This week saw the debut of broadband “nutrition labels” designed to help you understand what you’re paying for when you choose a high-speed internet plan. You can find them in stores or online from companies like T-Mobile or Comcast, and every landline or cell phone provider with over 100,000 customers is required to publish them.
This got me thinking about the state of high-speed internet in North America—specifically, how some of the biggest problems are still the same as they were years ago.
There are two real problems: unavailability and overcrowding. I’m sure industry experts have fancy names for it, but ultimately many people have limited or no access to high-speed internet because of these issues.
In rural areas there just isn’t enough to get around. It costs a lot of money to provide services in an area, and service providers are reluctant to make it possible without enough customers paying for it (and then making huge profits). You have to remember that companies are about getting rich, not about providing a service.
The downside is in places where there are too many people. There is a user cap for fast, reliable service, and when that is exceeded, the quality begins to decline. Usually it’s only an inconvenience at certain times of the day or on certain days, but ISPs are like airlines and sell, sell, sell, regardless of actual capacity.
Nutritional labels will not help here. Maybe nothing can fix this. But that shouldn’t stop us from demanding more from the companies that send us huge bills every month.
Rural areas are still screwed
In rural parts of North America, there are two types of internet service – poor and none at all. In 2024, it is almost impossible to take advantage of the technology age or the latest phone when the internet is in this state.
It’s getting better, but only just. Take for example the place where I live. I’m in one of those weird places where rural isn’t really rural – I live in the mountains, 43 miles from Washington, DC. It’s a cool place to live, but the internet used to die here.
Until a few years ago, “high speed” simply didn’t exist. In 2012, the Obama administration launched an initiative to bring high-speed Internet access to all federal highways. That trickled away from the highway and now I have 5G WiFi and fiber internet at the same address I had to pay for Comcast to bring cable there in 2007.
Not everyone, especially those who don’t live in a larger city, are so lucky. There are areas where there is no internet connection at all, but these are few and far between. The problem becomes clear when looking for high-speed coverage.
Companies like Starlink are making things better, but Starlink is expensive and requires a lot of maintenance. It’s not like DirecTV where it just works.
I understand the problem – there just aren’t enough people to justify it. But that’s not what we were led to believe high-speed Wi-Fi would look like in 2024.
Too many people can be just as bad
Everyone has heard stories about how poor connectivity is at a place like Google I/O or a New York Giants football game. When you pack so many people into one place at the same time, it’s very difficult to provide service to everyone.
The fact is, it doesn’t take a big tech conference or a football game to make the service bad. A single user is enough to exceed the total capacity.
I’ll use another anecdotal example here. I have some friends who live in DC and their service slows down during lunchtime during the week and all day on Saturdays and Sundays. That’s because everyone looks at their phone on their lunch break, and on the weekend there are a million extra people in DC to see the sights.
AT&T provided the infrastructure based on the people who actually lived there. If you quadruple that number, things get bad. This can be improved by using portable cell towers for events such as ball games or during the Cherry Blossom Festival in DC when crowds are large, so more infrastructure is the solution.
Nutrition labels are good for making it clear how the service we are paying for is supposed to work. However, the only way to fix something is to put money into solving the problem.
You probably don’t see these problems – I admit they are edge cases. However, these are the same edge cases that have affected the same users for a decade. Before we move to 6G, they must be addressed or North America will fall even further behind in high-speed connectivity.