• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

Is your slow American internet acceptable to you?

Is this acceptable?

  • Yeah, so what. 'Merica!

    Votes: 6 25.0%
  • No, this is ridiculous

    Votes: 16 66.7%
  • I'm worthless and weak for clicking here

    Votes: 2 8.3%

  • Total voters
    24
That's a great theory and all, except we have gigabit internet in places like Kansas City where google fiber is located. The cost is 70 bucks per month plus a 300 dollar installation fee. I'd gladly pay that if it were offered.
Thats fine and you may have other issues with your current provider - my point has nothing to do with those other issues but is talking about 70mb is better than 20mb. Quality and consistency are more important than speed as I've described.

Peter Grimm said:
Are you gonna sit there and tell me it isn't faster than this time warner 15mbps garbage I have now? Unlikely. People who have Google Fiber rave about it. Even if you're only getting half of the advertised speed, that's still 500mbps for basically the same price I'm paying now for 15mbps.
Your speed is throttled by the provider - all providers do this. Fast does not equal quality - the packet delay, packet drops, resends, and every hop in between your house and the provider or the location you are trying to connect to, which traverse multiple providers networks all effect not only speed but quality. The simplistic view that fiber to prem is better is not true nor accurate. Even a full fiber network end to end doesn't necessarily mean faster or better though in theory, the distortion, noise and transmission should make for a cleaner signal end to end.

Peter Grimm said:
Also, you're talking about bottlenecks. Well, if we were wired for google fiber, maybe the bottleneck would be somewhere other than the fiber optics. Fine, what does that do? That puts pressure on other parts of the system to upgrade their services, to upgrade their products. So yes, it's a positive as technical advancement always is.
They're not bottlenecks they are throttled on purpose - load balancing means to slow down faster connections and speed up slower connections to a specific measure - actual bottlenecks are managed by large network providers by diverting traffic or rerouting traffic through large SNRC's. Company's like Verizon and AT&T manage these bottlenecks as well as sometimes people who dig up large copper bundles and fiber bundles by rerouting the traffic through mid-point network connections while the breaks are fixed. That is not the same as managing the normal traffic flow, speed and quantity.

The idea that getting a gigabit connection and paying for such to your house will drastically effect your speed surfing the internet is incorrect. As I said, service providers love that misconception as people will over pay for speed upgrades which are meaningless. Businesses however pay for larger connections which run through private networks and use point to point connections or back haul connections to dump large amounts of data. They bypass the standard load balancing since their data traffic is specific and follows a pre-determined pathway. Gigabit therefore, for hospitals, architecture firms etc., who dump very large amounts of data (we're talking about 500 meg to 10 Gigabit per minute between say Chicago and New York is specifically engineered and uses redundancy such that any connection which goes down or a router dies, a secondary connection / router is used --- this is done using HSRP or VRRP with BGP-R or eBGP depending on the type of network used.
 
For myself personally, I'm fine with my current internet provision - granted it's cable, somewhat limited due to location, only Comcast serves that area, but....

It's better than the 56k dial-up I had before....now only a traumatic memory...

I hate comcast. Gave them the boot a couple years back. Got fed up with internet going out, then calling and getting some Indian dude on the phone that had no clue. Since I gave them the boot internet has only gone out once and got a guy that spoke English on the phone to fix it. Connection is probably a bit slower than Comcast, but it isn't noticeable.
 
I hate comcast. Gave them the boot a couple years back. Got fed up with internet going out, then calling and getting some Indian dude on the phone that had no clue. Since I gave them the boot internet has only gone out once and got a guy that spoke English on the phone to fix it. Connection is probably a bit slower than Comcast, but it isn't noticeable.
Well the connection does go out every so often. I kinda just marked that under "I live in a rural area".

I don't even get an Indian guy, though - just some recorded message about maintenance...so I stopped calling. Service is back in a few hours, at most.
 
Thats fine and you may have other issues with your current provider - my point has nothing to do with those other issues but is talking about 70mb is better than 20mb. Quality and consistency are more important than speed as I've described.

Your speed is throttled by the provider - all providers do this. Fast does not equal quality - the packet delay, packet drops, resends, and every hop in between your house and the provider or the location you are trying to connect to, which traverse multiple providers networks all effect not only speed but quality. The simplistic view that fiber to prem is better is not true nor accurate. Even a full fiber network end to end doesn't necessarily mean faster or better though in theory, the distortion, noise and transmission should make for a cleaner signal end to end.

They're not bottlenecks they are throttled on purpose - load balancing means to slow down faster connections and speed up slower connections to a specific measure - actual bottlenecks are managed by large network providers by diverting traffic or rerouting traffic through large SNRC's. Company's like Verizon and AT&T manage these bottlenecks as well as sometimes people who dig up large copper bundles and fiber bundles by rerouting the traffic through mid-point network connections while the breaks are fixed. That is not the same as managing the normal traffic flow, speed and quantity.

The idea that getting a gigabit connection and paying for such to your house will drastically effect your speed surfing the internet is incorrect. As I said, service providers love that misconception as people will over pay for speed upgrades which are meaningless. Businesses however pay for larger connections which run through private networks and use point to point connections or back haul connections to dump large amounts of data. They bypass the standard load balancing since their data traffic is specific and follows a pre-determined pathway. Gigabit therefore, for hospitals, architecture firms etc., who dump very large amounts of data (we're talking about 500 meg to 10 Gigabit per minute between say Chicago and New York is specifically engineered and uses redundancy such that any connection which goes down or a router dies, a secondary connection / router is used --- this is done using HSRP or VRRP with BGP-R or eBGP depending on the type of network used.

We're number 32 on the list in terms of the only measure that really matters at the end of the day - average download speed. That's unacceptable.

So whatever the technical reasons for that are, all I know is that I'm overpaying for a crap product at the end of the day, and there's not a thing I or anyone else here can do about it.

The people running Google Fiber seem to be happy with their service. The price seems reasonable. If it ever were offered here, I'd jump on it in spite of everything you've written, if nothing else just to stick it to Time Warner who freely admit that they sell a garbage service and that they have no intention of upgrading it.
 
I'm kinda curious....

Just how much WOULD it cost to run fiber to every dwelling in the country, or whatever.
And upgrade some switches and routers, probably.

Edit: by "the country" I meant "the USA".
 
The people running Google Fiber seem to be happy with their service. The price seems reasonable. If it ever were offered here, I'd jump on it in spite of everything you've written, if nothing else just to stick it to Time Warner who freely admit that they sell a garbage service and that they have no intention of upgrading it.
I would, too, if it ever gets to my neighborhood. My son-in-law has it and has been crowing for weeks about it. He has had some issues, though. The online game he's played for years hiccups for some odd reason that he hasn't figured out yet.


And aside from faster downloads (I download more video than he does) it really hasn't changed his usage any. Netflix isn't any better and the game he plays isn't any better.
 
I'm kinda curious....

Just how much WOULD it cost to run fiber to every dwelling in the country, or whatever.
And upgrade some switches and routers, probably.

Edit: by "the country" I meant "the USA".

The estimate is $140 billion.
 
Pocket change.

Scrap part of Obamacare and get on that.


:2razz:

Infrastructure costs money. One of the big differences between a first world country and everyone else is the development of our infrastructure.
 
Infrastructure costs money. One of the big differences between a first world country and everyone else is the development of our infrastructure.
I'd rather update our roads & bridges and large parts of our electrical grid before spending our money on internet speed.
 
I'm kinda curious....

Just how much WOULD it cost to run fiber to every dwelling in the country, or whatever.
And upgrade some switches and routers, probably.

Edit: by "the country" I meant "the USA".

A good penny. Much of the country is still on copper. And personally I don't see that as a bad thing. Fiberoptic technology has had several issues to overcome through the past couple of decades and not all of them have been resolved. The materials used do not hold up like copper. They deteriorate at a much more rapid pace. But what I don't hear people discussing is the corporate welfare aspect of all our communication corporations. All of them are in bed with the government. They all receive special bennies at the taxpayer's expense. Where's the outrage?
 
And that is still irrelevant. Just because you need more infrastructure because you have more groups means nothing... because with more groups you have more money to pay for it.

It amazes me that most American's still hang on the size issue. Sweden has some of the highest speeds and best infrastructure out there...and only Alaska and Texas are bigger in the US. France is only slightly smaller than Texas and has better Internet I believe. South Korea, some of the best Internet on the planet.. is the as big or bigger than 40 of the US states and has more population than any US state.

Size DOES NOT MATTER... it is the willingness to invest that matters.

No Pete, it's ENTIRELY relevant and size DOES matter. A willingness to invest is only partially relevant. There is a big difference between building a 10,000 square foot building and building 6 100,000 square foot buildings. Comparing a country to a state is dishonest. Compare the size of a country to the size of the other country... and no, not population as that too is irrelevant. Creating infrastructure when people are packed in a small area is far easier than doing so when people are not.

Size is the key issue.
 
No Pete, it's ENTIRELY relevant and size DOES matter. A willingness to invest is only partially relevant. There is a big difference between building a 10,000 square foot building and building 6 100,000 square foot buildings. Comparing a country to a state is dishonest. Compare the size of a country to the size of the other country... and no, not population as that too is irrelevant. Creating infrastructure when people are packed in a small area is far easier than doing so when people are not.

Size is the key issue.

Again no it is just an excuse.

First off the OP list is a bit odd, since it does not compare to all the average speeds lists out there. It seems to be the average PEEK internet speed not the average overall speed.

Secondly there is this list

Figure_14_Q3_20131.jpg


from

Which Country Has the Highest Internet Speed in The World?

Look at South Korea ... over double the speed of the US. Now the US is much larger a country yes, but as I stated before you connect towns and cities together and then internally in towns and cities you connect the end user. Hence size suddenly does not matter. And in South Korea's example you have a country of about 100k square miles, which is as large or larger as 41 out of 50 US states. Compare it to New York State which is half South Korea's size, where most of the population is in major cities and towns (just like South Korea)... and yet on the average list of US states, New York is under half the speed of the South Korean's.

The Average Internet Connection Speed in Every State in America | StateTech Magazine

Now explain that.. are you going to say it is because of size or population? What other excuse can you find?
 
I'd rather update our roads & bridges and large parts of our electrical grid before spending our money on internet speed.

Definitely. Upgrading the electrical grid, esp burying all power lines so we don't have to endure endless power outages with every storm that comes our way would be desirable. Perhaps they could bury power lines while they run fiber optic cable and repair the roads as needed? Why dig twice?
 
We're number 32 on the list in terms of the only measure that really matters at the end of the day - average download speed. That's unacceptable.

So whatever the technical reasons for that are, all I know is that I'm overpaying for a crap product at the end of the day, and there's not a thing I or anyone else here can do about it.

The people running Google Fiber seem to be happy with their service. The price seems reasonable. If it ever were offered here, I'd jump on it in spite of everything you've written, if nothing else just to stick it to Time Warner who freely admit that they sell a garbage service and that they have no intention of upgrading it.

Waste of time talking to you. Have a nice day.
 
Again no it is just an excuse.

First off the OP list is a bit odd, since it does not compare to all the average speeds lists out there. It seems to be the average PEEK internet speed not the average overall speed.

Secondly there is this list

Figure_14_Q3_20131.jpg


from

Which Country Has the Highest Internet Speed in The World?

Look at South Korea ... over double the speed of the US. Now the US is much larger a country yes, but as I stated before you connect towns and cities together and then internally in towns and cities you connect the end user. Hence size suddenly does not matter. And in South Korea's example you have a country of about 100k square miles, which is as large or larger as 41 out of 50 US states. Compare it to New York State which is half South Korea's size, where most of the population is in major cities and towns (just like South Korea)... and yet on the average list of US states, New York is under half the speed of the South Korean's.

The Average Internet Connection Speed in Every State in America | StateTech Magazine

Now explain that.. are you going to say it is because of size or population? What other excuse can you find?

False comparison. I've already explained to you that it is inaccurate to compare the infrastructure of a country to that of a state. Take your pick... population density or area... in both ways you are incorrect.
 
I will say that I dislike how the US's internet service system is set up.

In too many locations, one provider has a near-monopoly on a given form of communication.

For example, to my knowledge, in my area Comcast is the only provider of high-speed cable.
Or at least that was the case several years ago (want to say 5?) when we had it installed.
DSL was not an option at that time due to being too far away from the nearest hub.
Only other option was satellite of some sort and that was too expensive for the service provided, compared.

But the only way I can see a reasonable marketplace for this type of service existing (since it's so dependent on infrastructure) would be for the infrastructure itself to be public property.

Edit: Maybe this is more of an issue in PA, where I live.
 
Back
Top Bottom