> there is cause for celebration in Dallas, Seattle and Austin, after our analysis has shown that these cities are performing extremely well relative to most European capital cities.
Seattle has some actual competition now, and many (most?) of us can get fiber gigabit to the home for a reasonable rate. It's glorious.
I hope other American cities start courting meaningful ISP competition in their cities -- but I'm not holding my breath. Many American city governments see ISPs as companies they can shake down for fees and concessions, not realizing they're only hurting their own citizens by limiting choice and increasing costs.
Can you expand on when competition came to Seattle and how? I've been using Condo Internet (now Wave Broadband) for something close to 5-6 years. When was the tipping point in terms of competition?
Centurylink now offers fiber gigabit to the home for about $65 or so a month.
It happened because a former mayor (Ed Murray, who has since left office after a personal scandal) made it easier for ISPs to build out their networks and removed homeowners and neighborhood groups from the process which previously allowed them to block things like communications boxes on sidewalks.
At the time, a bunch of local columnists moaned about this "corporate giveaway"[1] -- but it's pretty clear in retrospect it was the right move.
1. https://www.seattletimes.com/business/mayors-centurylink-giv...
Also Ziply Fiber bought Frontierâs network in WA, OR, and ID, and started investing in their infra and expanding areas.
Don't forget about Google Webpass, they started advertising heavily in Seattle area starting about a year ago. I switched to them earlier last year due to having periodic issues with WaveG in my new apt building about 8 months into my lease (their technician would come a week or two after I report constant outages, fix something in the server room of my building, and then the issues would start again in a few weeks; haven't had any issues with WaveG at my previous apt though).
Service has been great, pricing is even cheaper than WaveG (I pay about $50/mo for their gig fiber offering), no contracts or any other lock-in (unless you pick the option to pay for the whole year upfront for a small discount). It definitely does feel like there is a good amount of real competition in Seattle now.
CenturyLink fiber is relatively recent to the Seattle area (2017 or 2018) and serves a broader customer base than Wave née Condo.
Condo was historically only available in a small number of buildings very close to the Westin building downtown (site of the Seattle Internet Exchange). It is slightly broader now, but only slightly.
Here's a big old PDF of Seattle area internet service (2019)[1]. Most of Seattle is CenturyLink + Comcast. The second biggest portion is Comcast-only. Wave covers very little of the city.
[1]: https://www.seattle.gov/tech/initiatives/broadband/gigabit-a...
I need to see whats out there. Still using Xfinity in the suburbs and it's pretty meh, terrible upload making wfh a pain.
Averaging can give some really unrealistic numbers especially when people are upgrading their home internet to work from home. Upgrading a single connection from 100Mbps to 1Ggbit is hardly the same as upgrading 100 connections from 1Mbps to 10Mbps.
The reported number is a median.
A geometric mean might make more sense in this situation.
That is very true, not to mention gigabit cable services probably rarely have anyone achieve those speeds very often. My guess is that most cable companies unlock the DOCSIS channels necessary, but node over subscription means that your only shot is to download a huge amount at 3-4a.m.
Non fiber internet advertising is pretty much a scam in my opinion.
Completely agree. It would be much more interesting to compare the data in a bin fashion from 2019 -> 2020 like this
0.1 - 1
1-10
10-20
20-50
50+
And then see how ridiculous quote just the average is in this case..
I wish there was some attention paid to upload speeds too. A 100Mbps connection often only has 1-5Mbps upload which seriously handicaps it for work and hobbyists.
Hence I consider anything thatâs not symmetric fiber to not be worthy of mentioning, because I know youâre getting on upload (and probably latency and packet loss too).
In other words, the interesting comparison is two log histograms (or overlaid).
Sure although I would say you can't just throw it into log bins automatically.. some data you need to massage it to what makes the most sense.
How much of this is people paying for faster connections to work from home vs actual infrastructure build out?
This seems more likely than Charter, ATT, et al. investing massive amounts of cash into their networks. I think there would be massive PR campaign if the actually almost doubled available bandwidth in a year. The capacity was always there, they just needed to be paid in order to open it up. I upgraded from 200/10 to 600/35, they just flipped a switch.
Or selection bias â people only speed-testing their new fast internet plan?
Can it also be people cancelling slow mobile plans?
No idea. As with all truth, you should check with multiple sources for corroboration first. I know in Hawaii at least there was a massive DCCA (chamber of commerce) initiative started way back in 2012 to outfit all public schools with gigabit fiber and all universities with 10gigabit fiber. Hospitals also got fiber connections though I don't know how fast, and there were a few 10gigabit undersea cables laid between the islands themselves. The state government started offering incentives and subsidies to encourage more cable landings on Oahu. This was also the same program in which they began installing the FirstNet system and the 5G infrastructure. No idea what's going on on the mainland.
https://cca.hawaii.gov/broadband/files/2015/01/Hawaii_Broadb...
What is up with Stockholm? https://fairinternetreport.com/assets/img/research/us-vs-eur...
There's absolutely no way that can reflect reality. I don't even think it's possible for people to downgrade their speeds that much even if they wanted to.
Anecdotal, but I just checked and the slowest speed I can get for my Stockholm apartment is 250/250, and the slowest speed my dad can get for his apartment is 100/100.
This has got to be some data anomaly. If they're basing their numbers off of tests that people voluntarily do, then maybe in 2019 a lot of people tested their mobile internet, while no-one bothered testing their home internet because it's fast enough?
Bad data science. Why are they fitting what appears to be high order polynomial curves to these data?
Recently my upload speed dropped from 50mbps to 10mbps. Trying to get the ISP to address the issue is like taking to a brick wall. The tech they sent out couldn't find anything wrong, but hinted that it was configured that way and there was nothing I could do to get it changed since the ISP wouldn't guarantee the upstream speed. We really need a functioning FCC to get this now critical infrastructure fixed.
The title makes it seem like broadband infrastructure in the country significantly improved over the last year, but I'm guessing people just paid more for faster speeds at home.
What I've concluded from measuring things on my home network is that my cheapo old router is actually only giving maybe a third of the download speed my ISP is providing me.
I'd guess that is the case for a non-trivial subset of the population.
And I mean I get ~15Mbps to my laptop when my connection gives me 50Mpbs, nowhere near something like gigabit which I'd guess is just an excuse for ISPs to fleece money out of people in all but a small minority of cases where people buy it.
But also I have zero incentive to upgrade my router because the internet is "fast enough" for everything I need, even with only using a small fraction of the available bandwidth.
Edit: Also to the headline of the article, my ISP doubled the base internet rate from 25Mpbs to 50Mpbs this year. So I guess the report lines up with my reality quite well.
Wow, I can't imagine being in your shoes at all. I would immediately go to the store and get a cheap semi-modern router for $50 to get my full ISP speeds, especially when missing 2/3 of it. Even a 10 year old 802.11n AP ought to be able to get you 50mbps at reasonable range.
I probably should get a new router. It's sort of become low priority.
The main signal issue is that our router is in the garage next to where our internet comes in.
For a few weeks in the spring I was looking at setting up a wired network since all the phone jacks in our house are actually Cat5e cable that could be upgraded to ethernet jacks pretty easily.
But then I also lost ambition for that idea.
I did spend $20 a couple months ago to get a latest-generation wifi chip for my laptop, which I'd recommend to anyone since it's a trivial thing to upgrade and I never even realized the wifi chips were swapable. That improved my network speed by a factor of two I think.
I'm also completely satisfied by my mediocre internet speed. Video streaming, conferencing works. I don't torrent anymore. I just don't know what I need more bandwidth for. Curious to hear from those that do use the data bandwidth provided at 50mbps.
While it's great that the average speed is in the mid-30s, it's still just the average. If it was closer to 100 I'd feel more elated by the news, since that means the lower ends would be acceptable no matter where in the USA a user is.
Also notable is that a lot of countries in the chart they showed had a 50% or more increase over 2019.
Good point. I imagine the average is going up because the already fast speeds in cities are just getting faster with fiber and faster cable connections.
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