Why is American internet so slow?

[Political Junky]

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.

I showed that you were wrong when you said, "Other countries (99%) of them have slower internet if they have it at all and no cell service".

 

[OnePercenter]

All American internet isn't slow. In Vegas I have Cox. (150 Mbps down/45Mbps up) Privately held company vs. publicly held.

OBTW; The future is WiFi.

compared to south Korea you are on dial up.

True! But that has to do with big business weening Americans into higher prices to satisfy their stockholders. Cox has no stockholders, thus causes competition.

 

[OnePercenter]

All American internet isn't slow. In Vegas I have Cox. (150 Mbps down/45Mbps up) Privately held company vs. publicly held.

OBTW; The future is WiFi.

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

WiFi is faster, cheaper, and can handle more traffic than fiber.

You can provide high speed WiFi to a 5 square mile area in 2 hours. Can you do that with fiber?

Almost every new office building being built is without the miles of CAT5.

My office in California has 10 work stations with zero cable.

 

[OnePercenter]

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.

Record profits can't be achieved?

 

[OnePercenter]

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.

Fiber is already in use. Fiber has it's place over long distances where curvature of the earth is an issue, but WiFi is much faster and can handle more information than fiber.

 

[WinterBorn]

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.

Record profits can't be achieved?

Reading a lot into that, aren't you?

Perhaps if you had asked for more info I could have explained that the contracts required 40% of our workforce be locals and less than 50% be subcontractors.

In the area where we worked there were virtually no experienced linemen, drillers or fiber splicers. So the ones we brought in could not bring their people with them. A lineman with a familiar groundman work as a team. To require that half of that team be dismisses just to provide work for a local when the project is only going to last 2 or 3 years, is ridiculous.

Also, the contracts required we pay the prevailing wage. Not a problem. Except the prevailing wage they set is FAR above what the local economy provides. In one area the average household income is around $16k. The requirements for what we pay requires that we pay a groundman, with no experience, $22 an hour. With no overtime that comes to around $45k a year.

The rules for dealing with the fiber date back to the early 1960s. We were not allowed to handle the fiber if the temperatures were below 30 degrees. That is lunacy and there is no recourse that won't take years to complete.

 

[Kosh]

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.

Record profits can't be achieved?

You must hate unions too, do you?

 

[R.C. Christian]

Why is American internet so slow? - The Week

The country that literally invented the internet is now behind Estonia in terms of download speeds

A
ccording to a recent study by Ookla Speedtest, the U.S. ranks a shocking 31st in the world in terms of average download speeds. The leaders in the world are Hong Kong at 72.49 Mbps and Singapore on 58.84 Mbps. And America? Averaging speeds of 20.77 Mbps, it falls behind countries like Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Uruguay.

Its upload speeds are even worse. Globally, the U.S. ranks 42nd with an average upload speed of 6.31 Mbps, behind Lesotho, Belarus, Slovenia, and other countries you only hear mentioned on Jeopardy.

So how did America fall behind? How did the country that literally invented the internet — and the home to world-leading tech companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Netflix, Facebook, Google, and Cisco — fall behind so many others in download speeds?

Susan Crawford argues that "huge telecommunication companies" such as Comcast, Time Warner, Verizon, and AT&T have "divided up markets and put themselves in a position where they're subject to no competition."

How? The 1996 Telecommunications Act — which was meant to foster competition — allowed cable companies and telecoms companies to simply divide markets and merge their way to monopoly, allowing them to charge customers higher and higher prices without the kind of investment in internet infrastructure, especially in next-generation fiber optic connections, that is ongoing in other countries. Fiber optic connections offer a particularly compelling example. While expensive to build, they offer faster and smoother connections than traditional copper wire connections. But Verizon stopped building out fiber optic infrastructure in 2010 — citing high costs — just as other countries were getting to work.

Crawford told the BBC:

We deregulated high-speed internet access 10 years ago and since then we've seen enormous consolidation and monopolies… Left to their own devices, companies that supply internet access will charge high prices, because they face neither competition nor oversight. [BBC]

If a market becomes a monopoly, there's often nothing whatever to force monopolists to invest in infrastructure or improve their service. Of course, in the few places where a new competitor like Google Fiber has appeared, telecoms companies have been spooked and forced to cut prices and improve service in response to the new competition. But that isn't happening everywhere. It's very expensive for a new competitor to come into a market, like telecommunications, that has very high barriers to entry. Laying copper wire or fiber optic cable is expensive, and if the incumbent companies won't grant new competitors access to their infrastructure, then the free market forces of competition don't work and infrastructure stagnates, even as consumer anger and desire for competition rises due to poor service.

I get tired of being right. This is why American internet access sucks because there isnt any competition and the companies dont give a shit. Since they have it locked down they jack up the prices and keep services wack and give you the finger

Because Obama's NSA is sucking up all the bandwidth silly.

 

[longknife]

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.



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....

Amen! Time after time. Freezes up and I can't exit. Going to convert all my bookmarks to Opera.

 

[WinterBorn]

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.

Record profits can't be achieved?

You must hate unions too, do you?

He is just looking for a reason to whine about the poor oppressed worker.

 

[OnePercenter]

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.

Record profits can't be achieved?

Reading a lot into that, aren't you?

Perhaps if you had asked for more info I could have explained that the contracts required 40% of our workforce be locals and less than 50% be subcontractors.

In the area where we worked there were virtually no experienced linemen, drillers or fiber splicers. So the ones we brought in could not bring their people with them. A lineman with a familiar groundman work as a team. To require that half of that team be dismisses just to provide work for a local when the project is only going to last 2 or 3 years, is ridiculous.

Also, the contracts required we pay the prevailing wage. Not a problem. Except the prevailing wage they set is FAR above what the local economy provides. In one area the average household income is around $16k. The requirements for what we pay requires that we pay a groundman, with no experience, $22 an hour. With no overtime that comes to around $45k a year.

The rules for dealing with the fiber date back to the early 1960s. We were not allowed to handle the fiber if the temperatures were below 30 degrees. That is lunacy and there is no recourse that won't take years to complete.

Other than the $22/hour requirement which cuts the windfall the company was expecting; What's the problem?

 

[OnePercenter]

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.

Record profits can't be achieved?

You must hate unions too, do you?

I'm pro Union!

My second company (printing) was a Union company and I had the BEST worker any employer could hope for. When a vacation came up, the local sent a well trained worker to take over who hit the floor running.

From my experience Union workers are hard working Americans, which is why I cringe each time one of you 'Ive got mine, so fuck everyone else sociopaths' Union bashes.

 

[Jarlaxle]

You truly are remarkably stupid!

 

[CrusaderFrank]

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.

Fiber is already in use. Fiber has it's place over long distances where curvature of the earth is an issue, but WiFi is much faster and can handle more information than fiber.

What? WiFi is faster than fiber? What?

Sent from my Chinese Supercomputer made from XBox parts Bush sent to China

 

[The T]

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.

Fiber is already in use. Fiber has it's place over long distances where curvature of the earth is an issue, but WiFi is much faster and can handle more information than fiber.

YOU know nothing of spectrum, do you?

 

[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.

Fiber is already in use. Fiber has it's place over long distances where curvature of the earth is an issue, but WiFi is much faster and can handle more information than fiber.

Try again. Fiber is many orders of magnitude faster, and can handle many orders of magnitude more information than "WiFi." Focused Microwave point to point is better than WiFi but still inferior to fiber optics. To be more specific a typical pair of fiber optic lines will give you 2,000,000,000,000 bits up and down, WiFi will give you 8,000,000 bits up and down.

To be fair there has been a lot of false advertising in the media about wireless and WiFi.

 

[WinterBorn]

Record profits can't be achieved?

Reading a lot into that, aren't you?

Perhaps if you had asked for more info I could have explained that the contracts required 40% of our workforce be locals and less than 50% be subcontractors.

In the area where we worked there were virtually no experienced linemen, drillers or fiber splicers. So the ones we brought in could not bring their people with them. A lineman with a familiar groundman work as a team. To require that half of that team be dismisses just to provide work for a local when the project is only going to last 2 or 3 years, is ridiculous.

Also, the contracts required we pay the prevailing wage. Not a problem. Except the prevailing wage they set is FAR above what the local economy provides. In one area the average household income is around $16k. The requirements for what we pay requires that we pay a groundman, with no experience, $22 an hour. With no overtime that comes to around $45k a year.

The rules for dealing with the fiber date back to the early 1960s. We were not allowed to handle the fiber if the temperatures were below 30 degrees. That is lunacy and there is no recourse that won't take years to complete.

Other than the $22/hour requirement which cuts the windfall the company was expecting; What's the problem?

Not being able to use experienced professionals would be one additional problem.

Not being able to use subcontractors, as is typical in many utility construction projects.

And not being able to handle the fiber if the temp is below 30 degrees. That rule alone cause countless delays for a project that started in Nov in eastern KY.



As for the $22 an hour cutting the windfall profits, you are obviously just looking for a reason to bemoan corporate America. But the same company that is making profits is the company that will be expanding again, buy new equipment, and starting more projects with more employees.

As for windfall profits, the company in question usually runs a profit margin of around 8-10%. Perhaps, in your dream of dreams, they would take no profit and give it all to the poor?

 

[WinterBorn]

Record profits can't be achieved?

You must hate unions too, do you?

I'm pro Union!

My second company (printing) was a Union company and I had the BEST worker any employer could hope for. When a vacation came up, the local sent a well trained worker to take over who hit the floor running.

From my experience Union workers are hard working Americans, which is why I cringe each time one of you 'Ive got mine, so fuck everyone else sociopaths' Union bashes.

But you have no problem insinuating that the project I discussed are all about oppressing the workers and robbing them. Funny how that works.

 

[Plasmaball]

Here?s What Lack Of Broadband Competition Looks Like In Map Form ? Consumerist

this is a good break down of the situation. It even covers New york city. There isnt competition at all. Your choices ares slim and rates have stalled.

 

[ron4342]

You're wrong. But... You're a dimocrap, which means you're stupid.

Ask yourself why Europe uses 220 Volt systems and we use 110.

If you can answer that, you'll have the answer to our slower internet.

XXXXX

It is truly amazing how little you know and how often you prove it. What a miserable life you must have when everything always comes back to your hatred of others. What a miserable world you must live in. I feel sorry for you and people like you.