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United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index

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Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index

#71

Post by dublinben »

miah_ wrote: post #29

I live in rural Michigan. My nearest "big city" has a estimated population of 2800. No big ISP has run anything our direction. We are just now getting municipal gas run in our area, our house has been on propane since it was built in the 90's. My current internet connection is provided by wifi access points strung across neighbors roofs that terminates into a T-Mobile data connection somewhere. I get on average 8Mbps…

>I live in rural Michigan ... I work remotely of course

Why? Wouldn't reliable broadband access be a primary consideration for someone working from home?

Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index

#72

Post by Aromasin »

What I find interesting about this is how embarrassingly low the United Kingdom is considering its history as a telecom power house. In my eyes, and maybe I'm reading this data wrong, it really showcases the devastating impact the privatization of our services has had on our country. We have basically stagnated on speeds since the early 2000's.

I still have the same speeds I had 10 years ago (100Mb/S with no opportunity to improve it). My family who live in the countryside (keep in mind in the UK, countryside can mean less than 10 miles from the nearest city) have been stuck with the same provider with the same near unusable broadband for the last 7 or 8 years. It's a sorry state of affairs.

Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index

#73

Post by vel0city »

arbitrage wrote: post #65
hunterb123 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prov…

> they should treat it like Texas treats its grid 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.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/06/25/blackouts-loom-in-cal...

Maybe there's more states than just Texas having to deal with the effects of climate change.

Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index

#74

Post by scottshamus »

tnorthcutt wrote: post #44
SteveGerencser wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We moved to a small rural community where a T1 isn't even available. I can get a 3Mb DSL connection or satellite. I have both because I need to redundancy. I did call to see what it would cost to have 'real' internet brought out here. They were happy to bring out a fiber line from the nearest town to serve our area. But it was going to cost me around $5k/mo with a 3 year contract for a 10Mb dedicated line. It's cheap…

It's cheaper to do point to point relays from that far. I would encourage you to look into this more, if you haven't already. I set up such a connection for my in-laws who live in rural Oklahoma, and it's been a resounding success. It still has issues, but it's worlds better than the antiquated satellite options they had before. They'll likely transition to using Starlink when it's available as the point to point con…

If you don’t mind, could you provide any more info on how to find providers for point to point relays? I didn’t even know this was an option and I’m having a tough time finding any information that isn’t specific to large businesses.

Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index

#75

Post by tnorthcutt »

scottshamus wrote: post #74
tnorthcutt wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cheaper to do point to point relays from that far. I would encourage you to look into this more, if you haven't already. I set up such a connection for my in-laws who live in rural Oklahoma, and it's been a resounding success. It still has issues, but it's worlds better than the antiquated satellite options they had before. They'll likely transition to using Starlink when it's available as the point to point con…

If you don’t mind, could you provide any more info on how to find providers for point to point relays? I didn’t even know this was an option and I’m having a tough time finding any information that isn’t specific to large businesses.

In my case (very small town), we shared a connection with a local business (feed store) that had a tall structure we could mount a pair of radios on (grain elevator), so we're not really using a "provider".

Sorry to not have better info for you, but hopefully someone else will see this and chime in!

Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index

#76

Post by none2123 »

Aromasin wrote: post #72

What I find interesting about this is how embarrassingly low the United Kingdom is considering its history as a telecom power house. In my eyes, and maybe I'm reading this data wrong, it really showcases the devastating impact the privatization of our services has had on our country. We have basically stagnated on speeds since the early 2000's. I still have the same speeds I had 10 years ago (100Mb/S with no opportun…

What provider are you with that is stuck at 100Mb? and what's the countryside speed/provider?

I have had gigabit in the rural homes and the flat in London that covers the last 6 years, before that is was Virgin media.

We actually have ~40%(1) of the country now on gigabit capable infrastructure many of those can choose between gigabit from multiple different first mile infrastructure providers. The government project 85%(2) gigabit coverage by 2025, I think we will get higher than that from all the plans I have seen. The biggest problem we in the Altnet world (non BT/Virgin media FTTH) is take up. Most people don't actually care and are happy to just stay on the cheapest 60Mb Sky/BT/NowTV/etc package for £22 a month. We see about 10% takeup/interest in areas with Virgin and FTTC, about 15% in areas with FTTC.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0028/218881/...

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index

#77

Post by foofoo4u »

Whenever it comes to comparisons between the United States and other countries of the world, it is best to keep in mind the difference in mass between the two. I put together this map to illustrate what I mean: https://thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTY2MDk5MTk.NzY3NTM1NA*...

As you can see, ALL of the countries that rank higher are significantly smaller than the United States. In fact, some of them are even smaller than some of our smallest states. And to truly capture the point, you can see all countries can fit within the United States with plenty of room to spare. The fact that America can rank so highly with citizens so spread out, a situation of which has its own scalability challenges, is rather impressive.

Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index

#78

Post by jeffasinger »

scottshamus wrote: post #74
tnorthcutt wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cheaper to do point to point relays from that far. I would encourage you to look into this more, if you haven't already. I set up such a connection for my in-laws who live in rural Oklahoma, and it's been a resounding success. It still has issues, but it's worlds better than the antiquated satellite options they had before. They'll likely transition to using Starlink when it's available as the point to point con…

If you don’t mind, could you provide any more info on how to find providers for point to point relays? I didn’t even know this was an option and I’m having a tough time finding any information that isn’t specific to large businesses.

Not the OP, but the people I've seen this do it DIY have all done it with Ubiquiti products. A single link can get a mile of range with clear LoS. Depending on how far out you are, that lets you connect to a "real" internet connection for cheap.

Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index

#79

Post by ziml77 »

Do these stats represent anything useful? First of all it's going to be biased towards people who test their connection speed. I could imagine that skewing the numbers upward. But even as a relative metric it doesn't say much because we don't know what the distribution is in different countries. Some of those averages could be bumped upwards by a small number of extremely fast connections.

Re: United States Broadband speed ranks 12th according to SpeedTest Global Index

#80

Post by 0xcde4c3db »

badsoftware wrote: post #2

I often see people commenting on the poor quality of America’s internet compared to European countries, but how much of that is due to the physical size of America? I imagine it’s much more difficult to build out a larger network especially when many parts of America are not very populated.

As far as I can tell it's not that America as a whole has bad internet, it's that we mostly put modern cable/conduit/equipment in neighborhoods that are either new or rich. There are places where brand new fiber and rusting DSL are separated by 100 feet.
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