FCC chair: Speed standard of 25Mbps down, 3Mbps up isn’t good enough anymore
FCC chair: Speed standard of 25Mbps down, 3Mbps up isn’t good enough anymore
Chair proposes 100Mbps national standard and an evaluation of broadband prices.
FCC chair: Speed standard of 25Mbps down, 3Mbps up isn’t good enough anymore::Chair proposes 100Mbps national standard and an evaluation of broadband prices.
It's 2023. Anything less than symmetrical gigabit is nonsense. We shouldn't have to settle for overpriced crumbs from ISPs.
130Symmetrical gigabit is a bit much for a baseline. Should it be widely available for all, and for a good price? Absolutely. But plenty of people (probably a majority even) could be adequately served by something like 300 down/100 up as a baseline tier.
51Let me go ahead and steal a quote from JFK:
“We choose to [build nationwide symmetrical gigabit fiber] in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.”
- John “I hate my worthless nephew RFK Jr.”Fitzpatrick Kennedy
35It’s not about what people need. It’s about building infrastructure for new services and applications.
Besides, digging a trench is digging a trench. Just put in the fiber. It’s 2023.
25imo the asymmetry only serves to upsell content creators to business plans. I do agree with you on the speeds though, gigabit is a bit overblown for average joe but it should be an option in most places for people that need it (Content Creators, WFH Visual Artists, Garage Startups)
18Today, maybe. But what about in ten years’ time?
14
IMO the focus should be on lowering the prices. A lot of people in my country still rely on spotty mobile data as their primary internet. Imagine 100 mbps fiber for $10 a month, that would be awesome.
21I don't disagree, but I think even just setting it to 500M symmetrical would be a MASSIVE improvement and a more achievable goal. Few regions right now are equipped for fiber and even fewer homes.
Most homes in the US have a coax connection, and with current tech coax connections can do a little over a gig bandwidth total (up+down). That said, we should be quickly ratcheting up to 500/500 while the fiber rollout hopefully accelerates.
9Funny thing is, they are selling vapor. They are renting the usage of equipment, nothing more. There's no finite amount of internet and you have to use it carefully. Sure there's limits in that equipment, but essentially prices are all over-inflated. In my shitty little country I have 350/150 for around 15€, 300 channels TV included. For gigabit I'd pay a bit more, around 30€.
1
Holy shit, there are people still using 25/3? How the heck can you function with that? I’m not entirely facetious: with trackers and ads and “web 2.0” nonsense and way over provisioning , I’ve seen “simple” web sites bog down on much faster connections.
As one data point, my ex had Comcast’s, I think 50/5 or something, and my kids constantly complained about the network over there. Part of it is being spoiled by my true gigabit symmetrical, part of it is the worst company in America, but the reality is that it’s noticeable
4125/3 is perfectly usable for a single user, provided you don't need to upload stuff. Watching 1080p60 on YouTube only needs slightly over 12 mbps.
I'm not defending the current state of the internet services, just saying it's not that bad.
19Honestly I am really happy when I get such high speeds. 25Mbps feels blazing fast for me. Everything loading/downloading so quickly. An average song in the FLAC 16/44 format would download in just 10 seconds instead of up to 5 minutes.
And there's already even 10Gbps available. I can't even imagine that. You could download a whole 4K movie in a matter of seconds!
Anyway, this is what I have:
Image link for compatibilityI can only dream.
13well, if you have the money for it, you can get starlink, but its far from cheap. But since you are at cellular network, a 4G receiver with good placement can much improve on those speeds. I assume you are in some signal shadow, and swan never had too good coverage outside large cities... Maybe try some other operator ?
1I think one of the issues I have with “normal” bandwidth is being spoiled by gigabit fiber. I don’t do anything to require that kind of bandwidth, not even close, but it just works. No matter what I do. Every time
Cable internet is notoriously poor and it really is. Sure, your minimum standard high speed internet is mathematically more than I need, “up to” more than I need, but the reality is far worse. I regularly see network lag and high latency, it regularly causes visible issues. It tends to be slow and frustrating even when the advertised speeds shouldn’t be.
If we’re going to set a standard based on advertised speeds, we need to do the same math that providers use to set a more useable standard. Or we can set the standard to actual speeds and watch them scream
1
My whole family house is on 25/5 in Australia. Most of laptops in the house are 1366x768 (so 720p youtube video) and we use adblockers.
The key is setting up proper queue control on your router (Openwrt + SQM) so that one person downloading or uploading doesn't ruin the latency for everyone else browsing the web; before I did that a single person downloading a steam game or uploading something to Google drive made the web unbrowsable for everyone. Sadly this only works if your internet connection link speed is stable and reliable.
I’m not entirely facetious: with trackers and ads and “web 2.0” nonsense and way over provisioning , I’ve seen “simple” web sites bog down on much faster connections.
A lot of web 2.0 nonsense slowness is caused by executing megabytes of javascript. Fetching the few MB itself isn't the bottleneck for us :)
9Best connection available in my town is a super overpriced 25/3, but what you actually get is more like 10/0.5. No fiber lines, no other providers around other than satellite, and no demand for more means it's just stagnant here
3I have this and find it fine 🤷🏻♂️
I can watch video streaming fine, browse fine, multiple family members.
Yeah fast would be nicer but I don’t really have issues.
2I live in Germany, most people here have that or less
1I get like 20mbps down and it's fine. Netflix only recommends 15 Mbps for 4k streaming. Lol, looking at websites and stuff is certainly not a problem. About the only time speed has ever been an issue is if I need to download a large game on steam. But I attribute that more to developers just being too lazy to actually optimize their games. I shouldn't need to download 50 gigabytes to play some game when I'm just running at medium settings.
1
Here's an interesting thing- we had Spectrum on copper and we're semi-rural so it was only about 30/5. Then a local company came in and offered to install fiber in the neighborhood if 40% signed up. Suddenly our Spectrum speeds went up to about 80/10. Then the neighborhood told Spectrum to fuck off and now we have decent fiber speeds. I'm getting 400/400 now and I could get it even faster if I wanted to pay for it.
37Yep, typical. Spectrum in my area (like 5-7 years ago) suddenly over doubled everyone’s speeds almost overnight once competition came in. I loved telling them to pound sand as I got symmetrical gigabit installed.
17
Yes, let's pay them to just take the money... for the third time!
23Asymmetric speeds are a disgrace. Internet used to be about exchange of content, ideas and collaboration. You consumed, but also contributed. The overall focus on high download low upload is clearly the sign telcos want Internet to be just a troth of content, not much different from cable tv.
21Pathetic. The acceptance of this terrible service speed shows how the American public is so isolated they don't know when they're being shafted by big business and the politicians the rich and powerful own.
No more lobbying. Institutionalized bribery is killing the American public. Healthcare, food, workplace rights and safety, and quality of services. Everything's compromised.
16I live in hotels. A good week is when I can measure in Mb and not Kb. A great one is when it’s more than 3mbps on a regular basis.😢
15I was so happy when we finally got a 2nd internet provider where I live. Now both providers offer steep discounts to keep customers. I upgraded my 450mpbs coax connection to 1gbps fiber when the new ISP came to town. My promotional period just ran out, so I called the ISP. They set me up with a new promotion for 2gbps at less than the price I was paying for 1gbps, and at the end of the promotional period it'll be the same price I was paying for the 1gbps service. Competition ftw!
12That's a dream. A pray for even a single competitor on my street.
1
We have 600/600 Mbps... In a third world country smh
12I have 500Mbps in Spain. Is it that bad in the American cities or is it only like rural Montana that has these speeds?
11Honestly, it's highly variable. Generally speaking, more populated areas tend to have much better options for internet and in some large markets even have a degree of competition.
In my case, I live in a town of only 180k or so people. At my home, I am able to get 1.2 gbps download from Comcast. They are the only option in my direct vicinity with this much bandwidth. The alernative is AT&T with only DSL as an option. I don't remember the top tier. But, it's considerably slower at maybe 100 mbps or something like that.
10Wow, that's pretty good for a town of that size. I live in a city of 1.6 Million. I think I might be able to get 1 gbps if I shop around, but I don't think much more than that is available to normal consumers at least.
3I've lived in small towns since 2009. 100mps would be a fucking dream come true. The fastest speed I've had in the last decade plus is 25mps until we got TMobile home internet, and now I typically get around 50-70. Technically it's up to 300 with our distance to the tower, but there's a fucking mountain in between us, so I take what I can get. :/
2
The issue is mostly that it’s highly variable, hard to change without moving, and hard to predict before you actually live somewhere.
The comcast rep will happily take your money to put you on a 200mb plan, but it won’t do shit if the infrastructure in your area is bad, and Comcast (or whoever the isp is) has absolutely zero responsibility to actually provide the promised services. Now you add in that 95% of the population including most of the phone reps working for the ISPs don’t even know the difference between a bit and a byte and it becomes a total crap shoot.
9That's the same here too. My first apartment only had ADSL. In 2015.
I couldn't even watch Netflix without it stopping to buffer.
I really wish they would put internet speeds on apartment offers etc.
3...wow. That's so shit. Where I live, your internet provider has to have the ability to provide the service or like with every other service provider it's really open for lawyer action.
This also makes so that internet providers are at the same time keeping their own infrastructure around which in turn makes that yet another selling point ("we have up to 1 gbps in your area!") and makes them keep it in top-notch condition.
3
I live in the mountain area, and my friend lives 30m from a multi-million population city, in an area with over 100,000 residents. His best option for internet to this day is hotspotting from his cell. Before that was viable, he only had access to satellite internet. Even semi-rural people here get fucked.
5It's widely variable, even in big cities the available ISPs can change depending on what side of a street you're on. A lot of people are stuck with cable (DOCSIS) providers that run over legacy TV infrastructure and provide wildly asymmetric speeds. This is an excerpt from Xfinity (Comcast):
Xfinity Gigabit Internet service has advanced, next generation technology, with WiFi download speeds of up to 1000 Mbps (up to 1200 Mbps in some areas) and upload speeds of up to 35 Mbps.
4There's a new docsis version right around the corner that will provide symmetric speeds. Comcast is starting to roll it out this year. Cable will be a lot faster in a couple years.
2
I live in middle America and oddly enough the rural areas have started getting fiber from utility companies. I live in a town of about 40,000 and the best you can hope for is either DSL from AT&T which is maybe 25Mbps with perfect conditions or Optimum Cable internet which is sold as "Gigabit" that never breaks 400Mbps and cost about $120/mo. I've also had to file multiple complaints with the FCC to have issues resolved. My connection for about 6 months was completely unusable when it rained and even after "fixing" the issue I have severely reduced speeds when it rains. It's an absolute joke and nothing is in place to protect consumers from any of this BS.
3
They considered that a standard? 25 meg?
Jesus wept. I haven't had internet that slow in well over a decade here in the UK!
How do they manage things like 150GB game downloads over there, or 3 or 4 people all using the connection at the same time...
9Not so much a standard as in "everyone should actually use the internet at this speed" but more as in "the bare minimum level, everyone should have at least this speed available (and we'll help pay to upgrade people stuck at slower speeds)", I believe.
It was still a low speed for that of course. It apparently hadn't been raised since the Obama administration (2015).
Rural internet speeds are often... not comparable to more densely populated areas, shall we say. My (European) perspective: I had about ~3 Mbit down (over ADSL) until I moved about a decade ago (on a good day, while paying for "up to 40 Mbit" (IIRC) that the line apparently just could not physically deliver to my house). Meanwhile, 1 km along the road people in town had cable internet (~100 Mbit down).
Luckily, both populations have since benefited from a fiber rollout by a smaller telco, but people in town still got that upgrade about 5 years sooner and without paying a ~€2k connection fee. AFAIK there are still areas in my country where ADSL is the best available...
5I’m in a hotel in London now and am getting less than 10/10. So not necessarily better. I’m an American who normally suffers under Comcast and have 60/25 or so at home.
2
I want fiber internet so bad, I live in a relatively big city for Christ's sake it shouldn't take this long
9My connection is 10/2. Please help me
9Ajit Pai never raised download speeds? Nooo. You don't say. Asshole who was against net neutrality didn't do anything to increase quality of network. Can't be.
8Big problem in the USA is infrastructure. Even cable service can be unavailable for people in rural areas. There have been situations where people had to co-op the cost to lay cable to their area. The cable companies won't spend the money to extend coverage without the return in customer numbers.
Fiber deployment has lagged cable by at least ten years, probably more. It's a bummer because fiber is greatly better. There are populated areas you still can't get fiber.
People in rural areas can have problems getting service because there has not been enough government subsidy to deploy infrastructure. In some rural areas the cell network is the only option for service, and not a good one either.
The Obama administration made a call to increase subsidies for the expansion of internet infrastructure, but nothing ever came of it. If the political climate had been the same when they proposed the interstate highway system, we'd all still be driving on dirt roads.
It's ironic the country that invented the internet has done such a poor job of deploying the infrastructure for it. Other countries are doing a greatly better job. So it doesn't do much good to increase the standards if it's not possible for them to apply in the first place.
7People in rural areas can have problems getting service because there has not been enough government subsidy to deploy infrastructure.
Technically the Telecommunications Act of 1996 allocated a ton of money for fiber infrastructure, but telecom providers rolled it out in dense urban areas with a lot of customers, bought each other up and then pocketed the extra cash.
Fiber to the premise in rural areas is insanely expensive but I see it like a modern version of the post office. If you want to be able to write a letter to anyone and have it be delivered you need to set the price so that rural customers aren't paying costs that are orders of magnitude higher.
2Let me fix that;
People in rural areas can have problems getting service because there has not been
enoughproper government subsidy to deploy infrastructure.I mean if the feds just toss money at these providers they'll use it how they please. It should be a matter of government doing what it is necessary to deploy service as widely as possible. Without oversight it's just giving them free money.
I suppose now that the cell network is able to provide "hotspot" service that could be an out for subsidy, but it sure won't make a 100Mbps standard. On 4G the best my phone can do is 50Mbps when close to a tower, less when signal strength is lower. You can get much higher speeds on 5G, but it's even more affected by tower distance. You're not going to get that in a rural area, same infrastructure problem.
3
5It's more than good enough for Netflix 4K so I don't know what the boomer is on about.
-525/3 is way more than fast enough for most people not to notice. Its enough to stream 4k compressed. Maybe we should start measuring broadband in terms of reliability and latency. That has a far larger impact on overall experience.
-22Broadband in most of the developed world is 100Mbps, with South Korea transitioning to 1Gbps broadband. The point is less "what's good enough" and more "evaluating internet access as a required utility".
21My point is, reliability, latency, and consistency is what is important. Bandwidth is nearly totally irrelevant for 99% of internet users. A couple years back I ran an entire office of 100 people on a 50 mbit connection. Thats 100 Concurrent users all using their cloud apps to do work. Many of them streaming music while they're working, some of them are even streaming video while they're working. It was never an issue for anyone and there was always plenty of bandwidth to go around, because bandwidth does not impact user experience unless you are regularly downloading or uploading massive files. Even on windows patch days where there are updates being downloaded for every computer at once it wasn't a problem and nobody noticed.
More megabits does not mean better or more reliable access to the internet. Just like how a 100 megapixel camera that costs $200 is not better than a 24 megapixel camera that costs $1000.
Just to prove my point, I restricted my internet bandwidth to 25/3 on my firewall, which means its restricted for the entire home. Every device on the network is sharing the single 25/3 connection. I started streaming a netflix 4k movie, then opened a youtube video concurrently, then started streaming a random TV show from amazon prime. I opened up another concurrent video YT on my phone and ran that concurrently. That is 3 1080p streams and 1 4k stream and I ran out of screens to test with. Then I started streaming music from spotify and apple music both at once. Then, to top it all off I ran a speedtest. I still had 8mbits/sec to spare and any website I went to was still loading instantly. With the connection 100% saturated there was absolutely no interruption in any of the other streams, thanks to QoS which almost every router has nowadays. This is not a hard thing to try yourself and I highly suggest it if you're open to your opinion being changed.
3
Its enough to stream 4k compressed
20thats upload. Netflix 4k is no more than 20 mbps. Typically around 16-18. Its easy to confirm this yourself by looking at your bandwidth usage by streaming said content.
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444 15 mbps is more than enough in reality.
Modern websites as bloated as they are are still a few megabytes at most, and many of the larger assets are cached locally so they’re only loaded once. on a 25 mbit connection thats less than a 1 second load time. The vast majority of the time the website server you’re talking to is never even going to provide you with that amount of bandwidth upstream anyway. You will notice absolutely zero difference in browsing and day-to-day usage at 25 vs 1000 mbit provided you have the same latency. Watching a youtube video on your phone is maybe 1-2 megabits/sec. Thats about 15-20 concurrent streams on 25 mbit which I don’t think most people are doing regularly.
All im saying is for the average user latency matters way more. A 25 mbit cable/dsl connection is massively better than a 200 mbit satellite connection.
2
The reality is that it’s not, most importantly because the advertised “up to” speed might rarely be achieved. However even simple websites are now horribly overburdened with ads and trackers and “live updates” and “lazy downloading” that it’s just not functional at that bandwidth
4This is really easy to verify and I think you might be surprised. Open your resource monitor and browse the web, stream videos, etc. My family of 4 with 2 of us working from home with a video streaming on the TV and maybe 30 total wifi devices has averaged 12 mbits/sec down over the past hour. The highest spike was to 30 mbps.
1