September 02, 2004
US Broadband Sucks Saw Fixing American Broadband on SlashDot and it just made me foam at the mouth again. Most Americans are unaware of the plentiful broadband in places like Japan, South Korea, and else where. I was lucky enough to enjoy stable 8Mbit DSL in Japan not too long ago, but now I'm Cox land where our service cuts out at least once a day. Our connection has been inspected several times, so I attribute the outages to incompetence at headquarters.
Here's a shining example of how poor the state of broadband is in Rhode Island, and I expect elsewhere. My dad connects to his work using a VPN. While at home, he gets disconnected every couple of hours so it eventually became just another fact of life. Recently he traveled to a refinery in the far western part of China. He showed up in a small town where his cellphone had no coverage and his long distance calling cards didn't work. But lo and be hold, this tiny town at least had a broadband connection. So he connected to his VPN, and found out the connection to his office network in Massachusetts was more stable half way around than in Rhode Island.
To sum it up: even a remote region in a communist country half way around the world has better connectivity to a Massachusetts office than one of America's leading free enterprise cable corporations only 50 miles away.
So I've been eager to sign-up for Vonage or a similar service, but there is no way in hell I'm going to reduce my phone service to the same level quality as my broadband connection.
Here's a shining example of how poor the state of broadband is in Rhode Island, and I expect elsewhere. My dad connects to his work using a VPN. While at home, he gets disconnected every couple of hours so it eventually became just another fact of life. Recently he traveled to a refinery in the far western part of China. He showed up in a small town where his cellphone had no coverage and his long distance calling cards didn't work. But lo and be hold, this tiny town at least had a broadband connection. So he connected to his VPN, and found out the connection to his office network in Massachusetts was more stable half way around than in Rhode Island.
To sum it up: even a remote region in a communist country half way around the world has better connectivity to a Massachusetts office than one of America's leading free enterprise cable corporations only 50 miles away.
So I've been eager to sign-up for Vonage or a similar service, but there is no way in hell I'm going to reduce my phone service to the same level quality as my broadband connection.
