FCC Abolishes Gigabit Speed Goal, Suggesting It Is Unfair To Slower Technologies (arstechnica.com) 132
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission last week eliminated the gigabit speed goal established during the Biden administration and declared that current levels of broadband deployment in the US are acceptable. Though fiber networks have routinely offered such speeds for years, the FCC said the gigabit speed goal is not "technologically neutral," suggesting that it isn't fair to other, slower technologies.
In 2024, the FCC raised its broadband benchmark to 100Mbps downstream and 20Mbps upstream, setting the new standard by which to judge whether deployment is reasonable and timely. The FCC at the time also set a long-term speed goal of 1Gbps download speeds paired with 500Mbps upload speeds, saying it would use the goal "as a guidepost for evaluating our efforts to encourage deployment." Republican Brendan Carr, who is now the FCC chairman, never liked that long-term goal. He proposed abolishing it last year, and the change was finalized on August 14 in the FCC's latest broadband deployment report. The reports are mandated by Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act.
"As part of our return to following the plain language of Section 706, we adopt our proposal from the Notice [of Inquiry] to abolish without replacement the long-term goal of 1,000/500 Mbps established in the 2024 Report," the order said. "A long-term goal is not mentioned in Section 706 and could appear to violate our obligation to conduct our analysis in a technologically neutral manner. At present, it is impossible to predict long-term technological developments and the evolution of consumer preferences." The FCC said that comments submitted by cable industry group NCTA and wireless industry group CTIA "support our reasoning for abolishing the long-term goal." Last year, the Brendan Carr-led FCC said (PDF) that the gigabit goal "may be unreasonably prejudicial to technologies such as satellite and fixed wireless that presently do not support such speeds." However, last week's report contradicts that stance.
"We disagree with commenters arguing that our concern about technological neutrality merely serves to accommodate technologies that may currently offer slower speeds," the FCC said. "At present, we do not know the nature of future consumer preferences and, considering that the goal is not required by the statute and does not serve any positive purpose (as discussed herein), we believe it prudent to abolish it."
In 2024, the FCC raised its broadband benchmark to 100Mbps downstream and 20Mbps upstream, setting the new standard by which to judge whether deployment is reasonable and timely. The FCC at the time also set a long-term speed goal of 1Gbps download speeds paired with 500Mbps upload speeds, saying it would use the goal "as a guidepost for evaluating our efforts to encourage deployment." Republican Brendan Carr, who is now the FCC chairman, never liked that long-term goal. He proposed abolishing it last year, and the change was finalized on August 14 in the FCC's latest broadband deployment report. The reports are mandated by Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act.
"As part of our return to following the plain language of Section 706, we adopt our proposal from the Notice [of Inquiry] to abolish without replacement the long-term goal of 1,000/500 Mbps established in the 2024 Report," the order said. "A long-term goal is not mentioned in Section 706 and could appear to violate our obligation to conduct our analysis in a technologically neutral manner. At present, it is impossible to predict long-term technological developments and the evolution of consumer preferences." The FCC said that comments submitted by cable industry group NCTA and wireless industry group CTIA "support our reasoning for abolishing the long-term goal." Last year, the Brendan Carr-led FCC said (PDF) that the gigabit goal "may be unreasonably prejudicial to technologies such as satellite and fixed wireless that presently do not support such speeds." However, last week's report contradicts that stance.
"We disagree with commenters arguing that our concern about technological neutrality merely serves to accommodate technologies that may currently offer slower speeds," the FCC said. "At present, we do not know the nature of future consumer preferences and, considering that the goal is not required by the statute and does not serve any positive purpose (as discussed herein), we believe it prudent to abolish it."
What a load of crap (Score:5, Insightful)
"could appear to violate our obligation to conduct our analysis in a technologically neutral manner."
What you are doing is exactly violating that. You set the goals based on where you want to be, not what you think the technology can do. That is what "technologically neutral" means. You are taking into account the technology when setting goals, which means you are not neutral at all. But what else would I expect from this band of asshats?
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re:What a load of crap (Score:5, Insightful)
Yup, in other words... just another day with the Trump administration, using terms that mean the exact opposite or what they're actually doing (see also "radical transparency").
And if you were in a position to point this out to them, they wouldn't provide a counter-argument - they'd pivot to personal attacks on you and/or your family.
Re:What a load of crap (Score:4, Funny)
Re: What a load of crap (Score:5, Insightful)
Itâ(TM)s for Starlink they are working for Elon. So they want to promote satellite, which canâ(TM)t reach the speeds and latency of fiber. This way they can not require telecom buildout and Elon can fill in any gaps with adequate service, and still get government money for it.
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I'd like a cheaper 1/1Gbps connection.
That only happens if something 2.5Gbps or better is available so 1Gbps stops being the ultra high end plan.
There are places where they're selling 1/1Gbps for $30/mo now because they're trying to convince grandma she needs 5/5Gbps for youtube for when her grandkids come over.
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Faster speeds being available benefit me even if I don't need them.
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"could appear to violate our obligation to conduct our analysis in a technologically neutral manner."
What you are doing is exactly violating that. You set the goals based on where you want to be, not what you think the technology can do. That is what "technologically neutral" means. You are taking into account the technology when setting goals, which means you are not neutral at all. But what else would I expect from this band of asshats?
It is indeed about being fair.
The Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers is running things now.
Not sure I disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
I recently downgraded from Cable 800MB to starlink. Simply because for some reason at 2pm EVERY SINGLE DAY my ping times with charter would go from around 30/ms to 100-1000/ms and it lasted for a few hours. I work from home and that was unusable. The only other "broadband" available was starlink. So now I'm much slower in the 100-200MB range, but overall we haven't noticed much difference.
So I'd say, yeah, you don't have to go all the way up to gigabit to be considered broadband.
Re: Not sure I disagree (Score:2)
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100MB *symmetrical* is 'vast majority' sufficient.
Cable routinely doesn't even provide 30 MB up.
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POTS and a modem should be enough for anyone. And none of that fancy 56k shit either, good old 14.4 kb/s.
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While 100 Mbps is enough for probably the majority of users, it doesn't mean we shouldn't set goals to make things better in the future. Honestly, this feels like the US in microcosm for the last 15-20 years -- "good enough" has become the national motto. Fuel efficiency, electrification, wages, housing, and yes, Internet speeds. It is the fundamental reason that China has positioned itself to eclipse the US in almost every technological measure (though at least we still have our free speech, god, and gu
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It's supposed to be about enabling new technologies and new business opportunities. It's hard to say how much slow broadband holds things back, but Starlink claims "typically" between 10 and 30 Mbps upload speed. If you work from home then I hope you don't need to share any large files. I work from home and that would be a major impediment to me.
Re: 20th century version of the same (Score:2)
I had rock solid dialup connections in the 197xx area.
Just another grift (Score:5, Insightful)
Now the question to ask is which of these poor technologies, that has been treated so unfairly, does Trump and his buddies have money invested in?
Re:Just another grift (Score:5, Insightful)
99.44% chance that this is about sending more tax money to ol' musky.
Re:Just another grift (Score:5, Insightful)
This is exactly what it is, Starlink can't do gigabit, can't do low latency, but *can* reach random places easily. Musk and Trump seemingly have made up relatively recently and I am certain this favor is a consequence.
So with this Starlink gets access to funds that are generally made available to give *quality* access to especially rural places. Money to make up for the relatively high incremental cost of wiring up an area compared to the revenue. Except Starlink has effectively zero incremental cost to serve these areas, so they get to collect the same money as a provider would have had to spend to actually run real wires.
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We shouldn't downgrade the requirements unless it's a loophole to kill fiber projects to farmland and other rural places. It's completely fine if there is an alternative (aka starlink).
Re:Just another grift (Score:4, Interesting)
99.44% chance that this is about sending more tax money to ol' musky.
Or just more business to 5G broadband from cell companies which is about 100-300 Mbps. I'm guessing cell companies prefer that as they don't have to install and maintain cabling to homes and businesses.
Re: Just another grift (Score:2)
Aside from carrier level NAT 5g internet thwomped Xfinity for quality in my neighborhood (this may have changed now that there's competition).
My choices (at the low end)were:
200/6 cable $75
75/50 5g $50
These were observed speed. The 5g was sold as 150/50 and cable 300/6. To get acceptable upload speeds to do remote work with cable was $185/month (I forget if that was 25 or 50).
Verizon ran fiber and now I'm paying $50 for 300/300 and getting pretty close.
Xfinity is now offering reasonable plans for $5
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Re: Just another grift (Score:2)
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SpaceX already gets massive amounts of tax payer money.
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And why should we subsidize bandwidth over reach?
The idea was a future-proof connection, so we weren't paying for old and busted.
Shouldn't Starlink and satellite have the same access to subsidies than Google Fiber, considering they enable people to have internet that otherwise couldn't at all?
No. That doesn't mean they should have no access to subsidies, but they are also substantially more expensive than other options.
Let me also say here that we should nationalize all of the telcos because all of them stole hundreds of billions from us that they were supposed to use to provide high speed internet and gave it to shareholders and executives instead.
Re:Just another grift (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, I suspect that it's more that telecom companies are supposed to improve their service, but that would cut into their profits, so they want to continue selling turds and calling it chocolate. We can all agree that wireless internet will not work the same as wired, but the only reason that so many people have terrible wired internet is because the companies would make less profit if they fixed it. So the FCC is saying "No worries! Customers are not important, your profits are!"
I hope everyone is having the day they voted for.
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uh (Score:2)
At present, it is impossible to predict long-term technological developments and the evolution of consumer preferences.
Yes, they might prefer slower internet!
This guy has passed right by needing to determine whether people would like fire which can be fitted nasally and on to deserving to have it fitted rectally.
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Yes, they might prefer slower internet!
It's at least good to have the option of a slower tier for people on a budget. Slow internet is better than no internet. Realistically, the only things you notice on the crappier end of the US broadband speed spectrum (pun intended) is that downloading app/OS updates takes longer and you might have to stream your TV content at lower resolutions.
I realize here on /. the idea that anyone would cheap out on slow speeds seems like heresy, but some people really don't need a gigabit connection just to watch Yo
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I'm the exact person you just described. I have never needed more then 100/10 connection. I would love to pay a lower tiered price for that "slower" speed. The real bottle neck isn't usually my ISP or local network, but the website I'm downloading from anyway.
I'm sure they realize quite a few people could easily get away with a 100/10 cheap connection but that wouldn't make them money. A single person or couple that just streams and games doesn't need gigabyte speeds. Sure, updates would be faster but if it
Cronyism is strong. (Score:3, Insightful)
"Maybe the consumers will want to CHOOSE to have slower internet. If we aren't legally obligated to ask, we'll just assume that because fuck you"
Changing the rules to accomodate crap ISP's selling 20MBit upstream is not being "technologically neutral".
Just clown car Republicans doing clown Republican things.
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The hallmark of this administration. How many of the fat turds family members are suddenly working appointed positions? Jared Kusher is flying around on the tax payer dime cosplaying as a diplomat and negotiator.
I thought... (Score:2)
I thought this administration considered fairness "woke", but for outdated technology, *suddenly* we need to be fair?
We should stop airplanes from flying, it's not fair to horse saddles.
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Hehe, yeah, as per usual, the real reason isn't said. My guess is, since streaming is the only thing needing those speeds, therefore the expected profits from streaming haven't materialised. So the string pullers have changed course.
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No, you don't understand. Fairness for *people* is "woke". Fairness for those poor corporations who are not getting a chance at federal money is noble.
I liked this one... (Score:2)
"...considering that the goal is not required by the statute and does not serve any positive purpose..."
Does not serve any positive purpose? Positive purpose must mean making him money personally.
Don't complain about the flavor of the milk (Score:2, Informative)
Won't someone please think of poor, poor SpaceX and all the other "unreasonably prejudiced" satellite internet companies who have been all too happy to suck at Uncle Sam's teat for decades while failing to meet the required level of service?
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Don't you mean "malk" https://simpsons.fandom.com/wi... [fandom.com]
This FCC announcement is just more slop from the Make America Mid Again (MAMA) crowd. Ugh.
it's all so fucking stupid (Score:2)
Wow, did you hear that? that was the sound of the free market driving directly up its own ass, the last remaining parking spot in the universe of bullshit it created.
Re: it's all so fucking stupid (Score:2)
This is the opposite of progress (Score:2, Insightful)
The whole point of making the floor 1Gbps was to force upgrades, growing the economy by creating jobs for new deployments, and I guess consumers get tolerable speeds, too. If anything they should have made the floor even higher.
Re:This is the opposite of progress (Score:4, Funny)
People wanted a conservative government and that's what they're getting.
Re: This is the opposite of progress (Score:2)
Re: This is the opposite of progress (Score:2)
This isn't a conservative vs non conservative thing. That would be cutting the funding.
This is "let's give government money to bad solutions instead of good ones". That's neither conservative or not. It is currupt and/or inefficient.
100M is enough (Score:4, Insightful)
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There are definitely use cases for which it isn't needed. But that doesn't cover everything. There will ALWAYS be use cases that would require (or at least benefit from) higher connection bandwidth...and speed can often substitute nicely.
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Yes, there are use cases but the "average" consumer doesn't actually apply there. You want a "tech professional connection" then that should be an option. The rest of us could get by with 100/10 connection and that's even overkill for just streaming and gaming, which is what most people use it for anyway.
We could call it a business grade connection or something such, but a cheap lower tier that wasn't purposely crippled would be wonderful.
I'll just keep dreaming.
Re: 100M is enough (Score:2)
This is about "tech professional connections" being available. Not being the lowest speed sold.
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I have to disagree, for several reasons. First off, file sizes just keep increasing. Instead of people thinking their televisions at home look great in "full 1080 HD resolution"? Now, everyone's moving to 4K TV, with 8K being the high-end offering. That means streaming television supporting those higher resolutions is going to use 4x to 8x the bandwidth it used to.
Second, any avid gamer knows how big the downloads have gotten for modern games. The regular updates they push out, alone, are typically 35GB to
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If this is on Steam you can have it update the games in off-use hours and it will be ready to go most times.
- yea but I want it naow.
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100Mbps is enough if you want to turn around and do all of this again in 10 years and not solve anything.
Why don't we want to do it right for once, rather than doing it over and over while the same megacorps keep sucking down the tax dollars?
Can we pull our head out of our ass for once?
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Honestly, if you want to live in the mountains in bum fuck no where, you can't expect society to provide you a fiber connection. We don't even provide those people with sewer connections for precisely the same reason. Those people are on septic tanks or community setups where it all stays right there locally (my uncle has this setup in the Idaho mountains north of Boise. Zero sewer connections but they have the community setup.
Of course, even in the city we can't get "good" competition for Internet prices.
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Honestly, if you want to live in the mountains in bum fuck no where, you can't expect society to provide you a fiber connection. We don't even provide those people with sewer connections for precisely the same reason.
Well, no. The two things are very different. Data leaves down the same "pipe" it came through, while sewage systems and water supply systems are both separate (you hope) and VERY DIFFERENT. They have almost completely different considerations in every department. Also, if you live in the sticks, there's no real drawback to not having a sewer connection.
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The point I was attempting to make was the act of dragging the pipe or data cable is prohibitively expensive. I'm almost positive my uncle is also on a community well, if not his own personally well. There's no outside major pipe line going into the mountains there.
In some scenarios, your best bet would be more cell towers or satellite, especially if the alternative is attempting to blast or bore through rock. Not to mention the environmental damage in all that as well.
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So if we're dragging cable to a remote location, why are we doing that with an "adequate" incremental improvement that we'll have to redo, instead of paying marginally more to do it right, and have it be done already when the next connectivity improvements come around?
This is what I'm talking about. If you are going to drag a wire out somewhere, at least make sure it's something that can be used for more than today's planned purpose so we don't replace it with different wire in 10 years.
USE FUCKING FIBER.
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Okay, we can agree on this point here. If we are going to drag any kind of wire through tough rural mountainous terrain, then yes, 100% put in the best possible fiber we have today because the real cost is digging and dragging of the wire and not the wire itself.
The debate then goes to whether this is a good idea at all or if we should just go wireless for rural because of the prohibitive cost.
But yes, if we do decide that actually dragging physical wire anywhere, we should drag the best possible wire.
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Not hard, either. Because there's a cable you can use - the poewr lines. Fiber lines can go along with power lines quite neatly, and many power companies already have fiber network deployments. In fact, there are more than a few rural utilities where your electricity provider will also do fiber. (Typically GPON).
The power cable is being run to the house anyways, and the poewr company's portion is the triplex to the weatherhead. From there it can run down the weatherhead and end at the ONT.
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There are lots of roads too.
My mother lives in a place that is probably more remote (as in distance to the nearest city > 100,000) than it's possible to get in the US outside of Alaska. Twenty years ago when they were paving the highway they also dug a trench and dropped fibre into it. The initial idea was to hook up schools and government buildings but a local started a company and just ran fibre to everyone's house, including the farmers'. They're cheaper and way more reliable than the only competitor
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"Now I'm currently using fiber at the speed fast than my wifi router, which makes my speedtest always wrong."
oh please expand on this - this is gunna be hilarious
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And what would there be wrong?
The fibre from the router to the ISP is 10 - 100 faster than the wifi.
It is even faster than ethernet, as my (old) Macs only have 10GBit ethernet, or my cables are not suited for more, no idea.
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Yep, that's what I've seen as well. Fiber is faster then your local network unless you have cat6 and a router that does 10gb. Even cat6 has distance limitations for the highest speed at about 55 meters then drops off gradually to 100 meters. Cat5e only supports up to 1gb over 100 meters.
Not sure I've ever seen a consumer router that supports 10gb but it has been a minute since I've router shopped. I also don't "need" that kind of speed on my local network as I'm rarely ever transfer files that huge. Also, n
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There are plenty of consumer routers with 2.5Gb/sec ports [google.com] that are simultaneously cheaper than 10GbE and faster than 1GbE.
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I have indeed seen 2.5gb consumer routers. Just never 10gb, that's all. They probably exist, else if you need 10gb local lan then you would just invest in business grade hardware at that point.
Most consumers don't have a use case. Not saying no one, just the average. I'll repeat that we should definitely have the top tier professional choice as well as some cheaper teirs for consumers. I'd love a 50/10 connection for under $50. Best I can do is 100/5? for $50, which isn't bad but if I can save some more mon
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The ISP here gives you one when you sign up for fibre service.
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Well wtf does he mean by speedtest then? If he's doing it from his phone or wifi connected laptop, then it's going to reflect the speed of his wifi. If he's doing it from his router, and complaining that the speedtest is wrong because his wifi is slower than his router uplink, I'd say that's a statement only a doofus would make.
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Who are you to tell me than 100Mb is not enough?
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New best solution for rural America (Score:2)
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1GB should be the standard or goal, IMO (Score:2)
My cable provider now offers 2GB download speed service, but it's problematic in the sense most people still have devices with wired Ethernet ports that only handle up to 1 gig. speeds. I have a pretty expensive Linksys Atlas mesh router at home (cost $850 or so for the 3 piece set, a few years back), and it doesn't have a port on it faster than 1 gig. for the cable modem to attach to.
Obviously, the provider is happy to supply their own combo modem/router to use but with a monthly cost attached.
But there's
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But there's just not a good reason in 2026 to not make a least gigabit connections a standard offering.
But there is. If telecom companies improve the service, then they will make less profit. Which is a good reason for the telecom executives, and a good reason for the current FCC. Crappy for the consumers, sure, but the FCC is staffed by the administration, so we had a vote and we made a choice.
They were never technologically neutral (Score:2)
While the selection of speeds is subjective enabling text of the legislation does not make any discrimination whatsoever between direction of flow:
"Broadband service The term 'broadband service' means any technology identified by the Secretary as having the capacity to transmit data to enable a subscriber to the service to originate and receive high quality voice, data, graphics, and video."
Notice it doesn't say RX high quality voice, data, graphics and video. It doesn't say TX high quality voice, data, gr
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Has nothing to do with "crappy upstream channels".
a) the traffic on the cable does not know if it goes up or down, but the router does. So you manage that 90% of the bandwidth is used for downstream, and only 10% for upstream
b) downstream can be cashed, upstream is pretty individual depending on the sender: and can not be cashed
This gets mitigated by glass fiber greatly: as you can sent in both directions without any data loss.
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Has nothing to do with "crappy upstream channels".
Nonsense. Cable operators allocate a large number of downstream channels and a limited number of upstream channels on the RF. From what I remember cable modems don't even support more than 8 upstream channels. I never saw more than 4.
a) the traffic on the cable does not know if it goes up or down, but the router does.
Nonsense. Every channel is designated and allocated by the operator.
So you manage that 90% of the bandwidth is used for downstream, and only 10% for upstream
b) downstream can be cashed, upstream is pretty individual depending on the sender: and can not be cashed
This is gibberish. Do you think the CMTS has come kind of PEP built into it or there is some sort of multicast going on? I can't even figure out what you are trying to say.
Rural Electrification (Score:2)
We seem to be in a parallel to Rural Electrification now.
If someone lives five miles from the nearest connection, currently on 100A AC and POTS, is the limited budget better spent on running five miles of fiber or dropping off a satellite terminal?
They'll be going from either 3Mbps DSL to 300Mbps satellite or 800Mbps fiber.
If we had unlimited money I'd say fiber almost everywhere. But that isn't realistic.
The flip side is some of these rulings which ought to be applied to edge cases may well be applied to a
Rural fiber (Score:2)
I've seen amazing deployments of rural fiber in places with a population density below 1 person per square mile. Meanwhile, back where I live where the population density is approximately "I can see 78 street lights from my front porch" can barely get DSL and you can tell where I live by looking for the odd gap in starlink coverage.
Well, I do hope to be moving to that spot out in the woods with fiber soon, so yay.
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Absofuckinglutetly fiber. If it was worthwhile to run power, gas, water or a shitty copper phone line then it's absolutely without question worthwhile to run fiber.
Our local electric coop recently made the decision to bring fiber to 100% of their customers, if you can get electric from them you can get 1/1Gbps fiber int
This is tricky. (Score:2)
Most people would be fine with 100 Mb: dual condensed HD streams, and relatively low latency. Hell: aside from the ISOs I occasionally download, I'd be fine with 25 Mb.
But.
This doesn't take into account the future. When I upgraded to 2400 baud, I thought I was pretty hot stuff then, too. If we don't keep the bar high, there's no real incentive to increase speed along the fringes -- rural communities, etc. I even know one guy who still uses dialup.
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There's no reason to deploy any tech today that can't do at least 1/1Gbps as any tech that can't would already be long obsolete before it was installed so when future needs come along you're just going to have to rip it all out and replace it with something half way modern like you should've done in the first place and it's going to cost far more than it would've to just install something decent in the first place.
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I mostly agree. Localtel recently capped me at the 100 mbit I am actually paying for. It used to run faster than that at off peak times. It's only noticeable when I'm downloading big updates, especially Apple's multi-gig monsters. Otherwise it's fine.
Nothing says more about winning than lowering stan (Score:2)
So now the FCC wants DEI... for broadband? (Score:2)
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Won't someone please think of the birds? [rfc-editor.org]
Brandan Carr is a dummy (Score:2)
The *stated* purpose of the 1Gbps target was to track the rate of spread of higher speeds to find where there are regulatory obstacles. By definition, you need to start with a value is is not available in most places.
The only reason to oppose the target is if you oppose removing regulatory obstacles. Apparently Brendan Carr is adding opposition to removing regulatory obstacles to his opposition to free speech.
This is just more fodder for America's favorite podcast-within-a-podcast "Brendan Carr Is A Dummy".
DEI (Score:2)
"the FCC said the gigabit speed goal is not 'technologically neutral,' suggesting that it isn't fair to other, slower technologies."
DEI is evil when applied to people but is glorious when applied to network technologies.
In other news, (Score:2)
Drug trials abolished as unfair to drugs that don't work.
And college entrance requirements removed as unfair to stupid people.
Although I think the last two have already been done.
Re: In other news, (Score:2)
So this what, the 2nd or 3rd time? (Score:2)
How many times have we, the tax paying public, had our "representatives" given away billions to the cable co's with the pinky swear they were going to expand rural access. I know it's at least twice but I feel like there could of been a relatively (~5 years ago) that we paid them AGAIN to do the job they were already paid to do.
Great job FCC! Just keep telling Congress it's SO important we keep paying for rural roll out but let's not make sure we actually get what we paid for. Fuckers.
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Complete anecdote, but every person that I know that lives in a rural location has had fiber installed within the last year or two.
I live in Minneapolis and we now have two fiber options (T-Mobile and CenturyLink).
Maybe it's just a Minnesota thing.
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Well that's at least encouraging to hear. It's also sort of sad as I live in San Diego and my last two residents did not have fiber. I'm glad someone rural is getting what we paid for!
You don't need it (Score:2)
DEI is back baby! (Score:2)
We are now picking techology choices not on merit, but on being inclusive and diverse. What is old is new again!
Neutrality? (Score:2)
Ahead of the hammer. (Score:2)
Glad in this area they met their giga goal before cable did, at a steady price, and performance. This current regime is why a lot of people will not have nice things.
Eh (Score:2)
Brenden Carr traded sexual favors for grades, suckled Ajit Pai's nipples, and now regularly tickles Trump's ball with a feather.
Buggy whips (Score:2)
Same argument, govt subsidies for buggy whips. The govt needs to set these rules for the benefit of the people, not to support companies trying to keep selling obsolete and uncompetitive legacy technology products.
Good riddance (Score:2)
First, I can't imagine any reasonable need for the FCC to define "broadband" in the first place. What's wrong with letting ISPs and consumers settle on what broadband means?
Second, I have no doubt the goal was to force, jawbone, or subsidize ISPs to deploy 1000/500 network connections. But for the vast majority of people, that's wildly overprovisioned. If all you do is watch AmaFlix and cat videos, you don't even need the 100/20 service which used to be broadband.
So I personally would prefer the FCC would S
It's Player Piano! (Score:2)
by Kurt Vonnegut. "True Democracy is only achieved when everyone is dragged down to the lowest common denominator!" Idiots.
the power of public comment (Score:2)
FCC: "Over the last month we've received many comments requesting that we do X, but we disagree with that, so we're going to ignore all your comments and go ahead with Y anyway."