RhetoricVille

“At this week’s Media, Entertainment and Telecommunications conference, AT&T COO Randall Stephenson told his listeners that increased bandwidth was no longer of great importance to consumers. . . .” AT&T: 15 Mbps Internet connections “irrelevant”

The article goes on to quote Stephenson as saying that there is no discernible difference Comcast’s 6 Mbps and DSL’s 1.5 Mbps download speeds. I think there is some truth to that. We used cable high-speed Internet for a year or so, and never got anything close to 6 Mbps, even though the company was advertising such speed. Usually, our connection was in the 1 - 2 Mbps range, but it varied a lot. We switched to DSL and are consistently getting 1.5 - 2 Mbps. I can’t tell the difference. Even if we had been getting close to 6 Mbps with cable, I’m not sure we’d notice the difference much. Sure, really big files would download faster, but we don’t download really big files much. When someone does download, say, a 50 MB program, the job gets done in less than a minute. But, as I said, downloading files of that size is a rare thing for us. We are saving about $30 a month going with the DSL deal. Now, if we can’t renew at the same price or close to it, I’d consider going back to cable. I want the best deal. Assuming a reasonably fast and reliable connection, I measure the deal more in dollars per month than in mega-bytes per second.

Of course, when I read about the service that consumers get in other countries, for much less money, then I get angry. The US is falling way behind in Internet technology. It’s sickening.