FCC scraps old speed benchmark, says broadband should be at least 100Mbps | Hacker News Reader

FCC scraps old speed benchmark, says broadband should be at least 100Mbps

arstechnica.com

82 pointsthunderbong47 comments

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URL to their press release: https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-401205A1.txt

The move is from 25/3 to 100/20. That uplink change is a big jump for sure.

Nothing in the press release about latency or jitter though.

(Corrected uplink; thanks @Thorrez!)

100/20, not 100/25

Makes sense, all that bundled JS isn't getting any smaller. You don't want to try and open a news site on a poor backyard 3G connection

Yay, I'll be able to play Fortnite now! Seriously, a backyard 3G connection should still be faster than an indoor 3G connection.

> Standard of 100Mbps down and 20Mbps up

Still only 20 up? Moving from 300/10 on cable to 300/300 on fiber has been huge. You can’t realistically use offsite backup on 10 or 20mbps up. Uploading a YouTube video can take an hour. I once sent a dataset to a coworker and it was embarrassing when they’re receiving at 10mbps. Being a tech worker with a stone-age connection…

Most consumers don't do offsite backups (more than icloud syncs of a few photos or whatever, 20Mbps fine for that) and upload lots to youtube, I guess.

Most consumers don’t read books but that doesn’t mean we should get rid of the libraries.

The point of this definition of broadband is to guide FCC subsidies. They’re saying 100/20 is goal for what everyone should have in every single home and business in the country, and that it’s so crucial that the taxpayer should pay for it if need be.

Taxpayers pay for libraries too, despite most not using them. What's the point of the state or taxes if not to push society in a better direction?

20Mbps isn't even a lot.

We’re talking about you saying the FCC should define broadband as requiring gigabit upload speeds minimum.

I personally like libraries, but you have a point, maybe we should put the money that goes toward library taxes to better use.

Federal policy is not targeted at your personal use case. 20mbit up is an entirely satisfactory BASELINE for residential internet access in 2024. You’re so far into a bubble that you can’t even see it.

Not analogous. The poster was talking about suggesting an improvement and you about removing an existing service altogether.

I do offsite backup with 30Mbps up, it takes days to do the initial but incrementals are fine.

Whenever I do an initial, I get a nastygram from my ISP (Cox Las Vegas) threatening me with disconnection for having the audacity to upload 3TB in a few days. This happens despite having paid an extra $50(!) line item addon (on top of a $120/mo bill, so a 42% upcharge) for “unlimited transfer” every month for something like four years.

Criminal scum, the lot of them.

Hey 50$ for 3TB is 0.016 per GB. Still cheaper than the 0.02 AWS EC2 egress fees! Oh there is also the 120$ base price. 170$ for 3 TB is 0.055 per GB. Still cheaper than the 0.085 Cloudfront egress fee.

Facts! Also, they threaten so that you reduce your utilization. Just ignore them. When they do cut you off, get back to us from your local library's public Internet access.

> Still only 20 up?

Its what happens when you get regulators who are clueless or allow themselves to be lobbied by telcos.

Its the same shit that allows large telcos like BT in the UK to get away with product definitions that have more holes than a slice of swiss cheese.

For example, in BT's world, as long as 50% of customers at peak time (8–10pm) are achieving "in-spec" average download speeds then everything is fine.

Or another BT example, their "Stay Fast Guarantee for Full Fibre" which gets carefully reworded more often than the seasons and is also full of swiss cheese. What does their current table look like ?

    - Full Fibre 100 100Mpbs down/10Mbps up
    - Full Fibre 300 150Mbps down/10Mbps up
    - Full Fibre 500 250Mpbs down/10Mbps up
    - Full Fibre 900 700Mbps down/10Mbps up

So, as long as you're getting 50% of your line speed on 300/500 or 70% of your line speed on 900 and 10Mb upload there's nothing wrong as far as BT are concerned. And that's assuming, of course, you don't fall into the other parts of BT's swiss cheese such as the "50% of customers" noted above.

I'm not sure that more regulation is the fix.

There are users that want the higher speed and then there are users who are content with inexpensive access Even if "slow". Most of the time the two don't go hand in hand.

> I'm not sure that more regulation is the fix.

It worked for labels on stuff in the supermarket - you dont buy a pint of milk and get between a half pint and a full pint depending on what time of day it is.

Your right, one day you buy a pint of milk for $1, the next day $3, and on a third day the store is out of milk.

Would you be happy with not having Internet access at times because someone else bought out committed bandwidth or having your Internet bill fluctuate based on a market rate?

> not having Internet access at times because someone else bought out committed bandwidth

This argument does not hold up because large telcos like BT put their committed bandwidth customers on a wholly separate network to the consumers.

So whatever Joe Blogs does at home/small-biz has no effect on the committed customer, and vice versa.

Over-simplified tech summary: The home/small-biz connection will go back via an intermediary step at the nearest street cabinet or underground aggregation node. The committed customer will go direct back to the exchange via blown fibre/dedicated fibre pair.

That's exactly my point. If you want committed bandwidth then pay for it. Now, if there is no option to pay for committed bandwidth, then you may have a legitimate gripe.

I believe that the Internet providers are not fully transparent about network utilization, but the bulk of the consumers are also ignorant about what they're actually paying for. Let me put it another way. What the Internet providers are really selling you is an opportunity to fill a pint bottle from a common spigot. They are not selling you the milk.

It's a bit like a ticket to an amusement park. You may get on your favorite ride right away, you may have to stand in line for hours or you may not get an opportunity to ride at all. Rent the ride for a private event and you'll be sure to ride it. Of course the amusement park could have timed entry for rides, but that's their business choice.

> you dont buy a pint of milk and get between a half pint and a full pint depending on what time of day it is

My point exactly !

How is it beneficial to the consumer to allow the telcos to market a product where they can perfectly legally only deliver half of the product at certain times of day.

A 50% difference is just nuts. 10–20% difference, fine, we could argue that's the price you pay for the cheap service, but 50% ? That's just not on !

You're right, they should be more transparent in their advertising, so should airlines telling you that you only have a x% chance of getting there on time because of seats being oversold.

Though I'm guessing that if they didn't overcommit the bandwidth, your Internet costs would be much higher and the network utilization abysmally low. Network usage tends to be lumpy.

Australia’s advertising regulations now require advertising typical evening speeds. There are a handful of good ISPs that will (voluntarily) publicly publish backbone utilisation metrics so you can get a feel for contention. Australia’s Internet policy is far from perfect, but, again, Americans need only look basically anywhere else on Earth to see how things could be, instead of sitting around hypothesising.

Chuckles hysterically and twiddles mustach...er..full symmetrical gigabit fibre to the home from a regional provider.

Moved from Plusnet (BT owned) 65/20Mbit (I think?) FTTC

Uploading a 30-minute YouTube video in 30 minutes sounds reasonable. It may actually improve the quality of YouTube and give creators an opportunity to touch grass.

Meanwhile, to my knowledge, ATT is actively pulling all existing DSL service with the only hard line alternative in many markets being a 1Mbps “UVerse” connection over the same copper phone lines. My 6Mbps DSL was suddenly turned into a 1Mbps UVerse line last year, with no warning. This has been happening to my neighbors as well. In some instances, after a big storm knocked out phone lines, ATT took the opportunity to cancel some folks DSL lines under their new policies. If you go to the ATT DSL page you will see that it is no longer being offered as a service.

Fortunately we were able to get Starlink soon after but it’s not a perfect replacement, particularly for gaming, due to the periods of short downtimes we still experience.

You're lucky that ATT is offering any wired Internet service in your area. I know highly urbanized ATT areas where they offer no wired service. They pulled DSL and put nothing in its place. Fortunately there is another monopolistic wired Internet provider serving the area, but with little competition the pricing is suboptimal from the consumer perspective.

Urbanized area should have 5G competitors. They suck, but they exist.

Urbanized should have had municipal wifi and even fiber, but regulatory capture in broadband is a bitch.

Maybe what is needed is a "local wifi collective" that can serve an apartment building from a single fiber or a fiber-to-directed wifi link to the building and then general wifi/wiring inside the building itself.

The fact there is zero innovation on this front shows the power of the regulatory capture by the big two. Nobody even bothers trying anymore, and any politicians that would support competitors have been effectively eliminated from the system.

Here in Australia we're often led by technological visionaries.

> In 2010, Turnbull called 100Mbps internet "a gigantic torching of taxpayers' money." In 2013 then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott said a download speed of 25Mbps will be "more than enough" for the average Australian household.

Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott (both subsequent prime ministers) put serious effort and political capital into ensuring our national (fiber) network was never built properly, setting us back at least 15-20 years (sunk cost on the low-quality deployment we ended up with).

Always nice to see we're not alone in poor-planning and top-shelf world-class short-sightedness.

100Mbps 15 years ago in Australia would have been huge, the return on investment almost instantaneous for that timescale (Say, 14 months)

Great, now mandate decent latency, too!

(Including maximum jitter. One can dream.)

Good. It seems the only way to get internet providers to do the right thing is to make it mandatory by law. We tried the carrot and now they should get the stick.

[dupe]

More discussion over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39708957

"Scraps"? No, they just updated it. Nothing was "scrapped". Typical journalist BS headlines.

I was on the fence about whether it should be updated, but 25 down / 3 up really isn't for "advanced" usage. That's really basic these days. So if that's the line, they made the right call.

I'm looking forward to the day they get to their 1000 / 500 goal. Having upload as such a small fraction of the download can be a pain sometimes.

> Having upload as such a small fraction of the download can be a pain sometimes.

I pay for 900 megabits and get 20. Upload, of course.

None of the other plans even offer upload speeds this high - so not only does paying for 900 get you only 20, but to get only 20 you have to pay for 900. That's nuts.

You're most likely not paying for 900. That's just marketing talking. That's not committed bandwidth.

Come to think of it, the asymmetry is probably a way to exploit transit fees.

> You're most likely not paying for 900. That's just marketing talking. That's not committed bandwidth.

I do get around 900 megabits of download on real actual workloads like downloading from Steam (over 100 MB/s). I believe there's absolutely no uptime commitment though, and they do commonly shut off my internet access for like 5 minutes at 4am, presumably to install some sort of unwanted update on the router that I don't own, because if I try to install a router I do own, they cut the line after a few days of usage.

in contrast, I get about 24 megabits of real-world upload speed.

That ratio is disgusting. (DL:UL 35+:1)

I think the FCC ought to mandate symmetrical gigabit as true broadband. With today's fiber tech, there's no reason ISPs can't deploy a symmetrical connection to anyone, and gigabit is a perfectly reasonable speed. After all, the hardware for it has been around for years now.

It’s not that easy. The federal government is in fact spending over $100 billion in the next decade laying fiber (and that’s only partial subsidies, so the total investment will be even higher) and it still won’t be enough to get fiber everywhere.

Not sure why the taxpayers are footing the bill.

Because it’s not profitable to build fiber out to many places.

Based on what happened last time:

- the telcos pocketed the money and did very very little actual deployment, and the FCC did nothing

- lobbied the FCC to deny Starlink funds when Starlink actually delivered a usable rural service and got them to declare it "not broadband"

At least the FCC hasn't been completely useless in mobile broadband. I'm sure if 5G starts approaching usable competition with Cable/Telcos, the FCC will kill it for them.

If the FCC had the power to mandate this and they exercised the power its power would likely be curtailed or Internet access would disappear completely, at least temporarily, in certain parts of the US. Infrastructure costs money that companies expect to recoup on a certain schedule (ROI) despite the technology being around for years.

Having said this I wouldn't mind at all having a big fat pipe Internet for next to nothing just like everyone else. I was excited to hear about Google's plans to lay fiber "everywhere." More than a decade later, I'm still waiting in my excited state.

I was under the impression that asymmetric connections were a trade off that on a technical level allowed more downstream than upstream - have I been wrong in thinking this?

That's the case for cable Internet, which I wager is a large plurality of Internet connections in the US. At least Charter for the past few years has been rolling out equipment along their cable network to support more uplink bandwidth for symmetrical service, called "high split" I think. I'm still waiting on my area to get the high split treatment.

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