FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

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.

>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.

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...

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?!"

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".

> 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.

> 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.

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

And yet, Netflix still produced Dark...

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

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...

> 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.

> Fast crypto transactions?

Is client bandwidth a limiting factor in crypto transactions?

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.

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'.

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

> 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.

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Hopefully starlink will raise the bar with competition

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.

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

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

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.

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.

> 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.

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

> 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.

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?

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.

>I don't need 100

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

> 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.

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.

plus some content providers limit the bandwith for individual connections

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

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.

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

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.

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

Most households are not a single person living alone.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.)

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.