Is the Internet Getting Faster? - Comments Page 1

I live in a very rural area. I had no choice but dial-up for a very long time, but after huge phone bills, we decided it just wasn't worth it. We finally got DSL and I was so excited. My excitement was short lived when I found that the DSL here was only slightly better than dial-up. They promised (and charged for) 3 mpbs but we are lucky to get 1.5. While it may be better than no internet at all, it is expensive for such a slow connection.We shouldn't be punished for living in the boonies!

My first modem was a 300 baud (I still have a couple of them). Moved up from there. I still remember when I got to be a beta tester for our first cable internet company (Roadrunner) It was amazing and now it would seem very slow.

Keep up the good articles.

How viable are mesh networks for providing internet access in rural areas?

That 15 Mbps "good enough" figure is probably true right now, but I fear it may be severely stressed as 4K video content becomes the norm. Some reports have video streaming as consuming at least 60% of the US bandwidth already.

I get by with less (9-12 Mbps) at my house, though there are times when there are two 720p Netflix movies playing at the same time and my son is running his X-box while I am surfing the web and fixing PCs on the bench.

The major webspeed hit I have seen recently involved Microsoft's questionable decision to automatically download the full bandwidth-hog W10 upgrade onto one or more of my PCs at the same time. Trying to kill the process once it had started didn't really work - I just had to tell my family members there wouldn't be a reliable net connection for a couple of hours until Microsoft was happy.

What about upload speeds? I was recently uploading to Dropbox while doing some volunteer call center work, and my callers had a hard time hearing me because my upload speed was so slow. My download was 20Mbps, but upload was often barely measurable.

Hi Bob and thanks for your articles. Have to say that this one made me smile, hence the note.

14.4K, you are obviously younger than you think. Some of us remember the days of acoustic couplers and 300bps. In fact my own experience takes me back to the days way before what we now call the Internet existed as a GUI.

I used to work with the international news agencies who relied on lines that operated a teleprinter at 1/4 speed. Full speed at that time was recognised as 50 baud and so these 1/4 speed lines produced characters at an approximate rate of 1 1/2 per second.

Hot News from Vietnam used to arrive on these lines proceeded by several bell characters which then had everyone gather around to read the news. The news then proceeded to arrive at a snail's pace, for example, this note of mine would have taken around 7 minutes to print.

Today's Internet users likely have no idea what they've missed!

EDITOR'S NOTE: For the record, I did use a Teletype Model 30 in high school, with a 300 bps acoustic coupler. :-)

You stress that spelling, punctuation, grammar etc are important. I agree. So sad, therefore, to see you lapse into the common error of saying in para 5 of your article: "so for you and I......" instead of "you and me". This is most unusual for you.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Thanks, fixed!

Hi,

I live near Lisbon, Portugal. I find quite surprising your speed 50 Mbps considering that you live in the USA. My contract is 100 Mbps and the average speed at home is : 87 Mbps using powerline
99 Mbps using direct cable connection and 55Mbps - 90 Mbps using Wi-Fi trough Apple Airport. The source for the mesures is : speedtest.net
Thanks

I'm lucky to live in an area which now has fiber and promises a 1 gigabit down and 100 megabit up.
The reality is, when using a wireless router, I do get about 300 megabit down and almost 100 up, which is more than enough for anything I might be doing.

If I use an Ethernet line, I do get 900 megabits down.

This will probably come be useful in 5 years but now, the only advantage is downloading a large file which takes seconds instead of minutes.

Btw, the cost is 40$/month plus taxes

Thank you very much for this article.

Please accept my best wishes for a happy and successful New Year 2016.

Oh, I agree with all that is mentioned, in this article! When I first started using the Internet, I was an AOL member and I can't tell you how many times, I was knocked off! I had a 14.4K modem, then a 28.8K and I thought I had died and went to heaven, when I got my 56K modem!!!

Back in the late 90's, I read about DSL. I live in Metro Atlanta and it was being tested in Birmingham, AL. I was so excited and couldn't wait until I got DSL. In March 2000 I got my DSL component. It was a DSL card that was installed in my computer. It was NOT a router, that came later. I got 1.5 mpbs and thought I had the fastest download speed, on the planet.

Now, I have a DSL Router, that I can get 25 Mbps download time. I get pretty close to that, depending on where I am connecting to. In Atlanta I get about 23 to 24 Mbps, but when I connect to Los Angeles or Seattle I only get about 10 to 13 Mbps. Speed is still controlled by the trunks across the USA. When the trunks are busy, everyone's speed goes down.

Yes, the phone companies are improving the infrastructure, but it still takes a lot of time, to upgrade to fiber-optic. Fiber-optic has it's own problems, when the fibers in the bundle start to break and they can, your speed will go down, as well.

I worked with fiber-optic endoscopes and those fibers are very delicate. For the scopes, you started to see black spots, meaning a dead fiber. It would be no different than "dead" fibers in the fiber-optic bundle for high speed Internet. The other fibers would have to work harder and eventually, they would die as well.

Internet fiber-optic bundles are huge, but, the basics are still the same, once a dead fiber, more will come. It similar to bad sectors on a Hard Drive. Once they crop up, the Hard Drive will eventually die.

It's ironic that we've pushed to get a faster Internet, and then Web pages have added videos, ads, pop-ups, and other stuff, which make the pages seem to load about as quickly (slowly?) as when we had dial-up.

I agree with you about our tax money. We need to be increasing the rural access to high speed internet. We, as a country, need to find a way to make broadband more affordable for both rural and the poor in our urban areas. Otherwise, other countries will continue to surpass us in this area, and that will not bode well 20 years from now.

My peeve is the mysterious pause with the stalled "busy" circle, either circling or frozen, that I often experience when surfing the web. I wonder what is causing this. When I test the internet connection speed, I invariably see that I have the speed I am paying Cablevision for (25 Mbps). Anyone have ideas?

Bob, I enjoyed this article very much. I remember when I worked for at&t & setting up spare circuits around the world for our "Christmas Net". It was a network of Teletype model 28 that we used to send Christmas pictures using paper tape. Some of those pictures took hours and the paper tape spools measured 10 inches in diameter on the big pictures. We had to limit the speed to 50 baud due to speed of print on those 5-level machines. I have been following your emails since Tours days. Keep up the good work!

You raise some interesting facts, most of which are worth considering. Yes, infrastructure download/upload speed doesn't make a lot of difference when most web servers won't serve content faster than 15 Mbps.
Since the World Wide Web began, I've found that download times for web pages hasn't changed much. The size of web pages content has more than kept pace with download speed improvements, so webpages take about the same time to download. For video streaming or big datasets, speed counts.
What is really awful is the lack of competition among ISP services in much of the USA. I live in a metro area in NJ, with effectively just one provider (Comcast), who charges monopolistic prices. The US could do a lot better in providing effective download speeds but first we'll have to bust the monopolies. Real competition is a great thing.

Nice article, but like and earlier poster I live in the boonies with Century Link DSL that is nominally 1.5Mbps and there are times when I get that or close to it, but I also get periods of time when it steadily drops to virtually zero every single day, usually after 7:30 pm. I can still watch Netflix at 0.5Mbps, but any lower and I have to wait for buffering. Below 0.3Mbps (and yes it does go below that daily) and I have to go back to Dishnet TV. Since I do watch Netflix and Amazon Prime wireless telephone or satellite internet is pretty much out of the question.

No idea Bob I have uploaded and download at 144.5 mbps is fdast enough for me

Very interesting article. About copper phone lines on the way out, at the current electronics convention, there is a company with equipment that will transmit 750 Mbs on copper phone wire.

I live in a town of 200000 people which is on the edge of one of Americas largest metropolitan areas. Internet access, here, is pretty good for most folks, but the area that I live in has NO CABLE (we also have only one televison channel that we can receive because of a mountain between us and the TV transmitters 50 miles away- a PBS station), and our telephone copper wires limit us to 768 Kbps mas DSL. So in our small area of this very large town, the approximate 500 residents have contracted out to a private company to get us internet access. They have done it using 3 radio transmitters within the community, transmitting to antennas on our roofs and then sent to a modem in our homes. They claim we get 3 Mbps. Of course, that is not the case as we actually share the radio transmissions, so average throughput is much less. Previously, I lived in an area served by Charter Communications. I used to get their internet at about 40 Mbps and was very happy. I am not with the radio transmitted internet. The only other alternative is Satellite internet which is not only pricey, it limits bandwidth. I use 30 - 50 GB bandwidth a month which is way over their limit. Satellite is not an option. We do use Satellite Television, as that is our only option.