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Communications The Internet

FCC Chair: Speed Standard of 25Mbps Down, 3Mbps Up Isn't Good Enough Anymore 131

Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel of the Federal Communications Commission proposes a new broadband standard of 100Mbps downloads and 20Mbps uploads, replacing the 2015's 25Mbps/3Mbps metric. From a report: "In today's world, everyone needs access to affordable, high-speed Internet, no exceptions," Rosenworcel said in the announcement today. "It's time to connect everyone, everywhere. Anything short of 100 percent is just not good enough." Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed "on a reasonable and timely basis" to all Americans. If the answer is no, the US law says the FCC must "take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market."

The FCC's previous Section 706 reports analyzed availability and included data on adoption but didn't consider affordability. In her announcement today, Rosenworcel said she "recently shared with her colleagues an updated Notice of Inquiry that would kick off the agency's evaluation of the state of broadband across the country, as required by Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act. Chairwoman Rosenworcel proposes that the Commission consider several crucial characteristics of broadband deployment, including affordability, adoption, availability, and equitable access, when determining whether broadband is being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion to 'all Americans.'"
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FCC Chair: Speed Standard of 25Mbps Down, 3Mbps Up Isn't Good Enough Anymore

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  • Depends (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jwhyche ( 6192 ) on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @09:10PM (#63714836) Homepage

    Depends on what you use it for. For a family of four it probably isn't. For a single person its probably good enough on a budget. For many small businesses that don't use it for video, but just for daily activities, is probably good enough.

    • Re:Depends (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 ) on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @10:32PM (#63714938) Homepage Journal

      Minimum should be 100/100 Mbps these days, no asymmetric speeds, that's a legacy from the ADSL era.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        It is still that way on cable for the same reasons it was on DSL. They want to use more of the line(s) for download because that is all the general consumer cares about.

        • While thatâ(TM)s true, you would think that they could have figured out a standard by now that can observe the demand for upload/download at any one moment and adjust on the fly.

          • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

            by Anonymous Coward

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docsis_3.1 [wikipedia.org], 60% there with DOCSIS 4.0. There's a lot of work just to support 3.1, so there's a lot of users still stuck on 3.0. A lot of cable users have been getting DOCSIS 3.0 downstream speeds but only DOCSIS 2.0 upstream speeds. If you're some place that actually offers DOCSIS 3.1, you'll probably also get much better uploads.

        • They do it so you can't/won't run a server on your end because of the crap upload speed. Any other reasons the ISP's cite are pure bull shit.

      • I am an old guy, family of four, not a heavy internet user. 25 down would suit our needs. 3 up will test my patience sometimes. But it is the bare minimum and probably not very future proof.
        Now I have the lowest speed package from my ISP. It is more than 100mbit down. That is fun, especially if you have fond memories of dial-up. I'd rather pay less and have a slower speed.
      • I agree it should be 100/100, but its a legacy of DEC, not ADSL.

      • Minimum should be 100/100 Mbps these days,..

        I'm curious: why "should"? Why not 50/50 or 200/200? What makes 100/100 special? And what makes you think there's a single minimum reasonable speed for everyone? That strikes me as similar to saying "a house should have at least 1,000 square feet per person."

        For a lot of people (most, I argue), 100/100 is way, way more than they need. If I'm checking WeChat or watching Paramount+, I don't need anything close to 100/100.

        • by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

          Because 100BASE-TX is the 100Mbps ethernet speed.

          Throttling the network artificially don't make sense. Coax nets are becoming obsolete as well. If you have a coax net then you can actually snoop on some of the traffic your neighbors gets too, even though it's less common now with https not all traffic is encrypted.

          • Because 100BASE-TX is the 100Mbps ethernet speed.

            I haven't used wired Ethernet in my home since I can't remember when. Everything is Wifi of some flavor. Why isn't that rate the rate you choose? Similarly, I can't remember the last time I saw a 10/100 Ethernet board. Everything seems to be 10/100/1000 these days. Why not gigabit up and down?

            I find your argument unpersuasive.

            In a fit of nerdiness, I looked up all the Ethernet standards I've used. The oldest was 5 Mbps "ThickLAN" using what I vaguely remember as about 1 cm cables. 10 Mbps "ThinLAN" using ~5

      • I wish. Still only get 50 up on my 1 gigabit plan
    • Per https://www.xfinity.com/networ... [xfinity.com]

      to get 20Mbits up, have to pay for 600Mbits down anyway.

      • If only the FCC would put in some minimum SLA requirements. Oh wait, I forgot about the competition from the lobbyists. (Of course the fine article goes into greater detail)
    • Ages ago I worked in an office with absolutely abysmal bandwidth and just as you suggested, the entire office did just fine until I streamed audio, and oh man did everyone notice quickly! (...and I never tried to do that again, but I just couldn't help myself. I just had to press that button to find out what would happen.)
    • ...but just for daily activities, is probably good enough.

      Spoken almost as if you're not a regulator intent on strong arming companies and buying votes through subsidies.

    • ...Anything short of 100 percent is just not good enough.

      Proof by demonstration she's incorrect. My mother-in-law has much lower than that and is happy as a clam. Ditto my dad. For that matter, I'm on Zoom all day and would also probably be fine with 25/3.

      I realize she's a politician spouting talking points so I assume she's duplicitous. I'd love to see some supporting documentation: how many people buy 10/1 versus 25/3 versus 100/20, what their actual usage is, and some correlation with their lifestyles. Someone downloading game ISOs all day is one class, someo

      • by King_TJ ( 85913 )

        I don't think "everyone needs 100 Mbps" for download speeds, by any means. But the providers have made it clear to customers for many years that they can provide speeds of at least 100 Mbps on the download side with little problem. Cable providers like Comcast and Spectrum were bumping this speed up by 100 Mbps at a time, free of charge, for existing subscribers, there for a while. (I remember paying for a 300 Mbps plans and then them announcing it would be 400 Mbps at no extra cost.)

        The real bottleneck has

        • by Xenx ( 2211586 )

          But the providers have made it clear to customers for many years that they can provide speeds of at least 100 Mbps on the download side with little problem.

          This isn't as much the case in rural areas. That is, it's entirely doable. It's just not economically viable in a lot of cases. Grant money is what makes it happen. Anyone that relies upon some for of DSL is just not going to attain those speeds at any sort of distance. It takes time and money to upgrade to fiber, and it also takes a customer base willing to adopt it. And to be clear, at least here, there are lot of customers that would rather hold on to their slower copper lines.

          The real bottleneck has typically been the upload side, and 3 Mbps is too little, these days.

          That is absolutely correct,

        • I don't think "everyone needs 100 Mbps" for download speeds, by any means. But the providers have made it clear to customers for many years that they can provide speeds of at least 100 Mbps on the download side with little problem...The real bottleneck has typically been the upload side, and 3 Mbps is too little, these days.

          Quite reasonable. If I were AT&T/Verizon/Comcast or whoever, I'd definitely be laying cable on the assumption I'd want to be able to support higher bit rates in the future. But I also have to believe at some point, future-proofing the network isn't cost effective. I suspect you're also right, 3 Mbps upload isn't good enough if two people are on a Zoom meeting or if you want to play a multiplayer game. Thing is, I suspect lots of people don't do those things. That's what I'd want to hear from the chairwo

    • by King_TJ ( 85913 )

      I'd agree with you, except I see so many issues that arise with that 3mb upload limit/cap. Especially in the case of a business, you run into the situation where it's "good enough" for 90% of what they do in a day. But they get clobbered when they've got a large document or video or CAD drawing they need to get emailed out or uploaded to a DropBox folder or what-not. (That upload bandwidth still needs to be sufficient to handle the checksums and smaller bits of data that need to keep going out in a timely m

  • Define away (Score:5, Insightful)

    by markdavis ( 642305 ) on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @09:13PM (#63714844)

    >"Federal Communications Commission proposes a new broadband standard of 100Mbps downloads and 20Mbps uploads, replacing the 2015's 25Mbps/3Mbps metric"

    They can define/redefine it however they like. But I regularly observe browsing and 1080P video streaming in less than 10Mb/s and it is fine. So let's not pretend that anything less than 100Mbs is somehow unusable. It just isn't true, even with multiple typical users.

    >"says the FCC must "take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market."

    Oh now that is a totally DIFFERENT topic. That has to do with offerings and pricing, not speed. Where I live there is *ZERO* competition. The cable company is all there is, and you can get multi Gbs if you want. But if you don't like their pricing or service or selection, well too bad. They just upped my bill AGAIN and updated the speed AGAIN. I don't NEED 500Mb/s, but I am going to pay MORE than I did before, because I have no choice... there is no lesser plan now. Give me the option to pay half as much and get 250Mb/s (half the bandwidth, which is what I had) and I would jump on it immediately.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Heck, give me a quarter of my 200 mbps at 80% of the price and I'd take it. Not happening though.

      • by Xenx ( 2211586 )
        The cost of the bandwidth is only a small portion of the overall cost of service. If anything, the complaint should be about how much more some places charge for the higher tier packages.
    • by Anonymous Coward

      perhaps they confuse speed with latency
      or all the extra hops a page invokes these days
      or the extra layers of bullshit that page demands the browser render (on lowspec machines)
      or the external-domain bullshit the pages insist on

      https://motherfuckingwebsite.c... [motherfuckingwebsite.com]

      the noise at the start of this post will not be improved by upping the "when saturated" raw thoroughput speed, of which 25mbps is actually crazy fast for non-video (and would be plenty for glorious 1080p if it wasn't for bloat and overhead)

      the spots wh

    • Oh now that is a totally DIFFERENT topic.

      Yep, and it's one of the most important ones, right up there with speed. Invalidate restrictions on municipal Internet, and much of the availability issue evaporates overnight.

    • Re:Define away (Score:5, Insightful)

      by slack_justyb ( 862874 ) on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @10:05PM (#63714908)

      Where I live there is *ZERO* competition

      Here's a story. I used to live in a suburb of Nashville Tennessee, pretty big town but not near a quarter million people. Was zoned in a Comcast monopoly area, best they could do for me was 300Mbps for $120/mo and the lowest I could go was 100Mbps for $90/mo (thanks Comcast), whereas the person. Literally right across the street from me who was AT&T + Comcast, could get their 1Gbps for $99/mo.

      About four years ago I moved into the middle of nowhere, BUT, they have their own coop teleco. They offered 1Gbps fiber to the house for $70/mo and Comcast is struggling to crack into the area with their $45/mo 300Mbps offer they keep shoving into my mailbox here.

      The problem is ISPs and the various monopolies they have. Having moved out to an area where actual competition happens, yeah, what's holding everyone back is fucking Comcast, TWC/Spectrum, AT&T, and Verizon. There's no doubt in my mind at this point these are a massive amount of the problem with American Internet. If the FCC would grow some balls and break these companies into thousands of companies, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

      The fact that my ISP today has about 11k customers (as the entire county has maybe about 30k people in it and that's being pretty generous) and is wildly profitable at selling $70/mo fiber gigabit really indicates that whatever the fuck is going on at like Comcast, has to be at least 300 employees shoveling cash into an inferno as fast as they possibility can, that or the CEO is just madly wealthy and gives every other employee the middle finger. We don't have a free market system in Internet, it's fucking monopolies and a few community telcos. And in every instance, when it's a coop or community telco, they're running fucking circles around anything the big ISPs could dream up in their most fevered dreams. And the fast that we've given these bastards billions of dollars to "build internet". These fuckers shouldn't walking free, they should be in a Federal Pound Me in the Ass Prison [youtube.com].

      • Re:Define away (Score:5, Informative)

        by fabioalcor ( 1663783 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @12:14AM (#63715040)

        Where I live there is *ZERO* competition

        Here's a story

        I came to tell a similar story, but from my country. We had a similar situation years ago, where like 3 or 4 big telcos dominated the market. In the day places like Europe, South Korea and some American areas were long enjoying blazing fast FTTH, we had monopolized, slow, unstable and overpriced ADSL, if we're lucky.
        And we did learn that in SK the secret for such high quality internet was competition. In big cities there were dozens of internet companies.
        And by some sort of miracle, our politicians, in a strike of good sense never seen before in our land, decided to decrease red tape in the land internet business, to improve competition.
        Soon, many smol guys fiber companies appeared, offering triple the speed, single digit ping, nice stability and benefits like included streaming subscriptions, for half, even one third the price the Big Telco were extorting us.
        TLDR: in my small and rural city of a (barely) developing country, where there was only 1 crappy expensive option, now we have like 5 good options for affordable prices, thanks to less regulation.
        Oh and all the Big Telcos are now in financial trouble, some already broke and were absorbed by some of the others.
        For me all of them deserve to crash and burn, good riddance to them.

        • Where I live, the same thing happened through increased regulation. Physical net owners were forced to allow competitors to use their net to sell connection, and now I have 8 offers of gigabit at very competitive prices on my wire coming into my home, and too many lower speed options at excellent value to count. Before there was no regulation, and companies would hog their wire and have high prices and low service, but the gov't wanted everyone to have good Internet so increased regulation.

    • But I regularly observe browsing and 1080P video streaming in less than 10Mb/s and it is fine.

      I'm happy you use the internet like it's 2005. I regularly observe and browse sites that load entire applications into the browser, and I do so while teleconferencing with multiple 1080p feeds (something that became perfectly normal during COVID as even random school kids had to monopolise that bandwidth for the the entire school day).

      I hope you didn't pre-order Starfield. At 10mbps the pre-order early play bonus may expire before you even download the 125GB install files.

      It's not 2005 anymore. Watching a 1

      • What you say is perfectly valid. But note I was talking about "typical" or "average" people. You aren't that :) Most on Slashdot aren't.

    • by necro81 ( 917438 )

      They can define/redefine it however they like. But I regularly observe browsing and 1080P video streaming in less than 10Mb/s and it is fine. So let's not pretend that anything less than 100Mbs is somehow unusable. It just isn't true, even with multiple typical users.

      Given how shitty the Quality of Service is, you probably need a 100 Mbps connection in order to actually achieve 10!

      This, really, is what I would like the FCC to be stricter about. All the ISPs like to advertise the "up to ### Mbps" metri

      • Agreed. The quality of the service matters just as much (if not more) than the claimed speed metrics.

  • ...or very low cost. I was on a TWC/Spectrum "everyday low price" plan when it was 3/1. They bumped their speeds, and I screwed myself out of getting a grandfathered plan because I went to one of their faster speed plans. Now, the grandfathered ELP plans are like $15-20 per month (I think), and 30/3 or something.

    • ...or very low cost.

      I'd be happy if T-bone steaks were free or low cost too. I'm not going to get it.

      But this is the crux of the issue: who gets to decide what products are offered at what prices? Chairwoman Rosenworcel seems to be saying she knows you'd prefer 100/20 at some higher price to 25/3 (or even 10/1) at a much lower price. I have no idea where she gets this confidence. I'm not even that confident I want coffee over tea this morning.

  • The only way to make sure everyone in the US has broadband is with a satellite mega-constellation, as envisioned by WorldVu/OneWeb back in 2012 and then blatantly stolen (reference: https://archive.ph/20140903223... [archive.ph] ) by and implemented by SpaceX as Starlink.

    • Might be ok for downloading traffic, but the competition for RF bandwidth could make performance worse than a noisy dialup line in the middle of a virgin forest.

      And upload speeds? Ha Ha Ha!

  • Maybe they should get the lead out.
  • ... more truckloads of cash for the telecoms.

  • by Wokan ( 14062 ) on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @10:04PM (#63714906) Journal

    Profitability and incumbent carriers are the biggest barriers. When individual towns tried to deal with incumbent indifference their efforts were sued into oblivion. Small companies can't do anything without the big kids taking them out at the knees with either their army of lawyers or just buying them out and shutting them down.

  • by mtaht ( 603670 ) on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @10:30PM (#63714934) Homepage
    The FCC mandating bufferbloat mitigations like fq_codel, or cake, or libreqos.io, would do a lot more, faster, and cheaper, to improve QoE and the ability to WFH.
  • 25 is good enough IF they could guarantee it. But we know they won't. We know that when they say 25 you'd probably actually provide 10 or less. That's why the standard needs to be 100 so they'll provide 25 consistently.

  • Even if you're using one of the more recent wifi standards, your typical device is limited to a tiny fraction of your actual home internet speed.
    Ethernet FTW.

    • Even if you're using one of the more recent wifi standards, your typical device is limited to a tiny fraction of your actual home internet speed.

      I remember getting 50mbps on wi-fi G back in the early 2000s. Nowadays I regularly get 200+ mbps with wi-fi AC on the cheap-ish APs I bought a few years ago. Wi-fi has been capable of fully delivering the sorts of speeds discussed in this article for a long, long time.

      • by Bert64 ( 520050 )

        You *can* get those speeds, in good conditions...
        Back when you were using G in the early 2000s, there were probably not many other wifi users nearby. When i first deployed wifi at home, my network was the only one visible, now i can see 20+ just from my laptop and many more with a high gain antenna.

        A lot of people use poor quality equipment, poor placement of devices, obstacles like walls and large furniture items, interference from neighboring users and other devices etc. A lot of people also clog the avai

  • As a minimum for participating citizens, that is. If you want good little consumers, 100/3 is more like it.
    • by jandoe ( 6400032 )

      In my village in Spain I can only choose between 400, 600, 800 and 1000 symmetric Mbps. 25 or 100 Mbps doesn't exist since at least a decade.

      • That's nice, and I have several hundred megabits per second at my disposal too (the cheapest FTTH plan), but we're talking about minimums here.
        • by jandoe ( 6400032 )

          The minimum available in my village is 4000 Mbps. I though I made it clear. My local provider doesn't offer any slower plans. I guess you could try hard to find some other, slower plan from some weird provider but it would probably cost you more.

          • by jandoe ( 6400032 )

            400 Mbps of course.

          • Are you deliberately trying to not understand the point? The discussion is about a mandate for every place in the country, not the minimum you can get in a particular place. It's nice that you got fast internet, but that isn't exclusive to your country. Lots of places in the US have fast internet too.

            Does Spain have a minimum internet speed that the government is working toward being available everywhere? Or is it "I've got mine, who cares about your village being left behind"? Hint: What you have isn't av
            • by jandoe ( 6400032 )

              Well, you're right. I got your point now. For accessing government pages, online banking or checking bus schedule 30 Mbps is enough. Only people that use internet for entertainment need more.

  • by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @01:32AM (#63715134) Journal

    Correct me if I'm mistaken, but I believe 25/3 is the current limit of DSL technology. Forcing a higher standard suddenly puts AT&T uVerse, for instance, in trouble, maybe. I'd expect some enthusiastic lobbying.

    As others have reported, in other countries it's been significantly faster symmetrical for a long time. And I strongly suspect that the necessity of offering asymmetric provisioning is not a technical issue and hasn't been for some time.

    I happen to live in a part of the US with a relatively new fiber infrastructure, and gig symmetric has been available for a while. And it's cheap.

    I think what we're really saying here is that a huge segment of the US is held prisoner by the owners of a century old copper pair infrastructure. And they're not budgin'.

    • by Megane ( 129182 )

      Uverse is VDSL2, and can go up to about 50/6, maybe a little better with perfect copper. I'm getting 35/6, and that's on the third pair that the guy tried. (I'm about 4 blocks to the box.) It is also now a legacy service, but the so-called "AT&T Fiber" only offers me 100mbit here. I doubt they could do even that much with this crap copper, and I've seen no signs of digging.

      But it doesn't really matter, since Google Fiber has been cutting into all the streets in my neighborhood here the past few weeks.

      • I have to wonder, though, if Google Fiber will be allowed to complete their infrastructure and actually offer it to sale to individuals. Or if AT&T will grease some hands and get it shut down.

  • Rural county in GA and most people get 3Mbps download speed if it's working at all. Be a cold day in hell before they bump everyone up to 100Mbps DL. I get steady 25 Mbps and it's ok. 2 years ago after checking their website, said I could get 50 Mbps for same price I been paying. New modem and all I could get was 40 Mbps, but happy. Then part of card inside burnt out, dropping me to 15 Mpbs. Tech service comes out, puts in new box, says he has to OK new box and then says, sir you are outside the required 5
    • I have family outside (or just inside, I forget) Greenville (rural area for those outside GA), and they just got fiber. I'm in the Atlanta suburbs and have no fiber option. Even though I'm pretty sure they ran fiber down GA154, right past my neighborhood.
    • I have Windstream, and I find them to be pretty darned good. Up until about 2015, I had Windstream DSL at 3Mb. Spectrum is in my area and was faster when it worked, but it would go down every day for hours at a time. The Windstream was at least stable at 3Mbit. Around 2015 Spectrum fixed their infrastructure and became stable, so I switched. About three years ago I discovered that Windstream had run fiber down my street. They offered me a 200Mbit symmetric connection for about $60 a month. I switche

    • by oldave ( 160729 )

      I've been on Windstream for years here in Houston county, GA (not exactly rural anymore). First DSL, started at 50, they upgraded the DSLAM, offered 100, that worked a treat. Another DSLAM upgrade and for a couple of years, I was on the "up to 200" plan, got ~180 down, and they just let 'er eat on upstream, routinely got 60-70 up. Rare to have any outage.

      In March this year, they brought fiber through our neighborhood. I'm now on 1gig/1gig fiber, $70/month. This week, Windstream began offering 8gig symm

  • by PJ6 ( 1151747 ) on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @06:14AM (#63715442)
    I bet there's some big federal program in the works that will pay billions for upgrades that will never happen.
  • "Anything short of 100 percent is just not good enough."

    And 100% is not possible, so enjoy making the perfect the enemy of the good and setting everyone up for failure. Big talk from a space-wasting bureaucrat might impress some weak-minded journalists, but it's just more hot air from a pompous fool.

  • This all comes from 1996 telecommunications act (47 USC 1302) where the term "Advanced telecommunications capability" is defined.

    "The term "advanced telecommunications capability" is defined, without regard to any transmission media or technology, as high-speed, switched, broadband telecommunications capability that enables users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications using any technology."

    Nowhere in the definition is there ANY preference expressed for dire

  • Cool, so who had that speed? When I was on dial-up I could choose my ISP.
  • Free stuff for everyone! Paid for by YOU.

  • Our area only has ATT DSL. 5MBs down and 1MB up on a good day. They have no plans to expand or improve service and refuse to add new customers while disconnecting some old customers. Our local ISP has tried for years to install fiber, but has run into stiff opposition from the telecom monopolies. Their attitude seems to be ... We won't provide service and will use every dirty trick in the book to prevent others from providing service

    We need laws that allow local ISPs to install fiber without interference. A

  • For the last year I have struggled mightily to get any kind of broadband internet there. I tried wired solutions, wireless point to point, wireless from AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon. I looked into satellite (mainly Hughes, Starlink isn't available yet). It all sucked. Bad latency. Unreliable connections. Several providers blanketed the area in advertising but then determined they couldn't serve my address. Even the stuff that reliably "worked" ran at around 10mbs max.

    Finally I found a company with

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