If you live in the sticks and work on the Internet like I do, you’ve no doubt lost many precious moments of your life downloading and uploading large files. Time is money and out here it can flow slower than molasses. It is by no means sweet.
Where I live, in eastern Shasta County, beyond the reach of broadband, there are essentially two choices.
Those who are out of pocket or don’t need the bandwidth choose service from Frontier Communications via a digital subscriber line, DSL.
Those who can afford it choose a satellite Internet service provider such as HughsNet, which offers more bandwidth than DSL, but doesn’t come close to matching the price or speed of the hard-lined fiberoptic cable systems available to the good citizens of Redding some 30 miles distant.
To simplify, if you live out here and you’re poor, you get a turtle. If you’re rich, you get a slightly lame jack rabbit.
Rural America’s need for broadband Internet has been recognized since at least the late 1990s, as the economy shifted to technology-based services. The same also applies to underserved urban communities. Since his election, President Barrack Obama has made it a domestic policy priority, devoting $2 billion of the 2009 stimulus package to expanding broadband’s reach.
Change is coming we are assured, but like that turtle, it’s moving at an aggravatingly slow pace. If you’re as annoyed about this as I am, it’s time to take the rural Internet speed test.
That’s not the official name of the program initiated by Cathy Emerson, of Chico State University’s Geographical Information Center, but it’s descriptive. The GIC is providing direct support to the California Public Utility Commission as part of the California Broadband Data Initiative.
You don’t have to be a techie to participate in the rural Internet speed test, which includes all of rural California, not just Shasta County. Emerson, one of rural northern California’s most active broadband advocates, has teamed with the California Public Utility Commission in an effort to map the speed of Internet services available in the state by geographical location.
You simple go to the CPUC website, click the “communications” tab on the top menu, then click “broadband public feedback” on the lefthand side of the communications page.
There you’ll be prompted to fill in your geographic information, anonymously. A map pops up with a list of the Internet service providers in your area and their advertised download and upload speeds. Then the fun part: press “send feedback” and take the rural Internet speed test.
The CPUC is using Speakeasy Speed Test, a popular, free website that measures the speed of your Internet connection.
In extremely lay terms, in order to establish a connection with an Internet server, your computer sends a “ping” to the server via your Internet connection. The server returns the ping to establish the connection.
Once the data begins flowing between the website and you, Speakeasy measures the download and upload speed in megabytes per second, Mbps. It’s like miles per hour on the Internet. When you’re watching a YouTube video, you’re downloading. When you send an email, you’re uploading.
I’m fortunate enough to have access to Frontier DSL service and HughsNet’s top tier satellite package. I’ve already submitted my speed test for both lines to the CPUC, but you can run a speed test on Speakeasy anytime. I’ll test both lines again and be back with the results in a second.
OK, I’m back. Let’s look at my Frontier DSL test results first.
As you can see, my DSL download speed is .48 Mbps. That’s 60 times less than the 30 Mbps cable broadband connection I used to have in Sacramento. Frontier’s maximum available DSL download speed is 1 Mbps, but I have many downstream users tapping into the line before it gets to me, and they were using half the available bandwidth at the time of the test.
Such low download speeds make it virtually impossible to watch video online without constant buffering. Facebook and other websites with rich content lock up. You can still surf the web but you’re not going to be watching Netflix, unless you have a high tolerance for herky-jerky movies.
My DSL upload speed is .09 Mbps. That’s fine for sending emails, small text files and photos measured in kilobytes, such as the ones I submitted for this story.
But when files start entering the megabyte range, it can take minutes to upload instead of seconds. I’ve found it almost impossible to upload files larger than 2 MB without timing out. I’m currently working on an art book project with a Sacramento colleague, and many of the images we’re using are 4 MB and higher. We won’t be doing the book on DSL.
My Comcast Internet cable service in Sacramento offered up to 30 Mbps downloading and up to 5 Mbps uploading for $50 per month. My DSL service from Frontier costs $40 per month and is all Frontier has to offer for my location. That compares to $113 per month for HughsNet’s top satellite Internet package, which as the speed test shows is considerably faster than DSL.
With a download speed of 15.19 Mbps—HughsNet advertises a range of 10 Mbps to 25Mpbs—I can easily watch Netflix programs with little or no buffering.
However, that comes with a major caveat. Compared to fixed “terrestrial” cable Internet, satellites have far less capacity. To ensure all its users have the access they’ve paid for, HughsNet and other satellite providers employ what are known as fair access policies.
HughsNet’s top tier package caps my use at 50 gigabytes per month. A one-hour Netflix program uses approximately 1 GB. A one-hour Netflix HD program uses 3 GB.
Let’s presume you binge-watched 50 hours of regular Netflix programs in two weeks—people do it all the time. You’ve used up your allotted 50 GB per month, and HughsNet does one of two things: It throttles your connection down to near-DSL speeds or it permits you to pay $9 per GB for the remainder of the month.
Obviously, if you’re running an Internet business as well, you’re going to have to cut down on the Netflix.
When it comes to uploading, my 1.44 Mbps satellite speed is 16 times faster than DSL for this particular test. HughsNet advertises upload speeds of up to 3 Mbps. Occasionally, I’ve seen it test above 2 Mbps at my location. This, I am hoping, will prove fast enough to work with large files on my aforementioned book project.
Chico State’s Catherine Emerson was extremely busy when I contacted her earlier this week. She’s working on several exciting projects that may be coming to our area soon. Public agencies and telecommunications companies are converging on the issue, along with the possibility of increased state and federal funding.
I’ll be covering these projects in future episodes of this series on bringing broadband Internet to rural California. In the meantime, for those who want to join in on the effort, Emerson recommends going to the CPUC’s website and taking the rural Internet speed test. Share this article with your hillbilly friends. It’s the best way I know to collectively tell the government and Internet service providers we want high-speed Internet.
One thing’s for certain. If we don’t tell them we want it, we’re never going to get it.
