The Howerter Blog

Bandwidth is always in short supply. If you have more than one location or need to access your resources remotely, more bandwidth would be beneficial. I am tired of the communication companies, even the new kids on the block (cable companies), continuing to give the same speed for higher prices or a “promotional price”. The cable companies do have the advantage of less regulation, but they don’t know how to work with complex businesses. While the big incumbent phone companies continue to sell the same 30 year old technology at 10x the price for 1/10 of the speed. These expensive circuits might have less packet loss of be up for 99.999% of the time, but users aren’t willing to trade speed for reliability.

The technological trend of our society is heading to acceptance of lower quality services as long as it is cheap or free. This trend may be fine for residential users, but it is difficult for the IT community. When you are told put in a cable or DSL Internet connection by management due to its lower price, they never remember your objections or your explanation that the connection may go down regularly. When it does go down, guess whose fault it is?

It is no wonder to me that America is trailing the rest of the world in connection speed. The telecommunications companies seem to be getting richer while not putting money into their infrastructure. They continue to advertise “higher” speeds, while the actual speeds stay around 50% of the advertised speed. It’s time for this to stop. Come on guys, give us some better options at reasonable prices. I would even be happy if they had to advertise their actual speeds.