Community Broadband Dominates List Of Fastest US ISPs

from the if-you-build-it-they-will-come dept

For years, a growing number of US towns and cities have been forced into the broadband business thanks to US telecom market failure. Frustrated by high prices, lack of competition, spotty coverage, and terrible customer service, some 750 US towns and cities have explored some kind of community broadband option. And while the telecom industry (and the lawmakers, regulators, and policy wonks paid to love them) routinely tries to paint such projects as radical socialist boondoggles that always end in failure, that's never actually been true.

The latest case in point: once a year PC Magazine offers a breakdown of the fastest broadband networks in the United States. And this year, as usual, the list is dominated by community-owned and operated broadband networks. Look at the list of the fastest ISPs in the nation overall:

Three of the fastest ISPs are directly owned by the city (Longmont, Colorado’s Nextlight, Chattanooga, Tennessee’s EPB Fiber, and Cedar Falls, Iowa’s CFU). These same ISPs, not coincidentally, also tend to score really well on overall consumer satisfaction studies. And the fastest ISP in the country (Empire Access) makes heavy use of an open access middle mile fiber network funded in large part by the public. Other companies, like Ting and Google Fiber are tightly partnered with local municipalities and regional fiber networks as well.

Data just keeps showing how locally-owned and operated public networks routinely offer better, faster, and cheaper service. But instead of embracing such options, our heavily compromised US regulators have either tried to hamstring them via dodgy state laws, or exploit myopic partisanship to demonize them ("socialism!" "government run amok!" "a terrible affront to the miraculous free market!"). Despite such networks seeing broad, bipartisan public support, House Republicans just this year tried to ban them completely across the entire United States. It's just blisteringly ignorant corruption.

As the Institute for Local Self Reliance notes, it's easier and cheaper for a politically powerful regional telecom monopoly like AT&T to pay off a few lawmakers than it is to actually try harder. But try as they may to demonize such projects, their popularity and effectiveness continues to speak for itself:

"Monopoly providers have often trotted out the claim that modern network infrastructure is too complicated and costly for local communities to build and operate successfully. It’s an argument that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, and even less so given that not only do modestly sized cities beat out the national ISPs for pure speed, they do it twice as fast, lapping the competition."

But it's also important to note that community broadband isn't some either/or option. Many areas are creating a healthy symbiosis between municipalities, cooperatives, community broadband networks, public/private partnerships, and private companies. COVID just got done educating us as to the essential nature of broadband connectivity. Efforts to hamstring or ban productive regional solutions continue to be ignorant and counterproductive.

Filed Under: broadband speeds, competition, municipal broadband

Frontier Communications Sued Yet Again For Lying About Its Pathetic Broadband Speeds

from the do-not-pass-go,-do-not-collect-$200 dept

For a long time we've talked about the fact that if you really want to understand why U.S. broadband is expensive and mediocre, you should take a good hard look at Frontier Communications. The regional phone company in 25 states has, for years, been accused of neglecting to adequately upgrade or repair its network, despite millions in wasted taxpayer subsidies. Protected from both competition and accountability thanks to state and federal corruption, the company has happily price gouged captive customers without facing real penalties.

In recent years that has shifted slightly thanks largely to individual states like Washington, New York, and Minnesota, which have all sued the company at various times for neglecting its network, advertising speeds its sluggish DSL lines can't deliver, or inundating its subscribers with bullshit fees and surcharges (a neat trick that lets ISPs advertise one price, then charge you a much higher rate).

This week Frontier found itself again under fire for, you guessed it, lying about its broadband speeds and overcharging consumers for substandard service. This latest suit (pdf) was jointly filed by the FTC, the attorneys general from Arizona, Indiana, Michigan, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, and the district attorneys’ offices of LA County and Riverside County, California. Like previous suits, the new FTC suit accused Frontier of advertising speeds it knows its aging and distance-constrained DSL lines can't deliver, failing to disclose those limits to consumers, and overbilling subscribers based on speeds they can't actually get.

Granted there's a reason Frontier keeps getting sued without much changing. And that's because the fines levied upon regional telecom monopolies are usually a small fraction of the money made from exploiting captive consumers (and local governments). As such, the penalties are just viewed as the cost of doing business, get quickly brushed aside, and little really changes in the underlying market mechanics.

Thanks to the Trump administration's net neutrality repeal (which also gutted FCC consumer protection authority), the FCC is now limited as to what it can do to thwart this behavior. That left (as telecom lobbyists intended) most oversight to the FTC, which can't make new rules, lacks the resources and staff to adequately tackle telecom (on top of fifty million other obligations across a universe of other sectors) and is limited to enforcement actions in instances where it's extremely clear a company is engaged in "unfair and deceptive" behavior under the FTC Act.

The telecom lobby knew all of this, which was the whole point of the net neutrality repeal. That was acknowledged by acting Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter in a statement on the lawsuit:

"As important as this case is, it also shows why the FTC can never fully fill the regulatory gap left in the wake of the repeal of Net Neutrality at the FCC, the expert agency on telecommunications services,” Acting Chair Rebecca Kelly Slaughter said of the lawsuit.

“The FTC will do what we can to hold broadband providers accountable,” she added. “But the pandemic has underscored the essential nature of internet access; just like the country’s water, electricity, and phone services, ISPs require direct and on-going oversight. That active oversight by the proper regulator may have prevented these violations."

While these scattershot enforcement actions do help somewhat, you can't fix US broadband dysfunction without targeting its two root causes: regional monopolization and state and federal corruption. There are a million ways to do that: restore FCC consumer protection authority, properly fund and staff regulators, ramp up flimsy antitrust enforcement in telecom, embrace genuine pro-competition policies incumbents won't like (including supporting community broadband), stop mindlessly rubber stamping every idiotic merger that comes down the road, and hold telecom companies accountable for repeated empty pre-merger promises. If none of that works and they remain absolutely dedicated to obnoxious behavior, break them up.

But US policy leaders decidedly don't want to actually do any of that. One, because these companies are politically powerful campaign contributors in a pay to play system. They're also tightly tethered to our intelligence and law enforcement apparatus, further reducing any political incentive to hold them accountable. So instead we get government policy (and a lot of press coverage and rhetoric) that treats the resulting problems as ambiguous issues that just dropped out of the sky one day (see: endless lip service about the "digital divide") without acknowledging that corruption and monopolization are the obvious cause.

Filed Under: broadband speeds, fcc, ftc, truth in advertising
Companies: frontier communications

The FCC Helped AT&T Hide Its Crappy Broadband Speeds

from the revolving-door-whiplash dept

Unless you're in fairly stark denial, it's clear the Trump Federal Communications Commision has been a rubber stamp for the every fleeting whim of the telecom sector, be it the agency's decision to effectively neuter itself at telecom lobbyist behest, or the attack on net neutrality rules with widespread bipartisan support. But such revolving door regulation has more subtle casualties, as well. The Wall Street Journal this week for example offered up an interesting deep dive into how ISPs successfully pressure the FCC to ignore slower broadband speed test data when analyzing whether ISPs are delivering the speeds they promise:

"AT&T Inc. was dismayed at its report card from a government test measuring internet speeds. So the telecom giant sought to change its grade.

The company pushed the Federal Communications Commission to omit unflattering data on its DSL internet service from the report, which assesses whether providers are delivering the speeds they advertise. AT&T also didn’t provide information the FCC needed to validate speeds on those customers, the test officials confirmed.

In the end, the DSL data was left out of the report released late last year, to the chagrin of some agency officials. AT&T’s remaining speed tiers notched high marks.

The Journal is quick to highlight how this kind of gamesmanship results in FCC studies and data that doesn't accurately reflect reality, something that obviously excites incumbent broadband executives all too eager to obscure incomplete deployments and a lack of competition in the sector:

"Companies wield tremendous influence over the study and often employ tactics to boost their scores, according to interviews with more than two dozen industry executives, engineers and government officials. As a result, the FCC’s report likely gives consumers an unreliable measure of internet providers’ performances by overstating speeds."

Hoping to use real world data to inform policy decisions (crazy, I know), just about a decade ago the previous FCC struck a deal with UK measuring firm SamKnows to measure real world broadband speeds under the creatively named Measuring Broadband America program. The firm in turn began using volunteers and custom-firmware embedded routers to obtain an objective, third party analysis of just what kind of speeds users see in the wild. Not too surprisingly the Pai FCC has been trying to discontinue the program, and AT&T says it will no longer cooperate with the FCC on the effort anyway (apparently with no penalty from the FCC).

Meanwhile, AT&T tries to claim to the Journal that the reason it wanted its slower DSL speed ratings removed from the study is because it no longer markets the service:

"AT&T said that in its case, the company asked the FCC to remove DSL data from the report because it no longer markets that older technology, which relies on copper phone lines, used by a small percentage of its customer base. The company said the commission’s own policies should have excluded the “obsolete” internet plans. AT&T also said that it did validate the DSL accounts for the FCC."

But we've noted for years that AT&T has been a cheapskate when it comes to finishing fiber deployments the company has received billions in taxpayer dollars for, leaving vast swaths of the country with the choice of either a cable monopoly or sluggish, capped DSL. AT&T would prefer it if government reports just floated the fuck over that fact, and the Pai FCC seems more than happy to oblige, with zero to no penalty for big ISPs that mislead the agency or refuse to take part in projects that give consumers an accurate view of the market.

This of course isn't the first time this problem has been brought up. FCC reports are routinely assailed as being rose-colored-glasses affairs designed not to inform, but to avoid upsetting deep pocketed telecom campaign contributors. The FCC's $350 million broadband map, which all but hallucinates competitors and speeds, and omits pricing data, is a perfect example of the end result of this dysfunction. The end goal is government reports that again hide the country's mediocre and expensive broadband shortcomings, lest somebody get the crazy idea to try and do something about it.

The Journal's report likely won't get much attention, since exclusively hating on big tech while forgetting big telecom is just as bad is all the rage right now. But uncharacteristically for a major US paper, the Journal does a nice job highlighting how a captured FCC is now a full throated apologist for the broken US broadband industry and its half-built, expensive, taxpayer-funded networks.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband speeds, competition, data, fcc, influence, lies
Companies: at&t

FCC Tries to Bury Report Showing Many Broadband Users Still Don't Get The Speeds They Pay For

from the hiding-it-won't-make-it-go-away dept

So every year like clockwork since 2011 the FCC has released a report naming and shaming ISPs that fail to deliver advertised broadband speeds. The Measuring American Broadband program, which the FCC runs in conjunction with UK firm SamKnows, uses custom-firmware embedded routers in subscriber homes to collect data on real-world speeds (an improvement from years past when the FCC would just take ISPs' at their word).

In the years since, the program has been an effective way to name and shame ISPs that fail to deliver speeds promised to consumers. For example, in the first report, the FCC announced that some ISPs, like New York's Cablevision, had delivered just 50% of advertised speeds during peak hours. By the next report Cablevision had moved to fix its under-provisioning issues, and the FCC found that the company was now offering more bandwidth than advertised at peak hours. In the absence of more competition, simply using real data was a useful way to motivate apathetic regional monopolies to try a little harder.

Of course last year that all changed under Ajit Pai, when the FCC boss refused to release the report at all. After being pressured by telecom beat reporters to explain why, the FCC this week finally released some of the data... buried in the appendix of a much larger report (pdf) few will actually read. The data again showcases how many broadband providers -- mostly telcos selling aging, slow and pricey DSL -- routinely fail to deliver speeds consumers are paying for:

In the years since the program launched, many cable providers have been successfully nudged toward over-provisioning their lines to remain on the FCC's good side (though it should be noted that one cable provider, Charter Spectrum, was busted by the NY AG contemplating ways to game the system). This wasn't particularly hard; DOCSIS 3.1 cable upgrades are relatively inexpensive anyway, and have helped the cable sector deliver gigabit speeds (at least downstream).

The problem is that cable is slowly but surely securing a monopoly over these next-gen speeds because the nation's phone companies no longer really want to be in the fixed-line broadband business. AT&T and Verizon have shifted their focus to wireless, video, and ads, and providers like CenturyLink have shifted their focus to enterprise. As a result, millions of customers are stuck on aging, expensive, (and often unnecessarily usage capped) DSL lines nobody really wants to upgrade because the return on investment is too slow for Wall Street's liking.

The result: less competition, higher prices, slower speeds, and worse customer service as cable secures a monopoly over high speeds. And no, 5G wireless is not going to magically fix these problems, as we've explored previously.

Of course because the Measuring American Broadband program highlighted these issues via a very clear stand alone report, it seems fairly likely that broadband providers didn't much like this. Like so much Pai does (like killing net neutrality rules), burying the report was framed by the FCC head as a noble effort to simply improve agency efficiency. But in a statement to Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin, Pai's fellow Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel seemed unsold on that explanation:

"We're all frustrated when our broadband speed doesn't live up to what was promised," FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, the FCC's only Democrat, said in a statement to Ars today. "So it's downright unacceptable that the FCC—which has been collecting data on broadband speeds nationwide—is slow to make this information public and, when it does so, buries it in the appendices to a larger report. This is essential data for every consumer in the digital age. The public deserves better."

The attempt to bury belated data in a study appendix nobody will read is just another example of Pai's largely blind fealty to the industry he's supposed to be holding accountable. From the attacks on net neutrality and FCC oversight to his efforts to literally weaken the very definition of competition, Pai continues to be the very best friend any lumbering telecom monopoly could ask for. After all, if you can manipulate or obscure data showing just how broken the US broadband industry is, it's far easier to justify your complete and total apathy toward actually doing anything about it.

Filed Under: advertised speeds, ajit pai, broadband, broadband speeds, fcc, hiding data, measuring american broadband
Companies: samknows

Charter Claims NY Lawsuit Over Crappy Broadband Speeds Just An Evil, Netflix 'Cabal'

from the everybody's-to-blame-but-me dept

Early last year, Charter Spectrum was sued by New York State for selling broadband speeds the company knew it couldn't deliver. According to the original complaint (pdf), Charter routinely advertised broadband speeds executives knew weren't attainable -- while simultaneously refusing to upgrade their network to handle added consumer demand (a problem that only got worse in the wake of its merger with Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks).

Buried in the suit were all manner of interesting allegations, including claims that Charter executives discussed via e-mail how they hoped to manipulate congestion to drive up costs for companies like Netflix (you'll recall this was part of the whole interconnection slowdowns Netflix and companies like Level3 complained about a few years ago). The suit also highlights how Charter gamed the results of a program the FCC has traditionally used to measure real-world broadband speeds using custom-firmware embedded routers in consumer volunteer homes.

Charter has since been trying to tap dance out of the suit by flinging pretty much every legal argument against the wall to see what sticks. Most recently, the company tried to claim that the FCC's recent net neutrality repeal contains language banning states from trying to protect consumers. And while that was certainly the hope of Ajit Pai's FCC, legal experts have argued that the agency's claims don't hold water. More specifically, when the FCC rolled back its Title II authority over ISPs, it also ironically dismantled its legal authority to tell states what to do.

Amusingly, Charter has now shifted its argument to the claim that the entire lawsuiit is somehow part of an unholy cabal orchestrated by Google and Netflix. You might recall that ISPs (and Ajit Pai) have long tried to claim that the entrenched telecom monopolies are innocent daisies, and that net neutrality is simply a conspiracy concocted by Google and Netflix to ruin AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Charter's livlihood. This narrative has been routinely driven by ISP policy folks despite the fact net neutrality is very much a bipartisan, grassroots consumer welfare issue.

New York State brought in Tim Wu, the Columbia Law Professor who coined the term "net neutrality," to consult on the case. And because Wu had at points talked to both Google and Netflix (who were concerned that Charter was abusing its last-mile monopoly to drive up costs), Charter hopes to use this "unclean hands defense" to try and scuttle the lawsuit by claiming it was a vast conspiracy against Charter:

"Charter's unclean-hands defense is that Plaintiff actively conspired with private parties through Tim Wu (a leading critic of ISP business practices) to investigate and sue Time Warner Cable Inc.," he wrote. "Thus, Plaintiff delegated what should have been an objective law enforcement investigation to third parties whose pecuniary and political interests are adverse to TWC's, and who had preconceived notions of how and why to penalize TWC."

The letter then goes on to talk about documents produced by the other side that allegedly show how Wu and third parties "manufacture[d] fraud claims" and how his "co-conspirators boasted of having orchestrated Mr. Wu's work."

The names of the individuals who allegedly were in cahoots with Wu include Google's Meredith Whittaker, who in a 2015 email to a colleague, discussed having gotten off the phone with Wu about the NY AG consumer protection complaint and how it would frame interconnection as a consumer harm issue."

Of course since interconnection was a consumer harm issue that's not really substantive or damaging. Charter, a company that routinely uses its own funded think tanks to pollute public discourse and erode accountability is also upset that Wu happened to (gasp) talk to a think tank partially funded by Google:

"Charter is taking the notion of a "cabal" seriously, also pointing to communications with several individuals at the New America Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank."

Ironically, both Google and Netflix's interest in standing up for consumers on this subject has waned proportionally with their growing power over the years. Still, Netflix and Google had every right to be concerned about what Charter and other ISPs were up to, since they were effectively trying to use their last-mile broadband monopoly to unfairly jack up costs for consumers, content creators, and transit operators alike. That Wu corresponded with companies with legitimate anti-competitive concerns over what broadband monopolies are up to isn't likely to scuttle the case and has the faint whiff of desperation.

Charter's other legal efforts to derail the case haven't gone well so far, and it's unclear whether this latest gambit will work. But it's abundantly clear that Charter is particularly worried about the ramifications of this case, given they appear to have been caught on e-mail routinely lying to the public and regulators. As we've been noting, uncompetitive monopolies like Charter are working together to demolish FTC, FCC, and state authority over their businesses, and they're using every trick in the book to do so.

Filed Under: broadband speeds, cabal, consumer protection, new york, tim wu
Companies: charter, google, netflix

Senators Whine About FCC's 25 Mbps Broadband Standard, Insist Nobody Needs That Much Bandwidth

from the lowering-the-bar dept

Just about a year ago, the FCC voted to raise the base definition of broadband from 4 Mbps downstream, 1 Mbps upstream -- to 25 Mbps downstream, 3 Mbps upstream. This, of course, annoyed the nation's mega providers, since the higher standard highlights the lack of competition and next-generation upgrades in countless markets. It especially annoyed the nation's phone companies, given that the expensive, sub-6 Mbps DSL foisted upon millions of customers can no longer even technically be called broadband.

Fast forward a year and the broadband providers' favorite politicians in the House are still whining about the improved definition. In a letter sent to the FCC last week (pdf), the six senators complained that the FCC is on a mad power grab, using a crazy and arbitrary new definition to saddle broadband providers with all manner of onerous regulations. Besides, argued the six Senators, 25 Mbps is more than any American consumer could ever possibly need:

"Looking at the market for broadband applications, we are aware of few applications that require download speeds of 25 Mbps. Netflix, for example, recommends a download speed of 5 Mbps to receive high-definition streaming video, and Amazon recommends a speed of 3.5 Mbps. In addition, according to the FCC's own data, the majority of Americans who can purchase 25 Mbps choose not to."

Focusing on the fact that a single Netflix stream eats just 3.5 to 5 Mbps ignores the fact that broadband connections serve an entire house of hungry users, many of whom will be gobbling significantly more bandwidth using any number of services and connected devices. It's also worth pointing out that a single Netflix Ultra HD stream can eat 25 Mbps all by itself. And on the upstream side of the equation, the FCC's definition of 3 Mbps remains relatively last-generation and arguably pathetic. Similarly, many consumers may not buy 25 Mbps because the lack of competition can result in high prices for faster tiers.

In other words, claiming 25 Mbps is some kind of "arbitrary," pie-in-the-sky standard is absurd.

Of course, the Senators don't really care about technical specifics, they're just blindly echoing the broadband industry's annoyance that the FCC is now actually highlighting the lack of broadband competition in the market. They're specifically bothered by this recent FCC study, which notes that two-thirds of U.S. households lack the choice of more than one ISP at speeds of 25 Mbps or greater. Companies like AT&T and Verizon also don't like how this data highlights the fact they're giving up on rural America and many second- and third-tier cities, freezing broadband deployments and in some cases even refusing to repair aging infrastructure.

And while it's certainly true the higher standard helps prop up the FCC's Congressional mandate to ensure quality broadband is deployed in a "reasonable and timely" basis (and by proxy its Title II reclassification), a lot of the FCC's efforts have quietly involved eliminating regulation, ranging from streamlining tower placement and pole attachment regulations, to eliminating the kind of awful state level protectionist laws that keep municipal and public/private broadband networks from taking root in incumbent duopolist territories.

At the end of the day, incumbent providers and the politicians who love them are simply annoyed that the FCC has any standards whatsoever, since that makes it immeasurably harder to pretend that the nation's broadband competition and connectivity issues don't exist.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband speeds, congress, fcc, senate
Companies: at&t, verizon

DSL Users Still Can't Get Advertised Speeds They Pay For, Nation's Telcos Couldn't Care Less

from the underwhelming-you-is-our-forte dept

Every year the FCC is mandated by Congress to release a report detailing the status of the U.S. broadband industry. The good news? This year's edition of the creatively-named "Measuring Broadband America Fixed Broadband Report" (pdf) notes that speeds have by and large tripled since 2011. The bad news? That's really only for those who have cable broadband (where DOCSIS upgrades are relatively inexpensive) and the few people living in an area getting wired with fiber to the home. If you're a phone company customer with a DSL connection, unfortunately, many of you are still lucky to get 12 Mbps downstream:

" Largely spurred by the deployment of enabling technologies such as DOCSIS 3, the maximum advertised download speeds offered by ISPs using cable systems increased from 12-20 Mbps in March 2011 to 50-105 Mbps in September 2014. However, popular maximum DSL speed offerings have not kept up with that growth. While average DSL consumer speeds have increased, popular maximum DSL speed offerings have stayed largely stagnant since 2011, with most DSL providers offering maximum download rates of 12 Mbps or less."

And that 12 Mbps mark is rather generous. There are tens of millions of DSL customers who are lucky to nab 3 Mbps downstream on a good day, thanks to phone companies that face no serious competitive incentive to upgrade. Worse, some of these companies (like AT&T and Verizon) are actively trying to drive these unwanted customers away with apathy and price hikes so they can focus on more-profitable wireless. Others, (like Frontier, Windstream and CenturyLink) are buying these aging assets up, but wind up being so saddled with debt meaningful upgrades aren't possible (assuming they had competitive incentive to do so).

For a few years now the FCC has taken to naming and shaming ISPs that fail to deliver advertised speeds as part of the report. And for a while, it paid dividends. Cable companies singled out in the report one year for poor performance (like Cablevision) would return the next having notably upgraded provisioned speeds for fear of bad PR. Even notoriously awful satellite providers, motivated by 4G wireless, have been improving things with new Ka-band deployments. But proudly, consistently, the nation's DSL providers continue to under-deliver in terms of both overall speed......and also how close they get to their advertised speeds:And this won't be changing any time soon. With no competition to speak of, most of these telcos intend to cherry pick only the most profitable areas over the next decade (housing developments, university dorms), then pretend these deployments are much broader than they actually are (aka "fiber to the press release"). Simultaneously, most of these underperforming telcos (CenturyLink & AT&T especially) have been busy lobbying, buying and quite-literally writing state laws preventing towns and cities from upgrading their own broadband, or from getting outside help in the form of public/private partnerships.

The result (despite a lot of hype surrounding gigabit deployments) is a huge swath of the country that will likely be stuck on last-generation DSL for the better part of the next decade. And while a lack of real broadband competition is the obvious culprit, these same companies will be sure to blame everything from net neutrality to rogue yeti for their miserable failure to provide even the barest semblance of mediocre service.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband speeds, cable, competition, dsl, fcc
Companies: at&t, centurylink, frontier, verizon, windstream

US Works Its Way Up To The Middle Of The Pack In Broadband Speed

from the US-broadband-providers-continue-to-lead-with-fearless-mediocrity dept

The more statistics are gathered on broadband speed, the more evidence accumulates that the United States' lack of true broadband competition is holding this country back. Karl Bode at DSLreports points to the latest data gathered by Ookla, which shows the US is still lagging behind several countries in connection speed.

According to the latest Speedtest.net data from Ookla, the United States has fallen to 31 in mean downstream broadband speed, behind such countries as Uruguay, Estonia, and Latvia. Ookla notes they collect the data from millions of user connections, measuring the "rolling mean throughput in Mbps over the past 30 days where the mean distance between the client and the server is less than 300 miles."

As Bode points out, part of this is due to the geographic sprawl of the United States. Many of the countries listed above the US (Malta, Macau, Luxembourg) are exponentially smaller than the US. But that's not the entire story. Countries with comparable sizes rank near the US in speed. One is Russia (#35), whose infrastructure is still hit-and-miss (but still a bit of an overachiever). The other is Canada (#37), a country with its own competitive issues.

Even weighing those factors, the lack of competition is still the main contributor to these under-performing speeds. As Bode notes, the speed results are also low because many customers don't purchase the fastest tier available. Again, this is because faster tiers are prohibitively expensive for most users. If other countries are obtaining better speed results, their customers are being offered faster speeds at affordable prices.

Not only are Americans connecting at subpar speeds, but they're not even getting what they've paid for. Ookla's "Promise Index" compares actual speeds with advertised speeds. According to its numbers, the US ranks 28th in the world. The actual percentage isn't terrible (92.95%) but it is another sign that there's a reason every advertised broadband package contains those two special words, "up to."

There doesn't seem to be much improvement on the horizon, either. Time Warner Cable is for sale and it's made it clear its preferred buyer is none other than Comcast, a cable company that routinely finishes towards the "top" of Consumerist's "Worst Company in America" polls. This would effectively give Comcast one-third of the national broadband market. This purchase would need approval from regulators (the DoJ and the FCC), but these agencies have been talked into very questionable "consolidations" in the past.

If the broadband market's ever going to improve, it needs more players. The incumbents have spent several years building up roadblocks to discourage new competitors. Google's fiber efforts may be spurring very belated improvements in limited markets, but it's hardly the answer. Without some sort of large-scale disruption, we're likely looking at rising costs, stagnant speeds and a push by providers to preferred high-margin services and the steady creep of customer-unfriendly usage caps.

Filed Under: broadband, broadband speeds, competition

With Google Fiber On The Way, AT&T Fiber Customers Receive Free Boost To Connection Only 976 Mbps Slower Than Google's Connection

from the loosening-the-artificial-cap dept

With the threat of Google's fiber expansion making real competition a reality in some markets (rather than the perceived competition where multiple cablecos and ISPs offer middling service while offering small discounts or limited time price breaks), AT&T is now being forced to upgrade its existing service in the affected area, or at least, to pay it some lip service. Its press release following the news read more like a Bart Simpson quote: "We can't promise to try. But we'll try to try."

It appears AT&T is actually doing at least a little something for its existing fiber customers in Austin. Austin members of the DSLReports boards are reporting that AT&T has removed the governor (or loosened it, anyway) on its fiber connections, bumping the speed up to nearly 2.5% of Google's offering.

I called to cancel U-Verse because Time Warner offers Docsis 3.0 speeds for far cheaper in the Austin area. Uverse told me that select FTTH customers can now get 24/3 instead of the previous cap of 18/1.5. They just have to send a "special" technican to upgrade my equipment. I am letting them come and try because I don't believe it.

Why aren't these fiber customers already enjoying vastly improved speeds over other U-Verse subscribers? Why has it taken the threat of a real competitor to remove the artificial cap AT&T installed? Apparently, it's because AT&T wants to treat all of its customers fairly and ensure they receive the same lousy connection speed.

While AT&T took the cheaper route when upgrading portions of their network to fiber to the node, the company has historically offered fiber to the home to a few locations (less than a few hundred thousand), primarily in upscale housing developments. While those lines are capable of significantly higher speeds, AT&T has traditionally capped those users at the same speed as other U-Verse users. The company told me in 2007 this was to create a "more consistent experience."

Consistent under-performance is consistent.

That means you have users on cutting-edge fiber infrastructure, in some places seeing downstream speeds of just 6 Mbps -- and upstream speeds of just 1.5 Mbps.

So, while this speed bump may be appreciated, it is long overdue. The fact is fiber customers should have surpassed 24/3 a long time ago, rather than making do with a small, tossed off bit of faux largesse from AT&T. An incremental boost like this, especially on a fiber connection, isn't going to be enough to keep AT&T customers from lining up for Google Fiber. Even if AT&T begins making more aggressive moves, it's highly doubtful its customers believe it will ever match Google's connection speed. As Karl Bode says:

Given these past speed issues, this is why most AT&T customers will believe 1 Gbps only when it's up and running.

Exactly. Time Warner Cable, facing direct competition from Google Fiber, flat out stated there was no demand for this connection speed and that it would certainly be happy to provide 1Gbps connection should anyone prove they actually needed it. Translation: probably never. AT&T's slippery press release "nailed down" pretty much the same approximate timeframe. It's clear competition will have some positive effect for those in the covered areas. I'm sure TWC and AT&T are both happy a nationwide Google expansion would be prohibitively expensive, allowing them to continue providing subpar connection speeds and terrible customer service.

Filed Under: austin, broadband speeds, competition, fiber
Companies: at&t, google