It's a good time to be online

What's your internet speed? I don't know about you but personally mine's looking pretty decent these days. I am astounded by the speed that I can get through a wire. Of course. it's all dependent on the servers I use; I can't pull anything down faster than they can serve it up. That doesn't make me any less impressed when I see something like this:



Seriously, it wasn't that long ago that I had problems getting that level of speed from across the room! It's not just me, either: Lightreading says that most ISPs actually do a great job of providing service at or above the level that they promise. Check out this chart from them:



If you look at this chart, only poor DSL customers have consistent issues reaching their advertised speed. At this point you have to figure that the only people who still have DSL are people who do not rely much on home internet or who cannot get faster options at their homes.

On the other hand, it looks like satellite internet shines, delivering more than 50% higher speeds than rated. Of course the other side of that is that satellite internet usually has data caps that discourage heavy users, which may help them maintain high quality of service.

No wonder the broadband market is going nuts. This article from Broadcasting&Cable highlights the positive reception given to this information. You can trust it, too, as the FCC was the original source. They tend to be impartial when it comes to this sort of thing.

All that said, there's still a lot of work to do. Home broadband speeds will have to exceed 100Mbps to get to the point where internet-based streaming can legitimately compete with traditional pay-TV services, and the US is still behind other countries in this area. Overall, though, the news is good, and when I think about it, adjusted for inflation, I'm paying about the same now for 56 megabit that I paid in the 1990s for 56 kilobit service. 1,000 times faster, no more dollars!