American ISPs Want You Slower
Internet providers seek low broadband bar
"WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The biggest U.S. Internet service providers urged regulators to adopt a conservative definition of "broadband," arguing for minimum speeds that were substantially below many other nations.
The submissions were filed with the Federal Communications Commission which had sought comments by August 31 on how the agency should define broadband for a report to be submitted to Congress early next year.
The Obama administration is seeking ways to extend broadband services to both unserved Americans living in rural areas and to make broadband affordable for those living in urban areas.
Some of the submissions from service providers argued for a definition that even undercut an international ranking of U.S. Internet speed.
A 2008 study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development showed that the United States ranked 19th with an advertised rate of 9.6 megabytes per second (mbps). The top three countries were Japan with 92.8 mbps, Korea with 80.8 mbps and France with 51 mbps."
posted by nolocontendere at 4:10 PM
2 Comments:
They did slow-down dial-up, despite Congress declining to pass that bill in 2004. I know because I was on it for 5 years and finally went to DSL earlier this year. The fascist-capitalists that push for these measures to slow internet service provider speeds are only doing it because they lack control over dial-up and DSL connections and want everyone to pay more for high-speed cable, which is being monopolized by the cable companies because they already have the technology in place for it.
Cable companies are also the ones that want to control the internet in much the same way they control cable television, a prospect that the NSA and big government finds very acceptable.
More technical illiteracy from a major wire service - "Mbps" is megaBITs per second, or 1/8 the data per second of "MBps" (megabytes dper second). Also, the "M" should be capitalized to distinguish "mega-" (1,000,000) from "milli-" (0.001), (but no one uses millibits per second, anyway.) "Mbps" (Megabits per second) is the standard unit of measure for communications, and has been for a long time. Communication speeds have always been measured in bits rather than bytes. (Well, "baud" was a measure often confused with bps 20+ years ago, but it is truly obsolete.)
Anyway, the big communications companies (AT&T & offspring in particular) have always had a dog-in-the-manger attitude about improving data service. They could have been providing 6 Mbps to 95% of their DSL subscribers from 2000 on; their backbones were at <5% traffic throughout the 2000-2005 period - and likely later as well. The main reasons they drag their heels are greed and institutional incompetence, technical issues are not a factor for more than 5% of lines being throttled down. Even so, it's just the mechanical nature of telco organisations dictating the bandwidths - there are thousands of lines out there that would effectively run faster if they were throttled down to lower maximums (long lines with variable interference often have no effective throughput, but work fine at less ambitious bandwidths). Nevertheless, the telcos won't reduce the nominal bandwidth to increase the effective bandwidth - it's one size fits all. The big telcos abuse their monopoly powers as a brainstem reflex in many other ways as well. Calling individual executives on the carpet publicly, especially with wide media exposure has a dramatic effect - these types love the anonymity of the organization and hate being put in the spotlight.
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