Why do we Americans get stuck with such slow broadband speeds?
Wasn’t the internet invented here? The answer is yes, yet so many other countries have such blinding high speed connections while our own internet speeds can be as slow as sorghum. What gives?
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8 Answers
More people are using it?
I don’t know, but it pisses me off!
Maybe because Big Brother is watching.
Are you shitting me, I mean seriously! Welcome to the wonderful world of Australian internet:-
The best plan that you can get is around 85USD per month for just the internet. We get a whopping 25GB cap per month and amazing speeds of 1500 kbps download and 256 kbps upload. After we reach our cap we get put back down to 64kbps until the ned of the month. Thats only slightly better than dial-up.
NB: for those who don’t know kbps is Kilo bits per second not Bytes. bits are much smaller units
We should enjoy this while we can… When we log into “The Tubes”, we take a lot for granted. We assume we’ll be able to access any website we want, whenever we want, at the fastest speed, whether it’s a corporate or personal site. We assume that we can use any service we like—watching online video, pirating music, sending instant messages—anytime we choose.
douche bags Companies such as AT&T™, Verizon™, Comcast™ and Time Warner™ want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won’t load at all.
They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video—while slowing down or blocking their competitors.
And if we don’t fight for Net Neutrality, this is all going to become a reality faster than you can say: Rule 34
Astro, it’s really because of the consolidation of AT&T. They don’t have to compete with anyone anymore. Why would they offer faster speeds? They would only be competing with themselves. The others who rent off the AT&T networks sublet their services to consumers. Again, they want those speeds to be just as slow as their other speeds.
When one company owns a majority of the backbone, they can beat out other services (which might be nicer) with their prices.
Sure there’s other services like cable or satellite but nationwide, more people are on AT&Ts network then anyone else. It’s a good thing we broke up the monopoly of the phone company in the 80s and made AT&T into a bunch of small regional companies. That way we can get to where we are here in 2008 where there are no small regional companies and only one big AT&T again. Smashing.
this graph is from a little over a year ago
Answered this same question a while back.
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