The Broadband Gap

[size=+2]Average Download Speeds by Country[/size] (Mbps)

Japan 63.6

South Korea 49.5

Finland 21.7

France 17.6

Sweden 16.8

U.S.A. 4.9



U.S.

[size=-2]Source: Information Technology and Innovation Foundation[/size]

 

Don't forget about Canada

The report that I found rated Canada 8th @ 7.6 (Mbps)
My personal bandwidth is between 1 and 2 (Mbps)
Its a good thing I type slow


Alex

 

Oh, we here in the US are WELL aware of how badly we are being ripped off. Can we do anything about it? Nope. The socialist telecoms are well protected by the government and only have the incentive to drag their feet and suck.

 

That was sorta my point. If business is leaving this enormous gap, maybe we should force government to step in?

 

It could be that since the U.S. is such a large country and large swaths of low population areas are covered by 1xrtt wireless that brings down the average considerably. Major metropolitan areas are covered fairly thoroughly by high speed connections--even wireless in these areas is pretty decent.

 

Yes, but the speed for what you pay for highspeed internet leaves a lot to be desired for many people.

 

4.9Mbps? I wish. I live in the Bay Area, and I'm still stuck with 1.5Mbps DSL.

Another thing to keep in mind is that although some companies have very high advertised download/upload speeds, if they notice that you are using more bandwidth than average, they will cap your download/upload speed significantly - which makes the fast connection largely pointless, especially for BitTorrent users like me.

 

The larger the country, the more 'wide open spaces' there are, the lower the average connection will be.

In an overpopulated Europe, it is very easy to pull fiber to the door. it's also very easy to saturate a city with 3G/4G wireless and neighborhood WiFi hotspots.

In Western Kansas or Northern Alberta, not so much.

 

Long live FIOS. Actually it could be a lot faster. At least with verizon's fiber optic network, the infrastructure has the capability to reach crazy bandwidth. Here at the beach I'm stuck with comcrap, but I realize this is a lot better than most people have available to them.

Companies want to charge as much as they can and provide as little as they have to. There was this city is north carolina, I think, that set up their own internet provider company that provided at-cost access. They were sued and lobbied against like crazy by telecom companies for unfair business practices. When they couldn't prevent it they tried to cripple them with taxes and operating fees that made them charge the same sort of bogus rates the companies were and forcing them to give all this money to the city government so that it couldn't provide cheap internet access. This city made access provided different tiers of access. The cheapest was faster than the fastest time-warner tier of bandwidth and the fastest was almost the same cost as time-warner's slowest bandwidth tier. Time warner is such a joke and ripoff. It is a lot worse than comcast imho. I had to deal with it in NY. I don't know what happened to this city-run ISP, but I hope they are around and not crippled by regulation. I'm all for market-based solutions, but in some cases it doesn't work and this is a prime example.

 

I had Comcast when I was working in Augusta, GA last year and it was fast--it was consistently pegging the dial @ speedtest.net and was only $28 a month.

I also had Sprint Mobile Broadband and it was practically unuseable except at like 3am or something. All those 3g phones eating up the bandwidth I guess--too many users and not enough T1 connections.

 

I love FiOS, and feel it's one of the better values in terms of internet access. Too bad it's still not widespread.

 

as far as teh cable companies go....

People ALWAYS forget the the cable companies are regulated not just by the FCC, but by a LOCAL cable commission. These hotbeds of local corruption are quietly famous for squeezing things like dozens of 'free' government access channels, mobile tv production trucks, and free air time for the local city basket weavers left handed underwater breathing conference meetings.

This all has to be paid for, plus a 'local franchise fee', from subscriber payments, meaning YOU.

The local skim combined with local and fedgov rate caps mean that there is precious little money to spend on non-core non-tariff services like data. Do some rate research. You will find that the areas with the fastest Internet and widest range of features/dollar are those with the minimalist interference and skim from the local cable commissions.

Go blame your neighbor.

 

At least (some of) you Americans have FiOS, as overpriced as it is.

I can't get a fiber-to-the-home connection even if I was willing to pay $1000 a month for it.

 

I just checked the prices and wow, I'm surprised. We must have the "fastest" service but I know we pay a whole lot less for it than the advertised $140.

 

I find that hard to believe.

In 1985 I had a bonded dual BRI (each one a 2B+d, total of 256 Kbps) IDSN connection in my house in Germany for what was then DM 55 a month.

The company I worked for was willing to install an E3 data line which would have cost them less than DM 200 a month. And this was before the Bundespost was broken up and spanked.

U$1000- a month buys a LOT of bandwidth. 20+ years later with more carriers and price competition, if you make a few phone calls you will probably find someone willing to give you service.

 

Bandwidth? Yes.

Are they going to lay fiber all the way from the central office to my house just for me for $1000 a month? I seriously doubt it. It'd take them years to make back the investment.

 

Don't assume that the only way to get fiber is to pull fresh cable from a central office. For fiber rings, the concept of a central office is vanishingly useless. It all depends on how close the fiber is to your house.

Less than 100 meters from my house there is a hub of one of the metro sonet rings. I imagine that for $1000 a month Qwest would be more than happy to pull a pair of MMF fibers to my basement and let me hook into their metro gigabit VLAN Ethernet service.

Popular but often overlooked fiber right-of-ways that often host fiber rings include railway tracks, underground pipelines, underground spaces below high-tension power lines, straight-line runs between cell phone towers (although ptp microwave shots are still in common use), etc, etc.

FIOS is just a marketing name for a cable plant build out from one specific company. These consumer-driven programs are nice, but they are far from the only game in town. At higher speeds, the business tariffs might well be cheaper and easier to get than to wait for a consumer grade product to be run into your neighborhood.

Don't assume anything about buried cable plant. It doesn't cost you a penny to ask questions of your local providers. Even if you live out of town there could very well be a buried fiber run nearby.

 

Actually, I asked both the nationwide cable company and the DSL companies about their plans for fiber a while back.

The cable company rep laughed and explained that cable still has plenty of capacity for future speed and bandwidth increases (true, but cable will always be inferior to fiber if only because speeds aren't guaranteed), so they have no plans for fiber in the near future, residential or business.

The DSL company told me that I'm in luck - since I live near their head office, I'm in one of the first neighborhoods to receive fiber when they start trials... in 2014. Furthermore, the rep explained that if I wanted a fiber-to-the-home connection today, they'd be more than happy to expedite my neighborhood and supply it for about the same price as one of their small business internet plans, provided that I pay for the infrastructure costs I don't want to know how many hundreds of thousands of dollars that would be and I'm not sure whether or not she was joking.

I should probably have mentioned in my last post that I can't have it for $1000, but I can have it for $10000.

 

I live in Canada near Wasaga Beach (northern part of southern Ontario) and lived with dial-up much less than the "advertised max speed", i was using a standard V.92 modem not a 33.6 kbps modem and was getting 24 kbps total download speed. I had this since i was born up until just 3 months ago where i get about a max of 3.5-4.0 mbps total download speed on Bell's network, with a 25GB/month bandwidth cap and no they do not throttle torrent downloads for some reason although my area was just made DSL but they advertise my "Performance" as having a max of 7mbps download speed.

 

You must be extremely young. I'm only 22 and it wasn't that long ago that I remember out 16.6kbps modem.

 

I lived with 4.8 kbps for one year
It was an interface to analog cellular
I had to disable pictures from showing in internet explorer


Alex

 

this widespread arguement isn't valid... look at Canada we are MUCH more spread out than the US (1/10th the population and 30% bigger). and according to another poster we get 7.6?

PS. most people here are at 1mbps or less. so yah I don't know where taht figure is coming from.

I'm with SHAW and I get 7.5minimum and they don't cap my internet!!! even when i push 30GB in 24hours. (have you ever seen a torrent at a sustained 1000KBps?, I have!).

 

Back in my day, we didn't even have modems. You had to physically tie tin cans to the ends of a string between your computer and the computer to which you wanted to connect. Then you told the person at the other end before you walked, drove, or flew back to your house to get on the computer at a pre-arranged time. When the time came, that person put five dice into the tin can on that end and shook it. You would then yell "Yahtzee!" and throw five dice at the wall in your house.

There were usually a lot of bit errors. One time, the computer crashed after the idiot on the other end used a 20 sided die and caused a buffer overflow.

I don't really know where I'm going with this, so I'll just say that I can upload faster than some of you can download and it's the cheapest plan offered by my ISP.



Why yes, I am showing off, why do you ask?

 

WOW, so the Japanese have the highest download rate in the world! Amazing, it's pretty small country compared to the rest on this list but they upgraded their system tremendously.
I think they really deserve 2nd spot with the world's richest economies (next to U.S.A. of course).

 

I would say several factors are responsible for the US being so far behind in residential broadband speed. I definitely think that ISPs are taking advantage of the fact that there is little regional competition and they have no incentive to improve speeds because of their regional monopolies. Another issue would be the age of the existing established infrastructure and the cost to bring it up to date, which costs money that nobody wants to spend.

I could go on and deservedly blame the ignorant and incompetent US government as well, but I think that's enough to chew on for a while.

If that isn't frustrating enough, then this is:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...stonia.ars?comments=1&comment_id=580009310041

 

I can't get fiber in my area because of a political stopgap.
Currently the only options in my area are Embarq (phones/DSL) or Comcast (phones/cable). Neither currently has a fiber plan at all in my area, so even if I paid $10,000, I doubt they could accommodate me. Maybe $10,000/month [and even then they might not], but let's be serious. I can't get it in my area.

 

Guess im lucky, mine is RATED at 25 but I consistantly get 31Mbps ( Shaw cable )

and yes Yuio, when they dont cap you it sure is nice.

 

Oh yeah, FIOS for the win!

 

I had to look up where Kampala is located. That's a long way from 192.168.1.1.

 

I think you mean 127.0.0.1
192.168.1.1 is just the default IP of crappy routers, though I'll give it to you that it is in the range of addresses reserved for private use.

 

Actually, I did mean to say 192.168.1.1 because I was thinking of the bandwidth within one's network compared to that between Trottel's home and Kampala, but you're right, 127.0.0.1 would have been a better comparison technically and colloquially (i.e. "That's a long way from home").

 

You are not kidding when you say crappy. The verizon router/"modem" contraption is a complete POS. You pretty much have to have another router plugged into it.

 

+11111111111.
So true,and i'm here stuck on dial up internet because in a more rural area,the only internet is a 1.2-5MB/S(depending on distance and cabling) ripoff connection that is $50.
$50 for a speed up to only 5megs,when everywhere else you get get a 8mb/s service for $30-40?

 

I feel your pain. When I moved to the small town I live in now, population > 3,000, there was nothing in terms of broadband. It was especially bad because I used to live in the big town with a speedy connection. On top it if I wanted internet I would have to get phone service, which I didn't want as I haven't had a regular phone since the last millennium, at $25 a month, plus pay for dial-up. If I wanted internet I had to go to the Library. They didn't even free WiFi like they do now. About all I could do was check my e-mail.

Finally I said screw it and got cable instead. After I'd been here about a year a little phone company opened and started offering naked 400k DSL for $65 a month. It sucked as I was paying a little more than half that in the big town, but I was happy to have it and I figured I could justify it by getting rid of the cable as I wouldn't watch it much anymore. I had to pay that for two plus years until the cable company decided to offer broadband at $25 a month thereby driving the price down for everyone in town. I'm still on 768k, which I don't mind. 2MB would be nice for Hulu and the like, but it still works decent and I don't download much.

Sure other places got faster internet, but for the things I do, I'd be happier to pay less and suffer the slower speed.

 

I'm happy , live out in the country , 5Mbps line for $29.00 a month . Look at the area the other countries have to cover , no wonder their speeds are higher Japa can fit in a small corner of a small corner of the US or Canada .

 

XD That's so true, words cannot describe the abomination that is the Actiontec Router. Too bad that's the one most people get, wonder why the D-Link wasn't used more often?

 

i'm averaging around 4.15mpbs according to speedtest ..tested twice.
I agree though...with overcharging.
used to live in a smaller town they were charging 60 a month for 1.5mpbs. i'm paying the same for qwest [their 5mpbs line] just higher speed.
the only problem i'm having is that like with emailing pictures ..[hotmail] my uploads are taking forever..:[