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Broadband isn't Broadband Unless its 2Mbps?
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri May 18, 2007 11:23 AM
from the time-for-a-bit-of-clarity dept.
from the time-for-a-bit-of-clarity dept.
quanticle writes "According to House Democrats, broadband isn't broadband unless its at least 2Mbps. The view of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications is that the FCC's data collection standards are hopelessly outdated, and is proposing a number of updates to their criteria. For one, they want 'broadband' reclassified to at least 2mbs, up from 200kbps. Another requirement will change the FCC's outlook on broadband availability. Just because one household in a zip code has broadband access, that will not longer mean everyone in the zip code does. 'The plan went over well with the consumer advocates who appeared before the subcommittee. Larry Cohen, president of the Communication Workers of America, said that the US is "stuck with a twentieth century Internet" and that he would support increasing the "broadband" definition to 2Mbps. Ben Scott of Free Press echoed that sentiment, suggesting that the definition needs to be an evolving standard that increases over time, which is in contrast to the current FCC definition; it has not changed in nine years. "We have always been limited by the FCC's inadequate and flawed data," he said.'"
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Politics: Broadband Data Improvement Act Clears Committee 128 comments
MBCook writes "Ars Technica is reporting that the Broadband Data Improvement Act has left committee with a unanimous vote. Among the changes proposed are requiring the definition of 'second generation broadband' (enough to carry HDTV) instead of the current definition of broadband as 200Kbps, and aggregating the data by ZIP+4 instead of just the full ZIP code. The act can now move to the full Senate."
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Forgive me (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Forgive me (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Forgive me (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Save a lot of taxpayer money that way, actually.
Re:Forgive me (Score:5, Insightful)
I think it's definitely a good step in the "truth in advertising" department...I'm tired of sneering at the commercials where the broadband companies are comparing their download speeds to 28.8 modems and other such crap.
Parent
Look out for the fine print (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Forgive me (Score:5, Funny)
I'm just surprised that politicians are talking about the Internet not involving the legislation bingo buzzwords ["predator" || "myspace" || "molestor" || "terrorism" || "censorship" || "children" || "tubes" || "columbine" ]
It's kind of like reading a Family Circus comic and having Billy talk about some sort of technology made after 1952. It just surprises you.
Parent
US Internet Infrastructure is PATHETIC (Score:5, Insightful)
Or you can go with DSL. Good luck if you don't live right next to the CO. Damn phone company took an entire MONTH to find a working line for me. How the hell do you not notice that one of the lines you tagged was in use!? T1s are nice, but way out of my price range. $300-$400 a month is a bit much, even if I understand why they price them like that.
Or you can get satellite. Not bad, but your uplink will be crap and your latency painful. Or, heh, you can go back to dial-up. That's great, if you don't use anything but email...
Compare this to almost everywhere else in the first world, where they have local loop unbundling, the telcos are public utilities (rather than deregulated monopolies) and you see that we're *WAY* behind. Japan is awesome: 10 & 100 Mbps connections for less than you pay the cable companies. Other countries, too, have invested in infrastructure and are just plain leaving us behind. In the US? We gave the telcos billions to upgrade things, and just what have they done? Hardly anything, from the looks of it.
So the story here is that the Democrats want to up the standards so that we in the US will have to stop kidding ourselves about the craptastic state of our internet infrastructure? GOOD! I'm sick of the telcos trying to kill things like Net Neutrality and using "deregulation" as a way to become legal monopolies and screw their customers over.
I'm sick of hearing "We don't care, we're the phone company!" and I'll probably give my vote to someone who seems likely to make them eat those words.
Parent
Mod parent up (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
hooray (Score:5, Funny)
Korea has 10MBPs to the home... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Korea has 10MBPs to the home... (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Korea has 10MBPs to the home... (Score:5, Interesting)
At least in France, many of the problems were solved by local loop unbundling. I imagine the same would work here.
Parent
LLU's dead; the FCC killed it. (Score:3, Interesting)
We had local loop unbundling here in the U.S., but then the FCC took it away. Now if you want DSL, it's back to the local phone company -- except for the places where they still have outstanding contracts with independent ISPs (like Speakeasy, etc.), there's no choice.
The FCC's rationale for reneging on the LLU decision was that consumers now had "choice" without it -- between the cable company,
Not the FCC's fault (Score:4, Interesting)
Also: the distinction between a "telecommunications service" and a "data service" is most definitely NOT pedantic. In fact it is the crucial heart of the entire fight over "net neutrality." The two terms are given different definitions and treatments in the 1996 Act--in particular, telecom services are held to common carrier status, while data services are not. Thus when the 9th Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that cable modem is a "data service", it exempted it from common carrier status--essentially granting permission to violate net neutrality.
Now the telcos want DSL classified the same way (it's currently considered a telecom service since it is delivered over phone lines), and they are lobbying extremely hard to get it. Plus, they are rolling out things like FiOS, which as a fiber optic line is considered a data service not a telecom service.
In the U.S., the "net neutrality" we took for granted for years was a direct result of the fact that we accessed the Internet over phone lines, and thus it was a common carrier service according to federal law. Now, with cable and fiber access, this protection is largely gone, and a fight for net neutrality protection must be waged.
Parent
Re:Korea has 10MBPs to the home... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
T-1 (Score:4, Funny)
--
So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
A T1 is slow by broadband standards. Compared with Europe, I think 2Mbps is actually too slow. I'd set the limit at 5Mbps as a minimum, and probably 10. They chose 2Mbps to make us look bad compared to the rest of the world without looking as totally backwater as we are.
Of course, if the government came back with stats that said the U.S. had 0.0000000001% broadband deployment, people might start suing their broadband providers for calling 768/128 "broadband" and then things would get ugly. On the othe
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What about uplink speed? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What about uplink speed? (Score:4, Insightful)
Providing greater upload speed runs counter to absolutely everything the telcos, and media conglomerates want in their new media delivery system.
Democratizing information and technology broadly works against both commercial and political interests. That's why uplink speed is BAD.
Parent
What about latency? (Score:5, Funny)
Also, the MTU (MINIMUM transfer unit) is 4 GB.
Well, 780 MB if you only want to use CDs.
Parent
rename it (Score:3, Funny)
The drama of SCSI? (Score:5, Funny)
SCSI-1
Fast SCSI
Fast Wide SCSI
Ultra SCSI(1.5)
Ultra SCSI(3)
Wide Ultra SCSI
Wide Ultra SCSI(1.5)
Wide Ultra SCSI(3)
Ultra2 SCSI
Wide Ultra2 SCSI
Ultra3 SCSI or Ultra160 SCSI
Ultra320 SCSI
Nah. Just make the term "Broad Band" a standard that is reviewed every 2 years and be done with it. Otherwise, in 20 years we'll be connecting over the Super double wide ultra fast inter tubes of doom .
-Rick
Parent
I thought Broadband Was... (Score:3, Insightful)
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So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?
Whoa! (Score:3, Funny)
What again was broadband? (Score:5, Informative)
FCC can't even seem to get a technicality right.
broadband != speed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What used to have something to do with carbon and hydrogen now means "yuppie approved".
Once you insert a technical term into the public vernacular, it will take on a widely different meaning.
Truth in advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
Definitions (Score:5, Insightful)
The definition also needs to specify up/down speeds. I don't consider a satellite connection with 1.5Mbs down and 56K up (phoneline) a broadband connection.
Truth in advertising (Score:4, Insightful)
The pedantic tech says... (Score:5, Insightful)
Like monkeying with the poverty line... (Score:4, Insightful)
This is similar to changing the poverty formula--or any other similar metric--in advance of an election.
Government in action. (Score:3, Interesting)
Rather than siting down for a minute and actually, you know, thinking about something, or heaven forbid talking to someone who has thought about it, politicians and bureaucrats just up and make laws. It's sort of like Slashdot, except the rule is "legislate first, then maybe think" instead of "post frist ;-, think second".
The most important difference between broadband and not broadband is Always On (or, as we Mediacom customers say, "Sometimes On"). The definition ought to be stated in terms of connect latency: how much difference is there between the time it takes to establish the first connection of a particular online session and the average connection time during a session? If the first is no different than the average, you have broadband.
The next most important attribute is Quality of Service:
The top speed of that connection, and the uplink and downlink speed difference, is important, but less so. Caching, prefetch, and P2P techniques mean that as long as you have anything faster than 9600bps, if it's always on you will have essentially the same online experience as someone with a 2Mbps connection.
Now, with regard to live video audio as a substitute for broadcast media, the faster the better. And 2Mbps is not enough, and is certainly not a magic threshhold, given the QoS concerns above.
"Up to" should be considered deceptive advertising (Score:5, Interesting)
What we need is an FTC rule that advertising any service quality or quantity with the words "up to" or substantially similar language is, by law, considered deceptive. Advertising should have to specify a guaranteed level of service. That would put cable and DSL on the same measurement scale, discourage underprovisioning, and make cellular data transfer rates in ads something you could rely on.
There's precedent for this. At various times in the past, the FTC had to tighten up the definition of "horsepower" for cars and "watts" for audio gear. [angelfire.com]
CALEA Impact (Score:3, Interesting)
Fix "Internet Service Provider" too (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:So I don't have broadband? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
ObSlashdot Meme (Score:3, Funny)
Re:So I don't have broadband? (Score:5, Funny)
You and your wife are boring. I can saturate both directions on the T1 at work without any help.
If you want to tell us to get off your lawn, just put up a sign.
Parent
Re:So I don't have broadband? (Score:5, Funny)
Your boss lets you look at porn at work?
-Rick
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So when will it be like Japan? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm going to expand a little on that with a simple line: what about consumers who want that bandwidth? Why should we have to wait for anything to download? And by wait I mean longer than instantaneous.
Parent
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:2mbps (Score:4, Funny)
Parent