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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.

> This is a modern equivalent of "640K of memory should be enough for anyone."

If you have a 4 bit CPU, it probably is enough memory for anyone!

I think we're focusing on the wrong thing. Download bandwidth is fine; stability, latency, and to some extent upload bandwidth are not. I think a forum of tech literate people should understand the importance of optimizing for the right thing.

But bandwidth does matter when you have multiple devices. On a typical day it is not uncommon for multiple video calls to be going on at the same time in my apt. My roommate and I used to schedule our meetings around one another so that we could have a call with our respective advisors that wasn't choppy. We'd also make sure not to be streaming video at these times either. Bandwidth is 100% part of the problem.

Now I agree that there are other issues like stability, latency, and upload, but it is just naive to dismiss download bandwidth.

> On a typical day it is not uncommon for multiple video calls to be going on at the same time in my apt. My roommate and I used to schedule our meetings around one another so that we could have a call with our respective advisors that wasn't choppy. We'd also make sure not to be streaming video at these times either. Bandwidth is 100% part of the problem.

I don't know your situation, but fwiw, if a friend was having this problem and they came to me for help, I would assume it was their wifi network.

Up until a few years ago, I only had 3 down / 1 up in my apartment. My building had FIOS, but it was much more expensive than my absolutely dirt cheap cable connection. The internet was stable and reliable, and Facetime calls went fine. I did live alone, and large downloads were a massive pain, but 3 Mbps is much slower than the speeds we're discussing.

A tip for anyone having such issues with wifi on linux: Is it a 2.4GHz network and is anyone using bluetooth (such as headphones)? They might be interfering with each other.

The iwlwifi kernel module has an option that tries to allow them to coexist, but it seems totally random whether or not you should have it on. Different bluetooth headphones also affect it in different ways (as I discovered a few weeks ago when I bought a different brand; with my usual the bluetooth would drop for about a minute then reconnect with no effect on the wifi, but with the new ones they would go crazy maintaining the connection, causing a lot of audio stuttering and extremely slow wifi).

https://techvorm.com/fix-wifi-not-working-slows-ubuntu-bluet...

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1060094/bluetooth-audio-inte...

Yeah, that's not what was happening. It was bandwidth issues over peak usage times. You could run speedtests (to the router) and find this out very quickly. I know you want to assert your original answer as still being correct. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm saying that there are other important variables here that you are just throwing out. Anyone that has done debugging with network issues knows that there's a thousand things that can go wrong. Yes, there's common problems, but there's a lot of breaking points. Certain ones became more common during the pandemic as we stressed networks in different ways than most people were doing previously.

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).

In the unlikely scenario where all four children are simultaneously using the internet full-throttle, they're still each getting 5 Mbps down, which Netflix says is sufficient for 1080p video. Upload speeds could start to be a problem though, and IMO that's a much more significant issue.

> 20Mbps is also entirely noticeable for bulk downloads

It is, but downloading Steam games quickly is not a critical need. It can be done in the background.

5 Mbps down is certainly more than adequate for a single 1080p stream that's been compressed ahead of time. When you have to stitch together multiple real-time streams as in a classroom environment, then the actual numbers can vary significantly.

If your kids are forced into remote learning, and you're working from home, then we might be talking more like 3-4 Mbps per person if your network is split 5 or 6 ways. And unless you're on a business internet plan, the only guarantee you have when you buy a 20Mbps plan is that your ISP will throttle you to that rate if you exceed it.

To be clear: I think most people would be happy if they could get a guarantee of 50 Mbps download speeds. But the fact of the matter is that during peak hours, if you pay for higher download speeds, you get a higher fraction of the available spectrum. Your big-name cable companies can have oversubscription rates of 100x or more. That doesn't translate to only getting 5Mbps out of your 500Mbps connection at peak, but you will see _some_ contention. If you're paying for 20Mbps under the assumption that you'll only need 18Mbps at peak, you'll be frustrated when you end up only getting 15Mbps and all the video calls stutter / cut out intermittently.

> If you're paying for 20Mbps under the assumption that you'll only need 18Mbps at peak, you'll be frustrated when you end up only getting 15Mbps and all the video calls stutter / cut out intermittently.

But isn't that the real problem here? Companies shouldn't be able to advertise a 20 mbps connection if they aren't able to maintain that speed. Dropping one megabit on occasion may be reasonable, but five is at the point where you should be compensating customers for the outage.

My thesis is not "everything is fine and everyone should shut up and accept what they've got." My thesis is that we're focusing on entirely the wrong thing.

There are certainly a lot of problems with incumbent ISPs that many other commenters have pointed out: deceptive marketing practices, anti-competitive behavior (ranging from lobby-driven legislation to lock out new entrants, to outright sabotage / destruction of cables), wildly asymmetric up/down speeds driven by economies of scale from 20 years ago, just to name a few.

Yes, even 4k video streaming at 20 Mbps is viable (assuming that your connection is stable). Yes, poor wifi performance / latency / bufferbloat / squirrels eating your coax are more common underlying causes of end-user pain points. But that doesn't mean that there aren't common use cases that benefit significantly from adding more bandwidth, nor does it mean that adding more upstream capacity is useless in the context of these other factors.

Also, let's be realistic: most regulators don't have anywhere close to the level of technical expertise that you'd expect from, say, a network engineer. It's a lot easier to reduce everything to the single dimension that is download speed, and it's a lot easier for a layperson to understand said changes.

It's also a straightforward way to place pressure on ISPs to upgrade their networks if they want to keep saying that X% of their customers have access to broadband plans.

> But that doesn't mean that there aren't common use cases that benefit significantly from adding more bandwidth, nor does it mean that adding more upstream capacity is useless in the context of these other factors.

I agree! I just don't think it's what we should be pushing for right now.

> Also, let's be realistic: most regulators don't have anywhere close to the level of technical expertise that you'd expect from, say, a network engine

Well, I have higher standards than you do. I think regulators should have a very strong understanding of what they're regulating, or should talk to people who do.

> It's a lot easier to reduce everything to the single dimension that is download speed, and it's a lot easier for a layperson to understand said changes.

To me, this is a bit like saying we should still be measuring all CPUs according to clock-speed, because it's easier for a layperson to understand a single number. (And make no mistake, clock-speed is important!)

People here seem to think I'm letting the ISPs off the hook somehow. On the contrary, I think this fuss over bandwidth is great for the ISPs. People pay more for faster speeds because they think it's making their Zoom calls more reliable, when the actual culprit is just the piece of crap wifi router they're renting for $5 per month...

> I agree! I just don't think it's what we should be pushing for right now.

While I agree that it's not the only problem at hand (and perhaps not the single most useful change the FCC could make), I think any movement is better than none. If nothing else, the WFH / distance learning situation brought about by the pandemic demonstrated that the current standard for upload speeds is entirely inadequate (and so the proposal increases that from 3 Mbps to 20).

It's also possible that these government agencies are nervous about trying entirely new things, lest the current Supreme Court swat down any such efforts as perceived overreach (as they've done recently to the EPA).

> I think regulators should have a very strong understanding of what they're regulating, or should talk to people who do.

Should != do

It certainly would be nice, but in the last 20 years, the only FCC chairs with relevant prior industry experience were Ajit Pai (Verizon counsel) and Tom Wheeler (CEO of CTIA).

As far as talking to people with experience, guess who's most likely to make sure they're represented at the table? That's right, the incumbent ISPs and their lobbyists.

> To me, this is a bit like saying we should still be measuring all CPUs according to clock-speed, because it's easier for a layperson to understand a single number. (And make no mistake, clock-speed is important!)

Well, we sort of still are, except that one number is Geekbench or whichever other benchmark is popular these days. (Okay, there's also single-threaded vs multi-threaded perf, but there's a strong correlation between the two for consumer-grade CPUs.)

(and I'd expect that your typical consumer doesn't really care much about the CPU details in large part because performance is so opaque now. They probably just buy something with an i7 or the latest generation Macbook and call it a day.)

Are you literally incapable of understanding that other peoples' needs are different from your own?

Tbf, the updates can just take longer to download. Higher speed does not enable them as such, which is what the op asked. Similar for steam - spending extra hour for a download ahead of time is... fine for me.

Great that it's fine for you. Is the fact that you enjoy waiting for downloads a reason to push the same suffering on others?

You've got strong opinions here, but... chill. I'm not enjoying the wait, I'm not pushing it on others and some wait time to play a game is not suffering. The question was what does the higher speed enable - of course it makes lots of things better, but waiting less is not enabling.

> The question was what does the higher speed enable - of course it makes lots of things better, but waiting less is not enabling.

It enables more productivity, if it doesn't take me x time to upload photography to a client, or push a bunch of Docker images to a remote, but x/2, x/3. That cycle time being reduced is useful.

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.

10 minutes? I wonder why you're only in the 200Mbps range.

It's because I'm uploading to https://www.box.com/ where IBM has an Enterprise account.

I am amazed that Box has nailed a good portion of the Enterprise market with a substandard product: poor transfer speeds and an astoundingly bad UX on their web access.

I do get the expected speeds when uploading to or downloading from other servers.

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.