Given the massive disconnect between the actual and advertised speeds, how is a broadband buyer to know in advance how well the connection will function?
What if ISPs had to advertise minimum speeds? In Hungary, they do
]]>In reality, no one gets these speeds. That's not news to the techno-literate, of course, but a new Federal Communications Commission report (PDF) shines a probing flashlight on the issue and makes a sharp conclusion: broadband users get, on average, a mere 50 percent of that "up to" speed they had hoped to achieve.]]>After crunching the data, FCC wonks have concluded that ISPs advertised an average (mean) "up to" download speed of 6.7Mbps in 2009. That's not what broadband users got, though.
But these incidents aren't just stories of human folly or corporate greed, they're subtle signs of a deeper issue: the increasing shortage of bandwidth relative to Americans' growing appetite for it. In the U.S. in 2010, a family can easily spend hundreds of dollars a month on cable, mobile phones and Internet and telephone services. Some families already spend at least as much on bandwidth as they do on energy. Face it: Americans love their smart phones and Internet television as much as they love their cars and air conditioners.
Bandwidth Is the New Black Gold - 10 Ideas for the Next 10 Years - TIME
]]>Not surprisingly, more than a third of broadband laggards, 36 percent, cited the high cost of broadband and technology, even as entry-level computers and laptops have become very affordable. But survey users report they spend an average of $41 a month on broadband -- which comes to nearly $500 annually....
Nearly 20 percent without broadband say they don't bother to subscribe, because there are 800 million web sites, but nothin's on -- or if they have dial-up, that there's nothing worth getting faster.
Cost, Crotchetiness Keep Broadband Out of 1/3 of U.S. Homes | Epicenter | Wired.com
]]>Findings:
- People of color are the majority in zip codes with zero access to high speed Internet.
- Mississippi's Second Congressional Districts has the largest population of people of color and the lowest levels of broadband access.
- Broadband builds the economy. Therefore, poor communities of color are less able to build their economies or the state and national economy:
- Zip codes with 8 or more Internet providers average 811 businesses. Those without high-speed internet access have a mere 7 businesses on average. Zip codes with 8 or more Internet providers average 13,212 jobs. Job opportunities in places with one, two, or even three Internet providers are a mere fraction of that, with an average of 646 jobs.
- Of the 124 applications for expanding broadband access in Mississippi, 87 were rejected and 37 are still awaiting a decision.
Poverty Worsened by Poor Broadband - Center for Social Inclusion
]]>SP 6.0.32 is still supported on these OSes:
(Note: NOW!Imaging is not supported for 64-bit Internet Explorer; 64-bit FTP/Email clients are not supported on SP 6.0.32)
Your best bet to combat these threats is to connect to a VPN, or have some kind of encryption on your side. SlipStream SP works within VPNs and can help speed up a bogged-down WiFi connection.
Like nomads searching for oases, we roam in our quest to find Wi-Fi hotspots from which to connect to the wireless world. Unfortunately, these cozy areas where everything seems so right actually can be black holes where our private data can be siphoned away....
A hacker establishes his or her own hotspot while naming it the same as the official hotspot and at the same time as routing traffic through his or her hotspot to the official system. In the process, the private data within the Internet traffic, such as credit card numbers, can be harvested.
Hotspots Can Be Black Holes of Hacking Danger - Eric Sinrod - Technologist
]]>First, and most importantly, is the definition of "broadband" which sets the benchmark from which all measurement and conclusion flows. The "study" uses 1.5mbs as its threshold. 1.5mbps! I believe this was the launch speed for Bell Canada's dsl service in 1998. 1.5mbps as "broadband" borders on nostalgic. This, more than anything else, takes this from "study" to "attempt at persuasion".
It is as if we were talking about hunger and debating how many Canadians are starving. I, and many others, are lamenting how hungry we are. We are complaining that in a country like Canada we should be eating MUCH better.
Tucows Inc. News » Blog Archive » The Sad State of Broadband in Canada
]]>A new survey provides empiric evidence of what, in out hearts and wallets, we already know - advertised mobile broadband speeds are a con. Subscribers are getting less that a quarter of the service they pay 100 per cent of their money for, writes Martyn Warwick.
UK mobile broadband: pay through the nose, get just 24 per cent of advertised speeds
]]>Ever had a sneaking suspicion that your broadband download speeds never quite measured up to the "up to" speeds trumpeted by your ISP--and that everyone around you was probably in the same boat? If so, you now have some solid empirical evidence that this is indeed the case.UK telecoms regulator Ofcom today released the results of a lengthy study that compared advertised download speeds with the actual speeds received by home users, and the results are shocking--average speeds are only half what is advertised.
Upload speeds are especially limited:
When it comes to upload speeds, the situation is just as dire. Average UK upload speeds were a mere 0.43Mbps, not exceeding 0.7Mbps even on 16Mbps plans.
[Source: ars technica]
]]>]]>When price and speed are combined, Canada sinks toward the very bottom of the OECD rankings. As measured by price per megabyte - effectively the price for speed - Canada ranks 28th out of 30 countries, ahead of only Mexico and Poland. This may be the most telling metric, since it confirms that Canadians pay more for less.
Canadian consumers also face far less choice with respect to broadband options. Canada was one of only four countries (Australia, New Zealand, and Belgium were the others) where all broadband options included "bit caps" that limit consumer use each month.
You remember dial-up? It's the beep, crackle, pop method of logging on to send e-mail and browse the Web that was pretty much the only option in the early days of the Internet.
In today's world of social networking, online videos and music downloads, going from high-speed to dial-up is like switching from a Maserati to a horse and buggy. But some say the hundreds they would save might make them go back, especially for those who have high-speed Internet at work.
Cost-conscious consumers downgrade from cable Internet to dial-up
]]>http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2009/03/us-broadband-growth-plummeted-over-13-in-2008.ars
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This was the best performance in net subscriber loss that we've achieved in more than three years and our turn rate was the lowest level we've achieved since the day we introduced pay internet access. My belief is that the dialup category might actually be helped by today's weakened economic climate, because there's a lot of evidence that consumers are trading down for lower price points. That's exactly why I launched the new NetZero ad campaign in the fourth quarter to encourage customers who may be conserving cash to save $300 dollars a year by switching to dialup for their internet access needs. As I state in my television commercial, if every broadband household in America were to switch to NetZero for just $9.95 a month, the 56 million American households on broadband would save $16 billion dollars per year after taxes.
http://seekingalpha.com/article/121639-united-online-inc-q4-2008-earnings-call-transcript
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