[Spexxvet]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

I'm sure part of it is how we're spread out, part is when our tech revolution occurred (do we require hardwired copper phones or can we just build past that).

But a big lot of it is just marketing because there are precious few people that actually need more than 10 Mb/s. The bits arrive there at the same time; you can't buy more bandwidth and make the Cellar faster, or even make Youtube stop buffering.

People think they want Google Fiber (1000 Mb/s) when they can't even get a 20th that number out of any devices connected over their WiFi. Now, Google Fiber tries to help speed up the other side of their network, so this is one case where an internet provider may "feel" faster. But it's not the big number they push up front that makes it so.

Latency, or the ping number you get from speedtest.net and elsewhere, is a bigger factor in how "snappy" the web seems, and how quickly requests for stuff turn around. But it's on the order of tenths of a second, so this is not what's making some webpages load all slowly. (That is more poorly scripted pages, on slow servers, allowing ads to interfere with the experience, with memory-hog browsers taking up all the memory on slower desktops, as technology changes, and so forth.)

I spose if you have a household of both gamers and media watchers, you may actually require 20Mb/s from time to time. Of if you torrent a lot.

So....

Why do others countries bother having high speeds? Have they overcome the problems you describe? How can we overcome those problems?

Is some of the issue that most countries, and Europe in its entirety IIRC, have a single protocol for devices?