Senators Call on FCC To Quadruple Base High-Speed Internet Speeds (theverge.com) 116
The federal government's definition of high-speed broadband has remained stagnant over the last six years, sitting at 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up since 2015. But faced with pandemic-fueled network loads and a new push for infrastructure spending, lawmakers are getting ready to upgrade that definition. In a letter to government leaders Thursday, a bipartisan group of senators called for a quadrupling of base high-speed broadband delivery speeds making 100Mbps down and 100Mbps up the new base for high-speed broadband. From a report: "Going forward, we should make every effort to spend limited federal dollars on broadband networks capable of providing sufficient download and upload speeds and quality," Sens. Michael Bennet (D-CO), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Angus King (I-ME), and Rob Portman (R-OH) wrote to the FCC and other agencies. "There is no reason federal funding to rural areas should not support the type of speeds used by households in typical well-served urban and suburban areas." The letter calls on the FCC and other agencies to change their definitions of "high speed broadband" to anything above 100Mbps down and 100Mbps up -- a shift that would prohibit the FCC from identifying an area as being served with broadband unless it met those speed criteria. It's a complete change of pace from the FCC under former Chairman Ajit Pai's leadership, which established the previous 25 / 3Mbps standard.
Very few people have 100 Mbps up (Score:5, Insightful)
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It's not that current 1000/35 Coax or 55/15 VDSL services would become illegal or anything. But, I kinda have to agree that we shouldn't be spending Federal dollars for subsidies to build out anything short of GPON... considering that was already a developed standard and in regular deployment 12 years ago.
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+1 GPON is the only thing worth subsidizing.
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I have 1000 mbps up and down with google fiber
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What part of the country are you in?
Is this a normal consumer connection to a regular household or is this a business type account?
How much per month?
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My Verizon Fios is Gig symmetric as well, $90/mo + router rental if you do that, but not required. In central Maryland.
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Plattsmouth, NE here (Well, called "Beaver Lake". I have an ISP called "Spiral Communications"
$109/mo. Static IP Address, and 1Gbps/1Gbps (Down/Up) fiber. Routerboard is given to use free to use, and I use my own WiFi Router myself (a NetGear NightHawk Dual-band router).
I *GET* 1Gbps/1Gbps easily when doing speedtest, just so long as I select an end that can actually send/receive at those speeds during the test. So it's do-able as I live in Bumshart, Nebrehoma here with a population of only a couple thousa
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My AT&T Gigafiber gives me 1Gbps symmetric.
DSLReports test shows about 850Mbps down and 920Mbps up. I have no clue why upstream is faster.
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Probably because fewer people use the upstream bandwidth. It may not be shared at your house, but eventually it gets to a shared connection, and even moderate usage by others will delay your packets a tiny bit, causing a minor speed shift. But I'm jealous of your internet speeds!
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I'm in the US (San Antonio, TX) and it's a household account
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Re:Very few people have 100 Mbps up (Score:4, Interesting)
75-Ohm Coax cable can absolutely do 100 up. It can do gigabit up if you like.
The issue is that, on most systems, there are 'diplexers'... amplifiers that amplify in one direction over a certain frequency and the other way below it. And the million-or-so of them in the current networks are mostly set to amplify out everything starting at 54 MHz up to 1 GHz or so. Because 54 MHz was the start of 'Channel 2', as defined in 1948 for broadcasting Amos n Andy in black and white, that's the standard still today.
For technical reasons, this left only a narrow window from ~15 MHz to 42 MHz as workable upstream bandwidth. Which caps out around 35-40 MBps and why you see few cable operators going beyond that.
They've known for about 20 years now that they need to pack downstream a bit tighter, move that 'split' to 150 MHz or 250 MHz, and they can accommodate Gig-plus down and near-Gig up speeds. But, it's expensive (all those pole-mounted amps). They're too busy counting their profits. So, 20 years on, few have done it.
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Yep, it's cheaper for them to lobby the government to avoid having to make those capital expenses. The amount of resentment towards the broadband providers (mostly cable TV companies) has caused them to routinely top the lists of most hated companies in the US. Sprinkle in lackluster customer service and the fact that there often are no alternative suppliers for "high bandwidth". The instant a credible alternative comes along that scales, you'll see an exodus away from those providers (think Comcast). T
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Yes, cable can provide 100 mbps down; Up is another story. I think the cable max is 50.
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but cable bandwidth up/down is usually determined by the DOCSIS revision and number of bonded channels available/used on the modem. My Cisco DPQ3212 modem (DOCSIS 3.0) has 8 downstream and 4 upstream channels. From the DOCSIS [wikipedia.org] page (Throughput section), that limits me to:
Down: 8 Channels, 343.04 (304) Mbit/s Throughput
Up: 4 Channels, 122.88 (108) Mbit/s Throughput
More info on Why Comcast and other cable ISPs aren’t selling you gigabit Internet [arstechnica.com].
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You're correct, but that 8/4 channel split is not foretold in holy tablets from the mountain. It's a choice in the spec, and made by the ISPs. Also, ISPs tend to way-oversubscribe the upstream channels, since before zoom calls the upstream was mostly used by torrents (which ISPs want to discourage). Also, the more they dedicated to upstream, the fewer left for downstream.
So cable CAN have very good upstream bandwidth, but they choose to optimize for downstream. It's a logical choice, though I suspect som
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Really? I pay for 100 down, but I don't know that the service has ever delivered more than 70 -- and that's on its best day. We were hovering at just about 20 yesterday, though we were back up to around 60 this afternoon. They "guarantee" 75% of what they claimed they sold us.
Cable monopolies suck.
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Can we stop saying the opposite of what we mean? (Score:3)
I don't suppose there is any chance that we can stop saying the exact opposite of what we mean?
A baseband connection, such as fiber optic or Ethernet, is typically quite a bit faster than a broadband connection such as 128 Kbps ISDN.
For two years or so, broadband (multichannel) ISDN was faster than single-channel (baseband), so for those couple of years only, for home connections only, the broadband option was faster than most popular baseband options at the time.
Gigabit fiber (baseband) is way faster than
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If it wasn't clear, for those unfamiliar:
Baseband - One fast channel / frequency. Typically used when the medium is designed for that speed. That channel may be serial or parallel, such as the case of 1000-BaseT.
Broadband - bonding multiple lower-speed channels, typically because the medium wasn't designed for high speed.
When the best connection most people had was a 64Kbps phone line, bonding TWO phone lines to get 128Kbps (broadband) was better.
Cable will send data over multiple 30 Mbps TV channels, so t
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Frankly, the suggested change is just fiddle-fucking around. We already know that the cell companies lie about speeds and coverage and throttling. The wired companies do the same. Until we have that data sorted out, messing around with our requirements is
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It doesn't really matter, it's just silly and slightly annoying.
It's the same as if some politician who was worried about monopoly wanted the government to use a "windows" (an operating system) that's not from Microsoft. So then the OMB write a regulation that 10% of federal computers have to run Windows - where Windows is is defined under the regulation as "any operating system not made by Microsoft".
It's just silly is all.
Here you heard of 10-Base-T or 100-Base-T? (Score:2)
> And it's a distinction without a different to the consumer. I'm technically savvy, and have never heard the distinction made between 'baseband' and 'broadband'.
Have you heard of 10-Base-T or 100-Base-T?
That's an abbreviation for 10 Mbps Baseband over twisted-pair.
> Why would anyone want to change the widely-understood meaning of a phrase at this point?
Indeed. x-Base-y has meant x Mbps baseband over y media since the 1980s, for forty years. The terms baseband and broadband were in use, with
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If it wasn't clear, for those unfamiliar:
Baseband - One fast channel / frequency. Typically used when the medium is designed for that speed. That channel may be serial or parallel, such as the case of 1000-BaseT.
Baseband does not have to be fast or slow. It is just modulation of power rather than frequency.
Broadband - bonding multiple lower-speed channels, typically because the medium wasn't designed for high speed.
So then a WiFi transceiver using a single 160mhz channel is not broadband because it is just one channel?
No of course not. Modulation is what makes the difference not channel count.
When the best connection most people had was a 64Kbps phone line, bonding TWO phone lines to get 128Kbps (broadband) was better.
Cable will send data over multiple 30 Mbps TV channels, so that's broadband. Fiber uses a single 1,0000 Mbps channel, so that's baseband.
If gluing multiple parallel baseband "channels" together makes something "broadband" why is an optical fiber in a GPON deployment not broadband?
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> If gluing multiple parallel baseband "channels" together makes something "broadband" why is an optical fiber in a GPON deployment not broadband?
GPON (gigabit PON) is the next iteration of BPON (broadband pon). So called because it has an upstream channel and a downstream channel, two channels on the same media. One can argue that's just duplex baseband - each signal is composed of exactly one channel. But they are in the same media.
> No of course not. Modulation is what makes the difference not ch
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GPON (gigabit PON) is the next iteration of BPON (broadband pon). So called because it has an upstream channel and a downstream channel, two channels on the same media. One can argue that's just duplex baseband - each signal is composed of exactly one channel. But they are in the same media.
There isn't one downstream channel there are multiple channels each operating at different frequencies on the same strand of fiber. The 'P' stands for 'passive' which means passive element e.g. a prism to split them.
Close, but not *exactly, according to the networking and signaling standards. Standards like 10-Base-T, 100-Base-T (100 Mbps baseband over twisted pair),
I asked about WiFi and you respond with irrelevant tidbits about ethernet. If you can't explain why a single channel 160mhz long is broadband not baseband then you can't answer my question.
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Close, but not *exactly, according to the networking and signaling standards. Standards like 10-Base-T, 100-Base-T (100 Mbps baseband over twisted pair), etc. It's not another name for AM and FM. Frequency is ONE way to have multiple channels on the same media. Actually it's a very practical way. Yet, when an FM radio station is sending their signal around the station and to their antenna, that's a baseband signal because there is only one signal on one channel. Once it gets out on the air, there are multiple channels in the same media.
FM radio (through the air) is broadband because there are multiple channels in the same air. So is AM radio, for the same reason.
By this same definition GPON fiber deployments are broadband NOT baseband because multiple frequencies are operating concurrently over the very same medium.
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Yes, as I said above, GPON is an extension of BPON.
The B in BPON stands for Broadband.
Yeah, Broadband passive optical network is broadband. And passive. And optical. Even at 1 Gbps.
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Gigabit fiber (baseband) is way faster than broadband (cable), so I'd much rather have baseband than broadband. Any chance we could stop saying we want broadband when in fact we want the exact opposite, baseband? Nah, now that a clueless politician started misusing a word he didn't know the meaning of, we all have to.
Yes, as I said above, GPON is an extension of BPON.
The B in BPON stands for Broadband.
Yeah, Broadband passive optical network is broadband. And passive. And optical. Even at 1 Gbps.
So now you are saying gigabit fiber is broadband not baseband right? Meaning this entire exercise in pedantic nonsense was all for nothing.
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Yes, technically 1 up and 1 down is two. Which means technically it's (barely) broadband, or full duplex baseband. In each direction, GPON uses time division multiplexing, as baseband does. The two directions (up vs down) use different frequencies, like broadband.
You'll note the modulation is AM (binary in this case), not FM.
We can further note that it does NOT carry different channels for different customers on the same fiber at the same time. A single upstream channel is time-shared by different users -
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We can further note that it does NOT carry different channels for different customers on the same fiber at the same time. A single upstream channel is time-shared by different users - as baseband is. A single downtream channel is time-shared by different users - as baseband is.
This is not at all the case. The downstream channel is comprised of multiple frequencies (WDM) over the same fiber. A passive filter (e.g. prism) removes frequencies of other channels before reaching subscribers ONU.
TDM normally only used for the upstream channel.
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> This is not at all the case. The downstream channel is comprised of multiple frequencies (WDM)
Pretty sure that's WDM-PON, not BPON.
At least that's what the vendors who make the equipment tell me.
Here's a little intro to a couple of the standards.
Tell me if you think any of this wrong, and if you have a source that says so:
https://community.fs.com/blog/... [fs.com]
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We can further note that it does NOT carry different channels for different customers on the same fiber at the same time.
Tell me if you think any of this wrong, and if you have a source that says so:
https://community.fs.com/blog/... [fs.com]
I don't know what to say. You have made a claim (NOT carry different channels for different customers) that is directly contradicted by a reference you yourself provide showing this exact thing occurring complete with pretty graphical illustrations.
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In the page explaining the difference between BPON and WDM-PON, which one has a different frequency for each user?
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Here's a hint while you're trying to figure out whether it's BPON or WDM-PON that uses wave division multiplexing:
WDM stands for wave division multiplexing.
One is literally NAMED wave division passive optical network.
Maybe you can guess whether THAT'S the one that uses wave division multiplexing, or maybe you'll keep insisting it's BPON that does that.
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You are conflating "broadband" in the context of telecommunication data transmission signaling methods, with "broadband" in the context of what regulators and general end-users understand as "it's the Internet, but fast!".
The two are very different concepts and the article is clearly about the latter, not the former.
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Is it though? Until recently I only had 35Mps and I was able to steam 4k TV with no problems. Of course more is better but if we're talking minimums I don't see that as being an unreasonable minimum. I guess it depends on what your benchmark is.
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The main benchmark is "when we take lots of government money, what is the absolute least we can get away with and not be sued into the stone age?" Given that that is the goal, I'm perfectly happy to raise the goalposts. If you want my money (via taxes), you better earn it, not install crap and call it gold.
Re: Very few people have 100 Mbps up (Score:1)
I guess that will be the point where it threatens their profits, and they will have to lower their prices.
(And remember back in the days whe Valve quartered the prices on Steam, and made more money in total than before.)
Ooor... they go full Content Mafia, and sue people for mass-"theft" for not giving them money anymore. ;)
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starlink (Score:2)
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Actually, I could see this as an attack on Starlink. The government is supposed to be subsidizing broadband rollouts to underserved populations, and this change in definition means that companies can only tap into that money if they will offer 100/100 or better. Starlink easily meets the 25/3 standard, but could struggle with the 100 up standard.
(For me, I'm thrilled with Fios. They recently upped me to 200/200, but speed tests show they actually set it at 300/300.)
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Re: starlink (Score:2)
Yes, they do, even if it isn't obviously in use right now. The internet is fundamentally designed as being peer serving and the tech should be there. The future has always been peering and decentralization, though corporations will figh it endlessly.
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Well, we've certainly seen over the last year that it's normal for a family to have five or six people who are all streaming HD video through Zoom and the like. That could easily be 5 Mbps for each stream, so that's 30 right there. Toss in some cushion to keep everything flowing smoothly, and you want 50 Mbps. Double that for some degree of future-proofing, and you get 100 Mbps.
So larger families can easily use 30-50 Mbps right now. We're talking about funding infrastructure that should last a long time
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Also, the average U.S. hou
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Need to? No. But the software will do it anyway, and it is a typical use case.
And we've also found throughout the history of the Internet that increasing typical bandwidth enables new technologies and drives economic growth.
Besides, why would you invest in infrastructure now that only meets the needs of today when you should be investing in infrastructure that meets the needs of the life of the infrastructure.
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I'm in complete agreement. Do we NEED communication better than IRC? Probably not, but I suppose we don't NEED indoor plumbing either. If it was good enough for my great-grandpappy...
Let's not hold back progress. Right now we could live with a "1 FPS low-res" stream, but we'll need more for the next technology improvement, whatever it is.
And since this definition is mostly used for "what is the absolute minimum that a company can get away with and still collect those sweet, sweet tax dollars", let's rai
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Sure feels like it, doesn't it. Starlink appears to pretty much solve the rural and suburban problem. It doesn't fix it (today, though you could imagine them putting big dishes on apartments to connect an entire building) for urban scenarios.
I would hate to see the government make it harder for the one player that is actually fixing the problem to protect the incumbents, who have completely exploited their last mile monopolies, but that's par for "the new Washington" that our citizens voted for...
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Starlink will never solve it for urban areas. Wired is ALWAYS better than wireless, and urban areas make wiring cost-effective.
But starlink is great for mobile (vehicles, not tiny devices) and rural areas. And it will lkely be a lot cheaper and better than other options in that area.
Re:starlink (Score:4, Interesting)
Starlink easily meets the 25/3 standard, but could struggle with the 100 up standard.
Starlink's target speed at full deployment is 10 gigabit down and 1 gigabit up.
Make the definition of broadband mean no caps (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Make the definition of broadband mean no caps (Score:1)
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Where have you been the last couple of years.
Quite obviously, as with all things spaceX, the answer is "Mars!"
hawk
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Any internet connection with caps shouldn't be allowed to be classified as broadband. I'd rather have a slower connections that's not capped than a faster one that is capped. I fear with the status quo many people will use latency heavy Starlink just to bypass caps.
Regarding Starlink: has it been clarified if there will be caps? There's nothing magical about it that makes bandwidth unlimited. And it's actually pretty reasonable latency. I think it might add a few dozen ms at most.
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I'm OK with a data cap, as long as it's a reasonable one. I doubt that many residential customers have a reason to exceed 5 TB of downloads in a month... why not start there?
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Exactly right. Most people have been sold on the lie that they need tremendous amounts of bandwidth, but even if everyone in a 4 person home is streaming 4K at the same time, which is a fairly uncommon and extreme use case today, you're still only talking about roughly 80-100 mbps down. But just one hour of streaming at that rate will burn through 35 GB, which would mean you'd get roughly 5-6 hours each month before you'd burn through the default data cap offered by my local ISP.
Video conferencing, cloud ba
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I'm fine with a datacap of 324 TB a month ( 1gbps * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 / 8 ). I'm probably really okay with 10% of that as a non-issue. But any legal cap (and caps in general) should be phrased as X% of what you theoretically could use.
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Having data caps is a fact of life, and even happens in enterprise dedicated hosting scenarios:
https://www.inmotionhosting.co... [inmotionhosting.com]
We might not like it, but the alternatives have other tradeoffs.
The reason is very simple. When we buy a switch it would rarely have the backend fabric and uplink capacity to match all ports.
So, they need to optimize. The choices would be:
A) Dedicate one of the uplinks to the client. For a gigabit connection this would be in $200 - $400 / month range.
B) Split it evenly. For example
I don't need 100mpbs to work from home (Score:5, Insightful)
Availability is the issue for me, not speed. I've had to pass on some really neat properties because there was no broadband. And this is 30 miles from Washington D.C., not Podunk North Dakota. I know someone who lives 10 minutes from an AWS data center and his only choices are cellular or dial-up because Comcast won't run a line.
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Exactly what they should be looking at. Let's fix the availability problem before raising the bar on whether or not you can run facetime, zoom, webex, netflix and game at the same time from 10 devices where broadband penetration already exists.
Re: I don't need 100mpbs to work from home (Score:2)
If they're fixing the availability problem they should fix it with modern tech anyway so let's do both.
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These Senators all have rural areas with jack shit for Internet because of their States' monopolies and/or regulatory schemes and rather than do the hard work of fixing that they're making a show about changing a number that won't help the people they pretend to represent.
Which is fine for people who live in single-family residences, as Starlink will help them out, but apartment dwellers and other renters may still be in a bind without landlord cooperation. Same for people in dense forests.
Brash whiners li
Re:I don't need 100mpbs to work from home (Score:4, Funny)
"I know someone who lives 10 minutes from an AWS data center"
That is some latency there.
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Availability is often a problem in places you'd not expect it to be. I used to live in the general area you're speaking of, and I saw a lot of that.
My experience with cable providers though, is they don't want to pay the initial cost to run new lines if they don't get some kind of reassurance they'll be able to subscribe X number of new customers using it. If you call in as a single person wanting service, they'll tell you no, because it's not built out there.
But what you'd be much more successful with is
Seriously, what do they use it for (Score:1)
It can't all be porn, can it?
Real 25/3 is fine. (Score:5, Interesting)
I assume the previous definition is 25/3 because that's the max ADSL can provide, so telecoms can provide it with the existing infrastructure of copper cables.
Thing is, if they actually sync at 25/3 ADSL most consumers are fine, those are actually broadband speeds that can support multiple HD video streams. But if an area is covered just by ADSL, then it is UP TO 25/3 with only very few people getting that speed.
So I don't think the definition is bad, but it should be the minimum speed users get, not the maximum. OK, the 3 upstream is a bit limiting, so maybe 5/10 would be better (which means at least VDSL), but the 25 down is good as long as it is the real downstream, not the theoretical maximum for the area.
But in general the ISP situation in the US is FUBAR due to the monopoly status. I remember when I lived in Brooklyn up to about 10 years ago, my fastest option was a Time Warner cable which was ironically called "RoadRunner" and its max down was 5Mbps (but I still paid something like $50-60 for it). My boss in Manhattan could only get slow ADSL through Verizon. He paid $5k/month for a nice upper west side apartment on a nice high-rise, but he could not have fast internet no matter how much he was willing to spend. I am talking just about NYC to avoid all the arguments about how "spread" the US is. Compared to then, I see it's better now speed-wise, but not everywhere and prices have not come down. In Europe, depending on the country, you are expected to pay $15-$30 for VDSL2 speeds (up to 80/20), some northern countries have cheap connections that are even faster.
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"In Europe, depending on the country, you are expected to pay $15-$30 for VDSL2 speeds (up to 80/20)"
Figures for 2020.
Hmm
https://img.datawrapper.de/EMN... [datawrapper.de]
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Not sure what you are showing me. It has very few European places listed and with kind of dubious prices and even more dubious reporting (they add monthly + installation in the graph like they are some sort of similar weight).
Take a look at a big study for which you can download all the data here: https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/mobile-and-fixed-broadband-prices-europe-end-2019 [europa.eu]
What it doesn't show is that in Europe you are always on promo offers too, as you just jump to another provider i
No wonder nothing ever gets done (Score:5, Insightful)
Both the article and the letter make a mish-mash of the history and terminology of the subject matter, so it is no wonder nothing "pro-consumer" ever gets accomplished with respect to broadband, the folks "We The People" hire are mostly morons and no match for the paid suits of the corporations.
First off, both the article and the letter conflate the term "high-speed broadband" with the FCC definition of "broadband". And how? One sentence in the January FCC report that puts the phrase "high-speed broadband" ahead of a next sentence wherein the FCC effectively defines "broadband" or "fixed broadband" rather, as "25/3 Mbps". Notice: latter is a lower limit; the former is a nice thing we'd all like to have. Now, the letter, through this conflation, has turned a perk into lower limit, literally "moving the goalposts", while entirely admitting that the prior "limit" has yet to be achieved and is even likely adulterated by really bad reporting data that the FCC has allowed (got caught allowing) the providers to lie with.
Second, the letter admits that "according to speedtest.net’s January 2021 analysis, average service is currently 180 Mbps download / 65 Mbps upload". Now, I almost don't expect these moron pols understand what the actual definition of "average" is, but I'd hope a technically-inclined staffer does. In short, many more than half of broadband customers don't have access to anywhere NEAR 100Mbps upload speeds. So that "goal" is so pie-in-the-sky as to be stupid; we might as well ask for rocket trip to the Moon. (Since Elon is likely to make that happen too before these idiot pols make any headway.)
But lost in ALL of it is what customers REALLY need: a clear, comprehensive Service Level Agreement-style "truth in advertising" scheme. We don't need 100/100; we need to know what we're paying for, and we need to be guaranteed we're getting it. Right now, the providers lie their asses off, and the customers have no recourse of action. In monopoly service areas, it is even worse because they lie AND soak us for exorbitant fees. The thing is, all of these providers should be doing service-level metrics... c'mon, we know they are. But they aren't compelled to share that information with customers, state or municipal regulatory bodies, or even the FCC. Every cable modem and DSL modem that gets plugged in knows and can report back its line speed, regardless of the customer's provisioned bandwidth. Comcast, et al know that info, but they lie to the FCC about it routinely as if they don't.
3Mbps upload is pretty shoddy when you're looking at day-on-end of WFH or at-home classroom video. Yup. But a goal of 1080p up is just plain daft in the face of where most DSL speeds are in large swaths of the rural America. And anyone who tells me that 25Mbps just isn't enough downstream bandwidth for a lot of tight-budget folks can just GTFO. The FCC compromised on 25/3 because of DSL; the cablecos tried to stick it to the incumbent telecoms by getting that raised, because they knew that the max DSL speed was ~12/2 (and therefore at most 25/4 with a two-line bonding), but ultimately failed to make it happen. However that should be re-examined, and that might should cause a conversation about how America is currently wired. (Old school POTS has had its day, 100 years ago it was the "moonshot". Today we need another... it should have been FTTC in the 2000s, but Rs screwed that up. Ds didn't do any better in the 2010s.) 25/5? 25/10? I dunno. But the cablecos have to be stopped raising bandwidth "promises" ALONG with prices, or this is just a joke. And the DSL companies... well, we need to just write that off, they're done, toast, bye bye, dead. Wireless? The capacity problems are so problematic I can't see that as a solution. And if the carriers are allowed to promote it as one, we will see data price gouging like we did at the outset of the smartphone, before Apple's infamous "Unlimited" iPhone plan with AT&T. (And, see what happened since!)
And that's where the SLA comes in, along with an enforced lower target: say, 25/10 for $25/month. I don't care HOW they do it, but every carrier should have that plan, available to every American. Then we can talk about subsidizing that.
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I would love a 25/5 at $25/month. I'm currently on 100mb/?mb for $84 and my company really wants me to upgrade my modem and go to 1000mb/?mb for $125 but I literally have no use for the extra speed in either direction. We don't own any 4k devices and it's just my wife and I.
I recently just got a "free" boost in Internet speed and the first thing I did was check in on the Tiers offered by my cable co to see if the lowest tier of service got a small boost as well. Nope, still 5mb/1mb as the cheapest offer wi
How will this help? (Score:2)
How will this help people who don't even have "broadband" under the current definition? That is the far greater problem. Where my daughter lives there is only satellite based broadband (they don't even have cellular or DSL), which has incredibly small caps and is expensive. That is the true problem in the US, is that there are people that don't even have the current "broadband" defined internet.
Anyway this is all too late at this point, as Starlink is quickly ramping up and will provide broadband to ever
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How will this help people who don't even have "broadband" under the current definition? That is the far greater problem.
Our government gave the telecoms a lot of money to guarantee a certain percentage of Americans had access to broadband. These same telecoms were further paid to make sure those services were provided to the last mile. This forces the telecoms to re-invest in the infrastructure or risk losing future grants to cover the last mile. The telecoms will probably get paid twice for the same job, at the taxpayers' expense. It will benefit people on the fringe either way. The people out too far out in the sticks will
advertised speeds (Score:2)
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Advertised speeds to where? I always get my advertised speeds to the comcast speed test.. but it's not necessarily comcast's fault if I can't get that to youtube.
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They've further upped their game on this and started to get dedicated routes across the USA to major peering locations and route through those. Essentially the majority of my tra
This sounds like the work of special interests (Score:2)
People trying to make the definition something they can easily achieve but others cannot.
I would love to have 100Mbps upstream at my house, but I surely don't feel drastically underserved at 40.
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Lucky you. I get 100Mbps down and 10Mbps up and that's the best possible consumer service I can get. Uploading (e.g. saving files) is...painful. It was even more painful when it was 5Mbps up.
I live in the 35th largest city in the U.S. I would love a definition of broadband to be a minimum of 100Mbps in both directions.
The telecoms should be ashamed that anyone can go out right now and spin up a virtual server on DigitalOcean that has 1Gbps guaranteed with burst rate of 3Gbps in both directions and 1TB o
at work (Score:1)
When legislators aren't spending $$ we don't have (Score:2)
...they're pushing unfunded mandates to insist OTHER people spend money for their political goals.
We don't even apparently care when we run out of money.
Who bothers to limit spending to resources anymore? So old-fashioned!
Chairman Ajit Pai's "leadership" (Score:1)
A leader is someone who has the best interest of the people they serve at heart. Ajit never qualified as an actual leader. He did what would be good for him.
So long as its symmetrical (Score:2)
From 1996 telecom act:
"ADVANCED TELECOMMUNICATIONS CAPABILITY- The term advanced telecommunications capability is defined, without regard to any transmission media or technology, as high-speed, switched, broadband telecommunications capability that enables users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications using any technology."
There is clearly no preference for directionality. The very same capabilities enumerated in the definition apply to both sending and rec
Sevice over Speed (Score:3)
For most consumers, service is a bigger issue than speed.
Currently, ISPs claim to "serve" an entire zip code if they serve at least one address in that block and the FCC accepts this. The FCC should require ISPs to report actual availability to every domicile in their service area.
Then the FCC needs to call on senators (Score:2)
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That's crazytalk. You must be one of them COMMUNISTS I heard about! God means our taxes to improve CEO salaries, not the lives of the common folk!
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Ok, why exactly should I give two fucks about worldwide broadband connections and spend MY tax dollars on this ?
My tax dollar should go to pay for MY countries needs first and above all else....
That's what my taxes are for....
I don't have anything against better broadband infrastructure and connections for the rest of the world, but I see no reason MY hard earned tax money should go to pay for it.
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Shut up idiot.
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It's not that we're whipping the government to get extra fancy broadband. It's more like we're cutting off the government handouts to corporations providing average broadband. If they want free money, they'll have to step up their game. If it's not worth their time, then they can continue to do what they are doing.
P.S. comparing typical Western lifestyle and needs to the world average standard of living doesn't serve much practical purpose. Unless you need a reason to remove indoor plumbing from our homes.
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It just means that a provider isn't eligible to receive federal incentive funding (Universal Service Fund, etc) for deploying a used DSLAM from 1996 off of eBay and calling it broadband.