Even our readers can’t agree on whether net neutrality is a good or a bad thing, so we thought we’d stoke the fire with a nice side-by-side comparison of sample broadband options for consumers in two “free markets,” the US and the UK. Art Brodsky of the Huffington Post (oops, we probably already lost half of you) writes that a British man he met while traveling showed him a spreadsheet he’d put together that compared 59 different broadband providers, so he’d know which one to do business with.
This fairytale-like story of consumer choice prompted Brodsky to look for comparison charts of services. What he found—a mag’s list of 25 common UK broadband companies versus what we presume to be his own local set of offerings—can’t be used for true side-by-side measurement, but it’s still a striking illustration of the stunted state of “innovation” and competition in the US market.
Click the links for more details on pricing and plan details, if you dare.
| US Broadband Companies (offerings available in Montgomery County, Maryland, from HuffingtonPost.com) |
25 UK Broadband Companies (most of which are available nationwide; from Which? magazine, August 2007) |
| Verizon Comcast |
AOL Be BT Bulldog Demon Eclipse Freedom2Surf Global Karoo Internet Madasafish MetroNet Nildram Orange (formerly Wanadoo) Pipex PlusNet Sky Supanet TalkTalk Tesco Telecoms Tiscali Toucan UK Online Utility Warehouse Virgin Media (cable/DSL) Waitrose Zen Internet |
“Our Internet Policy Is A Disgrace: Here’s The Proof” [HuffingtonPost via Yahoo! News]
(Photo: Getty)
More From Consumerist
-
Georgia Law Would Ban Public Broadband Service If Just One Person Has So-So Internet Access
-
Which ISPs Are Providing The Speeds They Advertise?
-
Comcast VP Says U.S. Isn’t Falling Behind Rest Of World In Broadband, Probably Can’t Read Graphs
-
Cable Companies Should Be Worrying About Kids Who Have No Plans For Ever Getting Cable
-
New Report Says “Cash Cow” Data Caps Are About Pleasing Investors, Not Relieving Congestion
Well, for a comparison, dial-up is considered something to never consider. For this day and age, with so many websites using flash and pictures, dialup is unacceptable. Sure you can disable these, but that is just dull.
I have between cable and dsl providers, 3 official choices, in one of the choices oddly enough I can choose 3 within those, so in total 5 ISP providers. Verizon and Knology are too slow, so is Earthlink, only choice left is Roadrunner. I’ve had good service for years, more especially so since Brighthouse took over from Time Warner.
I don’t want the ISPs to go and make their own decision about whether to charge you for “special” things, or whether or not to cap the amount you transfer per month. What good are fast speeds if there is only so much I can send?
I’d like to know that I will never need to worry about going over a certain amount a month or be charged, or pay an outrageous amount for unlimited. People pay enough as it is for sub-par services these days, now companies expect them to pay more for what they already get or more to do some small simple things.
If you want to do something, do what Roadrunner has done. They have a Lite service, a Base service, then two bandwidth upgrades for additional cost. That way the ones who need it can get it, the ones who don’t, well don’t. There is no worry about using up a certain amount of GB a month, that is how I would like it to stay.
I remember the trouble I had trying to get DSL through a company that used Covad as a CLEC. Before that I had DSL through a company that used Rhythms. The phone company at the time, Ameritech, said something like I was too far from the CO or some other BS. So I gave them a call and they then tried to sell me DSL through them. I never did get an explanation on why Covad couldn’t sell me DSL, but they could. At least I can say I have been happy with Bright House Cable ever since.
I got a choice of IO by Cablevision or FIOS by Verizon on Long Island. Decent, but FIOS is still new and not totally reliable yet, not to mention Verizon is one sneaky SOB
You can usually tell a pattern for US services:
One DSL (usually whoever put in the phone lines originally, years ago), one cable (same).
No other ISPs can come about since you’d have to put more wiring to each house, so it’s a steep cost of entry.
However, in other countres, the government usually owns the lines (or requires the owner of them to share with other companies), so other ISPs can flourish based simply on service level, price, etc, rather than ownership of a line.
Keep in mind, I am not an economics expert, but thinking over it for the past hour, this seems to make a lot of sense. For example, here, we have only Cox (cable) and Sprint… er, Embarq (DSL/phone).
That’s really inaccurate.
Living near Montgomery County, I can tell you that there are more than 2 broadband providers:
Comcast
Verizon
RCN
Speakeasy
Megapath
Atlantech
Earthlink
there might be others…
Good luck running long-term file transfers on the majority of those “choices” – most “unlimited” traffic plans are kind of like the “lifetime” warranties you get on some electronics that are only for 2-3 years.
Just remember folks, “Net Neutrality” isn’t neutral at all. Your off brand ISP would end up having to pay “tolls” to be able to use AT&T, SBC, COX, etc’s backbones to the internet.
@RandomITGuy:
You’re just not up on this new corporate speak yet. I used to struggle with this myself from time to time.
Unlimited plans are not limited until you reach the limit. Up to that possible point where limits would need to be imposed, there are no limits, hence the term “unlimited.”
Just like lifetime warranties guarantee that a product will work until it breaks. Therefore, it is guaranteed for the “life” of the product.
I hope that helps.
How about we compare size-wise the infrastructure necessary?
UK (slightely small then Oregon) < US
… it’s a little bit a stretch of land we need to cover
Fallacious comparison, anyone? Comparing the broadband ISP options in one US *COUNTY* to the ISP options of the ENTIRE UK is ridiculous and unfair. The comparison would be just as lopsided if the options and service in Montogomery County, MD were compared to every broadband ISP in the entire US.
What a terrible premise.
P.S. My father lives in Montgomery County, MD and uses AOL broadband (I know, I know). Why was that not included on the list?
Yeah, I have to agree with both of the above: this post is bullshit.
While I’m a huge proponent of net neutrality, and have no love for any service providers in the U.S., you’re comparing apples and oranges. As in:
U.K.:
- Area: 94,526 sq mi
- Density: 637 /sq mi
- Population: 60,776,238
– Population in London: 7,512,400 (12.4%)
U.S.:
- Area: 3,718,695 sq mi
- Density: 80 /sq mi
- Population: 302,401,000
– Population in NYC: 8,214,426 (.027%)
The U.K. has 20% of the population of the United States, consolidated in an area .025% the size of the U.S.. Their population density is 8x higher than ours.
Point being: any given internet company can lay down a network with a much smaller investment and have a much higher yield in a smaller amount of time.
Yes, the U.S. needs much more competition. And the telcos and everyone else have screwed us up the poop-chute on the deal they made with the gov’t to get us real broadband by, like three years ago. But there’s no comparison to the U.K. — the situations are simply not the same.
So they have a short and WAY incomplete list of the options available in that one county, comparted to a list of “ALL” the providers in the UK. Yeah, that’s good journalism.
@PandemicSoul: You’re right on the nose about apples and oranges.
It’s not apples and oranges. Reread the part where is says, most of which are available nationwide. That is, comparing apples to apples, the 30-odd broadband vendors would be available in every town, including the above example.
If the US took away the monopoly power of the telecoms and the cable companies – forced them to be common carriers, as long distance works – we, and Montgomery, AL would have the same loooong list of broadband suppliers.
@PandemicSoul: don’t you mean 2.7% vs. 0.027%?
@ShadowFalls: “If you want to do something, do what Roadrunner has done. They have a Lite service, a Base service, then two bandwidth upgrades for additional cost. That way the ones who need it can get it, the ones who don’t, well don’t. There is no worry about using up a certain amount of GB a month, that is how I would like it to stay.”
No, no, no! The WHOLE IDEA of net neutrality is that EVERYONE gets the ONE service! No one can pay more to get more! Everyone gets the same and pays the same. Heck, they may even throw in that bandwidth limit – it wouldn’t be very neutral if YOU got to get 50gb a month but since my mom only surfs the internet for e-mail, she only uses 1gb a month. She pays the same as you, so why is it neutral that you use more?!?!?! 1gb for EVERYONE!
I’m amazed that so many otherwise intelligent people WANT what amounts to net communism.
Tee hee. Kind of adorable how you guys are defending Comcast and other evil, monopolistic providers though. In a “beat me harder because you love me”, humorous fashion. If any of you ever face a long prison term, don’t forget to bring lots of chocolates and you’ll do fine. You’ll be very popular!
@trai_dep: “It’s not apples and oranges. Reread the part where is says, most of which are available nationwide. That is, comparing apples to apples, the 30-odd broadband vendors would be available in every town, including the above example.”
Wow. You totally missed his point. Go back and look at the land area stats and population density stats he posted. It costs astronomically more to wire up per person in the United States because we have an average of 80 people per square mile, and they have an average of 637 people per square mile. They also have over 12% of their population concentrated in one major city.
@PandemicSoul:
Most of the US is far more sparsely inhabited than that. Most of the US MARKET is far more dense than that. The population density of Maryland is comparable to that of the UK.
The term “unlimited” when it comes to phone/cable/wireless actually means “unlimited access”, not “unlimited usage”.
Found this out the hard way when a customer of mine used to much internet on his pc card with a major wireless carrier…
Wow, I wish I had 59 providers of 512K down and 256K up (check out the spreadsheet) to chose from – NOT.
I’m all for a good government sanctioned monopoly bashing, but lets not promote quantity over quality.
I live in the UK right now – I’m writing this from my house in Dorset. The kicker in the UK is that DSL is considered ‘broadband’, and it’s usually capped at 128kb/s, ie, not a whole lot better than dial-up. Secondly, the broadband access rates (just like everything else in the UK) are outrageously expensive. So, if you’re anywhere outside of a major metropolitan area (London, Manchester, Liverpool, etc), you’re screwed for genuine high-speed access. I know it’s fashionable to think that anything in Europe must be cooler-better-cheaper-etc, but it’s not. The only upside is that the ISPs will fight for your business – offering discounts and incentives, especially at the end of your contract. It’s like the long-distance wars in the early 90′s in the US, and that *is* nice….
@vonskippy: What on earth are you talking about? All UK ADSL providers offer at least a base of 2MB down now. Only the ultra budget packages offer 512k anymore.
The biggest advantage over here is that when they forced competition on BT (the UK equiv. of the old AT&T) they forced them to allow competition on their own network. So not only do we have a wealth of ISP options, but also phone options as well. Some piggyback on the BT network and exchanges, and some via Cable.
Just as a FYI, most mainstream broadband providers offer 8mb as standard, and there are already ISP’s offering ADSL2 with speeds up to 24meg. ADSL2 will be the the new standard here in a year will full rollout by 2011 ([tinyurl.com])
How does that compare in the US?
I think the consumerist should issue a recall or a retraction on this post.. Or perhaps even just a clarification.
Given that the UK list includes ISPs that fundamentally are the same as our CLEC driven ISPs in the US this is nowhere near an even fair comparison. You’re not comparing apples and oranges, you’re comparing apples and lava lamps! They’re not even in the same category.
Given the comments by HYPNOTIK_JELLO and HOO_FOOT, the consumerist royally screwed up and should own up to it they ask other companies to do!
@dbeahn: But American providers *don’t* wire every person in America. Certainly over half of the US (possible 3/4ths in fact) isn’t covered by DSL *or* cable.
@PandemicSoul:
Las Vegas;
- City: 552,539
- City Density: 4,154/sq mi (1,604/km²)
- Metro population: 1,777,539
Yet, somehow, we have two providers, Cox and Embarq.
Even if you assume that the reason there are so few providers here is because of the “sheer size of the US”, in a city like this there is no excuse to have only two providers.
There are many other isolated cases all over the US like this.
Let me put it another way — your excuse is that, assuming a city of 1,000,000, if two people camped out way, way, way out of city bounds, in some deserted area, then those two people would be a perfectly valid excuse to not have more than one provider.
Apply the appropriate scaling for cities and eventually the country and see where you get. UK is condensed into several small areas with a ton of people. The US is the same, just with more space between those super-condensed spots.
As an addendum, there have, as far as I know, been no “small startups” here. Mostly because the entire city is already controlled by Cox.
This city has a much higher density compared to the UK with a comparable population, so theoretically a good startup could make some good money. Care to explain the complete lack of them?
i think some of us are assuming that the reason there is no competition relates to cost of implementation. that’s just not true in most cases. the franchise system that exists in most of the united states prevents open competition. that’s the whole problem. i have cablevision & i love it, but the only reason i have access to it is b/c of where i live. comcast, cox, twc – none of these providers have a right to sell their products to me under the laws as they are currently written.
i said it before, i’ll say it again: cablevision: 15Mbps down, 5Mbps up for $50/month. 5 miles west is cox territory (charter): 3Mbps down, 256Kbps up for same price. “gold package” is 10Mbps down, (unknown-prob. 1.5Mbps) up for $80/month.
how can we even have a discussion on whether it is ethical for a company to “tier” their services when service is arbitrarily decided by where you live?
for the record, it seems fine to me that some companies tier bandwidth on price (except their prices are generally inflated by ~$30/month). i don’t think limiting usage is wise as most consumers don’t even know what bits or bytes are & i would absolutely abhor the restriction of certain bandwidth-intensive services (voip, streaming video, p2p sharing) by an isp. when an isp begins to manipulate available content is precisely when the hounds from hell should descend on their corporate headquarters & disembowel any executive that so much as received a memo on the topic.
@dbeahn:
Did I say I was for or against one or the other? No I did not.
What I am saying is that there should be an unlimited amount of data transfer. The only thing to pay extra for is how fast that data is being transferred.
If someone doesn’t need all that speed, they can get the Lite version of service and save money, while a person who needs more than the base speed can pay a little extra for it. The logic of that is understandable.
I am against any fees for certain data transfer types, or filtering them in any regard. “Net Neutrality” has its good and bad sides, the idea needs to be be adjusted till there are just good sides.
I should point out that many of those ISPs started out as simple BT ADSL resellers (BT owned the infrastructure until recently, so you can argue that it was all different brands of the same broadband). Now that LLU (the freedom for outside companies to install or buy infrastructure) has started, many of these old ADSL firms have begun to fold, although the better ones are flourishing – including BT’s own ISP.
Outside of ADSL, there were only really two cable broadband companies until recently, and these have now been absorbed into the monolithic Virgin Media, a company with so much heft that even Sky is mildy concerned.
Those crying about the “sheer size of the US” probably ignore that Canada is much bigger than the US, has much lower population density and yet communication services there have a much better feature/price ratio than in the US.
Anybody who thinks the state of communication services in the US is all fine and dandy is seriously deluded or seeking political office (or most likely both deluded and seeking office).
@dbeahn: “No, no, no! The WHOLE IDEA of net neutrality is that EVERYONE gets the ONE service!”
No, no, no, NO! It’s that everyone gets the same service to whomever they are accessing. It has nothing to do with YOUR tiered service, it has to do with forcing someone else, who is not your customer, on a tiered plan.
For example, if you paid for the 6GB plan with Time Warner and your mother has the 1GB plan with Comcast, your access too Google, Consumerist , etc is equal in regards to your capabilities. Time Warner shouldn’t slow down your access to Consumerist because Consumerist didn’t pay a fee to Time Warner so TW customers get faster connectivity to this site.
Furthermore, net neutrality also has to do not limiting the applications that run over the network. It shouldn’t matter if it’s web surfing, email, VoIP or file sharing, they all get the same treatment. What Comcast is doing to Bitorrent seeds right now is an example of what net neutrality would prevent.
@Lemur,
we’re not saying that our internet communication is fine and dandy. it’s not, it is clearly monopolistic. We know that. We’re just defending it against criticisms from a country we don’t regard as having superior communications.
And btw, I have NEVER heard anything good about any Canadian broadband ISP. The comments range from ehh they’re expensive to aww man they’ve fucked me.
Since we’re focusing on the number of US customers that are in rural, out of reach places, I thought that I’d inject some facts into the discussion (there’s some slipperyness b/c different nations define “urban” differently, but its a decent benchmark (cite: [geography.about.com])
Bottom line: 75% of the US population can easily be reached by the telecos. The other 25% the telecos agreed to reach, no gun to their heads, as part of the continued favoritism they get from the gov’t. They can’t really whine now that we suggest they live up to their word. Especially since they’ve had billions in profits these past years.
Note that Australia, which has even worse costs to reach their rural, has their rural wired with voice and broadband. With no corporate whining. I guess their telecos are simply more butch than ours.
Besides which, it’s all a smokescreen anyway. It’s a power grab – they want to sit on their throne, blithely picking winners (themselves and their strategic partners) and losers (Vonage, privacy, anyone criticizing politicians…)
It IS about, do you want the next net technology to be strangled in its crib b/c it can’t give hundreds of millions to AT&T? The next Google? If so, why do you hate America so that you’d like these companies to rule the world from elsewhere?
Country Urban Pop.
Sweden 83%
Denmark 85%
South Africa 57%
Australia 85%
Canada 77%
Israel 90%
France 74%
United States 75%
Mexico 71%
Belgium 97%
Iran 58%
Nigeria 16%
Spain 64%
Turkey 63%
Japan 78%
Hey, any Canucks reading this? Someone just said your entire country relies on baling wire and tin cans (and pay $4,000/mo (Canadian dollars, sure, but STILL)) to get half of what we in the gods-blessed USofA get for a pittance. Because USA USA! USA!!!
(gawds please someone lay some smack down)
@trai_dep:
I live in canada and we’re roughly in the same boat. I live in a city of 80k ppl and have the choice between 1, count ‘em 1 broadband isp. A second national broadband company offeres voip in my area, but cannot offer internet(due to laws I’m sure). I ‘ve read we get slightly better speed on a national level, but prices seem about the same(I pay $50/mo for 10 mbps down/640 kbps up) but could get cheaper rates to combine w/ phone/cable. Anyone who lives outside a city usually cannot get broadband at all and are stuck w/ dial up or satellite.
@trai_dep: The other 25% the telecos agreed to reach, no gun to their heads, as part of the continued favoritism they get from the gov’t. They can’t really whine now that we suggest they live up to their word.
they better not whine…not only did they agree to reach it, it’s a cash cow for them. they get payouts from the USF (that ~$1.50 charge that appears on the bottom of your monthly bill) every time they expand infrastructure in rural areas.
@dbeahn
There might be next to no room between people in the UK but no-one gets “wired up” here. All providers use pre-existing cables – the same cables – the same telephone exchanges etc, because it’s illegal to monopolise them.
The only company that put any new cables in is NTL – now Virgin – because they’re Cable.
Onouris: you’re behind the times. Local Loop Unbundling started last year. It’s only moving in small steps so far, but it’s given us ADSL2+ providers at least.
Also, to say that “All providers use pre-existing cables [...] because it’s illegal to monopolise them” is woefully inaccurate. The reason everyone used the same equipment until recently is because BT had a monopoly on telephone infrastructure. Other phone companies, broadband providers and whatnot had to lease BT’s gear, and could not install any of their own equiment in exchanges (therefore, no ADSL2+ until 2006).
That’s not an ISP (and I think you knew that). It’s merely a cobranded partnership with a few broadband providers. AOL dialup is an ISP.
It’s like HP, Dell, etc. all make their own OS. It’s all Windows, they just put their logo in the “System Properties” window.
Want to see real broadband, check out France. For a small fraction of what we pay, they get much more bandwidth (including upload). Sadly, thanks to the monopolies in the US, there’s no need to offer that type of speed. As a result, people think $50 for 8Mbps/1Mbps is a decent price. Take a look here for a 30 second summary of some of the offers. 15Mb/month for 29.99 euro. Including digital TV and VoIP. Just like Comcast right?
Montgomery County, MD is the richest county, in the richest state, with the highest percentage of lawmakers and regulators. If we only have 2 providers, then something is wrong. Verizon worked for 5 years to be able to lay fiber-optics to the door in montgomery county, and comcast opposed them. They then worked 3 more years to be able to break comcast’s cable monopoly, and comcast objected to competition. They then ran ads that claimed “cable supports competition”. For all intents and purposes, comcast are the bad guys here.
@raccettura: Well, if you want to see *real* broadband, you should actually be looking at Japan. $50 gets you 100Mb both ways there (and an additional $20 gets you unlimited usage of a mobile network card that gets 100-200Kb). That’s real service.
@raccettura:
Except that everybody with any familiarity with the French market knows those prices are suicidal. Lots of providers are going to go bankrupt, and then prices will return to more sustainable levels. It’s a price war, because a few smaller providers with nothing to lose (they’re failing anyway) are making a last stab at it.
I just wanted to point out that saying a company services an area nationwide might mean different things depending on the country.
Assuming that this list is for the UK (that is, just Great Britain and Northern Ireland), then that covers a land area approximately the same as that of the U.S. state of Michigan. (Actually Michigan is a little bit larger that the UK.)
@Xkeeper: But without connecting the population densities you might as well be on AOL. You need more than one node to make up the internet.
For a country that constantly talks about the “free market” and “open capitalism”, why the hell do we award more monopoly contracts than so-called socialist nations? We abandoned corporate Darwinism long ago, and companies no longer want actual competition. Innovation is dead, and all we see in the end is the waste products of the scavengers. I blame the current situation on shareholder protectionism, with laws passed to protect the interest of corporate investors that have a negative effect on inter-company competition, leading to the current oligopolies we see today. If we want real choice as consumers, we need to award service contracts that are independent of infrastructure contracts. IE, if a city wants to improve its fiber optic connectivity, it needs to pay a company to build it up that has nothing to with the service providers.
@synergy: Of course. But there are many, many more urban areas like Las Vegas in the US.
Even then, just plug LV into the backbone. Viola, nodes.
@andrewsmash:
Absolutely, and each town is free to build a muni network – taxpayers don’t likely actually paying for it, though.
Think of it this way – for a city the size of Chicago, building a municipal fiber network like Verizon’s FiOS would cost somewhere upwards of $1.5 billion, or about 27% of the city’s TOTAL SPENDING in a given year. Do you want to be the mayor who raises taxes 25% for a year to build out a network?
@JUSTAGUY2: they have been beating the US since the beginning of the decade. Yes a few are suicidal, but you don’t go in the red for most of a decade and still survive. US ISP’s make a killing because they offer several year old technology at inflated prices.
@andrewsmash: @JustAGuy2:
Here in a small city (125,000) in south Louisiana that’s exactly what we are doing. Finally after 5 years of prolonged court battles between the city and Cox, Bell South, et al, they are finally issuing bonds to install city owned fiber optic to each and every house. This should get real interesting.