Global Broadband Speeds Dropped At the End of 2011 118
darthcamaro writes "A strange thing happened at the end of 2011. For the first time in years, global broadband adoption and speeds dropped. According to Akamai, broadband adoption declined by 4.6 percent and average speeds declined by 14 percent. In a somewhat strange twist, New Jersey now also dominates the top 5 list of fastest broadband cities in the U.S, though Boston is the fastest overall at 8.4 Mbps."
Given the reversion to the Compuserve Model... (Score:5, Insightful)
...I'm not surprised.
Instead of providing superior service (at various levels) on a flat-rate connection, you get a degraded connection(at any level) that is metered.
People are VPN'ing into the office (Score:5, Insightful)
Jersey City is right near NYC. wouldn't surprise me if the reason everyone wants broadband is so they can VPN into the office instead of taking the train to work
It doesn't say New Jersey is a city, dummies (Score:4, Insightful)
It says New Jersey "dominates" the list. One entry can't dominate a list, so obviously they are saying that the list is dominated by cities IN New Jersey. If you RTFA you'll see that 3 of the top 5 cities in the US are all in NJ. It's always such a surprise when people are snarky and dumb on the interwebs.
Re:City, State, whatever (Score:5, Insightful)
People seriously need to go back to school and get some reading comprehension.
"New Jersey now also dominates the top 5 list of fastest broadband cities in the U.S"
The phrase "New Jersey dominates the list" means that the majority of cities on that list are in New Jersey.
Oh look (FTA): The fastest city in the US is Boston at 8.4 Mbps; fractionally ahead of North Bergen, NJ for average connection speed. Jersey City, NJ came in third at 8.3 Mbps, Monterey Park, CA fourth at 8.2 Mbps and Clifton, NJ fifth at 8.0 Mbps
3/5 cities on that list are in NJ. Hence, NJ dominates the list.
I'm not surprised... (Score:2, Insightful)
Take where I live for instance:
The cable company hasn't done much in 4-5 years for increasing bandwidth. However they did put in metering.
The telco, similar. DSL speeds have remained static, while there are now bandwidth charges.
Phones? Yes, that 4G phone might be cool, but it doesn't take much to burn through its bandwidth. Paying half a C-note to transfer a DVD? Bullshit.
It is no wonder why people are seeing this. There is zero incentive to add infrastructure, other than real time monitoring with indefinite log retention. So, the only things added for the consumer are fees.
Wake me up when I can actually pay less than $400 a month for a smartphone and Internet connection combined in a TX metropolitian area, and I am nowhere near a heavy user (no torrenting.)
There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Market (Score:3, Insightful)
"Freedom" for whom, that's the question. We, the people, who need more network capacity, and could easily get it for pennies if we paid for it with taxes, like our roads, are now paying enormously more for shrinking, monitored, censored communications. And it's going to get worse.
Image what our roads would be like if we had built them with a "free market" model. Constricted, gated, metered, and ten times more expensive. And most of us would walk.