Sometime ago I can remember a president standing at a podium making this statement, “By 2005 every American that wants to have high speed Internet will have it available to them.” That was President George Bush. Recently we had another president make this statement, “All Americans will have access to high speed broadband Internet services.” This was president Barak Obama.
If you are reading this and you have Comcast or FIOS then count yourself lucky. I have a local cable carrier and they are providing me with 5 MB download speed and 2 MB upload speeds. I am not complaining, before this I had DSL 2 MB down and 768 KB upload speeds. There are still millions, yes millions of Americans on dialup Internet. Remember that? And if you never had dialup count yourself as a lucky one.
We are the slowest growing country in the world with our Internet build outs. This always strikes me as odd seeing that we are the richest country in the world. I just think that our cable and phone companies have very strong lobbyist that can sway our government into doing what is in their best interest. What ever saves these companies the most money. The BIG 2, I call them don’t want to spend money building to areas with less then so many homes because their return will not be great enough.
Today if you have not noticed all of the money seems to be going to putting into more and more wireless technologies. The only issue there is a lot of people can not afford broadband Internet using wireless technology. Beside’s the lag and response of wireless just is not to par as the wired side of life.
The Internet today is just as important as Electric, Water and Gas. It has become a utility that we relay on each day to teach our children, shop at our favorite stores and even receive our entreatment. So it makes you wonder why do we still have homes using dialup Internet?
My final thought for today’s post is this. Check you Internet speed and comment on where you are from and what the speeds are. You can use this tool to check you speed. Speakeasy.