But broadband in the UK isn't faster than broadband in the US. On average, web page load time is 150% longer than in the US, despite greater population density and half the traffic volume. All the so-called competitors are connected to BT's switches except Virgin, so they're just reselling the same service. Effectively, you're confusing car dealers with car makers.
Cable modem is deregulated in Europe, as it is in the US. In Europe, cable modem is faster than the DSL service that's heavily regulated; in the UK, DSL tops out at 20-25 Mbps, but Virgin Media's cable modem service goes up to 150 Mbps for the 50% of Britons who can get it.
What easy setup do you imagine you see in Marcus's remark?
Free Press says Title II treatment of broadband will raise end-user prices by $4B, while Singer and Litan say it will raise them by $15B. They agree that there will be a price increase, but they disagree on the exact amount.
The wild card is state and local taxes, which Free Press judges totally impossible and which Singer and Litan note are automatically applied to telecom services today under state and local law. These taxes will obviously be triggered by reclassification.
Bode tries to distract the reader with complaints about sneaky below the line fees that aren't affected by Title II at all.
Given that this article was dictated by Free Press - by the author's own admission - why omit their claim that Title II will increase user fees by $4B?
And for bonus points, given that the author claims the Singer/Litan study was dictated by AT&T - a claim that is offered without evidence - who pays the bills at TechDirt? Last I heard it was Google, but the tone of TechDirt's opinions suggest that Netflix and the hosting companies are in the mix now.
First, let me congratulate you for commenting on my study. While your post is less than illuminating, at least you didn't try to ignore my G-7 study; I suppose I can thank Vox.com for forcing your hand. The study is iconoclastic because undermines the credibility of the endless stories tech blogs like to run about how the man is keeping the hipsters down and it's soooooo much better in Europe. So there's that. Now let's take note of the outright falsehoods in your story.
1. The United States is not "indisputably mediocre when it comes to broadband." I see this turn of phrase often in Bode/TechDirt articles when the author can't be bothered to make a provable claim. The US isn't "indisputably" anything in broadband as there's a lively debate about how to assess our standing and what the data actually show. But more importantly, even the sources that claim the US is less good than I find us to be tend to rate the US somewhere between 20th and 40th on measures such as download speed, subscription rate, or price/performance. That sounds bad until you realize that there are close to 200 nations in the world, so mediocre would be closer to 100th place than to first. The top quarter isn't "mediocre".
2. You say "It doesn't really matter if you look at data from FCC, the the OECD, OOkla's [sic] Net Index or walk next door and ask your neighbor. We're average or worse on metrics like speed (three quarters of the country has no competitive option at speeds faster than 25 Mbps), penetration, price and adoption..." Yet I cite all the sources you mention, as well as Akamai, Cisco, the EU, SamKnows, ITU, Google, Merrill Lynch, Infonetics, the Boston Consulting Group, Ofcom, Japan's MIC, and Plum, and I don't find any support for the claim that we're in the bottom 100 in the world. And no, walking next door and asking your neighbor will not tell you anything meaningful about international standings unless your neighbor is a scholar, and the number of competitors has less to do with speed than does the nature of the competition. More on that to follow.
3. You claim "The latest study of this type comes courtesy of our friends over at the Verizon, Comcast and AT&T funded American Enterprise Institute, whose latest analysis (pdf) compares U.S. broadband to only other G7 countries, since a broader global comparison makes us look worse."
I focused on the G-7 in this study because this is a group of nations that are more closely comparable with the US than city states such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea, but I've covered the whole OECD in the past. In fact, comparing the US to the entire 194 countries in the world makes us look a lot better than simply comparing us to the rest of the G7, G20, or OECD does.
4. You engage in ad hominem by claiming that I say "a think tank employed in part by the nation's largest ISPs has cornered the market on sound broadband pricing analysis" and that my study "makes light of all price studies that came before it." In the first place, AEI is not employed by anybody; it accepts donations from hundreds of contributors - most of whom are not even known to me - and I did not consult with a single one about this study.
It's also false to claim I make light of all previous pricing studies. I analyze most of them - including the credulous OTI report that takes advertising claims as reality - and I criticize some of their methods. In particular, I find that a dollars/Mbps analysis is less meaningful than a bit miles analysis.
Rather than making light of the OTI and some OECD studies that have used the wrong yardstick, I explain why I think measuring traffic and miles of cable is more meaningful. YMMV about which metric is more informative, but I show the math: wiring a Hong Kong apartment with fiber costs $200, but pulling fiber in the suburbs costs closer to $1000/home. That's a fact.
5. You say I claim "we're competitive under this criteria if you look at specific metrics in just the right way, ignore all previous studies, tilt your head just the right way, and ignore the industry's awful customer service." If this were the case, why would I cite the OTI, Ookla, and OECD studies you praise? I looked at every bit of public data I could find, and generated 70 charts and graphs showing how the various studies rank us. I refrained from making any claims that aren't supported by more than one source, and in most cases I use three or more sources before making any claims.
6. Your comments on cable are strangely inconsistent. On the one hand, you admit that cable modem is faster than the DSL that accounts for 80% of Europe's broadband connections, but on the other hand you say observing "United States has more cable in the ground than Europe sounds nice, [but] it's kind of like observing that Europe has different trees". When we're assessing speed, technologies matter, and cable affords the speeds that policy analysis classifies as "next generation broadband", 25 Mbps downloads or better. Because the US has more cable than Europe and Japan, we can employ different regulatory models to achieve performance-based competition, something that's lacking in most nations, including most of Europe where retail ISPs can only compete on price since they use the incumbent's DSL wires.
7. You claim I make a big deal over the fact that the "United States leads many G7 countries when it comes to the number of total fiber based connections, a metric that includes fiber to the home connections like Google Fiber, and the slower and much less costly fiber to the node connections like AT&T U-Verse." I follow the FCC/NTIA convention of excluding VDSL systems like U-Verse from fiber connections and only count genuine FTTH/B. This departs from the European convention that counts VDSL as "FTTx". The US leads all of the G7 on FTTH except Japan, where it's essentially universal. In fact, the US has twice as much FTTH as Europe's G7 nations have, and we continue to install more fiber miles each year than does the EU as a whole.
8. You make the false claim that Local Loop Unbundling leads to higher speeds and lower prices: "U.S. incumbent broadband pricing has long taken a particular beating when compared to places like Paris, where regulators took our discarded idea of local loop unbundling (opening up the incumbent networks to third party competition) and made it work. The result? Stories like this, where people visit Paris and are shocked to learn that Parisians can get 100 Mbps broadband, 250 cable channels, home phone service and a wireless phone with 3 GB of data -- for $63 a month."
LLU is a system that allows retail ISPs to lease DSL from the incumbent, often at cost or below. There is not a single case of LLU for cable in the G7, and only one in the OECD (Denmark) so there's no way it affects these higher speed networks.
Given that, there's certainly no way that LLU brings 100 Mbps services to anybody in the G7 unless FTTH is unbundled. I do a very thorough analysis of G7 FTTH policies and find that they're actually based on regulatory holidays from unbundling.
In Japan, NTT-E/W will only lease fiber to a competitor in groups of 8 strands, which makes competition impractical. Germany and the UK also restrict access to FTTH for competitors, but there's very little FTTH in these nations to begin with: 2.6% of homes in Germany, 0.7% in UK, vs. 23% in the US. In fact, regulators in other countries incentivize fiber by copying the deregulatory US model for fiber while retaining LLU for DSL. This discourages upgrading to higher speeds because it makes DSL artificially cheap.
9. Finally, you mention customer service several times, despite the fact that I make no mention of it. While it's certainly true that US carriers and utilities score low in customer service, even a quick Google search will show you that this is a global pattern. Nobody likes their carrier or utility, not even people in Europe and Asia, and but most people who use the Internet really like it. So there's no meaningful or measurable difference between the US and the rest of the world on that score, which is why I don't discuss it in the paper. In reality, telecoms are less reviled than actual public utilities in most nations.
Conclusion: I realize that I've simply cited facts here and haven't made appeals to emotion. Having seen that facts and logic don't weigh heavily against emotion, I don't expect you to change your tune, but I take satisfaction in knowing that in the back of your mind you'll be aware that at least some of your readers are aware of the way they're being manipulated when they see your leaps of logic, your ad homs, and your non sequiturs.
From Akamai State of the Internet report, Q2 2014:
"Mobile Connectivity / In the second quarter of 2014, average mobile connection speeds (aggregated at a country level) ranged from a high of 15.2 Mbps in South Korea down to a low of 0.9 Mbps in Vietnam." page 5.
Average connection speed for Vietnam: 2.9Mbps, global rank 90th; page 38.
Bulgaria has no cable network, so their next step up from DSL was fiber. But Internet is still a luxury there, used very lightly by a small group of people. Delaware has faster download rates than any nation but Korea, so what?
End-to-end arguments is not the same as net neutrality
You clearly haven't read the Saltzer, Reed, and Clark paper "End-to-End Arguments in System Design" if you think it has anything to do with net neutrality or any other form of broadband regulation; I would venture to say that you haven't read Tim Wu's "Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination" paper either. The connection you draw between these two diverse concepts - both of which are disputable - is based in Wikipedia knowledge, which is, well, not very deep.
Saltzer et al. admitted that there is often a need to place new functions inside the network core for performance and other reasons. Hence, the "all packets are equal" notion that's the core of the Techdirt understanding of net neutrality isn't supported by end-to-end. There are exceptions to every rule, you see.
The fact that net neutrality has become such a big issue reflects the fact that 75% of people who regard themselves as Internet experts don't know the difference between the Internet and the Web.
You seriously want to replace US regulatory policy for broadband because one hotel in Tokyo has snappy Wi-Fi?
Wow, that's amazing.
High speed networks in Japan - cable and fiber - are deregulated, just like US cable and fiber networks. What you experienced is the result of a hotel operator making a business decision, not a national policy.
Bode's original post is nothing but uninformed insults, so mine is in the same vein stylistically. You like the crass insults when Bode and Masnick write them, so what's wrong with mine?
Here, I'll TechDirtify it: "information wants to be free, dog".
I hate to burst your TechDirt-reader-who-thinks-he-knows-stuff bubble, but audio streaming is not a "lots of bandwidth" application. Here's a clue: if you can run the app over dial-up, it's low bandwidth.
It's interesting that the apps you mention are all about screwing artists out of the fruits of their labor except for Skype, which was the second act of a bunch of guys whose first act was a piracy app.
Yes, I surely have no clue what I'm talking about.
I asked about the connection between Europe's broadband speeds and its regulatory policy for a reason. I see you feel sympathy for American broadband users because you believe you're getting a great deal because Europe has "competition" between ISPs offering ADSL service over the legacy telephone network's wires. That's first generation broadband, and Europe has now hit a wall because there's no path to higher speeds than the 21 Mbps you have (you say it's 30, but the EC had measured it and you only get 70% of the advertised rate.)
Where I live - a small town in Colorado - we have VDSL at 45 Mbps over shortened telephone wires and 150 Mbps over cable TV wires. There is no open access for the cable here, but open access in Europe only applies to ADSL, so there's not much difference. The phone and cable companies here are rewiring the area at Gigabit speeds, or were until the FCC and the President threatened to break the Internet to scare up a few votes from the lunatic fringe.
So I'll show you a little sympathy for the pathetic first generation technology you're stuck with because the EU places more emphasis on cheap prices than on high quality services.
When people tell these outlandish stories about the alleged superiority of Europe"s networks few are serious enough to question the claims. If Europe is broadband nirvana, why is there no Internet business there (apart from Pirate Bay, Masnick's and Bode's favorite site)?
Actually, that comment was a test. Masnick generally delays posting my comments by four hours or so because he doesn't like his logical inconsistencies being pointed out, which is what I do. There's some history here.
What's the connection between the download speeds you and your friend may have and net neutrality? There isn't one, and your speeds are not typical of Europe. You neglected to mention the technology you and your friend use, but the speeds you describe are achievable with FTTH, FTTC, cable modem and ADSL2. If you have ADSL2, then you're the beneficiary of short copper loops that were laid to provide phone service at some point in the distant past. Europe has a lot of short loops because of its population distribution and poor PSTN technology.
If the "whole idea behind the net is based on NN", then why was there no mention of the term "neutrality" in any of the Internet's first 6000 RFCs? Surely there must have been a passing reference to the concept in the design documents for the Internet.
Net neutrality is an attempt to solve a series of technical problem with regulation. The main technical problems are: 1) The dysfunction of the Internet's congestion control mechanism, which is placed in the wrong level; 2) The side effect that this mechanism has on real-time applications; 3) The Internet address doesn't refer to the right object: it points to an interface instead of a host, and it can't support secure multicast; 4) The designed-in vulnerability of the Internet to Denial of Service attacks is another side effect of poor addressing; 5) The absence of an enrollment procedure before one host can blast away at another; 6) Generalized security issues with email and financial transactions.
Rather than admit that the Internet's architecture was created for research and is poorly suited for general purpose networking, a particular interest group seeks to mandate the continuation of traditional behavior at the expense of new opportunities.
This not good, and it only flies if it's borne on the back of hate-mongering toward ISPs, Big Content, or some other entity that's no better and not worse than the services companies such as Netflix and Uber. They're all in business for the same reason.
On the post: The Broadband Industry Pretends To Be Worried About Your Soaring Bill In Attempt To Undermine Net Neutrality
Re: Re: Re: TWC: Pot calling the kettle black
Now that's a strawman.
On the post: The Broadband Industry Pretends To Be Worried About Your Soaring Bill In Attempt To Undermine Net Neutrality
Re: TWC: Pot calling the kettle black
What easy setup do you imagine you see in Marcus's remark?
On the post: The Broadband Industry Pretends To Be Worried About Your Soaring Bill In Attempt To Undermine Net Neutrality
Omissions and Disclosure
The wild card is state and local taxes, which Free Press judges totally impossible and which Singer and Litan note are automatically applied to telecom services today under state and local law. These taxes will obviously be triggered by reclassification.
Bode tries to distract the reader with complaints about sneaky below the line fees that aren't affected by Title II at all.
Given that this article was dictated by Free Press - by the author's own admission - why omit their claim that Title II will increase user fees by $4B?
And for bonus points, given that the author claims the Singer/Litan study was dictated by AT&T - a claim that is offered without evidence - who pays the bills at TechDirt? Last I heard it was Google, but the tone of TechDirt's opinions suggest that Netflix and the hosting companies are in the mix now.
Can we have some disclosure please?
On the post: Yet Another Study Proclaims U.S. Broadband Awesome If You Intentionally Ignore All The Warts
Amazingly weak article
1. The United States is not "indisputably mediocre when it comes to broadband." I see this turn of phrase often in Bode/TechDirt articles when the author can't be bothered to make a provable claim. The US isn't "indisputably" anything in broadband as there's a lively debate about how to assess our standing and what the data actually show. But more importantly, even the sources that claim the US is less good than I find us to be tend to rate the US somewhere between 20th and 40th on measures such as download speed, subscription rate, or price/performance. That sounds bad until you realize that there are close to 200 nations in the world, so mediocre would be closer to 100th place than to first. The top quarter isn't "mediocre".
2. You say "It doesn't really matter if you look at data from FCC, the the OECD, OOkla's [sic] Net Index or walk next door and ask your neighbor. We're average or worse on metrics like speed (three quarters of the country has no competitive option at speeds faster than 25 Mbps), penetration, price and adoption..." Yet I cite all the sources you mention, as well as Akamai, Cisco, the EU, SamKnows, ITU, Google, Merrill Lynch, Infonetics, the Boston Consulting Group, Ofcom, Japan's MIC, and Plum, and I don't find any support for the claim that we're in the bottom 100 in the world. And no, walking next door and asking your neighbor will not tell you anything meaningful about international standings unless your neighbor is a scholar, and the number of competitors has less to do with speed than does the nature of the competition. More on that to follow.
3. You claim "The latest study of this type comes courtesy of our friends over at the Verizon, Comcast and AT&T funded American Enterprise Institute, whose latest analysis (pdf) compares U.S. broadband to only other G7 countries, since a broader global comparison makes us look worse."
I focused on the G-7 in this study because this is a group of nations that are more closely comparable with the US than city states such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea, but I've covered the whole OECD in the past. In fact, comparing the US to the entire 194 countries in the world makes us look a lot better than simply comparing us to the rest of the G7, G20, or OECD does.
4. You engage in ad hominem by claiming that I say "a think tank employed in part by the nation's largest ISPs has cornered the market on sound broadband pricing analysis" and that my study "makes light of all price studies that came before it." In the first place, AEI is not employed by anybody; it accepts donations from hundreds of contributors - most of whom are not even known to me - and I did not consult with a single one about this study.
It's also false to claim I make light of all previous pricing studies. I analyze most of them - including the credulous OTI report that takes advertising claims as reality - and I criticize some of their methods. In particular, I find that a dollars/Mbps analysis is less meaningful than a bit miles analysis.
Rather than making light of the OTI and some OECD studies that have used the wrong yardstick, I explain why I think measuring traffic and miles of cable is more meaningful. YMMV about which metric is more informative, but I show the math: wiring a Hong Kong apartment with fiber costs $200, but pulling fiber in the suburbs costs closer to $1000/home. That's a fact.
5. You say I claim "we're competitive under this criteria if you look at specific metrics in just the right way, ignore all previous studies, tilt your head just the right way, and ignore the industry's awful customer service." If this were the case, why would I cite the OTI, Ookla, and OECD studies you praise? I looked at every bit of public data I could find, and generated 70 charts and graphs showing how the various studies rank us. I refrained from making any claims that aren't supported by more than one source, and in most cases I use three or more sources before making any claims.
6. Your comments on cable are strangely inconsistent. On the one hand, you admit that cable modem is faster than the DSL that accounts for 80% of Europe's broadband connections, but on the other hand you say observing "United States has more cable in the ground than Europe sounds nice, [but] it's kind of like observing that Europe has different trees". When we're assessing speed, technologies matter, and cable affords the speeds that policy analysis classifies as "next generation broadband", 25 Mbps downloads or better. Because the US has more cable than Europe and Japan, we can employ different regulatory models to achieve performance-based competition, something that's lacking in most nations, including most of Europe where retail ISPs can only compete on price since they use the incumbent's DSL wires.
7. You claim I make a big deal over the fact that the "United States leads many G7 countries when it comes to the number of total fiber based connections, a metric that includes fiber to the home connections like Google Fiber, and the slower and much less costly fiber to the node connections like AT&T U-Verse." I follow the FCC/NTIA convention of excluding VDSL systems like U-Verse from fiber connections and only count genuine FTTH/B. This departs from the European convention that counts VDSL as "FTTx". The US leads all of the G7 on FTTH except Japan, where it's essentially universal. In fact, the US has twice as much FTTH as Europe's G7 nations have, and we continue to install more fiber miles each year than does the EU as a whole.
8. You make the false claim that Local Loop Unbundling leads to higher speeds and lower prices: "U.S. incumbent broadband pricing has long taken a particular beating when compared to places like Paris, where regulators took our discarded idea of local loop unbundling (opening up the incumbent networks to third party competition) and made it work. The result? Stories like this, where people visit Paris and are shocked to learn that Parisians can get 100 Mbps broadband, 250 cable channels, home phone service and a wireless phone with 3 GB of data -- for $63 a month."
LLU is a system that allows retail ISPs to lease DSL from the incumbent, often at cost or below. There is not a single case of LLU for cable in the G7, and only one in the OECD (Denmark) so there's no way it affects these higher speed networks.
Given that, there's certainly no way that LLU brings 100 Mbps services to anybody in the G7 unless FTTH is unbundled. I do a very thorough analysis of G7 FTTH policies and find that they're actually based on regulatory holidays from unbundling.
In Japan, NTT-E/W will only lease fiber to a competitor in groups of 8 strands, which makes competition impractical. Germany and the UK also restrict access to FTTH for competitors, but there's very little FTTH in these nations to begin with: 2.6% of homes in Germany, 0.7% in UK, vs. 23% in the US. In fact, regulators in other countries incentivize fiber by copying the deregulatory US model for fiber while retaining LLU for DSL. This discourages upgrading to higher speeds because it makes DSL artificially cheap.
9. Finally, you mention customer service several times, despite the fact that I make no mention of it. While it's certainly true that US carriers and utilities score low in customer service, even a quick Google search will show you that this is a global pattern. Nobody likes their carrier or utility, not even people in Europe and Asia, and but most people who use the Internet really like it. So there's no meaningful or measurable difference between the US and the rest of the world on that score, which is why I don't discuss it in the paper. In reality, telecoms are less reviled than actual public utilities in most nations.
Conclusion: I realize that I've simply cited facts here and haven't made appeals to emotion. Having seen that facts and logic don't weigh heavily against emotion, I don't expect you to change your tune, but I take satisfaction in knowing that in the back of your mind you'll be aware that at least some of your readers are aware of the way they're being manipulated when they see your leaps of logic, your ad homs, and your non sequiturs.
That pleases me.
On the post: Mark Cuban Again Illustrates He Has No Idea What Net Neutrality Is Or Why It's Important
Re: Re: Re: Europe's crappy broadband
On the post: Mark Cuban Again Illustrates He Has No Idea What Net Neutrality Is Or Why It's Important
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Europe's crappy broadband
"Mobile Connectivity / In the second quarter of 2014, average
mobile connection speeds (aggregated at a country level) ranged
from a high of 15.2 Mbps in South Korea down to a low of 0.9 Mbps
in Vietnam." page 5.
Average connection speed for Vietnam: 2.9Mbps, global rank 90th; page 38.
Try again, that was a fail.
On the post: Mark Cuban Again Illustrates He Has No Idea What Net Neutrality Is Or Why It's Important
Re: Re: Re: Re: Clickbait vs. Real Business
On the post: Mark Cuban Again Illustrates He Has No Idea What Net Neutrality Is Or Why It's Important
American broadband rules
http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/i/1050277073
I'm not complaining.
On the post: Mark Cuban Again Illustrates He Has No Idea What Net Neutrality Is Or Why It's Important
Spotify screws artists
On the post: Mark Cuban Again Illustrates He Has No Idea What Net Neutrality Is Or Why It's Important
End-to-end arguments is not the same as net neutrality
Saltzer et al. admitted that there is often a need to place new functions inside the network core for performance and other reasons. Hence, the "all packets are equal" notion that's the core of the Techdirt understanding of net neutrality isn't supported by end-to-end. There are exceptions to every rule, you see.
The fact that net neutrality has become such a big issue reflects the fact that 75% of people who regard themselves as Internet experts don't know the difference between the Internet and the Web.
On the post: Mark Cuban Again Illustrates He Has No Idea What Net Neutrality Is Or Why It's Important
Re: Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Mark Cuban Again Illustrates He Has No Idea What Net Neutrality Is Or Why It's Important
Re: Re: Clickbait vs. Real Business
I dispute it: http://www.aei.org/publication/g7-broadband-dynamics-policy-affects-broadband-quality-powerhouse-nat ions/
You're making a ridiculous claim that is not supported by any serious evidence.
On the post: Mark Cuban Again Illustrates He Has No Idea What Net Neutrality Is Or Why It's Important
Re: Re: Re: Europe's crappy broadband
Wow, that's amazing.
High speed networks in Japan - cable and fiber - are deregulated, just like US cable and fiber networks. What you experienced is the result of a hotel operator making a business decision, not a national policy.
NTT E/W has 71% market share for FTTH in Japan.
On the post: Mark Cuban Again Illustrates He Has No Idea What Net Neutrality Is Or Why It's Important
Re: Re: Re: Europe's crappy broadband
Biggest search engine in Europe: Google, 92% share.
Biggest social network: Facebook, 48%
Biggest video streamer: YouTube, 58%
Biggest audio site: iTunes, 62%.
Yeah, Europe is Innovation Central.
On the post: Mark Cuban Again Illustrates He Has No Idea What Net Neutrality Is Or Why It's Important
Re: Re: Clickbait vs. Real Business
Here, I'll TechDirtify it: "information wants to be free, dog".
On the post: Mark Cuban Again Illustrates He Has No Idea What Net Neutrality Is Or Why It's Important
Re: Re: Re: Europe's crappy broadband
It's interesting that the apps you mention are all about screwing artists out of the fruits of their labor except for Skype, which was the second act of a bunch of guys whose first act was a piracy app.
Yes, I surely have no clue what I'm talking about.
On the post: Mark Cuban Again Illustrates He Has No Idea What Net Neutrality Is Or Why It's Important
Re: Re: Re: morons
On the post: Mark Cuban Again Illustrates He Has No Idea What Net Neutrality Is Or Why It's Important
Re: Europe's crappy broadband
Where I live - a small town in Colorado - we have VDSL at 45 Mbps over shortened telephone wires and 150 Mbps over cable TV wires. There is no open access for the cable here, but open access in Europe only applies to ADSL, so there's not much difference. The phone and cable companies here are rewiring the area at Gigabit speeds, or were until the FCC and the President threatened to break the Internet to scare up a few votes from the lunatic fringe.
So I'll show you a little sympathy for the pathetic first generation technology you're stuck with because the EU places more emphasis on cheap prices than on high quality services.
When people tell these outlandish stories about the alleged superiority of Europe"s networks few are serious enough to question the claims. If Europe is broadband nirvana, why is there no Internet business there (apart from Pirate Bay, Masnick's and Bode's favorite site)?
Something doesn't add up.
On the post: Mark Cuban Again Illustrates He Has No Idea What Net Neutrality Is Or Why It's Important
Re:
On the post: Mark Cuban Again Illustrates He Has No Idea What Net Neutrality Is Or Why It's Important
Re:
If the "whole idea behind the net is based on NN", then why was there no mention of the term "neutrality" in any of the Internet's first 6000 RFCs? Surely there must have been a passing reference to the concept in the design documents for the Internet.
Net neutrality is an attempt to solve a series of technical problem with regulation. The main technical problems are:
1) The dysfunction of the Internet's congestion control mechanism, which is placed in the wrong level;
2) The side effect that this mechanism has on real-time applications;
3) The Internet address doesn't refer to the right object: it points to an interface instead of a host, and it can't support secure multicast;
4) The designed-in vulnerability of the Internet to Denial of Service attacks is another side effect of poor addressing;
5) The absence of an enrollment procedure before one host can blast away at another;
6) Generalized security issues with email and financial transactions.
Rather than admit that the Internet's architecture was created for research and is poorly suited for general purpose networking, a particular interest group seeks to mandate the continuation of traditional behavior at the expense of new opportunities.
This not good, and it only flies if it's borne on the back of hate-mongering toward ISPs, Big Content, or some other entity that's no better and not worse than the services companies such as Netflix and Uber. They're all in business for the same reason.
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