51–60 of 119 posts
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Actually, my speeds are about the same as those in Korea as I live in NYC. Which makes sense because South Korea is almost entirely urban much like NYC. It's not really fair to make cross country comparisons between countries with vastly different geographies.
> South Korea is almost entirely urban much like NYC Is this even true?
At this point, Cable companies are all members of a single large shadow monopoly not unlike Standard Oil was in the early 20th century. The rational the justice system used to break up Standard Oil is shockingly similar to the situation we now face with cable: Rates have been made low to let the Standard into markets, or they have been made high to keep its competitors out of markets. Trifling differences in distance…
It really is shockingly similar and a lot of the arguments against net neutrality try to dismiss it as applying "laws made for railroads" to the Internet. Back when oil was getting to be useful, lots of people discovered it. Usually, it was in a remote area. The only way to make money off it was to get it to a refinery and then the market. Standard Oil bullied and bribed the railroads into giving them preferential ra…
Hell, 5-6 generations on, Rockeffelers are still filthy rich.
A coaxial cable is displayed for a photograph in front of a Time Warner Cable helmet in Manhattan Beach, California, U.S., on Monday, August 12, 2013.Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing is, cable is more like the railroad than it is like Standard Oil. Petroleum isn't at all like a natural monopoly. It took a lot of corruption and bribery for Standard Oil to keep competition at bay. But nobody is really stepping forward to lay residential fiber. Google is the exception and it's because they're one of the only companies with enough money to survive a war of attrition with the incumbents, and…
There _are_ places where small companies are stepping up to place residential fiber. http://fiber.usinternet.com/
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It really is shockingly similar and a lot of the arguments against net neutrality try to dismiss it as applying "laws made for railroads" to the Internet. Back when oil was getting to be useful, lots of people discovered it. Usually, it was in a remote area. The only way to make money off it was to get it to a refinery and then the market. Standard Oil bullied and bribed the railroads into giving them preferential ra…
(My own views align closely with http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/we-dont-need-net-... and http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-13/forget-net... ) Do you have any evidence that cable companies wanted to charge for preferential treatment for traffic? I've seen that claim repeated a lot but never with evidence.
A few years ago YouTube got similar treatment on Time Warner -- they funneled everything to a YouTube point of presence on the TWC network that was over saturated. You could modify DNS and use and alternate URL and watch 1080p video with no lag.
Verizon also started limiting aggregate Netflix traffic. Through conincidence, it happened to start happening when they launched a video service.
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I think we still have some cultural inertia such that things like high-speed internet and cell service are seen as luxuries and not basic infrastructure (plus some who believe that the poor ought to be excluded from using basic infrastructure anyway). I'm also not convinced that Capitol Hill has fully realized that Comcast isn't competing with rabbit ears anymore.
Oh they know, they're just all on the take: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/recips.php?cycle=2014&id=D0... Relatedly, it's depressing just how cheaply you can buy the house/senate.
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(My own views align closely with http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/we-dont-need-net-... and http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-13/forget-net... ) Do you have any evidence that cable companies wanted to charge for preferential treatment for traffic? I've seen that claim repeated a lot but never with evidence.
Netflix is the canonical example. A few years ago YouTube got similar treatment on Time Warner -- they funneled everything to a YouTube point of presence on the TWC network that was over saturated. You could modify DNS and use and alternate URL and watch 1080p video with no lag. Verizon also started limiting aggregate Netflix traffic. Through conincidence, it happened to start happening when they launched a video ser…
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> The US has a different problem where only 4% of the population lives in a major cities That requires a rather narrow definition of "major cities".
The largest 10 cities are home to 16M Americans, the 10 largest cities in the UK are host to 12M Brits. The 100 largest cities in the US are home to 59M Americans, the 100 largest cities in the UK are home to 34M Brits. The US is 5 times as populous but there is only 30% difference between the top 10 cities in the US vs UK and 50% in top 100. Most people in the US live in cities under The rest of Europe isn't that mu…
(Edit: fixed 25 for 19, accidentally added a city twice)
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...and 200x slower than those in Korea.
Actually, my speeds are about the same as those in Korea as I live in NYC. Which makes sense because South Korea is almost entirely urban much like NYC. It's not really fair to make cross country comparisons between countries with vastly different geographies.
I'm not doubting your statement so much as just honestly curious, since getting access to the Internet in the US, from my experience, has been significantly worse than other places in the world where I've lived. In most of the EU, Asia, and in Russia, getting Internet was a breeze for my partner and I whenever we moved, and the speeds were usually, if not always, exactly as advertised.
For example, my partner and I live in Russia, and for some time, she did contract work as a chemist in Pereslavl, around 100 km north of Moscow. It was a remote and small town by any definition, but it had I believe 4 different internet providers and the options were all clearly laid out with simple pricing, and the pricing on the sites was the same as the pricing on our monthly bills.
Comparing this to when I've attempted to help friends prepare to move within the US and looking at ISPs, getting Internet in the US is a complete nightmare. The major ISPs often aren't able to give you an accurate pricing offer without first inputting an actual address onto their website, and very often the tool is broken or for whatever reason returns that the property is in the service area, even if the property already has a current connection from said ISP. (checking to ensure my parent's were getting a fair price from their ISP, for example, had both Charter's website and their sales representative inform me that Charter was not available in their neighborhood and address, despite them having used Charter's service for ~7 years.)
After that, it's introductory deals with the actual pricing buried in fine print on another page. Constant push to try to bundle land-line and media services, representatives insisting you need to rent a modem/router combo from the company when their own website has information on providing your own modem/router. While I do realize not all modems are created equal, that was not the pitch given to people I know or to family while I was present and helping them set up Internet.
I don't know, it just seems like virtually everywhere else, even if the speeds in major US cities are comparable, the entire "experience" of shopping around and getting Internet access is just better. The only place in the US where I've lived and it wasn't a pain to get service was when I lived in Tacoma, WA and used one of their municipal services. Aside from some occasionally goofy DNS issues, the service was lovely, competitively priced with Comcast, and their reps were also really fantastic. They also were very good at quickly getting information customers on known outages; their automated support line would switch to a special greeting informing the caller of a known outage, which saved a heck of a lot of time when storm damage or another random event disrupted service.
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Oh they know, they're just all on the take: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/recips.php?cycle=2014&id=D0... Relatedly, it's depressing just how cheaply you can buy the house/senate.
Almost makes you wish Apple, Facebook and Google would team up and buy them.
http://www.wired.com/2015/07/google-facebook-amazon-lobbying...