We've tallied the votes, and it turns out it didn't matter who you voted for. Sorry. We hope it felt, for a fleeting moment, like you had influence over anything outside your immediate surroundings.

I see the old 'representative democracy' fallacy is still quite prevalent in broadband talks. Maybe another decade of complaining on the internet might do it?

HEY BUDDY, if you don't think the country has come a long way from where it was in 2004, then I just don't know what to say to you.

> My broadband service is terrible

My business gets 10mbps down, 2mbps up, for $90/month in Los Angeles. It also goes down frequently (5-6 times a year). I think the next best upload rate (5mbps) was $400/month or so with some bullshit "enterprise" plan.

It takes way too long to do simple file transfers from my office to a remote machine. I fucking hate it and our culture of monopolies can go to hell.

My business has a redundant 10Gbps connection to our cabinet at zColo. We lease the dark fiber (but it doesn't run very far, so it's not very expensive.) The cabinet has a 1Gbps uplink for Internet.

Home is 50Mbps FTTH right now. Google should start to deploy in ATX during 2014, and when they come to my neighborhood, I plan to switch to Google Fiber.

I also have a Time Warner fiber service on premise, mainly for one of my employees who lives just outside Elgin, TX. (but also because we get a redundant 100Mbps connection.

While I spent an order of magnitude more than you, I also have much better service. :-)

I have lived in a number of places in northern Sweden. All had fiber to the house. New houses doesn't even have copper-lines for phones any more, they all go fiber. Some houses don't even have phone-outlets, only a 100 Mbit/s RJ45.

A town with 2500 people (100 Mbit/s the last 20 years, Between $60 and $30 per month)

Smaller town with 250 people (100 Mbit/s the last 15 years, $30 per month)

Small city with 100 000 people (100-1000 Mbit/s the last 15 years, $35 per month including IP-phone box and phone-account)

Been wondering how long it would take for you guys to do something about your internet connections. You keep blaming the big distances and so on but everyone I know is living in big cities and still has realy bad DSL...

Oh Sweden, is there anything you can't do? I'm impressed by this country, especially considering what they manage to pull off with such a small population.

I live in the UK, in London actually.

I don't get the choice you get, what I have currently (2Mb/s:d 80Kb/s:u and incredible latency) is the only thing you can buy as a consumer.

leasing a line would cost #1,200 (gbp) a month, which combined with my exorbitant rent would leave me literally penniless.

I would say you're a lucky case.

I have Comcast at my business in Los Angeles. It's $65/mo for what I measure at 50mbps down and 10mbps up.

When I tried the small, local cable ISP they were offering me 10/2 for 200 per month.

There's definitely no rhyme or reason to it.

I don't understand how Comcast charges differnt rates for internet speeds, but at around 5:30 p.m., when people settling in after a hard day of work--the rate is reduced?

My hope is Comcast is eventually split up by the government.

Do you think the government would rather deal with more ISPs or fewer, insofar as surveillance is concerned?

That's an interesting angle. My immediate thought was that it's different parts of the government making such decisions. But upon reflection I have no reason to believe NSA et al wouldn't try to influence such matters as they could.

Yep, exactly. Some matters are just "big enough" that you can't go rogue without answering for it. After all, the heads these agencies (NSA, SEC, whatever) are all presidential appointees.

The NSA != the government. It can't dictate how the economy works. It just has to deal with what's there.