arstechnica.com — The latest measure of the state of the US broadband market is now available and, like many other takes on the subject, the picture it paints is a bit depressing. The report puts the US in 15th place when it comes to national broadband speeds, and indicates that improvements are coming very slowly.
Aug 15, 2008 View in Crawl 4
rattelerAug 15, 2008
Yup The problem is a deliberately unfair market that slices up zones and gives them different carriers. In New York City, a Major market for everything, I've been places where people who live next door to each other have to have to be services by different carriers because of some zoning BS.The result, all the Comcasts, Road Runners, and Optimum Onlines, get to maintain an artificially high price for their service because they never have to compete directly with each other.Your "choice" for service is then, cable, or DSL.Pit Cable providers against Cable providers.... and pretty soon you'll have a competition for THE BEST SERVICE!!!! DSL will have to up their game to enter the market, and building that infrastructure suddenly seems like good investment into stead of money they don't need to spend.And none of them will give up information to illegal Government searches because we can DUMP them in protest.Instead of spending money building infrastructure to those 10 rural rubes, they've been spending it lobbying congress to protect their pluralapoly to provide you the minimum service.Where would YOU rather they spend their money? On your bandwidth, and accessibility, or stealing your right to privacy and avoiding a fair market.
vipersfateAug 15, 2008
Now that's a speed I can live with!
lerenardAug 15, 2008
Run some cable up to Quebec.. then over here to NH while you are at it :)
s68xAug 15, 2008
I live in the middle of nowhere and we have to pay over $60/month for 512Kbps down / 128Kbps up. Plus I have a web server...
bdbrAug 15, 2008
Wikipedia says Windows 2003 doesn't have it enabled. 2008 should have all the same enhancements in Vista.I can tell you that network engineers are seriously concerned about this. All that bandwidth will be great for the user, but we've seen in testing that it can stomp all over other traffic.
iamacomputerAug 15, 2008
I'm not sure, they're doing 16mbps "blast" right now over the normal coax. Probably will need a new modem, and maybe they'll do something interesting coming in from the street to the houses, I'm not sure if whats in place now handles that throughput.