An Explanation of the State of the Internet Infrastructure in the United States

I believe there are some misconceptions about the state of the internet within the United States. The belief might be that it was invented here, so it surely must be great. In limited areas it is indeed very fast. Extremely limited. In reality, many countries overall have better internet than the United States.

I can explain why. This also applies to many other aspects of our infrastructure.

Two things tend to motivate industries and companies to extend and create new infrastructure in the United States. This is either due to opportunity to access new markets that will offset or make the cost of extending that infrastructure immediately profitable, or government subsidies. With regards to government subsidies the waste is huge. These companies can often find ways to milk those subsidies so they do as little as possible to still get that money. I've seen grandiose sounding programs funded by the government that were supposed to extend infrastructure and cost vast sums of money to only see it not happen.

Currently in my day to day job I am a network engineer. I tend to do our data center side of things and deploy new servers and things of that nature. I program our firewalls and switches. I also am the expert in our company on ordering circuits.

For those not familiar with the term that means essentially in our case internet connections. We are a VOIP company and we pride ourselves in trying to provide customers that want it with redundant backup for their phone systems. In such cases I need at least two circuits and it is important the last mile of those circuits not be provided by the same local carrier. In the U.S. this means more often than not I get a CABLE circuit and a NON-CABLE circuit. Why? All Non-Cable circuits tend to go through the carrier that has essentially a local monopoly. So you can order DSL, T1s, T3s, MPLS, Fiber, and all manner of circuits from dozens of carriers. They will quote you. They will provide you the circuit, but the last mile will all go through the same local carrier.

I live in the Denver area though I support clients all across the U.S. and some in Canada (a few in Mexico as well). In the Denver area the local carrier is CenturyLink So if I get a T1 from XO, or Windstream, or Earthlink, or Verizon, etc they will sell me a circuit. That last mile. It will be CenturyLink.

So if I am trying to setup a redundant network for a client and I have an XO T1 and a Windstream T1 and something goes wrong with CenturyLink then BOTH of those circuits go down. That is not very useful for redundancy.

For this reason in most cases the second circuit has to go through a cable provider such as Comcast, Charter, etc. Why? They usually have a different network all of their own going through coaxial cable based networks. Though they have also been expanding into the fiber arena.

Yet that is generally the case. Really you might have TWO choices. Sometimes you have ONE.

Now ANY of these carriers will offer to provide you service. If they don't have the infrastructure there they are willing to give you the circuit if you pay the cost of running the infrastructure there. This can translate to many thousands of dollars to extend the network so it has access to your region. Most people will not do this.

When you see people extending networks it is usually because someone paid to have it extended and the carrier can gleefully then offer services to other people in that area. You'll usually know this happens when a carrier knocks on your door without you asking and starts soliciting you for a new service.

They do not extend for "possible" business. They wait for a guaranteed client, and then after they have the extension already in the work they solicit other people.

What does this mean?

Well I was living in a remote part of Colorado from 1997 - 2007. Most of that time you could get 56K modem in some places, 28.8K in a few others, and in many you got below 20K in speed. This was when the government was paying subsidies to extend the infrastructure. In fact, we saw them lay the fiber cable. They laid all the cable to do this. Then they never bothered to turn it on. So the alternative for awhile was to do it via Satellite at the time DirectTV was coming out with DirectPC. I was actually a certified installer of that. Then later Hughes bought out that business. It could provide good downloads but it has insane latency due to the delay in going back and forth between the satellite. So forget anything that required quick response time. They also began imposing such restrictive fair use policies that it wasn't worth having anyway.

In around 2006 that area finally started getting some DSL offerings. I moved in the summer of 2007 back to the Denver area.

Do you realize that today I still have clients in New York City that I can only get them T1s? This is changing, but unless the infrastructure is extended a lot of carriers do not offer anything faster.

There are places in Denver where the choices are T1s, DSL, or Cable. There are some places where Cable and some crappy DSL are all that is available.

This is the state of the United States infrastructure for internet. I don't think a lot of people outside of the U.S. realize this. I also know there are many people in the United States blissfully unaware of this.

Yet this problem is not just in the internet. It is also in our power grid, our sewer systems, our bridges, and many of our roads.

Who will build the roads? That is a popular question when people seek to counter people who would like to eliminate or severely reduce the size of government. The answer to that is the SAME PEOPLE that build them now, as it isn't the government that does it. It is the government who has wasteful poorly managed programs that pay entities that are not the government to build them. That money could be paid to organizations that could oversee it more critically without the waste say in some crowd funded manner. So "Who will build the roads if there is no government?"... answer: The same people that build them when there is a government.