Rick Hanton

If you have managed to live anywhere that is not on a college campus, you know that even high-speed cable Internet providers in the United States are not particularly "fast." Last week we found out that, sadly, Google didn't choose Ames as the location to test its 1 Gbps fiber network — though not for lack of trying, on Ames' part. Instead, they chose the city of Kansas City, Kan., to get 100 times faster Internet on a fast fiber-to-the-home network.

Kansas City, known at times as "the armpit of Kansas," where the current unemployment rate is currently more than 10 percent, will receive Google broadband at a low price for residents and no price for schools. Google was keen to pick Kansas City due to the possibility of easy installation of their fiber lines using existing power poles and buried utility pipes. They hope that by bringing in faster Internet service, they will help make Kansas City more prosperous and allow high-data services to proliferate on the relatively cheap network in a way that is not possible in other U.S. cities.

Google has always prided itself on the speed of its services. One of the reasons that google.com has always been quite plain is so that it loads quickly. It is rumored that Google had to double the computing power behind users' searches when they introduced Google Instant search. One limitation to Google's services, like YouTube, is that users have slow high-speed Internet by world standards.

As an avid user of Reddit.com, I occasionally see a popular story about a user who takes a trip to South Korea, stays in a hostel and gets free 55 Mbps (megabits per second) Wi-Fi Internet there. While this is quite fast, the average internet speed in South Korea as of this writing is only about 33 Mbps, which is still incredibly speedy. Notably, on the other end of the spectrum, is the United States with 11 Mbps speeds.

The state with the slowest tested speeds, besides Alaska, is Iowa — at about 5 Mbps.

If any Iowa politicians manage to read my column, this is one of the reasons I am not incredibly interested in landing a long-term position in your state. I've heard a lot about the work done by politicians to draw smart, young students and innovative businesses to Iowa. Here's a great way to start. Figure out what needs to be done to give companies like Mediacom a kick in the pants to develop faster, cheaper networks.

I agree that the United States is hard to cover in high-speed networks, but without rules that force the development of open broadband connection lines that can be shared by multiple end-providers, there is little competition. To compete with the incumbent providers, you have to bury your own lines in the ground, or above ground like Google. Other rules might be good, such as rules that regulate and test the speeds of providers, forcing them to provide users with average rather than maximum rates.

I will agree that most Internet services will hit the maximum rate that service providers sell you on, but how often they hit it is another issue and is based on things like network congestion. When living and working in Cedar Rapids, I'd check a handy graph of speed kept on my router on occasion and noticed that while once in a blue moon, Mediacom might hit their maximum 12 Mbps speed, most of the time it would be half of that.

While some argue that we don't need regulation of the Internet, I would argue that we need a little bit, if not a lot of regulation of Internet providers. There are tons of new services that use the Internet today, including companies like Netflix and Hulu. It is in Internet companies' best interests to slow these companies down so that you flip on your TV rather than your Roku player and continue to pay them for a $100 per month Internet/phone/cable bill.

Did I mention that Internet is much cheaper in other areas of the world like South Korea, as well?

Make sure you are careful what data services you pay for and how much you pay once you graduate or start working. We, as a generation and as a nation, need to question whether our high-data utility bills are paying for the best technology and the fastest service or for old generations of technology and money to line corporate monopolies' pockets.