Here in Page, Arizona, we are remote from the big cities of Arizona. There is no fiber-optic cable bringing us Internet. There is no cable coming here at all. Phones and Internet all get here via microwave, 140 miles of relay stations from Flagstaff. It is expensive to build, is fussy about the weather and you have to deal with the bureaucracy of the Navajo tribe to build it across their reservation.
Before the cable company brought Internet, most people had dial-up accounts and some had continuous connections via 2.4 or 5 GHz radio. The T-1 connections needed to service such connections cost in excess of $2,000 a month. Each.
Now, even the lowest tier cable internet connection is rated at 3-5 Mbps, though it’s impossible to get that throughput. The local (weekly) paper had an article on pages 1-2 explaining just how bad it is. (Capitalization and punctuation as in the original.)
“Nationwide averages 36.1 Megabits per second (Mbps) of bandwidth. Arizona averages 38 Mbps. Page has 1.5 Mbps, the same as Cuba, a country that’s locked in the 1970s.
“Netindex.com, a company that tracks global broadband speeds and measures and ranks internet service/bandwidth ranks Page dead last out of Arizona cities. …
“In fact most third world countries and isolated islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean have better internet than Page. Afghanistan has 2.5 Mbps, Uzbekistan has 3.9 Mbps. Iceland had 43.5 Mbps. Fiji, an island in the South Pacific has 13.3 Mbps. Nigeria has 6.0 Mbps. Ethiopia has 10.3 Mbps. Remember, Page has 1.5 Mbps.”
And my wife wonders why I resist getting a Netflix account. Heck, I can’t get YouTube videos to play without interruption.
I was on the phone with my cable company’s tech support people (300 miles away in Phoenix) a week before the article came out and they had me run a speed test. 1.4 Mbps down, 600 Kbps up. The test site (speedof.me) reported latency of 133 msec. The tech I had on the phone was appalled at the speed test results, convinced my home network was the problem. I’m supposed to be getting 3-5 Mbps.
The growth of streaming services is bringing the system to its knees. I cannot imagine a more inefficient distribution system for television. Drop cable? Not I.
1.4 Mbps is almost a T-1, which was great Internet decades ago. I can still remember the first time I hit 50 Kbps. These days I seem to have third world Internet.
Until 2010, I had my own servers (mail, DNS, ftp, http, etc) in my home for the sites I host. It was quite frustrating when the power went off, my servers kept running on a 2.2 KVA UPS, but had nothing to talk to, since the cableco’s equipment is not likewise on UPSs.
Given reliability problems with my network connection, and the cost of maintaining my own hardware and software, I moved my sites to a provider in Ohio.