

U.S. Ranks 28th in Internet Speed Among Industrialized Nations - callmeed
http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-tc-biz-tech-broadband-0825-0aug30,0,2465151.story

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quant18
As a guy living in one of the small countries which does reasonably well on
internet speed rankings, let me tell you --- high domestic speed is useless if
your country only has a tiny pipe to the places that have all the content
you'd actually want to watch.

The in-country content I browse is primarily textual --- the local newspaper,
classified/auctions sites, etc. You only need high bandwidth for those if you
want to watch all the stupid flash video ads they attach to everything.

The video content producers are all in the US, S. Korea, or China. In the
evening when everyone's trying to get on the same overseas sites, it doesn't
matter if the "last mile" into your apartment is all built from fiber-optics.
So instead of sitting around waiting for Youtube to load, plenty of people
choose an alternative method to get 150 megabits/second bandwidth --- walk
fifteen minutes to the bazaar, buy ten pirated DVDs, and walk back home.
Horrible latency, massive packet sizes.

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bcl
This article, and the so called 'study' is about as useful as a Facebook poll.

A couple of key points:

"Every American should have affordable access to high-speed Internet, no
matter where they live. This is essential to economic growth and will help
maintain our global competitiveness,"

This is utter crap. There is no reason to run fiber to rural areas where
providers lose money. If you care that much about your network speed move to
an area that supports the speed you need.

They talk about so called gains. But their study is non-scientific so
comparing their numbers from year to year is meaningless.

They included some territories and not others. Something those territories
have in common is that they are islands. It costs alot more to run cable to
them, therefore they are naturally going to have slower network speeds.

The so called data comes from 'Speed Matters, a site that promotes greater
Internet speeds', so the author is basing this article on numbers that come
from someone with an agenda and no science. Nice bit of writing.

If I were this guy's editor I'd fire him for being to lazy to go out and track
down the real numbers and come up with a real story.

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danielrhodes
Nobody ever mentions the relative geographical area of a country in relation
to internet speed. In countries with a high GDP proportional to the area of
the country and/or population, infrastructure is much cheaper to build out, so
they can move much faster.

~~~
DarkShikari
_Nobody ever mentions the relative geographical area of a country in relation
to internet speed_

Nobody? If anything, I see this mentioned dozens of times _every single time_
this discussion comes up, despite the fact that it's _completely wrong_.

Sure, the US is a big place, but if that argument were correct, I would be
able to get Japan-level internet speeds in big cities, since the population
density there is so high. The costs of running fiber between big cities is
minimal compared to the gargantuan last-mile costs, so one cannot claim that
it's because the cities are farther apart than in other nations, either.

In reality? With the exception of FIOS, most places in the US, urban or not,
have atrocious internet speeds.

~~~
danielrhodes
I was going to reply with some nice analysis, but then I realized how angry
your response sounded, and it made me want to stop visiting Hacker News since
this seems to be part of a growing trend on here lately.

This is a place for thoughtful and friendly debate, not some arena for trying
to rip people apart.

HN may be a smarter version of what Digg used to be, but it has become just as
unpleasant and nasty.

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ojbyrne
Quote from the article: "The study is not scientific"

~~~
tsally
Whatever the actual number is, I'm pretty sure we still suck. A component of
this is that we have so much land, but that's not the whole story.

------
Wilduck
I think a more interesting statistic would be the median internet speed.
Considering the rural populations in the US which have terrible speed, an
average is not a very reliable statistic.

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adnam
28th is not bad for something as ultimately trivial as internet speed.

(Compared to healthcare, human rights, carbon emissions, adult incarceration,
child mortality etc. etc.)

~~~
ori_b
That's down there too. [http://miscellanea.wellingtongrey.net/2008/10/26/were-
not-nu...](http://miscellanea.wellingtongrey.net/2008/10/26/were-not-number-
one/)

~~~
callmeed
Well, what the heck are we #1 at? I need something to hang my USA hat on :)

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robryan
A more interesting list would be for say ranking countries by there fastest
internet available at say under $100 a month. I'd say the US would be very
competitive on offerings? Just that the vast majority of the population
probably wouldn't want to pay the extra or don't have the option in remote
area?

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Dilpil
I wonder what the U.S. ranks in terms of median income? The United States has
a much larger unskilled work force than most countries- something which over
the past 100 years has been a blessing, but over next 100 may be a curse.

~~~
TheElder
It will be the downfall of the country. The numbers of unskilled are
increasing as a result of immigration from the poorest parts of the world and
from the offspring from those people who migrated here from those poorest
parts of the world. There's a large imbalance of people who pay the taxes and
the people who consume the taxes. It's fracturing now, and soon, it'll all
come down.

~~~
alex_c
Wow.

I don't live in the US, but I've traveled around... your comment about
immigration comes out of left field. If there's any generalization to be made,
it's that immigrant families tend to be more motivated to achieve something.

Maybe my view is just as skewed as yours, but I wouldn't look at immigrants as
the main source/cause of unskilled labor in the US.

~~~
ori_b
Currently, the US immigration policies are skewed to accept unskilled
immigrants. Read about the difficulties with the H1 visas and the near
impossibility for skilled workers to get a green card. Immigration _could_ be
an amazing source of skilled labor, if the USA played it's cards right.
Historically, it was one.

Sure, many immigrant families often are more motivated, but many of the ones
that the process are skewed towards still come with few marketable skills,
and, unfortunately, poverty tends to breed poverty. It's harder to pull
yourself out of the bottom of the heap.

------
Empact
One approach I've been long-interested in is cooperative ownership of local
infrastructure and private ownership of inter-city infrastructure. This would
mean that, rather than infrastructure representing a single-provider monopoly
in a given area, and a high barrier to entry, the local community could open
its infrastructure as a market to all providers or to those who offer the most
appealing services.

Seems this could make the difference between slow, monopolistic progress of
the status quo and dynamic competitive progress.

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jobeirne
"...[A] study by a labor union for telecommunications workers"

"Of course, when the U.S. spends some of the $7.2 billion allocated to
broadband development in the federal stimulus package, the union's members
would benefit from job creation."

This should be setting off some alarm bells. I'd be curious to know how the
data was collected and interpreted.

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JayNeely
The average person is going to find a "rank" for internet speed meaningless.

This is better promoted as:

"The U.S. has slower internet than Iceland, Poland, and Korea."

