Beyond Classic DOS Games

In my previous article, I complained about bandwidth caps and how internet speeds in the United States, and especially Canada, are much slower than the rest of the world, especially Europe and Japan. I talked about 50 and 100 Mbps services in Europe and Japan. In fact, Japan’s largest ISP, J:Com, had recently introduced a 160 Mbps internet service for a mere $60 per month, fully 10 times faster than the fastest service available from most North American ISPs while also $20 cheaper. But why does it really matter? Am I just concerned by a bunch of numbers?

Two weeks after I wrote that post, respected technology website ExtremeTech published an article called The Pathetic State of Broadband in America. Loyd Case wrote about how his internet connection, a 16 Mbps download but 768 Kbps upload service, just wasn’t meeting his needs. The upload speed was too slow for for uploading files to ExtremeTech or batches of high resolution photos to Flickr. Most people used to use the internet connection to take things from the internet, but now it has evolved into a place where people are increasingly putting things onto the internet! We are a society of tweeters and picture and movie uploaders. Our supposedly high speed internet connections are up to 50 times faster at downloading than uploading, and it’s starting to prevent people from using the internet the way they want to. There is no service in Canada that has an upload speed higher than 1 Mbps, despite 50 Mbps download speeds becoming available!

Loyd also wrote about how he is reaching the limit of his comparatively massive 250 GB per month bandwidth cap (my cap is 60 GB) because his family likes to watch television and movies on Hulu and Netflix Streaming, as well as digital delivery of games. The internet is no longer a place to look at static text and pictures. The internet has become the long-predicted digital convergence medium: it is a television, radio, and of course a computer, all in one. At least, it’s trying to be, but North American internet service providers won’t allow it. 60 GB is scarcely two high-definition movies per month! When Hulu comes to Canada (as they plan to), we’re going to have to limit ourselves to a few hours of usage a month. Canadian bandwidth caps won’t allow significant usage of such services. While the rest of the world moves forward, we in North America will be left behind.

It’s also interesting that Loyd referenced a well known survey from October 2007 that found that the average internet speed in Japan was a whopping 93.7 Mbps. It’s kind of embarrassing to be that much slower than another country’s average from almost two years ago! Scarier, though, is the difference in cost. According to IDG, the average price per megabit in the US as of the end of 2008 was around $16.10, versus $3.80 in the Asia Pacific region. You can charge four times as much per megabit when you have a monopoly like North American cable and telephone companies do.

So, with no competition, will the state of broadband in North America ever improve?

A few weeks ago Rogers placed a little “ad” at the top of my browser window to let me know that they had upgraded my internet connection from 7 Mbps to 10 Mbps for free. You might think I’d be thrilled. You’d be wrong.

Rogers advertised the move as a 40% speed boost for free. The fact is, my download speed was already fast enough, seeing as how my bandwidth cap prevents me from doing things like streaming movies to my computer. My upload speed, on the other hand, is the same 512 Kbps that it was before. That means that if I, heaven forbid, ever have to move my website to a new webhost again, it will still take 8 hours to upload all of my files. Unless, of course, I switch to Bell Canada, which offers higher upload speeds on even their cheap internet plans. Here is the new comparison chart for Rogers and Bell internet services.

Rogers

Bell

So Rogers Hi-Speed Lite tripled in speed to 3 Mbps and Express was bumped from 7 to 10, but in both cases the upload speeds remain the same. I checked Bell’s website to see if they had increased the speed of their services to compete, and they didn’t. They didn’t have to. The reality is, you really won’t notice the difference between Rogers Hi-Speed Lite and Bell Internet Essential Plus, or between Rogers Hi-Speed Express and Bell Internet Performance while downloading. If you frequently have to upload files, on the other hand, you’ll certainly notice that Bell’s Essential Plus service lets you upload more than three times faster than Rogers Hi-Speed Lite (800 Kbps vs. 256 Kbps), and that Bell’s Internet Performance lets you upload twice as fast as Rogers Hi-Speed Express (1 Mbps vs. 512 Kbps). You don’t need a stopwatch to notice that you can upload your website in 4 hours instead of 8!

The surprising proof of my statement is that Rogers Hi-Speed Extreme didn’t get a speed boost. It’s still a 10 Mbps download service, but it costs $13 per more month than Express. The only difference between Extreme and Express is the upload speed, so clearly Rogers believes that a faster upload speed is worth something!

I just can’t get over the fact that I could increase my upload speed by 56% by downgrading to Bell’s cheaper Essential Plus service. Why is Rogers’ $50 plan slower than Bell’s $40 plan? It just boggles my mind! So if upload speed is so important to me, why haven’t I switched to Bell? I already have a Rogers bundle (cable and internet), and I don’t feel like switching to satellite television. For now, I’m stuck with Rogers, a fact that I regret more and more each day.