In other words, U.S. Internet providers are the worst at making sure their networks can meet demand, at least from Level 3. Instead of augmenting their network capacity (at costs that are “not significant,” according to Level 3), these ISPs are holding out for payments, either from middlemen or from content providers such as Netflix.
This is what we pay for. As consumers, there seems to be very little we can do because they are all part of the scheme.
It is far worse in Canada. ISPs notoriously refuse to upgrade their technology while holding the Canadian public ransom via their Tory government backed oligopoly. We are charged far more than the bandwidth we receive is worth.
And the winner is… Deregulation! Congratulations to all you lucky lobbyists!
If you read the Level 3 blog article.
you will notice that there is no congestion
in Washington D.C. area.
So best to live in the neighborhood of a politician’s family
to get the upgraded treatment.
I don’t understand why Canada has such poor service.
Even CBC ran a story about it several years ago
and the worse service was from the Canada Bell (may be forgetting the name?).
If your banks are tightly regulated then why isn’t communication sector.
Don’t you guys have common carriage.
Part of the Canadian experience is to think that things are worse in Canada than in the US (except for really obvious things like health care, policing, and gun violence) but that is not really the case.
Canada is more than 2x larger than the US, and yet only has the same population as California. Cell towers only cover so much land at once. Cables cost more the longer they are. And almost the entire of Canada goes through a yearly cycle of total deep freeze followed by nearly being boiled alive, which is murder on infrastructure. So Canadian bandwidth literally costs more than US bandwidth. That is just a fact of life. They way to get over it is to remember that every year, almost 1 million US Americans are forced into bankruptcy by medical bills, and that severely reduces their ability to pay for bandwidth and/or enjoy the Internet.
As much as you are disappointed by your conservative government, the conservative government in the US is much worse. And it is always a conservative government in the US, no matter who is elected. Harper is a wannabe. He could not get past a Republican primary in liberal California. And you had to go all the way to darkest, stupidest Alberta (wannabe Texas) to get him. In the US, you can get a much more evil conservative even in California. For example, Darrell Issa. And in the US, we have totally legal bribery of politicians and unregulated elections. Oligopoly? The American word for that is “business.”