The First Honest Cable Company

[Cagey]

This is too funny, but sadly, too true. (May be NSFW)

 

[anorakDan]

Nice. If only real advertising had to be that truthful.

 

[Dan025]

hah. yeah america sucks at service. but i cant varify the 200 times slower than korea thing. my japanese internet wasnt all that great. but i was in the northern part of the country several years ago....

this is what wikipedia says about korean internet. and it was an auto complete search result o ngoogle so i guess it's a big search topic... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_South_Korea

this wikipedia article claim 2mbps which is about the upload on my hspa+ (faux-g) cell phone. i get much more if i'm within a stones throw of the tower but generally it's no better than my hspa connection (3g+ or 3.5g in canada) on my last phone so that's not that great. at home my cable speeds are up to 12mbps...

but they might be getting information from the study referenced in this wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_the_United_States which claims north americas average is ~5mbps (better by far than what's listed above for south korea) but south korea is claimed here to have ~17mbps..... there is something wrong with one study or the other. they were both carried out in the same year. i'm guessing one was more influenced by burst speeds than the other.

 

[Cagey]

Reporters, pundits, comedians, politicians, etc. all cherry-pick data to make their points. Last place I was at I had 16Mbs service, and it could have gone higher if I wanted to pay for it. Here, I've got 2Mbs service, but the same thing is true - more speed is available for a price. Some areas don't have broadband at all, and some have ridiculously high speeds. So, you have to take what you hear with a grain of salt.

What's most miserable is the final point made in the skit above - 99% of the areas served only have one provider, and they're locked in by legal agreements. That can get sticky, depending how corrupt a local government is. For instance, Detroit didn't have cable at all until about 20 years after everybody else because nobody was willing to come up with a bribe the mayor thought was in line with the potential market (which was not as large as he imagined by any stretch of the imagination). So, no competition means you get crummy service at whatever price point they care to set.

 

[bagman67]

Detroit has corrupt politicians?  Wonders never cease.

 

[Cagey]

Yeah, after the '67 riots the city started emptying out fast, and by '74 they were able to elect Coleman Young mayor. Things really went to hell at that point, and only got worse from there. What was once a vibrant city of 2 million working people with all that implies now has less than 700K, and I suspect they only came up with that number by counting all the rats and pigeons along with the welfare recipients. You'd be better off in Pyongyang or Baghdad.

 

[Dan025]

Reporters, pundits, comedians, politicians, etc. all cherry-pick data to make their points. Last place I was at I had 16Mbs service, and it could have gone higher if I wanted to pay for it. Here, I've got 2Mbs service, but the same thing is true - more speed is available for a price. Some areas don't have broadband at all, and some have ridiculously high speeds. So, you have to take what you hear with a grain of salt.

What's most miserable is the final point made in the skit above - 99% of the areas served only have one provider, and they're locked in by legal agreements. That can get sticky, depending how corrupt a local government is. For instance, Detroit didn't have cable at all until about 20 years after everybody else because nobody was willing to come up with a bribe the mayor thought was in line with the potential market (which was not as large as he imagined by any stretch of the imagination). So, no competition means you get crummy service at whatever price point they care to set.

we have a law in place that is supposed to help protect the local phone company from national competition so they have a local monopoly in a sense. i guess at a county level it's not a monopoly.... or this agreement is totally illegal and the big boys dont want to waste their breath fighting it. well it only protects phone lines, not internet. so time warner our cable company ended up with a monopoly on internet and cable. the phone company does provide dsl but not tv. the cable company trick people into thinking they are getting a big discounted price on the bundle so odly enough time warner can sell you land line service because it's really all bits that travel over the internet coming through the cable so it's a loophole that the cable company can sell you land line service and verizon can not! the funny thing is dead center of the county there is one city that decided not to go along with the agreements, or already had BELL or some other national phone in place at that time so today they get verizon fios, pay less, get phone cable and internet like me but at 3 times the download speed and symetrical upload/download so it's about 15 time the upload speed and at least have a choice (kinda an obvious one if they are informed).

my brother is a sysadmin for cable vision now. he said he can't believe how badly engineered the cable system is. but he says things should get better in about 5 years. they have replaced a lot of the back end with fiber but leave the coaxial in neghborhoods because it works. the multiplexers they use were cheaper than replacing the copper they already bought years ago with fiber but the network is not very robust. it is over extended and they count on people usung the internet sparingly to make it all work out. that's the deal with all the usage caps being proposed, the % users that abuse the internet is extremely low and that would suggest usage caps are all but useless, but there isn't enough headroom in the system so even a few users saturating their connection can bottleneck the whole system. but there is a plan atleast with cable vision to try to catch up to verizon though even verizon will be playing catchup if google gets widespread deployment of google fiber. the real problem is they listen to the bean counters even though the engineers know it's just bad practice. they fall behind demand and don't care because most people don't have an actual choice and when people do and switch it only frees up their own network so they don't have to invest in upgrades in that city...

the thing that sucks is we don't have any choices except for a few cities but the public isn't informed enough to know the real world differences.

 

[mullyman]

Well, I can speak for Japan. I don't know DanO's situation when he was here other than it sounds like he was in a rural area.

I live in Shizuoka, actually about 20km out of Shizuoka city. It's not Mayberry by any stretch but it's not Tokyo either. Regardless, I have what they call "Hikari Fiber". The advertisement claims 200mbps. In actuality, at home, I see downloads averaging around 70-75 and uploads in the 60's. We regularly stream movies with zero lag. I've been with the same cable provider since 1996, when they were still dial-up, and have NEVER had any outages. Only time the net is down is when they do a scheduled maintenance, which they mail me about 2 weeks prior AND they do their maintenance between 1:00 - 6:00am so you really aren't inconvenienced. Also, those maintenance days are usually a Tuesday or Wednesday.

I also have a wifi router in my house for our iPhones, iPads, and notebooks. Nothing to complain about thus far.

I went to Seoul last Xmas but wasn't overly impressed, especially since they block a lot of stuff.
MULLY

 

[Dan025]

mully that's some fast internet.. though verizon has internet that is faster... for a price!.. but generally speaking that's a lot faster than the verizon base fiber package by several times. i believe they have a package that's 300mbps available to residential installations but nobody does that. the standard 35mbps is more than most people will use. and it is true that cable companies had every opritunity to do what verizon did but to same a surprisingly small amount of money they decided to invest in expensive hardware to cobble things together rather than run more fiber and give the network a ton more headroom.

 

[Cagey]

Thing is, you need the feeds to meet the speeds, which largely don't exist. When I had 16Mbs, I generally didn't get downloads much faster than I do now at 2Mbs because the servers won't feed you that fast. Some companies (the biggies like MS, HP, Oracle, etc.) will feed you just about as fast as you can take it, but for the most part you won't see that kind of performance. I rarely saw feeds much higher than 1Mbs from anywhere. Felt good to run the speed tests available from [whoever] and see you had a pretty fat pipe, but in general the actual speeds I saw things were much slower. Doesn't matter that I have a fat pipe if the sources aren't much more than drippy faucets.

 

[Jumble Jumble]

I've got a 100mbps connection at home and the measured speed is usually >95. It's fibre to just outside the house.

For the most part, these days, servers can feed me data at that speed. It's rare I see it coming down at less than 50. Seems to have been a huge increase in bandwidth pretty much everywhere in the last few years.

 

[mullyman]

I just took the speed test here at work. My computer is my personal Macbook Pro.
MULLY

 

[Re-Pete]

I just took the speed test here at work. My computer is my personal Macbook Pro.
MULLY

I'm envious....  :sad1:

My Speed test result from regional Australia.  :help:

http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/2829054905