Your broadband speed on cable will slow down as more people use it.
Cable is like a party line on telephones 50 years ago. We have basic
slow broadband, but it's as cheap or cheaper than dialup. Verizon gives
that choice, if you catch the deal on the right day. It still sucks,
just not as much as dialup.
The United States keeps getting further behind other countries that act
like broadband is important to their economies--it is. Broadband
companies are suffering from old ways of thinking. They can't/won't
solve problems that aren't particularly complicated because it will cut
into the profits that monopolies have allowed and enabled. They needed
monopolies to develop the networks, but that system was supposed to
expire--just not where I live, and not where Paula lives either.
It's the last few miles that are most expensive once the main grid is
laid out. Cable vs. FIOS? It makes sense to make the rest wireless, or
pooling resources to make the neighborhood the client instead individual
homeowners. Your entire community can have faster, cheaper broadband by
acting together and contracting to have a neighborhood network. It's
been done in Virginia near Reston. The city of Lafayette, Louisiana is
dealing with what happens when free markets end up not wanting to serve
them at all, but they're finally getting municipal broadband.
The broadband companies have lobbyists to prevent free markets from
cutting into their profits. Those same companies back things like
Consumer Choice for Television Act in Louisiana and Georgia that strips
municipal and parish governments from negotiating their own cable
franchise agreements and gives that power to the Secretary of State
who's already in the pocket of the corporations. Next thing the same
kind of phony deregulation legislation will show up in other states like
Indiana or Virginia, or nationally.
What kind of nonsense is it when companies lie to us about the high cost
of a product that is demonstrably cheaper to produce than even a year
ago! We're quibbling about 2Mb, 6Mb, 10Mb service while they're testing
1Gb service in Amsterdam and in Sweden! It's only preliminary tests, but
that's to improve service that's already faster than what we have
here--and not limited by Gb or BS.
BTW, Comcast sends threatening letters to customers who use the
"unlimited" service they contracted to receive, but doesn't tell them
how much they've used until it they exceed the "limit", whatever that means.
Does anyone know what Verizon's policy is regarding bandwidth?
Do they also restrict it? I could go back to their slower
service over the phone lines if Comcast kicks me off.
From an engineering point of view, I think there would be little
incentive to cap FIOS because it does not have the same flaws as
cable provided broadband. Of course they still could apply caps as
a means of charging extra for something that costs them almost
zero. Evil has no bounds.
Unfortunately, FIOS isn't available at my home tho it IS just 3/4
mile away! When I temporarily tried the Verizon DSL the technician
couldn't believe we didn't have it but we don't. It's CONcast for
high speed or nothing.
We had the cable vs DSL/fiber discussion here a few months ago and
our cable fan bois insisted that cable provided broadband was not
technically flawed and severely bandwidth limited. We now see that
cable can not carry the load.
My download speed last night varied from 4874 kb/sec to 8676 kb/sec.
It used to be a lot faster.
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