Locally Run ISPs Offer the Fastest Broadband In America (vice.com) 156
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Using data from 356,925 broadband speed tests conducted over a year, PCMag recently compiled a list of the fastest ISPs in America. ISPs were then affixed a PCMag Speed Index score based on a combination of line performance, upload, and download speeds. When all regional ISPs were compared side by side, the fastest ISP in America was independent California ISP Sonic, with a score of 610.6. Sonic has been working with select California communities to leverage their publicly-owned fiber networks. All told, six of the ten fastest ISPs in the States were either directly run by a local community, or involved some form of partnership between the public and private sectors.
Market-facing, non-governmental (Score:3, Insightful)
Those locally run ISPs are much more exposed to market forces, not only because they depend on pleasing all their customers, but also because they don't benefit from a government-granted monopoly.
Evolution by Variation (supplier competition) and Selection (consumer choice). It's the only way. There is no such thing as Intelligent Design.
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I am guessing the poster and yourself didn't take economics. As this isn't evolution but Supply and Demand
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The law of Supply and Demand, is independent of the economic system.
In the barter system, the guy who hunted down big game, may be able to trade 3 days worth of meat, for 5 days worth of grain, thus be better off for his work then someone else.
The problem with Communist Russia was the breadlines. This is because the government control didn't account for demand of particular supplies. So there will not be any lines on days they sold cooking oil, but long lines where they sold bread. Because the Supply wasn
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Quite true, however the problem with modern ISP's is the amount of infrastructure needed. Back in the dial up days We would have 2 bills to get internet access. One for the phone company (which we could also use for voice) and one for the ISP.
You could pay a lot of money for the big name services like AOL or MSN. Or you could do some research and find inexpensive ISP's that don't have as many busy signals. and offer fast and friendly support. Because they needed to be competitive with the big names. I u
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Re:(0) Don't need high speed. (1) Need specializat (Score:4, Insightful)
Three years ago, the average web page size passed the total size of the original Doom game: https://www.wired.com/2016/04/... [wired.com]
At 3mbps, a 2MB web page will take 5 seconds to download.
3mbps is simply not enough bandwidth for a decent browsing experience.
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At the very least, let clients store (e.g., "install") the client-side code for re-use instead of downloading it every time;
Great, you've just invented HTML5 app cache manifests. They've been a W3C approved standard for half a decade.
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Yeah, no. They were pretending it didn't exist and acting so clever for inventing it themselves. And also, why are we talking about you in the third person?
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All those things you say will work just fine with 3Mbps are things I don't WANT to use at 3Mbps. Your luddite is showing.
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but also because they don't benefit from a government-granted monopoly.
There are no government-granted monopolies in the US for Internet service or telephone service.
There were government-granted monopolies for cable TV service, but all of those expired in the 90s/early 00's and did not cover Internet service.
The problem isn't government monopoly. It's natural monopoly. The incumbent can drive any competitor out of business before they can establish themselves due to the high roll-out costs.
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People have free will, and the world is sufficiently complex; consequently, there is no such thing as a "natural" monopoly.
You start your own ISP, rolling out where Comcast currently covers. You think you'll turn a profit because you can charge $10/mo less than Comcast.
Comcast cuts their rate by $25/mo in the area, causing them to serve the customers with zero profit or a slight loss.
You have giant bills from rolling out your service. You can't pay them. Comcast already paid their rollout costs, so they don't have those giant bills to pay.
You go out of business.
Comcast returns their rates to normal.
According to you, this sce
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perhaps start smaller
Now your per-mile rollout costs go up.
and only grow in a low-debt manner
Their debt is zero and they can afford to go without profit forever, especially if you're only in a "small area".
Also, what about the residents of that area? In your marketing, remind them that it's up to them to fund an ISP who respects its customers wallets
How does that work when Comcast is charging them $15/mo less than you? Also, a very, very small number of people are actually willing to spend more money on utilities to virtue-signal.
It's personal responsibility. People COULD collectively
:blink:
Might wanna think that through some more.
There is no such thing as a natural monopoly
Every economics course on the planet says you're wrong. This example shows how you are wrong. Your response is "Insane market
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However, in reality, there is no such thing as a natural monopoly.
Yes there is. When deploying water service, the company that gets there first wins, always. Efficient delivery of water requires owning the high ground. The incumbent owns it. You can not shove their water tower off to the side and build your own on the high point in a town, and you can't shove their pipes out of the way and build your own that can also take advantage of the terrain to flow downhill as much as possible. You also can't build a system that interpenetrates theirs. Consequently, you will
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but the companies have definitely agreed not to compete against each other which accomplishes the same thing.
No agreement is necessary. It's the result of the logical move of each ISP - spreading into a competitor costs a lot and that competitor can undercut making it unprofitable.
It's more like MAD with nuclear weapons. Everyone figures out it's in their best interest without an agreement.
Who knew... (Score:4, Insightful)
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It's called "capitalism". The US should give it a try sometime.
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Tried that after WWII. Had this terrible bug of democratizing wealth.
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In the case of the fastest ISP, Sonic, the means of production are publicly owned, so this is actually closer to socialism than capitalism.
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No reason you can't have a free market with some socialism.
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I mean, in sane circles we call this a "utility."
The poles are city-owned, but the fiber itself is purchased and installed by Sonic themselves.
I'd rather see it become a public utility (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was a kid I hit a wall on programming. For some reason I didn't understand the concept of Basic's "Data" statements. The way it works, if you don't know Basic, is you call a READ DATA function to read data embedded in your program, normally the data would be entered at the end of your program.
I couldn't tell you why, it just didn't make any sense to my kid brain. I didn't have any teachers to teach me (computer classes were few & far between in my crappy neighborhood) and I had limited access to books at my library. So I gave up. Years later I thought about it again, looked it up, and had a good laugh at my younger self for being so damn stupid. But if I'd had the internet and Stack Overflow I'd have found 80 different explanations and a 1000 code samples and one of them would have clicked.
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It does. Capitalism means he who has the most dollars, wins.
Competition is the antithesis to capitalism, and in a truly capitalistic world, the big will gobble up the small because a monopoly is the final end. There is no finer goal in a capitalistic world than monopoly. And of course, keeping it.
That's why you have regulations, oversight and other things to try to ensure fair play. Unfortunately, you still have things like bribery and such to t
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Re: Who knew... (Score:2)
Yeah, capitalism has done so well for modern Russia and Somalia.
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The Nordic model is underpinned by a free market capitalist economic system that features high degrees of private ownership
Kind of exactly what socialism does NOT want, as Socialism [wikipedia.org] holds that:
"individuals do not live or work in isolation but live in cooperation with one another. Furthermore, everything that people produce is in some sense a social product, and everyone who contributes to the production of a good is entitled to a share in it. Society as a whole, therefore, should own or at least control property for the benefit of all its members"
It is diametrically opposed - at the very base level - to the Nordic model of private ownership. Anyone who holds up the Nordic nations as "socialist" is either woefully ignorant or explicitly lying about what Socialism really is.
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IMO, an ISP speed metric should involve more than just peak bandwidth speeds. It should involve other factors that in practice would actually impact your speeds.
For instance, if I had a gigabit connection to my ISP, but my ISP was oversubscribed with slow links to the Internet, then it doesn't help (which is why the third-party speed tests are nice).
If my peak speeds are fantastic at 3 AM, but terrible at 6 PM, then that bandwidth is not nearly as useful. (IE, wireless in every hotel I've ever stayed at, ev
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Competition really is a good thing for consumers.
Don't worry, Ajit Pai will do something to rectify that post haste.
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He'll offer a sweetheart deal to the big boys -- they won't need to share infrastructure at all, they can lock competitors out of public conduits and keep them off the public poles, all in exchange for another promise of connectivity that the big boys of the ISP will once again break.
10Gbps residential UTOPIA (Score:3, Informative)
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Just spoke with ATT about some business fiber for a client $500/mo for 10/10. The sales guy was telling me that 10/10 was faster than the 100/10 cable because it is a dedicated love. While there may be times it is slower I've not noticed issues with shared back hauls in a long time, and even if there were issues is just more marketing BS
ATT marketing is generally fairly inexplicable. It's cheaper to get access from an ATT reseller than from ATT itself in most markets, and then you wind up talking to TWO sets of support people (at least) every time you have a problem. How can that be cheaper, even for ATT? They wind up talking to both you and to the reseller, too.
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I will say that I've been on the business side of that *sort* of relationship, though not in that market specifically.
I didn't understand it being on the 'customer' end and dealing with it, but I learned that for every call that is going to have to go to the actual provider anyway, there are at least 10 calls where the customer missed something easy on their end and the reseller could take care of it without involving the real provider.
That's generally what the provider sees as value in the reseller, able t
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Good 'ol xmission. I was always jealous of the folks who had that ISP. I wanted to subscribe to Netcom too, back in the early days. Especially once they introducted the ix.netcom.com service. Yum.
Here I am (Score:2)
And here I am out in the middle of no where re-tuning my directional antenna...
14 Mbps connection? Oh my!
Community Broadband = Socialism (Score:3, Insightful)
There's nothing more American than being overcharged for crap service by a mega corp!
Nope. It's capitalism. Voluntary Trade. (Score:1)
Any resource with well-defined ownership semantics is capital; capitalism is the philosophy that as many resources as possible should be given well-defined ownership semantics—that is, ownership must be transferred voluntarily.
Choosing to allocate your capital (e.g., your time, your money, your labor, your expertise, your real estate, etc.) to "community" broadband is just capitalism.
You know what's socialism? The FCC granting half a billion dollars, again, to mega corporations to build broadband infr
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Where did you cock up that definition of capitalism and even worse, the odd conflation of command economy with socialism?
Capitalism: Labor is capital, individuals can own the labor or others and or the means of production.
Socialism: Labor is owned by the laborer, and therefore the means of production cannot be owned by a private individual third party.
This isn't fucking rocket science. The FCC coercing trade through regulation is command economics. There is NOTHING in socialism that states the means of pr
Socialism is their name for helping people (Score:1)
Socialism is what they called public power.
Socialism is what they called social security.
Socialism is what they called farm price supports.
Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance.
Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.
Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.
--Harry S. Truman Syracuse, New York, on 10 October 1952 [trumanlibrary.gov]
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You don't want community fiber? Just don't apply for a connection. Socialism averted.
I'd rather not have cops. I'm armed and can take care of myself. But I've still got to pay for their doughnut-eating asses.
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Your consent is inherited. It's all indirectly voted for.
Good luck living somewhere with no public infrastructure. No roads, no public water supply / sewer service, no national electric grid. Americans want a society period. You're wanting some sort of Utopian anarchy.
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confuses the distinction between government and society
Ideally, there should be no distinction. Government is merely how society organizes itself. Yes, I elect someone to represent me. Nobody has enough time in the day to be part of coordinating full participation of every citizen. Just the overhead from communication alone would drown any possible progress.
If you believe in capitalism, then you would know that is also anti-society when taken to its logical extremes. Therefore, maybe you're also anti-society.
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Mussolini was a lifelong Marxist, and merely translated the internationalist ideas of Marxism into nationalist ideas
Oh shut up with that half-truth ahistorical bullshit. He literally said fascism is the opposite of socialism.
Fascism [is] the complete opposite of ... Marxian Socialism
-Benito Mussolini (1932) [fordham.edu]
And if that isn't enough, allow me to remind you of Pastor Martin Neimoller's famous poem that begins:
"First they came for the socialists..." [ushmm.org]
You are just another feeble-minded chump who has swallowed actual fascist propaganda hook line and sinker.
You know who loved fascism? Died-in-the-wool capitalists like Henry [thehistoryreader.com]
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Socialism is what they called public power.
No, a boondongle - see Puerto Rico and their power grid.
Socialism is what they called social security.
No, it is a ponzi scheme, by definition - look it up.
Socialism is what they called farm price supports.
Oh, you mean how the government taxes tax dollars, pays them to farmers to not grow crops they otherwise would or could, to ensure prices on farm goods remain high for farmer and the consumer?
Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance.
That's a pretty good one.
Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.
I've never heard anyone make that claim, but I was born 12 years after Truman wrote/spoke the above.
Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.
Socialism applies to most of the above, when you consider it's actual definition of so
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Socialism is what they called social security.
No, it is a ponzi scheme, by definition - look it up.
It is only a Ponzi scheme if people are immortal. Since they aren't immortal, it's basically deferred retirement payments.
Old age and death cycle out the people at "the top." That cycling out NOT happening is what defines a Ponzi scheme.
Here's another clue: If an institution has lasted just fine for 84 years, that's a pretty good clue that it's not a Ponzi scheme.
Re: Socialism is their name for helping people (Score:2)
According to the social security trustees report, the social security trust fund will be depleted by 2035, and Medicare health insurance by 2026. We will start drawing down social security reserves in 2020 - next year.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/TRSUM... [ssa.gov]
Not a fair comparison. (Score:2)
In essence, they can focus on a community with a tight and selected set of network connections. In other words, the environment is gamed for performance.,
A large ISP has to hand a wide variety of conditions -- distant users, poor existing infrastructure, etc. Not a fair comparison.
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The operative phrase is, "working with select California communities to leverage their publicly-owned fiber networks". In essence, they can focus on a community with a tight and selected set of network connections. In other words, the environment is gamed for performance., A large ISP has to hand a wide variety of conditions -- distant users, poor existing infrastructure, etc. Not a fair comparison.
A large ISP in the US generally has no competition and thus has no real incentive for anything other than to rip people off for crappy service.
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Commercial ISPs can deny service if it's not commercially feasible. I couldn't get DSL from Verizon because I was 'too far from the central office' when a neighbor had it, was farther away (measured along their cable*) and it worked fine. Public utilities are committed to providing service for all customers within their jurisdiction.
*They tried to bullshit me about the distances, measuring from the CO 'as the crow flies'. But I worked for the power company and had a map of the underground utilities. They l
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Put another way, ISPs that don't have to invest in last-mile infrastructure can offer greater speeds for less money.
Amazing.
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Most of these independent ISPs really are running the last mile - even if the next to last mile is leased public fiber. Most of the highly rated ones are not reselling last mile belonging to a larger ISP - the larger ISPs don't have good enough infrastructure for that anyway.
Chicago (Score:1)
i am on CableOne (Score:2)
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Wow, shared infrastructure is not consistent? That's amazing - I would have never guessed that to be the case...
Sanders, Warren, and the other 21 candidates (Score:1)
I wonder when the Democrat Presidential candidates will realize we are presently suffering the greatest Bandwidth Gap in America's history - fully expect them to propose a federally-mandated minimum bandwidth speed and some sort of policy to reduce the bandwidth of the top 1%.
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There were already minimums (for the definition), which the FCC under the current administration tried to further reduce - to include slower and capped cellular. Mandating wouldn't make sense, except where de facto monopolies have been granted, but this is used to at least forbid calling something broadband when it isn't really by today's standards.
Nobody wants to reduce speeds at the top - only straw men.
If you want to get a job done well (Score:2)
...you do it yourself.
Probably not going to be popular, but... (Score:2)
I have Spectrum cable at home, and it has a consistent 400+ Mbps down, and 60 Mbps up (NOTE: I do not use their POS Arris generic wifi modem/router; I use a Netgear cable modem and a Netgear Orbi; the Arris they gave me for free could never reach 80 Mbps, swapped it for the CM800 from Netgear and never looked back). It's about $70/month - not too shabby, I think.
And at my office, I have AT&T at my business for $140/month (includes 2 phone lines as well), and it's 200 Mbps symmetric. Rock solid as wel
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It's 100% location, location, location.
I'm assuming you live near where you work, and from your own description it sounds like your locality has competition (Spectrum vs AT&T)
Competition is the only thing that makes these "services" (should be utilities) bearable.
I do agree with you on hardware. The provided gear is garbage. Never rent, refuse using theirs, only use your own, install open or dd wrt, setup a local DNS server and be free of your ISP.
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Faster bandwidth, faster typing? (Score:1)
So fastest broadband doesn't really matter to me unless I'm necessarily streaming high-resolution media (HD st
A bit of an apples to oranges comparison (Score:2)
The efforts of local broadband providers are laudable and I would like to see more of them. But their rankings also benefit from the face that most of them are operating in just one or a few communities and all of their infrastructure is modern. In contrast, the big name ISPs have some communities where they offer very high speeds, but also others where older equipment drags down the company-wide average. Verizon and Comcast are good examples. Verizon FIOS is very fast but the company also offers slow DSL.