FCC to eliminate gigabit speed goal and scrap analysis of broadband prices
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
- Reduce science
- Reduce collected data
- Reduce immigration
- Reduce infrastructure
- Reduce adoption of EVs
What if we want to be a world leader in satellite internet coverage? Is that a goal you support? Because that's part of what these changes are about.
Socialism with chinese characteristics/ Xi Jinpeng thought is the most successful ideology currently. Free speech/free markets power has decayed since people found ways to exploit them and more powerful people found ways to aid the exploiters.
The US is apparently powerless to exploit our own rare earth resources and fund/subsidize them or lithium production or photovoltaic production, nuclear reactors, or even semiconductor production.
By any measure that is weak.
The DOD took a direct stake in a US rare earth miner / refiner, in addition to a long term purchase agreement at set prices. Apple also piled on last week (no doubt after some backroom conversations).
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/10/pentagon-to-become-largest-s...
And China’s dominance in LFP is based on its acquisition of A123’s IP out of bankruptcy [1].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130131031501/http://www.reuter...
That might be the only difference, though.
Conservatives takes different names in different places. Calling the spade a spade, a more truthful name is 'Reggressives', no matter what the colour on the banner is. The signatures of regressivism is , among others, the yearning for the past, to bring back the old ways of life, the predisposition for worship (idolatry)--be that of imaginary creatures or very wealthy people.
Some of us would find it really hard to imagine why some others would say, "yes please, more oil. I really would love to inhale more toxic fumes". Yet, such people exist. I can't explain why.
They’re radical reactionaries at best.
While many of their asks mirror traditional Republican social positions, they’re responsive to an economically disadvantaged class in the Republican Party that’s historically been ignored.
And while there’s certainly a lot of backroom dealing to favor business interests, I think it’d be hard to argue that the poor Republican voter has had this much power in the party… ever. (See things like immigration policy, which agribusiness is scared shitless of)
The previous Republican bargain was ‘We say we love god and guns, but let business get on with business, and we’re never going to harm the latter for the former.’
At the core, it is Anti-Science.
Why Anti-Science?
Because the answers that come from science are independent of the authoritarian ruler's whims, and that cannot be tolerated, as key to authoritarian rule is that it must be entirely responsive to the whims of the regime.
It is the same reason that completely freaked me out when I read that Lenin and Stalin had directed their death squads to target their most loyal party members first. Why the hell would they do that? It turns out it is because the most loyal party members would object to the dictator's schemes on grounds of ideological principle, and such objections or principled people could not be tolerated. Pure evil, but genius in the context of a dictator's needs.
Thus, every authoritarian regime attacks the intelligent, academic, and scientific worlds. Both Mao and Pol Pot not only executed people with scientific and academic credentials, but merely for wearing glasses which signified people who likely read a lot.
Consistent Anti-Science actions are one of the key signs you are not dealing with a mere political party, but something far worse — a full-on authoritarian takeover.
Beware.
> Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed "on a reasonable and timely basis" to all Americans.
Carr says that when looking into whether that is being satisfied the FCC should not consider affordability because section 706 does not contain the word "affordability".
But it also does not contain any words for any of the things he does want the FCC to consider. All it says is "reasonable and timely".
I bet if you polled consumers and asked what they would think it means if they were informed some commercial service or product was available to them on a reasonable basis an overwhelming majority would include in their answer that it means it is available to them at a price they find affordable.
Note: affordable and cheap is not the same
I'm guessing it's not arbitrary at all and it's choosing an interpretation most favorable to the industry that has bribed and captured the agency
To prevent this level of monopolar partisanship.
Is this action a net-negative for ISP subscribers (i.e. everyone)? Yes.
However, this doesn't give any leeway at all in ignoring the past failures of the other side when it comes to this space either. The only (legally advisable) path left is vocal advocacy for its restoration. Doesn't matter who it is, only that this goal is to be achieved.
---
Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
I had saved it from some other social media type. It accurately describes a lot of HN community.
Isn't that a pretty much the definition of an internet troll[0]? I don't disagree, but let's call a spade a spade, okay?
The new administration stopped that and rescinded all the approvals, made various changes to the program (which will result in many areas that would have gotten high speed broadband that would be sufficient for decades getting slower broadband that will be obsolete much sooner), and now everyone has to reapply again.
Infrastructure projects take time and the project was coming along just fine within its timeline. It's not a coincidence that several red states were the furthest along in the process - https://broadbandnow.com/research/bead-grants. The "delays" in the process were because it prioritized needs rather than grant political favors. Ironically the new rules will set these states back and harm them. It's a recurring pattern.
I live in France, growing up most homes were equipped with ADSL. Optical fiber was rolled slowly but surely over the entire territory, systematically replacing older infrastructure. It's now to the point that everyone I know enjoys fast internet, from the center of Paris to the middle of nowhere.
In semi-rural hill country TX, 2.5 Gbps symmetric from an internet co-op is $90 USD/month without data caps.
I'm sorry, is this some American problem I'm too European to understand?
I think the slowest speed on offer at the moment is 500 for rural connections. I think everyone except the most rural households (and probably our surrounding islands) have 500meg fibre to the home now.
It's nice.
And then it turned out that the muddy dog just bought me a new yacht.
Also, it’s important to remember that Chevron wasn’t “however they want” or to “reinterpret their own authorizations”. It was a doctrine that if the agency (staffed by domain experts responsible for resolving the ambiguity) had a reasonable interpretation of an ambiguity in the law, even if the court thought it had a better opinion, it had to defer to the agency that Congress created and left it up to congress to resolve that ambiguity if they felt the agency did so incorrectly.
This is not an accurate description of what agencies are meant to be experts in.
Their expertise is meant to be in how best to act within their bounds. Which is distinct from deciding what those bounds are.
> In 1974 the Supreme Court stated that deference depends on an administrative interpretation being consistent with the agency's other statements and being consistent with the congressional purpose
So it wasn't that the agency got to set its own bounds - it had to be consistent with all their other statements and with the congressional purpose of the body. So for example, Congress said the EPA had the power to regulate pollution sources but did not define what meant sources or specifically what regulations they could enact. Chevron said "Congress intended the EPA to figure this out so they get to do that". Loper said "actually, Congress needs to spell everything out" which is actually quite a radical idea for administrative legislation which with a stroke of a pen undoes a huge amount of legislation that had been done with Chevron in mind (& before that it was understood to be the case anyway since judges didn't even have power over administrative powers).
Under Chevron courts were to defer to agency interpretations if the statute was ambiguous and the agency's interpretation was reasonable.
given the new shiny one (that hasn't launched) is topping out at 1Tb of downlink (with half of it going to backhaul) and the current units are 80 Gb/s
Starlink got my business after VZW forced their 5G boxes to use 5G and not allow forced LTE usage. 5G is unusable there with 60-100/0.03. I force my phone to use LTE and all is well but 5G just does not work.
I hate giving Elon money but it’s the only affordable month-to-month option now.
I am not seeing a plan on Starlink’s website that is lower than $120 a month for unlimited data.
I live in rural Ohio.
My lake home is in Central MN.
You're competing for the amount of bandwidth in your cell. If there's more people in your area wanting service, it makes sense it's more expensive. There's a fixed supply and highly variable demand per square mile.
… is it? Why wouldn't a corporation use any and all data available to them to price discriminate as hard and as much as they possibly can?
> my corner of Ohio either. We have 3 fiber providers in the area
I … am not sure I believe that. Everywhere I think I have ever lived, broadband is a local monopoly.
(They seem to work well, from what I've read of them.)
- Elon is still stoking the Epstein stuff on Twitter as we speak
It’s not good for Starlink for that reason. We are inside the belly of fascism, so your question reads like someone oblivious, with all due respect.
Brendan Carr's has critiqued federal broadband spending: too much spent on rebuilding existing networks to be faster, not enough going towards new build out. This is because upgrading wealthy customers' internet leads to increased profit, and there is less money in serving the underserved. Several states have tried fighting the telecom companies on what they've delivered and I think the worst case was a slap on the wrist.
Starlink and 5G are likely increasing broadband coverage far faster than fiber, which is a big goal of federal broadband spending.
AT&T Fiber or Verizon Fios will tend to start at $60-90/month as an "introductory" price where your bill just keeps going up $10-20/months every yera unless you go through the dance of calling up and threatening to cancel every year. So you could be paying $140/month when a new customer is being charged half that.
Chattanooga, TN has long been known for its excellent and affordable fiber Internet [1].
We know what works: it's municipal broadband not national ISPs. We've known this for a long time but we somehow refuse to recognize it, in part because national ISPs have successfully bought and paid for legislators to create a moat through things like onerous regulation or outright banning of building muncipal broadband.
But why is this so? It's economics and incredibly simple. You see when a town or city or county owns the Internet infrastructure, you've removed the profit motive. Put another way, the workers own the means of production.
When you have a national ISP, some pension funds and shareholders own the means of production. And what do they demand? Ever-increasing profits. And how do profits increase? By raising prices and cutting costs.
There is absolutely no reason Internet access should cost $100/month.
And we see this same pattern play out in every market. It's the end state of capitalism.
"we" = the corporations: "yes, quite right"
sigh
I cant believe America is a fascist state. it only took 6 months. un fucking believable. Makes me sick.
The founding fathers did not protect the branches from each other nearly enough, and certainly did not give the people an end-run mechanism to bypass and fix it.
Article III is light in describing the courts [1]. Our judicial system is mostly a creature of Congress, not the Constitution.
I’m personally a fan of choosing by lot, from the appellate bench, a random slate of justices for each case. (That court of rotating judges would be the one in which “the judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested”.) You could do this entirely through legislation—nothing in the Constitution requires lifetime appointments to a permanent bench.
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-3/
President nominates judges; he doesn’t appoint without the Senate.
Moreover, “the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments,” a category that includes “Judges of the Supreme Court” [1]. The Congress may, by statute alone, remove the President’s power to appoint SCOTUS justices.
1. The electoral college, which removes voting power from people who live in populated areas in favor of people who don't.
2. A system of governance that doesn't require coalitions and thus also stimulates a 2 party system.
3. No mechanism for federal legislation to occur through solely the actions of the voters. There should be a way for American voters to check the government through a legislative process that allows items to be put on the national ballots outside of congress and the president.
4. If every branch is meant to check every other branch, each branch should have an enforcement arm, so that if they're ignored, physical action can be taken.
5. citizens united
6. The first amendment protecting disinformation
There's probably more.
As has already been noted by law there can be no more than 3 commissioners from the same party.
Traditionally when a commissioner's term expired and they were from the party that did not control the Presidency the President would ask the other party's Senate leadership who to nominate and would nominate that person.
Also traditionally the Senators of the President's party would vote to approve that nominee.
Biden followed this tradition, as did the Senate Democrats.
/doubt
Edit: downvoters, please explain why I need 125MB/s (that's 3 full installations of Windows 95 every second) for normal browsing.
Nope. You don't. But why should I have to pay Google/AWS/Azure/Cloudflare/Digital Ocean/etc./etc./etc. to host my small business/vanity/family chat/photo sharing site, or YouTube to host my barbecue sauce unboxing videos, when symmetrical (okay, 300 up/down would likely be plenty for most of that, but once there's fiber, Gb/sec seems good to me)?
I have no interest in propping up huge companies with hosting fees because other huge companies have no competition.
All that said, I get your point. But my use case is not your use case. Do you get mine?
Edit: Clarified prose.
For example, the Texas market is going crazy with FTTP providers. Even comcast is starting to get involved by upgrading infra and buying out even worse incumbents. My old house in the Houston area has two competing fiber providers now.
These aren't fly by night operations either. The last provider I had backed their entire last mile infrastructure with standby natural gas generators. I never lost symmetric gigabit internet access despite not having any power or water during Beryl.
At what point do we look at broadband penetration as a solved problem and focus on bigger ones? Unless you live in a radio quiet zone, there is going to be some ability to get online at this point.
Edit: why disagree?
640K was "perfectly fine" for most people, too.
100/20 is barely enough for a household of 3-5 "light" users. The US already has abysmal broadband speed/bandwidth/latency metrics compared to the rest of the developed world and settling for 2010's version of "fast" in 2025 is ... not how we're going to get better.
> I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas
Why spend money and time to expand copper into rural areas when fiber is the same cost. it's the people/permits/labor that are $$$$. It makes no meaningful difference weather your expensive hbm crew is pulling fiber or copper and we know that copper doesn't go as fast ...
Well they voted for it, so I'll stick to my fiber in my big city and they can fend for themselves and pay $90/month for 10 up 1 down or whatever while I pay $40 for 1 gig....
With the snide remarks aside, why expand copper or fiber into rural areas when we can just let SpaceX and others launch satellites and provide a potentially better service?
I'm sympathetic to a goal of "have really, really fast Internet service" but maybe there is a better regulatory framework for increasing competition both urban/suburban and rural areas.
Not all of us.
> why expand copper or fiber into rural areas when we can just let SpaceX and others launch satellites and provide a potentially better service?
Fiber is objectively the right choice for future proofing. Bouncing a radio wave off of cube 300 miles above will _always_ be sub-par compared to a direct fiber connection because the latency is higher. SL May have a slight edge going vast distances since the speed of light is faster in a vacuum compared to glass but for 99.999% of residential ISP needs, fiber-to-the-home is going to offer a more robust pipe that fits more and with less latency.
> but maybe there is a better regulatory framework for increasing competition both urban/suburban and rural areas.
Almost certainly. Regardless, any better solution necessarily exists only in a world where 100/20 isn't "cutting edge" 30 years after it became technically possible.
I didn't vote for all these highways and suburbs either but we live in a democracy. By and large rural voters* voted to cut programs like this, though, and I think it's very fair to point that out.
> Fiber is objectively the right choice for future proofing. Bouncing a radio wave off of cube 300 miles above will _always_ be sub-par compared to a direct fiber connection because the latency is higher.
Yes and no, it depends on the cost. It might not be ideal but I'm also not sure my tax dollars should go to make sure people who live in rural areas have faster Playstation downloads. Do we actually need to physically pay for and build this infrastructure? I'm not necessarily opposed to it, but where is the economic analysis? If we invest $XYZ on this infrastructure what's the expected ROI versus alternatives?
* Just to be clear I don't have any particular problem with "rural voters" and I don't really like these arbitrary groupings of people into Urban, Suburban, Rural but it is what it is.
I wish I had a clear answer and good data on this. My gut tells me that giving more people faster and more reliable access to information is almost certainly going to be worth it in the long run. A few hypotheticals that come to mind:
Some highly paid engineer can live out in the boonies but still work for their high wages. That excess cash is probably going to make it's way into the local economy.
Likewise, rural schools are not know for their performance. That almost certainly could change if better content/curricula was easier to access and distribute. There is a non-zero chance that some breakthrough cure for cancer comes from a smart kid that grew up in a rural area. With crap internet access, that kid almost certainly would not get the education to match their potential.
(or maybe it isn't a cure for cancer, it's the next John Carmack...)
Fiber isn't the only way to level-up access... but it is the easiest to maintain. Other than the very ends of the connection, it's all passive.
No need to to inject power for amplifiers. No need to keep building/launching satellites and corresponding ground-stations.
Once it's installed, it's more or less maintenance free until a wild backhoe shows up...
What the hell are you doing that 100/20 is "barely enough"?
Also its ridiculous to think that is excessive in any way. Imagine what we could have if we had 100 gigabit or 1 terabit. Instead of watching a flat 4k movie, render a full 4k scene in AR.
[]: destiny 1/2 consume a lot, but that would mean your older child is over 30 and living with you.
That's if you use any streaming service, if you're streaming legally ripped Blu-rays, then yea, 100/20 isn't enough, but those are usually within LAN. And if you're talking seeding/streaming to others, then any asymmetric connection speed will suck.
A buddy of mine has horror stories about what happens when an office full of iPhones all download the same 1+ gig iOS update at the same time.
> Imagine what we could have if we had 100 gigabit or 1 terabit
Exactly my point. I'd rather we not let large ISPs be the ones that decide what is innovative and "fast enough" for us. I want somebody with the power to push them... pushing them to be faster and better.
> Instead of watching a flat 4k movie, render a full 4k scene in AR.
It wouldn't take 100-gigabit to make this happen. You can already get this on existing VR headsets today. I watched some basketball games with a Windows Mixed Reality headset nearly a decade ago, and I definitely did not have terabit networking.
Many things. A partial list in no particular order:
My day job is all SSH so I don't need a wide pipe so much as I need a short pipe. If the pipe is also quite wide, I can reliably stream content while I work. This isn't just music, this is watching the daycare camera feeds.
Every once in a while I need to docker pull a multi-gig image. It's nice when that doesn't take more than 30 seconds. I don't worry about background tasks moving/syncing/backing-up data; there's plenty of headroom!
Some of my hobbies involve _lots_ of data and the less time I spend waiting for that to download is more time I get for actually doing hobbies.
I also have a few scripts that backup other consequential data stores; the biggest one is google takeout for a few accounts. This results in ~ 800 gigs of data from a few different accounts.
The work product from these hobbies and backups is something that I like to back up off site and a 20mbps connection is trivial to saturate for hours as a time.
Every once in a while I'll make some of my excess compute/GPU available to friends so they can render things. The assets involved are not small and a big pipe means that everybody gets the desired result _faster_.
If you give me a faster/wider pipe, I _will_ find a new use for the extra room. I may not be representative of the typical user but I know for sure that I would not have developed my skills to the extent that I have if I had crap internet access.
It's plenty for my household with a similar number of users. We have people working from home, streaming, downloading documents or games, etc with no problem.
"The US already has abysmal broadband speed/bandwidth/latency metrics compared to the rest of the developed world"
Because the countries in the rest of the developed world are about the size of 1 state and have higher urbanization. If you want better coverage for an area this size, then it makes sense to include satellite coverage. The gigabit goal excludes them.
"Why spend money and time to expand copper into rural areas when fiber is the same cost."
They're only the same cost if you're starting from the same location. Copper has better penentration already. Expanding copper might mean adding a couple miles. Expanding to that same location with copper might mean putting in 10-50 miles plus any sort of hub or substation. So yes, equal distance is roughly equal cost, but almost everywhere fiber is put in, it's alongside copper anad thus not increasing coverage nor decreasing costs.
I recognize that "no problem" and "as fast as possible" are not the same. 100/20 works for you but once you've seen 1000/20, you really do notice things taking ~10x longer than they need to. It all adds up.
> Copper has better penentration already.
Excluding 56k, twisted-pair copper has absolutely crap throughput unless you're ~500m or less from the 'head-end' which is where your DSL is being turned back into laser pulses. Coax does have better performance/distance compared to twisted pair but now you have a non-trivial network of amps/taps/power-injectors to maintain. DOCSIS really does not like it if there's any issue w/ the coax so you're going to need a small army just to keep the hard-lines in good shape.
I have never seen a PON network get it's throughput cut in half just because somebody didn't screw the cable _all the way_ in to the tap. I see ingress degrading DOCSIS networks all the time though.
At least as far as rural northern CA goes, ATT runs fiber out to plants and then twister pair from there to the customers which are - at most - a few km away. Fiber is already 85% of the way to the customer... let's just finish the job instead of giving everybody a starlink account.
100/20 is fine for one person. But gigabit isn't very hard to achieve and is a far better goal speed for entire households. Gigabit is also a lot more convenient any time a big download is involved.
> The only thing really supporting the old goal of gigabit connections was fiber.
Coax can do it.
> I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas. Fiber plans tend to be expensive and mostly available in the areas that already have usable high speed options.
Shouldn't fiber be a bit easier to run than coax? If you're going to run one data wire to a new area, it should be fiber. And if you can run power you can run data too.
This is changing with newer DOCSIS standards! It's still up to the network provider to choose how many channels they allocate for up vs down. Even in perfect lab conditions, DOCSIS 4 is still about 3:1 ratio down/up (about 5/1.5 gigabit). Fiber is the only medium that makes a 1:1 down/up possible at any meaningful speeds.
This scarcity is artificial. Fiber cabling is not expensive; even the poorest of countries have fiber networks well established in suburban areas.
In India you can have high-speed, even gigabit internet at the price of two pizzas a month.
Anyone I've known worth their salt in networking cares about latency far more than speed. Historically upload speeds on asymmetrical plans were a problem too, but since people have started to work from home, most cable/fiber/wireless internet providers' lowest plans offer upload bandwidth at multiple tens of megabits per second, faster than the ingestion speed of most video hosts, and more than enough for a dozen simultaneous HD video conferences, and their dowstream speeds are enough for dozens simultaneous 4K video streams at the highest resolution streaming services provide.
Incumbent ISPs lying about the benefits of gigabit plans, and lobbying for their requirement, is the equivalent of Intel bragging about 5 GHz speeds in the Netburst vs Athlon days. It ran at a higher clock speed, and that sold processors, but they ran slow, because they responded horribly to branching, and were late to the market on 64-bit an monolithic multi-core architectures.
Outside of rare power users, or someone especially impatient for one-off downloads, Gigabit is ridiculous for a large family or small office, and especially overkill for a small family or individual.
I can't stand the government either, and they'll probably replace that rule with one that's even worse, but it was a bad rule to start with.
That difference in latency isn't even what matters; it's the latency from the various types of modems. With the direct connection of fiber providers, you can often get sub-millisecond latency from nearby collocations, and rarely do ISPs have more than a few milliseconds of latency.
With cable providers, DOCSIS adds ten to twenty milliseconds of latency. You'll get about double that latency With LTE providers and low-eath-orbit satellite providers that have nearby ground stations. With geosynchronous satellite providers, you'll get several hundred milliseconds of latencu.
A 50 Mbps fiber plan will get an order of magnitude lower latency than a gigabit plan from anyone else.
Everyone from your fiber provider is getting fiber-class latency, regardless of the plan's max speed. The fiber ISP in my area uses 10 gig ONTs for everyone, and limits each plan's speed with PPPoE. This is pretty common, and likely yours is doing the same.
On the other hand, everyone using the cable provider in my area, whether on their fastest or slowest plan, is getting the same tens of milliseconds of DOCSIS 3.1 latency, on a node that has tens to hundreds of gigabits of bandwidth but is using TDMA and FDMA to share it between a few hundred users.
My point is that the lowest-tier subscriber from your fiber ISP is getting magnitudes lower latency than the top-tier subscriber from my cable ISP. If either of the switch plans, but don't switch ISPs, they'll have the same latency.
Are you sure? I'm on cable (Xfinity) and ping to 1.1 is varies from 11 to 13 ms, and I see as low as 7.2 ms to some random Xfinity thing that is not at my home but on their network.
I've got an ancient DOCSIS modem, a Motorola MB7621, and my understanding is that newer modems have lower latency than mine.
It surprised me, but it works. And despite my 1125/50 connection at home, it surprised me how easy it was to adapt to lower speeds.
That being said, given the option I'd say 200/20 is my preferred minimum.
Propagation delay usually dominates latency, so it's generally not the biggest factor, but on a simple local network with two PCs and a switch, you can expect about 1ms latency with 100BASE-T, and 0.12ms latency with 1000BASE-T.
| Component | 100 Mb/s | 1 Gb/s |
| ---------------------------------------------- | ------------------- | ----------------- |
| Propagation (30 m) | ≈ 0.15 µs | same |
| Two NIC serializations (TX + RX, 1 500 B each) | 2 × 120 µs = 240 µs | 2 × 12 µs = 24 µs |
| Two switch serializations (store‑and‑forward) | 2 × 120 µs = 240 µs | 24 µs |
| Processing in switch + NICs | \~10 µs | \~10 µs |
| **One‑way latency** | **≈ 490 µs** | **≈ 58 µs** |
| **Ping RTT** (×2) | **≈ 1 ms** | **≈ 0.12 ms** |Regardless, the latency difference between 100BASE-TX and 1000BASE‑T pales in comparison to the difference in modem speeds between different providers' network types.
Fiber providers with an ONT get LAN-like speeds, while cable providers' DOCSIS modems add tens of milliseconds of latency, LTE modems are similar to double that of DOCSIS, and satellite providers range from similar to LTE all the way up to hundreds of milliseconds of latency, depending on the orbit and if there are ground stations nearby.
Again, within any provider, you get the same latency with any the plan, but changing providers can have order-of-magnitude differences.
There's no savings for the ISP to throttle your pipe.
> rare power users
I would expect a lot of overlap between these two groups! Extremely common things tech people do that benefit greatly from high-bandwidth connections:
- disk backup to the cloud
- use Docker
- have a household with multiple HD TVs (Netflix recommends 30Mbps per stream)
- software installs/updates as a brief interlude instead of an ordeal
Essentially, high-bandwidth connections let you use the Internet like it's functionally infinite instead of something rationed.
Even if you are doing that to initially back up your network or install Call of Duty, after the initial usage you're only making differential updates, unless something goes very wrong, which hopefully doesn't happen even once a month.
For some users, it may be worth an extra $1000/yr to get the gigabit plan instead of 100 megabit, so that a Call of Duty install could theoretically happen in tens minutes instead of an hour or two, but really it's going to take an hour for your computer to decompress and write the data. Everyone else paying that $1000/yr extra is just wasting their money.
Also, Netflix only uses 16 Mbps at most, for a 4K video which is only a small portion of their catalog and only available to their top-tier subscribers. The extra bandwidth is a recommendation to allow for other users to still use the network and also to account for a special case of high latency that used to occur when saturating the connection on the fastest plans some ISPs offered. Here's some good research into actual streaming usage: https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/ (It's WSJ, but there's no paywall)
On top of that, the cheapest plans offered by most telecoms in the US are over 100 megabit, so you still get a guaranteed three 4K streams Netflix without issue, but realistically could pull off double that.
> which hopefully doesn't happen even once a month.
This is the mindset I was referencing. Nobody thinks about how often their computer has to write to its local disk, and if you have a sufficiently fast Internet connection you can adopt the same carefree attitude towards Internet use.
> an extra $1000/yr
This is the disconnect. In my area, the price gap is much smaller, less than half that. The bigger consideration for us was going to a gig connection was also the only way to get a connection without a usage cap and therefore a predictable bill (Xfinity is the other provider).
Incidentally, it looks like the WSJ test used mobile devices like phones and tablets. AFAIK all the major streamers deliver lower-bandwidth content to those devices by default, so this is not the best test.
Fast, low-latency, and cheap is a pretty great combo.
Which is to say, every major telco offers faster speeds than the majority of their subscribers will ever use, often even on their bottom-teir plans, but a significant portion of ISPs have enough lag to affect their users, even on their top-tier plans.
If you're trying to push telcos toward offering a more useful product, don't set a goal for them to offer higher speeds, which are already high enough for the vast majority of customers, but instead push for low latency, which most telcos cannot provide even between the customer's equipment and the telco's equipment.
Fiber providers have excellent latency, and of course that's what you should get if it's an option, but many subscribers are stuck with telcos that use DOCSIS over a cable network or LTE over a cellular network, and nothing can be done to reduce the latency for current generations of those protocols, but there's no technical reason the protocols couldn't have lower latency, so pushing telcos toward offering lower latency could make it happen, creating an actual useful improvement.
Also, Netflix 4K streams at 15Mbps on average. Four phones streaming whatever plus someone or two playing a game is enough to mostly max out a 100 Mbps link. This is a real possibility in the rural settings that qualify for this bill. (Large families in large homes that are heavy TV viewers with nothing to do for miles on end.)