Why is the Internet slow and costly in the U.S.?

Topic

New Reply

	TOP STORY Why is the Internet slow and costly in the U.S.?
	By Patrick Marshall In Tokyo, Seoul, and Hong Kong, residents get bidirectional, gigabit Internet for less than U.S. $40 a month. On the other side of the globe, Parisians have a similar deal, though their upload speed is only 200 megabits per second (and much of the rest of France isn’t so lucky). Most of us in the U.S. would be happy with half that bandwidth — even as we accept paying twice as much as Internet subscribers in Asia and Europe. In Seattle, I pay Comcast nearly $67 per month for a 50mbps (6.2 megabytes per second — Mbps) connection.

---

The full text of this column is posted at windowssecrets.com/top-story/why-is-the-internet-slow-and-costly-in-the-U-S (opens in a new window/tab).

Columnists typically cannot reply to comments here, but do incorporate the best tips into future columns.[/td]

[/tr][/tbl]

Reply | Quote

Replies

Think yourself lucky – i pay 80 Aussie $ a month about 59 US $ per month for 4.48 Mbps download and 0.45 upload, we have the National broadband coming soon – it is fibre to the node – i.e. a small cabinet that is in a nearby street and copper from there and that will give a significant increase in speed but no doubt a significant increase in cost as well.

A good follow up from the article would be for you to ask your subscribers everywhere to run a speed test and report the results back.

Reply | Quote

I’m with Bob – I pay AUD100 pm for the new National Broadband Network for which I get 25Mbps d/l, 5Mbps u/l. Same price as you but half the speed. So you’re not too badly off after all in the US!

A speed test shows actual speeds of 23.90 and 4.53 in the middle of the working day, pretty close to what I’m paying for.

Reply | Quote

There was an article on why the UK is in a similar position

http://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784/1

Reply | Quote

Hello – this is England calling. I could cry – and here’s why. I currently pay (approximately) GBP30 per month for a combined broadband (uncapped) and voice calls package. This gets me NO MORE than a 7MBPS download speed and a 384Kb (yes, 384Kb) upload speed. I live 6 miles from a metropolitan centre, but it’s all copper wire connections. Cable providers are not willing to bear the expense of digging up the roads between my village and the town centre to install fibre. The main telecomms provider has a roll-out plan to upgrade the local exchange, but it’s not happening anytime soon. Oh, and my upload and download speeds are better than some around the UK.

Reply | Quote

“And why would markets be less attractive to competition if a city provides broadband? Opponents of public broadband would argue that cities can always deliver the service at a lower cost.”

No, cities can deliver it at lower price, not cost. The cost is subsidized in some way by the taxpayer. In fact, the actual cost for anything the private sector can also do is never as efficiently delivered. The old shell game.

Reply | Quote

…

Reply | Quote

With private sector internet and cable service, those costs are also subsidized by the taxpayer — use of city owned poles, conduits, dark fiber leases, rights of way and easements. So I would rather the taxpayers get more for that. Instead of huge profits by the private sector. Utimately, internet service should be a public utility, and the private sector should actually have to compete on service and prices. Right now in a lot of areas, it’s an oligopoly.

Reply | Quote

One of the main reasons we pay so much is because comm companies can basically charge as much as the market will bear and even then they lie through their teeth in their advertising. While I’m generally opposed to government regulation, they have let the comm companies get away with highway robbery.

One of the greatest sins is that comm companies have been allowed to act as super-monopolies. They control the means of delivery, control the content, and even act as content providers. Competition is an illusion – stay with any provider for longer than the introductory period and you will find yourself paying roughly the same amount as the guy next door with a different provider.

Reply | Quote

One of the main reasons we pay so much is because comm companies can basically charge as much as the market will bear and even then they lie through their teeth in their advertising. While I’m generally opposed to government regulation, they have let the comm companies get away with highway robbery.

One of the greatest sins is that comm companies have been allowed to act as super-monopolies. They control the means of delivery, control the content, and even act as content providers. Competition is an illusion – stay with any provider for longer than the introductory period and you will find yourself paying roughly the same amount as the guy next door with a different provider.

I totally agree with you, these cable companies (particularly Comcast) are a monopolistic whore.

I would be VERY glad to see them regulated/deregulated like the old Ma-Bell phone company years ago. Then perhaps we would see some new companies stepping in to give these big guys some well desired competition.

Reply | Quote

My average speeds from Cablevision(Optimum) New York City are: 119.90 Mb/s Down & 42.42 Mb/s Up

Reply | Quote

Ha, you’re all getting off light If I didn’t gripe and whine and threaten to jump ship (where to is a bit of a fib, being nonexistent) until my ISP’s Loyalty Department comes on the line and gives me a half-price deal, I’d be paying $50/month for 1.5Mbit down, 0.6Mbit up. After I griped and whined some more, they replaced all the phone wiring to and in my house, and now Yay, I get a whopping 2.4Mbit down, 0.8Mbit up. Big improvement!. There’s fibre across the road, but 300 rural customers aren’t deemed sufficient to install a new junction box.

Where I lived in SoCal, it was worse… $40/mo. for what was supposedly 1.5Mbit but in reality usually more like 0.3Mbit, fixed wireless being less than wonderful but it was that or dialup, on phone lines that would only support 28bps.

The real reason, at least in California, that little new cable is being laid, is not the initial cost. It’s CA’s tax structure. Overhead lines are not taxable, but cable in the ground is taxed as Real Property, effectively 2% of value (deemed as cost to lay the cable) per year. This, in fact, is why overhead lines are being outlawed (not because of visual standards, tho that’s the excuse) — to force ’em into paying tax on new utility cable. If customers were willing to pay to cover the tax (which is about a buck a foot per year for electrical cable, a bit less for phone cable), no doubt new cable would be buried more often. (This is also why electrical service is not being extended in rural areas that still lack it. Which is a surprisingly large chunk of even this populous state.)

As to the cost of laying cable (and subsequent ongoing and ever-rising taxes), fixed wireless can be done at a cost of around $150 per customer. But there’s all the issues of needing line of sight and rights to hang the equipment on a pole and that it really does not work well in bad weather.

Truth is we caught ourselves in a no-win situation by being rather more progressive about all this communication stuff than was the rest of the world. By the time they caught up, things had changed, and most of what we did to limit ourselves no longer applied. A cautionary tale on regulations applied in advance of actual need.

Reply | Quote

In NYC I have Verizon FIOS. 75 mb/sec down & up. I think I am paying around $80 – $100 / month. I am not sure of the true cost because it is bundled with telephone & TV. It is much more expensive and slower than what is available elsewhere in the world. The monthly data limit is uncapped. That is a good thing compared with typical USA and world wide cell phone data plans.

I suspect the article’s analysis is correct. We have slow, expensive internet access in the USA because the conservative “free market” advocates have established private sector monopolies that are designed to maximize big company profits. In NYC we have some competition. In most of the USA there is only a single “high” speed provider and you can’t get anything close to 100 mps speeds at any price. The only private company providing gigabit speeds is Google and they do it only in a very few places on an experimental basis.

Look back to history. Would you accept the idea that the water supply was provided by private companies rather than by municipalities? No one currently is upset that the water supply is paid for by taxes. The idea of multiple water supply infrastructures and duplicate pipe system is just inefficient and expensive.

Supplying household water by private, profit making companies currently seems insane. But, once upon a time that was the accepted mode in the United States. Think about the Manhattan Water Company that was founded in 1799 by Aaron Burr. It turns out that this was a legal scam with a charter that allowed it to rapidly morphed into a bank that challenged the financial monopoly of Hamilton’s Bank of New York.

Reply | Quote

South Korea is mostly mountainous, which is why 25% of their population lives in Seoul. A majority of the rest live in other nearby cities around the yellow sea basin. So their population density is extremely high.

The raw average density for South Korea is 1,288 people per square mile. I’d guess that’s about triple if you’re considering the yellow sea basin area.

America has a population density of a whopping 84 people per square mile. Sure, that also includes places like Alaska and Wyoming, but there are sure a lot of rural areas with about 85 people living in each square mile. I totally wouldn’t change that–I love having elbow room. But it explains why it’s kind of difficult to get good internet speeds across the country.

Of course, if you compare cities like New York (Thanks, AMF1932) with Seoul or Tokyo, things may look different. But I question your assumptions–According to Akamai, the average internet speed in South Korea is only 23.6 Mbps (https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/content/state-of-the-internet-2015-executive-review-volume-01.pdf). Sure, gigabit internet may be available in some places for $40/month, but apparently isn’t very common yet. (a few 1000 Mbps connections skew averages pretty fast.) The first source I could find for a New York City average was http://testmy.net/city/new_york_ny , which places that fair city right in the neck of the woods with South Korea/Seoul.

If we’re comparing “available” speeds, Google Fiber in Kansas City is 1Gbps for $70/month, which isn’t much worse than the prices quoted in the article.

My advise: be patient. Companies will get faster bandwidth to you as fast as they can. It’s only good business.

Reply | Quote

I pay $79 per month for 3 MBPS download speed. Plus, $25 for a phone which I don’t want. But it’s unlimited data, so I stay with it.

I could get Verizon 4G or satellite, but I would pay for how much data I use.

We watch Netflix, so we need unlimited data.

Some of you are crying about speeds which are astronomically higher than mine.

There’s nothing else available in my area.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

Reply | Quote

I pay $79 per month for 3 MBPS download speed. Plus, $25 for a phone which I don’t want. But it’s unlimited data, so I stay with it.

We watch Netflix, so we need unlimited data.
.

Have you checked your speed to verify that you are truly getting that 3 mbps?

And is 3 mbps really just fine for uninterrupted Netflix?

Reply | Quote

Have you checked your speed to verify that you are truly getting that 3 mbps?

And is 3 mbps really just fine for uninterrupted Netflix?

Here’s how the providers play games with this. They advertise “speeds up to…”, which can be anything beween 0.1 to 3.0.

Secondly, they make a big deal of having speeds really fast speeds, which is great except there are almost no content providers that can use anything that high. Netflix states that you need 5mbps for streaming HD signals – that’s DSL speed. Even if you have several users in the house, 25mbps is probably more than adequate. In my area, Comcast offers 3 & 6 then jumps to 25, 75 and 150mbps. Seriously???

People are being sold cargo vans to carry a bag of groceries from the store.

Reply | Quote

Have you checked your speed to verify that you are truly getting that 3 mbps?

And is 3 mbps really just fine for uninterrupted Netflix?

Yes I have checked it. That is approx. the actual speed.

We were getting by on Netflix when we had 1 mbps. But Facebook was extremely slow, so we bumped it up to 3.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

Reply | Quote

Yes I have checked it. That is approx. the actual speed.

We were getting by on Netflix when we had 1 mbps. But Facebook was extremely slow, so we bumped it up to 3.

Not a FB person,, I was just wondering what on FB could require that bandwidth?

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

Reply | Quote

Not a FB person,, I was just wondering what on FB could require that bandwidth?

I have discovered that Flash was what was slowing everything down. EVERYTHING on the internet was slow. The reason I associated it with Facebook was that, whenever I would click on a link in Facebook, it would take literally two or more minutes to completely load the page and give me back control of the computer.

By accident, I discovered that Flash was the culprit. I decided to use Firefox rather than IE. I noticed that it was a lot faster, and I also noticed that it was blocking Flash, since Flash was out of date. I updated Flash, then Firefox slowed way down. I disabled Flash, and Firefox speeded up again.

Now my surfing is fine (including Facebook), and I probably could get along with the slower internet that we used to have (1 MB), but I prefer the blazing speed of 3 MB [/sarc off].

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

Reply | Quote

I live in a semi-rural area in the Northeast part of the United States. DSL is the only high-speed access available in my town, and for $40 per month I receive 1.52 Mbps download & 0.47 Mbps upload speeds. Of course, I’m paying for much faster throughput, but my home is too far from the nearest box to take advantage of the full throughput I’m paying for. Not so far away, subscribers with the same commercial provider of internet access are receiving gigabit speeds over fiber. I have no idea how much they pay for that level of service.

Absent wireless high-speed access, there is no reason to believe the situation will change at this location. With 52 people per square mile, and with 59 miles of roads on which citizens live, the town is much too spread-out to ever build its own system. For the same reason, cable companies won’t lay cable in the town. Pity us not, neighbors further up the road are too far from the box for DSL, and they must rely upon HughesNet – this in a million-dollar home.

Reply | Quote

The reporting on the Muni Broadband situation in Seattle is misleading. I have been involved with that since 2007. Back then, a task force was created to study feasibility and concluded it would be feasible back in 2007. The current consultants report was constrained to very specific parameters and outcomes by the city. This was based upon building a FTTH network from scratch, not using existing city dark fiber. And it was based upon Internet only, leaving room for VOIP, but specifically did not include triple play with cable TV type programming. 85-90 percent of the expense and hassle is for that programming, and that was eliminated from estimated costs. Streaming programming ala carte is going to supplant cable in the foreseeable future.

Even with a from scratch build, that $75 for a 1GB connection is 40 or more percent lower than what Comcast or any other recent provider in Seattle is charging. You can buy the same bandwith from current providers without cable programming–but they charge you the same rate as with it–you must “bundle.” However, the city deliberately leased out all it’s dark fiber for private business to business use over the past several years, effectively precluding the option of using that for a public municipal network and would have saved significantly over building from scratch. This was setup so that Mattmiller and the city could play the financial responsibility card to dodge the issue. And the final report released to the public took well over a month past their promised release because the city deliberately re-wrote it.

The bottom line was, as before, the city was looking for an excuse NOT to do this. They also changed some local ordinances just prior to that consultants report to favor CenturyLink’s and WAVE’s “competition” with Comcast. Prices between the oligopolistic “competitors” services are still unchanged and Service deployment is still not universal. Someone certainly wanted it to play out this way. The city had a great opportunity, again, and failed to deliver. Deliberately.

This is the result of policy that considers mere access the equivilent of “competition” regardless of the cost. And they do not have a clue about how to manage public-private partnerships for anything other than low income access. So Seattle remains an embarassment regarding the cost and actual availabilty of broadband as now defined by the FCC.

Reply | Quote

My new box is getting~29 Mbps Down and 5.37 Up with basic Cablevision debundled price around $55-60 I estimate. Now my old box is getting 1.6 and 1.95 respectively. I attribute this difference to Comodo security o the old box versus MS Defender or what ever on W7.
I am in the upper left hand corner of Westchester County.

:cheers:

Just because you don't know where you are going doesn't mean any road will get you there.

Reply | Quote

Great article. Some commonality in Canada too. There’s another aspect of history here. Places where the infrastructure is all copper face a considerable upgrade costs to shift to fiber – and not just the cables. All the switches and routers, etc too. And theres the wild card – Google coming in and and laying fiber in some areas.

In a local city, they prewired a large development with cheap fibre, $5 a month. Then they’ve gradually extended that into the neighborhood. High levels of subscription due to the low price and enough to continue to expand.

It will be interesting to see how it evolves. I don’t think the local management model works anymore, especially related to the rollout of new infrastructure.

Reply | Quote

The only solution is public action. For the U.S., faster and cheaper broadband Internet service will come only with broadening competition — in all forms: DSL, wireless, satellite, and so forth. If having a choice is important to you, I suggest actively supporting local, state, and federal laws that create a level playing field — and opposing those that don’t.
…Citizens United. ‘Free speech’ now permits corporations unlimited cash dumps on our State and Local legislators. While the press helps a bit with overdumping on our national candidates, it doesn’t do well on State legislators and local officials. Don’t look for anything that would take money out of cable and dish companies — all couched as ‘improving competition.’

Reply | Quote

Welcome to anarchy of capitalism, especially conservative, decentralized American style.

Reply | Quote

Why is the Internet slow and costly in the U.S.?

If I’m reading this article correctly, this is an appeal to more government control, basically, “the government needs to do something”. Our government is broken. Socialism is a proven disaster. What the government should do here is remove laws that prevent competition. I’m no expert here, but I suspect, and this article seems to confirm, that our governments are passing laws that favor the company that is giving the politicians money to stay in office. The appeal here seems to be that cheap internet is provided by the municipality. That means government, we’ll tax everyone to have cheaper internet service. Where’s the competition in that? Socialism doesn’t work. It’s the root of many evils in our world today.

Reply | Quote

As your opinion is not based upon direct knowledge of the topic, but pure fact free ideology, there is no basis for your application of that ideology to this topic. But you were not the first, nor will you be the last to try to inject that in order to derail or deflect this.

Reply | Quote

As your opinion is not based upon direct knowledge of the topic, but pure fact free ideology, there is no basis for your application of that ideology to this topic. But you were not the first, nor will you be the last to try to inject that in order to derail or deflect this.

Explorer, were you replying to JohnWelch? If so, it’s best to use Reply with quote so the context isn’t lost. You can always delete irrelevant text as well. As your reply followed mrjimphelps’s, your reply appeared to be connected to it.

Eliminate spare time: start programming PowerShell

Reply | Quote

Explorer, were you replying to JohnWelch? If so, it’s best to use Reply with quote so the context isn’t lost. You can always delete irrelevant text as well. As your reply followed mrjimphelps’s, your reply appeared to be connected to it.

Yes, that is was I intended. This board is very non-intutive. Depending upon where you log in from, you get a different starting point and different or missing buttons below the messages.

I get it now, I think. But it could be designed a lot better.

Reply | Quote

Frankly I was shocked to find this article made no mention of The Telecommunications Act of 1996 that allowed Americans to be deceived and defrauded by many of their telephone companies to the tune of $200 billion – money that was supposed to have gone to pay for a broadband future we don’t – and never will – have.

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 existed on two levels – federal and state. As a federal law, the Act specified certain data services that were to be made available to schools, libraries, hospitals, and public safety agencies and paid for through special surcharges and some tax credits. the so-called Information Superhighway still doesn’t appear to have been a success, but it wasn’t a criminal failure. Many schools and libraries were wired at considerable expense though the health care and public safety funding.

The failure was at the state level where one we can find that all 50 states and the District of Columbia contracted with their local telecommunication utilities for the build-out of fiber bring bidirectional digital service to millions of homes by the year 2000. The Telecommunications Act set the mandate but, like all dealings with the phone companies, the details were left to the states. Fifty-one plans were made and 51 plans failed.

Reply | Quote

Socialism doesn’t work. It’s the root of many evils in our world today.

I do love gross generalisations!.

cheers, Paul

Reply | Quote

It’s the government’s job to govern, not provide.

If somebody wants to compete with the cable company’s “monopoly”, all they have to do it what the cable company did… lay down thousands of miles of wire. Verizon did it, at least in my area. And guess what happened? The price went down.

This is really a non-issue anyway. Before long wireless technologies are bound to come along that will kill off any wired service.

Reply | Quote

It’s the government’s job to govern, not provide.

If somebody wants to compete with the cable company’s “monopoly”, all they have to do it what the cable company did… lay down thousands of miles of wire. Verizon did it, at least in my area. And guess what happened? The price went down.

This is really a non-issue anyway. Before long wireless technologies are bound to come along that will kill off any wired service.

I prefer wired internet over wireless for two reasons: in my neighborhood, there’s no cap on wired internet; and, I feel that wired is more secure than wireless.

Verizon offers 4G home internet in my neighborhood. It would be a lot faster than what I currently have. The problem is, I would pay for the amount of data that I use.

On the other hand, I can continue with my slow, wired, UNLIMITED internet for one flat rate per month. Since we watch Netflix, we need unlimited, flat-rate data.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

Reply | Quote