FCC chair proposes raising broadband standard to 100Mbps | Hacker News Reader

FCC chair proposes raising broadband standard to 100Mbps

engadget.com

29 pointsmikece9 comments

Good, the last thing we need are small ISPs competing against the consolidated media giants.

Small ISPs can't manage 100/20?

I am on a small ISP and the best I can buy is 20/1. I am not sure how this proposal would change that situation.

Well I would say that's not because it's harder for them than a large company.

I wasn't saying small ISPs are necessarily good. Just that this rule won't favor big over small, and we shouldn't use "think of the small ISPs" as a reason to dislike it.

I work in the Industry and I can assure you Smaller ISPs often offer faster speeds without datacaps than comcast and such. There are some rural places where this is the exception but often the larger ISPs either aren't offering anything or everyone is offering the bare minimum.

This is just the FCC trying to maintain the power and budget they've accumulated under the guise of bringing high speed internet to rural America. But these days mobile terrestrial providers and Starlink are increasingly accomplishing this. So instead of saying "great, this problem is being solved, let's move on to other things", the FCC prefers to move the goalposts in order to retain that particular power and budget and mission.

> But these days mobile terrestrial providers and Starlink are increasingly accomplishing this.

They're really not. Starlink's median speed with the small number of users they have is ~90 Mbps.

Mobile providers in rural areas are even slower, and prohibitively expensive ($110/month for 200GB of data was about the best I saw).

> So instead of saying "great, this problem is being solved, let's move on to other things", the FCC prefers to move the goalposts in order to retain that particular power and budget and mission.

Of course the goalposts move. As network speeds improve, applications grow to rely on that excess bandwidth. A T1 was a really good connection once upon a time, and hasn't been for a decade or two. The FCC should be updating these baseline speeds to reflect what the average citizen needs, instead of saying "yup, 1Mbps was good in 1990, so it's clearly sufficient in 2022".

Wireless internet always has tradeoffs, and satellite internet is inherently less reliable than wired internet. Calling 25/3 "broadband" was laughable even in 2015, and since the pandemic created more remote positions (or at least more opportunity to work from home part-time) it's more important than ever to make sure everyone has access to real broadband.

Starlink also costs $110/month (plus a $600 setup fee), which is... decidedly more than the $10/month a low-income household would pay for the Comcast essentials plan. If you're in an area with lots of Starlink users you may see speeds under 10mbps, which is on the border of usable in 2022 even for 1-2 devices.

The goalposts should move every decade or two!

25 down is getting restrictive, and 3 up is very much not enough these days.

You also have so many cable companies offering tiny upload amounts and hiding the numbers, in non-rural areas. They need more pressure to reallocate/upgrade frequencies.

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