The FCC Just Redefined Broadband So Expect Faster Internet

"About half of Americans in rural areas don't have access to 25 Mbps down/3 Mbps up speeds, meaning that they can't take advantage of a lot of the internet's best goodies (read: streaming video)."

I agree with the sentiment. However, you don't need 25mbps to stream Netflix at high quality. My brother lives in a very rural part of the country, has 15mbps cable service, and streams Netflix, Hulu, and Prime perfectly well. In fact according to some threads on HN, people report being able to do that with ~5mbps just fine.

The only thing I'm aware of today that average consumers need, say, 50mbps for is numerous simultaneous streams (gaming in one room, hulu in the next, netflix in the next). This isn't to say the US shouldn't have drastically faster broadband mind you.

So while it's great to shove the telecom companies to higher speeds, there's no sense in gizmodo pretending 25mbps is some magic cutoff point, where below that you just can't "take advantage of a lot of the internet's best goodies." I consider it unfortunate that there are not more services that actually need 50mbps type speeds, to provide a lot more consumer-driven anger about being left out.

Where I live (just outside a very small town in Ohio) there are a few options, but they're:

1) The phone company

2) Satellite bundled with TV service, with an absurd data cap and high latency

3) Line-of-sight wireless. If it rains, it stops working

There's a cable company but their lines end just short of this road.

The only one that is both reliable and usable in practice is the phone company.

It's DSL with a possible max of 10Mbps down, but the actual line sync rate is 4Mbps, partly because the copper lines are quite long (it's amazing it can even hold 4Mbps looking at the line stats in the modem).

But it tends to be capable of sustaining that rate 24/7, there's no throttling at specific times etc. There is a soft cap of 250GB buried on their website, but pfSense routinely shows 1.5x-2x that sometimes and I've never heard them complain.

Netflix and Hulu work fine, but they're being prioritized by pfSense. Without it, if someone is watching a short Youtube or Facebook video elsewhere in the house, it will cause Netflix or Hulu to react by cutting bitrate severely (if possible. Apple TV will just pause and buffer).

It costs $120/month, and their breakdown shows only $39 of that being internet related.

In my (parents') experience, the problem with the internet connections available in rural areas is not the speed, but monthly data caps. You can get satellite internet service that is fast enough to use Netflix, etc., but you'll hit the cap so fast that it's not really usable.