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United States Network The Internet

88 Out of Top 200 US Cities Have Seen Internet Speeds Decline This Past Week 56

Posted by BeauHD from the compare-and-contrast dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The impacts of telecommuting, shelter-in-place laws and home quarantines resulting from the COVID-19 outbreak are starting to impact broadband speeds across a number of U.S. cities, a new report has found. According to broadband analysis site BroadbandNow, 88 out of the top 200 most populous U.S. cities analyzed have now experienced some form of network degradation over the past week, compared with the 10 weeks prior, as more people are going online to work from home, video chat and stream movies and TV to keep themselves entertained. In a small handful of cities over the past week, there have even been significant degradations with download speeds dropping more than 40%, compared with the 10 weeks prior. It's not necessarily the areas hit hardest by the spread of the novel coronavirus that are experiencing the worst problems.

Cities including LA, Chicago, Brooklyn and San Francisco have seen little or no disruption in download speeds, the report claims. Seattle is also holding up well. But New York City, now considered the epicenter of the virus in the U.S., saw download speeds drop by 24% last week, compared to the previous 10-week range. That said, NYC home network connections, which have a median speed of nearly 52 Mbps, are managing. The good news is that in the majority of markets, network speeds are holding up. But of the 88 out of 200 cities that saw declines, more than two dozen saw dips of either 20% below range or more, the data indicates. The three cities seeing network degradations over 40% include: Austin, TX (-44%), Winston Salem, NC (-41%), and Oxnard, CA (-42%). San Jose, CA was nearing this range, with a drop of 38%.
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88 Out of Top 200 US Cities Have Seen Internet Speeds Decline This Past Week More

88 Out of Top 200 US Cities Have Seen Internet Speeds Decline This Past Week

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  • Hey ISPs we bailed you out TWICE to prevent this. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Narcocide ( 102829 ) on Thursday March 26, 2020 @10:31PM (#59876414) Homepage

    I'm waiting for your apologies, you fucking colossal failures.

    • Damn straight! There's no excuse for the last episode of Picard to be buffering.
      • Yes, spot on. If your contract stipulates enough nominal bandwidth that it should not be buffering, then it should not be buffering.

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by whoever20 ( 6709002 )
          Not the ISP's fault if CBS can't deliver, so here ya go [rarbg.to]. The gist of the last episode is that everyone splits up into tiny little two-person factions to be against/for killing the transmitter, butterball chick and Picard are paired up (she rips out the human eyeball of dead android, optic nerve and no twisted pair this time), Romulan dude, angry black chick, LotR dude + samurai sword, and Rios are paired up, and so on to create a plot twist that falls flat on its face. You *know* what's going to happen.

          -Se
      • Actually that may be a plus.

    • They can apologize because apologies are very cheap - practically free of charge -- but do apologies substitute for lack of timely investment in infrastructure, and can it be compensated for with anything else but throttling once everyone is using the network all the time at the same time, violating all business assumptions from the "normal" times?

    • We can't expand, we have to buyback stock to appease shareholders!!

  • All of that free porn. What a time to quarantine!

    Of course, Pornhub couldn't have done this at a worse time. Think: free porn when you're stuck at home with your spouse. What a kick in the nads!

  • Only downloaded a couple TB this week (Score:3)

    by bobstreo ( 1320787 ) on Thursday March 26, 2020 @10:40PM (#59876440)

    Not including netflix streaming.

    Thank goodness for no caps.

    I haven't really seen any real differences in speeds, I run speedtests once in a while, and there haven't been any infrastructure issues I've seen (other than the cat knocking my router over)

  • Internet in SF sucks right now (Score:3)

    by crgrace ( 220738 ) on Thursday March 26, 2020 @10:41PM (#59876452)

    Regardless of what the article says, I'm working from home like millions of others and the Internet connection really sucks. I have tons of Zoom meetings and someone's voice is always getting choppy or dropping out, and we're getting a lot of "Connection Unstable" warnings. I also do a lot of CAD drawing for work and the lag is so bad at times (usually in the middle of the day) it can be hard to get work done.

    I'm also getting a lot of drop outs from Spotify where the music just stops for a little while. It has gotten so bad I'm just listening to local files and watching DVDs at night now to free up some bandwidth for everyone.

    Everyone I work with is complaining about the network performance. So, yeah, things aren't good in San Francisco.

    • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday March 26, 2020 @10:57PM (#59876478)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Part of this is ISPs tend to be asymmetric

        I haven't had an asymmetric connection for about ten years and I'm in second-world Spain.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rlwinm ( 6158720 )
      I'm on the opposite end of the country (south Florida)

      I don't listen to music or watch TV/movies but I too am working from home. A bit of PCB layout, lots of firmware, etc. I've always had terrible connectivity. Comcast says I should be getting 5Mbps but I rarely get 2Mbps down and I get a pathetic 500Kbps up. That was before everyone was quarantined. Now my ping times to various hosts are increasing a few milliseconds every day! SSH is becoming painful.

      It's just the nature of where I live. The wiring

    • I also do a lot of CAD drawing for work and the lag is so bad at times (usually in the middle of the day) it can be hard to get work done.

      Maybe you should acquire CAD software then. Just a thought.

    • But is it the internet though? Or just the last mile to each residential location. And how many of those residences are using WIFI and think that will remain reliable and drop out free all day?

      Business class internet exists for a reason.

      • On a good day I can see about 50 Wifi networks where I live. If they're all streaming Youtube at the same time then there's your problem, right there.

        Hint to anybody who's Wifi is slow: Try using a cable to connect to the router.

  • Time for a network neutrality study! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wierd_w ( 1375923 ) on Thursday March 26, 2020 @11:06PM (#59876494)

    The FCC was championing how the introduction of fast lanes vs slow lanes would not meaningfully impact the nation.

    The tried to support that with "Best of times" data.

    Now is a great time to collect "Worst of times" data. See how much hidden cost there really was to this decision on their part to allow telecoms to further ignore necessary upgrades in their systems and prioritize revenue streams from corporations, vs ensuring quality domestic service levels.

    Part of having these kinds of regulations is to assure the networks and infrastructure can endure sudden usage spikes--- LIKE THIS ONE.

    You cannot predict when those will happen, so that capacity has to be available, or you end up with these problems. Which is partially why those regulations exist(ed).

  • The speed of adds on Youtube are actually increasing. But nutflakes seems to be working best only at low band settings. The artifacts of movements on a 55 inch TV are really starting to show like they do on most of the overcompressed crap on 1080p cable tv. Moca systems are getting whacked and there is significant drop out on cable TV here in Canada. Mostly sudden time out blank screen dropped data or audio dropout.

    The cable companies may be forced to scale back to 720p to compensate during peak hours inst

  • ... it seems that the issue is DND lookup latency. Pages load noormally, once reached.

    So, extra random traffic, not just youpron.

    • ... it seems that the issue is DND lookup latency. Pages load noormally, once reached.

      So, extra random traffic, not just youpron.

      Maybe you should pick a better DNS server? What are you using now?

    • DND lookup latency

      well tell the DM to put away the cheesey poofs and play the game already!

  • Maybe I'm missing it, but this doesn't appear to be a measure of network congestion causing degradation. It's city-wide averages, so it's detecting people moving from university/work connections to home connections. Yes, our suburban, old, home network connections in Austin are lousy compared to the connections provided in our workplaces. AT&T has gigabit in the area, but never bothered to install it down my road. All of the UT students had great connections on campus, but now aren't using those. This f

    • You're spot on. I work at a local university that has a 20 gig connection to a statewide backbone. That's split among some 20,000 people so each person, on average, has a 1mbps connection. However since most aren't using the pipes at any one time, we see speeds approaching 1 gig during the day. At night however, connection speeds slow down which is attributable to Netflix traffic.

      Right now, those pipes are mostly empty and that traffic has migrated out into the surrounding area with Youtube and Netflix tr

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bws111 ( 1216812 )

        Nothing contradictory in there. The first statement says that they have not lowered the resolution, the second statement says that the quality within that resolution may be slightly worse. Resolution and quality of image are not the same thing.

  • I have 400 Mbps from Spectrum in Los Angeles. Still get 500Mbps bursty like usual. It's only $20/mo more for the full gig but I'm too spartan. I just don't need it.

    • Here in Spain I get one gig symmetric for $20 a month - fiber all the way to my home router.

      • That is probably what it should cost, especially since I am near city center and there is 50-100 terabits of fiber running past my home. My total bill is $95. But hey, it's still better than 5 years ago when the best you could get is 100mbps for the same amount of money.

  • wow, such amazing news. you mean to tell me that when we're all BUSSED on the same LAN (essentially) and we have to compete for time slices on that same medium, that the more people there are, the slower it gets?

    SAY IT ISN'T SO!

    captian obvious is, well, obvious.

    • You could always try using tokens instead.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Jahta ( 1141213 )

      wow, such amazing news. you mean to tell me that when we're all BUSSED on the same LAN (essentially) and we have to compete for time slices on that same medium, that the more people there are, the slower it gets?

      SAY IT ISN'T SO!

      Yes, it always amazes (and amuses) me how so many people can't (or won't) grasp the fact that the network is a shared resource with a finite capacity.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bws111 ( 1216812 )

      And in other shocking news, when everyone is on the road at the same time traffic slows down. And when everyone is sick at the same time we run out of hospitals beds. And when everyone is using a lot of electricity at one time there may be brownouts.

  • the stats are useful for the service providers to use in order to keep data caps in place when it is all over.

  • Meanwhile in Europe... (Score:5, Informative)

    by 4im ( 181450 ) on Friday March 27, 2020 @06:21AM (#59877174)

    ... data traffic has gone up something like 70%, and no speed degradations could be noticed.

    Check out the numbers e.g. of DE-CIX, the largest european data exchange.

  • Internet drooped 4 times yesterday....too much usage

    • Internet drooped 4 times yesterday....too much usage

      It's not too much usage. It's too little infrastructure investment and too much ISP corruption on a critical resource that lawmakers don't understand. As a result, the latter keep giving the former billions of dollars to not prepare for this very predictable situation (pandemics are unavoidable as population increases), and we get to a point where the underprovisioned infrastructure can't handle the load.

      This entirely avoidable situation is directly attributable to the corrupt collusion between Congress a

  • Let me see, shove most of America into their houses, tell alot of the adults to work from home, have all the kids playing video games and sitting on their phone, and someone is shocked when speed becomes an issue.

    Ya, and don't toot your horn country XYZ. Netflix saved your butts by degrading their service/

  • After spending decades resisting upgrading their networks, it's hardly a surprise these criminally negligent monopolies are seeing their house of cards collapse around them during an actual emergency. Time to break them up. You know, again.

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