FCC Scraps Old Speed Benchmark, Says Broadband Should Be at Least 100Mbps (arstechnica.com) 103
The Federal Communications Commission has voted to raise its Internet speed benchmark for the first time since January 2015, concluding that modern broadband service should provide at least 100Mbps download speeds and 20Mbps upload speeds. From a report: An FCC press release after today's 3-2 vote said the 100Mbps/20Mbps benchmark "is based on the standards now used in multiple federal and state programs," such as those used to distribute funding to expand networks. The new benchmark also reflects "consumer usage patterns, and what is actually available from and marketed by Internet service providers," the FCC said.
The previous standard of 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream lasted through the entire Trump era and most of President Biden's term. There has been a clear partisan divide on the speed standard, with Democrats pushing for a higher benchmark and Republicans arguing that it shouldn't be raised. The standard is partly symbolic but can indirectly impact potential FCC regulations. The FCC is required under US law to regularly evaluate whether "advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion" and to "take immediate action to accelerate deployment" and promote competition if current deployment is not "reasonable and timely."
The previous standard of 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream lasted through the entire Trump era and most of President Biden's term. There has been a clear partisan divide on the speed standard, with Democrats pushing for a higher benchmark and Republicans arguing that it shouldn't be raised. The standard is partly symbolic but can indirectly impact potential FCC regulations. The FCC is required under US law to regularly evaluate whether "advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion" and to "take immediate action to accelerate deployment" and promote competition if current deployment is not "reasonable and timely."
"Fast" is relative (Score:2, Insightful)
It depends on how you use the Internet. For some people, they're downloading so much crap that it strains even a Gig connection at times. Others just want to check their mail and do crosswords online. Even old DSL speeds are fine for that. "Fast" is whatever is suiting your needs.
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Re:"Fast" is relative (Score:4, Informative)
Shouldn't you at least look around you and see what is available when evaluating whether something is fast?
You should factor in what actual customers are using it for, whether they are satisfied with it, and also consider trending applications/scenarios.
Many people here mention games. The number of people who play online games that require a fast Internet is disputable. (Industry likes to say there are a lot, but they are biased and I am skeptical of their numbers.) Personally, because of my business I am in regular personal contact with hundreds of people. None of them play video games. Ever. They also only very rarely do videoconferencing and none of them watching streaming. (They do a small amount of watching YouTube though.) They do listen to music. The few that Zoom are working from home but they're only doing that a little (preferring low-bandwidth things like email, texting, and mainly using the telephone). They are mix of "ordinary people" and high-end professionals (corporate managers, Government lawyers, software developers, consultants, engineers) and everyone I'm talking about lives in the suburbs of Washington D.C., Boston, MA, or San Francisco. Not the rural sticks. Not technologically challenged people. Youngest age is 25. They all have iPhones but don't watch videos or game on them, either, and don't do video calls. The younger ones do Instagram. Okay, a tiny few of the youngest ones play some video games. Their usage patterns are nothing like mine and nothing like the average Slashdot reader.
My service actually clocks in at 250/250/7ms, but I recently only had 100 Mbps. With 100Mbps I can do everything I want, which includes: video streaming services, Zoom, and the easy stuff like music. I don't play videogames, either, but I know I can get 70fps over the 100 Mbps, and can download Linux distros and various analytical data sets I'm interested in, and manage my cloud-based servers (that's just ssh). I'm online at my desk usually 14-17 hours every day of the week.
So a baseline of 100 Mbps seems reasonable to me.
The old numbers sound ridiculously slow. (DSL ?!?)
I've had every broadband medium/service since 1985, except satellite. How fast is that, anyway? And should that count? I would want rural people to have service that's as good as mine (100 Mbps), so how does that play into these statistics of public policy?
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Personally, because of my business I am in regular personal contact with hundreds of people. None of them play video games. Ever.
Depends on how you cook the numbers. If you include things like playing games on your phone, then their 3.2 billion number is plausible, though most are probably occasional players. If you mean actually playing streaming games on a computer, it's probably just double-digit *millions* worldwide. So maybe O(1%) of people.
It's also highly dependent on age, gender, and whether you have kids or a job.
They also only very rarely do videoconferencing
So none of the people you talk to work from home? Statistically, 26% of U.S. households have at least one per
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I was with you until your "I know I can get 70 fps over 100 mbps" part.
Did you know you can also get your computer to display 70 frames per second WITHOUT AN INTERNET CONNECTION at all?
Re:"Fast" is relative (Score:5, Interesting)
Indeed. Until recently I was stuck on a 1.2 mbps DSL connection, and while downloading stuff would take ages I also maintained a solid 50ms ping in games I played. That at least made it bearable.
Re:"Fast" is relative (Score:4, Informative)
For an individual, yes. For dealing with national policy, no. You need to sample "how people use the internet" and what the available speeds support versus what they could. Your cherry-picked example would be on the far left of the bell curve, being both suitable on low speed connection and as a sample of what people commonly do -- and only do -- on the internet. Your example of the downloader straining gigabit connections is an example from the far right of the curve. As national policy, we're more concerned with the big, fat middle.
Like it or not a lot of what is commonly called work, especially office work, can effectively be done remotely with suitable broadband speeds. Ensuring adequate broadband means those workers can relocate, and revitalize, small town and rural America.
Re:"Fast" is relative (Score:5, Interesting)
They are setting the benchmark for the lowest service considered broadband, i.e. able to claim funding for deployment to underserved areas. They have to set it at a level where a household could reasonably get by with it, which means multiple users streaming, doing interactive tasks like video calling and gaming, and installing popular software and games.
While many people could, by themselves, manage with a few megabits per second, if they set that as the baseline it wouldn't help families or anyone who needs something that allows use of all popular services in a reasonable manner.
Re:"Fast" is relative (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem, as I understand it, is that everytime they increase the minimum it makes the ISPs start over with bidding on urban underserved & exurban underserved [suburban underserved mostly doesn't exist]. The true rural never gets served, b/c it's not profitable enough. So the ISPs take the federal money over and over but never improve the broadband footprint.
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Why don't they just make it so they have to serve the worst areas first? Hook up all the sub 10Mbps areas before they can get cash for the others.
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Regulatory capture, mostly.
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For the purposes of the FCC, and based on our collective pandemic experience, "good enough" should probably be measured against whatever is necessary to maintain two simultaneous video conferences. (E.g., a single parent working from home and one kid doing remote learning.) By that metric, 100 Mbps is probably overkill, even when taking into account the usual bullshit of "speeds up to..." you see in advertisements. But old DSL would fail that test.
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Re: "Fast" is relative (Score:1)
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Disagree.
If you're not sharing your connection, you want to saturate your bandwidth when downloading. Making full utilization of your bandwidth is a desirable state and not "straining". Would you buy an F1 car and then only do 30mph so you don't "strain" it?
Also, ISPs rely on overselling bandwidth. If you're not using 100% of your connection, you're not encouraging them to spend money upgrading their infrastructure. If you don't, your money is going to their shareholders, not bettering your service. ISPs he
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ISPs in the U.S. don't upgrade their infrastructure unless they absolutely, positively have to, or are ordered to do so. If you're saturating your line they will notify you and tell you to cut back. If you continue they will throttle you using terms in their contract.
That said, I'm at work. My machine is turned off at home. How would you like me to use all of my line speed when
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That said, I'm at work. My machine is turned off at home. How would you like me to use all of my line speed when I'm at work?
You could run a Tor node. Or a seedbox. My security cameras are uploading to my cloud storage. I'm sure you could find a way.
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I write this as someone stuck on 72Mb DSL at home due to the flat (apartment) block I live in not having any internal data cabling except POTS copper lines.
If you live in a flat, then the area surely must have mobile coverage? Why not use mobile broadband, where speeds have been 200-300 Mbps for the last decade or so...?
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I'd be pretty happy with 35/20 (enough for an UHD stream and some overhead down and to do work in a reasonable time up).
But I think 100/20 is pretty reasonable, though I don't think I'd have a problem with 50/20 being the definition.
The old definition of allowing 3 up was pretty bad around here.
I had to go to 200/20 to get over 6 up and it was quite expensive, whole 250/6 was pretty cheap (second cheapest plan with an add on for 250/6, and a very premium plan to get that 20 up).
I'm sure I'm not the only per
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100/20 is plenty for lots of people. UHD streaming often requires around 25-30Mbps, so this lets 2-3 UHD streams to happen simultaneously
You might think why - but streaming is currently a viable method of TV distribution along with regular cable, OTA and satellite. And given the uptake and numbers over the past few years, it's reasonable to assume that the average family will probably want the ability to watch 2 or 3 streams at full quality on their TV - there will be lower quality streams to tablets and su
Re:"Fast" is relative (Score:5, Insightful)
Fast isn't relative. What you're describing is not a different definition of fast, it's a different requirement. If you're just doing online crosswords and checking your mail you don't need "fast" internet. It's okay to use the word "slow". It's not a dirty word.
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Re:"Fast" is relative (Score:4, Interesting)
No they aren't. Your requirements differ, not the definition of the word.
I can remember when 56K was considered blazing fast, and if you're just working with text, such as an old-time BBS or Usenet, 2400 is Just Fine
At the time 56K was considered fast. Now it's considered slow. If you're working with text such as an old-time BBS then you can comfortably use a "slow" internet connection. That doesn't make your internet fast. When you drive in a school zone your car doesn't magically get a Ferrari logo on it.
Dial-up is not fast in 2024, regardless of what application you use.
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I remember when 30 bps (30 characters per second) was considered fast (because we were used to 6 characters/sec) and we walked uphill in the paper tape. Seriously, I started in the early 1970s.
When I first got on the ARPANET around 1976, the long-haul backbone was 56K. IMP (router) to Host speeds were much less than this, and multiple hosts might be sharing that 56K backhaul line. Each Host weighed a ton or more and gave timesharing service to many users. Users were connected to the host on 300-1200 baud typewriter (often CRT) terminals. Transferring a file from your host to another host (FTP) was probably (I forget) no more than about 7 K bits/sec.
Some people did play interactive video games over these "fast" connections, using faster host-to-smart-terminal interfaces For example MAZE [wikipedia.org] on an IMLAC [wikipedia.org] connected to a PDP-10 host, playing against someone on another PDP-10 across the ARPANET.
I am sure that BBN, for example, had network stats but I just don't recall more than I've said here. Amazingly, hosts did not have any ping or traceroute or similar program. Some very fancy implementations of FTP clients did allow you to press a key to see the progress and would compute a transfer speed, though. I never transferred any files so large that I wondered how long it would take. A megabyte file in those days would be considered a huge monster.
Anyway that's today's history lesson, kids!
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Fast isn't relative.
The meaning of lots of words is relative to the time and context in which they are used, fast definitely being one of them. What was fast (internet) 20 years ago isn't fast now, and what's fast now likely won't be fast in another 20 years. Fast for a sprinter, isn't fast for a car, which isn't fast for a plane, and certainly isn't fast for the internet (which basically isn't comparable). Nevertheless, I agree with your response to the OP about the difference between a definition and an application requireme
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Indeed. Time and Context. Time: 2024, Context: internet connection speed.
That's really all there is to it. Your internet connection speed doesn't get redefined by its application. It is still an internet connection speed. It may get redefined over time (which is exactly what is happening here), but slow internet speeds aren't magically fast internet speeds simply because you have a low bandwidth requirement.
Your car doesn't get faster when you drive in school zone.
Well... unless you really don't like kids..
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Your car doesn't get faster when you drive in school zone.
Tell that to my parole officer...
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Sure. And as connection bandwidth goes up, people find new uses for it, so what's "fast" or "adequate" is an endlessly moving target.
In a way this is marketers being hoist on their own petard. Originally, "broadband" had a completely unambiguous technical meaning: it meant that a signaling scheme had no zero hertz component, and which therefore could be frequency multiplexed on the same medium with other signals. The antonym of "broadband" wasn't "narrowband", it was "baseband".
The big problem in bringin
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>Every time I hear someone say "narrowband" I want to throttle them.
Interesting. I don't think I've never heard anyone use that term to mean "slow internet."
When I got into radio I realized "oh, that's what bandwidth actually means" and it got borrowed in networking to mean data transfer rate. (Of course, bandwidth does correlate with a channel's bit rate, more or less depending on the signalling method...)
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Do you have any source for your claimed historical meaning of broadband? I'm an EE/CS guy, and work in a company that mostly does DSP .. and in my work, broadband vs narrowband is all about the spectral width of a signal, with a typical cutoff around 100 KHz. (Phone lines and voice data are unequivocally narrowband, but broadband for us is still pretty tight in terms of modern signals.) "Baseband" means the signal is transmitted at or around DC, which is an entirely separate question from being able to s
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Well, for example here [techtarget.com], although that's rather imprcise not authoritative it's clear that it means a broadband signal has no DC component. I'd have to dig out my old college textbooks from the 1980s for better citation; and they're up in the attic in a pile of cardboard boxes. If you look on the Internet for tthis use of he term you have to look prior to the adoption of the term to refer to Internet, which is when the meaning changed. The problem is most of those instances are quite sloppy and incorrect i
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I'm an EE/CS guy, and work in a company that mostly does DSP [,,,] "Baseband" means the signal is transmitted at or around DC
I never (bothered to) understand when the term "baseband" seemed to refer to a type of Ethernet. Like 10BASE5 was 50 Ohm coax doing 10 Mhz Ethernet. What's that all about?
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Every time I hear someone say "narrowband" I want to throttle them
That's interesting, because every time an ISP hears "broadband" they want to throttle someone, too!
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You might think DSL speeds are sufficient for Grandma who from your observations of her usage patterns just appears to need the ability to check email and do online crosswords. Until one day you email her a link to a video you took of her grandkids, and she is distraught with all this modern newfangled technology leaving her unable to view the video you sent her and she as no idea why.
Presumptions that someone should be satisfied with significantly less than the state of the art only lead to disappointment.
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This ruling is more about misleading labels, than about how much speed people need. The FCC is saying here that slower speeds can't be called "broadband."
Re:That's a lot of Mbps (Score:5, Insightful)
Your assumption is entirely based on a single-user use case.
The FCC definition is more designed for a "family" home where there are multiple concurrent users.
Also, streaming video isn't the only purpose of the internet.
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You also happen to be wrong in your assumption of how many people lived on the internet at my house during Covid, although I'
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42/6 seems a little tight for an HD video call too run smoothly with much else going on.
The downstream is fine, but 6 up leaves a lot of common uses wanting.
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And I just found I have >800 down and 6 up. Thanks Comcast.
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The 800 comes with 15 up here.
What's wild is that I consistently get at least 30 up (usually closer to 50) with my wireless service from T-Mobile (which I replaced my Comcast with since 6 up was rough for working from home).
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I just moved so once they manage to get the service working at the new place (today, hopefully) if it's still lousy I will see if there's something they can do about it. My understanding is that isn't just the way it is, the upstream is intended to be much faster than that.
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I would think that there's certain liberties you can take WRT latency for a broadcast you can't for a call leading to different codec selections.
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There are other limiting cases. Try being in a video conference on a connection with only 3 Mbps upstream. It's a lot of fun. If you like that, try having two people in the household being on video conferences at the same time.
The 25 Mbps downstream in the old definition was probably adequate for a lot of people. You can stream high definition video, and yes, that's the highest bandwidth thing most people do. Maybe it's limiting in a large household where several people want to stream video at the same
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As a taxpayer I would not feel inclined to use public funds to subsidize 100 Mbps.
As a taxpayer you have helped subsidize hundreds of billions of dollars given to telcos to build out the last mile which they gave away in executive bonuses, spent on lobbying, used to pay dividends, etc.
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Not to make new subsidies but to tighten up the ones that already exist. As someone mentioned earlier, putting the standard at 100 Mbps would weed out all the terrible providers with substandard speed that currently are considered "broadband." So for 1) they won't qualify for subsidies (rural broad band, under served urban, etc) unless they improve their networks. And for 2) it will change the availability surveys for rural areas and give a better reflection of what is actually out there.
I have a lakehou
Re: That's a lot of Mbps (Score:2)
Thanks for getting it, AC. Too bad the mod that follows me around dropping troll mods on facts doesn't.
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The point is that we already did subsidize it. We just didn't get much for our money. Now the FCC is putting pressure on them to deliver more for the money they already received.
Guess what just happened earlier this month? Comcast spontaneously increased my upstream bandwidth from a pathetic 5 Mbps to an actually usable 20 Mbps. Maybe it's just a coincidence that they did it a week before the FCC finalized the new standard. And the level they raised it to just happened to be the minimum needed to meet
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You can't even handle 4K video stream without glitching? That's not acceptable internet for even a single person living by themselves, that is you not even being able to use a modern TV.
Subsidies (Score:3)
If we accept that subsidies and corporate welfare will exist for the time being, we should not subsidize the things we do not want.
Make them work for it - they are legally required to not work for it (fiduciary duty) if they're not required to do it.
Republicans probably think the subsidies shouldn't exist and people will do the right thing given the chance but they'll refuse to strike the root and change the incentives. They're usually "worst of both worlds" cowards on issues like this, healthcare, etc. They'll do nothing and consider themselves virtuous despite the old adage.
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The problem with "small government" is the government is paying tel-cos to build the network and paying again for people to use the network: That's definitely not Capitalism and even Communism isn't that dishonest.
The consequence of stopping corporate welfare is a bitch-fight even the Republicans will avoid. Republicans complain only about unemployed/umemployable persons and single mums receiving welfare: They're always willing to give money to rich 'people'.
Should be Gigabit (Score:4, Funny)
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Moore's Law had nothing to do with internet speeds.
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Not directly, no. But...bits/Hz efficiency is dependent on signal processing and almost all of that is digital. Dr. Moore's observation does have a significant voice on the economics of high speed communications.
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I personally don't want to pay for everyone to have the ability to stream at 8K. I don't even see at 8K. Why should I be paying taxes to guarantee that my neighbors can watch their sportsball at ridiculous resolutions? What's the other use case for such ridiculous amounts of bandwidth?
There is a certain amount of broadband that I feel that we should subsidize, but I think that it is very easy to get carried away.
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The "p" in fttp (fiber to the premises) is wildly variable. The premises could be a single-family home with a handful of internet users. Or it could be a 100-unit apartment complex with several hundred users.
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Fibre to the cabinet and Adsl just don't cut it anymore. Moore's law means they are effectively slower than dialup was.
Uhh, did you ever live with dialup? I was using dialup, 1.5 Mbps DSL, and so forth. What we have today is much better than dialup. Now, if I could convince browsers to never, ever automatically start playing video ads, it would be better yet.
Gigabit fttp should be the minimum and 10 gigabit should be desirable by the 2030s. Predictions for 10th generation consoles include terabyte download sizes and 8k streaming services, all of which need multiple gigabits. Lazy isps who don't roll out fast enough should be charged with sabotage of modern society.
Slow down there Jackson. No one is saying ISPs shouldn't offer faster service for those who are willing to pay for it. The argument isn't even really about what service gets the "broadband" label slapped on it (and the whole argument is kind of weird when you think abou
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Gigabit fttp should be the minimum
Sorry but that is abject horseshit. 99.9% of consumers don't have a need for a gigabit connection right now, so there's no reason to set that as a benchmark. Shit I download TBs of data a month, have multiple 4K TVs here streaming away, download and upload shit out the fucking wazoo, remotely use many files from the cloud, ... and yet the other day when T-Mobile dropped by to offer me gigabit FTTH I turned them away saying I was more than satisfied with the virtually instantaneous speeds I experience the in
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caps need to go or be set much higher with fair bi (Score:2)
caps need to go or be set much higher with fair billing.
Not the BS of if you rent the Comcast router you get uncapped for free but if you have your own device you pay like X2 the cost of renting
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Not an American..
Bah!
You are so behind, Where I am currently, 1gbps is common and cheap (20-40usd can get it from various ISPs) , and 10gbps is not expensive.
You should aim for 10 gbps now while you are aiming for the sky.
I'm fine at 50Mbps (Score:2)
I work from home and multiple people in my household are streaming video simultaneously all day. 50Mbps down seems to be fine.
The only time it bogged down was when one of my kids was downloading an 80GB game, and that was only because Verizon throttled it down hard. Very annoying.
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Re: I'm fine at 50Mbps (Score:2)
Refinement of definition needed (Score:1)
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I believe the current system allows for a providers bandwidth to be averaged in order to show the "overall" performance and service being delivered in order to satisfy the requirements...The FCC should add that the lower tier plans should be required to stay in place as to not taint the averages. No gaming the system,
Interesting observation. I'd be very open to the idea of improving reporting requirements (assuming customers actually care about those). Rather than showing a mean or median rate, show me the actual used and maximum rates for my house, or my neighborhood, or whatever. Problem is, only observability nerds like you and me will care about that, everyone else just wants "snappy". And that's the thing: if you're happy with your service, does it really matter if your download is 22 or 27 Mbps?
Thing is, this isn'
And for some in rural areas (Score:5, Interesting)
There are nearly no options at any price
I live in rural NorCal and my neighbor ran the local ISP
They got grants to install fiber, but faced roadblocks and lawsuits from the telecoms
The telecoms seemed to have the attitude... We won't serve your area, but we own it and will prevent others from serving it
We need laws that allow local providers to compete fairly
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Pretty sure those laws already exist. 50 years of "business-friendly" voting got us to this, complete lack of enforcement.
Satellite? (Score:2)
Not even satellites like StarLink?
Speed is not the only metric. (Score:3)
Speed is important, but at a minimum I'd like to know about outages and latency. And consistency. If my "broadband" is 200Mps sometimes, but throttled to 5Mbps on Wednesday nights, then it's not as useful to me as a constant 75Mbps even if it is "over 100Mbps" on average. And I think "cost" is a far more important metric to most -- U.S. internet doesn't seem advanced at all when you look at that metric.
And how about adding a category for "adequate" speed? Higher speed is great and all, but most households could function just fine with 10Mbps, 25Mbps is already overkill.
Better latency for gamers? (Score:3)
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Anyone bothered by the partisanship? (Score:5, Insightful)
For all that I'm annoyed by this action and the inevitable regulation and subsidies it's setting the stage for, there's a deeper problem.
TFA mentions this whole action was tied up in the partisan nature of the FCC. Wasn't that entirely not the intent of regulatory agencies? They were supposed to be above the political fray, making rules based on expert opinions, deliberate rule making processes, and rational debate. Instead we seem to have agency after agency wildly see-sawing on rules based on which party controls Congress and the White House. If, as seems all too plausible, Trump gets re-elected, I have no doubt the FCC will be re-packed to reverse this decision.
It's nuts. I don't see how any individual or business can plan in this environment.
I know, It's naive to expect executive branch agencies to not reflect the policy goals of an elected executive. But could we at least hope for a little consistency?
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They were supposed to be above the political fray, making rules based on expert opinions, deliberate rule making processes, and rational debate. Instead we seem to have agency after agency wildly see-sawing on rules based on which party controls Congress and the White House and the Supreme Court
FTFY, the Supreme Court is more and more involved in deciding technical matters now. If you think the internet is "a series of tubes" is bad, just wait till you see how Originalism gets applied. I'm not even joking.
100/20 is not unreasonable! (Score:2)
One item they shoul
Allow me to retort (Score:1)
As an ISP serving areas with farmland nearby:
Fuck you.
Probably to target Musk and Starlink (Score:2)
(the reason could also be geopolitical in that they think Starlink is vulnerable to anti-satellite weapons)
With Starship soon ready to launch the new bigger and improved Starlink satellites en masse, they are sure to beat the Rural Broadband minimum speeds, so... move the goal posts.
new DEI hires (Score:2)
I've seen/used it all (Score:5, Informative)
I'm lucky enough to have grown up in a technical household with my father being an electronics tech and HAM radio operator (I eventually got my HAM ticket too). In the early 80's we set up CW/RTTY radio BBS' and then moved to packet radio for speeds of up to 1.2K over 2 meter. In the early 90's I set up a local POTS BBS starting at 2.4K and eventually shut that down when 56K was the norm. It was at this time local ISPs (I helped run one of them) starting popping up offering "The Internet" for $19.95 a month at 56K. Then Ma Bell stepped in with DSL and squeezed all the local ISPs to death. Since then speed has been irrelevant because it's all been a monopoly. Competition is dead. Let's focus on local municipalities allowing more competition. When there was competition from the 5 other local ISPs we had in town we all competed to offer the best damn service we could. You can mandate MBs all you want but without competition nothing will change. The monopolies are ripping us off for what they offer. They know it, we know it, but nothing changes.
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Use of bad language (Score:2)
Apologists on this sight?
Sad!
Oh lookie there... (Score:2)
I'm absolutely shocked and amazed that they left the upload at exactly what Comcast already provisions.
Or... (Score:2)
You could define a Broad Band as a group of musicians comprised of females.
(or at least all the vocalists are females)
I don't really agree? (Score:2)
What does one REALLY need more than 25MBit for? A Netflix 1080p stream seems to be about 5MBit.
Sure, 4k seem to be around 15MBit - but do you really need 2 simultanous 4k streams as a MINIMUM? For the vast majority of people, 1080p is more than enough.
Apart from video streaming, the only thing really benefiting from higher speeds are faster bulk downloads (like huge games
Upload speeds are what matter (Score:4, Insightful)
I have 350/10, and I would kill for 20 up.
But really, the minimum should be 50 up, IMO. Download you can often wait on. Uploads, OTOH, tend to need to happen right away so you can share stuff with colleagues. The disparity is anti-publication. Lots of people have good reason to want to publish something.
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The disparity is anti-publication. Lots of people have good reason to want to publish something.
And that is the way it will stay. The State has a vested interest in hindering publication by the masses.
First, the State wants to be able to control the narrative.
Second, the State is able to gather obscene amounts of wealth by enforcing monopolies in Publication.
You don't matter. You never mattered. You never will matter. The only thing that matters is the State. Welcome to Freedom!
Comcast (Score:1)
Lo and behold, Comcast went the bare minimum upload for everyone who doesn't want their overpriced rented hardware. Just got the email yesterday. "We've doubled your upload speed!" As if 20mbps is something to gloat about. I couldn't even share my screen before, it became a slideshow. I'm expecting a viewmaster now...
No penalty for lying (Score:2)
A 25Mbps/3Mbps is enough to live-stream 720p video and download single-file applications: Gigabyte DLC is a one-off event, so customers can wait. Most people live on their phone, without complaint, which is nowhere near that fast. If people want to live-stream Netflix or 4k/8k video, then they can pay extra: That is not a common use-case.
As long as there is no penalty for lying, it doesn't matter what the benchmark is. Until the FCC starts policing these corporations, nothing will change.
Also, it mea
Consider this a precursor to (Score:2)
denying service to rural areas, and if you want internet, move to urban dense housing.