How is this not investigated as an antitrust violation?
North America has some of the highest telecom prices in the world with some of the slowest speeds and worst service. There's clearly something very wrong with the market.
I live in a rural college town on the East Coast USA. I paid Verizon 90 USD per month for 1.5Mbit DSL and a home phone number.
I had this phone service for about 12 years. It was horrible. When the phone rang, the DSL would stop working. When I ended calls, the DSL would stop working. There was so much static on the line I could barely talk/hear others. But it grew worse and started impacting my ability to work from home after COVID.
Verizon said they could "roll a truck" to my house in about two months if I agreed to pay several hundred dollars upfront. I told them no. I had had enough. I ported my phone number to Consumer Cellular and use 4G for Internet access now. It's faster, $30 cheaper each month and much more reliable although I do limit my use as it has a 35 GB per month cap and "may" slow down if I go over that. I wonder, would it slow down more than Verizon's 1.5Mbit?
I'm still Waiting on Elon and Starlink to save us.
It would create huge shockwaves in the US if these problems were fixed, like fixed for real. It's an ingrained part of the North American market. You would, IMO, have to go all the way to removing all money, except state funds, from politics to start to fix this. Top to bottom fixed are needed. Turtles all the way down.
Corruption is basically legal in the US. You will go to jail for trying to bribe a judge but there are dozens of totally legal ways to bribe politicians. This is one of the most significant problems with American politics and is why quite a few things are perverse and broken.
My limited understanding of US politics (UK resident, Irish citizen here) is that lobby groups, once considered criminal organisations to the US senate, have gained 'acceptence' via decades of regulation creep i.e. the backdoor. This is why such loud responses have appeared from the 'Net neutraility' movement. The consequence is; more for the haves, less for the have-nots. Participation in democracy is a requirement, not an option... it can get exhausting though...
Varies widely. I could be fantastic in one town, but terrible in the next town over, even if the towns are similar in terms of size, density, demographics, and wealth. But in general, more places than not have pretty poor broadband.
From what I understand, most European countries have some sort of system in place where one company owns the copper/fiber line to your house, and another company connects that line to the backbone. (I'm oversimplifying because I don't understand it) The US doesn't have that- the same company that maintains the copper maintains the connection to the backbone. And if there's only one line to your house, that company has a monopoly on you, and they have no financial reason to better their service.
Thankfully, my house/neighborhood is serviced by at least three broadband providers. I pay $60 a month for 150Mb/s up, 150Mb/s down. Customer service is pretty good. I'm very happy with it.
25Gb/s though, that's wild. I have difficulty imagining it just from a technical perspective.
Most mid or large US cities have gigabit options, sometimes multiple options (in which case prices will be affordable)
Small cities and towns probably won’t have fiber. If you’re lucky and the cable infrastructure is new, you might be able to get gigabit cable, but it’s more likely that the affordable options are 25-300mbps.
If you are in a rural village, you may or may not have cable availability. (Likely depending on your proximity to other populated areas) Without cable, you may be relying on LTE or DSL.
And finally, if you’re in an area more rural than this, the only utilities that come to your house are likely electricity and copper phone. You’re either choosing between satellite or a (likely weak) cell signal.
Not a US citizen so take this with a grain of salt, but it seems to be mostly country wide. A US colleague of mine lives less than 10 mins from our office (which is close to many other offices), and he is struggling to get anything beyond 20mbps.
It’s country-wide, except in the very few areas where municipal broadband or community-local ISPs have stepped in and run their own fiber.
There’s a fiber loop a hundred feet away that’s restricted to businesses, but it still scares Comcast (because it’s a fiber run by one of those local ISPs) enough that my price for a symmetric is half what it would be on the other side of town.
How does that work when even 10Gbps ethernet is still cost-prohibitive for SOHO applications and "real" 1Gbps+ Wi-Fi just doesn't happen in thick-walled european houses...
> That’s why America, the birthplace of the internet, has some of the slowest, most expensive broadband in the rich world,
You see this repeated everywhere, but is it actually true? At least for speed, the data I've seen recently indicates the answer is "no". The Wikipedia page with charts from speedtest.net and speedtestnet.io has the US actually doing very well, not at the very top, but close to it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Interne...
The US is in the #11 spot in both charts, with speeds of 192 Mbps and 171 Mbps, respectively.
> So why is Altice slashing upload speeds? To be “in line with other ISPs.” In other words, “The rest of the industry is fucking awful, so why should we be any better?”
Wouldn’t the real reason with DOCSIS be so they have more downstream channels and less upstream? Giving them more downstream bandwidth to sell. Why didn’t the article mention this?
This is only an issue when providers use a configuration called low-split, which majority of providers do use.
The main issue is that changing the network to support higher upload speeds is that they need to replace most of the splitters in their network, but it is doable and there are providers that already did that.
It's strange as Altice is a French company (or partly owned by a French company by the same name) which owns/operates SFR in France.
I guess their French services are inline with French competition, except that means increasing speeds at lower prices, because competition.
The 1yr 'teaser rate' is ~US$19/month for 500/500, 160 TV channels and a home phone with unlimited calls. After a year it goes up to ~US$45, but because competition, you can threaten to leave or actually leave and get promo prices again. And it's europe, these prices include a 20% sales tax.
And that's kinda expensive, you should probably go with free.fr instead.
It wasn't always like this is in France. Telecom used to be quite terrible actually, so the government opened up everything. That's why you rarely see a case study on French telecom policy elsewhere in the world, nobody in industry wants to talk about it.
If you want more ISP competition where you live, I suggest getting active in your town government.
A while ago, I called up the town hall of the suburb where I grew up, and asked for a copy of their contract with Comcast. It technically doesn't grant them a monopoly -- that would be illegal -- but in effect it does. The contract says Comcast must serve any resident within two business days of the request. It also says the town can't give a better contract to another ISP (I forget the exact legal terms, this was years ago).
That means a startup ISP can't launch neighborhood by neighborhood. In order to provide service in the town, you need to build out connectivity everywhere, upfront. That is a multi million-dollar construction project which stands no chance of being paid back within a time period any investor would be comfortable with.
Even another large ISP wouldn't want to take this risk, which is why they still haven't done so in my home town. Best case is that you get around 5-10% of residents within a couple years. Even if your service is much better than the incumbent's, it can be hard to educate consumers. Most people won't know what they're missing, they'll be too lazy to switch, etc.
So, if you want to attempt to solve this problem in your town, there are a few things you can try to do:
- Make it so that startup ISPs can build out neighborhood by neighborhood. Yes, this means the hardest-to-reach/least profitable areas will be served last, but it's better than nothing.
- Get your town to fund construction. There are plenty of ISPs who would jump at the opportunity to serve your town if they didn't have to pay the capex. Have your town reach out to every startup ISP you can find and work on a deal.
- Build a municipal ISP. It's not that hard, more and more towns are doing it.
ISPs get away with too much BS nowadays and lobbying[0] is one of the main reasons why. The US is not even in the top 10 of countries ranked[1] by internet speed. I honestly think that if we changed a few rules around lobbying many problems would be solved pretty quickly and not only regarding the internet.
It's cheaper per capita to roll out fibre to 50 million people than to 5 million; no-one can seriously argue otherwise. This alone shows how broken the system is. Not only broadband but also healthcare and other services should be extremely cheap and well tested in the US in locations with a high density of people. That it is often as broken in high density areas as in rural areas baffles the mind. As a Scandinavian I'm often chocked how the US isn't number one. It really should be.
I'm saddened that there is no 'best practices' toolkit for the enterprising folks in rural America who have the skills to install their own fiber. The real pervasive monopoly is interconnection.
Years ago when I travelled in rural Tibet the phone signal was better than what I have now in Silicon valley. I didn't have phone signal today in a hospital in mountain view.
Normalising the dimensioning data links by arbitrary fractional throughput rates is an anachronism which needs to be challenged and eradicated from the entire industry.
Just to add another anecdote, I live 30 to 45 minutes (miles) outside of a major US city, just at the cusp of the metropolitan area. I live in a county, not in any city limits, etc.
We have access to at least two different providers offering gigabit service, along with many different speed services below that. We also have various satellite and cellular data options as well.
As stated many times before in various comments, articles etc: Sure, ISPs can definitely do better, but considering the landmass of the US and the different population densities, I think things are going pretty well. If you want to move rural enough, then a lot of things are going to become an issue utility wise, including electric, gas, water, internet, etc. The saying goes that you can't have your cake and eat it too. From prevailing comments and articles online it seems people want to be able to blindly pick literally anywhere on a map to live and also expect 100 Mb to gigabit service, not considering any sort of infrastructure that is around the area they have picked to live.
It's a mirror image of "shrinkflation" - the process whereby hiking of the price of chips gets partially disguised by reducing the number of chips in a bag rather than increasing the sticker price.
It's nice to have a symmetric connection, but for most people outside of tech, upstream is only stressed when uploading photos. It's rarely advertised outside of fine print. I personally love symmetric connections, but in some way the average consumer is subsidizing the costs for me.
This isn’t about symmetric connections. It’s about Altice lowering the upstream from 35 Mbps to 5 Mbps.
Going from 35 Mbps to 5 Mbps is ridiculous. It effectively lowers the quality of the broadband by bottlenecking connection.
You need upstream bandwidth to use your downstream. Having only 5% upstream of your downstream means the connection is at risk of congestion merely from return packets when downloading.
Once you saturate your upstream your downstream will become laggy and slow down.
Even ignoring headline downstream speeds, 5 Mbps of upstream bandwidth is a piddling amount of bandwidth. It is trivial to exhaust that amount of bandwidth just by normal Internet usage and a video call.
The whole thing is just a money grab from Altice by forcing customers to upgrade to more expensive packages just to get working broadband equivalent to what they had before.
Surely video calls must be the most common upstream killer these days? I am often in calls where coworkers turn off their cameras to avoid dropping off.
You can only use your new Boulangism toaster with approved, compatible groceries. Please hold your Boulangism approved food item in front of the Boulangism toaster to let it scan it. Your Boulangism toaster will open when it recognizes compatible food from producers from its partner program.
Paraphrased from Doctorow's excellent novella Unauthorized Bread.
Also annoyed. Turning a freaking blog platform into a walled garden is an absolute farce. What value exactly does Medium add over WordPress? It's trendy and newer? Has a more "minimal" design? The gimmicky inline comments? I've added Archive.is' Firefox addon and my default is to read Medium (and many other sites) as archives.
I really wish that search engines would start indexing these sites as humans see them. Maybe Brave can take a stance like that.
Here in the Netherlands this is now the standard for everything. What started as a cheaper than supplying a fob 2 factor, ended up naturally with locking up all info in apps. That, and Whatsapp being the only method of communication offered.
As emphasised by Freak_NL, it seems particularly ironic that this is Cory Doctorow behind the paywall.
What I don't understand is why when I'm searching for technical articles, Google ranks Medium at the top of results. Doesn't this fall into the whole "one result for the spider and another for the user" trap to get marked down? It's a blight on the web.
Spot on... I was just about to write about the very same point, and delighted to see it's the top response here... Paywalls, paywall, paywalls, please. Line up, line up.
I wonder how would your position change if they put another option that says "read in browser for 1$" and what it does, is to immediately pop up the 1 step payment confirmation and unlocks the article once you complete the payment(which itself could be 1 step with faceID or touchID on Apple devices).
This rant is the default reaction on for any article that is not presented frictionlessly and for free. There must be a metric in the analytics for it :)
Let's call it bounce/rant ratio. Over 1.0 it means that people don't care enough about your article, if it's under 1.0 it means that people can take even more in order to read it.
[+] [-] deadalus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maltalex|4 years ago|reply
North America has some of the highest telecom prices in the world with some of the slowest speeds and worst service. There's clearly something very wrong with the market.
[+] [-] _wldu|4 years ago|reply
I had this phone service for about 12 years. It was horrible. When the phone rang, the DSL would stop working. When I ended calls, the DSL would stop working. There was so much static on the line I could barely talk/hear others. But it grew worse and started impacting my ability to work from home after COVID.
Verizon said they could "roll a truck" to my house in about two months if I agreed to pay several hundred dollars upfront. I told them no. I had had enough. I ported my phone number to Consumer Cellular and use 4G for Internet access now. It's faster, $30 cheaper each month and much more reliable although I do limit my use as it has a 35 GB per month cap and "may" slow down if I go over that. I wonder, would it slow down more than Verizon's 1.5Mbit?
I'm still Waiting on Elon and Starlink to save us.
[+] [-] Dah00n|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andromeduck|4 years ago|reply
If we want to fix broadband and cellular, decouple utility pole ownership/permitting from retail providers.
[+] [-] pydry|4 years ago|reply
Also because political donations.
[+] [-] johndunne|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway2037|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aardwolf|4 years ago|reply
Is this slow broadband in US a country wide thing or only certain areas?
[+] [-] nwallin|4 years ago|reply
From what I understand, most European countries have some sort of system in place where one company owns the copper/fiber line to your house, and another company connects that line to the backbone. (I'm oversimplifying because I don't understand it) The US doesn't have that- the same company that maintains the copper maintains the connection to the backbone. And if there's only one line to your house, that company has a monopoly on you, and they have no financial reason to better their service.
Thankfully, my house/neighborhood is serviced by at least three broadband providers. I pay $60 a month for 150Mb/s up, 150Mb/s down. Customer service is pretty good. I'm very happy with it.
25Gb/s though, that's wild. I have difficulty imagining it just from a technical perspective.
[+] [-] kube-system|4 years ago|reply
Most mid or large US cities have gigabit options, sometimes multiple options (in which case prices will be affordable)
Small cities and towns probably won’t have fiber. If you’re lucky and the cable infrastructure is new, you might be able to get gigabit cable, but it’s more likely that the affordable options are 25-300mbps.
If you are in a rural village, you may or may not have cable availability. (Likely depending on your proximity to other populated areas) Without cable, you may be relying on LTE or DSL.
And finally, if you’re in an area more rural than this, the only utilities that come to your house are likely electricity and copper phone. You’re either choosing between satellite or a (likely weak) cell signal.
[+] [-] gizdan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] floatingatoll|4 years ago|reply
There’s a fiber loop a hundred feet away that’s restricted to businesses, but it still scares Comcast (because it’s a fiber run by one of those local ISPs) enough that my price for a symmetric is half what it would be on the other side of town.
[+] [-] AdamJacobMuller|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gaudat|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DaiPlusPlus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TulliusCicero|4 years ago|reply
You see this repeated everywhere, but is it actually true? At least for speed, the data I've seen recently indicates the answer is "no". The Wikipedia page with charts from speedtest.net and speedtestnet.io has the US actually doing very well, not at the very top, but close to it: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Interne...
The US is in the #11 spot in both charts, with speeds of 192 Mbps and 171 Mbps, respectively.
[+] [-] rbut|4 years ago|reply
Wouldn’t the real reason with DOCSIS be so they have more downstream channels and less upstream? Giving them more downstream bandwidth to sell. Why didn’t the article mention this?
[+] [-] zekica|4 years ago|reply
The main issue is that changing the network to support higher upload speeds is that they need to replace most of the splitters in their network, but it is doable and there are providers that already did that.
[+] [-] Scoundreller|4 years ago|reply
I guess their French services are inline with French competition, except that means increasing speeds at lower prices, because competition.
The 1yr 'teaser rate' is ~US$19/month for 500/500, 160 TV channels and a home phone with unlimited calls. After a year it goes up to ~US$45, but because competition, you can threaten to leave or actually leave and get promo prices again. And it's europe, these prices include a 20% sales tax.
And that's kinda expensive, you should probably go with free.fr instead.
https://www.sfr.fr/offre-internet
It wasn't always like this is in France. Telecom used to be quite terrible actually, so the government opened up everything. That's why you rarely see a case study on French telecom policy elsewhere in the world, nobody in industry wants to talk about it.
[+] [-] apeace|4 years ago|reply
A while ago, I called up the town hall of the suburb where I grew up, and asked for a copy of their contract with Comcast. It technically doesn't grant them a monopoly -- that would be illegal -- but in effect it does. The contract says Comcast must serve any resident within two business days of the request. It also says the town can't give a better contract to another ISP (I forget the exact legal terms, this was years ago).
That means a startup ISP can't launch neighborhood by neighborhood. In order to provide service in the town, you need to build out connectivity everywhere, upfront. That is a multi million-dollar construction project which stands no chance of being paid back within a time period any investor would be comfortable with.
Even another large ISP wouldn't want to take this risk, which is why they still haven't done so in my home town. Best case is that you get around 5-10% of residents within a couple years. Even if your service is much better than the incumbent's, it can be hard to educate consumers. Most people won't know what they're missing, they'll be too lazy to switch, etc.
So, if you want to attempt to solve this problem in your town, there are a few things you can try to do:
- Make it so that startup ISPs can build out neighborhood by neighborhood. Yes, this means the hardest-to-reach/least profitable areas will be served last, but it's better than nothing.
- Get your town to fund construction. There are plenty of ISPs who would jump at the opportunity to serve your town if they didn't have to pay the capex. Have your town reach out to every startup ISP you can find and work on a deal.
- Build a municipal ISP. It's not that hard, more and more towns are doing it.
[+] [-] jedimind|4 years ago|reply
[0]https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/verizon-communications/summ...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_...
[+] [-] Dah00n|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cashsterling|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shadilay|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway890u|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1ncorrect|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raptor99|4 years ago|reply
We have access to at least two different providers offering gigabit service, along with many different speed services below that. We also have various satellite and cellular data options as well.
As stated many times before in various comments, articles etc: Sure, ISPs can definitely do better, but considering the landmass of the US and the different population densities, I think things are going pretty well. If you want to move rural enough, then a lot of things are going to become an issue utility wise, including electric, gas, water, internet, etc. The saying goes that you can't have your cake and eat it too. From prevailing comments and articles online it seems people want to be able to blindly pick literally anywhere on a map to live and also expect 100 Mb to gigabit service, not considering any sort of infrastructure that is around the area they have picked to live.
[+] [-] pydry|4 years ago|reply
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/02/private-equity-crapi...
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/01/the-crapification-of...
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/02/james-surowiecki-pro...
It's a mirror image of "shrinkflation" - the process whereby hiking of the price of chips gets partially disguised by reducing the number of chips in a bag rather than increasing the sticker price.
[+] [-] luke2m|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hytdstd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iptrans|4 years ago|reply
Going from 35 Mbps to 5 Mbps is ridiculous. It effectively lowers the quality of the broadband by bottlenecking connection.
You need upstream bandwidth to use your downstream. Having only 5% upstream of your downstream means the connection is at risk of congestion merely from return packets when downloading.
Once you saturate your upstream your downstream will become laggy and slow down.
Even ignoring headline downstream speeds, 5 Mbps of upstream bandwidth is a piddling amount of bandwidth. It is trivial to exhaust that amount of bandwidth just by normal Internet usage and a video call.
The whole thing is just a money grab from Altice by forcing customers to upgrade to more expensive packages just to get working broadband equivalent to what they had before.
[+] [-] blacksmith_tb|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ev1|4 years ago|reply
Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, all of these make this untrue. Even GDrive/Dropbox of projects, videos is extremely common these days.
It is important that users be allowed to produce in addition to being spoon fed ads at maximum download rate.
[+] [-] vijaybritto|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tobr|4 years ago|reply
How can someone write this sentence and not even try to address the obvious follow-up question: Why?
I can imagine a few reasons, and none of them makes me want to do what Medium is asking me to do, ”free” or not.
[+] [-] Freak_NL|4 years ago|reply
Paraphrased from Doctorow's excellent novella Unauthorized Bread.
[+] [-] eloisius|4 years ago|reply
I really wish that search engines would start indexing these sites as humans see them. Maybe Brave can take a stance like that.
[+] [-] fallingknife|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brnt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] turminal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vinay_ys|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imron|4 years ago|reply
Because you’re not using an add blocker.
[+] [-] bencollier49|4 years ago|reply
What I don't understand is why when I'm searching for technical articles, Google ranks Medium at the top of results. Doesn't this fall into the whole "one result for the spider and another for the user" trap to get marked down? It's a blight on the web.
[+] [-] EMM_386|4 years ago|reply
It's my go-to for Medium, almost always already archived and ready to read.
I haven't found a way to effectively get around it with either uBlock Origin or Bypass Paywalls extensions installed.
[+] [-] commoner|4 years ago|reply
https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean
Also works on mobile, if you use Android.
[+] [-] johndunne|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrtksn|4 years ago|reply
This rant is the default reaction on for any article that is not presented frictionlessly and for free. There must be a metric in the analytics for it :)
Let's call it bounce/rant ratio. Over 1.0 it means that people don't care enough about your article, if it's under 1.0 it means that people can take even more in order to read it.
[+] [-] Proven|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]