FCC To Eliminate Gigabit Speed Goal, Scrap Analysis of Broadband Prices (arstechnica.com) 105
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is proposing (PDF) to roll back key Biden-era broadband policies, scrapping the long-term gigabit speed goal, halting analysis of broadband affordability, and reinterpreting deployment standards in a way that favors industry metrics over consumer access. The proposal, which is scheduled for a vote on August 7, narrows the scope of Section 706 evaluations to focus on whether broadband is being deployed rather than whether it's affordable or universally accessible. Ars Technica reports: The changes will make it easier for the FCC to give the broadband industry a passing grade in an annual progress report. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's proposal would give the industry a thumbs-up even if it falls short of 100 percent deployment, eliminate a long-term goal of gigabit broadband speeds, and abandon a new effort to track the affordability of broadband.
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."
Generally, Democratic-led commissions have found that the industry isn't doing enough to make broadband universally available, while Republican-led commissions have found the opposite. Democratic-led commissions have also periodically increased the speeds used to determine whether advanced telecommunications capabilities are widely available, while Republican-led commissioners have kept the speed standards the same.
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."
Generally, Democratic-led commissions have found that the industry isn't doing enough to make broadband universally available, while Republican-led commissions have found the opposite. Democratic-led commissions have also periodically increased the speeds used to determine whether advanced telecommunications capabilities are widely available, while Republican-led commissioners have kept the speed standards the same.
No shit, Sherlock (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the goals of Project 2025 and the expressed intent of effectively gutting any service provided by the federal government to the population at large, this scrapping of FCC policy goals meant to aid the public by constraining corporations from offering the bare minimum of service for the maximum of money, without regard for any other goals whatsoever, falls firmly into the "No shit, Sherlock" category of disappointing but unsurprising news.
Re:No shit, Sherlock (Score:4, Insightful)
Orange Jesus: Slow internet is good!
MAGA: Slow internet is good!
Re:No shit, Sherlock (Score:4, Funny)
Orange Jesus: Slow brainz is good!
MAGA: Slow brainz is good!
Orange Jesus: I be very stable geeniuz!
FTFY
Re: (Score:2)
You forgot the "Amen". Maybe two?
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe he thinks fast internet connections are like dolls, we should get less and pay more.
Just s/dolls/megabits/ and I'm sure you
Re:No shit, Sherlock (Score:4, Insightful)
Orange Jesus: Slow internet is good!
MAGA: Slow internet is good!
It helps keep the people poorly educated and Trump loves the poorly educated [youtube.com] -- which, ironically, he literally next goes on to say, "we're the smartest people".
Re: (Score:2)
Slow internet IS good.
Remember a key Project 2025 goal is to ban pornography. What use is high speed internet but a way to consume more and more pornography? Thus, slowing down the internet is a great way to restrict the use of porn - first by getting rid of videos, then they'll bring us back to the wonderful world of dialup where even images were minutes to disappointment.
Considering how a key part of Project 2025 wasn't even close to being ac
Re: No shit, Sherlock (Score:5, Insightful)
One thing is sure : whataboutism never accomplished anything.
And you certainly wouldn't very able to know, anyway, if all the analysis is scrapped.
Re: (Score:1)
I think the parent's original point is this. Was the policy working and was it fiscally wise? Did the policy have positive impact? If the policy under Biden was not working, not being implemented, or was not fiscally wise, then why continue it? If it was working and was having a positive impact, then it should have been continued. Maybe I am wrong in my interpretation.
I don't have an answer either way. I don't know enough about what policies were in place and what policies were specifically ended. I have fo
Re: No shit, Sherlock (Score:5, Insightful)
yes, but poster you're replying to was specifically stating that you're not going to know if Biden's policies were helping because you've stopped analysis which is exactly why this is silly.
So the reality is as follows: broadband subsidies continue giving telecoms billions of dollars every single year but now we don't care if they spent the money on yachts or actual telecom infrastructure. Biden's policies were trying to help them accountable for our tax dollars, something you would think we would be important in the age of DOGE.
Re: (Score:3)
Biden's policies were trying to help them become accountable for our tax dollars, something you would think would be important in the age of DOGE.
You misunderstand the purpose of DOGE. DOGE is a bullshit Federal Agency invented out of air and without Congressional oversight to 'disrupt' the Federal government as much as possible before they could be reigned in, in order for the election winning donor class to extract as much profit as possible, one way or the other, period. Private Equity bought the feds. This is the price we're all paying so that 34x convicted, 90x indicted MoFo criminal won't have to die in jail.
Re: (Score:3)
I think the parent's original point is this. Was the policy working and was it fiscally wise?
A policy of setting goals for the industry and rating them based on how well they met those goals? Well, I can't say for sure whether it was working, but putting blinders on and saying things are going great sure can't work better than having actual data, that's for sure.
Did the policy have positive impact?
To a limited extent, sure. The problem is that as long as the FCC is a political football — as long as Republicans don't actually care whether the poor have access to acceptably fast Internet service — the industry will genera
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What did you think we were going to take this bullshit seriously? Back in my day trolls were better than this. We had Hot grits and then we Portman and greased up Yoda dolls.
Now all we've got is the same Russian botnets spewing the same talking points. Sad. Low energy.
Re: No shit, Sherlock (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
The changes will make it easier for the FCC to give the broadband industry a passing grade in an annual progress report.
he said:
The secret to success is to lower your expectations to the point where they're already met
. Watterson then presciently ends the strip with the comment "Remind me to invest overseas".
Re: (Score:1)
Yeah, and you'll continue to pay $100/month for some god-awful Internet service, with a customer service arm fully submerged down the toilet. Meanwhile, here in the Really Free World, we pay $30-$40/month for gigabit up and down.
America First!
Re:No shit, Sherlock (Score:5, Informative)
Posting this as Anon as possible since it's insider info.
I work for a county IT dept that was working on getting broadband to the underserved. The amount of bureaucracy involved in this initiative is absolutely insane to the point that our state is still trying to divvy out COVID broadband money in 2025.
The way Biden did it was give money directly to the states, who then made committees to divvy out where the fed money goes. these commissions had to pick and choose who gets what based on the fed requirements as well as who needs the money the most. As you can imagine, Politics got involved.
At first, we had just about everyone from every Major Telco ISP's to Mom and Pop WISP's bidding out underserved areas. then the rules change so that it could only be 1GBPS fiber to the home to qualify. This kills Starlink, the Cell Providers and all of the WISP's. Then the commission required that all bidders must hire union labor and pay a prevailing wage, which killed all of the cable Co's willing to run fiber and all but the most determined Telco's who were already paying union wages. Then once the first round of winning bids came through, it was blatantly obvious that the counties with the most politicians sucking the commission's lower appendage got the most successful bids.
Then Trump gets elected and the commission panics, So all of the rules change again. All of a sudden the FTTP provision gets axed. Now all of the Cell providers are back in bidding for areas and are undercutting the Telco's which now bail because of all the BS, Then the Union and 1GBPS requirement gets rescinded, which now brings Starlink, CableCo's and every Mom and Pop Wisp's back into bidding. Telco's then rebid now that the prevailing wage is gone and they can contract out all the digging, So now everything's in chaos a few months before the second round of winning bids needs submitted.
Meanwhile, we get a call from a consortium of counties that wants to start a municipal fiber initiative because they think it will look better to the commission (IE attract more politicians to suck the commission's lower appendage harder) and get approved faster. We ask who is going to maintain it. We get shrugs and then "Well, all of the ISPs who will flock to sell service on it that we contract!", then shrugs again. Ultimately it falls through once they realize that maintenance is expensive and no one wants to be on the hook for it.
And don't even get me started with pole rights. If you always wondered why every FiberCo and CableCo use Ditch Witches and Lawn Fridges instead of pole lines, It's because its much MUCH cheaper and faster. You can literally dig ditches faster then putting cable on a pole because of all the BS bureaucracy. It literally takes at least 6 months minimum to get a pole line approved, and that depends on who owns the poles from one destination to another and what they do with it. From extorting the line runner for anything such as you must replace every pole on the run because they're too old, to your competitors purposely dragging their feet to move lines on the pole just so you can put your line on. This is the #1 reason why the broadband industry is so stagnant in the US and why there are so many WISP's and Cell Providers offering broadband service because no company wants to deal with this Pole rights BS.
Re:No shit, Sherlock (Score:5, Interesting)
At first, we had just about everyone from every Major Telco ISP's to Mom and Pop WISP's bidding out underserved areas. then the rules change so that it could only be 1GBPS fiber to the home to qualify. This kills Starlink, the Cell Providers and all of the WISP's.
For good reason, to be fair. Starlink is able to pay for itself, and doesn't need subsidies to provide service. Wireless ISPs are going to suck no matter what, and no amount of subsidization will make it not suck. If you want bang-for-the-buck, you want fiber, because that can keep being pushed to faster and faster limits as technology improves, without changing the fundamental medium. Right now, I think the state of the art over a single fiber is one terabit [fierce-network.com]. So we have three orders of magnitude of growth potential without any changes other than to the hardware at the two ends of that fiber.
Contrast that with celluar technology, where pushing speeds to orders of magnitude more than we have now can only realistically be achieved by massively increasing the tower density and, as a result of having more towers, also massively increasing the cost of every future hardware upgrade going forwards.
Starlink is a neat party trick. It can help with a lot of things, like providing service where it isn't really feasible, providing service to your RV, providing cell service in the Mojave Desert, etc., but it can't realistically ever be the ISP for the entire country, because you can't realistically put that many birds in the sky.
So fiber is the only plausible solution that is forward-looking and provides room for future expansion. Everything else is just wasting money, frankly.
Then the commission required that all bidders must hire union labor and pay a prevailing wage, which killed all of the cable Co's willing to run fiber and all but the most determined Telco's who were already paying union wages.
Meh. Part of the point of that program was to provide jobs with decent pay. That's not really so unreasonable, is it? The real question is why the cable companies aren't willing to spend the extra few bucks to hire union labor for running their cables, in exchange for government subsidies.
Actually, no, the real question is why local governments didn't put in bids to build out municipal fiber networks that they could lease in a nondiscriminatory fashion to the cable company, the phone company, a dozen mom-and-pop telcos, etc. to provide the actual service to customers. This approach works way better than letting large monopolies or oligopolies get more power.
Then Trump gets elected and the commission panics, So all of the rules change again. All of a sudden the FTTP provision gets axed. Now all of the Cell providers are back in bidding for areas and are undercutting the Telco's which now bail because of all the BS, Then the Union and 1GBPS requirement gets rescinded, which now brings Starlink, CableCo's and every Mom and Pop Wisp's back into bidding.
And at that point, it's just corporate welfare, and serves no real purpose.
Meanwhile, we get a call from a consortium of counties that wants to start a municipal fiber initiative because they think it will look better to the commission (IE attract more politicians to suck the commission's lower appendage harder) and get approved faster. We ask who is going to maintain it. We get shrugs and then "Well, all of the ISPs who will flock to sell service on it that we contract!", then shrugs again. Ultimately it falls through once they realize that maintenance is expensive and no one wants to be on the hook for it.
And yet that's literally the only thing the government legitimately should be spending money on in this space. Every attempt to do this through private business fails. Every single time. Municipal fiber works. If you do it r
Re: (Score:2)
"Starlink is able to pay for itself, and doesn't need subsidies to provide service. Wireless ISPs are going to suck no matter what,"
You know Starlink is wireless, right? SO profit and suckiness are different things. Is Starlink usable and sufficient for most users?
Feel free to define 'usable' and 'sufficient' in a way that renders Starlink inadequate, but your low-end terrestrial ISP is excused.
Re: (Score:2)
This is true - see https://youtu.be/bCNUBxFMPdk [youtu.be] on build back better process to get federal money, sorry I couldn't find a neutral source. This is about internet infrastructure spending.
Re: (Score:2)
Go back further. 1996, the Universal Service Fund. Expanded to also promote 'universal' Internet service. I recall Net Day, wiring schools around southern Maine so that they could effectively use the MSLN, a T-1 backbone through Maine connecting schools, libraries, etc. via DDS-2 lines (that's 56k synchronous, for you to recall).
Not a total waste, I cleaned up a pile of Appletalk and Localtalk wiring that had turned into uselessness.
But since than, billions (man Billions) of dollars have been extracted from
Re:No shit, Sherlock (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes and no. Project 2025 is the Republican Party platform. Period. It's what the Senate and Congress plan to do. Trump is their vehicle for pushing it through and so far he's been fine with all of the P2025 stuff he's been asked to sign and take credit for.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
Given the goals of Project 2025 and the expressed intent of effectively gutting any service provided by the federal government to the population at large, this scrapping of FCC policy goals meant to aid the public by constraining corporations from offering the bare minimum of service for the maximum of money, without regard for any other goals whatsoever, falls firmly into the "No shit, Sherlock" category of disappointing but unsurprising news.
Based on how many times taxpayers have paid for a broadband rollout initiative for all, this likely has fuck all to do with Project 2025 and far more to do with cutting funding that ends up in executive pockets instead of broadband connections.
Stop it. Stop funding ALL of it until the fucking corruption stops. We’ve been watching providers lie to the FCC and take taxpayer money for literally decades. Keep up the Us vs. Them political shitslinging, and idiot voters will give the politicians enough t
Re:No shit, Sherlock (Score:4, Interesting)
Any public service that can be privatized and profited-from, they seek to privatize. Regulations that hinder profit, are being eliminated. Good for the business-owner class, not so much for the consumer.
"If money is speech, the wealthy have a lot more of it than you."
I think Citizens United was a disastrous decision. Instead of saying only physical persons could contribute to politicians, they went the opposite direction and said any logical construct, union or business, could contribute. Perhaps it was consistent with existing law but it really empowered the donor class to the detriment of the rest of the population. It's creating stresses in society. And both sides cowtow to money and moneyed interests.
In democratic societies, power has a tendency to coalesce to the center of power, to consolidate. A dictatorship is the ultimate form. Feudalism is an intermediate form. If it's not resisted, democracy becomes hollowed out, and we return to de facto oligarchy and feudalism.
Re: (Score:2)
Most regulation does not accomplish what you think it does. Most government regulation of industry helps protect the existing, large incumbents and places hefty barriers of entry to new comers. While the regulation has some benefits to consumers, it ultimately serves to protect the entrenched, slows innovation, and ultimately stagnates or increases prices because new competition does not enter the market and create either surplus or price pressures.
I'm not wanting zero regulation, but there's a turning po
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not wanting zero regulation, but there's a turning point of negative return
And in between these two points is every regulation that has ever existed.
Case by case, no more broad strokes "regulations good or bad". Most regulations exist for a reason, you change them without eliminating them.
have to hire entire teams of lawyers and accountants to understand and audit regulations
They're likely to get involved in your system as well but for different reasons.
Re: (Score:2)
Most regulations exist for a reason
I notice you didn't say "a good reason" -- for good reason.
Re: (Score:2)
For a reason, that's why it has to be taken case by case. Saying regulation bad/good is a brain destroying simplification.
Re: (Score:2)
Has that ever actually happened without being the direct consequence of social collapse and/or external factors? The Weimar Republic fell to a dictatorship because Germany had lost a war, the economy collapsed, and society was disintegr
Re: (Score:2)
Given the goals of Project 2025....
The middle class is getting squeezed out of existence. The GOP's greatest achievement is convincing the middle class to blame somebody else, other than those actually doing the squeezing.
Re: (Score:2)
But do we REALLY need gigabit broadband for everyone? I think for most Americans, 256 megabits/second download speed is more than sufficient for most uses including working from home.
Maybe the standard for everyone should be 256 megabits/second download and upload.
Re: Lets all welcome the USA (Score:4, Informative)
Much farther. The Dobbs decision that ended the right to abortion referenced medieval texts.
Re: (Score:2)
Read the OP. If you still can't figure out the point, that's on you.
Re: Lets all welcome the USA (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
However- Dobbs is a whole new and different kind of fucked. Dobbs is going to be the Dred Scott of the 21st century.
It essentially allows for the deconstitutionalizing of anything that doesn't have a historical precedent that is, to quote- "deeply rooted in American history".
It can be used to get rid of Loving, Dred Scott, and others. It's
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Lets all welcome the USA (Score:2)
It is unfortunately the way the supreme court works now. Lowercase is intentional. 6 of the 9 justices are no longer even pretending to be reading and applying the US Constitution.
Re: (Score:2)
That is exactly how the Supreme Court works.
Re: (Score:2)
The Roe ruling was augmented by later rulings that made the restrictions on abortion bans pretty solid. The Dobbs decision was utterly insane, invoking irrelevant medieval priests and ignoring the views of those who wrote the constitution (Franklin felt "how to have an abortion" was so fundamental he added it to a book he published about basic household science) as well as the clear intent of non-totalitarian interpretations of the constitution since its creation that privacy and the right to bodily autonom
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The folks in charge are shooting for a little bit earlier - like 1880. See: their retrograde views on women, health, finance, liberties, civil rights, etc.
Meanwhile In China . . . (Score:2)
https://kdwalmsley.substack.co... [substack.com]
The first countries to commercialize 6G will enjoy overwhelming advantages over those who are left on 5G protocols and technologies.
6G represents a 1000-times increase in transmission speeds, with latency falling by similar orders of magnitude. . .
Much of the developed world is on 5G telecommunications networks, and the race is on now to build 6G. The difference between 5G and 6, is orders of magnitude increases in speed and applications. 1 terabyte per second is a thousand
Re:Meanwhile In China . . . (Score:5, Informative)
Wireless is NOT the answer
We need fiber
Re: (Score:2)
We definitely need something wired, and if any new investment is going to be made in 2025, it should be nothing less than fiber.
Re: (Score:2)
Wireless is NOT the answer
We need fiber
I can agree with that.
Wireless communications means being line-of-sight, open to easy interception, greater vulnerability to weather such as towers blown over or hit with lightning, more easily jammed or spoofed, and limited by the available RF spectrum in the area.
Re: Meanwhile In China . . . (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Well if you don't have fiber, then clearly nobody should, right?
Wouldn't it be nice to have a competitive option to keep everyone honest, and motivate incumbent providers to offer more to keep your business?
Seriously - think before posting.
Re: Meanwhile In China . . . (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Wireless is fine if they update the protocols.
Even my shitty T-Mobile Home Internet is capable of 300Mbps. What exactly is anyone doing that requires gigabit speeds? Right now the only criticism I have of mainstream US Internet technologies are: prices, poor upload speeds, and too many restrictions on what you can use it for (why the fuck does anyone care if I run a server?)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: Meanwhile In China . . . (Score:2)
5G still delivers only 0.2 Mbps where I live. Will 6G do any better in non-urban environments? I have my doubts. I would take a few Mbps over what 5G can do today, though. Without a wired connection and Wifi AP, I cannot even make any calls. Cell network is unsuitable, as my phone constantly switches between 4G and 5G every few seconds.
Re: (Score:2)
What happens if you just disable 5G on your phone?
Re: (Score:2)
My S24 Ultra doesn't have a way to truly disable it, only preferences. "5G preferred", "LTE preferred", "3G preferred".
And a separate checkbox for "Allow 2G service".
Both the 5G and LTE are unreliable, even without the constant handshakes, and I would want to disable them both at home, but there is no way to do so. 3G has been shut down, so disabling that would have no effect.
2G would probably work for calls, if there was a way to force the phone to use it. I have the checkbox set to enabled.
The phone has a
Re: (Score:1)
Porn downloads 1000x faster. Hurray!
Re: (Score:2)
I hope you realize that what you quoted from the article is mostly rubbish regarding the technology improvements 6G is bringing? For example latency, 5G has that already well below 10ms (in some applications closer to 1ms to the tower), and now 6G promises several orders of magnitude better?
Furthermore most of internet latency (tens of milliseconds) comes from the fact that the server you are connecting to is NOT in that cell tower, but far, far away, and in any case, that traffic is going over the fiber b
Re: (Score:2)
6G is not going to matter in the United States AT ALL if our shitty telcos are still allowed to flog users with bandwidth caps until their wallets open and more money falls out.
Oh boy! I can hit my bandwidth cap in 2 days instead of 10 now! Yayyy!
Or even better: hey, I have a shload of bandwidth between my phone and the tower now, but the backhaul from the tower to the telco switch is still a massively oversubscribed piece of shit that only delivers a few megabit per user! Such improvement!
Big performant
Re: (Score:2)
someone actually makes sure they do it.
Good luck with that, regulatory capture seems almost complete here in the Untied States (spelling deliberate). Did **ANY** of the myriad "rural internet initiatives" result in penalties for carriers who took the subsidy but failed to even complete 10% of the requirement? If so I never heard of it (and they would have been whining with the volume set to 11.)
My point was that we're rapidly becoming the Third World country that China was a couple of generations ago, while the center of innovation and develop
Affordable is not the problem (Score:5, Informative)
Available is
Our local ISP tried for years to install fiber in our area and was blocked by the telcos
They didn't serve out area, but used every dirty trick in the book to make sure that nobody else could serve us
We don't need any government rules except one. The rule that telcos can't block private efforts to install fiber
Re:Affordable is not the problem (Score:4, Insightful)
It's not just other telcos. Also electric companies, or whoever owns the poles, or dug the trenches. The regulations we do have are just insufficient. The Telecommunications act of 1996 is very outdated. It was OK for sharing DSLAMs with the ILEC, and not much else.
Re: (Score:1)
It's the actual regulations that are preventing new providers. The issue is over regulation which protects the incumbents.
Re: Affordable is not the problem (Score:3)
I don't believe so. Absent regulations, not even ILECs would have been forced to share DSLAMs with smaller ISPs. They would have kept the lines completely to themselves.
The existence of regulations is what forces incumbents to share things like their existing lines, or right way and so on. It works very well in Europe. I grew up in France, and back then, you would pay a few cents for 3 minutes of local calling, and far more for long distance. There was no competition. France Télécom wa
Re: (Score:2)
I'll just leave this here. https://arstechnica.com/tech-p... [arstechnica.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Our local ISP tried for years to install fiber in our area and was blocked by the telcos
Bespoke fiber is the very definition of vendor lock-in, and should be banned. The last mile should be government-run, and then the telcos attach to standard points of interconnect, and compete together on a level playing field with equal access. This is what they do in Australia, and it has vastly improved telco competition, and eliminated unnecessary and expensive last-mile fibre runs.
Re: (Score:2)
We don't need any government rules except one. The rule that telcos can't block private efforts to install fiber
I'll disagree a bit about rules, but I will say that Telcos should flat out be told to drop dead whenever they are bleating to block others. Why? When you get to the point some other broadband option is moving in, or some municipality has voted to install a separate option, your company has failed. They can own their failures and deal with the fact their intransigence has created a new competitor. I don't particularly care if that new competitor is a private company or if they are the municipality. Telcos,
I predict Republicans will avoid this thread (Score:5, Interesting)
Because, and here's the trick, if they don't go running the safe spaces they stop being Republicans.
Re: (Score:2)
They only then become "independents" because Republicans are so brainwashed they never convert to anything else. I've also rarely met an "independent" who isn't just too cowardly or ashamed to admit they are still a Republican but did some independent thinking for a short time period. I think this is because their culture is not accepting of too much deviation of thought (aka diversity;) when you break from the dictated party line you have to leave until things calm down, then all is forgotten and the hidde
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, because heaven forbid someone might not align completely with either of the two major parties.
I'm an independent. The Republicunts can go fuck themselves - they will never get my vote again unless they kick literally everyone involved in their current policies overboard. But that doesn't mean I'm all in on what the DNC is selling either.
This isn't a hard thing to understand unless you're such a partisan hack that you're also subscribing to the idiotic binary "us or them" philosophy that makes MAGA so
Re: (Score:2)
I've never voted for a Republican for a higher office than dog catcher, but I'm not a Democrat. The DNC as a whole is way further to the right of me than the GOP is to the Democrats. There are some individual Democrats I like, but the party as whole are a bunch of feckless neolib authoritarians with a nicer coat of paint that the alternative, but not enough breathing space between them.
Do you need gigabit to a household? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm paying for 100 Mbit, and am getting 90 up and down at 8 PM, (I just checked). When things are draggy it's the server at the other end. What advantage would I get from faster? I have one TV and it's not 4K.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm paying for 100 Mbit, and am getting 90 up and down at 8 PM, (I just checked). When things are draggy it's the server at the other end. What advantage would I get from faster? I have one TV and it's not 4K.
We probably don't need gigabit, but we do need a reasonable lower limit to officially be "broadband" and to measure what counts as "Internet being available to everyone". I have a house where the best internet you can get is a dual bonded DSL connection that totals 12MB down and 2MB up. I don't count that as broadband as while its okay for basic video consumption when I am there, it's not enough for video conferencing, and it is certainly not enough for remote security cameras. There are lots of folks where
Re: (Score:2)
Good answer.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
By the time we have widespread gigabit, we'll probably have uses for it or the machines that replace us will.
Re: (Score:2)
We have widespread multi-hundred Mbit speeds. I mean, very few here on Slashdot have a connection that's under 300Mbps, and even fewer under 100Mbps. and we're not using THAT. (If we were, all the Comcast customers here would be screwed given it'd take an hour give or take of it to use our monthly 1.2 Terabyte quota!)
So how are we going to suddenly start using gigabit speeds any time soon? Even if we all moved to Blu-ray quality 4K for streaming (which nobody is going to do) and the average household had th
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
\What advantage would I get from faster? I have one TV and it's not 4K.
"640K memory should be enough for everyone."
Re: (Score:2)
Who are you to tell me what speeds I need.
Re: (Score:2)
If you only have one person in your home, you probably won't get an advantage.
If you do have more than one person, and you both are doing high bandwidth things to different servers, you will see an advantage as you are talking to two different sources that each have their own upload bandwidth.
Making ameriga (Score:5, Funny)
Make sure the cronies are taken care of... (Score:1)
Gigabit (Score:2)
Gigabit goal is stupid.
I don't even have gigabit internet and that's mostly by choice, I get 500mb down and ~200mb up. I used to have 500 symmetrical with a different provider.
I barely see a point in changing this; and I don't use it lightly.
I constantly stream, music, shows, etc. I run applications that pull data on an ongoing basis to do analysis, etc.
I could be using multiple 4K streams and probably still wouldn't care. (I'm not doing 4K anywhere, because I don't see the point in it.)
100-250mb seems to b
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe start feeding the poor.
Killing less immigrants?
Maybe stop sending people to death camps.
Fucking Americans.