This is over regulation imo. If you support this then you can’t complain about there not being any low cost housing because it’s regulations akin to this that is increasing the costs.
25->100 is more of a luxury then a necessity
25->100 is more of a luxury then a necessity
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I think your understanding of this technology and the practicalities of implementing it may be misinformed or out of date.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.
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.
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.
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.