[rsynnott]

So, on the high end, the US is fine, and thus is does fairly well on mean speeds (top 10 on some metrics). However, if your internet in the US is bad, it's often really, _really_ bad. In areas without competition, providers still sometimes use ADSL1! (Max 8 down, <1 up, if you're lucky).

In general, the tendency in most European countries has been to force wholesaling and/or LLU, and set minimum standards for both; this has generally at least wiped out ADSL1. The FCC is somewhat lighter touch.

[jquery]

How is American internet when taking into account its rural-bias and sheer size? My understanding is it's reasonably good, all things considered (not that it couldn't be improved, especially in dense metros). I remember seeing an apples-to-apples comparison chart a while ago, but I can't find it. I understand we're 9th in the world on average in 2017[1], which I believe is not a bad place to be considering our density. For comparison, the highly dense city-state of Singapore has a non-mobile average broadband rate about double ours. Our speed also rose 40% that year so we may have moved up the rankings.

[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevinmurnane/2017/08/14/speedte...

[14]

Side not as a Canadian...you can bet the farm the the second satellite internet becomes mainstream, Bell Telus and Rogers will be shitting them selves because they provide the shittiest service for the worst price you can imagine and just like BCTel had us by the balls at one point the second competition came in they were done for and people left in droves. I really hope it pushes these crappy business to offer better service for the price.

[Sanzig]

We're veering off-topic, but I was very pleased to see that the CRTC effectively told the incumbents to shove it with last month's telecom order setting wholesale access rates:

https://crtc.gc.ca/eng/archive/2019/2019-288.htm

Background - incumbent ISPs in Canada are required to sell last-mile access to third-party ISPs. Third parties pay a speed-dependent per-user access fee as well as an aggregated per-Mbit capacity fee which defines the size of the pipe at the carrier hotel where they interface with the incumbent network.

The incumbents were asked to provide rates they thought would be fair for wholesale access, as well as financial justification that those fees were reasonable. Their responses contained a range of creative accounting features and omissions. In response, the CRTC eviscerated the incumbents in their decision and cut the capacity fees almost in half, and set the access fees to a flat rate regardless of connection speed. They also made the new rates retroactive to 2016.

If the order stands (the incumbents are doubtless going to challenge it), we should be seeing some significantly cheaper internet options from the third-party ISPs in the near future.

[merb]

well is ADSL1 that bad? in most cases (non video on demand) bandwidth is never the problem. no matter how good your bandwidth is as soon as the latency is bad, it won't get better.

[oarsinsync]

There are times when my mobile speeds degrade to around 1-2Mbps (typical ADSL1 sync speeds), with variable latency depending on how much throughput is being used (typical ADSL1 experience). Webpages (being the insanely bloated things that they are today) stop loading at that point, and I have to wait for my phone to sync to a different tower. This often happens during my commute when I hit congested towers. It's annoying that the experience on a 56k dialup connection in 1999 was better than it is on a 4G mobile phone in 2019.

[rsynnott]

Yes, ADSL1 is that bad. 8Mbit/sec is the best case, but closer to 1 or 2 is common depending on distance from exchange. About a 30ms latency penalty, IIRC.

[tompccs]

Some of the problems are unique to America - for instance, states each have their own regulations, as well as federal ones, which makes nationwide roll-out far costlier. You also have way more geographic concentration of homes in Europe, which makes the ROI for roll-out over a particular area way better.

UK's utilities are generally quite good (despite grumbling), which I think is because regulators focus on creating frictionless marketplaces - ie, easy to switch, providers can't obfuscate costs, proliferation of comission-based switching services.

[rsynnott]

I don't think the "US is big" argument really works when it comes to forcing telcos to get rid of their 20th century DSLAMs. Like, obviously ideally they'd be upgrading to something semi-modern, but even swapping out the last of the ADSL1 for ADSL2+, like it was 2006, would be an improvement.