I didn't have issues with the various Ubuntus, Mint, etc. until I tweaked them into not working. Windows takes a long time to boot so I seldom use it. Maybe they fixed that in 7?

I used to run Mint, but I actually like the Unity GUI, so I've been running Ubuntu for a couple of years.

Back in the XP days, I ran Linux 90% of the time. Since Longhorn came out, I boot into Linux once every couple of weeks.

And only Firefox crashes. Never had Chromium crash.

i hear ya....same for me....