AT&T and Verizon: 10Mbps Is Too Fast For Broadband

[twaddle]

"According to Comcast, about 47% of residential customers use 50 Mbps internet speeds. "

I have a nearly 300 dollar a month cable and internet bill that would disagree. 11mbps right with comcast and it's bloody pathetic.

 

[Sleepy Sol]

Just checked and it says mine is 160.06 mb/s download, and yet Steam still only downloads at 10 mb/s. Come on Volvo.

But that really sucks for Americans. I would be livid with 4 mb/s. And from what I've heard it's really dodgy most of the time too.

Hopefully the freakin' FCC can twist their arms and get better standards from your piece of shit ISP's.

Keep in mind that download speed is measured in Megabits when using sites like speedtest.net and stuff. There's 8 megabits to a megabyte, so divide it by 8 and it's closer to what you should see downloading on stuff like Steam and such. So still slow for the speed you're paying for, but that might be issues with Steam as well.

[http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/3748947735]

Thanks, collegenet. Still not nearly as good as the European fellows, but I can still download games at okay speeds.

 

[Mezahmay]

Wait, when the hell has the REQUIRED MINIMUM been 4Mbps?! At home I get maybe 2Mbps down and I've never experienced it faster than 3Mbps. Well, on the bright side, if the FCC does raise the legally required minimum speed for broadband than, according to the current legal ratio, I might get 5Mbps down at home. Here's hoping this actually is implemented and the FCC doesn't fold. I have to wonder how much money the cable providers are actually saving by spending so much on lobbying instead of actually providing a more effective service to their consumer base. It might make people hate them as much and stop leaving or perhaps give a damn about their native streaming services if bandwidth is less of an issue. Then again, I guess I am grossly overestimating the awareness of the average consumer when it comes to how badly we're getting screwed in the States.

 

[Armadox]

Center of town here in good ol' Panama City. This is as good as it gets. The biggest problem is, it's not about where you're at. It's that there's nothing trying to fix it on the consumer side.

I am however right upset that the bloke in Alaska has so much better net then I do. 74.7 Mb/s less then bloody Alaska?! They're not even connected to the rest of the U.S.! I bet he's a yeti in disguise..

 

[ryazoph]

I don't care if broadband remains at a minimum of 4 megabits, as long as they upgrade short path bandwidth enough so there's no congestion.

 

[DeaDRabbiT]

The more I read about your ISP actions, the more convinced I am that your country is a corrupt shithole.

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with your legislative branches?

They are bought and paid for by corrupt corporate interests that themselves write the legislation their patsy's present on capitol hill.

American's are too broke, and beat down to do anything about it. We've subconsciously decided that instead of full scale violent revolt we are just going to sink into social and economic apathy until the assholes in Washington screw up so bad that change happens anyway.

That's my hope at least.

As it stands right now studies show that the average American citizen has almost no power over legislation. It's all corporate.

It sucks.

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

I average 34Mbps. On a cable provider, in Florida USA. But thats probably because I live smack dab in-between two major city hubs...

 

[not_you]

But the US seems to pay more than anyone for internet access that is way behind the times.

You obviously haven't been to Australia...

Then again, "Broadband" here is specc'd at a theoretical maximum of 25Mbit/s (And the telco's will advertise it as that regardless) yet with such shitty quality copper running around, (since the 80's or whenever it was installed) I'm lucky to get 4Mb/s at my home...

Either way, I'm looking to move towards America in the near future, so this pleases me greatly!

 

[Exbando]

I only get 2.12 Mbps download and 1.15 Mbps upload, and I'm in a fairly populated area. Every other ISP I can get is around this or worse. I don't even know what I would do with 10 Mbps...

 

[MrHide-Patten]

Are these guys like the Telstra of America? I fucking I hate you Telstra, monopolizing D-bag. Currently being throttled now and paying out the ass for it.

 

[Ziadaine_v1legacy]

Try living in Australia. We pay twice as much for speeds almost 3-times slower, and yet they think it's acceptable. We live on a freaking rock away from every other country, meaning the majority of downloads (legal or not) take almost forever with uploads virtually impossible. Say you make a 10 minute Video in 720p to upload to Youtube, It would take an average 18 hours to upload, and if there's an interruption, you have to start again.

The place I'm living in I only get 25GB a month and the real estates excuse is "It's all we can afford" despite living in the bang-smack center of a major CBD, where the rental earns so much, that setting up Unlimited Internet here with each resident allowed 50GB would be like pocket change.

 

[Carrington666]

Man, 10Mbps sounds like heaven to me. We may pay for 16Mbps, but the cables here are so bad that I'm lucky if Steam goes up to 700kB/s.
And it's not like I live in the middle of nowhere. It's just 8 miles to the center of Germany's 18th largest city...

 

[AvangionQ]

Internet is my most important utility ... 55mbps / 25mbps, but I pay $65 per month for it ... everyone in the US should have speeds like this or faster, at half this cost.

 

[Strazdas]

10mbps is theoretical upper limit of regular DLS internet cables. Anyone that still has to have DSL cables should be getting that as a minimum. Also no scamming with upstreams either. Its 10/10. Anyone that has fiber optics should never be limited to as low as 10mbps though. And considering most of earth is covered with fiber optics now.....

Also FCC doing something reasonable? what sorcery is this?

4K Video streamed at constant 30Mb last time I tried it on Youtube.

Things are progressing quickly to a place where 4Mb isn't going to be capable of anything outside of email.

Sigh. this is sad. A good quality 1080p stream would take more than mbps, and youtube compresses 4k to 30 mbps. no wonder raw 480p look better than youtube 1080p.

So, someone knowledgable please explain to me what actual strain this would put on At&T and Verizon's infrastructure? I remember reading about south Korea's broadband and... well
snip

There was a internet outage/distruption couple weeks back that pretty much was felt by anyone connecting to US servers. It was caused by one of the large internet privoders there. A person who refused to disclose which company he worked for for safety reasons explained why it happened. To keep technical info out of the way, basically they were using devices that were over two decade old and the buffer size was limited to 100bits per buffer on those devices. now two decades ago that meant they were very powerful, however couple weeks ago the buffer exceeded that size and the devices basically crashed. thing is, they KNEW it was coming, they KNEW for years with projections and plans to avoid it but they did nothing to prevent that because that would mean actually spending money, however to quickly eliminate crash they needed massive (think thousands of devices) orders quickly and paid premium for it - spending even more money, to avert the damage.

The main point - the people running those companies are grossly incompetent.

So consumers want (nay, demand) faster internet, ISPs tell them faster internet isn't necessary...

Sorry, I admit economics isn't my thing, but isn't that scenario the direct opposite of the free market ideology the Republicans keep telling us is the solution to all our problems?

Ah, see, but for free market you need one thing: perfect competition. which means that every user has to know EVERYTHING there is to know about the item and can switch between different providers at absolutely no cost or time spent for the switch. Now, as you will be quick to point out - this is not possible in reality. hence, free market cannot work in reality.

*stunned* seriously?
I just checked to be sure. The slowest connection I can get with my cable provider is 50Mbit. THE SLOWEST!
On DSL I can go as low as.. brace yourselves.. 10Mbit.

have you check the wireless internet carriers (the ones that basically work like cell internet)? those seem to ask double the money for as slow as 2mbps, i wonder who uses them.

The more I read about your ISP actions, the more convinced I am that your country is a corrupt shithole.

Seriously, what the hell is wrong with your legislative branches?

The problem with legislative branch is that it is comprised of people that said corrupt companies bought rather than actual legislators.

But I have to ask, with the sheer audacity of this - whatever this is - how are they still even making money? In Britain if our services are or have become sub-par we switch

and thats the difference. you can switch. in US everyone you can switch to - does exactly the same. There is noone to switch to. Google tried to make competition, got slapped with lawsuits because "its unfair that big company competes with them". Google lost the case in court. apparently competition is illegal in US.

I have cable internet (provided through my rental agreement) which has about 40 Mbs download... and an incredibly unstable .2 Mbs upload.

please change your provider. stop feeding those morons. noone should suffer upload speeds lower than download speeds.

Well, we have something called an "Ogliopoly", in which multiple cable companies agree to not compete against one another in order to overcharge and underprovide for the customers. Which should be illegal, but those companies have dozens of "lobbyists" whose job it is to bribe government officials to look the other way.

Actually Oligopoly means that there are few big companies in firce competition with eachother. what you got is a "Cartel" and is in fact illegal.

It's enough for 1080p video, apparently, so that probably is plenty for most people right now, especially people who live alone. And it's not like this definition of "broadband" is preventing anything higher from being available (Time Warner, our local provider, offers six tiers of service; four of them are between 15 and 50 Mbps, and the other two are clearly aimed at people who used to be content with dial-up), nor would this proposed change force them to lower their prices any (which is the bigger concern, given that every ISP has been constantly raising their rates over the past few years).

its not even close. Incompressed 1080p is a 230mbps stream. the 10mbps 1080p streams (like netflix) look worse than uncompressed 480p. It is not plenty for most people, its just that people adapt and get by with horrible internet, just like homeless get used to sleeping outside. they get used to it, does not make it a confortable thing though.

 

[And Man]

"According to Comcast, about 47% of residential customers use 50 Mbps internet speeds. "

I have a nearly 300 dollar a month cable and internet bill that would disagree. 11mbps right with comcast and it's bloody pathetic.

Holy shit that's a lot for only 11mbps. I'm guessing you live in California?

Center of town here in good ol' Panama City. This is as good as it gets. The biggest problem is, it's not about where you're at. It's that there's nothing trying to fix it on the consumer side.

I am however right upset that the bloke in Alaska has so much better net then I do. 74.7 Mb/s less then bloody Alaska?! They're not even connected to the rest of the U.S.! I bet he's a yeti in disguise..

I couldn't help but laugh at your ISP being named "WOW! Internet"

 

[Korskarn]

Quite frankly, any time I hear people in the US whining about their internet service - service that is ranked in the top 15% globally - I think "First World Problems".

Boohoo - you're not in the top 10 countries. Do you know how many other countries have worse internet than you? Over 150. Suck it up.

Problem is America is one of the most developed countries in the world, so the fact that their internet is relatively far behind is frustrating.

And just because someone has it worse than you doesn't mean you're not allowed to complain. If someone stole your TV and they also stole your neighbors bigger better and more expensive TV, you still have the right to complain.

Yes, if someone steals your stuff you can complain. It's also totally NOT THE SAME THING as complaining that you're "only" in the top 15% of service globally. Try complaining about your health system - that genuinely sucks.

 

[CardinalPiggles]

Quite frankly, any time I hear people in the US whining about their internet service - service that is ranked in the top 15% globally - I think "First World Problems".

Boohoo - you're not in the top 10 countries. Do you know how many other countries have worse internet than you? Over 150. Suck it up.

Problem is America is one of the most developed countries in the world, so the fact that their internet is relatively far behind is frustrating.

And just because someone has it worse than you doesn't mean you're not allowed to complain. If someone stole your TV and they also stole your neighbors bigger better and more expensive TV, you still have the right to complain.

Yes, if someone steals your stuff you can complain. It's also totally NOT THE SAME THING as complaining that you're "only" in the top 15% of service globally. Try complaining about your health system - that genuinely sucks.

You're right it's not the same thing, but it was just a hypothetical example.

I'm also not American, FYI. And I'd appreciate it if you stopped baiting me into a senseless argument. Thanks.

 

[seris]

charter offers 100 down, 5 up where i live for only 30 dollars a month (charter has also increased their speed twice in less than a year, it used to be 30 before january, then it was 60). AT&T is still sticking to their pitiful max of 15 down...

 

[Ohlookit'sMatty]

To all of our American internet users, I'm so sorry // Love & kisses, all your European internet counterparts [http://imgur.com/RMaxxY1]

-M

 

[Roxas1359]

Holy shit that's a lot for only 11mbps. I'm guessing you live in California?

I can't answer whether the original person you quoted lives in California or not, but I live in southern California and my internet costs us about $200 a month. Now that's combined with cable, but if we removed the cable we'd still be paying about $70-$100 for internet. My download is supposed to get 10 mbps at maximum, since we have the highest internet plan from Cox, but the highest it's ever gotten for us is 3.7 mbps. My up is also barely 1 mbps. T^T