Broadband speed

I just found out over the weekend that the broadband (cable) I have is somewhat slow compared to a lot of other countries broadband speed.

For ie. in England they have speeds up to 2gbps (gigs), and most Asian countries speeds are over 100mbps. Here in US (Indiana) my cable speed is only between 4-8mbps. What gives? Anyone Know why so slow? I asked ISP and all they said is its just all we offer. I find that to be a cop out answer. So any suggestions would be welcomed. Thanks in advance.

 

justwanttoknow--I get about 800KBytes per second (roughly 6Mbits per second) download speeds from Comcast Cable where I live--the only speed they offer to home users. That is about double what it was a few months ago.
But you are very right that other countries have much faster connection speeds. See the first sentence here
http://news.com.com/South+Korea+leads+the+way/2009-1034_3-5261393.html?tag=st.ref.goo

 

Christer--Interesting to learn that telephone dialup download speeds also are much faster in other countries.
In the US, telephone dialup download speeds are limited to 53Kbits per second by law, but even the theoretical maximum is only 56Kbits per second.

 

In DC, Comcast offers 8200kb/s down and 708kb/s up to my home for a premium fee. Having switched from Verizon DSL (ugh!), I would now prefer FiOS. But Verizon probably will get around to installing domestic fiber optics services in the nation's capital when pigs learn to fly.

Until then, wireless home video streaming won't work very well. Verizon is missing a big bet because with this kind of investment, they could effectively compete against cable and sat as a content provider.

 

One other thing that can affect cable speeds (From what I was told anyway) is that everybody using that type of service is really on a large LAN, and when people hit the web in prime time it causes download speeds to drop off.

 

I was going to stay out of this but I changed my mind.

I have to agree with James Martin. I believe he was told the truth.

I am on Cable Internet.

I will use this site right here as an example. Some days it seems to take forever to get it on screen. Other times ( most ) it seems to be on screen before I even get my finger off of the mouse button. I find it to also vary greatly during the day.

I have also found that the speed may vary with different sites. Sometimes I can get here with no problem but I can't get to lets say MSN. Somedays it is the other way around.

One thing that I have done to check is try another machines. 99.5% of the time it behaves the same way at the same time.

We play Golf online with a Friend in Canada Tuesday evenings. We direct connect using his IP address. This last week it took at least 3 trys and 10 minutes to get connected. Usually we are connected and playing within a couple of minutes. We usually complete 18 holes in around 2 hours. This week it took us 2.5 hours.

BUT !!. I got an e-mail from him the next day saying that he found that he had left another online program running.

Speaking of things running in the background. Over a perion of time I have found this to be the BIGGEST cause of slowdowns. Both machine and online wise.

If I find something quite large that I want to download I usually try to do it in the AM. Somedays if I wait till the PM forget it.

Overall I do not think that the online highway is much different than the automoblie highway. It depends a lot on now many users ( vehicles ) and how many connections ( traffic lights ) we need to go through to get where we want to.

Last but certainly not least. I have learned that when I hit the submit button here, DO NOT get in a big hurry. It may go Quick;y or it may take a minute or two.

BillyBob

 

John Dvorak's take on US Broadband:

Hijacking the Internet http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1936571,00.asp

Regards - Charles

 

Here in England the average speeds on offer are between 512kps and at the top end 8-10mbps with an average of 2mbps being considered the high speed average dont know of anybody offering 100mbps