Looking at the countries above the USA... They all mostly have one thing in common, their populace lives almost entirely within a few primary concentrated areas. It is much easier to build out the infrastructure to only support a handful of major cities which certainly helps raise the average.
edit: I want to make it clear that I think the fact that I can get gigabit internet in a town of 300k smack in the center of "flyover country" is absolutely amazing. I think that the USA competes with these other countries despite the size disadvantage is nothing short of astounding.
This is the usual argument against doing large infrastructure in the USA, and I think it’s kind of missing the point: the USA also has much larger financial and physical resources than those countries. We also have counterarguments: we have a universal electrical network. We built a large railroad network across the entire country. We have an interstate highway system reaching every continental state (and with “interstates” in Alaska and Hawaii as well, if I’m not mistaken). Also, universal telephone service.
I live in the heart of Silicon Valley, and I can’t get cell reception at my house. I have basic broadband, but I can’t get fiber despite being on a street where other houses have it.
I would be very interested in a comparison of what the citizens of each country have paid to fund internet service. US taxpayers have given the telecom mono/duopolies a ton of free money and right-of-way and the providers have broken every promise to provide universal service in exchange.
Railroads, highways, and power/cable lines all go hand in hand. It's an amazing network and they were all built a long time ago with little improvement. The problem is shoveling money to other "universal" slush funds while ignoring actual infrastructure for decades. ISPs should have been a utility and they should treat it like Texas treats its grid. Have a company that manages the actual lines, and have multiple providers that can compete and sell data on it.
Something like this was actually tried in the '90s for local phone circuits ("local loop unbundling"). As far as I know, it basically worked and is technically still policy, but the type of access mandated is no longer competitive for most purposes.
like garbage that falls apart when people actually need to use it? or like a regressive money funnel to line the pockets of an oligarchical captured regulatory body?
texas' power grid is not a goal any serious advocate can advance as doing anything right.
Texas' grid is the reason why 100% of the dollars I spend on electrical energy goes towards renewable energy sources at $0.084c/kWh for energy+transmission. What do you pay and what mix is renewable?
Texas' grid also makes it incredibly easy for you to get your local solar/wind connected to the grid to sell your electricity back, further incentivizing local and renewable energy production.
Finally, when Texas' grid has issues with big events which knocks out power, it captures national headlines for months on end. When California has blackouts, its just California being California.
>Finally, when Texas' grid has issues with big events which knocks out power, it captures national headlines for months on end. When California has blackouts, its just California being California
Meanwhile, the other 48 states, including a tiny island and a giant tundra wasteland larger than Texas have no problem keeping their power on in adverse weather.
I have family in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and other states. They've definitely lost power in major snowstorms before, sometimes for multiple days. I've lost power from hurricanes and other kinds of weather events elsewhere. Losing power from big weather events isn't an incredibly uncommon thing.
The differentiating factor is that most states at least attempt to prepare and design for the understood risks, unlike Texas. I'm not saying other states do not lose power in extreme weather events, but the weather that hit Texas was closer to a ten year event than a hundred year event
> have no problem keeping their power on in adverse weather.
It sure reads like other states have no problem keeping their power on and not other states sometimes do lose power as well but hey at least they're trying. And besides, hurricanes hit the East Coast pretty dang often and yet still hundreds of thousands of people will lose power. Sure sounds like they're not trying hard enough if they should have no problem keeping the power on.
Also, as someone who has lived in Texas for 30 years, this storm was absolutely not a ten year event. It may become one with the changing climate, but I have never experienced an ice storm quite as extreme. The major winter storm that happened ten years before was still not close to the one this year. For the one ten years prior, most pools didn't freeze over. Even with the pumps running on my pool, I had nearly an inch of ice form. I've never seen it get that cold in Texas.
My gigabit internet in HK was similarly priced to my gigabit internet in suburban USA (like US$80/mo). That said, in HK areas with robust competition between ISPs, some of the offerings were shockingly cheap. A friend of mine got 10Gbps for less than US$100/mo after negotiating. I don’t remember if HK lines were symmetric or not - my US line certainly isn’t.
Note that symmetrical gigabit connections in the US are sometimes available. Its highly dependent on the type of network deployed. If its a PON deployment there's a good chance you're going to get a symmetrical connection (AT&T, Verizon, Frontier Fiber). If you have a coax connection (Spectrum, Comcast, Cox), there's little chance its symmetrical.
For example, at my home on a residential PON connection a recent speedtest today showed ~990Mbit down, ~978Mbit up. At my office's new business coax connection just a few miles away, I usually get ~980Mbit down, 30Mbit up.
Yup, but I wonder why there were bandwidth issues in Europe when the pandemic first started (video streaming services started throttling bitrate very aggressively in Europe) but there were no issues in the United States.
Perhaps the last mile average is slow but the overall infrastructure and backbone is more robust in the US (this would make sense historically as well)
Wireless internet is more common in European and Asian countries because you can put up a few towers and be done, it gets throttled when you have congestion.
America has fiber and mostly copper (from our phone line laying days) strung all throughout America, the bandwidth is much higher in total.
The job left here is replacing copper w/ fiber (or at least DOCSIS 3.1 via copper), but it's expensive and some ISPs it isn't worth it for the customers they have, so you have some areas bringing the national average down.
Starlink will be nice for really remote areas where it make no sense to run a line or a tower for a couple customers. Existing sat internet is unusable. There's also been a big push to modernize slightly bigger towns with fiber by smaller ISPs.
As far as I can remember, the stress was mostly put on exchanges more so than overall capacity. I'm not aware of any real degradation beyond the panic in the news about « running out of Internet ».
Now take those same countries and look at GDP, number of publicly traded software companies, and capital investment provided by governments. There is some valid critique about how poor the USA is in terms of bandwidth. Not to mention cultural appropriation by most Americans of "being the best" at everything. Thus there's a reason (maybe not 100% valid) why people complain the USA isn't #1 on this list.
While density may be part of it, my (admittedly: anecdotal) experience in splitting my time between Los Angeles and the nearby mountain communities over the last year is that LA broadband speed is consistently 5 times slower.
edit: I want to make it clear that I think the fact that I can get gigabit internet in a town of 300k smack in the center of "flyover country" is absolutely amazing. I think that the USA competes with these other countries despite the size disadvantage is nothing short of astounding.