FCC scraps old speed benchmark, says broadband should be at least 100Mbps

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/fcc-scraps-old-speed-benchmark-says-broadband-should-be-at-least-100mbps/

by thunderbong • 2 years ago

82 47 2 years ago

dirkc• 2 years ago

Makes sense, all that bundled JS isn't getting any smaller. You don't want to try and open a news site on a poor backyard 3G connection

ufocia13• 2 years ago

Yay, I'll be able to play Fortnite now! Seriously, a backyard 3G connection should still be faster than an indoor 3G connection.

wccrawford• 2 years ago

"Scraps"? No, they just updated it. Nothing was "scrapped". Typical journalist BS headlines.

I was on the fence about whether it should be updated, but 25 down / 3 up really isn't for "advanced" usage. That's really basic these days. So if that's the line, they made the right call.

I'm looking forward to the day they get to their 1000 / 500 goal. Having upload as such a small fraction of the download can be a pain sometimes.

LoganDark2• 2 years ago

Having upload as such a small fraction of the download can be a pain sometimes.

I pay for 900 megabits and get 20. Upload, of course.

None of the other plans even offer upload speeds this high - so not only does paying for 900 get you only 20, but to get only 20 you have to pay for 900. That's nuts.

ufocia13• 2 years ago

You're most likely not paying for 900. That's just marketing talking. That's not committed bandwidth.

Come to think of it, the asymmetry is probably a way to exploit transit fees.

LorenDB• 2 years ago

I think the FCC ought to mandate symmetrical gigabit as true broadband. With today's fiber tech, there's no reason ISPs can't deploy a symmetrical connection to anyone, and gigabit is a perfectly reasonable speed. After all, the hardware for it has been around for years now.

notquiteright4• 2 years ago

It’s not that easy. The federal government is in fact spending over $100 billion in the next decade laying fiber (and that’s only partial subsidies, so the total investment will be even higher) and it still won’t be enough to get fiber everywhere.

ufocia13• 2 years ago

If the FCC had the power to mandate this and they exercised the power its power would likely be curtailed or Internet access would disappear completely, at least temporarily, in certain parts of the US. Infrastructure costs money that companies expect to recoup on a certain schedule (ROI) despite the technology being around for years.

Having said this I wouldn't mind at all having a big fat pipe Internet for next to nothing just like everyone else. I was excited to hear about Google's plans to lay fiber "everywhere." More than a decade later, I'm still waiting in my excited state.

hsbauauvhabzb• 2 years ago

I was under the impression that asymmetric connections were a trade off that on a technical level allowed more downstream than upstream - have I been wrong in thinking this?

cloudwalk9• 2 years ago

That's the case for cable Internet, which I wager is a large plurality of Internet connections in the US. At least Charter for the past few years has been rolling out equipment along their cable network to support more uplink bandwidth for symmetrical service, called "high split" I think. I'm still waiting on my area to get the high split treatment.

pcl• 2 years ago

URL to their press release: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-401205A1.txt

The move is from 25/3 to 100/20. That uplink change is a big jump for sure.

Nothing in the press release about latency or jitter though.

(Corrected uplink; thanks @Thorrez!)

Thorrez• 2 years ago

100/20, not 100/25

yurishimo• 2 years ago

Good. It seems the only way to get internet providers to do the right thing is to make it mandatory by law. We tried the carrot and now they should get the stick.

reassembled• 2 years ago

Meanwhile, to my knowledge, ATT is actively pulling all existing DSL service with the only hard line alternative in many markets being a 1Mbps “UVerse” connection over the same copper phone lines. My 6Mbps DSL was suddenly turned into a 1Mbps UVerse line last year, with no warning. This has been happening to my neighbors as well. In some instances, after a big storm knocked out phone lines, ATT took the opportunity to cancel some folks DSL lines under their new policies. If you go to the ATT DSL page you will see that it is no longer being offered as a service.

Fortunately we were able to get Starlink soon after but it’s not a perfect replacement, particularly for gaming, due to the periods of short downtimes we still experience.

ufocia13• 2 years ago

You're lucky that ATT is offering any wired Internet service in your area. I know highly urbanized ATT areas where they offer no wired service. They pulled DSL and put nothing in its place. Fortunately there is another monopolistic wired Internet provider serving the area, but with little competition the pricing is suboptimal from the consumer perspective.

AtlasBarfed2• 2 years ago

Urbanized area should have 5G competitors. They suck, but they exist.

Urbanized should have had municipal wifi and even fiber, but regulatory capture in broadband is a bitch.

Maybe what is needed is a "local wifi collective" that can serve an apartment building from a single fiber or a fiber-to-directed wifi link to the building and then general wifi/wiring inside the building itself.

The fact there is zero innovation on this front shows the power of the regulatory capture by the big two. Nobody even bothers trying anymore, and any politicians that would support competitors have been effectively eliminated from the system.

duffyjp• 2 years ago

Standard of 100Mbps down and 20Mbps up

Still only 20 up? Moving from 300/10 on cable to 300/300 on fiber has been huge. You can’t realistically use offsite backup on 10 or 20mbps up. Uploading a YouTube video can take an hour. I once sent a dataset to a coworker and it was embarrassing when they’re receiving at 10mbps. Being a tech worker with a stone-age connection…

_joel• 2 years ago

Most consumers don't do offsite backups (more than icloud syncs of a few photos or whatever, 20Mbps fine for that) and upload lots to youtube, I guess.

sneak3• 2 years ago

Most consumers don’t read books but that doesn’t mean we should get rid of the libraries.

sneak3• 2 years ago

I do offsite backup with 30Mbps up, it takes days to do the initial but incrementals are fine.

Whenever I do an initial, I get a nastygram from my ISP (Cox Las Vegas) threatening me with disconnection for having the audacity to upload 3TB in a few days. This happens despite having paid an extra $50(!) line item addon (on top of a $120/mo bill, so a 42% upcharge) for “unlimited transfer” every month for something like four years.

Criminal scum, the lot of them.

bauruine• 2 years ago

Hey 50$ for 3TB is 0.016 per GB. Still cheaper than the 0.02 AWS EC2 egress fees! Oh there is also the 120$ base price. 170$ for 3 TB is 0.055 per GB. Still cheaper than the 0.085 Cloudfront egress fee.

traceroute663• 2 years ago

Still only 20 up?

Its what happens when you get regulators who are clueless or allow themselves to be lobbied by telcos.

Its the same shit that allows large telcos like BT in the UK to get away with product definitions that have more holes than a slice of swiss cheese.

For example, in BT's world, as long as 50% of customers at peak time (8–10pm) are achieving "in-spec" average download speeds then everything is fine.

Or another BT example, their "Stay Fast Guarantee for Full Fibre" which gets carefully reworded more often than the seasons and is also full of swiss cheese. What does their current table look like ?

    - Full Fibre 100 100Mpbs down/10Mbps up
    - Full Fibre 300 150Mbps down/10Mbps up
    - Full Fibre 500 250Mpbs down/10Mbps up
    - Full Fibre 900 700Mbps down/10Mbps up

So, as long as you're getting 50% of your line speed on 300/500 or 70% of your line speed on 900 and 10Mb upload there's nothing wrong as far as BT are concerned. And that's assuming, of course, you don't fall into the other parts of BT's swiss cheese such as the "50% of customers" noted above.

ufocia13• 2 years ago

I'm not sure that more regulation is the fix.

There are users that want the higher speed and then there are users who are content with inexpensive access Even if "slow". Most of the time the two don't go hand in hand.

linker3000• 2 years ago

Chuckles hysterically and twiddles mustach...er..full symmetrical gigabit fibre to the home from a regional provider.

Moved from Plusnet (BT owned) 65/20Mbit (I think?) FTTC

ufocia13• 2 years ago

Uploading a 30-minute YouTube video in 30 minutes sounds reasonable. It may actually improve the quality of YouTube and give creators an opportunity to touch grass.

actionfromafar• 2 years ago

Great, now mandate decent latency, too!

(Including maximum jitter. One can dream.)

Jedd• 2 years ago

Here in Australia we're often led by technological visionaries.

In 2010, Turnbull called 100Mbps internet "a gigantic torching of taxpayers' money." In 2013 then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott said a download speed of 25Mbps will be "more than enough" for the average Australian household.

Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott (both subsequent prime ministers) put serious effort and political capital into ensuring our national (fiber) network was never built properly, setting us back at least 15-20 years (sunk cost on the low-quality deployment we ended up with).

Always nice to see we're not alone in poor-planning and top-shelf world-class short-sightedness.

cushpush• 2 years ago

100Mbps 15 years ago in Australia would have been huge, the return on investment almost instantaneous for that timescale (Say, 14 months)

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

[dupe]

More discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39708957

FCC scraps old speed benchmark, says broadband should be at least 100Mbps

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