If you want competition, stop letting local governments make "deals" with the ISP's to bring such and such Internet or service to that area. Almost always that ensures the company will get a monopoly in that area. It's precisely for this reason why I'm against states making deals with ISP's even if it means bringing gigabit fiber to their areas. Will it still be fast enough 10-15 years later? Because you can bet they…
> I'm sure 1-10 Mbps seemed super-fast 10 years ago It's plenty fast now, too. Good-quality 1080p H.264 video is 3Mbps. 6Mbps is 50GB/day. If this is not enough, you most likely have a software problem. Not that we shouldn't strive for progress, but most of the complains in these comments are completely different from the rural horror stories of the article - they're taking for granted development that isn't actually…
And 640k should be enough memory for anybody.
The problem here is that decent internet access (10-30mbps per person) is cheap to deploy, and easy to do, when there are no other problems standing in the way. (For instance, when the cable company doesn't buy off the local government).
Apologizing for phone and cable companies who are raking in record profits doesn't help us in any way.
> they're taking for granted development that isn't actually there.
The development is there. Lithuania, Sweden, Switzerland, Iceland, and Romania didn't just "magic" their internet in existence. They took cheap easily-obtained widely-available technology and simply deployed it, along with the 30 other countries who all have (on average) faster / better / more reliable internet service than the USA.
http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries/
Notice the pricing there too -- USA pays more for internet than many other countries that rank higher than we do. (We pay 4 times more money per mbps than Denmark does, and receive slower service then them for that cash).
http://www.netindex.com/value/allcountries/
> Signing up for the cable company because it has the highest advertised speeds and then complaining about the implications of a shared medium provided by an unregulated monopoly is myopic entitled whining.
I think we understand the implications of the shared medium. But it's clear that the medium isn't the issue -- it's the misuse of the technology by the ISPs. DOCIS 3.0 is not the issue, Comcast trying to cut costs by making thousands of homes share the same backhaul on the same lines, is the issue.
And what else should folks do? Cable is the only internet service that qualifies as "high speed" (by the FCC's very very lax definition of 'High speed') in 99% of the United States.
There are zero other options.
> Look into competing DSL options, really.
Why bother? So I can switch to one of the dozens of companies who all resell the same 2mb AT&T ADSL line. (A line which, according to our own Federal Communications Commission, is too slow to be called "high speed internet")
http://www.fcc.gov/reports/sixth-broadband-progress-report
Why would you suggest we subsidize the phone companies attempts to kill our access to the internet? At least the cable company offers something.
> Your new provider may even have warm-blooded people answering the phone.
They sure do. AT&T has the friendliest phone support team, who will in very kind and gentle terms, explain that since they're too lazy to maintain a single copper pair, I can't even maintain a single Netflix stream. But I should pay them $40/month for it anyway, because it includes "free long distance".