The ISP business in North America is all kinds of shady. They half-ass the upgrades and paint all sorts of floweriness in advertising and generally piss all over us. The fact is that they are not meeting demand, and really hope we won’t notice.
So when they offer us super-mega fast connection speeds, all it takes is a swing through Speedtest.net to see that a bronzed piece of shit is still a piece of shit. My biggest complaint is that when Shaw advertises up to 25 Mbps downstream, they aren’t mentioning that to get that speed you would have to be the only one using your shared pipe, which is normally shared by seventy-five or so other connections. I rarely see more than 800 kbps on my 7.5 Mbps line. I’ve certainly never seen 2 Mbps. Telus lines are not shared the same way, but they still suffer from a lot of noise that slows you down anyway.
![[shamelessly stolen from Penny Arcade]](http://adriantaverner.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/20090501-500x250.jpg "2009-05-01")
If I had a lot of scratch, I would contract with cities and municipalities to build the infrastructure for a fibre network and lease it to the ISPs. And yes, with all that bandwidth, I would work with cities to offer free wi-fi (at a throttled rate to protect the nicely co-operative ISPs).
Fibre is the future (and has been since 1986), and they should stop fucking around.