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Comments on news posted 2010-03-04 14:43:06: A company by the name of ID Insight has released their list of the nation's fastest broadband counties. At the top of the list sits Nassau County, NY, where users see a median download speed of 15 megabits per second and a median upload speed of 4. ..
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 | | FiOS - Fiber - Cable I live in Snohomish County, WA (on the list) which is anchored by Boeing as the major employer with about 40,000 showing up to build planes daily. It has a strong middle class base with definite pockets of upper middle class demographics as well as a core working poor population. Verizon kicked FiOS into overdrive here in 2006 and Comcast had to up its game.
Adjacent to this county is King County where Seattle and Bellevue anchor it. The only Verizon FiOS area - due to them only having a franchise in these communities - is anchored by Microsoft in Redmond with another 50,000 or so employees that show up there to work from time to time. The affluent demographic in that general area is skewed to upper middle class and above for the most part. King County doesn't make the list - despite Comcast's DOCSIS 3.0 - because it is a traditional Qwest area that takes in Bellevue and Seattle dwarfing the small FiOS footprint.
Also adjacent to Snohomish County is Island County - another of the top 25 list. No FiOS there, but half of the largest island in the county has a small telephone company that has pushed the envelope on providing broadband, though not on fiber. The demographic for that area is affluent with a lot of second homes. The other half of the island belongs to Verizon which has DSL technology. The other island that is part of the two making up the county has Verizon DSL but, again, there is another company that has pushed the envelope there. Neither of Verizon's competitors offer anything approaching FiOS speeds.
The two largest counties in Oregon listed - Multnomah (Portland) and Washington - have a large FiOS footprint (not including Portland); in fact, the City of Portland is the doughnut hole in the FiOS footprint, again, because Qwest operates in Portland. However, Comcast is in play and had to put its DOCSIS and Wi-Max technologies in play to compete.
My point here is that while Sandy, UT, may be an important example of fiber-to-the-home, Wasatch Co./Salt Lake City are not. There needs to be a critical mass of some type such as Nassau County competition to begin to develop a 'Fastest' moniker.
Verizon has a million or so households in Southern California that offer FiOS and AT&T has a smaller U-Verse footprint. They, however, are competing with Time Warner. . . slouches by comparison to the Comcast juggernaut. | |
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