I'm resigned to the US never having speeds close to that. Never. I've heard everything from "it's market forces" to "it's the government's/FCC's/President/your mayor's fault" to "we're too far apart" to "the people don't want it so they don't ask for it". Which is it? Or is it a combination of all factors creating some "perfect storm" of awful service and slow speed?
I don't even bother streaming HD on Netflix or youtube because of the burps and buffering.
I wonder how things can get done so seemingly fluidly in terms of technology and broadband adoption in other countries, where it's either super-socialist or statist (like Nordic countries) or mythical in its backroom, nepotistic corruption (like apparently Asia, including HK). How does anything get done in other countries if its so galactically hard to do so in the US, even in places with aboslute population density like NY and LA?
Is it really the federal government? Or is it local government? I'd hate to think it is. I mean that HK 1Gbps line _has_ to be somewhat funded or subsidized by their government, either by funding the laying of fibre or some other thing.
What's more, our wireless speeds are bad, too. I mean, my brother was recently in Vietnam and he said their 3G connection consistency and speed blew the US equivalent out of the water. Of course, 3G adoption is likely not as high as here in the US, but the point stands.
> Which is it? Or is it a combination of all factors creating some "perfect storm" of awful service and slow speed?
Enough regulation (and entrenched interests/semi-monopolies) to make new entry in the field prohibitive, but not enough to force incumbents into e.g. line-sharing and local loop unbundling, compounded by incumbents holding great sway over politicians and (directly or indirectly) over those supposed to oversee them.
The geographical claims are cute, but they're either excuses or convenient misdirections:
* I hear americans go "states states states" all the time. Several states have european densities yet don't seem to have the service. Some big cities are in the ballpark's of HK's densities yet are nowhere near its quality/price ratio (New York City actually has a higher population density than HK)
* Alternatively, if the claim is federal equality across the land, the claim is invalidated by the terrible service in rural areas where speeds (at the same insane price as in more urban zones) are in ranges which have not been seen in a decade in western europe, when it doesn't get to dialup (in 2008, 10% of american adults were using dialup, and it seems this number grew with the recession to escape the high costs of DSL and cable; by comparison, in France in Q4 2008 dialup was about 5% and falling)
> Enough regulation (and entrenched interests/semi-monopolies) to make new entry in the field prohibitive, but not enough to force incumbents into e.g. line-sharing and local loop unbundling, compounded by incumbents holding great sway over politicians and (directly or indirectly) over those supposed to oversee them.
Hong Kong's government is very well run and largely corruption-free. It is an institutional legacy of the British civil service. They also have arguably the freest economy in the world, which reduces the potential for corruption.
America's Congress, on the other hand, created a national scheme of myriad local cable "franchises" or monopolies, which are historically awarded to connected insiders. U.S. phone service, the other major source of broadband, is also highly regulated and only the courts (ATT Breakup, MCI long distance case) forced America's greedy political class from keeping telecom as a national monopoly.
Telecom, as an industry, is still the #1 or #2 source of political donations. That's why your broadband sucks.
If you want a comparison, look no further than the Hong Kong airport. It's not just restricted to broadband.
This project was completed in 6 years, cost $20 billion to build and was the largest in the world at the time, and included flattening two islands and reclaiming 10 square kms of sea bed. It also involved building a new high speed railway link to the city.
Can anyone imagine something like this being built in 21st century USA? At no time was the project held up by property disputes, political in-fighting, environmental disputes, corruption problems, lobbying efforts or anything else. They just decided to build an airport, found a spot for it, raised the money, awarded the contracts and then set about the serious job of running an airport efficiently, pausing only to collects endless awards.
In the UK, the public enquiries for Heathrow Terminal 5 took longer, as did the build (8 years for enquiries, 8 years to build), and that was just adding a new terminal to an existing airport, and the new terminal was a fraction of the size of the Hong Kong airport. Add to this the fact that the Hong Kong airport cost more than 10% of the country's GDP yet the country still has no net debt. When the financial crisis hit, the airport announced a $500million relief package for airlines to encourage them to continue operations. The airport now generates around $1 billion per year for the government, after paying down it's debts, which are rapidly dwindling.
Basically the people in south-east asia want to build the biggest and best infrastructure and have the best living standards in the world, and they're not sitting around pointing fingers and throwing buns and yelling at each other on TV while they go about it. Frankly I'm surprised they don't sit around laughing at the rest of us. There is no reason why things like the HK airport and broadband infrastructure can't be built, but they require a government to stop sticking it's fingers into lots of pies and get on with the basic provision of infrastructure.
They might have cheap broadband, but when people are only earning $800 a month in a city whose GDP per capita is comparable to US...
In the streets of Mong Kok (very high density suburb), there are youngsters standing on the side of the street for the whole day trying to sell broadband packages. Those broadband companies don't have retail shops; They pay a small wage to people in their early twenties who did not get into university / cannot get another job, to just stand there in the street (equivalent to $800 USD a month, 4 days a month off), to provide support as well as sell internet to new customers.
In the afternoon there's this shopping street closed off to cars. The internet salesmen move into the middle of the road, set up their portable sign, and work. Sometimes they bring a small chair.
At least they have cheap broadband.
Source: I'm in Hong Kong at the moment.
P.S
If you had only 4 days a month off, and your friend only have 4 days a month off, then you have a 1.8% chance of having the same day off each month. It equates to having one day to go out with your friend once every 2 years.
I think the math is bit off. Let's say you have the 1,2,3, and 4th of the month off. Assuming total randomness in the days off (unlikely, as csomar commented), your friend has 1/30 chance of having the 1st off, 1/30 of having the 2nd, ... so in total 4/30 chance of having a day off at the same time as you do in a given month.
1/30 chance of having the first day off? They have four days too, it should be 4/30 each of the four days, for overall odds of just over half. I ran a quick monte carlo and it said the same thing.
Oops. I didn't know why I squared 4/30, which is better since it is once every ~7.5 months.
Its not as non-random as csomar suggested, since you could have the day off any day of the week. However you usually get a day off once a week. I guess it should be better estimated at 1/7 chance of having the same day of, per week. That gives roughly 1 day every 2 months
If you had only 4 days a month off, and your friend only have 4 days a month off, then you have a 1.8% chance of having the same day off each month. It equates to having one day to go out with your friend once every 2 years.
It's probably Sunday or Monday. So they'll probably meet. Also they can meet intra-day to launch or dinner.
It's simply due to the regional monopolies the telcos and cable cos have in the US. If you had open competition it might go something like what happened in the UK.
Bandwidth was pretty expensive in the UK back in the nineties, but then OFCOM (the regulator) forced British Telecom to be broken into two companies...one wholesale and one retail. BT retail has to buy from BT wholesale at the same price as everyone else, and even small ISP's could now offer ADSL, and were allowed to install their own equipment at the exchange.
Fast forward to today...I pay £10 p/month for 24/2. If you have a satellite package with Sky TV you can get 2Mbps for free, or 20Mbps for £5 p/m or so. BT is just launching a 40Mbps service for around £25 p/m. Normally in the UK we get stung on prices and everything else I can think of is 20-50% higher in cost than the US...so it's pretty amazing our broadband costs are more competitive than many other countries. There just happens to be very health competition in this category.
It's the NIMBYs. No one wants their property torn up to install the stuff. Same for the wireless providers. People get pissed when a large cell phone tower is placed anywhere near their home.
I pay $45 for 25/5 FIOS and never have a problem streaming Netflix in HD to my TiVo. That's over 802.11G wireless too.
FIOS is the happy exception to the rampant crappiness in the US broadband ISP field. Unfortunately, it never seems to be available. My parents in rural MD have had it for years, but it hasn't been available in my past three apartments in NYC, two in the Bay Area, or one in the LA area. Instead, I've been stuck with inconsistent on-and-off service from cable providers who are all basically the same except in name.
Source? If this is true, I'm really, really disappointed. FIOS was really the one bright spot in my life as an ISP customer, to the point where I've considered investing a week or two into adding a FIOS availability overlay on PadMapper (which would probably go unused except for me) so I could find an apartment with it next time without polling their ridiculous address entry form a thousand times manually.
They're only expanding into markets where they can get a local cable franchise agreement. They need both Internet and TV customers to make it worth the initial deployment costs. This has been the big hold up in Baltimore. Comcast has such a strangle hold on the Baltimore city council that they refuse to give a franchise agreement to Verizon.
It's not a technical failure but just a reality of the economy and increased competition from cable with DOCSIS 3. To the same point cable has backed away from FTTx deployments. (not that they were ever that committed in the first place but most had serious plans on the drawing boards for the near future)
That's disheartening, but I suppose it makes sense if they thought they could just be selectively one-upped by the cable companies in every area they entered. That the cable companies are basically holding areas hostage that way is a pretty good argument for public internet infrastructure, though.
I would just about sell my soul to get on FiOS instead of comcast here in Pittsburgh. I was looking into CLEAR, but then I read about them throttling anyone who downloaded more than 8 gigs in a month, so that was straight out. Way to nerf the entire point of WiMAX guys.
FIOS is supposedly available here, but the only variety I've seen offered is a $99/month bundle with TV and telephone, both of which are useless to me. What's the secret password to get 25/5 for $45/month?
Be a customer since 2007 and keep calling for the higher rates at the same price. I'm also grandfathered into the old TV plans. I refuse to switch to the new ones since I'll get less channels at the same price.
You really need to call them. What you find online is nothing compared to the deals you can get over the phone.
FWIW, EPB offers gigabit broadband in Chattanooga TN where I live. I don't use it since it costs quite a bit more than $26, but it's nice to know it's available :)
the size of hong kong also has a lot to do with it, i don't think it's any bigger than san francisco. plus it's densely populated and the GDP is great. but i think you're right, the government plays a huge role in this, too much regulation stifles things like this.
In Slovenia I'm paying 20 euro a month for 20/20 unshaped, uncensored and uncapped FTTH. There are Gbps lines, but that costs something like 200 euro a month, which is completely unacceptable.
Last I checked, NYC has nothing even resembling 1GBps speeds, not unless you're willing to pay for an OC12 line, which I think is in the US$100,000-200,000 per month.
> Last I checked, NYC has nothing even resembling 1GBps speeds
I think that was his point: NYC has the same population density as HK (higher, actually, by close to 10%) but you'd be hard pressed finding an ISP offering 1Gbps for $30.
... or compare US with China. I know which one I prefer :D
300kb/s download, 1Mb/s up. That's international. I guess the firewall slows it down a bit.
No real shaping or anything, just certain sites are unreachable.
Cost is quite competitive. About $7/month. Only problem was setting up a router, this province uses some weird username-scrambling dialer software (windows only, of course), and my real username (sniffed via Wireshark) happened to get a new-line+char-return scrambled into it. I had to brush up on XML, then hand-edit a router config file. Did you know that XML has really stupid new-line/char-return handling? Anyhow ... it's better than Australia (on the sites you can reach), and the ISP service is only a little worse.
Big cities can get 20Mb/s, at ~$50 a month, but that's a premium plan.
New York doesn't have its own currency, immigration, and customs. It's also primarily English speaking, as is the US as a whole. HK isn't just a city in China. It's already economically developed.
Whenever I hear about foreign currency translated into USD, I get nervous...
Is that $26 a month merely a direct translation at the going financial rate (about 200 HKD), or is that taking in to account the general wages of Hong Kong in general?
For example, when you're paid $3000/month, $26 is nothing, but if you're only paid $800 a month (like many in Hong Kong), then that 200HKD is no longer comparable to $26. It's more like $98 a month.
Living in Japan, I get a lot of comments about how expensive video games are here (6000yen or 71USD). The fact is 6000 yen is more like 60USD, as long as you're living and working in Japan. Just because the USD is in the crapper, doesn't mean that all of our products suddenly got more expensive.
</rant>
By the way, we have 1Gbps here in Japan as well... I believe it's only 70-100USD a month?
I live in Hong Kong, and the people I know get paid roughly what they would get paid in the US. Most goods and services cost roughly the same as they do in the US as well. Some things are cheaper (taxis) and others are more expensive (imported beer).
There are a lot of people working for way less than what they would get in the US though -- domestic helpers are a prime example.
I posted this on HN a while back when I was looking at a new internet provider. I didn't choose the 1Gbps but got a 100mbps instead with a bundled package. Using speedtest.net to a HK-based server I get 60-70mbps download and 30mbsp upload fairly consistently. Love it. HK-hosted sites load like they are on a local server.
Canada can never have anything like this, since the CRTC has proven that they will defend Bell's write to keep a stranglehold on last mile connections to consumer homes. Even if a startup did want to provide the ridiculously high speeds, the 'cost' of convincing Bell to let you compete on their copper will be prohibitive.
Jeff Atwood wrote about how the internet has overthrown the major telephone companies, specifically naming Bell: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/02/the-importance-of-n...
I think it's funny (ie., sad) that Bell is pretty much completely in control in Canada. The federal government overruled the CRTC, but the CRTC has set a very poor precedent.
I'm in Canada (Toronto) and have fiber to the home, and have had it since about 2002. If you see more of this sort of thing in Canada, I suspect it will likely be brand new neighborhoods in metro areas, large scale condo projects, etc.
Still only 8mbps up. That's another big problem, people want to backup their data and access their media from outside their home. Upstream bandwidth is a big factor in this as well.
Companies can always build their own "last mile connection". I have a fiber optic connection here in Vancouver (20/20mbps), it cost $45/mo, which is reasonable.
The thing is that the ISP (Novus) had to lay cables to all the suites in the tower. This cost money, and might only viable in high density areas.
Chattanooga, TN USA currently has residential speeds of up to 1,000 Mbps. As far as I can tell it is still the only place in the USA where you can get some of the fastest internet speeds. HOWEVER it's 349.99 for that speed [see https://epbfi.com/you-pick/#/ ]
Has anyone else heard of any other place in the US that offers speeds close to any of this?
I don't _need_ 1GBps connection or even 100Mbps connection, but I do want to be able to get at least 3Mbps for a reasonable price. Last time I checked, it was $35/month + $240 installation fee. The way I see it, this area has no real competition. It's mostly AT&T plus some cable company (usually Comcast).
When you have it you'll find good use for it. With that bandwidth you can start using cloudservices for backup and storage for starters.
Currently I'm dumping photos on amazon once in a while as my sole backup, but once I've routed some cables from my new 100Mb line I plan on taking more advantage of the cloud and in the process throw away a few annoying external harddrives.
Prague, Czech Republic: 30/30 Mbps $30, 50/50 Mbps $45, 100/100 Mbps $55. I was on the middle deal for 18 months, it's uncapped and unshaped even on the uplink.
I think the way they did it in Japan was really good. Obviously, any industry that leverages legally enforced right-of-way or geographical exclusivity is already regulated, so it makes sense to try to do a good job regulating.
They've done that here, although it is hard for me to imagine the government in the US doing nearly as good a job. Pipes are essentially scarce, whether fiber or DSL or cable, and so pipe owners are required to make them accessible to different providers.
I just recently switched from SoftBank YahooBB fiber-to-the-buiding service (synchronous 100Mbps, I'd get 10MB/sec downloads) to NTT fiber-to-your-router service (200Mbps down, 100Mbps up, now getting slightly over 20MB/sec downloads). This is about $50 per month, and I had my choice of something like 40 different providers to choose from when they installed the new fiber terminal in my room. (1Gbps "business" service was also available, but that cost $400 per month and my future wife vetoed the idea.)
It was a similar deal in 2005 when I had fiber installed here at a different Tokyo location, though. That time the fiber was owned by the electric power utility, and I got various competitive offers for IP service.
For work I have also set up connectivity at a few US locations, all DSL or cable since fiber isn't widely available. The problems with Internet service in the US are mainly political, not technical. Regulations create artificial oligopolies where you usually must choose a.) the local telephone monopoly, b.) the local cable monopoly, or c.) an esoteric solution like a leased line or some kind of wireless service. There are often reliability issues or huge costs associated with that last one, so in many/most US locations it is a choice between two monopolists whose respective pipes are protected by government regulation, but which are not under the sorts of regulatory obligations that they are here, which create real competition in the market.
Without real competition, there is little incentive to make major infrastructure investments and so you end up with the US being a pathetic backwater banana republic in terms of Internet connectivity. (For that reason, I hate trying to work in the US almost as much as in mainland China.)
I have HKBN at one time. It is a lot less exciting than it sounds. I picked cheapest package at only 100M. It is a large pipe but the problem is I'm only getting trickles from it. The actually speed don't even match my unglamorous ADSL in US. It seems the Transpacific network has only very limited bandwidth. So if you are watching video served by a CDN in Hong Kong you will be fairly happy. But 95% of internet connection I'm making, such as to my company's VPN, is to the US. And the bandwidth is pathetic. Forget about 1Gbps. If I can get a guaranteed 3Mbps I'll be fairly happy.
I wonder what are the real speeds, because true unmetered gigabit link certainly costs more than $26 (and even more than $260).
I believe it's that you would get a peak speed of about 1 Gbps, but I'm certainly sure it's impossible to have a constant 1 Gpbs speed over long time. In one possible case, you'll divide the ISPs' uplink with other users, so if ISP has a total uplink connectivity of 100Gbps - which is extremly rare case - and there are 1000 users, they'll all get less than 100Mbps. In another case, if you'll hit some sort of a bandwidth cap, your connection will be shaped down.
Here in Jamaica, the equivalent of USD $38 gets you 20 Mbps down/1.5 Mbps up. You can get 50 Mbps down for USD $105, and 100 Mbps down / 5Mbps up for USD $129. It's not bad at all, all things considered.
My upload is about 10 times slower that download - that's the A in ADSL.
As it's about 2.5Mbps up and 25Mbps down I'm not hugely bothered - we have 100Mbps symmetric fiber connection at work and it's generally only noticeably faster when you do multiple gigabyte downloads.
Let's be fair, there are better deals even in Canada. I think the Bell 25/8 is around $80/month if it's available where you live. Generous 75 GB/month!
Hong Kong and Singapore have a huge advantage over the States in that the population there is extremely concentrated. A thousand households there is a single (albeit large) apartment building, while here it's a small neighborhood. I don't know how much cheaper it is to wire a single building than 20 blocks of single houses, but I imagine it's several orders of magnitude.
In reality these are beauty contests. We should pay attention only when Hong Kong creates startups that makes use of the 1Gps.
On the other hand, I enjoy the meta discussion about monopolies and barriers to entries that exist in America. If anything, it is a pointer to a more general malady that befalls every aspect of doing business in the U.S.
Lived in HK for a while in 2009, they had this same 1Gbps package, but more expensive. I talked with a few people working for the firms offering these packages and they all mentioned to me that this 1Gbps speed is guaranteed only within the Hong Kong area. If you made connections to say US, they would not guarantee that speed.
I travel to singapore every quarter and in
my experience the bandwidth sucks. You get nowhere near advertised speeds on wireless networks and the international connectivity is highly contended on the wired links. My links in the UK are much faster for comparable cost.
Lived in Singapore for a while in 2008, was never impressed with .sg internet. I hated having to register my mobile so their government could find out what I'm looking at etc. Also, they have a less intrusive version of the "Great Firewall of China".
Singapore is a very small island. Easy to build advanced infrastructure, and their government advocates improving technology.
One day we'll stop comparing city-states to continental countries.
How about an apples-to-apples comparison. Hong Kong is part of China. How's the internet compare between the US and China? Average speed? Broadband penetration? Choice of ISPs? Freedom of access?
I come from a different continental-sized country also full of internet-speed whiners, and boy do they love pointing at tiny countries and outliers and making it sound like these are the norm. Huh, fancy that - South Korea is an order of magnitude ahead of everyone else in the world. Clearly we /must suck/, because we don't match that hypertech'd outlier!
I suppose we can hope for better coverage in the highest population density areas, but even there the US population is just much more spread out than most of the civilized world.
* There are places in the US with even higher densities than HK (NYC), they don't get the service
* There are a number of states with densities in the ballpark of european countries, or South Korea, or Japan, they don't get the service either
* Service in the sticks in the US is crap right now, it's not like cities get awful service because everybody gets the same thing, DSL speeds in rural areas are advertised the same speed they were a decade ago in France, and for twice the price. And the US still have a significant population of dialup users (>10%, I believe)
This sounds cool but will have an impact on the Internet. We all want more and more bandwidth but it comes at a hidden cost. Today’s computer is so much more powerful than just a few years ago. These computers in the hands of novices coupled with extreme amounts of bandwidth create the perfect environment for hackers…not hackers like us but the botnet credit card thieving type. The average home user doesn’t know how to secure his/her machine. In years past a sluggish computer might have been a good sign you had a virus/Trojan/malware. Today these machines can send millions of emails, portscan servers or participate in DDOS attacks and the user has very little if any noticeable performance hit.
No, no its not. I am not saying people shouldn't have 1g connections. My point is the majority of these users will have no idea how to handle it..like giving the keys to your Ferrari to a 16 year old. If everybody had this type of access and they continue poor security practices there will be an impact.
> Today these machines can send millions of emails, portscan servers or participate in DDOS attacks and the user has very little if any noticeable performance hit.
Unless the downstream vs upstream economics of the Internet backbone become severely asymmetric, technological advances that lower the price of bandwidth will benefit everyone equally. Once you get down to the subscriber line level (e.g. ADSL) you do see asymmetries but biased towards downstream, which speaks against your argument.
I don't even bother streaming HD on Netflix or youtube because of the burps and buffering.
I wonder how things can get done so seemingly fluidly in terms of technology and broadband adoption in other countries, where it's either super-socialist or statist (like Nordic countries) or mythical in its backroom, nepotistic corruption (like apparently Asia, including HK). How does anything get done in other countries if its so galactically hard to do so in the US, even in places with aboslute population density like NY and LA?
Is it really the federal government? Or is it local government? I'd hate to think it is. I mean that HK 1Gbps line _has_ to be somewhat funded or subsidized by their government, either by funding the laying of fibre or some other thing.
What's more, our wireless speeds are bad, too. I mean, my brother was recently in Vietnam and he said their 3G connection consistency and speed blew the US equivalent out of the water. Of course, 3G adoption is likely not as high as here in the US, but the point stands.