FCC chair: Speed standard of 25Mbps down, 3Mbps up isn’t good enough anymore::Chair proposes 100Mbps national standard and an evaluation of broadband prices.
It’s 2023. Anything less than symmetrical gigabit is nonsense. We shouldn’t have to settle for overpriced crumbs from ISPs.
Symmetrical gigabit is a bit much for a baseline. Should it be widely available for all, and for a good price? Absolutely. But plenty of people (probably a majority even) could be adequately served by something like 300 down/100 up as a baseline tier.
Let me go ahead and steal a quote from JFK:
“We choose to [build nationwide symmetrical gigabit finer] in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.”
- John “I hate my worthless nephew RFK Jr.”Fitzpatrick Kennedy
It’s not about what people need. It’s about building infrastructure for new services and applications.
Besides, digging a trench is digging a trench. Just put in the fiber. It’s 2023.
Today, maybe. But what about in ten years’ time?
imo the asymmetry only serves to upsell content creators to business plans. I do agree with you on the speeds though, gigabit is a bit overblown for average joe but it should be an option in most places for people that need it (Content Creators, WFH Visual Artists, Garage Startups)
IMO the focus should be on lowering the prices. A lot of people in my country still rely on spotty mobile data as their primary internet. Imagine 100 mbps fiber for $10 a month, that would be awesome.
Lol In Italy I get gigabit for about 6€
Edit: whoops thats for my unlimited calls, text and 150gb 5g mobile plan. I pay a whopping 30€ for actual-unlimited-not-rate-limited-after-a-TB gigabit.
O RLY? Which ISP?
Though let’s be honest, this is not something generally available.
It is throughout Europe. We’ve been getting hosed in the states for years.
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Uh, definitely not the case in a few other countries. Actually, gigabit/6€ would be an extreme outlier: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings?displayCurrency=USD&itemId=33®ion=150
https://www.cable.co.uk/broadband/pricing/worldwide-comparison/#speed
A 1 Gbps up/down in Denmark is around 40-50€, and low speeds like 100/100 is more like 25-35€.
Same for Norway and Sweden. Everything is unlimited of course.
I don’t disagree, but I think even just setting it to 500M symmetrical would be a MASSIVE improvement and a more achievable goal. Few regions right now are equipped for fiber and even fewer homes.
Most homes in the US have a coax connection, and with current tech coax connections can do a little over a gig bandwidth total (up+down). That said, we should be quickly ratcheting up to 500/500 while the fiber rollout hopefully accelerates.
The depressing part is how much fiber is out there, but dark or locked in ridiculous agreements with private owners that will keep it from being the municipal service it deserves to be.
Yes, let’s pay them to just take the money… for the third time!
Holy shit, there are people still using 25/3? How the heck can you function with that? I’m not entirely facetious: with trackers and ads and “web 2.0” nonsense and way over provisioning , I’ve seen “simple” web sites bog down on much faster connections.
As one data point, my ex had Comcast’s, I think 50/5 or something, and my kids constantly complained about the network over there. Part of it is being spoiled by my true gigabit symmetrical, part of it is the worst company in America, but the reality is that it’s noticeable
25/3 is perfectly usable for a single user, provided you don’t need to upload stuff. Watching 1080p60 on YouTube only needs slightly over 12 mbps.
I’m not defending the current state of the internet services, just saying it’s not that bad.
My whole family house is on 25/5 in Australia. Most of laptops in the house are 1366x768 (so 720p youtube video) and we use adblockers.
The key is setting up proper queue control on your router (Openwrt + SQM) so that one person downloading or uploading doesn’t ruin the latency for everyone else browsing the web; before I did that a single person downloading a steam game or uploading something to Google drive made the web unbrowsable for everyone. Sadly this only works if your internet connection link speed is stable and reliable.
I’m not entirely facetious: with trackers and ads and “web 2.0” nonsense and way over provisioning , I’ve seen “simple” web sites bog down on much faster connections.
A lot of web 2.0 nonsense slowness is caused by executing megabytes of javascript. Fetching the few MB itself isn’t the bottleneck for us :)
Honestly I am really happy when I get such high speeds. 25Mbps feels blazing fast for me. Everything loading/downloading so quickly. An average song in the FLAC 16/44 format would download in just 10 seconds instead of up to 5 minutes.
And there’s already even 10Gbps available. I can’t even imagine that. You could download a whole 4K movie in a matter of seconds!
Anyway, this is what I have:
Image link for compatibilityI can only dream.
well, if you have the money for it, you can get starlink, but its far from cheap. But since you are at cellular network, a 4G receiver with good placement can much improve on those speeds. I assume you are in some signal shadow, and swan never had too good coverage outside large cities… Maybe try some other operator ?
For 13EUR/month I sure could get faster speeds, but also fairly small data limits. Here I get 300GB/month.
Maybe the nearby cell towers are overloaded, I don’t know. But at midnight it can go up to 45Mbps. The speed peaks around 2-3AM.
Also there’s the free national roaming in Orange 2G/3G network. So if I really need faster internet speeds, I can use Orange 3G HSPA+ which is pretty reliable, although with 20GB/month cap.Cellular is always overloaded in rural areas. Mobile ISPs always take on more customers than their infrastructure can handle.
I have this and find it fine 🤷🏻♂️
I can watch video streaming fine, browse fine, multiple family members.
Yeah fast would be nicer but I don’t really have issues.
I get like 20mbps down and it’s fine. Netflix only recommends 15 Mbps for 4k streaming. Lol, looking at websites and stuff is certainly not a problem. About the only time speed has ever been an issue is if I need to download a large game on steam. But I attribute that more to developers just being too lazy to actually optimize their games. I shouldn’t need to download 50 gigabytes to play some game when I’m just running at medium settings.
4k requires 25mbit, at 15 your going to lose quality or frame rate.
Best connection available in my town is a super overpriced 25/3, but what you actually get is more like 10/0.5. No fiber lines, no other providers around other than satellite, and no demand for more means it’s just stagnant here
I live in hotels. A good week is when I can measure in Mb and not Kb. A great one is when it’s more than 3mbps on a regular basis.😢
Here’s an interesting thing- we had Spectrum on copper and we’re semi-rural so it was only about 30/5. Then a local company came in and offered to install fiber in the neighborhood if 40% signed up. Suddenly our Spectrum speeds went up to about 80/10. Then the neighborhood told Spectrum to fuck off and now we have decent fiber speeds. I’m getting 400/400 now and I could get it even faster if I wanted to pay for it.
Yep, typical. Spectrum in my area (like 5-7 years ago) suddenly over doubled everyone’s speeds almost overnight once competition came in. I loved telling them to pound sand as I got symmetrical gigabit installed.
Asymmetric speeds are a disgrace. Internet used to be about exchange of content, ideas and collaboration. You consumed, but also contributed. The overall focus on high download low upload is clearly the sign telcos want Internet to be just a troth of content, not much different from cable tv.
I was so happy when we finally got a 2nd internet provider where I live. Now both providers offer steep discounts to keep customers. I upgraded my 450mpbs coax connection to 1gbps fiber when the new ISP came to town. My promotional period just ran out, so I called the ISP. They set me up with a new promotion for 2gbps at less than the price I was paying for 1gbps, and at the end of the promotional period it’ll be the same price I was paying for the 1gbps service. Competition ftw!
Ajit Pai never raised download speeds? Nooo. You don’t say. Asshole who was against net neutrality didn’t do anything to increase quality of network. Can’t be.
Pathetic. The acceptance of this terrible service speed shows how the American public is so isolated they don’t know when they’re being shafted by big business and the politicians the rich and powerful own.
No more lobbying. Institutionalized bribery is killing the American public. Healthcare, food, workplace rights and safety, and quality of services. Everything’s compromised.
Big problem in the USA is infrastructure. Even cable service can be unavailable for people in rural areas. There have been situations where people had to co-op the cost to lay cable to their area. The cable companies won’t spend the money to extend coverage without the return in customer numbers.
Fiber deployment has lagged cable by at least ten years, maybe more. It’s a bummer because fiber is greatly better. There are populated areas you still can’t get fiber.
People in rural areas can have problems getting service because there has not been enough government subsidy to deploy infrastructure. In some rural areas the cell network is the only option for service, and not a good one either.
The Obama administration made a call to increase subsidies for the expansion of internet infrastructure, but nothing ever came of it. If the political climate had been the same when they proposed the interstate highway system, we’d all still be driving on dirt roads.
It’s ironic the country that invented the internet has done such a poor job of deploying the infrastructure for it. Other countries are doing a greatly better job. So it doesn’t do much good to increase the standards if it’s not possible for them to apply in the first place.
People in rural areas can have problems getting service because there has not been enough government subsidy to deploy infrastructure.
Technically the Telecommunications Act of 1996 allocated a ton of money for fiber infrastructure, but telecom providers rolled it out in dense urban areas with a lot of customers, bought each other up and then pocketed the extra cash.
Fiber to the premise in rural areas is insanely expensive but I see it like a modern version of the post office. If you want to be able to write a letter to anyone and have it be delivered you need to set the price so that rural customers aren’t paying costs that are orders of magnitude higher.
We have 600/600 Mbps… In a third world country smh
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To clear up confusion, 6MBps (MegaByte) down would be equal to 48Mbps (Megabit). So you would be above the mentioned standard.
Or you made typo, then you’re indeed below standard ^^"
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One is a rate of data, the other is an amount.
Mbps means megabits per second.
MB is just megabytes. You can of course turn it into a rate, but then it would be MB/s.
There are 8 bits in a byte, so 100 Mbps would be 12.5 MB/s (divide by 8)
They considered that a standard? 25 meg?
Jesus wept. I haven’t had internet that slow in well over a decade here in the UK!
How do they manage things like 150GB game downloads over there, or 3 or 4 people all using the connection at the same time…
Not so much a standard as in “everyone should actually use the internet at this speed” but more as in “the bare minimum level, everyone should have at least this speed available (and we’ll help pay to upgrade people stuck at slower speeds)”, I believe.
It was still a low speed for that of course. It apparently hadn’t been raised since the Obama administration (2015).
Rural internet speeds are often… not comparable to more densely populated areas, shall we say. My (European) perspective: I had about ~3 Mbit down (over ADSL) until I moved about a decade ago (on a good day, while paying for “up to 40 Mbit” (IIRC) that the line apparently just could not physically deliver to my house). Meanwhile, 1 km along the road people in town had cable internet (~100 Mbit down).
Luckily, both populations have since benefited from a fiber rollout by a smaller telco, but people in town still got that upgrade about 5 years sooner and without paying a ~€2k connection fee. AFAIK there are still areas in my country where ADSL is the best available…
I’m in a hotel in London now and am getting less than 10/10. So not necessarily better. I’m an American who normally suffers under Comcast and have 60/25 or so at home.
My connection is 10/2. Please help me
I have 500Mbps in Spain. Is it that bad in the American cities or is it only like rural Montana that has these speeds?
Honestly, it’s highly variable. Generally speaking, more populated areas tend to have much better options for internet and in some large markets even have a degree of competition.
In my case, I live in a town of only 180k or so people. At my home, I am able to get 1.2 gbps download from Comcast. They are the only option in my direct vicinity with this much bandwidth. The alernative is AT&T with only DSL as an option. I don’t remember the top tier. But, it’s considerably slower at maybe 100 mbps or something like that.
Wow, that’s pretty good for a town of that size. I live in a city of 1.6 Million. I think I might be able to get 1 gbps if I shop around, but I don’t think much more than that is available to normal consumers at least.
The issue is mostly that it’s highly variable, hard to change without moving, and hard to predict before you actually live somewhere.
The comcast rep will happily take your money to put you on a 200mb plan, but it won’t do shit if the infrastructure in your area is bad, and Comcast (or whoever the isp is) has absolutely zero responsibility to actually provide the promised services. Now you add in that 95% of the population including most of the phone reps working for the ISPs don’t even know the difference between a bit and a byte and it becomes a total crap shoot.
That’s the same here too. My first apartment only had ADSL. In 2015.
I couldn’t even watch Netflix without it stopping to buffer.
I really wish they would put internet speeds on apartment offers etc.
…wow. That’s so shit. Where I live, your internet provider has to have the ability to provide the service or like with every other service provider it’s really open for lawyer action.
This also makes so that internet providers are at the same time keeping their own infrastructure around which in turn makes that yet another selling point (“we have up to 1 gbps in your area!”) and makes them keep it in top-notch condition.
It’s widely variable, even in big cities the available ISPs can change depending on what side of a street you’re on. A lot of people are stuck with cable (DOCSIS) providers that run over legacy TV infrastructure and provide wildly asymmetric speeds. This is an excerpt from Xfinity (Comcast):
Xfinity Gigabit Internet service has advanced, next generation technology, with WiFi download speeds of up to 1000 Mbps (up to 1200 Mbps in some areas) and upload speeds of up to 35 Mbps.
I live in the mountain area, and my friend lives 30m from a multi-million population city, in an area with over 100,000 residents. His best option for internet to this day is hotspotting from his cell. Before that was viable, he only had access to satellite internet. Even semi-rural people here get fucked.
my friend lives 30m from a multi-million population city
It took me a beat to realize this was 30 miles or 30 minutes and not 30 meters.
Ah that’s my bad, should’ve used metric.
Oh, metric isn’t a requirement (although I myself am striving to use it when I remember), just that “m” alone is ambiguous. And in my daily work, a number followed by a single m is meters.
