The NCTA—The Internet & Television Association—told Akamai’s latest State of the Internet Release this month in a post headlined, “America’s Internet speeds continue to go down.”
“The US is now in the top 10 countries for adopting the Internet speeds covering 15 and 25Mbps as well as the top 10 for overall mediocre speed,” the lobby group said.
On its Twitter account, the NCTA boasted that “the cost per megabit has gone under 90 percent over the last 10 years.”
That doesn’t mean the actual monthly bills have gone down since customers could be paying extra for faster speeds. US customers usually have little, if any, choice of high-speed home Internet providers, so cable corporations don’t feel much pressure to lower charges, and many ISPs are implementing data caps that force customers to pay more when they download and upload more information.
Anyway, NCTA says that “This near-quadrupling of Internet speeds in only five years is the effect of constant innovation sequences and determined deployment of new technologies across the country.”
The US does still have a major rural broadband difficulty, with people in sparsely populated states often not having access to wire or fiber. But even here, NCTA paints a rosy portrait, saying, “Gigabit cities are springing up across the country in both metropolitan and rural associations, further driving medium speeds into the stratosphere.”
As we can see, the NCTA has flexible messaging and uses conflicting arguments to different locations. When the NCTA tells the Federal Communications Commission that it should roll back net neutrality laws, the association says that the rules harm investment and increase prices on consumers. But when trying to persuade the public that US broadband is a miracle of innovation and that we should all be thankful to cable companies, the NCTA says speeds are soaring and that clients are paying less.
The NCTA recently managed a survey that found that 61 percent of respondents either “strongly” or “somewhat” support net neutrality regulations against blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. Fifty-three percent support “a light-touch advance to the Internet that allows regulators to control the marketplace and take action if users are harmed.” That’s what the current rules consist of—the core net neutrality laws and a case-by-case method to other ISP action—yet the NCTA argued that the poll showed a “strong bipartisan agreement” against “burdensome laws.”
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