FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

https://www.fcc.gov/document/chairwoman-rosenworcel-proposes-increase-minimum-broadband-speeds

by happyopossum • 4 years ago

369 288 4 years ago

100/20 is definitely an improvement, and is probably a reasonable minimum bar to set. I'm sure most of us have much higher speed connections, but I know I rarely take my 1Gb pipe over 10% of that... Heck, 2 TVs streaming 4k during a zoom call would be fine on 100Mb...

stop50• 4 years ago

plus some content providers limit the bandwith for individual connections

giantg23• 4 years ago

I don't think it's reasonable if it means my provider's offering start at 100 Mbps vs my current 25 Mbps, at what I'm sure will be at least double the cost to me.

bufferoverflow• 4 years ago

4k during a zoom call would be fine on 100Mb

Not sure what bit rate TV is at, but one 4K YouTube stream can take up to 68Mbps, and 8K even more.

We're on 400Mbps, and even then I manage to block internet for others when I download a large file at full speed.

danachow• 4 years ago

We're on 400Mbps, and even then I manage to block internet for others when I download a large file at full speed.

That's more of a router/QoS issue. A large download shouldn't negatively affect quality for other uses, especially VoIP. If the place you're downloading from has a pipe bigger than yours and can saturate your bandwidth you're going to need to implement some kind of rate-limiting/queue management.

kalleboo2• 4 years ago

I don't think I've ever seen a 4K YouTube stream over 15 Mbit, where do you find a 70 Mbit stream? Even the king of streaming bitrate, Apple TV, is said to peak at 30 Mbps

refulgentis2• 4 years ago

I'm not sure this is accurate, maybe a sufficiently cherry-picked small # of frames in a VBR recording?

It, at the very least, hides more than it illuminates in that 68Mbps is an order of magnitude higher than an average 4K video's bitrate over it's duration

gnicholas5• 4 years ago

I'd rather have two providers that offers 25Mbps than one that offers 100Mbps. I don't need 100, or even 50. But Comcast has been jacking up their prices, along with increasing the minimum speed available, for years. They respond to government regulations like these. I'm now paying 2x what I used to (from $25 to $50/mo), and getting 2x the speed. But I don't want to be forced to buy 2x the speed (or even faster, as this proposal would require).

I would much rather have the govt provide incentives for there to be more than one provider. I live in the heart of SV (Menlo Park), and Comcast is the only option. 5G is not well-served where I live, and the pricing is also not competitive. We need more competition, not more redefinition of "broadband".

metadat2• 4 years ago

You might be eligible for ATT [gigabit] fiber? Could be worth a shot. (Unless you're in far-east Menlo)

IME the fiber service is faster more reliable than Comcast, but AT&T support is the absolute worst, super incompetent (across the entire company, not just U-verse internet).

It's fine as long as you don't need any support and don't try to deactivate anything, but if your account gets messed up it can literally take a dozen calls and 20+ hours of being on the phone to get seemingly simple issues resolved. </rant>

The Comcast ATT duopoly is pretty atrocious. Given the regulatory climate, how can a new player even succesfully enter into the market?

DrewADesign• 4 years ago

(Unless you're in far-east Menlo)

Unless they're in far-east Menlo or like 99.99999% of the rest of the world. While bay area folks are certainly heavily-represented here, the commenters come from all corners of the globe.

Stratoscope6• 4 years ago

One trick for better AT&T support here on the Peninsula may be to sign up through Sonic instead of directly with AT&T. In some areas like SF, Sonic runs their own fiber, in others they are an AT&T reseller - with the wrinkle that Sonic handles all support with their own local staff. I have been told that they have better insight and connections into the internal AT&T systems than AT&T's own support team. I haven't had much need for support, so I can't vouch for that, but it wouldn't surprise me.

I'm in Flood Triangle (between Menlo Oaks and 101), and AT&T ran fiber though our neighborhoods last year.

I had good Comcast service, at least after I reported some intermittent outages and they finally sent someone out to test the connection and he said "I'm surprised you're getting any service at all! Your drop has been spliced a few times. I'm calling my buddy with a bucket truck and we will run you a new drop."

(A "drop" is the cable that connects your home to the main cable line.)

After that it was solid. Had gigabit downloads, but uploads were limited to 30 megabit. Comcast is in a bind here, as they built out their infrastructure in an era of "on-demand television" where download speed was the important thing and upload was just a simple control channel. So they have hardware filters everywhere to separate the upload and download frequencies, and naturally they gave more spectrum to the downloads.

In my work I often need to upload large files of 15GB or more. So when AT&T came through I signed up and it is a huge difference: ten minutes to upload one of those files instead of two hours (with people waiting on it).

gnicholas5• 4 years ago

I'm far-west, which isn't served by ATT. There actually is an upstart in the area, Atherton Fiber. [1] But they don't serve my area either.

1: https://almanacnews.com/news/2022/07/05/new-internet-provide...

ethagknight• 4 years ago

Bear in mind that connection speed sold “up to xx mbps” is largely irrelevant to the actual cost of service. It’s just the sales model that most ISPs have adopted over the last few decades when bandwidth really was constrained. Comcast’s costs are its people, truck rolls, equipment and infrastructure outlay, and advertising.

Convincing or requiring you to pay double for 2x the speed is just the way they can increase cash flow.

ZoomerCretin• 4 years ago

I would much rather have the govt provide incentives for there to be more than one provider.

In the UK, ISPs are forced to lease their last-mile lines to anyone who wants to provide internet service. This results in a decent amount of competition.

rootusrootus3• 4 years ago

The US did that. But only with copper. And so the telcos just ripped out all the copper. There's not too much left.

hamandcheese2• 4 years ago

If, say, Comcast had to lease their last mile, why wouldn’t they charge an arm and a leg to whoever was trying to sell internet? I don’t see how this would bring prices down meaningfully.

gnicholas5• 4 years ago

Yeah we have MVNOs that do this for mobile. But it can't currently compete with wired internet on price, and we apparently don't require it for cable internet.

closeparen• 4 years ago

ISP customer service is never fun, but my problem is not really with who picks up the phone. It's with the physical network that's provisioned for my neighborhood and the way it's maintained. The lessee has no more power over this than I do, only now I can get stuck in customer-service hell between two different companies instead of two different departments.

eneumann• 4 years ago

Ideal world would be seeing the laws preventing municipally owned ISPs struck down. I'd also like the see the right of ways municipally owned as well, to better facilitate competition with new providers.

sneak• 4 years ago

and Comcast is the only option.

This is by design. Utility service regulation in the US is famously corrupt.

The system is working exactly as intended.

Internet access should now be close to too cheap to meter, yet it is a nice cash cow that can be milked, so the regulators have an arrangement with the highest bidder.

The US does not have the rule of law.

rgbrenner• 4 years ago

Would two providers solve anything? There are 3 cell phone companies and they’re all virtually the same price.

abawany2• 4 years ago

In my area, the arrival of 5g home wireless providers caused some fast downshifts in price by att and spectrum, albeit for introductory pricing.

gnicholas5• 4 years ago

Do you think the price would be the same if two of them were eliminated? I guarantee you the price would go up.

Also, there are MVNOs. You can get cell service much cheaper if you don't go with the big 3, and the quality is basically the same.

abawany2• 4 years ago

have you considered looking into the 5g home offerings from Verizon and TMobile? In my area Spectrum was having a fine time jacking up rates unfettered and laughing at me when I asked to reduce them. I switched to Verizon 5G Home and when I called Spectrum to cancel, they practically begged me to stay (edit: I didn't) and have now adjusted their rates to match Vzw/Tmo; of course these reduced rates are only good for one year because they are Spectrum, and there is no cure.

gnicholas5• 4 years ago

Where I live, there is neither Verizon or T-Mobile service, unfortunately. This is a stone's throw from Stanford; I cannot understand how we only have cell provider that works at our house. Fortunately there are MVNOs, so we're not stuck paying AT&T pricing for mobile.

bobsmooth2• 4 years ago

I don't need 100

Idk, downloading games at multiple MB/s is pretty sweet.

eternityforest2• 4 years ago

The amount of bandwidth you need depends on the number of people. 50Mb or 25Mb is probably fine for 1 person. As long as it can do 4k, and zoom calls, it's fine for most people.

100Mb might not be enough for six people, who might need to download, zoom, game, and stream all at once.

happyopossum2• 4 years ago

I think you're somewhat overestimating the amount of bandwidth used by those services. TO watch Netflix in 4k, you only need 15Mbps, zoom uses about half of that for a decent connection and will downgrade nicely.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 4 years ago

TO watch Netflix in 4k, you only need 15Mbps

So on a 25 Mbps connection that was previously considered broadband, two people in a household can't do that at the same time.

gh02t• 4 years ago

I agree with you, a lot of these services aren't as high bandwidth as people imagine but I will note that part of the reason is because that's what people routinely have access to. Netflix or whoever could be pushing higher bitrate content or potentially exploring other more bandwidth intensive ideas if people had access.

adgjlsfhk1• 4 years ago

what's the obsession with 4k? 1080p abd 1440p are way more common.

Strom2• 4 years ago

It's obsession with technological advancement. There was a time when people were resistant to even 720p, saying that 480p is more than enough and they can't even see the difference.

charcircuit• 4 years ago

What's the point? It's not even possible for me to get what's currently defined as broadband where I live. Changing some definitions isn't going to give me faster internet.

jeroenhd• 4 years ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure the term "broadband" is connected to things like subsidies (i.e. giving an ISP $x if they can provide y people with broadband) intended to increase internet connectivity in poor or remote areas. Increasing the definition also means that ISPs can no longer cheap out and pocket the subsidies.

toast04• 4 years ago

I'm sure it's also connected to incentives to bring 'broadband' to 'unserved communities'. Now, CenturyLink can get a new incentive to let my sync rate float up a smidge. Or, maybe they'll decide since it doesn't qualify for broadband that they'll just bow out, it's not like they enjoy being a phone company anyway.

giantg23• 4 years ago

No. This is insanity.

Faster speed will mean that providers will charge more. I am perfectly fine with 25 Mbps. I was fine with 10 Mbps too until they eliminated that level and I was forced to pay more.

Edit: why disagree?

simplyinfinity• 4 years ago

I pay 15$ for 500/300 megabit. It's a monopoly that gouges your prices, not competition or mandated high speeds.

giantg23• 4 years ago

Yeah, and if they don't fix the monopoly (this rule doesn't), then it will only exacerbate the current conditions (monopoly gouging us).

rasz• 4 years ago

mandating higher speeds is how you preserve monopolies

zuminator2• 4 years ago

This is not forcing providers into faster speeds. It's forcing them to stop marketing crawling speeds as "broadband." Of course if they are competing for contracts for deploying internet, they will have to meet the higher standard if "broadband" is specified in the contract.

Additionally, it's far from a foregone conclusion that "faster speeds will mean that providers will charge more." I've been paying roughly the same amount for the past 20 years starting from DSL speeds all the way up to 1Gbps. There were some years that my speed doubled but the bill was lowered.

pdx6• 4 years ago

With how slowly these proposals roll out, 100/20 won't be enough. As others said, there is a lack of both competition and pricing to worry about too.

In a major tech hub like San Francisco, where I live, it's possible to get 1gb/1gb in some areas for under $90, but which those are isn't consistent nor wide spread. Home cell coverage at 100/20 is spotty at best, and there is only one flat rate vendor (T-Mobile Home, no Verizon Home yet). For those outside of the Bay Area exurbs, I can only imagine the horrors of Comcast/Xfinity or only DSL people must deal with.

Looking forward, the FCC is assuming that people are just watching Netflix, Tiktok, and making angry Karen posts on Nextdoor. We're not sure where web3 will lead, and how much bandwidth will that take: Distributed file systems/data privacy? Fast crypto transactions? Metaverse/VR/AR glasses/contacts? And what about latency?

1000/500 should be the FCC goal.

eertami• 4 years ago

In a major tech hub like San Francisco, where I live, it's possible to get 1gb/1gb in some areas for under $90

As a point of comparison, I live in a small city in Europe (80k population) and we have 10gb/10gb for $60/month. My internal network is only capable of 2.5gbit, but I can upload at that speed indefinitely. I could honestly not imagine going back to ADSL speeds.

xboxnolifes• 4 years ago

You have access to residential internet with 10Gbps up and down? I didn't even know that was a thing.

lostmsu• 4 years ago

What's the city?

teaearlgraycold3• 4 years ago

TBF I'm in a SF suburb and I get 10Gb/s down and 2Gb/s up for $40/month.

inferiorhuman9• 4 years ago

San Francisco is an interesting case (and I say this as an SF native). The city government is so unfathomably dysfunctional in large part due to London Breed (the current mayor) bringing cronyism back as fast as she can.

Parts of the city are covered by MonkeyBrainz (microwave p2p), parts by Webpass (fiber), and most of the city is covered by Comcast (cable) or PacBell/SBC/AT&T (DSL and adjacent). Up until Sonic started rolling out 1 Gbps fiber a few years ago all I could get at my last place in the city was 3/1 Mbps ADSL or Comcast.

PacBell was always reluctant to build out RTs compared to GTE/Verizon (who has a significantly smaller presence in the Bay Area) so DSL speeds in large chunks of SF were always shit. Even when they did build out RTs the ILECs were never required to resell RT access so speeds remained shit. I'm not entirely sure why AT&T's U-Verse (FTTN, VDSL last mile) was rolled out so slowly but I expect the need for intrusive sidewalk boxes was part of the problem. Sonic got boned because SF's supervisors were/are reluctant to allow micro trenching. For a while there was some buzz about muni fiber but that never got off the ground (and Sonic certainly helped put a few nails in that coffin).

nanidin• 4 years ago

Fast crypto transactions?

Is client bandwidth a limiting factor in crypto transactions?

bogota• 4 years ago

I can’t actually think of any where the client is the limit. However for some having faster server nodes that are hosted at peoples homes would help speed up some currencies such as nano.

rayiner4• 4 years ago

Why is broadband so shitty in the heart of Silicon Valley? Why doesn’t Google just wire the whole place up as a tech demo?

Comcast just upgraded my fiber to 7 gbps. It’s spendy ($300/mo) but I also have gigabit Fios available for $80/mo.

bad416f1f5a23• 4 years ago

Google wired my city up as a tech demo. Their microtrenching approach was atrocious and resulted in frequent service interruptions and significant traffic disruption as they patched the same spots multiple times.

Eventually they decided the network was so damaged that they’d have to do a total rebuild, and that wasn’t interesting. They threw up their hands up and left, giving the city a few million to clean up the mess.

So, careful what you wish for.

toast04• 4 years ago

Why is broadband so shitty in the heart of Silicon Valley? Why doesn’t Google just wire the whole place up as a tech demo?

Google couldn't figure out how to get on poles. When they announced their batch of 20? or so real Google fiber cities, AT&T rolled out fiber to a good number of them before Google got city council approval to do anything. Comcast announced a loss leader 2Gbps symmetric for $300/month program [1], etc. It's not too hard to roll out fiber if you've got access to the poles and enough clout to put your fiber boxes wherever you need to. (sure, you gotta pay the property owner a little bit, but not it's not too bad)

[1] IIRC, it was always delivered as 10G metro ethernet, originally limited to 2G, but I think they increased that over time (I thought I had seen 6, but you're reporting 7). You've got to be close enough to their existing fiber that they're not losing too much on the buildout with their $1000 installation fee cap.

josh26002• 4 years ago

This.

I am insanely embarrassed by the third world telecom infrastructure many Americans have to live with.

100Mbps symmetrical is just on the edge of what telcos can jam into dsl over their existing install base. The goal of the telco is to keep the FCC speed goal at copper limits for as long as possible to avoid paying the fiber they were paid to build in the 90’s.

Om Malik wrote a fantastic book entitled: “Broadbandits” which covers the $750B telecom heist (way back 30 years ago when a single billion was a lot of money for a business).

https://www.amazon.com/Broadbandits-Inside-Billion-Telecom-H...

SamReidHughes2• 4 years ago

Who paid them to build fiber and under what contract?

toast04• 4 years ago

100Mbps symmetrical is just on the edge of what telcos can jam into dsl over their existing install base.

I'm not sure that's going to cover much of their base. I've got a pretty good line, I could probably hit 100M down, it's around 90M now, but not more than 40 or 50M up, it's capped at 16M though, cause fixed profiles :/

Elsewhere near me, there's like a chance of 10M. New technology isn't going to help that, unless it's fiber to the curb; but you might as well go the rest of the way to the premises if you can.

5e92cb50239222b2• 4 years ago

I live in Kazakhstan and am paying just a little over $10 a month for a 500 Mbit/s symmetrical FTTH link (no caps either). It's even faster and cheaper in Russia (at least it has been until now, I don't know how long it's going to be true since they're sanctioned to the moon). Both countries pretty much have (their own) monopolistic internet providers, and yet. Why do Americans tolerate this bullshit?

rejor121• 4 years ago

I’ve never had good internet in America, but my internet has been so good in east Asia. Even japan, which is supposedly worse than other countries, is worlds better than what I ever paid for in the states.

The one exception is China. I could never live there because of their shit internet due to the great firewall

evandijk70• 4 years ago

Fiber was installed here, and they provide three tiers - 50Mb/s, 100 Mb/s and 1000 Mb/s, for 45, 50, and 55 euro each. We took the 100Mb/s.

I have no idea what I would use 1 Gb/s for, using it as definition for broadband would be premature. Than again, Bill Gates said that: '640 kB RAM ought to be enough for anybody'.

Youden3• 4 years ago

At 1Gbps the internet becomes close to indistinguishable from a local network, opening up interesting possibilities like a "NAS" that's actually just the cloud. That extra bandwidth, combined with the low latency of fibre, can make it possible to easily interact with a remote PC as if it's sitting in front of you, so you could do away with a home PC or workstation and use a thin client to access a beefy machine on-demand in some datacenter.

superkuh2• 4 years ago

The problem, in the USA for most people, is Comcast.

Downspeed hardly matters. It's been plenty for decades. Upload speed has stagnated. I uploaded as fast in 2003 as I do now in 2022. And as others have said, it's not so much about 1 fast provider as many providers and choice. In my comcast monopoly my plan started at $60/mo in 2011 and without any changes on my end and no change in my upload speed that price has increased to it's current $105/mo. In addition to the price increases they've implemented a new system of total data transfer limits ((up/down)+internal overhead) meaning even if I could have a faster connection it'd mean nothing if I used it in the first week and then got hit with multiple $10 overage "fees".

But I don't have a choice. It doesn't matter how good, or bad, Comcast is. They're the only game in town.

rascul• 4 years ago

Downspeed hardly matters. It's been plenty for decades.

Until the power company ran fiber earlier this year, the only wired option here was 3Mbps DSL from AT&T. AT&T buried fiber all over the area (including in front of my house) years ago, but it sits there unused.

xahrepap• 4 years ago

Same where I am. Most of the city has competition because it’s most new developments out here and a few fiber companies were able to get in the ground early. My neighborhood is older so we only have Comcast. But Comcast buried fiber here to “future proof” ages ago, they just haven’t lit it up. And they’re the only company who got their hardware in the ground. So I’m stuck on their cable.

As it turns out the service here is good, so I shouldn’t complain. But it’s still frustrating that they are just sitting on fiber and not using it. And also that there’s no competition where I am.

If I ever move, then I’ll know better and pick a house with fiber already. :/

dubswithus• 4 years ago

My parents live 4 miles from the nearest city in a rural area. Someone paid for a fiber line and my parents got a free install because it crossed the property. Before this they were using a microwave antenna and getting 10 megabit.

walrus015• 4 years ago

and people wonder why folks in not-very-far-out suburbs are buying and using starlink or other options, if all they have is ultra long loop length copper DSL and no DOCSIS3 available and no GPON or active ethernet fiber based service.

i've seen starlink terminals in places they have absolutely no logical need to be if the local terrestrial incumbent phone company and cable companies with rights to the ROW (right-of-way) would get off their asses

cyral• 4 years ago

I was curious about the upload issue recently and learned that it is because of limitations of the old cable infrastructure. You presumably receive your internet over coax (which can still provide really good download speeds, I was surprised when my gigabit internet package came and it only had a coax port instead of fiber). Cable TV is pretty much all downloads, with only a small portion of the bandwidth reserved for uploads, since uploading is only needed for authenticating your subscription, pay-per-view purchases, etc. Unfortunately there isn't an easy way to re-allocate the upload bandwidth, because this splitting is implemented with actual hardware frequency filters that are buried and on poles all over the US.

harikb2• 4 years ago

As far as I have heard, they could choose to use N out of M channels for either upload or download and they are choosing to keep it the way it is. Probably they need to keep it that way for other reasons (their own cable-TV signal goes through it). But I know nothing about the electronics/signal-processing involved, so I could be totally wrong.

Symbiote2• 4 years ago

In Denmark I had 300Mbit/s coax/cable broadband. I think the upload was about 30Mbit/s.

It was then upgraded to 1000Mbit/s down, 250Mbit/s up, with no change to the cost, IIRC. A technician installed a frequency (?) splitter of some sort, one side for TV and the other Internet.

He remarked that my socket was nicely accessible, so I think he'd been doing this hundreds of times.

(I may have paid an engineer call-out fee for this, I can't really remember. It was 2 years ago.)

Stratoscope6• 4 years ago

Yes, you have it exactly right. The cable infrastructure was built out in the era of "on demand TV", and the coax cable and frequencies they used required some hard choices. Hard in the sense of hardware. Perhaps quite sensibly for the time, they installed hardware filters that allocated most of the spectrum for download.

lallysingh• 4 years ago

Hopefully starlink will raise the bar with competition

ganoushoreilly• 4 years ago

Uploads are about the same 8-20 on the Starlink connection we have at our farm.

arcticbull2• 4 years ago

Unfortunately Shannon's law makes that all but impossible.

godelski4• 4 years ago

This is such an artificial/politically generated problem too. I used to live in Tennessee and there were several cities with gigabit internet that was created by public funding. Chattanooga did this but was blocked from providing access to those that were in unincorporated areas. Even though the city still provided these people other utilities (electricity, water, gas) and mail. Same thing happened in Tullahoma (city next to where Bonnaroo Music Festival is). Then I remember Google Fiber trying to come in but the state had a law where lines needed to be placed in certain areas (which were of course in use) and that one operator could not lay down lines unless there was a representative from those that already had lines in place (supposedly to protect property). But this obviously led to shenanigans. Similarly when I moved into an apartment I chose the faster city internet but the previous tenant had AT&T. When the utilities company came to turn on my fiber (as they had provided for the apt previously) they found that AT&T had slashed their line, which caused me to have to pay an instillation fee. For a state where the people were so proud and supportive of libertarianism and the free market there sure were a lot of laws that supported or enabled monopolies to run a muck.

There are clearly available solutions and there's room for markets to exist and provide competition but it is very clear that we've set up a system that enables the unregulated monopolistic actions of ISPs.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 4 years ago

The problem is lack of competition. My father gets outstanding service at his house in RI because he can switch to about 3 providers. When he threatens to cancel they know he means it. I get fisted by Cuckcast up here in NH because they're the only choice.

xibo92• 4 years ago

Have you heard from Fidium yet in your community? I know they haven't got coverage everywhere yet, but its surprising how quickly they have been backfilling. Plus, fully symmetrical 1 gigabit/sec under $100/mo has been nice.

philjohn• 4 years ago

This is the key - capitalism only works when there is viable competition, otherwise it's just a monopoly.

They got around this in the UK by splitting the monopoly (well, except for Kingston upon hull) into BT and OpenReach. OpenReach provides the infrastructure, and are bound by government regulation to provide open access to last mile infrastructure for a fixed fee per product - this allows a load of ISP's to offer their own value-add services.

AAISP is pricey, but you get legendary support Zen is less pricey (and unlimited) and good support PlusNet is cheap as chips

The one are this is different with is FTTP - because of the slow roll out on OpenReach's part, plenty of smaller providers have stepped up and built their own infrastructure and cover various parts of the country.

Is it perfect? Of course not, but I'm paying 54 GBP a month for 900 down and 110 up FTTP.

imoverclocked2• 4 years ago

But I don't have a choice. It doesn't matter how good, or bad, Comcast is. They're the only game in town.

To extend that, Comcast is on my street but refuses to run a line up to my house because they consider it to be too cost prohibitive. At the same time, they block anyone else from making money in my region. I'm stuck with whatever cell signal I can acquire and that is as good as 5mbps during the day and might double that at night on a clear evening.

jfoutz2• 4 years ago

somewhat cynical, but I think effective.

Look into wireless internet service provider gear and mesh networks. It won't be faster than Comcast. 50Mbit maybe. Make flyers and talk to your neighbors. Call around and ask about pricing for fiber backhauls.

Of course you don't want to run your own ISP. But, you could. It's not really that hard. Your neighbors could chip in for gear and be part owners. or a co-op or whatever.

If you can create a plausible threat to the $5000 a month they're collecting around you, I suspect they'll greatly enhance performance in your area, and might even offer to connect you up.

epmatsw2• 4 years ago

Talk to your local government. We were in the same situation, and it turns out Comcast was legally required to service our house, they just didn’t want to (because of the expense). A few days after getting the government involved we had a trenching crew on-site.

alfalfasprout2• 4 years ago

Often if they're the only option in your area AND they're on your street they've signed an exclusivity contract with the town. Part of that contract is they must service you. I know multiple people they've done this to and in all cases getting the city involved swiftly got them an installation.

thayne• 4 years ago

And in the new world of a lot more people working remotely, upload speeds are suddenly a lot more important. Mostly because of viseo conferences, but transferring other kinds of data too.

koala_man• 4 years ago

My internet in the Silicon Valley today is worse than I had in Europe 10 years ago. It's pretty disillusioning.

_jal• 4 years ago

Hah, my internet in San Francisco is worse that it was... in San Francisco in the 90s.

My symmetric DSL then was faster than downstream-DOCSIS is now. I also have to keep a backup line, because Comcast here (SOMA) goes out about every other month, and I work from home. So I pay another $35 for MonkeyBrains, which is much slower, but more than nothing when Comcast is dead.

To paraphrase Gandhi, I think American capitalism would be a very good idea.

rayiner4• 4 years ago

How’s your public transit compared to Europe? The number of homeless people/drug addicts? Personal safety?

walrus015• 4 years ago

The problem is not just Comcast but everything of its ilk, and by that I mean Charter (Spectrum/former Time Warner Cable), RCN/Grande/Astound and similar giant size coax based DOCSIS3 operators. In Canada, Shaw and Rogers.

They are absolutely determined to squeeze every last dollar of ROI out of that existing coax cable plant by doing asymmetric RF channels for downstream/upstream. And not overbuilding themselves with GPON FTTH.

There's a limited amount of RF spectrum in a given coax segment and they bond it together in such a way that 85% of it is used for downstream, and some paltry amount for upstream. On a heavily loaded DOCSIS3 segment it can also be 12-13ms latency to the gateway which is an eternity in metro area networking fiber terms. So you end up with something like a 200 Mbps down x 15.5 Mbps up cable connection.

Obviously the abusive bait and switch customer acquisition and retention tactics are also a huge problem. Now they're doing additional bullshit like making special offers to bundle your cellphone service and cable together (Comcast is a MVNO on some nationwide cellular carriers), for a "discounted" price, so that it makes it more painful for you to switch your ISP service in the future if you're unhappy.

Eventually they will need to spend a spectacular amount of money to overbuild themselves because in some places the local phone company (centurylink, ziply, verizon, others) is building 1 strand of dark fiber to each house, running it to some neighborhood level splitter, and going 1G or 10GPON on it for service that approaches real symmetric gigabit to the customer. To individual single family houses.

Comcast is just the most obvious example of the problem in the incumbent cable operator industry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbHqUNl8YFk

jbman223• 4 years ago

I got lucky, the subdevelopment I live in has been upgraded from classic Centurylink DSL to “Spectrum” fiber (1gbps fiber line to the house for $60/month, no contract and no equipment or setup fees. Growing up a few blocks away, it was a comcast subscription or a 1mbps DSL line(~10yrs ago).

It’s awesome when a competitor can enter the market.

tguvot• 4 years ago

While there is plenty of things that can be blamed on cable providers, the allocation is asymmetric RF channels it's not something that they decide to do specifically to mess up with clients but actually part of DOCSIS standard that is made by CableLabs (yea.. with input from cable companies, yet...) . A lot of todays restriction are derived from dark ages when cable was tv and not internet. IIRC till DOCSIS 3.1 (or 3.0?) data downstream was actually framed inside mpeg segments (or something like this) . They did manage to incrementally squeeze much more out of their infra (coax) compared to what is achievable with twisted pair.

Last house that I rented had 30+ years old coax drop that were handling 1000/30 just fine and at my current house i get 1200/30. Yea, it sucks that upstream is limited but sometimes legacy tech is legacy tech and decisions must be made in order to properly serve all the clients on plant with all the gazillion of different devices that they have

Edit: nice old discussion about upstream channels allocation in DOCSIS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22572536

zxcvbn40382• 4 years ago

I always thought the upstream speed was an artificial limitation so they could upsell "business internet" to people who wanted to host servers - and that they doubled down by reassigning your IP periodically if they saw a lot of incoming connections on layer 4. I did try hosting a server on my comcast cable internet for a while and the IP which I had for seven years prior did start changing every day - sometimes more frequently. Just a coincidence? Or is that really how they play things? When I set up Tor so I could reverse proxy into my server as a hidden service my IP stopped changing - though I did notice my IP got reassigned again a few days after I got a 4K tv and started streaming the UHD content.

FireBeyond3• 4 years ago

So you end up with something like a 200 Mbps down x 15.5 Mbps up cable connection.

I have a 1200mbps down Comcast connection that still only has 35mbps up.

Sunspark• 4 years ago

If Starlink is in your area, this is an option worth looking into.

dntrkv2• 4 years ago

Or 4g/5g. I bought a place way out in the boonies and I’m getting 70 down with a 4x4 MIMO antenna, no data cap. Without the antenna it would be <5 down.

arcticbull2• 4 years ago

So far it appears that only early beta customers of Starlink are getting anywhere close to useable service and as soon as it opens up to more customers the links quickly saturate and you're back to whatever everyone else is offering - except with higher latencies. Something about Shannon's Law. It's better than nothing for folks who don't have any other options, but it's not a solution to this particular problem.

The best solution I've seen to date is city-run fiber.

chiefalchemist• 4 years ago

And! When you lease a Comcast modem + wifi equipment, you then become an Xfinity wifi hotspot provider. Mind you, they don't tell you this. But to charge the customer money to expand their hotspot availability (and marketing bragging rights) is shite.

But like you said, often there's no choice. But even when there is - in my area of NJ - aside from new customer deals both Verizon and Comcast are wildly expensive.

zdware• 4 years ago

FCC needs to care about stability through statistics like packet loss. In my hometown area, the sole DSL provider in my area oversold capacity and it demolished the DSLAM. Ironically, they also took advantage from the Connect America fund to do this. I did connectivity tests to various hosts throughout the days, pings were 500ms+ 40% of the time and packet loss was 1%.

I can't be the only one that this happened to.

hedora2• 4 years ago

Yup. Same with one of the local WISPs around here. On top of it all, I think they used some external grant funding to upgrade the last mile links, and cut upload by 90%.

I haven't run a ping test since then, but last time I checked, it was > 1% and 1 second to the internet.

In fairness, they're lobbying for a govt bail out to subsidize their upstream fiber provider.

gunapologist99• 4 years ago

So, in areas where a provider only offers 20 or 50... will they just stop serving that area until it's financially worthwhile to upgrade that equipment?

tzs• 4 years ago

No. The minimums set by the FCC are just the minimums for the service to count as broadband. There's no requirement that a given internet service actually is broadband internet service. The worst that would happen to the provider is that they might not be eligible for some government programs that promote broadband.

The law requires the FCC to regularly check on the availability of broadband in the US and to determine if it is being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion. If they determine it is not they are required to take action to accelerate deployment by doing such things as removing barriers to infrastructure investments and promoting competition.

To do that they need to define broadband.

nfiedel• 4 years ago

Am surprised to see the pushback asserting this will cause prices to rise. This speed was practical on comcast's cable system back in 2007 (when we got it) and probably earlier. There is a wealth of evidence that higher bandwidth has minimal to marginal costs for typical residential usage.

On to the actual proposal, it raises the minimums from: * Down: 25mbps --> 100mbps * Up: 3mbps --> 20mbps

As a head of household of 5, I carefully monitored and managed our internet usage during covid, and upgraded from comcast to AT&T fiber (1g symmetric). I can say with high certainty that the previous minimum (25/3) would be severely inadequate for a family of 5. This bump to 100/20, while not amazing, is a good step in the right direction. It would make 5 people working/learning remotely at least _possible_.

TLDR: The tech is cheap and decades old. There should be minimal cost to ISPs. The best arguments in this thread, imho, are that we should strive for even higher.

Wowfunhappy6• 4 years ago

What resources does a 100 Mbps connection give access to that a 25 Mbps connection does not?

You don't need 100 Mbps to access educational content. Khan Academy looks fine in 1080p. And even if it didn't, Netflix says their 4K streams only need 15 Mbps.

You don't need 100 Mbps to be a remote knowledge worker. Video calls need a stable connection with low latency—I wish more people used ethernet—but that connection does not need to be particularly fast. An upload speed of a few megabits is sufficient.

You also don't need 100 Mbps to apply for jobs, read the news, chat with friends, or participate in the political process. Any noticeable improvements in page load times above 25 Mbps will be marginal at best. It's fun to hate on how bloated modern websites are, but the situation isn't anywhere near that dire.

I'd posit that if a non-technical person with a 20+ Mbps connection thinks their internet is too slow, they probably aren't actually getting 20 Mbps, most likely because of spotty wifi. And if they really are getting 20 Mpbs, they're probably reacting to latency rather than bandwidth.

vitus4• 4 years ago

What if you have a family with four kids, all of whom need to engage in remote learning on occasion?

20Mbps is also entirely noticeable for bulk downloads, whether it's a Steam download or a Windows update. By going from 20 -> 100 Mbps, you save nearly an hour on a 10GB download (1h6m -> 13m).

Wowfunhappy6• 4 years ago

In the unlikely scenario where all four children are simultaneously using the internet full-throttle, they're still each getting 5 Mbps down, which Netflix says is sufficient for 1080p video. Upload speeds could start to be a problem though, and IMO that's a much more significant issue.

20Mbps is also entirely noticeable for bulk downloads

It is, but downloading Steam games quickly is not a critical need. It can be done in the background.

viraptor3• 4 years ago

Tbf, the updates can just take longer to download. Higher speed does not enable them as such, which is what the op asked. Similar for steam - spending extra hour for a download ahead of time is... fine for me.

godelski4• 4 years ago

I don't understand how this is the top comment here. This is a modern equivalent of "640K of memory should be enough for anyone." You're also making your assumptions off of a single device on the network. I don't even know a home that has only one connected device at any given time. It also doesn't consider things like how speed can help an unstable connection as a high speed but with moderate variance can beat out a low speed that is stable. There's just so many factors at play that are ignored here that this comment is odd to be placed so high in a forum of tech literate people.

Edit: okay, not top comment anymore.

Wowfunhappy6• 4 years ago

This is a modern equivalent of "640K of memory should be enough for anyone."

If you have a 4 bit CPU, it probably is enough memory for anyone!

I think we're focusing on the wrong thing. Download bandwidth is fine; stability, latency, and to some extent upload bandwidth are not. I think a forum of tech literate people should understand the importance of optimizing for the right thing.

devwastaken• 4 years ago

ISP's already have the ability to switch everyone to 100mbps. It's a simple remote config switch. They don't, because they are milking money. They are all publicly funded through city contracts and federal subsidies.

I can imagine very easily why 25mbps isn't enough - people have families. No, you cannot actually do business or school work when media content is now the vast majority of consumed bandwidth.

Also don't advocate against yourself. Your city boards have already been doing that for decades by giving exclusive access to specific ISP's and making the public pay for it.

viraptor3• 4 years ago

For one person, I completely agree. But if you have two remote workers on a conference and a kid doing something else at the same time, 20mbps is not going to be comfortable anymore. (Yes, it's probably still usable with degraded quality.)

_Algernon_2• 4 years ago

In a modern household you may have multiple people on the same connection. Two people streaming Netflix at 4k from the same household would not work in your example of "sufficient" 25mbit/s speeds.

Additionally, higher speed provides opportunities which lower speeds don't (e.g. building a live streaming business) which you otherwise don't have.

Stratoscope6• 4 years ago

Everyone's needs are different. Yes, a lot of people can get along just fine with 20 megabit up and down, and you are spot on that latency may be the worse issue.

In my case, my work requires me to frequently upload files of about 15GB in size. On my old cable connection - which did provide gigabit downloads - the uploads were capped at 30 megabits. So it took about two hours to upload one of these files, with people waiting for it.

Now that I have a symmetric gigabit fiber connection, these files take only 10 minutes to upload. That's a game changer.

Dylan168073• 4 years ago

10 minutes? I wonder why you're only in the 200Mbps range.

walrus015• 4 years ago

What resources does a 100 Mbps connection give access to that a 25 Mbps connection does not?

a 25 Mbps connection might be at the absolute top end of what's possible on some old degraded infrastructure that the local phone company has held together with the metaphorical equivalent of duct tape (like a VDSL2 DSLAM in a street cabinet attached to your copper). It can never get any better until replaced with a totally different technology.

100 Mbps at least requires something like reasonably well built DOCSIS3, if on old coax, or it could be a low tier service plan on something that is actually capable of gigabit. There's people out there right now buying cheap residential 100 Mbps accounts on GPON ONT that are actually capable of full gigabit.

by requiring providers to meet a metric of 100 Mbps down, it is one method of ensuring that whatever tech they use to provide the 100 in the last mile is at least somewhat future-proof.

gtvwill• 4 years ago

You never lived in a modern house with kids I take it? We got >10 devices online at all time. Phones,4k TV's, between 1 and 6 computers, up to half a dozen tablets. Live video feeds coming in (up to 4k in res), online gaming, live video chat connections going out, system updates, vpn into work, constant content streaming, software downloads, web apps, web games. Can easily fill a 100mb connection. Hell we do most of the day.

On the other side...you know once you have fiber pairs in the ground in good network layouts...its about 80 bucks per user for the infrastructure on each end to get the user 10gb symmetrical connection. In rural areas you can roll fiber cheap as chips, lil vibratory plough + conduit. air blow fiber from poi straight to peoples front door so to speak. Its actually quite a cheap process given the infra lasts for about 20 years.

bobsmooth2• 4 years ago

I was able to download and play a 60GB new video game in the same hour on my gigabit connection.

hedora2• 4 years ago

Presumably, they'll be measuring by taking the minimum available speed (up or down) over 5 minute windows, on a quarterly basis, and disqualifying anyone with > 1 second latencies for one of those windows, right?

Yeah. Didn't think so.

Politicians gotta politic, I guess.

Edit: At least I'll have decent speeds at 4:38AM now...

wmf2• 4 years ago

The FCC's Measuring Broadband America program did pretty much what you're suggesting but it got defunded during the previous administration.

userbinator• 4 years ago

Aren't they more like "minimum maximum speeds"? If your local service is fast enough then you'll only manage to saturate your connection to nearby servers that aren't heavily loaded. Those with gigabit Internet can probably relate.

tbrownaw• 4 years ago

That possible "future" goal of 1G/0.5G sounds like it'd be a decent standard for right now. Even if symmetric would be better.

ww520• 4 years ago

Is this a competitive barrier for Starlink? Or is this a response to the Starlink competition?

refulgentis2• 4 years ago

Error here is assuming the consequent and either/or thinking, it actually has nothing at all to do with Starlink

Overtonwindow• 4 years ago

There needs to be more competition. Universal pole access should be a thing.

prirun3• 4 years ago

IMO, the FCC should:

1. make payments to local governments in exchange for monopoly access, illegal.

2. strike down laws that prohibit local governments from providing internet service.

3. stop forcing these speed minimums that also come with price minimums not everyone wants.

amalcon• 4 years ago

It's unlikely that the FCC has the power to do either 1 or 2.

Wohlf• 4 years ago

The FCC doesn't have the power to do this, and these are likely unconstitutional.

sofixa• 4 years ago

these are likely unconstitutional.

If these are considered to be the correct way forward, the constitution needs to be amended then. When it was written Internet didn't really exist, so it would make sense there aren't many provisions covering it.

prirun3• 4 years ago

Isn't it the government's job to promote competition and regulate / prevent monopolies and oligopolies?

namecheapTA2• 4 years ago

I got tired of my previous internet provider. I noticed Xfinity wifi was available at my house. I signed up.

They asked me to either rent a router or bring my own and do self install. I have done neither.

I use the Xfinity wifi. For over a year now. No complaints.

Wiring every house in a dense area seems weird when you can just go wireless.

NavinF• 4 years ago

That just means you have very low standards. Wi-Fi is half duplex and the latency spikes are ridiculous.

namecheapTA2• 4 years ago

I do I suppose. I just want my files to download, send, and my websites to load. I don't play games or operate some kind of server from my house, so for me it works as well as the wired internet at my work.

cagey• 4 years ago

I'm trying to figure out what the likely outcome of this proposal will if enacted be, mapping to my tenuous but sufficient home internet service.

Is my current best-choice provider (TMO 5g Home internet) going to boost my speeds from current 10-100/1-10 Mbps dn/up to a solid floor of 100/20Mbs or lose Federal funding?

Or, will TMO receive more Federal funding to bring me up to a solid 100/20Mbs floor?

Or, will TMO classify my service as something other than "broadband" and continue to provide unchanged QoS?

Or, will TMo drop customers such as myself "on the performance margins" of their service (instead of boosting tower capacity)?

ta988• 4 years ago

I just hope the FCC will make it 100 symmetric. I can already hear the army of Comcast lobbyists calling their friends in the government. Look closely at who opposes that.

kromem• 4 years ago

Meaningless vs the most important change the FCC could make for home internet:

"Common carrier"

spoonjim• 4 years ago

Besides watching 4K TV there is almost nothing that you need 100Mbps for. I don’t see why this is necessary.

p1necone2• 4 years ago

Most households are not a single person living alone.

happytiger• 4 years ago

1Gbps/100mbps should be the standard. Prices have risen for two decades but speed not so much.

America is falling behind, and broadband speeds (and access issues) are at least a contributing factor.

We have certainly paid enough to telecoms, and community telecom after community telecom provide similar speeds.

The main reason it hasn’t been done is the milking of the copper line infrastructure — and the government handouts — by just a few large isps.

aimor• 4 years ago

Is there anything in there about increasing the minimum throttled "unlimited" mobile data speed?

standardUser• 4 years ago

I pay $40 for a Verizon FIOS connection. It's marketed as 300Mbps but my speed test just now showed 120Mbps. But it also consistently exceeds 100Mbps on the upstream. It's easily the best home internet connection I've had since the university dorms in the late 90's. They also offer 1Gbps for $70, which is tempting but really unnecessary for my needs.

I don't understand why I'm getting such an amazing deal! It's a fixed price, not a special. And this is in Manhattan, where most things are noticeable more expensive than in the rest of the country!

Previously, I lived in SF and was forced to use Comcast because they were the only option in my old, rent-controlled building. I paid a lot more, both for the service and for modem rental, but received much slower speeds. I hope the FIOS model is finally making it to more of the country. But 3 years ago I couldn't even get it in downtown SF!

travbrack• 4 years ago

Gigabit is so clutch, it's worth it for the satisfaction of being able to download a 30 gig game in less time than it takes to go to the bathroom.

google2341232• 4 years ago

Do game stores even support providing downloads that fast?

p1necone2• 4 years ago

There's a lot of comments on this thread pointing out typical bandwidth usage of popular streaming services, games etc and claiming that there's no need for higher bandwidth connections.

There's an important point that I think people are missing, which is that the bandwidth usage of internet services is going to be carefully tuned to balance quality and stability at typical internet speeds. When a large portion of consumers have < 100Mbps down of course all services are going to use < 100Mbps of bandwidth - you don't know what kind of stuff you're missing out on because of these slow internet speeds, because nobody is making it available, because it wouldn't work.

The most obvious thing that we already know we're missing out on is video streaming quality. You've possibly already noticed that low contrast dark scenes and scenes with snow/rainfall don't look very good on Netflix/YouTube/insert streaming service here - this is because these are the kind of scenes with the most obvious sacrifice of quality from video compression. (It's also possible you haven't noticed this, because streaming services generally avoid producing content that doesn't play well with their video compression).

Casteil• 4 years ago

There's an important point that I think people are missing, which is that the bandwidth usage of internet services is going to be carefully tuned to balance quality and stability at typical internet speeds.

...or the fact that there can be and often are more than one person in a single household.

saghm• 4 years ago

This was super noticeable for a few years whenever I went back home to visit my parents. I would struggle to load basically anything on my laptop most evenings due to the 5 mpbs or so being split between 3+ devices (although the weak signal in most rooms due to the poor placement of the router that they were not interested in moving somewhere more central didn't help either). Eventually when the pandemic hit and my father started working from home, they quickly discovered that he would not be able to get his work done if my mother was streaming something at the same time, so they ended up upgrading to a more expensive plan, and the next time I visited, I was pleased to find that my issues had vanished.

jbay808• 4 years ago

Streaming services generally avoid producing content that doesn't play well with their video compression

And yet, Netflix still produced Dark...

daniel-cussen2• 4 years ago

There's a lot of comments on this thread pointing out typical bandwidth usage of popular streaming services, games etc and claiming that there's no need for higher bandwidth connections.

You said it, not me. You said there's shills on this thread. That's the only possible motivation to argue there's no need for more bandwidth, there's another reason I came up with but I don't want it to be plagiarized, so I won't say it, they're stuck rehashing the "really sincere" focus group maneuver. It's also because actual bandwidth meaning through a wire has more rights and is better protected from tapping than wireless or radio or what is it now 5G? So the whole game is to funnel people to depending on this little walkie talkie that never turns off and which has no buttons, and is so sophisticated you can't fix it yourself, and has a baseband (that's a whole nother conspiracy theory but it's boring), and it gets GPS readings like every time you don't consent for it to, and that's why they're attacking the pipe, the wire, the cable, the fiber, they want everybody getting a cellular antenna for everything. The wire means having rights, photons it's like, everything goes. Surveillance in fact, they want us all to literally broadcast our eg 911 calls instead of calling them on a landline. They don't like landlines because they're well-litigated, have rights, martyrs died over getting their line tapped or being unable to call 911 just by pressing 911 (there's a case over that, they were meant to dial 9 first, 9911, and victims couldn't get through to emergency service and one died), 5G turns back the martyr clock forty years.

Yeah totally want to get all my needs met by a nagging machine.

Like these guys run their own ISP you think they can't log into a site and tell them both sides of the story? They've been doing it since the 1910's. Or shill robots by this point. I wonder if it counts as public speaking if you're only speaking to robots. Just trying to pass the Cussen Test here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31111806

You said it, not me.

heartbreak• 4 years ago

Regarding your Cussen Test, did you write this comment using something like GPT-2?

I got curious so I checked a few of your account’s other comments. Some of them are very similar to this one [0], but others are short and concise [1]. I can think of a few other explanations for this, but since you mentioned the test…

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31937861

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31988748

PaulKeeble• 4 years ago

There is still a market for Blue rays for precisely this reason, compression does a lot of harm to the image and streaming services often run at 1/4 or less the bitrate. There is also the sound compression as well which is very heavily done on places like Netflix, presumably because their intended audience is watching on a tablet or a low end smart TV that has terrible in built speakers but if you have reasonable addon speakers and especially surround sound the average has clearly gotten worse.

The effect is very dramatic on Youtube and Twitch. Twitch has its ~6mbit/s limit and Youtube limits 1080p to around 10 mbit/s and 4k to about 18mbit/s which is well below the blue ray standard bitrates for these resolutions. You can't even override it with a better quality upload as it always compresses the Video to its standard bitrates. It shows up a lot in game footage where grass often becomes a smudge. The somewhat manipulative use of this recently has been DLSS and FSR. These two technologies effectively hide really well within Youtube's compression, while using them they introduce noticeable artifacts but once compressed by Youtube they largely disappear and appear almost identical to the original image. Soft images due to Temporal Anti Aliasing and reduced resolution also appear relatively normal on Youtube, they just hide in the impact of the compression.

These defaults for ADSL levels of performance of the internet are quite harmful to image and sound quality across a range of services and while those companies might not want to pay for more bandwidth we as customers should want better bitrates for when we play it on devices capable of showing and producing better.

ehPReth2• 4 years ago

Completely agree! I’d love to see a “new world” with higher bitrate video

NonNefarious• 4 years ago

You really see how lame our so-called HD is on streaming services when a lot of pixels change at once. Images of rough seas and fast-moving live sports are good examples.

And “4K” under 100 Mbps? A joke.

My parents are stuck with AT&T (which peddles glorified DSL), and Netflix barely works.

MrDunham• 4 years ago

To pile on here with a tangential analogy:

My parents worked at IBM in the 70s through '00s. They told me when new hardware came to the office that had a gigabyte of storage and their reaction:

"A gigabyte! What would you ever do with a whole gigabyte?!"

sethammons• 4 years ago

I had the exact reaction when my dad brought home our first 1gb hd in the 90s. "Do you realize how many books you can store pn that?!"

camkego• 4 years ago

In video many things become possible with higher bandwidth availability:

Youtube Recommended video bitrates for 60fps HDR UPLOADS:

8K: 150 to 300 Mbps, 2160p (4K): 66 to 85 Mbps, 1440p (2K): 30 Mbps, 1080p: 15 Mbps,

Some example uncompressed video bitrates: 1080p60: 3 Gbps, 2160p30: 6 Gbps, 2160p60: 12 Gbps, 2160p/8k@60: 24 Gbps and upward,

It might be hard to imagine using uncompressed video over the internet, I know it is for me. But all the applications we can only do locally start to become possible over large geographic areas. The applications could be amazing relative to what we know and understand today.

I think applications we can't imagine would become possible with large jumps in low-cost available bandwidth.

References: https://www.optcore.net/introduction-to-sdi/ https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en#zipp...

treis• 4 years ago

Sure, but getting true blacks on your 4k screen isn't exactly a compelling government aim.

jrochkind12• 4 years ago

The most obvious thing that we already know we're missing out on is video streaming quality. You've possibly already noticed…

I only pay for the lowest tier of Netflix which does not give me HD, and I have literally never noticed a quality problem watching on my TV (which I have no idea the resolution of, honestly).

Apparently I don't care or notice much about quality. I actually have no idea if i'm the majority or you are.

raisedbyninjas• 4 years ago

We do the same. Subscriptions and rentals are 1080p. 4k versions of content usually cost twice as much. A few simultaneous compressed 1080p streams easily fit in the slowest broadband service I can get.

FireBeyond3• 4 years ago

One of the things that frustrates me is that ISPs have successfully lobbied broadband surveys to exclude "inconvenient" plans.

AT&T asked that their DSL plans were not counted towards their "average bandwidth" because they were "obsolete and no longer being marketed".

To be clear - they were still _available_, and in many cases, your only option, but they were an anchor pulling down the average, so AT&T just "didn't want them to count".

ehPReth2• 4 years ago

Jesus! The power of ISPs seems unchecked and immense :/

deepsquirrelnet• 4 years ago

How does this affect smaller competition? Regulatory capture is always what comes to mind when I think about the FCC. Who are the winners and losers?

cbanek• 4 years ago

What I really want is an elimination of data caps. But this can be good too.

humaniania• 4 years ago

There needs to be much more upload speed and much higher data caps. The current structure is stunting the economy for the profits of some not awesome people.

aosmith• 4 years ago

I haven't read this whole thing yet but there should also be a limit on latency. All the viasat services have stupid high latency. Starlink is so much better, also cheaper.

natch• 4 years ago

Sounds like the notice of inquiry would be interesting reading. Anyone know whether it is available to the public on the website?

jrochkind12• 4 years ago

Here in Baltimore, the only option for any kind of broadband is Comcast XFinity, and it costs $85/month for 50 Mbps service. (And there is no plan available for under $65/month).

What does it mean to say the "minimum" is 100, are they just gonna charge me a minimum of $150/month or something?

The fact that I see other people in this thread saying they're already getting gigabit(+) service for $40(!)-$80/month, while I pay $85 for 50Mbps from the single monopoly provider that does not offer gigabit/fiber....

makes me think the biggest need for regulation is not about minimum speeds, but about price gouging from monopoly providers. I wonder what Comcast charges for the same 50Mbps service I pay $85/month for (with again no plan avail under $65), in markets where they have a competitor. i would love to pay $40/month for my internet, and don't even need any more than 50 Mbps -- comcast increasing the speed of my $85/month plan (or doing so and raising the price!) doesn't actually help me much.

Has anyone done a national broadband price map? They intentionally don't make their geographically disparate prices very transparent of course. It would be interesting to see the variation in what comcast charges for the same speeds, and how it correlates to having competitors in a market vs monopoly.

jl62• 4 years ago

Higher minimum upload speeds will be more impactful than cranking download speed even higher.

100/100 is way, way better than 500/20.

Upload speed is what enriches the two-way internet - servers, content uploads, high quality videoconferencing, cloud backups. Prioritising download speed is keeping us in the broadcast era.

icedchai4• 4 years ago

For tech nerds like us, definitely. The average consumer doesn't need more upstream. A long as Netflix and Youtube work, it's fine!

fomine33• 4 years ago

Some average consumers now upload YouTube videos.

alfalfasprout2• 4 years ago

Here in the portland area we get Centurylink and I have to say, having been forced to use comcast in the bay area for years it's a breath of fresh air. It's a large company, sure, but 1gbps symmetric is very reasonable (around $50/mo) and they let you directly connect your hardware via IPOE (using a VLAN tag).

smugma• 4 years ago

Comcast charges me if I use more than 1TB/mo, so higher bandwidth just means I’m more likely to go over.

FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

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