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Why US Broadband is So SlowMonday March 7, 2011
The CEO of sonic.net wrote a clear and concise blog entry on Why US Broadband is So Slow. Sonic is a wonderful small ISP that serves the Bay Area and have been in the middle of the fight to bring good broadband to its customers for years. I've been their customer for a long time. It's nice to have a service provider who knows what they're talking about. The summary: blame the congresscritters.
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Comments:

sonic.net worked fine for the 10+ years I used them, but when I switched to Comcast, my download rates suddenly went from a solidly capped 200k/s to easily 1Mb/s. I can't believe I'm actually saying something about Comcast, but it's really more about Sonic's double talk. They really cap the speeds they are giving you, you should really compare them to another ISP, you'll be shocked.

Posted by Steve on March 07, 2011 at 05:55 PM PST #

1Mb/s is pretty awful. I have 24Mb/s from Comcast.

Posted by Charlie Hayes on March 07, 2011 at 06:31 PM PST #

"blame the congresscritters"? That's exactly the opposite of what the article actually says. You're way too smart to buy that kind of foxnews crap.

Posted by David Moon on March 08, 2011 at 06:07 AM PST #

I never understood why we don't pay for the bandwidth we use. Why should I pay the same monthly rate as my neighbor who downloads *gigabytes* more content than me? Electricity and water are pay-by-volume regardless of capacity. Mobile carriers are adopting that model for internet use, so I suppose it is only a matter of time before we see it for land lines, regardless of fiber or copper.

Posted by Jon on March 09, 2011 at 07:11 AM PST #

@Charlie I'm guessing he's talking bytes, not bits. 200Kb/s download rate is roughly 1.5Mbit/s connection speed whereas 1Mbyte/s is roughly an 8Mbit/s connection. Your 24Mbit/s would be a download rate of 3Mbyte/s. That is somewhat a mixture of doublespeak (picking the better looking figure) and legacy hangups from the days of "baud" and PSTN modems.

Posted by alphaxion on March 09, 2011 at 09:26 AM PST #

My town has a municipal electric utility. They are busy installing optical fibre throughout the town, as part of a "smart grid" initiative. When they are done there will be fibre leading to every home and business in the town. The next step will be to rent that fibre to an ISP. My town is pretty forward looking. They buried optical fibre along with the power cables under my street over ten years ago! I'm really looking forward to kissing Comcast goodbye this spring. Hopefully this isn't a unique situation. How is the Smart Grid build-out progressing elsewhere in the US?

Posted by Ron Ten-Hove on March 09, 2011 at 04:03 PM PST #

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