Our country has had plenty of issues with the Internet, between the NSA's mass reconnaissance and the progressing fight over an open Internet. With such a large number of elements debilitating the principal way that the Internet is used by the average person, enhancing the nature of our country's broadband Internet capabilities has, generally, tumbled off the radar.
You may have recently run a speed test to see how your own Internet compares to the averages.
If you somehow happened to tell somebody in Asia the amount you pay for your Internet in the U.S. what's more, the rates you get consequently, they would be stunned. America may have been a pioneer in the development of the Internet, yet we have truly fallen behind with the rate of our broadband systems and the amount we pay to get to an utility that is necessary around the world.
Beyond just slower speeds, we pay more for considerably less. On average it costs an American about $55 a month for broadband access, while nations with a more developed broadband infrastructure, like Japan, Korea, France, Russia and the United Kingdom pay less than $45 monthly. In Hong Kong, that cost drops to $31 per month, and they have some of the fastest speeds in the world.
The basic fact remains that the U.S. currently isn't a leader in broadband technology by any standard. Some of the biggest cable and DSL Internet providers in the U.S., like Comcast and AT&T, who control immense sections of America's high speed Internet, simply have no real incentive to develop things at a faster pace.
These large broadband companies simply have little motivation to upgrade their whole systems to fiber-optics. That would have to come from pressure by competitors or controllers, and such pressure currently doesn't exist,
In rural areas of the country, only satellite Internet is available to most residents.
There are indications of a development for urban areas to create their own fiber-optic systems and lease the fiber to retail Internet suppliers. Many municipal districts in the U.S. have taken it upon themselves to set up there own networks with speeds up to 1 Gbps.
Most people in America will find they only have one provider that offers Internet service in their area. You can check for Internet providers by zip code and see for yourself.
In specific urban communities within America, the danger of new broadband Internet suppliers such as Google Fiber has prodded the enormous, existing ISPs to do something novel: expand the rates they offer and begin the development of their own fiber-optic Internet systems.
