How is this not investigated as an antitrust violation?
North America has some of the highest telecom prices in the world with some of the slowest speeds and worst service. There's clearly something very wrong with the market.
I live in a rural college town on the East Coast USA. I paid Verizon 90 USD per month for 1.5Mbit DSL and a home phone number.
I had this phone service for about 12 years. It was horrible. When the phone rang, the DSL would stop working. When I ended calls, the DSL would stop working. There was so much static on the line I could barely talk/hear others. But it grew worse and started impacting my ability to work from home after COVID.
Verizon said they could "roll a truck" to my house in about two months if I agreed to pay several hundred dollars upfront. I told them no. I had had enough. I ported my phone number to Consumer Cellular and use 4G for Internet access now. It's faster, $30 cheaper each month and much more reliable although I do limit my use as it has a 35 GB per month cap and "may" slow down if I go over that. I wonder, would it slow down more than Verizon's 1.5Mbit?
I'm still Waiting on Elon and Starlink to save us.
Starlink, unfortunately, will not present meaningful competition. It will really only be viable in sparsely populated areas--even once the full constellation is deployed, there simply won't be the bandwidth for large numbers of users in densely populated areas like major cities--and both Starlink spokespeople and Musk himself have not been particularly coy about that fact...though I suppose neither have they tried particularly hard to push back against the prevailing tech-media narrative that once Starlink is fully armed and operational it will have Comcast, Spectrum, Cox, et al. quaking in their boots.
I think Starlink has a chance to raise the floor in rural areas.
Telcos (usually) do an OK job when there's a competing cable company, and vice versa, but when it's just one offering, there's often low reliability, low speed or both. This is most often in rural areas, where Starlink should be viable.
Some urban areas do fall into the same single provider, low quality offering, and Starlink won't be viable there.
Starlink will be good for people in rural areas, but it won’t positively change the existing economics of terrestrial internet service.
Frontier doesn’t offer slow DSL to rural areas because they’re rolling in cash from having no competitors. And when they lose customers to Starlink, it’s going to make their subscriber revenue to infrastructure expenditure ratio even worse.
If I'm Frontier, why spend on infra to provide a better product to people in areas with no competitors? That's just money spent with no change in revenue.
Now if there's a viable competitor, it's a choice between spending the money to keep customers or not spending the money and losing the customers over time. Terrestrial networking can easily beat Starlink on bandwidth, availability, latency, jitter, etc, all the quality metrics (except portability), but only if the terrestrial network makes the effort.
Telcos have the ability to quickly roll out new networks when they're inspired. AT&T ran fiber to the home (GPON) in several markets within about 18 months when Google Fiber announced they were entering those markets (which they then decided not to). Telcos have an army of people (many consultants) who can run outdoor wiring and do home installation, they have easy access to poles, and (mostly) a decent database of addresses and line lengths to get multifiber lines factory manufactured to roll out with minimal field splicing.
And that's the hard way; things like better remote terminal equipment and/or backhaul don't require a lot of capital or labor individually (but may in aggregate), or just more adaptive DSL speed profiles just developer labor and configuration pushes. I could probably get 50% more downstream speed and 2-3x my upstream speed, but my ISP has inflexible speed profiles; that's probably not the issue for people on 1.5 M dsl, but it's got to be an issue for some.
If you're not familiar with Frontier -- they currently aren't profitable and recently filed bankruptcy. Their network consists mainly of the old rural systems that the big telecoms didn't want due to a lack of profitability. The big and profitable telecoms have concentrated their service to denser areas, and pulled out of lesser profitable rural areas entirely, even though they had a monopoly in those areas.
Their bad service is not the result of a lack of competition, it's a lack of a profitable business model. It is simply more expensive to connect 1 customer with a mile of wire than it is to connect 100 or 1000 customers with a mile of wire. I don't think there's any way to solve this problem without subsidization of rural internet.
> Frontier doesn’t offer slow DSL to rural areas because they’re rolling in cash from having no competitors.
They actually do. The reason they’re going bankrupt is because competitors have started showing up due to the Connect America Fund causing them to lose customers in droves.
Simultaneously they took funds themselves and didn’t bother using them to upgrade infrastructure.
Source: previous frontier customer who couldn’t leave fast enough. Also convinced every single neighbor to do the same, even the ones who thought it was “fine” and wanted to be “loyal”.
Rural broadband (non-satellite) has always required more infrastructure per subscriber. More revenue, like through the subsidies you mention, are the only way to fix the problem. The lack of competition in rural areas is more of a symptom of the inherent infrastructure problem, rather than the cause.
The Connect America Fund is also known as the "universal service high-cost program"
Isn't the point to target sparsely populated areas? I haven't seen anyone saying it will replace fibre optic networks in high density areas. 1Gbps is becoming common in New Zealand major centres and I've seen 4Gbps offered recently as well (with some minor upgrades required)
My parents live an hour out of our city (2 with traffic) and their service is around 3Mbps and it has just slowly degraded over the time they've lived there and been left behind by ISPs. They do have a great view of the sky though for their connectivity issues. I love the night sky there and soon I hope to love it even more knowing that its no longer a frustrating trade off for them.
Rural broadband and satellite providers are the ones looking to be disrupted with their low speeds, low data caps and high costs.
> Tesla certainly isn't, and their customer service is not good.
How is Tesla not pro-consumer? Genuinely curious. My thoughts as a non-customer are that they have blazed the trail for normalizing EVs. Without Tesla, the Porsche Taycan likely wouldn't exist, Rivian wouldn't exist in the same way, and electric vehicles altogether would probably be in the same place they were 10 years ago.
Even if their product isn't the best, at least it's an option, which leads to more competition, which in my eyes seems to be pro-consumer.
There’s both a legitimate challenge (the land masses are huge in countries like Canada and the US) and functional monopolies that are leveraged by the companies who own the infrastructure that stretches out over those land masses.
Canada is an easier example because it’s essentially serviced by 3 companies who then lease out to the smaller “competitors”: for rural areas some people have the choice of either DSL over oxidized above-ground lines or tower-to-dish internet where the tower is daisy-chained from another tower or from it’s own oxidized lines. There is no cell coverage at all, and poor phone service. If someone in an area like that wants internet the company says that ~”the cost of the service must cover all the infrastructure and maintenance” and then they base that cost on only a few percent of people actually using it. In that way it’s hard to argue against “well, it costs us $1500/mo to provide service to 10 users, so we’re losing money when we charge a ‘reasonable’ $120”. But what’s really happening is that people in those areas are bandwidth starved, signing up for anyone who can provide decent service, and signing up in bulk while the company oversubscribes. It’s easy for them to still show losses publicly, but on the back end they are collecting government subsidies and using free capital to extend the network as far as they can.
> When the phone rang, the DSL would stop working. When I ended calls, the DSL would stop working.
In Russia such issues were just solved by adding some passive "splitter" device that supposedly filtered some of voice call from DSL data transfer. Every DSL ISP did it.
Same. I still have a couple of DSL splitters Verizon gave me when I had DSL ~20 years ago. They should have been included with the installation. One can probably find the splitters online for a few bucks if they need them.
We just didn't get Starlink in Placerville, because we are surrounded by 100-ft tall trees. So we are still stuck on microwave links. (ATT ran fiber to within yards of the house more than a decade ago, and never lit it because the FCC allowed them not to. They pocketed the $half-trillion the FCC let them tax landlines for to build it, though.)
But it is good news that Pville is in a served area now. Where did you find a prairie in Pville?
We're lucky - it's at the top of a hill overlooking a giant valley up mosquito road I think on the west side of town? It took a few tries and there is still a minor obstruction which causes occasional 10s drops. It's my in-laws house (I just bought the starlink set up for them so there would be better connectivity when I'm there).
If I had control over placement and such I think I could get a view without obstruction.
They still have calnet as a fallback network, but it's slow and has similar latency.
Have you looked at T-Mobile's home ISP product? I'm in an urban area, but it's been working great here @ $50/mo. Last speed test was 220Mbps down / 60Mbps up.
The fcc never gave them half a trillion. The fcc never had half a trillion to give. Can you show me where in ATTs financial statements they gained $500 billion or anywhere near that?
It was a $half billion. And obviously the FCC never gave it to anybody; as I wrote right there in the very posting you replied to, landline subscribers were taxed for it.
A $half billion seemed like a lot of money back then.
I feel like geo internet such as HughesNet would be both cheaper and better than what you describe. Geo is high latency but at least better bandwidth than 1.5Mbps
It would create huge shockwaves in the US if these problems were fixed, like fixed for real. It's an ingrained part of the North American market. You would, IMO, have to go all the way to removing all money, except state funds, from politics to start to fix this. Top to bottom fixed are needed. Turtles all the way down.
At least in the areas so rural that the power companies didn't want to build out infrastructure either, where electricity only became available after FDR's Rural Electrification Act formed non-profit local electrical coops, the problem can be solved by allowing those still existing coops to get into the broadband business.
Mississippi changed the law to allow this, and gave out matching block grants to get the ball rolling, and has seen great results.
The comment makes sense to me if I read “state” as “government entity” rather than “individual state in the union”.
Elections cost money to run, someone has to pay for that, so allowing funding but forcing all the money coming into the system to come from the government makes it harder for private individual or group X to subvert it in a “I scratch your back here and you remember this later” way.
I suspect that first amendment will bar bans on advertising that would be necessary for this to be fully effective (without another amendment, of course), but a lot of progress is still possible without running afoul of 1A.
Corruption is basically legal in the US. You will go to jail for trying to bribe a judge but there are dozens of totally legal ways to bribe politicians. This is one of the most significant problems with American politics and is why quite a few things are perverse and broken.
In reductionist terms the real underlying reason for market failure is regulatory capture.
As to utility poles, a large number of poles are owned by power companies who by and large do not offer retail broadband services, so even here you are barking up the wrong tree.
That being said, there are issues with utility poles which need to be addressed. Efforts such as one touch make ready and the like are needed on a national level.
The parent to my original post identified a problem, but misdiagnosed the root cause and prescribed an incorrect solution.
As noted above a lot of poles are owned by power companies that do not offer broadband service. Furthermore exclusive franchises have not been permitted for a good while anymore.
Anybody with the correct permits can secure space on poles. This isn’t the issue. Part of the problems is how costs are assigned and how timely work progresses.
I'm guessing by "decouple utility pole ownership/permitting" you're thinking about the Last Mile.
This is almost exactly what happened in Britain.
The last mile telephone system is owned by Openreach, which is owned by British Telecom, but they're required to sell the things you'd actually want that system for at regulated wholesale prices to any outfit that wants to retail it.
So for example they'll sell you LLU (Local-loop Unbundled) service which means you can put data onto a copper cable between a home or business property and one of the thousands of physical telephone exchanges that used to house Strowger electro-mechanical switches when that's how telephones worked. You also get some footprint inside the exchange. How you make that into an ISP is your business, but unlike running cables to millions of houses, running fibre to a few thousand telephone exchanges is something a business might actually compete at and sure enough BT have competition for that part of the problem, at least outside the very rural areas.
Or if you're a small outfit and you don't want contracts to shove data over fibres around the country you can buy Wholesale Line Rental for a higher price and Openreach will deliver the bits from that copper cable to a single point elsewhere on the telephone network, then you just build your ISP at that location.
Since Openreach isn't allowed to sell retail products, the regulator mostly needs to make sure that it doesn't deliberately tweak these prices to benefit its owner, BT, which does sell retail products to consumers. For example maybe BT doesn't need Wholesale Line Rental, the regulator needs to make sure the price for it makes sense anyway as smaller ISPs would otherwise be run out of business.
Overall I'm very satisfied with the results. Britain's cable Internet is a monopoly instead (Virgin) but of course almost everywhere that can get cable has a telephone line, so at least they are competing with somebody. More than 95% of households could actually get Superfast broadband (ie 30Mbps or better if the WiFi wasn't in an upstairs bedroom connected via a 1970s bell wire phone extension)
In the US, the 1996 telecoms act setup similar, but weaker, requirements for incumbent local (telephone) exchange carriers. But a series of regulatory and court decisions ended up with almost all of that being vacated. Basically cable worked to get excluded because they were 'new', and then telco worked to get excluded because it wasn't fair to make them do it when cable didn't have to, and the regulator said between cable, telco, power line (hah!) and radio (hah, but slightly less hah) users had choices and everything was fine.
And the key weakneses were that the companies weren't restrucured, so retail could charge less than wholesale rates and corporate accounting would sort it out, that makes it really hard to compete; and even bigger was that access was only on a space avaialable basis, and new facilities (namely DSL remote terminals) were purpose built to provide desirable products to end users while minimizing space such that there was no requirement to provide competitive access since there was no space.
From accross the pond, OpenReach seems like a big success, and what we could have had, but didn't end up with.
National regulatory authorities may, in accordance with Article 68, impose obligations on undertakings to meet reasonable requests for access to, and use of, specific network elements and associated facilities, in situations where the national regulatory authorities consider that denial of access or unreasonable terms and conditions having a similar effect would hinder the emergence of a sustainable competitive market at the retail level, and would not be in the end-user’s interest.
I hope it stays the same in the UK now. This practice has also had similar positive development in the Netherlands.
the US had this local loop unbundling. anyone could build, and anyone else could access those incumbent carrier's lines to provide service at regulated wholesale rates. this was created by the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
but then fiber came along, and Verizon vs FCC (2002) slowly made it's way through courts, got to the supreme court, and the supreme court sided with Verizon, who said fiber was so fancy, so costly, so new, that they required a monopoly. the Supreme Court overruled Congress & upturned the Tecommimications Act & have fiber a local monopoly, and things in the US have been getting slowly worse ever since.
We had a similar shitshow with the local incumbent in NZ, until LLU was passed in 2006, with a split of the monopoly operator into two separate retail + wholesale and network companies.
Went from shitty 256kbps ADSL to 1gps FTTH, with 2gbps and 4gbps options on the horizon.
The usual conservative suspects were complaining about interference with property rights, undermining investor confidence, unnecessary expenditure for the size of the nation, etc.
None of the doom and gloom predictions came to pass.
And now, of course, everyone loves it, and our household monthly bandwidth used has gone from about 100-200GB to terabytes with all the streaming and Linux ISO downloading.
In the UK the wholesale access part applies even to FTTC/P, so you can get fibre all the way to your door operated by Openreach and connected to BT Wholesale but with packets being passed to your choice of ISP for internet access.
There are some additional requirements - I think in the early days you had to take a modem from BT and there’s a minimum commitment (used to be 18 months).
Antitrust laws are incredibly vague. Here's the relevant part of the Sherman Act as an example.
>Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony,
You can’t begin to understand anti-trust law in US without looking at the extensive body of case law too - like any common law system, just reading the statute doesn’t tell you the whole story.
My limited understanding of US politics (UK resident, Irish citizen here) is that lobby groups, once considered criminal organisations to the US senate, have gained 'acceptence' via decades of regulation creep i.e. the backdoor. This is why such loud responses have appeared from the 'Net neutraility' movement. The consequence is; more for the haves, less for the have-nots. Participation in democracy is a requirement, not an option... it can get exhausting though...
Why do people think there’s something inherently wrong with lobbying. Lobbying the government with your opinions is an essential right and a key part of how a government needs to work.
I think the problem is when you're not particularly familiar with the US senate lingo or a non US native. In this case, the term 'lobbying' might most often be heard abroad when discussions are around the problem of the 'big money' behind lobbying. And it's this practise that was unlawful a few decades ago, not the lobbying itself. My bad, educated a little more and thankful.
The issue in germany is quite different though. There is a unique legal situation where isps can use unrelated digging operations to throw in their cables if they want. This results in effectively no investment in new last mile infrastructure ever, because if you where to pay for it all your competitors would use your investement to extend their networks as well and charge lower prices, since they didn't have to pay for anything. Some cities tried to create their own networks only to be outcompeted by the telekom who immediately used the opportunity to lay their new cables for free.
Varies widely. I could be fantastic in one town, but terrible in the next town over, even if the towns are similar in terms of size, density, demographics, and wealth. But in general, more places than not have pretty poor broadband.
From what I understand, most European countries have some sort of system in place where one company owns the copper/fiber line to your house, and another company connects that line to the backbone. (I'm oversimplifying because I don't understand it) The US doesn't have that- the same company that maintains the copper maintains the connection to the backbone. And if there's only one line to your house, that company has a monopoly on you, and they have no financial reason to better their service.
Thankfully, my house/neighborhood is serviced by at least three broadband providers. I pay $60 a month for 150Mb/s up, 150Mb/s down. Customer service is pretty good. I'm very happy with it.
25Gb/s though, that's wild. I have difficulty imagining it just from a technical perspective.
Most mid or large US cities have gigabit options, sometimes multiple options (in which case prices will be affordable)
Small cities and towns probably won’t have fiber. If you’re lucky and the cable infrastructure is new, you might be able to get gigabit cable, but it’s more likely that the affordable options are 25-300mbps.
If you are in a rural village, you may or may not have cable availability. (Likely depending on your proximity to other populated areas) Without cable, you may be relying on LTE or DSL.
And finally, if you’re in an area more rural than this, the only utilities that come to your house are likely electricity and copper phone. You’re either choosing between satellite or a (likely weak) cell signal.
The problem in US with cable isnt download speeds, it is that the major providers limit uploads rather drasticaly (they never talk about how much upload they can give and talk about "gig" internet). I've had a 300/12 Mbps connections, that's pretty insane...
That's, at least partially, a technical limitation. The cable television network was designed and built for massively more signal going to homes (vudeo) than coming back from them (authentication or whatever).
DSL does it more by choice, but the main problem there is that there's just so little bandwidth all together (upload and download combined).
That's not to say I disagree with you. I dropped cable internet and switched to fiber the moment it became available, because it gave me symmetric speeds.
Maybe so, but that’s an extreme outlier. In general, cities have good networks even if it’s a monopoly and rural areas don’t have them at all, not even one run by a monopolist.
Not a US citizen so take this with a grain of salt, but it seems to be mostly country wide. A US colleague of mine lives less than 10 mins from our office (which is close to many other offices), and he is struggling to get anything beyond 20mbps.
Cities will of course be higher, typically ranging from 100-900 for non-gigabit. Rural is more frustrating, and will hopefully be alleviated by the new satellite ISPs coming online.
I’ve lived in many kinds of places. But please focus on the data I provided. There are of course exceptions to the general trend of speeds being higher in more densely connected areas.
I think that speed by state is a pretty bad measure for conveying anything useful. Speeds vary within each state by orders of magnitude, depending on whether you can get a connection to a particular medium or not.
I bet the full data set of speeds is not a bell curve. There are probably huge peaks for each medium, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the mode and mean are significantly different.
Yes, it’s not great, but I hoped it would serve to correct the misperception that such slow speeds are typical in the US. I hope I can find better data next time.
It’s country-wide, except in the very few areas where municipal broadband or community-local ISPs have stepped in and run their own fiber.
There’s a fiber loop a hundred feet away that’s restricted to businesses, but it still scares Comcast (because it’s a fiber run by one of those local ISPs) enough that my price for a symmetric is half what it would be on the other side of town.
Not the OP but as a resident, it's available at my address near the edge of the city, albeit in a larger building rather than an older individual home, so I imagine it's accessible to most people in the city limits. The city has municipal connections into homes that ISPs can then lease, allowing them to compete for customers without competing over infrastructure rights, so it seems to have the benefits of both ends of a public-private partnership.
One of the most well-known providers of the fastest speeds, Init7, charges 64.75 CHF/mo (~70 USD) with a 333 CHF (~365 USD) setup fee.
It's fairly easy nowadays to find 10 Gbps symmetric plans for 50 CHF/mo, although they used to cost more a few years ago.
How does that work when even 10Gbps ethernet is still cost-prohibitive for SOHO applications and "real" 1Gbps+ Wi-Fi just doesn't happen in thick-walled european houses...
10gbit is just on the border of affordable for IT hobbyist people
Lots of data center hardware getting sold in masses on eBay.
And copper cables these days also can do 10gbit, but even fiber at home you can get the Transceivers for about 15€ each, and a switch for another 200€used, some old PC as Router with cheap 10gbit card also works wonders
The problem here is most people want new. Why? I have no idea. Maybe they're thinking of everyone buying one.
I've been looking at making a NAS box and it would cost less than 200 Euros for decent hardware (better than some QNAP, including a 10Gbps fiber adapter and Wifi) and a completely custom aluminum case.
I hope I'm not taken the wrong way - but in certain geographies technologist salaries/total-comp are such that it costs us more money to search for bargains than it does to plonk down $hundreds for brand-name SMB hardware for our SOHO gear.
That is is why we buy new kit instead of used. I could spend 2-3 hours of my time scanning eBay and Craigslist and comparing spreadsheets of compatible equipement and then waiting for USPS mail deliveries (at my $200/hr consulting rate) or I could spent 5-10 minutes on Ubiquiti's online store and be done with it.
It's ugly and I dislike it (the thrill of the chase...). But that's capitalism. Frankly I won't be able to "enjoy" this again until I'm after retirement...
What part is cost prohibitive? It really doesn’t have to be too expensive to have a modem like device that attaches fiber and a number of (10) gigabit lan ports and fast WiFi.
Its an amount of bandwidth that’s difficult to fill but that’ll change.
Prices for 10Gbps switches are in the hundeds of Euros, compared to the prices for 1Gbps switches - or the type of 4 or 5-port switches embedded in ISP-provided CPE.
> I assure you that your customer profile is not representative of the vast majority of your ISP's customers.
The top tier is almost always a tiny minority [1] of any ISP's customers but it's convenient marketing and usually has by far the highest margins. It's like arguing Bugatti buyers aren't the majority of Volkswagen Auto Group's customers: it's true but what difference does that make?
> It's like arguing Bugatti buyers aren't the majority of Volkswagen Auto Group's customers: it's true but what difference does that make?
Actually, you raise a good point of discussion: But I'll argue that UK residential ISPs touting their highest-tiers as "proof" they're being competitive, even though only a tiny minority of punters shell out for it, as being self-serving and ultimately against the national interest.
With Bugatti: people are buying an asset. You're paying for the quality of the engineering workmanship that goes into the final product - but once you've given your $1-3m over to Herbert Diess you're no-longer an ongoing concern to them, beyond the dealer's servicing fees - and your investment in a single vehicle means little to the road and highways infrastructure where you live - even if your jurisdiction implements vehicle-value-based property tax and road-usage-tax it won't mean much at the end-of-the-day - but with residential broadband it's something else...
Not normally no but in this instance it is "representative of the vast majority of my ISP's customers with 1/1gbps connection". I'm convinced that most people who order 1gbps (or 25 for that matter) is aware that WiFi isn't able to provide those speeds most of the time if ever.
For the past, literally 15 years, I've balked at a workgroup switch that cost more than $50.
(Granted, since last year I've been a convert to Ubiquiti gear, but that wasn't a valid option when I was a teenager living with my parents, trying to convince my dad on good tech to buy within a reasonable budget)
I have a bunch of WiFi ac and ax devices in the house and they collectively can easily saturate my 1G WAN link. While I don't have a workflow they would warrant 10G, the overhead is getting desirable.
> That’s why America, the birthplace of the internet, has some of the slowest, most expensive broadband in the rich world,
You see this repeated everywhere, but is it actually true? At least for speed, the data I've seen recently indicates the answer is "no". The Wikipedia page with charts from speedtest.net and speedtestnet.io has the US actually doing very well, not at the very top, but close to it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Interne...
The US is in the #11 spot in both charts, with speeds of 192 Mbps and 171 Mbps, respectively.
Consider two groups of ten people. Group A consists of ten people, who each have a Ferrari. In this group, the average car is a Ferrari. But in Group B there are also ten people, one of them has ten Ferraris, nine others own a 2CV. In this group the average car is also a Ferrari.
But Group B's cars suck. 90% of people in Group B do not have access to the "average" of a Ferrari.
There are two elements to access and the US doesn't do great at either of them. One element is: Can you actually get a decent service? If the best service you could actually buy is a 2Mbps ADSL connection then, "No", you can't, even if your best friend has 1Gbps symmetric. The US is almost inevitably going to suck in this respect for some of its most rural residents, but nobody in a suburb let alone inside a city ought to be suffering this under a rational approach. Second element is: Can you afford decent service? Maybe 1Gbps is technically on offer in your neighbourhood, for the same price as your rent. Obviously you won't buy that. In some cases this is going to be impacted by other economic decisions. If your country's idea of a "living wage" doesn't include paying for Internet service then that's maybe a problem in 2021.
The best way to handle all these issues is to use the median rather than the mean. If most people have no Ferraris, then the median person has no Ferrari. If most people can't afford gigabit, then the median person has no gigabit internet.
And yes, the US has much lower median speed (Speedtest.net reports an "average" of 191 Mbps in 11th place, and FairInternetReport reports a "median" of 30 Mbps in 23rd place)
Interesting about the pandemic. So that suggests the access problem was less bad than I had thought, since presumably lots of people were able to buy better Internet service, once it was important to them.
30Mbps seems fine to me. I only have slightly more than that here, and I have never felt the need to buy more even though I could afford it. Of course that's for one person, the median US household size is considerably more.
I've only given the following a cursory glance, but it doesn't look like consumers had much to do with the speed increase. Instead, Comcast was concerned with being called out on price gouging in Baltimore [0]. Or they increased their minimum speed without increasing the price [1,2] - which I'd think implies Baltimore had a point about the price gouging.
So while some people may have been able to buy better internet before, the data doesn't support that it was affordable, if it was even available at all.
No ISP on the planet can guarantee speeds across the internet. They can only guarantee speeds on their own network. I suspect most people that use speedtest.net understand this as it quite literally shows that your ISP is hosting the test (assuming your ISP has one).
Really? I've never seen my ISP listed on that site or seen in any obvious way that my ISP is hosting the test. Maybe it's there but if it is, it's either hidden, or done in a way such that it's non obvious your getting "fake" speeds compared to the rest of the internet. There's no disclaimer that because it runs on their servers you'll get higher than normal speeds in the test. And in my experience where I live the average consumer has no idea those tests are bullshit.
If it's actually a test of internet speed, why are they choosing to run it in a way that does not reflect the true speed you will see when using the internet. I remember reading a reddit post where a person said he noticed that the speed tests were ridiculously faster and thus decided to proxy all his internet through that address. Anecdata but it was stated it _vastly_ increased his internet speeds until the ISP caught on and stopped it somehow. The question was how they might continue to get around it.
It's obvious the ISP are not providing even a fraction of the advertised speeds to an advanced user but average people tend to really believe they will see those speedtest speeds throughout the rest of the internet.
"the true speed" isn't a thing for internet. All speedtest services just measure speed for specific server.
fast.com is notable speedtest service because it measures between Netflix' server, I recommend it. It reflects real usage. If your use case is torrenting, just download popular Linux ISO.
I don't know what the reality is but I doubt something just a bit technical (as running a speedtest) shows the average speed for everyone. My guess is it is worse than it appears but that the people with some technical expertise is better off in the US than in many other countries but that the average user is worse off. I can't prove that either way though.
> It was a collective effort by many people (of varying nationalities) across many countries (US, UK, France, etc../).
What are you talking about? The internet started with Arpanet. Later, other countries built their own TCP/IP networks and connected the.
There is no ambiguity and no collective effort across many countries except for the fact that many countries later built their own parts of the network. The internet began in the US.
Arpanet as a project built upon existing ideas to create a wide-area network. Yes, this project began in the US and it built upon the work of others.
I wasn’t there and I’m not a historian, but when I try to understand the facts I see many nationalities and countries having contributed to what we ultimately call the Internet.
Having ideas to create something is very different from actually building it.
Everything is built on existing ideas. It is meaningless to reference this.
> I see many nationalities and countries having contributed to what we ultimately call the Internet.
We aren’t talking about ‘what we ultimately call the internet’. This discussion is about the birthplace of the internet which is unequivocally the US, and which you denied.
The birthplace of the internet was the US. The birthplace of the web was Switzerland. It’s complete bullshit to pretend otherwise.
Yes it is, when you contradict something, you deny it.
I’ll assume you didn’t intend it as a denial and that this made an unintentionally ambiguous statement. We can clear this up easily with a clarifying question:
Do you agree that the US was the birthplace of the internet?
> So why is Altice slashing upload speeds? To be “in line with other ISPs.” In other words, “The rest of the industry is fucking awful, so why should we be any better?”
Wouldn’t the real reason with DOCSIS be so they have more downstream channels and less upstream? Giving them more downstream bandwidth to sell. Why didn’t the article mention this?
This is only an issue when providers use a configuration called low-split, which majority of providers do use.
The main issue is that changing the network to support higher upload speeds is that they need to replace most of the splitters in their network, but it is doable and there are providers that already did that.
It's strange as Altice is a French company (or partly owned by a French company by the same name) which owns/operates SFR in France.
I guess their French services are inline with French competition, except that means increasing speeds at lower prices, because competition.
The 1yr 'teaser rate' is ~US$19/month for 500/500, 160 TV channels and a home phone with unlimited calls. After a year it goes up to ~US$45, but because competition, you can threaten to leave or actually leave and get promo prices again. And it's europe, these prices include a 20% sales tax.
And that's kinda expensive, you should probably go with free.fr instead.
It wasn't always like this is in France. Telecom used to be quite terrible actually, so the government opened up everything. That's why you rarely see a case study on French telecom policy elsewhere in the world, nobody in industry wants to talk about it.
If you want more ISP competition where you live, I suggest getting active in your town government.
A while ago, I called up the town hall of the suburb where I grew up, and asked for a copy of their contract with Comcast. It technically doesn't grant them a monopoly -- that would be illegal -- but in effect it does. The contract says Comcast must serve any resident within two business days of the request. It also says the town can't give a better contract to another ISP (I forget the exact legal terms, this was years ago).
That means a startup ISP can't launch neighborhood by neighborhood. In order to provide service in the town, you need to build out connectivity everywhere, upfront. That is a multi million-dollar construction project which stands no chance of being paid back within a time period any investor would be comfortable with.
Even another large ISP wouldn't want to take this risk, which is why they still haven't done so in my home town. Best case is that you get around 5-10% of residents within a couple years. Even if your service is much better than the incumbent's, it can be hard to educate consumers. Most people won't know what they're missing, they'll be too lazy to switch, etc.
So, if you want to attempt to solve this problem in your town, there are a few things you can try to do:
- Make it so that startup ISPs can build out neighborhood by neighborhood. Yes, this means the hardest-to-reach/least profitable areas will be served last, but it's better than nothing.
- Get your town to fund construction. There are plenty of ISPs who would jump at the opportunity to serve your town if they didn't have to pay the capex. Have your town reach out to every startup ISP you can find and work on a deal.
- Build a municipal ISP. It's not that hard, more and more towns are doing it.
ISPs get away with too much BS nowadays and lobbying[0] is one of the main reasons why. The US is not even in the top 10 of countries ranked[1] by internet speed. I honestly think that if we changed a few rules around lobbying many problems would be solved pretty quickly and not only regarding the internet.
It's cheaper per capita to roll out fibre to 50 million people than to 5 million; no-one can seriously argue otherwise. This alone shows how broken the system is. Not only broadband but also healthcare and other services should be extremely cheap and well tested in the US in locations with a high density of people. That it is often as broken in high density areas as in rural areas baffles the mind. As a Scandinavian I'm often chocked how the US isn't number one. It really should be.
Living in sparsely populated fenno-scandinavian country I really never understood how badly others can do things... Like Germany and USA? Germany has no excuses, and USA does have some large areas, but outside those?
> It's cheaper per capita to roll out fibre to 50 million people than to 5 million;
This assumes an awful lot of things.
If the average number of linear feet constructed grows when going from 5 million to 50 million then the cost per capita isn’t going to decrease.
What going from 5 million to 50 million enables is averaging high cost builds over a larger subscriber base resulting in affordable prices for more people. Note that this will not however decrease costs overall.
I'm saddened that there is no 'best practices' toolkit for the enterprising folks in rural America who have the skills to install their own fiber. The real pervasive monopoly is interconnection.
There are a lot of (high level) resources online, but on a practical level you will have to deal with local permitting and right of way issues, so there really can’t be an ultimate mater plan.
Interestingly interconnection, or more precisely Internet capacity, isn’t really an issue. If you have enough subscribers, it is fairly straightforward to purchase wholesale bandwidth from one of the many commercial providers.
Years ago when I travelled in rural Tibet the phone signal was better than what I have now in Silicon valley. I didn't have phone signal today in a hospital in mountain view.
Normalising the dimensioning data links by arbitrary fractional throughput rates is an anachronism which needs to be challenged and eradicated from the entire industry.
Just to add another anecdote, I live 30 to 45 minutes (miles) outside of a major US city, just at the cusp of the metropolitan area. I live in a county, not in any city limits, etc.
We have access to at least two different providers offering gigabit service, along with many different speed services below that. We also have various satellite and cellular data options as well.
As stated many times before in various comments, articles etc: Sure, ISPs can definitely do better, but considering the landmass of the US and the different population densities, I think things are going pretty well. If you want to move rural enough, then a lot of things are going to become an issue utility wise, including electric, gas, water, internet, etc. The saying goes that you can't have your cake and eat it too. From prevailing comments and articles online it seems people want to be able to blindly pick literally anywhere on a map to live and also expect 100 Mb to gigabit service, not considering any sort of infrastructure that is around the area they have picked to live.
It's a mirror image of "shrinkflation" - the process whereby hiking of the price of chips gets partially disguised by reducing the number of chips in a bag rather than increasing the sticker price.
It's nice to have a symmetric connection, but for most people outside of tech, upstream is only stressed when uploading photos. It's rarely advertised outside of fine print. I personally love symmetric connections, but in some way the average consumer is subsidizing the costs for me.
This isn’t about symmetric connections. It’s about Altice lowering the upstream from 35 Mbps to 5 Mbps.
Going from 35 Mbps to 5 Mbps is ridiculous. It effectively lowers the quality of the broadband by bottlenecking connection.
You need upstream bandwidth to use your downstream. Having only 5% upstream of your downstream means the connection is at risk of congestion merely from return packets when downloading.
Once you saturate your upstream your downstream will become laggy and slow down.
Even ignoring headline downstream speeds, 5 Mbps of upstream bandwidth is a piddling amount of bandwidth. It is trivial to exhaust that amount of bandwidth just by normal Internet usage and a video call.
The whole thing is just a money grab from Altice by forcing customers to upgrade to more expensive packages just to get working broadband equivalent to what they had before.
Surely video calls must be the most common upstream killer these days? I am often in calls where coworkers turn off their cameras to avoid dropping off.
You can only use your new Boulangism toaster with approved, compatible groceries. Please hold your Boulangism approved food item in front of the Boulangism toaster to let it scan it. Your Boulangism toaster will open when it recognizes compatible food from producers from its partner program.
Paraphrased from Doctorow's excellent novella Unauthorized Bread.
No it is indeed an excellent and very believable story (although taken to the extreme). The general moral of that story doesn't jive the notion of having to get a free app to continue reading a blog article, even if a web browser suffices from a technical standpoint; so I cheekily referenced it in that context.
Juicero definitely sounds like the inspiration for Doctorow's novella.
Also annoyed. Turning a freaking blog platform into a walled garden is an absolute farce. What value exactly does Medium add over WordPress? It's trendy and newer? Has a more "minimal" design? The gimmicky inline comments? I've added Archive.is' Firefox addon and my default is to read Medium (and many other sites) as archives.
I really wish that search engines would start indexing these sites as humans see them. Maybe Brave can take a stance like that.
I avoid medium by default these days. Problem is more and more of these pay walled sites are "oddly" starting to appear near the top of search results. Even though that same data or news exists on non pay walled sites/blogs. TowardsDataScience is another one.
I know it's not the same but the rise of "Axios" feels just as artificial or pushed. Like all of a sudden it popped up and everyone is "what do you mean you've never heard of them, they're a top news organization." Yet the first time I heard of them was watching an interview they did where the journalist was interviewing a major politician whilst holding a look of absolute disgust on their face.
Here in the Netherlands this is now the standard for everything. What started as a cheaper than supplying a fob 2 factor, ended up naturally with locking up all info in apps. That, and Whatsapp being the only method of communication offered.
I encountered "whatsapp is the only option" exactly once; and stopped doing business with that company. (Whatsapp is not any sort of standard,and I definitely don't support it :-P )
I think I've seen it once or twice now. One is a small local burger side-gig here in Leeuwarden (limited in the sense that they only work/deliver on Friday's) which seems to exclusively work through Instagram and WhatsApp. I can't order from them because of this, but they are unique in this regard. But then again, their target demographic seem to be younger people who wish to buy not just burgers but also a photographable experience (at least, that is what I make of the pink hamburger buns and general vibe).
Tangentially related: one of those nasty new grocery delivery apps — this one is called 'Crisp' — only works with an Android or IOS app (which is weird, because it is just an online shop for groceries, and it is usually much easier to just set up a website for an online shop, so they are definitely in the game of manipulating their customers to the extreme based on purchase patterns and other trackable behaviour).
All in all, nothing major yet. But yes, very annoying.
That could also be explained by pure economy. It's too costly to support many communication channels so they just focus on the ones that brings more money. And Whatsup is one of major chat platforms in Netherlands due to historical reasons.
Absolutely true. But if there is something we have (failed to) learn time and time again: that way lies madness.
I'll vote with my wallet and hope to counterbalance things slightly. That's one way to ensure that there will still be alternatives when ie6/flash/whatsapp are inevitably End-of-Lifed .
Many. Sometimes after digging through the website you can find a forgotten phone number or even email adres, but that's clearly not where they're nudging you. WhatsApp, Facebook or Twitter, or their own app.
As emphasised by Freak_NL, it seems particularly ironic that this is Cory Doctorow behind the paywall.
What I don't understand is why when I'm searching for technical articles, Google ranks Medium at the top of results. Doesn't this fall into the whole "one result for the spider and another for the user" trap to get marked down? It's a blight on the web.
Spot on... I was just about to write about the very same point, and delighted to see it's the top response here... Paywalls, paywall, paywalls, please. Line up, line up.
I wonder how would your position change if they put another option that says "read in browser for 1$" and what it does, is to immediately pop up the 1 step payment confirmation and unlocks the article once you complete the payment(which itself could be 1 step with faceID or touchID on Apple devices).
This rant is the default reaction on for any article that is not presented frictionlessly and for free. There must be a metric in the analytics for it :)
Let's call it bounce/rant ratio. Over 1.0 it means that people don't care enough about your article, if it's under 1.0 it means that people can take even more in order to read it.
An account doesn't net them $1 though, and $1 is also a lot of money to risk considering Medium hosts a lot of garbage. If the button represented the true income they earn from someone creating a throwaway account then I'd be happy as it would be in the range of a few cents.
It's free market. I also don't see how we are entitled to get it for free or get it in our own terms(I want it for free and I want it without creating an account and I want it it he browser).
If the offer is not good, just bounce. The entitlement for for free stuff on the internet is amusing, what I actually wonder is if it is a millennial thing to believe that we deserve it for free or at the perceived inartistic value of our own. My observations are that the older generations and the newer generations have no problem with understanding the concept of paying for content(with money, data or access to you for an upsell later).
The early internet has spoiled us when everything was made for the glory and later in 2000s free again but paid by VCs during the gold rush and land grab.
I don't see the irony. The article is about the ISP situation in the USA, which is arguably monopolistic in nature. It's hardly the case with blogging platforms, in fact, lately most of the blogposts here on HN tend to be hosted on SubStack.
I also remember the days when Medium was supposed to change publishing. Back then, Medium were the "good guys". Then they monetised.
I would like that. It’s easy to understand: Medium is a business, they need money to keep going, so they ask people to pay for the service. Instead I’m left guessing why they so desperately want me to sign up, even though they probably can’t pay their employees with user accounts.
I think you have a point there. Why would you be required to create an account, all you want to do is to read an article right? The connection is not obvious, as you said it. Putting a price tag for instant anonymous reading could clarify things.
> The surging anti-monopoly movement has been greeted with skepticism from the left, some of whom suspect the whole thing is merely fetishizing competition for its own sake
I wish it would become less common place on HN to share articles that a) are hidden behind paywall and b) start with a loaded sentence antagonising some abstract unknown political entity (who even is "the left"?). The entire article is about lacking broadband in the US. Why even include some random rambling about US politics when the subject matter is not even political to begin with?
1. A big part of the political spectrum believes a free market will lead to the best resulting infrastructure
2. Internet infrastructure is one of these things where the "shape" of the incentive structure can make or break how things develope
Therefore if your goal is getting fast broadband for as many people as possible as soon as possible, political or organisational interventions will get you there quicker than just waiting and hoping. And getting their could be key for the future economic development of whole nations.
Gladly we have many regions and a few decades of network infrastructure building, so seeing which approaches worked and which didn't is just a matter of looking carefully and trying not to lie to oneself about this.
That being said: so far the "free market" approach didn't really keep its promises if we are honest.
There hasn't been a free market approach with regards to internet in the United States in any sense of the word. From municipal to federal government the market has been captured by regulations that results in many places in the United States only having one available ISP that provides broadband internet. This was pretty evident when you see Google's efforts to roll out fiber internet all around the United States being stonewalled left and right.
I will concede that even if the market were free, there'd be plenty of edge cases (a lot of last-mile infrastructure) that'd reduce access, and I think those cases are where the government can excel. But realistically it seems more likely that Starlink is going to be available sooner than any movement from local governments.
It's a bit disingenuous to think they're just aligning their offering to competitors. This is the usual trick to impede p2p protocols like torrent on their network, without outright saying so.
A friend of mine runs an internet provider (in Europe though) and he's flooded by all the takedown requests of warez content on his network. Luckily he's not in Germany, so people don't get fined or sent threatening lawyers letters so he just notifies customers. Other providers just swallow them.
TL;DR Most providers do limit uploads for various reasons, reading it as a monopolistic measure is far fetched.
The problem with internet in the USA is the same as most problems in the USA: a huge population scattered across a huge country. Good luck with serving fast internet to everyone, it's not Europe.
As a proof of this, metropolitan hubs in the USA are fine internet wise.
Looking at how well public services are run in general, I doubt a public monopoly would be better than this "private" monopoly: last mile providers in the USA have a hard job.
> The problem with internet in the USA is the same as most problems in the USA: a huge population scattered across a huge country. Good luck with serving fast internet to everyone, it's not Europe.
The population density here in Finland is half of USA and we still got 1gbit fiber available in pretty much any city.
Nobody is expecting to have fiber into every farm but any city/town with more than 10k people can have fiber installed in a profitable way just fine.
This is possible due to rules/laws that encourage competition not stifle it. (Mainly centered around forcing renting out the last mile infrastructure to your competition at reasonable rates)
But in reality those 16k hold a very small part of the population. Them existing is not a reason you could not have fiber available for the majority of the population (and for cheap like 100mbit unlimited for $20 per month)
Here in Finland only 97 towns have over 10k population (out of 310). And this number has gotten “better” over the last couple decades as we joined a bunch of small/dying places together.
Basically for any argument about population density Finland just has a really low density. From western countries only Canada, Iceland and Australia beat us in that.
(Finland is 216 out of 250 worldwide with our 16 per km^2)
Claiming that America has slow connections compared to Europe without acknowledging the obvious differences in infrastructure cost is ridiculous.
Europe is way more dense than America, just look at any light pollution map and compare. Europe has also a LOT of previously built roads that make deployments way cheaper.
Once you take that into account, the ISP market in the US is not that dysfunctional, it’s just that economies of scale matter too much.
The US has a well developed and competitive national backbone market.
When building networks the geographical extremities of the nation do not matter, only the distance to the closest point of presence.
Europe and the US are not that dissimilar in geographical extent or population density, so neither of these can be used as convincing arguments for American exceptionalism.
The fact remains that the US is just that dysfunctional compared to Europe.
ISPs and carriers in the US have no problem deploying 5G nationwide. If only the first strand is expensive in a fiber deployment, why duplicate work by not installing residential fiber at the same time?
Also in the US, the availability of high speed, low cost fiber options versus slow, expensive copper can be accurately guessed based on nothing but the median home price in a neighborhood. When fully occupied apartment buildings lack fiber but not the townhomes across the street, "population density" is not a satisfactory explanation.
Canada and Australia have the same issues as the us. It’s mostly a geography issue.
I’ve also never seen convincing evidence that US is really worse on average than other large countries— Germany, France, Italy, Spain. All the speed test rankings place us around the same.
When you consider pricing—you need to consider average income. ISP costs are mostly tied to local wages. So you can’t compare US prices to Romania.
This argument every single time. If you take into account people, high pop density is a downside. Laying fiber from one town to another you have to go through hundreds of private properties.
It's also worth pointing out that the US has faster Internet speeds than France, Germany, Spain or Italy. That has been true for at least 20 years running at this point.
The two largest economies in Europe have always had inferior Internet speeds to the US. France in particular has spent decades as a badly lagging second class Internet citizen on speeds. As recently as four years ago France was one of the absolute worst places in the affluent world for Internet speeds, while the US has routinely ranked near the top dozen affluent nations (competing mostly with far smaller nations, with far greater population density concentrated in a few major cities, such as Switzerland or Norway in the case of Europe).
It's really funny to read "I live in the middle of no fucking where and I all I have is a shitty DSL. Why won't the ISP pay $100k to deploy a cable just for me?"
They think it's any better in Europe? In the places where it is better it's because the government has given the isps a lot of money. Money that would be much better spent elsewhere, as I believe if you want good services you have to move to the cities - you shouldn't ask the rest of the country to subsidise your lifestyle.
Look at Romania. It is pretty similar to the US in density and number of small towns per capita I believe, and ISPs deliver fiber to shitty little towns with 5000 people for the same price as in the city. Somehow the United States can't do that?
Then look at Germany, they're squeezing up to 300 Mbps out of copper (really impressive tbh, but it's no fiber) and 4G is atrocious. The UK fairs much better in both. Spain seems to be quietly ahead of both in fiber.
It's all about people and politics, not technology or distance when it comes to good Internet.
The reverse argument makes as much, if not more, sense : rents in cities are far too high, the economy is too concentrated and it has negative side effects on quality of life, health, political stability, wealth disparity and growth. Deploying more infrastructure to cheaper areas and insentivizing decentralization helps solving that.
