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This week saw the debut of broadband “nutrition labels” to help you understand what you’re paying for when you sign up for a high-speed internet plan. These are posted in stores and online at companies like his T-Mobile and Comcast, and wired or wireless providers with more than 100,000 customers are required to post them.
This got me thinking about the current state of high-speed internet in North America. Specifically, some of the biggest problems remain the same as they were years ago.
There are two real problems. It’s lack of availability and overcrowding. I’m sure industry experts give them fancy names, but at the end of the day, many people have limited or no access to high-speed internet due to these issues.
In the countryside, there is not enough to move around. Providing a service to a region costs a lot of money, and service providers are reluctant to make it happen without enough customers to pay for the service (and make a huge profit). You have to remember that companies are in it to make money, not to provide a service.
The back side is a place with too many people. A fast and reliable service has a user limit beyond which quality begins to degrade. Usually it just makes him inconvenient at certain times of the day or on certain days, but internet providers are like airlines, they sell, sell, sell, regardless of their actual capacity. .
Nutrition labels alone will not solve this problem. You probably can’t fix this. But that doesn’t stop us from demanding more from the companies that send us big bills every month.
The countryside is still terrible
In rural North America, there are two types of Internet service. Poor internet service and no internet service at all. In 2024, with the current state of the internet, it is nearly impossible to take advantage of the technological age and the latest new mobile phones.
It’s getting better, but just barely. For example, consider where I live. I live in one of those weird areas where the countryside isn’t really countryside. I live in the mountains 69 miles from Washington, DC. It’s a great place to live, but it used to be the place where the internet died.
A few years ago, the word “fast” didn’t exist. In 2012, the Obama administration launched an effort to make high-speed internet access viable along all federal highways. It has inched away from the freeway, and now he has 5G wireless and fiber internet at the same address he had to pay Comcast to run cable in 2007. .
Not everyone is so lucky, especially those located far from major cities. There are some areas where there is no internet service of any kind, but these are few and far between. Looking for fast coverage reveals this problem.
Companies like Starlink improve the situation, but Starlink is expensive and requires a lot of maintenance. Like DirecTV, it doesn’t just work.
I understand the problem – there aren’t enough people to justify it. But this is not what his high-speed wireless will look like in 2024.
Too many people can be just as bad
We’ve all heard stories about poor connectivity at places like Google I/O or New York Giants football games. When he crams so many people into one place at once, it’s very difficult to serve everyone.
The point is, it doesn’t take a big tech conference or a football game for service to go bad. All he needs is one user who exceeds the total capacity.
I’ll use another anecdotal example here. I have some friends who live in Washington, DC, and their service is super slow during weekday lunchtimes and throughout the day on Saturdays and Sundays. This happens because at lunchtime everyone checks their phones, and on the weekends another million people come to DC for sightseeing.
AT&T provided the infrastructure based on the people actually living there. Things get worse when that number quadruples. This can be solved with more infrastructure, as the use of portable cell towers may improve during busy times such as ball game tournaments or the D.C. Cherry Blossom Festival.
Nutrition labels are good at telling us how the services we’re paying for work. However, the only way to solve something is to throw money at the problem.
You’ve probably never seen these problems. I admit that these are special cases. However, these are the same non-terminal incidents that have been impacting the same users for 10 years. These issues must be addressed before moving to 6G. Otherwise, North America will fall further behind when it comes to high-speed connectivity.
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