Basing this analysis on ZIP Code greatly underestimates the reality many Americans face, especially in more densely populated areas.
Here in New York (10003, for example), the site says I have four options for broadband, but in reality, many buildings have exclusive contracts with ISPs (I could only get TWC in my old building, for example).
My sister lives in Miami and she also has access to one ISP, despite the site giving two options. Her ISP, Hotwire Communications (which gives her "up to" 20 Mbps), isn't even listed.
Same thing with my parents' ZIP Code (and they live in a single family home). The site says they have access to three ISPs, but one of them is only 12 Mbps and the other isn't actually available.
ISPs have to submit coverage data to the FCC (Form 477) twice a year. This data goes down to the census tract level which is generally far more specific than a ZIP Code.
So there is a reason for this. The wires (the copper cabling) in your building are owned by hotwire or comcast or whomever made a deal with the building at the time of construction. These wires are a real-estate asset with attached exclusive rights of way over them. For most buildings it is too costly to kick out comcast or build their own internal network. So technically her neighborhood might have multiple providers, each in different buildings.
In some cases the building management is given a wholesale rate for your internet, and then marks it up and uses the revenue to fund association costs, or their own profits.
There's nothing you can really do about this. Even if there were dozens of potential providers, apartment buildings wouldn't want to accommodate dozens of companies running wiring through their building or putting equipment in their telecom closets. And they certainly don't want to take on the cost and hassle of maintaining their own wiring inside the building.
Right... I know it's hard to figure out an appropriate division, but when this came up a few weeks back, I came up with the following:
For my home, 2.5mi from the Capital Building in Washington State, I'm offered four wired broadband providers:
1. Comcast, "advertised 100mbps to 1gbps" (true enough, although you can only get 150mbps, so I'm not sure if that's bracketing)
2. CenturyLink, "25-50mbps" (CenturyLink's own website says "Our systems indicate that our High Speed Internet is not currently available at your service address." I tried several other streets in the area that indicated that none of them had availability either.)
3. Platinum Equity LLC, "10-25mbps" (err, Platinum Equity is an investment firm - oh, one of their portfolio offers "T1 and Bonded T1" lines to businesses and after further investigation would offer me 192K SDSL as a residential offering)
4. Integra Telecom Holdings, "3-6mbps" (a Vancouver telco that does business fiber).
So there's one - Olympia, WA.
Even in smaller cities within a single zip-code there can be problems.
Here in San Luis Obispo, Charter cannot run cable to many of the downtown historical buildings–leaving AT&T DSL as the only option. I've turned down some office space because of it.
Yep I'm in the same boat. My apartment complex has its own ISP, whose max available speed is 6mbps with a 150gb cap. Outside of the complex, at least Charter is available, which is 60mbps. The kicker? I pay $46/mo and Charter's offering is $40. Even if it's introductory that's still worth it.
I would actually pay more than I already do to get better internet through my complex, but I literally can't. Bloom Broadband is terrible.
Yeah I've lived in a few larger and mid sized cities and I've never had more than one option. On the east coast its Comcast in some buildings and Time Warner in others (mostly in the North). On the West Coast its all Comcast. Some residential areas I know have access to Century Link but I've never heard of someone in an apartment complex having a choice on their ISP.
98005 lists 5, the building I'm in right now doesn't have any of them; actually called those only to be told that the service is not available. (Only I heard that Comcast 6-digits money to extend their line, I don't know how long it'll take...)
Also consider qualitative differences: sure, I can get DSL, but it would be a far worse option speed- and cost-wise than cable. So I'm effectively forced into one provider.
I'm in the same boat, living in a small town in Iowa. We pay $57.95/month for the fastest package — 12M down and 512K up. If my ISP ever gets uppity, I have the "luxury" of switching to the only other provider at $39/month for 6M down and 512K up.
Maryland/Baltimore don't show up on that list, but while Verizon has some existing DSL (not FiOS) customers, they don't seem to be taking any new customers (and you can find no evidence on the internet that they offer DSL in Baltimore).
Baltimore essentially only has a Comcast option.
I wonder if it's actually even worse than this article suggests -- not only is DSL slower than most people want, but there are some places Verizon may technically 'offer' DSL, but in fact not really. (many places? I think Verizon is focusing on FiOS and there may be other places that they only 'offer' DSL, but do not really offer it at all?)
> Baltimore essentially only has a Comcast option.
I have FiOS in Baltimore.
That nobody else does is 100% the fault of the city. Verizon was willing to build FiOS here, and did in a few places where they didn't need permission. But the city turned it into a huge social justice issue and sank the whole thing.
When I lived in Tucson I had a similar problem. IIRC Comcast offered acceptable speeds (15/1?) and Qwest or similar offered maybe 1.5 Mbs down and less up. "Competition" existed only in a theoretical sense.
I actually tried writing to the head of Qwest Arizona and Qwest nationally to try and convince them to run faster pipes to my area—a lot of students and younger people who like fast Internet access lived there—but didn't get any action.
The [Reddit] thread has much more information regarding this article, including the Author and co-founder of the site.
The head of this study is on reddit, as reddit.com/u/NickReese
This study does not take in account the upcoming change of bradband >=25Mbps . The current site uses >=10Mbps .
There's also question regarding their data, as it does seem compromised in certain locations. He was looking into it, after a few redditors that supposedly had multiple broadband providers only had one, and some none at all.
I live in Virginia and have access to ZERO wired providers and zero wireless -- all we have is satellite. That's because the state allowed Verizon and others to chomp up the lucrative northern Virginia market with FIOS without requiring that they upgrade the rest of their wired switching equipment in less-populated areas. So Verizon makes money on the nicest part of the market -- and the rest of us get nothing. And this is from a company using eminent domain to provide their service.
I thought it was a bad situation ten years ago. Now I think it's a scandal. Especially for poorer areas on the Mid-Atlantic, the tobacco deal was specifically supposed to provide broadband. The idea was that over time we would trade off tobacco farming for some kind of technology work. Instead we were sold out.
Just last week, a neighbor came to me asking about doing internet work for a call center from their house. I told them it was impossible, short of leasing a T-1 or T-3 from Verizon. I cannot tell you how whacked it is to say that in 2015.
This is a posting from July 22, 2014 that states, "Yet as of the 2013 over 39 Million Americans (12.1% of the population) only have access to 0 or 1 broadband providers..."
What are the numbers now that broadband has been re-defined as "25 mbps" [1]?
Hey, co-founder of broadbandnow.com and author of the article. We'll be rerunning the stats with the new definition shortly. I'll make sure it's posted here.
How about wireless? It is good enough for many cases. Especially on country side without interference from other users.
I would like to offer two stories:
- Czech Republic before 2005 had really bad internet service. Single telecommunication company had monopoly. It only offered expensive dial-up and very slow ADSL. So it gave rise to community driven internet providers based on WIFI. They even made their own hardware based on laser diods. The biggest community network had about 500K users.
- Ireland around 2010 had (and still has) very bad internet access. Goverment gave free license to new mobile phone operator which used exclusively 3G networks. One of the conditions was to provide internet access over phone for montly fee 20 Euro. Many people are now using phone as their main connection (I know case where monthly traffic was 44GB without any complain from provider).
Here in the states, Comcast cable modems/routers automatically create a "public" wifi hotspot in your home by default, so the infrastructure for a large wifi network exists in many places. The catch is, for the public to join the wifi network they must have a Comcast account in good standing. I can only assume based on Comcast's intent to build "the largest public (private) wifi network" themselves and the recent legislative attacks against community/public broadband networks that attempting to create a truly public wifi network using any of the available broadband providers as a backing service would be a Bad Idea. Anecdotally, the wireless broadband providers here are also a joke.
Some cities have wifi providers. It's not common. As for mobile internet, the data caps are the issue. Data for Verizon is $60/mo for 10GB. With Comcast, it's unlimited (or maybe 250GB) for maybe $50/mo?
http://broadbandnow.com/Pennsylvania/Pittsburgh Looks like it's pretty decent, but everywhere I've lived so far (which has been in quite a bit of the city in the past 4 years) has not had access to FiOS. In my apt right now I only have access to Verizon DSL because Comcast canceled my account because I wanted to downgrade. (Their sales staff could only upgrade, status quo, or cancel outright -- not downgrade.)
Also, http://broadbandnow.com/Pennsylvania claims that 90% of people have access to 100mb service in my county. 1) No. 2) "Access" doesn't mean at any price anyone but a business can afford.
I am one of these 39M Americans. My sole provider is AT&T through a 6mbps DSL line. I live in Charlotte, NC within 20 minutes of the center of the city.
It's unfortunate that I live on a more rural road where there's an approximate 1 to 1.5 mile stretch of road with absolutely no houses. Beyond that, my street has only 20 houses after this stretch. This is definitely off-putting for carriers to install new lines down to us because they're likely to not see ROI foreeeever.
I really don't know what to do. Satellite is currently unacceptable with the bandwidth caps and latency.
Does anybody have any suggestions? I've contacted all of the major providers looking to get updates to our area.
Parents have a strikingly similar situation in VA, except they can't even get DSL. They eventually went with Verizon over LTE after years of crappy satellite internet. You can't purchase more than 30GB/mo, but otherwise, it's worked great for them.
The only problem with the LTE service is that so many things like to silently update in the background---they can bump up against that 30GB limit without intending to.
Maybe contact your board of supervisors or whatever they're called in your neck of the woods? At least you could get them thinking about the problem next time the service contracts are up for negotiations.
What's your LTE situation look like? Also, how do you like your neighbors? It might be worth someone's while to run fiber out there if they could guarantee they'd have 100% uptake to those other houses.
I'm in this group and it seriously blows. Windstream DSL is my only option for wired internet. During the daytime, my speed is usually around the advertised 6mb down/0.75 up. But in the evenings and on weekends, I frequently see it drop to 0.5/0.1 or less. During the past year I've had a dozen or more outages, including two that lasted for a day or more.
When I want to download something quickly (or just open a web page some evenings), I tether to my cellphone which thankfully has unlimited LTE service because I've refused to sign a new contract. (Speeds are around ~18/5 if I put the phone in my front window.)
A guy working at Time Warner (which provides 50mb service about 0.5 miles from my house) said it would cost around $22k for them to wire up my neighborhood and that was too much for them.
After that, I've started looking into what it would take to run my own fiber lines to my neighborhood. It looks like it'd cost me that much or more, which is not an insurmountable amount, but it is significant. And I'm not sure if there's any way I could ever hope to make it profitable.
Edit: Oh, and I forgot to mention: my price has gone up twice during the past year - I'm now paying ~$65/month.
Second edit: I just realized that my service doesn't qualify as "broadband", even under the FCC's old definition. I have zero wired broadband providers available.
How many people are in your neighborhood? Perhaps you could crowdfund part of it and say, "We will pay you X to wire up our neighborhood ...", and defray the cost enough to make it viable.
The biggest bullshite in Austin is that now that Google rolls into town, Time Warner and AT&T are scared, so now they are complimentary upgrading everyone. Yes they may have made recent upgrades too, but it takes someone like Google to make them provide something better.
And even though I got a complimentary upgrade to 300mbps down, it's capping out at 100...
In DC in theory you have 3 providers but in practice that's not how it works. Even though my neighbors had RCN or Verizon they could not serve me. I ended up stuck with Comcast and everything this implies. Then I moved to another place, just a round-robin, now I'm stuck with Verizon.
This article was based on the OLD definition of broadband and that included DSL as a wired provider.
When the FCC releases it's 2014 dataset we'll re-release this same report and apply the new definition. (My gut says the results will be much different)
Also in using the site if you find that your zip is vastly inaccurate (lots of areas in PA that we're investigating) drop us a note here or via help [at] broadbandnow.com and we'll dig into the data.
Our goal is to help make shopping for broadband easier.
It's a big undertaking as the industry leverages it's opaqueness to charge higher prices, but hopefully we can bring more transparency to the marketplace.
Greetings from beautiful Cedar Key, Florida. Bright House Networks will take your order for 90Mbps cablemodem, but the installer who eventually comes out will tell you that they don't do cablemodem here. AT&T will sell you 3Mbps (yes that's a 3) DSL that has horrendous packet loss and dropouts. There are no WISPs, although expensive LTE service is really good. Fortunately this is an area that is eligible for Exede Satellite Internet's Freedom plan, which is enough for work, google hangouts, Netflix, and more. TL;DR zero reliable wired providers of any sort, and one terrible one.
[Disclaimer: Do not interpret this as a complaint, I knew what I was getting into when I moved here, and I do love this place for a lot of reasons]
Yep. I live right outside Chicago. Comcast is the only game in town... well that is a lie. You can also get at&t which offers lightning fast speeds upwards to 1.5mb for THE SAME PRICE as comcasts 16MB offering. Wooo competition!
In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, It seemed I could choose from some pretty slow DSL from Verizon or cable Time Warner (turns out to be pretty slow a lot of the time). Then I found a smaller company offering much faster Fiber connections for the same prices as the DSL or Cable. So I called them up, and while they do service our street, they are specifically not allowed to service our house. I assumed the worst—two companies dividing up territory. Ended up with some pretty terrible Cable internet that gets decent speeds around 1AM when I am either asleep or out of the house. Rest of the time it crawls.
As critical services move to the Internet, and we become reliant on IoT and cloud for our day-to-day, including emergency communication, many residences and businesses will need access to at least two permanent connections because we will need 99.999 uptime (and some programmable CPE to abstract the user from switching between the providers when one is down or degraded).
This means even two broadband providers will not always be sufficient. Many of us will need at least four total (true) broadband providers:
2+ wired
2+ wireless
to then choose from in truly healthy, competitive enviro...
Counterwise, you've just illustrated why I pay absolutely no attention to the IoT and will be surprised if it really gets anywhere any time soon (like, probably within my lifetime, assume a quarter century), and make sure nothing bad will happen when my rock solid AT&T DSL does occasionally go down.
Heck, Heinlein discussed this sort of thing in his 1966 The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
[+] [-] martingordon|11 years ago|reply
Here in New York (10003, for example), the site says I have four options for broadband, but in reality, many buildings have exclusive contracts with ISPs (I could only get TWC in my old building, for example).
My sister lives in Miami and she also has access to one ISP, despite the site giving two options. Her ISP, Hotwire Communications (which gives her "up to" 20 Mbps), isn't even listed.
Same thing with my parents' ZIP Code (and they live in a single family home). The site says they have access to three ISPs, but one of them is only 12 Mbps and the other isn't actually available.
[+] [-] jauer|11 years ago|reply
I'm not sure why they aren't using the more detailed information from http://www.broadbandmap.gov/data-download
[+] [-] brianbreslin|11 years ago|reply
In some cases the building management is given a wholesale rate for your internet, and then marks it up and uses the revenue to fund association costs, or their own profits.
[+] [-] rayiner|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FireBeyond|11 years ago|reply
For my home, 2.5mi from the Capital Building in Washington State, I'm offered four wired broadband providers: 1. Comcast, "advertised 100mbps to 1gbps" (true enough, although you can only get 150mbps, so I'm not sure if that's bracketing) 2. CenturyLink, "25-50mbps" (CenturyLink's own website says "Our systems indicate that our High Speed Internet is not currently available at your service address." I tried several other streets in the area that indicated that none of them had availability either.) 3. Platinum Equity LLC, "10-25mbps" (err, Platinum Equity is an investment firm - oh, one of their portfolio offers "T1 and Bonded T1" lines to businesses and after further investigation would offer me 192K SDSL as a residential offering) 4. Integra Telecom Holdings, "3-6mbps" (a Vancouver telco that does business fiber). So there's one - Olympia, WA.
[+] [-] callmeed|11 years ago|reply
Here in San Luis Obispo, Charter cannot run cable to many of the downtown historical buildings–leaving AT&T DSL as the only option. I've turned down some office space because of it.
[+] [-] jtymes|11 years ago|reply
I would actually pay more than I already do to get better internet through my complex, but I literally can't. Bloom Broadband is terrible.
[+] [-] ryanSrich|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unsignedint|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] clarkm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calinet6|11 years ago|reply
Also consider qualitative differences: sure, I can get DSL, but it would be a far worse option speed- and cost-wise than cable. So I'm effectively forced into one provider.
[+] [-] biesnecker|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asyncwords|11 years ago|reply
The price of living in a small town I guess.
[+] [-] rhino369|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrochkind1|11 years ago|reply
Baltimore essentially only has a Comcast option.
I wonder if it's actually even worse than this article suggests -- not only is DSL slower than most people want, but there are some places Verizon may technically 'offer' DSL, but in fact not really. (many places? I think Verizon is focusing on FiOS and there may be other places that they only 'offer' DSL, but do not really offer it at all?)
[+] [-] rayiner|11 years ago|reply
I have FiOS in Baltimore.
That nobody else does is 100% the fault of the city. Verizon was willing to build FiOS here, and did in a few places where they didn't need permission. But the city turned it into a huge social justice issue and sank the whole thing.
[+] [-] jseliger|11 years ago|reply
I actually tried writing to the head of Qwest Arizona and Qwest nationally to try and convince them to run faster pipes to my area—a lot of students and younger people who like fast Internet access lived there—but didn't get any action.
[+] [-] kefka|11 years ago|reply
The head of this study is on reddit, as reddit.com/u/NickReese
This study does not take in account the upcoming change of bradband >=25Mbps . The current site uses >=10Mbps .
There's also question regarding their data, as it does seem compromised in certain locations. He was looking into it, after a few redditors that supposedly had multiple broadband providers only had one, and some none at all.
[Reddit] http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2vk1xx/after_33b...
[+] [-] DanielBMarkham|11 years ago|reply
I thought it was a bad situation ten years ago. Now I think it's a scandal. Especially for poorer areas on the Mid-Atlantic, the tobacco deal was specifically supposed to provide broadband. The idea was that over time we would trade off tobacco farming for some kind of technology work. Instead we were sold out.
Just last week, a neighbor came to me asking about doing internet work for a call center from their house. I told them it was impossible, short of leasing a T-1 or T-3 from Verizon. I cannot tell you how whacked it is to say that in 2015.
[+] [-] 127001brewer|11 years ago|reply
What are the numbers now that broadband has been re-defined as "25 mbps" [1]?
[1] http://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-finds-us-broadband-deploymen...
[+] [-] nickreese|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hapless|11 years ago|reply
I'll bet it's a lot more than 12%.
[+] [-] godzillabrennus|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jkot|11 years ago|reply
I would like to offer two stories:
- Czech Republic before 2005 had really bad internet service. Single telecommunication company had monopoly. It only offered expensive dial-up and very slow ADSL. So it gave rise to community driven internet providers based on WIFI. They even made their own hardware based on laser diods. The biggest community network had about 500K users.
- Ireland around 2010 had (and still has) very bad internet access. Goverment gave free license to new mobile phone operator which used exclusively 3G networks. One of the conditions was to provide internet access over phone for montly fee 20 Euro. Many people are now using phone as their main connection (I know case where monthly traffic was 44GB without any complain from provider).
[+] [-] xdissent|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freehunter|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimktrains2|11 years ago|reply
Also, http://broadbandnow.com/Pennsylvania claims that 90% of people have access to 100mb service in my county. 1) No. 2) "Access" doesn't mean at any price anyone but a business can afford.
[+] [-] jqueryin|11 years ago|reply
It's unfortunate that I live on a more rural road where there's an approximate 1 to 1.5 mile stretch of road with absolutely no houses. Beyond that, my street has only 20 houses after this stretch. This is definitely off-putting for carriers to install new lines down to us because they're likely to not see ROI foreeeever.
I really don't know what to do. Satellite is currently unacceptable with the bandwidth caps and latency.
Does anybody have any suggestions? I've contacted all of the major providers looking to get updates to our area.
[+] [-] mcmancini|11 years ago|reply
The only problem with the LTE service is that so many things like to silently update in the background---they can bump up against that 30GB limit without intending to.
Maybe contact your board of supervisors or whatever they're called in your neck of the woods? At least you could get them thinking about the problem next time the service contracts are up for negotiations.
[+] [-] rayiner|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] strick|11 years ago|reply
And those who have more than 1 are served by an oligopoly who overcharge for mediocre (at best) service.
Are the few cities with municipal broadband or Google Fiber seeing better service and prices?
[+] [-] nfriedly|11 years ago|reply
When I want to download something quickly (or just open a web page some evenings), I tether to my cellphone which thankfully has unlimited LTE service because I've refused to sign a new contract. (Speeds are around ~18/5 if I put the phone in my front window.)
A guy working at Time Warner (which provides 50mb service about 0.5 miles from my house) said it would cost around $22k for them to wire up my neighborhood and that was too much for them.
After that, I've started looking into what it would take to run my own fiber lines to my neighborhood. It looks like it'd cost me that much or more, which is not an insurmountable amount, but it is significant. And I'm not sure if there's any way I could ever hope to make it profitable.
Edit: Oh, and I forgot to mention: my price has gone up twice during the past year - I'm now paying ~$65/month.
Second edit: I just realized that my service doesn't qualify as "broadband", even under the FCC's old definition. I have zero wired broadband providers available.
[+] [-] gknoy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stephengoodwin|11 years ago|reply
Time Warner is the most available and is the only cable option for many people.
Grande Communications is available in a few, selected areas.
Google Fiber is slowly becoming available across the city, one neighborhood at a time, but is not available to most at the moment.
AT&T U-verse is also an option, but the impression I've gotten is that Time Warner is still much faster.
[+] [-] josephjrobison|11 years ago|reply
And even though I got a complimentary upgrade to 300mbps down, it's capping out at 100...
[+] [-] silveira|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nickreese|11 years ago|reply
When the FCC releases it's 2014 dataset we'll re-release this same report and apply the new definition. (My gut says the results will be much different)
Also in using the site if you find that your zip is vastly inaccurate (lots of areas in PA that we're investigating) drop us a note here or via help [at] broadbandnow.com and we'll dig into the data.
You can check your zip here: http://broadbandnow.com/search
Our goal is to help make shopping for broadband easier.
It's a big undertaking as the industry leverages it's opaqueness to charge higher prices, but hopefully we can bring more transparency to the marketplace.
[+] [-] justanother|11 years ago|reply
[Disclaimer: Do not interpret this as a complaint, I knew what I was getting into when I moved here, and I do love this place for a lot of reasons]
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] digitalneal|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adregan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gz5|11 years ago|reply
As critical services move to the Internet, and we become reliant on IoT and cloud for our day-to-day, including emergency communication, many residences and businesses will need access to at least two permanent connections because we will need 99.999 uptime (and some programmable CPE to abstract the user from switching between the providers when one is down or degraded).
This means even two broadband providers will not always be sufficient. Many of us will need at least four total (true) broadband providers: 2+ wired 2+ wireless to then choose from in truly healthy, competitive enviro...
[+] [-] hga|11 years ago|reply
Heck, Heinlein discussed this sort of thing in his 1966 The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
[+] [-] NDizzle|11 years ago|reply