Americans don’t need fast home Internet service, FCC suggests
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
1. I can host time-machine backups for my entire family on my home server, allow them to have off-site backups.
2. I can provide openVPN service for my entire family when they're outside of the home. I can also browse full-time on my own openVPN client at full-speed.
3. I can seed legitimate torrents for far, far longer than I normally would. For example, new Ubuntu releases.
4. I "donate" some of my bandwidth to other people and projects, allowing them to host files from my home.
5. I can test and host my own websites/services from my house. If it gets a little traction it won't destroy my entire internet.
These are all things that simply were not possible when I was with Comcast, with only 10 Mb/s upload and bandwidth caps. If we completely deregulate internet I'm afraid they will be impossible for most everyone.
But here's the issue.
When you tell non-tech-savvy people about "provid[ing] openVPN service for [your] entire family" they go wall-eyed. That's the best-case scenario. In the worst case scenario (e.g. politicians and telecom execs), people become suspicious about what you might be hiding.
Increasingly (for going on 50 years now), the US is an authoritarian state with low tolerance for people who insist on exercising the rights granted them in the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. (I'm thinking of the right be secure against illegal searches expressed in the 4th Amendment and the use of cryptography as a munition protected by the Second Amendment.)
What upstream speed do your family have? I've got the equipment and the bandwidth to do this, but my family have <1 megabit upstream available.
I don't need more speed, I need more freedom to use what I have.
The service is always on, it's always stable, there's no weird routing or congestion latency at peak hours, it's just... functional.
That's what's miraculous about it to me - basically never needing to reset the router or reconfigure things. Internet as reliable as electricity. I literally don't even think about it.
Also the total cost difference is $45 a month for a far more satisfying experience.
How come? I generally get between 800-1200Mbps on 802.11ac, real, measured speed with iPerf3.
I use several models, check out the dual concurrent triple chain ones like: https://mikrotik.com/product/RB962UiGS-5HacT2HnT
I wrote a little bit about my set-up here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14743866
> Also, do you use custom firmware?
No, just standard Mikrotik firmware.
It's all the things yet unimagined that ubiquitous high speed internet would enable that's the real tragedy here.
The complete failure of imagination of today's "leaders" is very disheartening.
Greater connectivity creates new business opportunities. Uber would be impossible without smartphones and reliable data. Netflix would be a DVD company without high-speed home internet.
When the FCC tells us we "don't need" better internet, it forecloses whole new categories of businesses.
However even better would be an actual /map/ showing you by area of ISP service, the fastest speeds (down and up) that an ISP is willing to attempt* (believe in a normal case they have a reasonable chance of success) to provide.
Then from that map, weighted by population density, reaching qualitative conclusions; such as mode average based on population, or the cutoffs at 20 and 80% of the population.
The reasoning is the same: by keeping the cost per unit as low as the customer will tolerate, you make more profit without building out more capacity.
If most customers of an ISP are currently on a 10 Mbit/s connection, do you think they'll pay 100x for 1 Gbit/s?
> ISPs want to maximize their profit, not the speed of their internets.
How this is contradictory? If you have faster network, you can have more people subscribing and paying more money.
And make no mistake, ISPs are a monopoly. Due to 1) the inherent difficulty of building a broadband network 2) a hellish patchwork of local regulations and government-granted exclusivity deals, ISPs function in a state of basic monopoly.
Densely populated areas can have multiple options for high-speed internet, but the market is not bursting with competition.
If you don't have to compete, what's the point of building out faster internet? Why spend more on investment without competition? Why not just focus on making as much money as possible off previous investments?
And let's not forget that even the things that seem normal and widely available are out of reach for many people: Video streaming, data backups and other tasks just aren't an option for people in underserved areas. Now add a whole family / household and your already inadequately met bandwith equirements multiply.
Cable and broadband companies were massively innovating in the 90s and early 2000s, now they are focusing on their 'innovation' on pricing and milking it by: slowing things down, data capping it, lobbying for more monopoly control, trying to get access to your private info and constant pricing games. All of these actions are due to lack of product innovation and to make up for lost revenues of not just increasing capacity and speeds thus offering a better product people will pay more for.
All we can hope for is another disruptive network innovation that puts them in the rear-view or adds some competition like Google Fiber did or others. Google Fiber had an amazing impact to pricing and speeds in any market they entered. For the most part broadband has been lagging on real innovation and expansion, in favor of MBA metric pricing games and value extraction for some time.
This republican excuse for poor government is so tired. Further, from the third paragraph in the article:
> But during the Obama administration, the FCC determined repeatedly that broadband isn't reaching Americans fast enough, pointing in particular to lagging deployment in rural areas.
So no, it's not really both sides here. There is very clearly one side doing a shit job.
This idea is not only false but also poisonous to democracy. If it becomes dominant then the US will be vulnerable to revolution. While I think an overhaul of the constitution is about time, a revolution is usually highly unpleasant.
If all democratic choices are equally bad, then you have two choices left: Resignation or revolution. This is kind of what Trump is about, I think: A lot of angry people wanted to see if they could vote for something else than the traditional two ideologies that they regarded as equally bad.
It's not that they're "the same," but they've come to reach a homeostasis that protects each side while not truly fixing hard problems. They may not have sought that out intentionally, but now that they're in it, they're intentionally, happily, staying in it.
The end result is, we're watching a play, where each side has some powerful dramatic lines full of tense conflict, but it's all fake and they're really cooperating to keep everything pretty much the same.
Calling this "absolute bunk" just demonstrates you don't know what you're talking about.
And saying that people who disagree with you just "don't know what they're talking about" is incredibly intellectually lazy.
Immigration is a loaded topic. We can't afford to let every single person on the planet who wants a better life to move here. Maybe they should work on improving their own countries instead? Mass immigration is unsustainable with growing populations.
And calling an argument intellectually lazy is being "intellectually lazy" itself.
You're delusional if you think the Democrats and Republicans by and large have any real interest in the American people. They are both in bed with corporations and they both need to be rooted out and removed from office. If you vote Democrat you're just as bad (maybe worse since you should know better) as Republicans.
Like the end to discrimination against pre-existing conditions. Like the end to yearly and lifetime caps on coverage. Like the end to insurance companies just being able to drop you the minute you get sick.
"Immigration is a loaded topic."
No, it's not.
"And calling an argument intellectually lazy is being "intellectually lazy" itself."
No, it's not. It's pointing out the faults in your argument.
"You're delusional if you think the Democrats and Republicans by and large have any real interest in the American people."
And you're far too cynical if you think they don't, or if you think that they're the same.
"If you vote Democrat you're just as bad (maybe worse since you should know better) as Republicans."
Wrong. No matter how much you hope that they're the same, they are not. Again, all it takes is looking at the various issues facing people today. Healthcare. Immigration. Minority rights. Voting rights. For you to say they are equally as bad is for you to say you have never actually looked at anything, and want an excuse not to.
I have absolutely no respect for lazy people like you who don't even bother to look at the issues, and just choose the easy way out. Do not bother responding back with another easily disproven and shot down argument.
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the HN guidelines as well as for using it primarily for ideological battle (an abuse of the site, as I've explained many times) and ignoring our requests to stop. We'd be happy to unban you if you'd actually like to use the site as intended, but alas that seems not to be the case.
The out of context snippet you quoted is no more a violation than most other things on this site. For you to go after certain viewpoints like you do, not out of any notion of preserving civility, but to silence certain viewpoints, smacks of censorship.
However, the people holding the opposite views say exactly the same thing (including yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14984601). And there are plenty of users arguing for the same positions as you who respect HN's rules and consequently don't get moderated or banned. So from my perspective, your posts have more in common with those from the opposite extreme (i.e. posts by users whom you would regard as your enemies) than with the majority of community members who share your views.
It's certainly true that moderation gets applied inconsistently but that's not for ideological reasons nor because our principles are inconsistent. It's because we only see a portion of the comments that get posted here (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14977025 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14977025 for more explanation).
I do not wish to draw this out further than I have already. I know you have a hard job, and I am sorry for losing my cool at the tail end of the above discussion.
We've banned this account for repeatedly violating the site guidelines and repeatedly ignoring our requests to stop. If you don't want to be banned on HN, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
I used to believe that, but I no longer do. The Trump administration, in particular the leaks associated with it, has given us a perspective that we've never had before as private citizens.
There really is a good side and a bad side here, and they are not secretly in bed with each other. No one would make themselves look this incompetent if they were reading from a prewritten script.
Could be a great opportunity to send a message to the voters, "Hey, don't try putting outsiders in here."
(None of that is meant to take away from the crazy mistakes the Trump administration has been making. The Mooch!)
We had the same thing happen here in Australia a few years previous; the opposition party just said "No!" to everything that the incumbent government was trying. They got into power, and then realised that that trick only works when you're in opposition... and when that's the only muscle you've exercised, you're now lost at sea with no idea what to do. They had nothing but poorly-planned destruction on the cards; nothing constructive has come from their tenure.
Even more true today then when Gore said it!
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/6s1mge/10_membe...
To the contrary, usually when we impose special excise taxes like that we do so to discourage what we perceive as undesirable industries (alcohol, tobacco, gambling, sugary drinks). It's the height of political innumeracy to expect a different result with internet service just because our intentions for imposing the excise tax are different.
It is quite literally "money we've ... given them."
You are wrong in that the subsidies are not a tax on the companies. The subsidies are a fee collected from the subscribers by the companies on behalf of the government.
Those subsidies are then distributed to different incumbents, based on applications. This distribution is not based on which companies collected and how much. The collection and distribution are disconnected.
So to summarize, it is indeed "our money", since it's being collected from us and if it wasn't we'd get to keep the money hand have cheaper service. It is also "given" away as a subsidy to incumbents.
In other words, "money we've ... given them."
What's wierd is not that we give them our money. What's wierd is that this is not a regular tax, but a fee tagged on to telecom services. But hey, it's far easier to tax by proxy, call it a fee and somebody else do the dirty work. At least rhen you don't need to call it a tax.
"...ISPs don’t actually build what they get the money for. One used hundreds of millions for trips, expensive food and wine, and luxurious parties while not actually delivering anything. The $200 billion handout in the Telecommunication Act of 1996 was supposed to fund fiber to the home. Instead:
> other countries made sure the money went into ground wiring and other upgrades. The U.S. lacked the regulatory will...and thus, the phone companies were able to simply spend less and not be held accountable."
And here's a newish example. This is the consequences of fundamentalist orthodoxy and foundational mythology:
"EPB wanted to build out its gigabit fiber network to many of these same communities using money it has on hand or private loans at no cost to taxpayers. It would then charge individual residents for internet service. Instead, Tennessee taxpayers will give $45 million in tax breaks and grants to giant companies just to get basic infrastructure built. They will then get the opportunity to pay these companies more money for worse internet than they would have gotten under EPB's proposal."
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170412/06311737132/tenne...
In a time where many European countries aim at providing 100Mbit as a minimum in the next years and thus also open rural areas for economic development, decision/opinions as the one described in the article seem ludicrous. Of course, providing net infrastructure in the US with its huge size is a challenge. Yet, in a country like Sweden with similar population density, 100Mbit is already kind of the basic minimum even in remote areas.
Here in my town in Germany we had super slow internet until 3 years ago. Now I can choose up to 400Mbit from different providers (100Mbit DSL or up to 400Mbit cable). Connectivity skyrocketed and it does in many other European areas. Now the US decides to lower standards? Is it the same kind of thinking as "we don't need high speed trains, we will have Hyperloop in 50 years", just adapted to "everything will be mobile one day"?
So much endless mindless war...
Since 2001, America has spent an average of ~$300 billion dollars per year on the nebulous war in the Middle East.
Terrorists are media-hyped paper cuts compared to over 1 million Americans a year dying due to heart disease and cancer ($11B/y federal R&D) - not to mention Alzheimers, diabetes, obesity... and, to be blunt, you and almost everyone you know will probably die from one of those diseases.
For perspective: on average terrorism kills ~79 Americans per year (including 9/11). There are 121 American suicides per day.
The math doesn't make sense on any level. $300B/y killing people thousands of miles away and directly fueling increased hatred towards our nation... and a mere $11B/y invested in heard disease + cancer, which saves millions of citizen's at home.
Even pie-in-the-sky research like fusion is a better investment. Fusion would solve or mitigate large global problems, including terrorism, yet it receives a mere 1/1000th the funding level as our wars.
The real problem is we keep voting for the establishment parties because we believe that "3rd party will never win" dogma both parties roll out.
Remember this: Nobody won the 2016 popular vote.
40% of Americans didn't vote last year, 30% voted Trump, 30% voted Clinton - and many of those 30% were compromise voters that would have preferred a different primary candidate, or simply voted against the opponent's candidate.
This is democracy. If we want something different, we have to vote for someone different.
So of course we don't have money for any of those things... we need to save it for NK.
A few key differences:
* Everyone is already registered to vote (through IRS equivalent records)
* It's always on a Sunday
* Everyone gets a letter home in advance telling them where to go to vote (60% usually do this), or how to mail-in vote.
* Identification is handled either through ID/drivers license, OR someone with a valid ID vouching for your identity.
* There are 8+ parties to vote from, and you get parliament representation if your newly created party gets 4% of votes.
IMHO, a tolerable mediocrity across every field would be better than national greatness if that mediocrity were uniformly distributed across the country and its residents.
Similarly Amtrak is a government monopoly disaster, there's no opportunity for private investment in U.S. passenger rail. Wikipedia says there are 1,500 private passenger rail companies in Germany. There are none here, outside of a handful of tourist experience lines. Our privately owned freight rail is, however, the finest in the world.
In any event, the U.S.'s proportion of higher-speed connections compares pretty well to Sweden. According to Akamai, in Q4 2016 the U.S. at 42% of connections above 15 mbps. That's less than Sweden (49%) but comparable to Finland (44%). It's way higher than Germany (30%).
I have to say that recently I sound much too arrogant concerning the US. Sorry to you guys. It is just that the little Texas landowner in me, that I am, wants to cry at night at the sum of this years politics. It has not been like that the governments before.
If there is a country that has a place in my heart, it is yours.
[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/lots-of-people-in-citie...
And as far as I can tell the difference in uptake is not really because broadband is cheaper in Stockholm Internet. Telia charges 990 SEK ($122) for gigabit. Comcast charges $150 for 2 gig, while Verizon charges $70-100 for 1 gig. At the low end, Telia charges $50 for 100/100, versus $40 for Verizon's 50/50 plan.
DC also is a good example of what I mean about population-weighted density. The D.C. metro area has about the same density as the Stockholm metro area, and the municipalities have about the same density too. But in Stockholm 40% of people live in the denser core city versus only 10% of people in D.C. So even though the metro areas have the same density, the distribution makes DC harder to wire (all else being equal).
Ah so the internet is good in theory, it's only in practice that internet connectivity is poor.
Oi.
So many excuses for why in so many large cities of the US you can struggle to find anything above 5mbps connections.
"Oh, the US has such a unique density, unlike anywhere else!" - well, actually ...
"Oh, well, the cities are shaped differently!"
Come on now.
> versus $40 for Verizon's 50/50 plan.
You mean with FIOS? That they are not selling any more because it wasn't profitable enough for them once they had had to build any notable infrastructure?
Oh, not to mention that that $40/mo 50/50 plan actually went up to as high as $99/mo after year one, depending on your area....
As to FIOS, they're not only still selling it, but upgrading the whole footprint to gigabit. And in much of the footprint (e.g. the D.C. suburbs), Comcast is offering multi-gig for $150/month. I don't know why my redneck neighborhood in exurban Maryland apparently has better internet choices than the Bay Area. Chalk that up to another major difference between the US and Europe: in the US, actual broadband construction is driven by state and local policy, not national policy.
PS: Fairfax county a suburb of D.C. has a over 60% of the population (1.1m) than West Virginia (1.8m) in less than 2% of the land area aka 406mi² vs 24,038 mi² aka or well over 50 times the population density.
Another comment expresses concerns about not being able to get the coverage advertised, but these are all just political issues. When you take a contract here they'll check the expected coverage and warn you if it could be bad, and even then you can cancel the contract within the first 30 days with no extra charges. And don't forget that LTE hardware designed for home use usually has more and better antennas than mobile devices, and you can install an external antenna.
N.b. The Akamai ratings for Lithuania don't look that great, but I'd assume it's mostly because people here often have older generation mobile devices (so not the fastest LTE) and computers (so no 5GHz wifi). There is also a bit of a resistance to upgrade, so a lot of people are on slower connections that they deem 'good enough' even though they could switch provider and get 10x the speed for the same price (a couple of years ago fibre was installed in my building so I could upgrade from 10 Mbps cable to 1000 Mbps fibre, but they didn't even put an advert on the noticeboard so I didn't realise for a few months).
Obviously large cities in all countries will have high speed broadband. A better measure of broadband penetration is probably to look outside cities. Perhaps surprisingly, fiber is often built from "the outside in" in Sweden, due to subsidies. Dense areas such as cities obviously have a lot of choice, but after that the places that got (and keep getting) fiber are remote and very sparsely populated areas. The thinking (I'm assuming) is that medium density places such as suburbs will be getting fiber by market forces, and already have choices such as DSL in the meantime - so the vast subsidies to pull fiber to every remote cottage is focusing on the really remote areas such as small islands, small remote villages etc.
So contrary to what one might think, Sweden now has fiber in many of the lowest density areas such as remote houses in the Stockholm archipelago
What leadership (except in economy size and military)?
Other nations have been more developed in internet, infrastructure, healthcare, education, work culture, etc for decades.
Heck, parts of NY were like a developing world city back then, much less places in the South and co...
Are the other nations which are ahead in US in these areas which I am missing?
I think you should travel more. Maybe try Switzerland or the nordic region?
In internet speeds for example, the US just made it in the top 10 this year: https://www.fastmetrics.com/internet-connection-speed-by-cou...
And if you visit a place like Switzerland you'll wonder what kind of developing world nightmare is the US compared to their efficiency, cleanliness, infrastructure, government services, and lots of other things besides.
It's also a few places ahead of the US in per capita GDP. But then again, several countries are: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
Not also how Sweden, Norway, Switcherland and Denmark have higher per capita median income than the US (adjusted for purchasing parity etc): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
(Apart from access to healthcare, UK is less developed in those areas than lots of countries)
> The time to schedule an appointment has jumped 30% in 15 U.S. metropolitan areas from 18.5 days in 2014 amid a national doctor shortage fueled by aging baby boomers, population growth and millions of Americans with health insurance.
It's easy to shorten wait times for healthcare by removing/keeping millions of people from having coverage.
This has been a long standing position even prior to the NBN existing, resulting in almost two decades of delays and debates in replacing half century old copper phone lines that provide much of the people's internet.
I wouldn't wish such lengthy technological delays on another country, so I hope this gets sorted out rather quicker than our issues have been.
Dear USA: please do not use this as evidence for mobile broadband's inherent superiority.
I recently moved to Germany and am on what is considered a slow DSL link: 32Mbps down, 8Mbps up. It's wonderful and life changing compared with the 4/1Mbps Telstra DSL I used to have.
"Both Frontier and AT&T maintain antiquated DSL systems that serve millions of Californians who live in communities that don’t have sufficient revenue potential. Low income and low density communities in other words."
http://www.tellusventure.com/blog/california-bill-magically-...
AB 1665 seems on hold until legislators return on August 21:
http://www.tellusventure.com/blog/hostile-takeover-of-califo...
No skin off my back. I already have internet service significantly better than the FCC broadband definition, and my core concern in this space is net neutrality. Rural areas are the ones that will be negatively affected by this kind of policy change in the coming years. You get what you vote for in this case.
How many customers have trouble accessing your website or service? How many potential customers, vendors, partners, employees etc have limited education and income because they lack basic resources?
Side note - the US population is heavily urban/suburban, so even if I was running some kind of internet-based business, the loss from ignoring/losing rural areas is something like ~25% of the population; imo it doesn't really matter that much.
I think Pai is the kind of scum that's only persuaded by what's filling up his own intestines.
He's not on some kind of Peter Thiel-level of cerebral, cold-hearted business mastery. He's just a big fat leech that somehow managed to climb the ladder far too high for anyone's good.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/08/maybe...
I know that a lot of other pieces have to fall into place to make this happen, but the entire country wired with strong backbones and last mile service will definitely help.
FCC expresses possibility that in the near-future wireless connectivity may be more important to consumer internet users.
Admitting "we don't know which way this industry is going to go" is probably a healthy thing for government to do.
25Mbps/3Mbps wired is already an unambitious requirement, and Pai dissents from it having been raised from a previous 4/1 requirement, and suggests that a 10/1 mobile connection would be enough.
The whole proposal sounds like they just want to lower the bar to what's available now and toss up the "Mission Accomplished" banner.
It is actually about mobile home access. Generally:
- mobile coverage in the home is different from outside of the home. The primary focus of radio planning was outdoor coverage and the networks reflect this. I suspect this is about having a mobile access point at a fixed location which helps a little via antenna and positioning vs. a cell phone.
- mobile networks have been planned with totally different traffic assumptions and those are literally cemented into base-station locations.
- mobile is a shared medium with low constraints. It will be hard to guarantee minimum rates. Much harder than for fixed networks. There is a reason for the data caps - if there were not then competition would have long eliminated them.
- disincentives for scale: Providing data rates for one home may be easy. But if all the neighbors hop on that bandwagon then things get more difficult.
It is possible in principle but the cost for universal mobile access service and these bandwidth guarantees with the current technology may be quite high at this time. Anecdotal evidence of localized solutions also in other countries exist but can anyone point to a place where such a service has been deployed in a large country?
Sorry financially-challenged rural dweller, you only have a phone with a fixed data allowance. I guess you'll need to continue relying on old media for your information needs. Have fun with whatever the public library has to offer-- oh by the way we're cutting the library from our budget.
Oh and those of you who, despite our best efforts, discovered that you can learn a knowledge trade and work from home, staying near your family and friends, bringing money into the local economy rather than move to a city? Sorry, it's not in our political interest to allow you to broaden your horizons.
> This would also be the first time that the FCC has set a broadband speed standard for mobile; at 10Mbps/1Mbps, it would be less than half as fast as the FCC's home broadband speed standard of 25Mbps/3Mbps.
I mean, what that "standard" does? Is it prohibited to sell connection slower than this? Clearly not, since there tons of home internet offers slower than 25/3. So what is the meaning of this standard, what consequences does it have? Of course the press, who is supposed to inform me, is too busy trying to propagandize me and forgets to explain what that all actually means. Could fellow HNians fill the gap?
The speed standard is used to funnel money to the incumbents. The incumbents are supposed to improve and/or upgrade their speeds or coverage to match these standards in return for these subsidies, but reality has a way to get in the way. In practice the incumbents pocket the money and deliver whatever they feel like.
No, it's total bullshit, except in the pedantic "well, humans don't NEED electricity/medicine/communications/synthetic shelter/[anything since we wandered the plains of Africa and had a life expectancy in the 40s]" sense. Fast, symmetrical end point Internet is of massive importance and in not just direct but emergent ways that a surprising number of people, even on HN, don't seem to consider. Think for example of many of the concerns that have been raised over the last few years here about how the net has become ever more centralized, or about the difficulties of efforts like Tor. A lot of the core driver for that comes down to lack of end point bandwidth vs demands. If symmetrical gigabit connections were the rule rather then the exception, it'd be possible once again for significantly sized services run directly. Obviously if a service grew large enough they'd eventually need to move towards the core, but for a lot of people it'd completely eliminate the need for many current colo and cloud offerings. Would you be happy going back to thinnet or 10BASE-T on your LAN? Everything that runs there could run over the net with more bandwidth, latency only becomes a significant issue over extremely long distances.
More bandwidth also means more can start to be devoted to meta-content issues like privacy. If we consider 25 Mbps to be a target for many services say, then onion routing networks are hard to make use of because they tend to impose significant overhead and be limited by slow nodes (particularly as even someone with a "enough" 25 Mbps connection themselves often would not be willing to allow all of that to be used by the larger network). But if everyone had 1000 Mbps (or more) to play with, then they could easily devote a bunch of that to sharing networks, take even a 90% overhead hit, and still have as much bandwidth as they needed. Just as more power in CPUs/GPUs has allowed us to not merely run things faster, but optimize towards the value of human time vs computer time, more bandwidth "then needed" represents leeway to optimize towards goals beyond the bare necessities.
Seriously, giving everyone (or close enough) fast, symmetrical connections should be one of the absolute highest priorities of anyone concerned about market competition, centralized control, privacy, and so on. It'd be one of the best investments America could make, just as national electrification, telephone, and roads were.
That assertion seems reasonable to me. What does "fast" even mean? Don't know? Then it's a good assertion. You don't need what isn't defined.
This is not the same as "humans don't NEED access to nuclear materials", because the acceptable safety measure is currently 0. So that's also a feasible assertion. The question about tradeoffs and what is practical has to be answered first. Until you say what the minimum is, there's no point arguing about how supposing an upper limit (to what is needed) is wrong.
Says who? Love and friendship aren't defined either, but humans need both.
Do you need food? How much? If you get thinner your TDEE lowers, so you "need" less.
Do you need running water to your house? Hoe much? Our hygiene has in part made us live longer, but maybe we just "need" a few pints a day to drink?
Do you need a refrigerator?
Stop muddying the waters. Internet access is increasingly relevant, and before we had it (as with electricity and running water) we didn't know so. It's not a problem to give people much better, faster and uncapped access, it's only not in the monetary interests of incumbent ISPs and their puppet Ajit.
I would argue it's a necessary right. That's not the issue and I ask again, what does fast mean? It has no intrinsic meaning.
> Stop muddying the waters.
Insisting the terms of a negotiation before taking an agreement is not muddying the issue. It's rationally rigorous and seems to be problematic. That's why it's worth discussing. I'm still waiting.
Is that why you conveniently disregarded my other questions? If you can't answer those, it should inform you of why your question is disingenuous, which was my point. I'm still waiting.
The question is still about degree. Starting with new off-topic propositions to attempt to derail, are for your own entertainment. Since you're just here to argue about anything but the issue at hand, I'll wish you good luck.
The question stands. What does "fast" mean, in regards to need? A natural negotiation before condemning an imagined policy that has not specified limits or prerequisites.
Simple and objective. "Fast" equals current standard deployed wired LAN speed, so right now about 1 Gbps symmetric (technically WiFi has exceeded this but in practice there is far, far more discrepancy in advertised vs actual WiFi bandwidth). I would be willing to accept arguments about delayed ramp ups and the like, so after 10 Gbps becomes standard industry wide for wired LAN I could see WAN upgrades taking x years, but in basic principle the only difference between WAN and LAN should be latency (should be mostly irrelevant except for special applications and continental/intercontinental distances), SLA/uptime responsibility and guarantees, and who exercises network control.
You're taking a typical argument from incredulity without bothering to actually give this any particular thought. It's frankly pretty simple and certainly not a technological challenge either. What should we be able to use the Internet for? At least the exact same stuff we use our LANs for (plus more). Again, I invite anyone who argues that 1 Gbps or more is "unnecessary" to go right back to 10BASE-T for a month on their home & office networks and see how that works out for them.
This title makes it sound like the FCC is advocating that speeds above those are unnecessary for anyone, as if they're coming for your network speed. I don't get the sensationalism here, this hardly even seems newsworthy.
So people with internet at current minimum will see their speeds lowered.
And just because a cell provider purports to offer LTE within a geographic area, that doesn't translate to LTE being available and reliable within and throughout your residence. In the past, I frequently experienced downgrades to 3G and Edge, with only intermittent LTE availability.
I don't think we're in disagreement; I just wanted to share my perspective.
(The sarcasm is real. Claiming that home internet access is unneeded implies a fundamental misunderstanding, a regressive misunderstanding, of how society has transformed in the past 20 years.)
I don't see where I said that. If you'd like a data point, then look no further than the ultimate failure of Google Fiber. The largest internet company in the US can't successfully deploy fiber. Meanwhile in Japan, fiber is available almost everywhere, even in rural Hokkaido.
I don't want to be stranded on slow internet while the rest of the world races away to faster and faster speeds. I hope president Trump's strategy to Make America Great Again works out, and we get fast internet here too. Whatever the previous administration's plan was, it clearly wasn't working.
It's fine for me; I work mostly in plain text and prefer it whenver there's an option. But undertand many people want more. Don't understand the FCC weighing in one way or the other. Should be up to private enterprise to provide what customers want to pay for. Get rid of the local monopolies, get out of the way, and watch what happens.
- 5300 water systems in violation of lead rules: http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/28/us/epa-lead-in-u-s-water-syste...
- rank 16 in road quality http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-sad-state-of-americas-roads/
-expensive, slow mobile phone service compared to rest of the world http://time.com/money/3633758/wireless-cost-us-world-ofcom/
- Piss Poor electrical grid, with an increasing number of outages http://insideenergy.org/2014/08/18/power-outages-on-the-rise...
- 1 out of 9 bridges are structurally deficient https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/06/19/transp...
- rising death rates for prime age whites due to massive drug epidemic, obesity, and loneliness http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/03/23/52108333...
- highest incarceration rate in the world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra...
- highest first day infant mortality in the industrialized world http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-has-highest-first-day-infant-...
- U.S. adults rank below average in basic educational skills https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/08/us-adults-ran...
- Expensive, broken healthcare system that bankrupts families. We spend twice OECD average on a percent GDP basis with below average results https://www.oecd.org/unitedstates/Health-at-a-Glance-2015-Ke...
- Expensive, broken tertiary education system that bankrupts students. We spend twice OECD average on tertiary education and get poor results. https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/spending-on-tertiary-educa...
- Awful, expensive secondary education system compared to rest of industrialized world https://data.oecd.org/pisa/mathematics-performance-pisa.htm
- Slow, expensive broadband compared to rest of the world http://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-falls-behind-rest-of-t...
-all of the above probably contributes to us ending up poorer (in terms of median wealth) than other industrialized nations even though per capita GDP is high and taxes are low
http://www.middleclasspoliticaleconomist.com/2012/07/us-trai...
Could somebody explain to me why one needs 4K for video conferencing? No, I mean it'd be nice to have tons of bandwidth, but why 4K video conference is an absolute necessity? The article kinda makes it sound like not having 4K video conferencing is the state of absolute depravity and without it it can't be even called proper internet service. Can anybody explain it to me?
4k deserves more of a mention than say 16K because that's what the current high-end mainstream screens/recorders use.
> that's what the current high-end mainstream screens/recorders use.
But not for video conferencing, unless your are shooting cinema-class movies over videoconference.
4K video conferencing was specifically chosen for legal reasons. The quote is from politician who is talking about this because it shows a mismatch between what's happening and how advanced telecommunications capability is defined in the statute. It gives them a leg to stand on. Don't read too much into it. This is about faster internet, not an effort to specifically deliver 4K video conferencing to humanity.
That's a severe understatement. You need 40 to 50 inch display to really see the difference (which will probably still be irrelevant for videoconf purposes), otherwise you just waste money to buy a fashionable buzzword label.
> It's an example of technology being held back by low internet speeds.
Or an example of 4K resolution not being needed to see a couple of talking heads?
> The quote is from politician who is talking about this because it shows a mismatch between what's happening and how advanced telecommunications capability is defined in the statute.
There is no definition in the statute - it just says "high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications" - what is high-quality is not defined. You can consider it 4k, 16K, 128G, whatever you like.
> Don't read too much into it. This is about faster internet, not an effort to specifically deliver 4K video conferencing to humanity.
Maybe then journalists and politicians should not use irrelevant examples? If it's about faster internet, talk about internet, not 4k video conferencing.
> Or an example of 4K resolution not being needed to see a couple of talking heads?
You keep coming back to needing something. It's a weak argument, because you don't really need anything besides water and a slice of bread. In addition, let's say I do actually need my 4K video conferencing. I would still be held back by the low speeds in question.
As for choosing relevant examples, 4K video conferencing is just fine. You're free to choose another example for your own campaign, but be warned that there will be plenty of people who will claim your example is irrelevant and a waste of resources. Because again, if we're not talking about water then it's a luxury and not everyone will be interested.
From the law: "(1) Advanced telecommunications capability: The term 'advanced telecommunications capability' is defined, without regard to any transmission media or technology, as high-speed, switched, broadband telecommunications capability that enables users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications using any technology."
Originating high-quality video for the near future should reasonably mean 4k video worth of upstream bandwidth.
Also, 25 MBps is still really wimpy. In any reasonable moore's law resembling curve we should have 1-10 Gbit broadband by now.
It is fast. The question is what is the use of 4K video conferencing. None of the usages I've seen require anything even close to it.
> In any reasonable moore's law resembling curve we should have 1-10 Gbit broadband by now.
Why internet speeds should follow Moore's law? Where did you find the law of nature that requires it? Should we also have flying cars, real hoverboards and robots doing all the work while we relax in holodecks?