Wow, the United States left behind

[Alessandro Machi]

US lags far behind on internet connection speed...

 

This has got to be terrorism related. Everything we post or email must be going through some sort of "terrorism sifter" and that is gumming up the works, as in viewing demo reels and such, yes or no?

[William A Chapman Jr]

US lags far behind on internet connection speed...

 

This has got to be terrorism related. Everything we post or email must be going through some sort of "terrorism sifter" and that is gumming up the works, as in viewing demo reels and such, yes or no?

 

Maybe, its hard to say.

[Alessandro Machi]

Doesn't this slow down economic productivity?

 

Is the much slower internet speed due to the type of cabling that has been laid down? Although in Japan they do a lot things wireless. So is this a wireless versus wired issue? Can the United States just magically increase the bandwidth overnight if they passed a law requiring it? Maybe this is illegal downloading related?

[Carlos_Martinez]

its just America being the money hungry imperialistic country it has become today. It be easier to charge people 30 bucks a month for slow internet than fast. That and well we are all still wried for the 1900's so it wouldn't be cost efficient to do so. so its a factor of being cheap and still trying to bleed the citizens dry of their hard earned money

[Michael Collier]

Well, I mean look at who regulates the internet. The guy in charge is my very own senator from Alaska, Ted Stevens (yeah, the 'hulk tie guy', the guy whos always angry) This guy once said, and I quote: 'The internets isn't a bunch of dump trucks, its a giant tube!!! // I sent a peice of internets out to my assistent friday....and it didn't get there until tuesday!' (all real quotes from senate floor).

 

 

FYI, stevens, along with son ben stevens and about 7 other local and state lawmakers from Alaska are all either indicted or soon to be indicted. Ted stevens is soon to be indicted for allegedly letting veco (an oil service company) build a multi-thousand dollar improvement to his Girdwood home without him paying. This is alleged of course, but keep in mind the owner of veco has pled guilty to massive legislative bribes and fraud. I guess after that maybe our tubes might speed up. sorry that was a tangent.

[Dominic Case]

Calm down guys - it's not terrorism-related. Though you might want to believe that the fact that Australia's speeds are way slower than the US's, and that Australia is also involved with the USA in Iraq, may have something to do with it.

 

But paranoia aside, it is not a matter of filters - it's a matter of the bandwidth capability of the pipes and the nodes etc. You would have faster speeds in the US if fewer people used the internet - you are all contending for the same bandwidth, and the private sector that provides the infrastructure is making money out of very full usage. Also, in Korea (with very high speeds reported), a high proportion of the population live in urban high-rise apartments, where it is very easy to get fibre optic connections to large numbers of people.

 

A better measure would be the total bandwidth used per capita. But I don't know who has those figures.

 

In Australia, there are political and commercial fights over who is going to roll out a nation-wide broadband network, while the Federal Minister responsible recently asserted that most people in the cities are satisfied with their present connection speeds. Here, it is supposed that anything over 128kbps (count them!) is "broadband".

 

Fraudband is a more popular term. Makes even the US median speed look good!

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

I think it's all down to your inability to count to thirty in whole numbers. I mean, what would you say if someone offered you an internet connection at 29.97kbps? You'd scream blue murder and beat upon the ISP's door with your bloodied fists - and you'd be right to do so.

 

But seriously: it's down to size and population density. The US is a large country which is, compared to the UK, rather sparsely populated. Australia is a truly vast country with a population, at the last census, of fourteen. The amount of money you can make for laying a foot of fibre-optic cable is directly related to the number of people you can connect to it, and the lower the population density, the smaller that number is. Now of course this is mitigated in Australia because the population is overwhelmingly concentrated in a few cities, but the US is much more evenly distributed.

 

I live about a mile from the telephone exchange, in a town of about 150,000, about forty miles from central London. As of right now my router reports 2400kbps download and 667kbps upload, which is reasonably typical - and I'm only paying for 1024/512! This is presumably because the telecomms people in the UK spent much of the early nineties opening trenches and pouring in fibre optic cable by the armload, to the extent that much of it is still not lit, and there's a comprehensive national network with several very high capacity trunk routes. But you could take this country and drop it into the state of Queensland, and you'd have to send out search parties to make sure it was OK.

 

And it wouldn't be. Because there would be kangaroos.

 

Phil

[Alessandro Machi]

A. Terrorism related in the sense that if every email and message is being examined for key phrases, yes that would bog down the system.

 

B. Or, the other reason could be to slow down illegal downloads.

 

C. Or, as Dominic states, the internet pipeline is too small.

 

But why are so many other countrie's pipline able to accomodate more bandwidth? Refer to A or B???

[Dominic Case]

But you could take this country and drop it into the state of Queensland,

Most of it is here already, in Sydney, in the form of backpackers. The only bartenders and coffee-shop waiters here who don't have English accents are the ones with Irish accents ;) *

 

But, back to broadband. Phil also points out:

The amount of money you can make for laying a foot of fibre-optic cable is directly related to the number of people you can connect to it,

Correct. The countries that have better and faster networks (after everything else is taken into account: geography, population spread, computer ownership etc) are the ones where government recognises the importance of infrastructure - not as a means of generating direct profit to the provider, but as a necessary system allowing third parties to generate wealth for the economy at large - which ultimately benefits the provider anyway.

 

Most countries have developed road networks, not as a means of making profit for the roadbuilders, but as a necessity for the economy to flourish. Many countries developed rail networks for private profit, (successfully in the nineteenth century) but attempts to run them as profit centres these days usually lead to shrinking services and closed lines. Broadband connectivity should be the same. That's why the US and Australia are backward in this.

 

*PS before anyone else point this out, I understand London is equally full of Aussie visitors, who may even outnumber the kangaroos loose in the countryside around Whipsnade Zoo.

[Daniel Smith]

I think it's probably more because the United States has such a huge area, that there are tons of proxies/mirrors to send and receive the information through.

 

That and there is so much wasted bandwidth, with junk mail etc.

Edited July 4, 2007 by Daniel Ashley-Smith

[David Auner aac]

I think it mainly has to do with the fact that most telephone lines date back to at least the 50s. When I lived in Michigan, LP, for half a year in 2000, the fasted I could get out of that phone line was around 23-33kbps. Back here in Austria I had around 384kbps. The folks in Michigan back then had scarcely ever heard of DSL or the like...

 

Cheers, Dave

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

> most telephone lines date back to at least the 50s

 

So do ours. It's just slightly more practical to start en-masse replacements of the UK infrastructure, since the population density is much higher.

 

Actually, it's probably no longer true that our infrastructure dates back to the 50s, but it was until the mid to late 90s.

 

Phil

[David Auner aac]

So do ours. It's just slightly more practical to start en-masse replacements of the UK infrastructure, since the population density is much higher.

 

Yep. It would seem that the less dense your country is populated and the fewer people are living there, the harder it gets to keep up with kind of technological advance. And it ain't gonna slow down anytime soon, I guess.

 

Cheers, Dave

[John Sprung]

The only bartenders and coffee-shop waiters here who don't have English accents are the ones with Irish accents ;) *

Hmmm -- that sounds like a conspiracy to confuse vacationing Americans. Maybe you could send the kangaroos to David in Austria, too. Fun to see them hopping around the Hoher Markt.... ;-)

 

Seriously, though, the one place we've had real bad bandwidth problems is South Africa. Getting dailies back from there was problematic.

 

 

 

-- J.S.

[David Auner aac]

Hmmm -- that sounds like a conspiracy to confuse vacationing Americans. Maybe you could send the kangaroos to David in Austria, too. Fun to see them hopping around the Hoher Markt.... ;-)

 

 

Hi John,

 

you're aware of the T-shirt they sell here? "There ain't no Kangaroos in Austria!" And, depending on the version, you'd have a crossed out kangaroos or one of them Australian warning signs on them. :D

 

Cheers, Dave

[John Sprung]

you're aware of the T-shirt they sell here? "There ain't no Kangaroos in Austria!"

You should get some -- just to confuse the tourists.... ;-)

 

 

 

-- J.S.