

Why U.S. Broadband is So Slow - bmf
http://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2011/03/05/why-us-broadband-is-so-slow/

======
blahedo
Having just moved (and thus done my shopping for a new internet connection), I
found it pretty galling that I was pretty much expected to either get a $30
land line or a $50 cable-TV package if I wanted to get internet. Technically I
didn't need to get the bundle, but they didn't even list prices for an
internet-only connection.

I have line-of-sight to our local water tower, though, so I was able to get a
wireless internet connection and bypass everyone else. It's not super-high-
speed, but I have 2.5 down and 1.5 up, and that's not too bad... and I have
the moral satisfaction of not paying anything at all to either the cable
companies _or_ the telcos.

~~~
nantes
Hey, as a WISP employee myself, thanks. It is really frustrating sometimes
that potential customers have been trained that the duopoly the article
mentioned is reality.

In truth, there is a vibrant, resourceful, and outspoken group of
entrepreneurs out to take all of the incumbents marbles. But, like the article
says, we have to fight at every turn for access that telco's and cable co's
take for granted.

~~~
nitrogen
I'd love to support an independent ISP, but there is none serving my area with
50+mbit/s speeds.

------
ary
The last line stood out to me.

> ... passing by along the way the idle fiber infrastructure that the FCC set
> aside nearly a decade ago.

Can anyone elaborate on what exactly they mean? Is this dark fiber sitting
around somewhere? Did the FCC sanction the deployment and private companies
built it out (and then ignored it) or was government money spent to lay the
wires?

~~~
yummyfajitas
There is tons of dark fiber, due to the economics of laying cables.

Digging a ditch is expensive. The fiber you put in the ditch is cheap. So if
you are already digging a ditch, you load it up with 100x as much fiber as you
imagine yourself ever needing in the future.

This is vastly cheaper than digging a second ditch 5-10 years down the line.

~~~
mbreese
Yeah, but aren't we talking about the "last mile" problem, not about dark
fiber? I thought that most of the dark fiber was in long inter-city/state
runs, not running down my neighborhood street.

I thought he was referring to dormant fiber that the telco owns that used to
be available to third-parties at wholesale rates.

~~~
ary
That's exactly what I was talking about.

------
makecheck
The conclusions are interesting, although I think they give government
intervention way too much credit. If other product lines are any indication,
people can become pretty content pretty quickly; they may not _demand_ more
even if they might achieve it. I suppose life is just too short and people
move on to more pressing concerns. If tomorrow all TVs in the world stopped
working and shows could only be watched online, I think customers' attentions
would shift and demand for high speed would see a new life. That's just the
way these things work.

Incidentally, I hate the use of the term "Republican led FCC" in this article
when "FCC" would have sufficed. I'm no Republican, but these kinds of loaded
phrases invite ad hominem arguments. Readers should be able to learn about the
actions of an organization such as the FCC and judge them as good or bad based
on _relevant_ facts.

~~~
robterrell
But it's entirely true that the FCC was under the watch of Republicans when
the telecom act was defanged and shared access to customer copper was rolled
back. Maybe you don't remember, but ten years ago you could get various
providers on the copper you had -- I had DSL from a local company over my
Verizon-provisioned phone line. My dad had earthlink service over his time-
Warner cable line. There was a price difference and most definitely a
difference in service. Nowadays the best you can do is speakeasy, and they
have to pay covad to roll a truck and use a second pair of copper. This change
was courtesy of the FCC, who agreed with an industry assessment that
competition was really driving them nuts. And like it or not, the FCC was run
by Republicans (Kevin Martin, remember him?) when this anti-consumer change
was made. Your comment that "people become content" more accurately describes
today's marketplace, where people are faced with a dearth of options for home
and mobile broadband and just suck it up, pay the outrageous amount, and get
on with life.

~~~
makecheck
I didn't say the Republicans' involvement was untrue, I said it was
irrelevant. When an article points out a political party in this way, the
publication is implying that the outcome is _because_ of that party (something
that simply can't be known from the facts). I suggested that they leave this
out because it is more important to report on exactly what the FCC did and
exactly what the outcome was. It allows people to have reasonable debates
without becoming heated over their politics.

~~~
nitrogen
_I didn't say the Republicans' involvement was untrue, I said it was
irrelevant._

IMO the constant flip-flopping between the extreme policies of either party is
a significant contributor to our country's lagging Internet speeds (and a
number of other problems in the US), so I consider the party association
highly relevant.

------
jeffool
Potentially silly question: Why did we dig ditches and bury cable? Why didn't
we dig ditches and bury pipes that you can snake cable out of and into as
needed? This makes our Internet seem less like a problem of feasibility, and
more like a complete engineering fuck-up.

~~~
elithrar
Cost. I would also say that most of the 'cable' is laid inside conduit, but
conduit with limited space and owned by a particular carrier who has no
incentive or regulation dictating that he share that conduit.

~~~
jeffool
Now i can't help but wonder, would it be wise for the government (likely
local) to lay pipe and license room in it to ISPs? Much of it could even be
done when working on sewers and roads, I'd imagine.

(Cue complaints of government interfering with business.)

~~~
sapphirecat
You might find your answer in the history of municipal network projects. But
I'm strongly biased against the incumbents, so I'll avoid leaving any details
here.

------
lr
Switched to Sonic.net about 2 months ago and love it! Twice the speed (getting
over 6 megabit now) of AT&T and for 1/2 the cost ($40/month vs. almost $80).

~~~
nostromo
Hmmm, is that considered fast? On Comcast in SF I get about 20Mbps down and I
never really thought of it being particularly speedy.

edit: Someone should create a website that both tests your speed, but then
also shares that result with the world (anonymously). I'd love to pop up a
list of ISPs in a specific city and see exactly how accurate their listed
speeds are before buying.

~~~
nitrogen
Does Speedtest.net not do this for you? There is the small problem that the
local Speedtest.net server was moved from a high-quality independent ISP to
Comcast, so all Comcast speed tests are now completely unrealistic.

------
techsupporter
Or, you could do what Verizon did: Build a large fiber optic-based network in
several metropolitan areas and, for the first time, give Comcast, Charter, and
Time Warner a run for their money. Then, turn around and dump several "second-
tier" markets (Portland, Redmond/Kirkland/Bellevue, most of North Carolina,
etc) onto a company that is actively trying to persuade customers _not_ to use
that network.

Sometimes large telcos just baffle me.

------
bane
The interesting bit is that I'm not sure in many cases it matters.

I'm lucky to have FiOS (25down/5up), and I have many times the bandwidth I can
manage. I can be downloading a couple torrents, my wife and I can both be
streaming a movie, our phones can both be updating, I can forget I left
Pandora running, and a friend can be in another room doing goodness knows
what, and web sites still load more or less the same as normal.

I'd don't think I've ever come close to saturating my connection mainly
because the sites I'm connecting to...even major sites...can't serve me data
fast enough. For example, I routinely wait for youtube to buffer (though oddly
720p appears to load faster and more smoothly than any other
resolution)...often I'll watch something on hulu while a videoclip buffers on
youtube.

I've been on 100mbps connections in East Asia and didn't notice any
perceptible difference...I did about the same amount of stuff in about the
same amount of time...the sites I was connected to simply weren't servicing me
any faster.

~~~
shmageggy
Unfortunately, due to the duopolies described in the article, most of the rest
of us are stuck dreaming of such a fibery heaven. Verizon has said explicitly
that they won't be coming to my area. Ever.

~~~
bane
I should have probably been more clear. There are consumer level DSL and cable
connections that are >5mbps. Except for very _very_ heavy usage, I doubt that
somebody on a ~5mbps connection would see an appreciably different Internet
than I do.

Or look at it another way, I wouldn't consider it a major penalty to move
someplace without FiOS and "only" a 5mbps connection. My day job has 2 paired
T-1s and I only notice a slight slowness compared to my fiber home connection.

Either way, I wait about as long for a youtube video to queue up, and I can
watch hulu without problems in the meantime. I supposed it'd really matter if
I wanted to stream 1080p HD. But there's really not a ton of that sort of
content on the web anyway that's streamable.

------
asharp
I do find it strange that you can go and get wholesale bw in the US for
$1/mbit or less, yet residential ADSL tails, sold with contention ratios in
the order of thousands:1 can be sold for like $60/month....

------
tobylane
In the UK the main speed factor is the line between you and either your
cabinet, or your exchange. You're sold packages that are probably either 8 or
24 MB/s, and you get what you can. I'm 1.1 miles from the exchange directly
with no fibre in the road, so I get 6.5 while paying for 24. When fibre comes
any nearer, it will be free. How is it in US? Is fibre to the street/cabinet
common?

------
jeffool
My favorite article on this topic, by Robert X. Cringely in 2007, on the
Telecommunications Act of 1996:
[http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_0026...](http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html)

"The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen."

------
baltcode
Why doesn't another big company step up and lay down its own copper/fiber into
homes? Sure, it will be a BIG investment but the return should be awesome. I
am sure it will be worthwhile in at least some areas like NYC, Bay Area,
Boston etc.

~~~
cooldeal
Can you fathom how much it will cost to dig up the streets, lay fiber and fill
them back in? Will cities even allow that, due to the impediment to the
traffic?

~~~
nitrogen
It's been managed before for fiber deployments in northern Europe. I remember
seeing a perspective on Ars Technica from Amsterdam, with a photo of a
sidewalk tiles neatly removed and replaced without damage:
[http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/03/how-
amsterda...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/03/how-amsterdam-
was-wired-for-open-access-fiber.ars)

So, it can be done.

------
kqueue
Hong Kong is small country which makes it faster / cheaper to adopt new
technologies compared to adopting it in 50 states where some states are
magnitude bigger than Hong Kong.

------
cageface
The Western capitalist dogma is that state-run economies like those of China
are inherently inefficient. But it seems to me that more and more recent
evidence suggests that it may be that the partisan gridlock of Western
democracies, dominated by monied interests and their lobbies, is more
detrimental.

~~~
giardini
The "Western capitalist dogma" to which you refer applies to competitive
situations. But cable and phone companies are not competitive in the U.S.A.,
they are monopolistic.

Read that section of a western economics text that explains monopolies for
further enlightenment.

------
ck2
Not sure what people are going to do with 20mbps+ broadband when they will
certainly set caps that will be used up within the first few days of your
billing cycle?

Sonic apparently has no cap but that's virtually unheard of today.
[http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-
bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/05/...](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-
bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/07/05/BUFD1K6GF7.DTL)

Which would you rather have, unlimited speed with a 150gb cap or 6mpbs with no
cap?

~~~
watty
First off, caps are not "virtually unheard of". Secondly Comcasts cap is
250GB/month. Who would use that in a few days? The biggest bandwidth eater I
can think of is Netflix and a user would have to watch 108 movies in the best
quality to reach that number.

~~~
sp332
I think your Netflix number must be wrong, because I work at an ISP and there
are a lot of subscribers going over 250 GB/mo on Netflix. Anyway, one movie a
day (or 3 TV episodes) on 4 computers is 120 movies/month.

------
gcb
When choosing internet service 4 months ago for my new place, i made a
decision that my next job hunt will be around areas were walking distance from
the office are covered by sonic.

Startups think about mentioning this as a benefit. seriously.

------
niels_olson
Soooooo ... hate to point it out, but basically the Republicans gooned this up
to?

------
jdelsman
Seriously? Move to China, then we'll talk about slow broadband...

