New minimum speed for US broadband connections

Owen DeLong owen at delong.com
Wed Feb 16 17:52:45 UTC 2022



> On Feb 11, 2022, at 13:14 , Josh Luthman <josh at imaginenetworksllc.com> wrote:
> 
> Because literally every case I've seen along these lines is someone complaining about the coax connection is "only 100 meg when I pay for 200 meg".  Comcast was the most hated company and yet they factually had better speeds (possibly in part to their subjectively terrible customer service) for years.
> 
> >An apartment building could have cheap 1G fiber and the houses across the street have no option but slow DSL.
> 
> Where is this example?  Or is this strictly hypothetical?

There are literally dozens (if not thousands) of such examples in silicon valley alone.

> I am not seeing any examples, anywhere, with accurate data, where it's what most consider to be in town/urban and poor speeds.  The only one that was close was Jared and I'm pretty sure when I saw the map I wouldn't consider that in town (could be wrong) but again, there's gig fiber there now.  I don't remember if he actually got his CLEC, or why that matters, but there's fiber there now.

Pretty sure you would have a hard time calling San Jose “not in town”. It’s literally #11 in the largest 200 cities in the US with a population of 1,003,120 (954,940 in the 2010 census) and a population density of 5,642 people/sq. mile (compare to #4 Houston, TX at 3,632/Sq. Mi.).

Similar conditions exist in parts of Los Angeles, #2 on the same list at 3,985,516 (3,795,512 in 2010 census) and 8,499/Sq. Mi.

I speak of California because it’s where I have the most information. I’m sure this situation exists in other states as well, but I don’t have actual data.

The simple reality is that there are three sets of incentives that utilities tend to chase and neither of them provides for the mezzo-urban and sub-urban parts of America…
	1.	USF — Mostly supports rural deployments.
	2.	Extreme High Density — High-Rise apartments in dense arrays, Not areas of town houses, smaller apartment complexes, or single family dwellings.
	3.	Neighborhoods full of McMansions — Mostly built very recently and where the developers would literally pay the utilities to pre-deploy in order to boost sales prices.

Outside of those incentives, there’s very little actual deployment of broadband improvements, leaving vast quantities of average Americans underserved.

Owen



> 
> On Fri, Feb 11, 2022 at 4:05 PM Brandon Svec via NANOG <nanog at nanog.org <mailto:nanog at nanog.org>> wrote:
> What is the point of these anecdotes? Surely anyone on this list with even a passing knowledge of the broadband landscape in the United States knows how hit or miss it can be.  An apartment building could have cheap 1G fiber and the houses across the street have no option but slow DSL.  Houses could have reliable high speed cable internet, but the office park across the field has no such choice because the buildout cost is prohibitively high to get fiber, etc.
> 
> There are plenty of places with only one or two choices of provider too.  Of course, this is literally changing by the minute as new services are continually being added and upgraded.
> Brandon Svec 
> 
> 
> 
> On Fri, Feb 11, 2022 at 12:36 PM Josh Luthman <josh at imaginenetworksllc.com <mailto:josh at imaginenetworksllc.com>> wrote:
> OK the one example you provided has gigabit fiber though.
> 
> On Fri, Feb 11, 2022 at 8:41 AM Tom Beecher <beecher at beecher.cc <mailto:beecher at beecher.cc>> wrote:
> Can you provide examples?
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twe6uTwOyJo&ab_channel=NANOG <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Twe6uTwOyJo&ab_channel=NANOG>
> 
> Our good friend Jared could only get 1.5M DSL living just outside Ann Arbor, MI, so he had to start his own CLEC. 
> 
> I have friends in significantly more rural areas than he lives in ( Niagara and Orleans county NYS , between Niagara Falls and Rochester ) who have the same 400Mb package from Spectrum that I do, living in the City of Niagara Falls. 
> 
> This is not to say that rural America is a mecca of connectivity; there is a long way to go all the way around regardless. But it is a direct example as you asked for. 
> 
> On Thu, Feb 10, 2022 at 3:57 PM Josh Luthman <josh at imaginenetworksllc.com <mailto:josh at imaginenetworksllc.com>> wrote:
> >There are plenty of urban and suburban areas in America that are far worse off from a broadband perspective than “rural America”.
> 
> Can you provide examples?
> 
> On Thu, Feb 10, 2022 at 3:51 PM Owen DeLong via NANOG <nanog at nanog.org <mailto:nanog at nanog.org>> wrote:
> 
> 
> > On Jun 2, 2021, at 02:10 , Mark Tinka <mark at tinka.africa> wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > On 6/2/21 11:04, Owen DeLong wrote:
> > 
> >> I disagree… If it could be forced into a standardized format using a standardized approach to data acquisition and reliable comparable results across providers, it could be a very useful adjunct to real competition.
> > 
> > If we can't even agree on what "minimum speed for U.S. broadband connections" actually means, fat chance having a "nutritional facts" at the back of the "Internet in a tea cup" dropped off at your door step.
> > 
> > I'm not saying it's not useful, I'm just saying that easily goes down the "what color should we use for the bike shed" territory, while people in rural America still have no or poor Internet access.
> > 
> > Mark.
> 
> ROFLMAO…
> 
> People in Rural America seem to be doing just fine. Most of the ones I know at least have GPON or better.
> 
> Meanwhile, here in San Jose, a city that bills itself as “The Capital of Silicon Valley”, the best I can get is Comcast (which does finally purport to be Gig down), but rarely delivers that.
> 
> Yes, anything involving the federal government will get the full bike shed treatment no matter what we do.
> 
> There are plenty of urban and suburban areas in America that are far worse off from a broadband perspective than “rural America”.
> 
> Owen
> 

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