These statistics are always interesting but tell only half the tale.

“And a comparison of the speed would clearly put things in perspective.”

COX Cable serves as my home ISP. When working, its speeds are more than adequate for my purposes. However, the last 3 weeks the throughput speeds have become worse than dialup. For example, it took me 32 minutes to navigate the three pages of depth required to find their customer service telephone number!

The COX technician arrived yesterday, and much to my surprise, found nothing amiss. He showed me the COX-supplied Internet page that indicates my download and upload speeds; they were excellent and as advertised. In turn, I showed him how painfully slow internet pages were to load, including many pages at Google (always a good fault check of congestion). He shrugged his shoulders and pointed again to the results of his “test”. I likened that test to the airline industry’s ontime performance rating: the flight could depart 90 minutes late and still arrive on time. (The dirty secret is that airlines contract with airports based on arrivals, not departures. So they damned well better land on time.)

As I said, the numbers might indicate more broadband home subscribers, but I suspect the connection speeds they receive are anything but broadband. Numbers lie. (Thanks, Mark Twain!)

The phone companies never were set up for data transmission, preferring voice and its profits, so I find it surprising that DSL has become more reliable than cable, which was created originally for data transmission, and quickly gaining in demand and usage.

When will we ever have fiber to the home…? Then we might finally have true broadband connections!

Om Malik has been tracking female musicians through his popular Broadband Blog for years. Now it appears the whole thing is taking off. Om offers this chart from Leichtman Research that shows more than 40 million households are now surfing…