They’ve been stealing taxpayer dollars for 30 years, constantly stalling and delaying and then saying the plans are now outdated and we need more money for the new plans. Repeat every decade. Everyone knows it’s a monopoly with speed/price fixing yet somehow it never improves.
@Foggyfroggy @BrikoX I really wish someone in the FCC /FTC/Federal government in general would put their foot down and say to the industry, “You WILL build broadband everywhere, you WILL make it 100 Mbps at minimum, and you WILL pay for it out of your own pocket.” Nothing less is acceptable.
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Can’t speak to Comcast’s evils, but I call my ISP once a year to ask about my speeds and bill. Just got bumped from 200/20 to 1000/?, with a $10 discount. I’m on the edge of town, not technically rural, but close enough.
Not sure the answer to the monopoly thing, but I used to be an internet cable guy, so I can speak to the complexity of having 2 providers where there was only one. The costs are staggering.
Not sure the answer to the monopoly thing,
- make it a publicly owned and operated municipal utility
- make the “last mile” publicly owned infrastructure and private service providers can connect to the data center that connects the last mile
- require that the company who owns and maintains the last mile can not also be a service provider over that last mile infrastructure
The last one is how Texas handles the power grid, so it would need a real regulatory body making sure the private last mile infrastructure is actually maintained, unlike the Texas power grid.
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Looks like over a dozen states ban municipal ISP in some form or another.
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It’s been 20 years since broadband became fairly ubiquitous, there is 0 excuse for telcos to milk us like this, bandwidth gets so much cheaper for them every year.
The 25/3 bar was specifically lowered to that so that 4G LTE would meet this bar and they could claim that 99% of Americans now have access to high-speed Internet for political points.
Realistically, if it were up to me, I’d say anything 25/3 and lower is “low-speed”, between 25/3 and 100/10 is “standard speed”, and set the bar for “high-speed” to mean 100/10 or better. Companies should not be allowed to advertise “blazing-fast high-speed Internet” and then it turns out to be 30/3 ADSL for $50 a month
You might be right, I thought it was actually for adsl, because otherwise post-bells had to roll out fiber or comcast were the only high-speed isp.
The problem is most people can live on 25/3 or less, stick to youtube sd, email, web, etc, it’ll be slow but not ludicrously so, and they won’t complain much.
Not a lot we can do, the limit on bandwidth means we are stopped from creating services that need more bandwidth, which means they’re no reason to get that bandwidth.
HD video is nice, but not a requirement for most people, and ISPs desperately want to keep their customers limited so they can either upsell traditional tv/voice or otherwise keep their customers from adventuring too far outside their walled gardens. AOL both helped deploy and was destroyed by the internet, modern ISPs don’t want to see the same thing happen to them, and honestly most customers use a handful of common sites.
After how ajit pai shilled the fuck out of the chair position I don’t know if I can ever take it seriously again.
Fuck ajit pai, of course.
she supports net neutrality so that’s nice
Ehhhhh https://youtu.be/LFhT6H6pRWg
You know he’s not still Chairman right? That’s why I said she not he?
Yeah we would’ve had it already too if the government didn’t get fleeced. It was about 2010 when the “National Broadband Plan” was unveiled. Part of its goal was 100Mbs to 100M people by 2020.
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Take a few billi off the top, route it back to policy makers through lobbyists, and you got a stew going 👌
Comcast is finally doing their part in WV.
There’s an absolutely massive fiber install happening statewide.
Data caps are just as fucking evil. Pure greed.
You guys are gettin caps?!?
Tell that to Spectrum. ‘Up-to 300mbps’ my ass.
…that’s the standard? wtf? 100mbps is a bit slow but would make sense, but 25???
I love even crazy tech nerds say this shit. 100mbps is more than enough for the vast majority of families. Unless you constantly have 5 or 6 streams running concurrently you’ll never use more than that outside of the occasional video game download.
It’s not though. You’re taking marketing claims at face value, assuming the customer consistently sees that bandwidth with few to no glitches and low latency. You’re assuming bandwidth isn’t sucked down by ads and trackers. Doing the math in ideal numbers makes it look sufficient, but actually using it highlights that it’s not
I’ve lived on 100mbps quite easily for many years. I have gbps available and choose to save the $10. You are grossly exaggerating. Comcast and FiOS have been reliable well over 10 years now.
Raising the standard enables new uses of technology.
🙄
I think this is the “up to speed of __” nonsense. I have 30 and we can stream multiple devices.
I wouldn’t call this speed okay even in 2012
Yes that’s shit.
But also on top of that 25 really means maybe 15, because they also don’t require them to provide the bandwidth they advertise to you.
Yes. We need the numbers to be minimum bitrates and we need at least a 90% uptime for that minimum. If you could rely on your bandwidth to be a specific rate all the time you could pay for less and everyone could get more without more infrastructure upgrades.
90% of peak hours.
99% of all hours.
We don’t really think the FCC chair is going to do anything, do we?
There are 4 people in the FCC that get to vote on policy, 2 democrats and 2 republican. The republican ones are just Comcast and att lobbyist. The democrats don’t suck but can’t do anything without a third vote. The president gets to appointment someone to be a tie breaker, but Biden didn’t do it until after midterm so they no longer had the votes to get her approved, and by the time the current one gets through the next election will be happening so nothing will get done. If Biden wins another FCC voter will have to step down and wait for Biden to pick a replacement and Congress gets to approve or Biden losses and the republican appoints another lobbyist.
So no nothing will be done.
Throw more free money at the major telco firms. I’m sure that’ll fix it. Not like we haven’t tried that before. Repeatedly.
I’m just waiting on anyone to kick my 15/3 AT&T out of our subdivision.
Man I wish I got 25 ever.
Lol I like how this post somehow has negative one downvote
Feel free to throw rocks at me and put me on a cross, but 25Mbps is still good enough as is…
…if all you are doing w/ it is to let a live stream of a beach playing 24/7 on a small display or something like that. :^)
t. I’m doing that right now – on a rpi 4 that is on my left. It’s breddy gucci.
