FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric from 25Mbps to 100Mbps
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[1: https://www.spectrum.com/resources/internet-wifi/what-is-a-g...]
ver year download upload
1.0 1997 40 Mbit/s 10 Mbit/s
1.1 2001 40 Mbit/s 10 Mbit/s
2.0 2002 40 Mbit/s 30 Mbit/s
3.0 2006 1 Gbit/s 200 Mbit/s
3.1 2013 10 Gbit/s 1–2 Gbit/s
4.0 2017 10 Gbit/s 6 Gbit/s
The theoretical max up and download aren’t additive. It’s like saying that an egg carton can hold a max of 12 white eggs or 12 brown eggs. Good luck putting 24 eggs in it.
The DOCSIS standards carve up the available throughput, using some of that for upload and some for download.
I do think 25Mbps up is more than what's required for a large number of households (>33%). I have advised family that 15Mbps is adequate when they needed to do office work from home. Perhaps the only good thing about this is that it will force ISPs to upgrade their infrastructure, but I'm worried the cost of that will be passed onto consumers at a time when inflation has already taken a toll on budgets.
This whole time I've been told that Xfinity couldn't provide decent upload speeds because of infrastructure reasons, but now that's been proven a lie.
It looks like DOCSIS 4.0 is actually a path forward to symmetric upload/download speeds over the same cables
20 Mbps, while still suffocation, provides a massive amount of breathing room from 6.
Seemed crazy to me, but I guess they are just staying well ahead of the crappy competition.
I thought one of the reasons why DOCSIS was straightforward to rollout was because they only really needed bi-directional amplifiers to do it. Though in the early days of cable internet, some setups used a telephone modem for your uplink.
And if you already had Hybrid-Fibre Coaxial infrastructure (which was rolled out for noise reasons in the pre-data analog days) you were already a step ahead of the game in terms of segmenting nodes/worrying about CPE noise.
Upload is crap because they have to dedicate channels to it at the cost of download channels, and upload has more overhead because of the coordination required.
70s/80s cableTV companies basically won the lottery by being able to re-use their existing last-mile plant for high-value data. Telcos not so much.
For example, in the same region of Massachusetts (around Worcester) I previously paid $40/mo for 300/300 Mbps to Verizon FIOS but now after moving I pay $40/mo to Spectrum for 500/15 Mbps.
Yet my experience when streaming high def video is much better in places with symmetric fiber with much higher upload bandwidth (> 100Mbps) than it ever is in places with coaxial cable bandwidth.
You can't even get 1080p on zoom unless you're using "Business, Education and Enterprise". Pro and free users are limited to 720p and 360p respectively. Moreover people don't even have 1080p webcams, much less webcams where you can tell the difference between 1080p and 720p. That's not to say there are other reasons for wanting > 3.8 Mb/s up, but "video conferencing" is a poor one.
Meanwhile our Swiss friends have 10+gbps to home…
After I first experienced symmetrical gigabit fiber I have only lived in residences that offer it -- it is a prerequisite for me choosing a domicile similar to trash pickup and electricity. My argument isn't that we shouldn't offer faster internet. We should have more places that offer faster internet. My question is what is the minimum viable upload speed for residential service.
I might be building some software locally and uploading it to a cloud server to test it. The built artifact might be tens or hundreds of megabytes and take several minutes to upload.
This isn't even solely a software developer thing. Someone who does video production certainly needs to send around large quantities of data as well. I'm sure we could come up with examples from other industries.
It's pathetic how limited the coax infra is in the US these days. Supposedly this will be improving soon with DOCSIS 4.0, but c'mon, it's 2024...
It would great if DL/UL would be at least 10:1. So 1Gbps user would get 100Mbps upload.
Meta: I wish it was more acceptable to not enable video.
At my last job audio-only was the default, but at the current one people turn it on.
>We've increased your internet speeds to show you our appreciation
I was wondering what I'd done to deserve it!
Also I believe that an ISP is counted as broadband by the FCC if they have some plans available that meet the FCC's minimums. They do not have to meet them with all plans.
I talked to them and they say I am still on the 50/20 plan... they replied saying I would need to pay more to get 100mpbs. I don't need it, so I won't.
To me, this seems to be a clear positive outcome of the FCC's change: Xfinity had this capacity, the FCC raised their standards, and now all(?) Xfinity customers have increased upload speeds for zero additional cost. Seems like pretty much a best-case result of this metric increase.
Edit: Formerly 200/10, now 300/20. Email arrived 10am today.
When the plan was 200 mbps I'd get around 240 down on speed tests. Xfinity has always been 10-20% faster for me than whatever the sticker on the plan says.
I'm not sure, unless they actually say it is, that this is in response to the FCC. In the almost 20 years I've had Xfinity I've had numerous speed bumps like this, much more often than the FCC bumps the speed in their definition. My plan went from 100 mbps to 200 mbps sometime in the last few months for example.
[1] Run netstat once a second to get the byte counts in and out per second, multiply by 8 to get bits.
I'm skeptical that they just coincidentally matched the new minimum upload speed after years of insisting that residential plans could make do with 6.
Frontier is advertising 3 nines average network-wide availability for their new fiber network. Three nines is completely unacceptable, but our neighborhood barely got one nine last year.
Based on their current behavior, there's zero chance of them providing the bandwidths they're advertising for the new build out, even when the network is completely up and completely idle. Currently, if we try to sign up, they say we can get <<1 mbps (bits) theoretical. However, the internet coverage maps claim they provide broadband service to our address, so they must be claiming > 25Mbps to the FCC.
But what they mean by "99.9% network-wide availability" and what I mean by "99.9% availability to my house" are very, very different things.
However, I suspect that the actual availability is extremely skewed, given the one nine they delivered to our area.
Totally fine with both of these, even as someone who works from home.
> However, I suspect that the actual availability is extremely skewed, given the one nine they delivered to our area.
And this is what I'd find unacceptable.
The town got popular with city people going remote during the pandemic, many of whom bought houses. I was visiting my parents a couple of years ago when the power went out for 18 hours or so during a deep cold snap. I was shocked that none of the new neighbors–who had recently completed huge costly renovation projects–had bothered to install an automatic generator.
Oh, and then there was the time a building contractor accidentally took out the underwater cable connecting CenturyLink to Seattle... turns out they don't have multiple paths for that, that was about 48 hours of no internet for me there too. I remember some cell towers didn't work, but I can't remember if it was by tower or by carrier.
Less than 9 hrs of downtime per year is unacceptable for consumer internet?
If you need it for an emergency call, you need higher reliability, but you can prioritize, and I don't know how common landlines are any more.
I doubt that's true for most jobs. But yes, there are jobs where it is, and some of us (e.g. me ;) are just finicky about network connectivity. In which case I highly recommend having a fallback connection, with a different modality than the main one. For most of us, that means LTE. Tethering is fine if you can live with <5 min outages, but sure, you can also do automated failover.
But it's not a level of service that I think is reasonable to expect from a single ISP connection. A single construction incident will burn the annual SLO budget, and there's nothing the provider can do about that.
(And of course, it'd still be nice if telcos ran their backends competently. Looking at you, AT&T)
I poked around to try to figure out what the current requirements are, and it looks like they've mostly been scrapped. "Central office backup power" is required, which matches my experience attempting to get terrestrial internet or cell service during power outages.
What does the ISP have that can cause 9 hours worth of outages throughout the year? The only thing I could think of is the ISP being targeted by a massive DDOS attack.
I guess I'm really just spoiled. In the last 10 years I think I've only really experienced like 1 or 2 outages caused by my current ISP and they were resolved within the hour. My assumption is that like most people, all the ISP equipment is buried so the only things that can really go wrong are either at the colo or the home (like a router that dies). Having a line cut is simply a hyper rare event.
On the other hand, my overhead powerlines have caused most of my outages. An idiot crashing into the telephone poll has made my power less reliable than my internet.
They have the real world -- ice storms, trees blown down by wind storms, power outages, backhoe outages, etc.
A tree took out internet in my neighborhood for 2 days, others had longer outages since it was a big storm and it took a while to repair.
Their CTO was on holiday and was unreachable because their phone went into SOS mode and they just assumed it was them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Rogers_Communications_out...
In 2021, their mobile network went down for like 9 hours: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/rogers-identifies-root-caus...
The Nashville AT&T explosion didn't take out the data lines, but took out the electric service. Then the gas company cutoff the gas lines so their backup generators couldn't run (wiki says it was due to fire/water damage, so maybe I have that part wrong). The facility didn't have roll-up generator connections, so they had to figure out how to wire them in at a big time cost.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nashville_bombing
In 2003, the "Slammer" worm slowed down ISP's core routers (including Rogers' to the point of not working anymore) with the quantity of small packets.
OTOH, I frequently have scheduled power outage times that exceed that metric so it sort of doesn't matter, and that's ignoring unscheduled power outages (a necessary part of life in a temperate rain forest with above ground power). I've taken to keeping a small generator handy to power the modem.
I had a bad connection because of bad coax cable, and it's infuriating because each dropout causes long delays while TCP recovers.
Internet it available less than 10% of the year where you live ?
Sure, I'd like 4 or even 5 9's, but I don't want to pay for it -- each additional 9 is exponentially more expensive to guarantee, and few people are willing to pay for that much reliability for their own network gear.
The target for phones used to be significantly higher, but with cellphones home internet is generally less safety critical.
ADDED: I don't. But people having backup generators in snow country is not a weird thing.
Today in California, I'm getting 3 nines in an urban area. Those living a couple of blocks further towards the suburbs are not so lucky. And many people in the mountains don't get even 2 nines.
In 2023 our availability only had one nine. We had power ~96% of the year. And it wasn’t like it was a lot of hour long outages that added up or something. Longest was 8 days.
I am not in a dense urban area, but I am connected directly to a line connecting a couple of larger towns along a major highway, so we’re generally restored fairly quickly. During the 8 day outage, quite a few people in the major city nearby were actually still without power when mine was restored.
Maybe unsurprisingly, my internet has actually been vastly _more_ reliable.
In my Eastern European country the SLA from the (state owned) power company is no more than 6 hours of down time per event, after which they need to pay compensation. Within highly populated areas it's shorter.
Admitidely the most remote place is less than 1.5 hours from the nearest reasonable sized town, so we aren't as remote as some parts of the US. The purpose of this was to force them to make their network more reliable by upgrading old equipment, burying overhead lines (lots of trees used to fall on lines during winter) and ensuring redundancy.
They replaced several hydrants near me a couple years ago and there were disruptions on a couple of days.
BTW I run a serious network at home (Proxmox cluster, all enterprise gear, virtualized router with HA, UPS power) and only target 4 nines on the LAN. System updates and things like server crashes making the router failover to another node cause around 30 minutes worth of network downtime a year. If a core or floor switch fails it'll automatically take me over an hour to swap in a spare and configure it. I don't bother trying for that fifth nine and I'm a very demanding user.
Now if one of you have a consistent 5 nine home system I'd be curious to learn more about it. I'm guessing that would practically be a datacenter setup with CARP, dual switches, etc. - or you're just really really lucky.
It was reliable, so reliable that "as reliable as dial tone" was something to aspire to, but also costly and limited in capability. Even if I could get DSL today, my fastest speed would top out around 12mbit/sec due to my distance to the CO, which doesn't even meet the current definition of broadband.
3 9s is essentially an outage or two from a major storm. That’s fine for residential internet.
It's all going over the same wire. Why not put in the extra fraction of effort?
Yes and no. Even if it's going over the same wire, there are different data flows. Voice uses predictable amounts of bandwidth per phone number.
* Last mile has a downed line, yes that will result in a local outage
* Backhaul gets taken out. Re-route traffic. Drop/throttle non-SLA traffic
https://help.bdc.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/articles/10476040597787-Ho...
Frontier is labeled as a fiber provider for my address on the New York State PSC Broadband map and I made sure to provide some feedback to them about that claim.
Would love to have even just a single alternative option besides satellite internet. I'm only 10 miles outside of the downtown area.
It is ridiculous that nutrition labels are not forced to standardize on something like x/100 grams (even Freedom units would be acceptable). Plus a x/package. None of this 3/8 serving size nonsense.
I've recently been on vacation back to my home country (Indonesia) where my parents have some $100/month 50 up/5 down internet package, and I was struggling with how slow that is. Things I always took for granted like pulling in Docker images or whatever would take forever compared to back home, and doing anything while on a conference call or whatever was a non-starter.
I'm always amazed when I read about US internet. With the whole tech sector being what it is there, you'd think they'd be world-class in terms of internet speed/stability/price, but it seems basically comparable to the internet you get on a remote island in Indonesia, which is mind blowing to me.
> # We've increased your internet speeds to show you our appreciation
>You can now enjoy 2x faster upload speeds and improved download speeds for smoother connections when you’re working, gaming and streaming.
>We’re excited to share this increase to your current internet package at no additional cost. Not seeing the faster speeds yet? Restart your gateway. Enjoy!
Either way, good. 100 is a reasonable minimum for modern society. Now if only I could get a steady connection on T-mobile.
Here's a mirror of the text I grabbed from another computer/IP for anyone else getting blocked:
FCC INCREASES BROADBAND SPEED BENCHMARK
Annual Agency Assessment of High-Speed Internet Service Deployment Establishes New Standard to Better Reflect the Broadband Needs of American Households
--
WASHINGTON, March 14, 2024—The Federal Communications Commission today adopted its annual assessment of whether advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion across the U.S. In addition to deployment, the Report considers broadband affordability, adoption, availability, and equitable access, when determining whether broadband is being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion to “all Americans.” The Commission’s Report, issued pursuant to section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, raises the Commission’s benchmark for high-speed fixed broadband to download speeds of 100 megabits per second and upload speeds of 20 megabits per second – a four-fold increase from the 25/3 Mbps benchmark set by the Commission in 2015.
The increase in the Commission’s fixed speed benchmark for advanced telecommunications capability is based on the standards now used in multiple federal and state programs (such as NTIA’s BEAD Program and multiple USF programs), consumer usage patterns, and what is actually available from and marketed by internet service providers.
The Report concludes that advanced telecommunications capability is not being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion based on the total number of Americans, Americans in rural areas, and people living on Tribal lands who lack access to such capability, and the fact that these gaps in deployment are not closing rapidly enough.
Using the agency’s Broadband Data Collection deployment data for the first time rather than FCC Form 477 data, the Report shows that, as of December 2022:
· Fixed terrestrial broadband service (excluding satellite) has not been physically deployed to approximately 24 million Americans, including almost 28% of Americans in rural areas, and more than 23% of people living on Tribal lands;
· Mobile 5G-NR coverage has not been physically deployed at minimum speeds of 35/3 Mbps to roughly 9% of all Americans, to almost 36% of Americans in rural areas, and to more than 20% of people living on Tribal lands;
· 45 million Americans lack access to both 100/20 Mbps fixed service and 35/3 Mbps mobile 5G-NR service; and
· Based on the new 1 Gbps per 1,000 students and staff short-term benchmark for schools and classrooms, 74% of school districts meet this goal.
The Report also sets a 1 Gbps/500 Mbps long-term goal for broadband speeds to give stakeholders a collective goal towards which to strive – a better, faster, more robust system of communication for American consumers.
Action by the Commission March 14, 2024 by Report (FCC 24-27). Chairwoman Rosenworcel, Commissioners Starks and Gomez approving. Commissioners Carr and Simington dissenting. Chairwoman Rosenworcel, Commissioners Carr, Starks, Simington, and Gomez issuing separate statements.
GN Docket No. 22-270I'm curious what types of situations require more than 40mbps, and why the inability to do those tasks would mean that someone doesn't haver "real broadband access". I was pushed from 50 to 75 a while back and seriously hardly notice it.
I guess we live the simple life!
The example was 2-3 simultaneous streams plus a "work environment" (a zoom call?). My family of 4 doesn't ever have that much usage, which is why I don't enjoy being forced to pay for 75mbps — Comcast's lowest tier. We cap out at two simultaneous streams, which is probably the same for your parents. It has literally never been an issue — even when we had 25mbps.
Do consumers care or differentiate “broadband” anymore?
Why do I feel like they might just pivot to not using the word “broadband” at all anymore and use some internal branding like the stupid 10g crap Comcast tried. Thankfully they were told to stop but if they are more careful…
> Raising the speed metric is important because it helps the commission determine which areas in the country are receiving adequate internet speeds, and if more government funding is necessary. In 2015, the FCC raised the metric from 4Mbps/1Mbps to 25Mbps/3Mbps. But since then, US senators, government watchdogs, and FCC officials have urged the commission to raise the metric even higher, citing the US’s growing reliance on internet services and apps.
With sufficient upload connectivity and ipv6, it could be possible to make “cloud” connectivity an appliance you can buy and put in your home, so that you can be freed from having to use an external cloud provider.
> do we really want the government throwing money to solve that (non) problem?
The FCC isn't saying you can't sell internet under this requirement. Plenty of places have still offer ADSL even though it is under the old 25/3 requirement for broadband. They just can't call it broadband and receive the federal money that goes along with providing broadband. The new rule requires ISPs that offer broadband and receive federal funds to meet the new rules. The new rule forces ISPs to provide a better service to millions of Americans or lose the money they have been receiving for years. Without the new rule ISPs get to collect the money anyways while providing an objectively worse service.
>but if there's a home out there that currently gets 50mbps but the infrastructure for 100mbps isn't in place,
What situation would that be? ADSL don't meet the old requirements anyways so its not relevant, cable based systems like DOCSIS have supported well over 100/25 for 2 decades (DOCSIS 3 can do 1gbit/200mbit and that came out in 2006 lol), and any fiber based system can obviously do more than 100/25. Even if there was some situation were 50mbit was possible but 100/20 wasn't it doesn't mean they lose internet or anything. The ISP is just forced to upgrade their system or not receive federal funds.
Anyway, the 15/3mbps down/up I get in the Oregon countryside is indeed high speed compared to the 5/1mbps down/up I had smack in the middle of the Los Angeles suburbs.
_Today_, most consumers aren’t going to be that bothered between the difference between 100 and 1000. But that’s today; the sensible telecoms regulator thinks on a longer scale, because otherwise they just have to revisit the whole thing in a decade.
In Ireland we’re on our third try; the first saw a lot of subsidised satellite and fixed wireless in rural areas, the second, better fixed wireless (a minimum latency requirement killed off the satellite option), and FTTC; in the third, they do seem to have finally decided to stop screwing about, and are rolling out FTTH in otherwise-poorly-served rural areas.
(From a practical point of view, I do get that a state rural fibre wholesaler probably would not fly politically in the US, but this approach of repeatedly easing the minimum standard up is ultimately kinda wasteful.)
If you've got actually decent Internet, or you actually do use the bandwidth, great! My experience is that only a few applications will max out my 115Mbit/s connection, and given I have semi-decent kit and a decent ISP using the full bandwidth doesn't have a big impact on latency so I can be streaming, downloading, and have multiple people video-calling and that's fine.
Looking at my stats, there's only been a five minute period in the past 24h with sustained speeds used of over 20Mbit/s.
I'd rather have 200/20 than 15/15 or 20/20 (obviously), but I would also rather have 200/20 than 25/25.
Every household use google or apple photos app that upload backups to cloud services.
Oh, and an SLA too...
UPnP was meant to help alleviate some of those requirements but I don't think there's been any progress on that front since the spec came out in 2001...
My experience is that people rarely feel constrained by bandwidth because everyone is fighting to optimize every last bit, often using varying techniques that sacrifice quality. Not a single video calling app that I’ve used recently feels like it’s actually delivering good video to me. They're all bitcrushed. They work for some meetings at work, but I would really love a much higher bandwidth connection for screen sharing on Discord and practically every streaming app.
Latency is also important: don’t get me wrong about that. But the fact that I have 1Gbps and I can’t get high bitrate video down kills me.
I suspect this is largely done for the sake of latency, due to buffer bloat.
Well, that and as a result of typical upload speeds being much lower than download speeds.
If higher bitrates lead to higher latency, most tooling will try to keep latency low enough even if that means sacrificing quality. I've got 1/10 of your total bandwidth, but still seem to maybe get better video quality? I'd attribute that to better active traffic management.
Maybe I'd get a faster download with a faster connection, but it's the low latency applications that are of top importance.
I've got a 115Mbit/s connection for my last mile, and AAISP limit what they'll try to send down it to 95% of the line rate, so BT should never need to buffer anything.
This is a core tenant of Net Neutrality.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of people have $30 wifi routers that are incorrectly configured and positioned behind a concrete wall in the garage. So 100mbps comes into their house, but their laptops, TVs and phones see 20mbps.
There's also a huge amount of government money going into rural connectivity. It seems to me that StarLink is an ideal solution to this. Rather than running lots of cable to houses that are miles apart, give people subsidies to get StarLink. But if you make legislation that StarLink isn't "broadband", then the money needs to go to the incumbents, who will want billions of dollars in subsidies to lay expensive cables to service a small number of people. If I had to guess, some of those large players might have lobbied for this change, because they want some of that $18 billion pie that the FCC authorized for rural broadband expansion [1].
Anecdotally, Comcast has a 50mbps plan in my neighborhood for $20/month. If I needed more than that, I would gladly pay for it... affordability isn't the issue, I just get very little benefit from a connection faster than that, and the faster plans still have the same 10mbps upload speeds [2]. What I would 100% definitely pay for is more reliable internet that (almost) never goes down, but there's only two options in my neighborhood and I'm not sure the alternative is better. And I'm a software engineer... I'm on my computer all day, often downloading large files, on lots of zoom calls, while my kids are watching Netflix. I doubt most people's needs are substantially higher than mine.
[1] https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-authorizes-over-18-billion-...
[2] they actually gave me a free bump to 150mbps a few days ago, probably in response to this new ruling. I haven't really noticed any difference.
Internet service providers already receive money from the government through grants, loans, and other programs. Opposing increasing the pretty low requirements on ISPs who already receive this money just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Millions of people are getting an increase in their internet speed (including many in this thread!) at the flip of a switch. Seems like a pretty big win.
>Anecdotally, Comcast has a 50mbps plan in my neighborhood for $20/month. If I needed more than that, I would gladly pay for it... affordability isn't the issue
Nothing is stopping Comcast from still offering that plan to you. They just can't call it broadband or keep receiving money from the government. They now have to provide a slightly better service if they want to keep receiving those federal funds.
>There's also a huge amount of government money going into rural connectivity. It seems to me that StarLink is an ideal solution to this. Rather than running lots of cable to houses that are miles apart, give people subsidies to get StarLink. But if you make legislation that StarLink isn't "broadband", then the money needs to go to the incumbents, who will want billions of dollars in subsidies to lay expensive cables to service a small number of people. If I had to guess, some of those large players might have lobbied for this change, because they want some of that $18 billion pie that the FCC authorized for rural broadband expansion [1].
Sorry this just silly. We already run electricity to basically everywhere so hanging some extra fiber on the polls that already exist isn't really hard. Rural electric coops exist and have been rolling out fiber across their existing power network with great success! Starlink is not a serious solution to providing reliable, fast broadband to rural America. It doesn't have the capacity to meet the needs of rural America either. Put aside the long term future concerns of starlink (whose satellites are all in LEO and have to constantly be replaced) the price argument alone isn't great. The local electric coop that covers 9 rural counties near me offers a base plan of 100mbit up and down at $70 a month via fiber. Starlink is $120 a month for a speed that varies between 250mbit to less than 40mbit. Internet speed demands are only going to increase so we should keep in mind the ability to scale up; which is an area fiber wins at again. We already have the polls and electric coops ready to serve rural America. No need to gamble on a more risky and worse product like starlink.
Worrying about subsidies for "incumbents" while in the next sentence suggesting subsiding for Starlink/Elon is pretty funny!
>but I have some involvement in my city's digital equity community, so I have some insight into what this translates to for local governments and community organizations. Now what will happen is someone at the county level in charge of digital infrastructure will look at at a map and say "oh no, 40% of our population doesn't have broadband, and 20% don't even have access to broadband".
GOOD. They should be looking at it! If 40% of the county can't get a basic 100mbit/20mbit internet package then something should be done to address that. DOCSIS has been able to push multi gbit speeds over coax for a decade so I don't buy it Comcast or whoever in your county can't provide 100/20.
The problem isn't that they're offering higher speeds. The problem is that they're getting rid of lower speeds. I've been repeatedly forced off my old plan as Comcast has sunset them. It appears very clear that their moves are in response to FCC definition changes. I wish I could still have my 25 down service, along with my old price ($19). But I can't! They killed that service years ago, before they killed the 40 down service and the 50 down service. The lowest tier I can buy is 75 down.
I'm all for options, but it's clear that rejiggering the definition of broadband has the (perhaps) unintended side effect of eliminating low-cost options that would be fine for many families.
I suspect the issue you are describing has more to do with Comcast than anything the FCC has done. Comcast realized they can extract more than $19 from your household and others like it so they axed that plan. The major phone companies have done the same thing in past decades. Comcast is notoriously sleazy! This is the same company that at one point required customers to pay $25 a month to get the full speed of their internet package (in addition to their monthly bill of course). Realistically it costs Comcast the same amount of money to provide you with 25/3, 40/5, or 100/20 so a slightly higher broadband definition should have 0 impact on what they charge.
Why would they have the routers in their garage instead of in their house? Most houses that have cable have cable outlets inside the house, since the reason cable was originally put in was to support cable TV and generally people have their TVs in the house.
I wouldn't say this is incredibly common though, it really depends on which network and when the original install took place.
It's a quality of life improvement. :/
However, it doesn't scale nearly as well as just running fiber to the home, either in number of subscribers, or in per-home cost.
Some relatives live in an area with a phone co-op, and they ran trenchless underground fiber to each home in their service area. Population density is something like 1.2 people per square mile, and median income is ~ $20K. Monthly rates are extremely low. I watched the installers. It was two people and they were covering a good fraction of a mile per day. Equipment and material costs are negligible. There are communities in the SF bay area that are outside of telco monopoly territory. Trenching fiber here (in the mountains) runs something like $10K/house, which is $27/month when you amortize the cost out over 30 years.
The equity / subsidy programs I've seen are always just handouts for large ISPs that have established monopolies and that refuse to reinvest even a small fraction of their monthly revenue into network upgrades.
Establishing municipal broadband or broadband co-ops and giving them automatic right-of-way priority over the incumbents would fix this problem overnight. Either there would be a second fiber network that didn't suck, or the incumbents would actually invest in their networks.
I'm more impressed by the long-term goal of 500Mbps upload speeds.
But then there's something wrong with their peering or something. Youtube videos randomly buffer even at 1080p. Downloads randomly drop from 400 Mbps to 10. Sometimes the problem lasts an evening, and then goes away. I have no idea.
Have you ever seen an HN thread with so much pro-regulation sentiment?
Almost everyone in the world is in favor of some form of regulation of businesses.
Yes, when the service in question is a physical monopoly where there is no choice except to move.
Using a wide brush to paint all of HN and similarly all of gov't regulation is what leads to cognitive dissonance where there is nuance.
Today: 100Mbps down / 20Mbps up (45 million Americans lack access as of Dec 2022)
2015 onward: 25Mbps down / 3Mbps up
Pre-2015: 4Mbps down / 1Mbps up
The commission's longterm goal is 1Gbps down / 500Mbps up. These distinctions of 'broadband' help determine where to focus resources.
Now that 5G Internet exists, I am paying $25 a month for 300 Mb access and my life is better. I debated over years just because of the inability to get decent Internet at home.
I envy the LPBs.
Also of note, some uploads might actually go up substantially - a bunch of people on 100 down plans have seen uploads cut to almost nothing, e.g, 35 -> 5.
Time will tell.
I "splurged" for 100mbit and now it seems like it might be the bottom tier.
Good thing the FCC doesn't control Ireland, or I'd no longer be able to declare that I have broadband via satellite! Well, part of the time, anyway.
> Good thing the FCC doesn't control Ireland, or I'd no longer be able to declare that I have broadband via satellite! Well, part of the time, anyway.
I mean, you can call it what you want, but it’s under the minimum standard set by the NBP in 2012 (30Mbit, 25ms). Fortunately, if that’s the best you can get, you’re almost certainly in an NBI intervention area, so a minimum of 500Mbit via FTTH should be available to you at some point.
You can check here: https://nbi.ie/map/
I can't imagine why you'd need 4k streaming. I can't tell 4k from 1080p on my 65" from my chair, and my phone isn't 4k.
… Eh?
“ In Ireland, Starlink costs €65 per month with a one-time installation fee of €450.”
There are a bunch of providers on NBI, but with the cheaper ones you’re looking at ~45EUR/month for 500Mbit/sec, no installation fee.
(In general, unless you’re planning to switch provider every year, you should avoid introductory offers, at least in this country; Eircom’s 75EUR after a first year at 35EUR, say. If you avoid this type of ‘offer’, though, it should be in the 45-55 range.)
25->100 is more of a luxury then a necessity
The problem with this theory, particularly in the case of an ISP, is you need an actual free and open market with a large amount of competition before it starts making any sense. When you talk about things like ISPs which are region locked and have low or even no competition then it's meaningless. A region locked ISP can (and will) charge pretty much any price the market will bear divorced from the actual cost of service.
So building housing in a remote area only served by a WISP gets more expensive.
In practice I don't think the FCC really thinks about oversubscription.
Not if you work remotely.
Not to mentions that for my personal computers, I want offsite backups. I have to take a hard-drive and personal laptop to the office every few months to seed a full backup, since it is just too slow from home, other than the incremental backups.
I currently pay $60/month for 600 down.
An ISP that actually struggles to provide 100mbps down at a reasonable rate, today, is simply one that refuses to update their hardware. 100mbps is not hard to achieve with semi-modern hardware.
I know of ISPs servicing remote small communities with 1gbps down at $100/month. 300 down for $30/month.
Hanging fiber isn't really a complex process anymore anyways. We already run power to basically everywhere people live so hanging some fiber as you go isn't that hard. Electric coops have been receiving federal funding to hang fiber in even the most rural areas for the last 8-10 years with great success.
If the premises served are low-density enough, you may be looking at only one or two per coax section, and at that point you’re probably cheaper just using fibre to the premises anyway.
Fiber is not available here, and without significant extra pressure from the government, probably never will be.
We've had internet through Spectrum (and before that Time-Warner) since we moved here a decade and a half ago. 100Mbps has been available that entire time. I don't know exactly what all the available speeds have been at any given time, but in about 2017, we upgraded to 400Mbps, which we still have. It's not always the advertised speed, but it's almost always above 100.
I think your understanding of this technology and the practicalities of implementing it may be misinformed or out of date.
Rural telco is heavily subsidized already. To the point where I've literally personally done a run of Internet to a mountain house in the middle of nowhere.
The issue is that bigger telcos like spectrum and time-warner, simply do not care.
There's a reason Google was able to start doing urban fiber installation (which is more expensive than rural installs) and they were able to advertise $100 1gbps speeds 10 years ago. That wasn't all due to deep pockets.
Like, I can totally believe that there are places where they are perfectly content to shrug their shoulders and ignore entire populations (I actually know of some not too far from here). But to say that as if it's a universal constant is patently false.
Regardless of what the particular geographic parts of Spectrum you're familiar with do, it is demonstrably possible to get 100Mbps+ internet service over coax in rural areas, from them specifically. Thus, to say that you're "realistically looking at fiber" to go over 100Mbps doesn't hold up.
If you want to just bump that up to 1Gbps+, instead, your statement will hold pretty true.
Raising the floor to 20mbps for uploads is also fairly important for more practical things, having to backup a laptop at 3mbps was wholly impractical. 20mbps is a good bump if you're running some backups overnight, or uploading a 4k video file.
I don't see any reason to raise the definition of bandwidth higher for the next decade though. But I should stress, the amount of money needed to make these upgrades is pretty marginal in the grand scheme of things, we're not talking about replacing a ton of last mile wiring.
I think this is an odd choice of a counter-example. Is 4k streaming a necessity or a luxury? How many people could even tell the difference in an A/B test between 4k and 1080p on their televisions at their viewing distances?
> 20mbps is a good bump if you're running some backups overnight, or uploading a 4k video file.
I agree that it's a good bump. Back to necessity vs luxury, how many people back up entire laptops (with or without a sense of urgency) and/or upload 4k video files?
> we're not talking about replacing a ton of last mile wiring
Of course we are, unless it's delivered wirelessly. A huge percentage of last miles are relying on DSL over lousy POTS lines. I use DSL as a backup connection because cable is so unreliable for me, and the fastest I can get in a major metro area is 25-30Mb/s against AT&T's "Internet 50" plan.
Nothing is stopping internet providers from selling internet below broadband standard and many do. Changing the exact meaning of broadband allows the government to raise the standard of service people receive and pressure ISPs to be better. Now ISPs have to be at 100/20 minimum otherwise they will not be able to receive grants or other government funding.
It isn't over regulation to mandate ISPs who take government money to meet some pretty basic speed requirements. 100/20mbit isn't even a high bar.
I pay 29€ for 1000/100 (2/3ms to first hop) but the contract is a few years old. I could upgrade to 2500/500 at the same price.