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Broadband isn't Broadband Unless its 2Mbps?
quanticle writes "According to House Democrats, broadband isn't broadband unless its at least 2Mbps. The view of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications is that the FCC's data collection standards are hopelessly outdated, and is proposing a number of updates to their criteria. For one, they want 'broadband' reclassified to at least 2mbs, up from 200kbps. Another requirement will change the FCC's outlook on broadband availability. Just because one household in a zip code has broadband access, that will not longer mean everyone in the zip code does. 'The plan went over well with the consumer advocates who appeared before the subcommittee. Larry Cohen, president of the Communication Workers of America, said that the US is "stuck with a twentieth century Internet" and that he would support increasing the "broadband" definition to 2Mbps. Ben Scott of Free Press echoed that sentiment, suggesting that the definition needs to be an evolving standard that increases over time, which is in contrast to the current FCC definition; it has not changed in nine years. "We have always been limited by the FCC's inadequate and flawed data," he said.'"
But its too correct (according to the summary, I didn't RTFA). Something else has to be behind this, given american politics.
Even 2 Mbps is painfully slow for some us. :)
Fat tubes for all!
Let's aim high. In the future, it is likely many individuals will run media servers, VPN in to home, download a ton of video and use services like VOIP that rely on quality bandwidth. Instead of going piecemeal into this future, let's design for the next fifty years, roll out the hardware, and enjoy a nice long depreciation curve. It will be cheaper in the long run...
technical writing / development
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So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?
My wife and I share a 1.5Mbps DSL connection with 256k up. I've never had to wish it were faster.
If the downlink is required to be 2Mbps to count as "broadband", I think the uplink should be a minimum of 512Kbps. Far too many people are stuck on lines that have 128Kbps up and far too easily saturate the uplink and bog the whole connection down.
I read the internet for the articles.
After all, they've already completely redefined "broadband" once. It never used to refer to the download speed at all.
Hax-fu?
Im sure the CWA believes this will lead to more work for the CWA members.
They're widely misusing the term "broadband" already (just like "modem" and many others), so why not simply define the class of service they want to standardize and give it a NEW NAME instead of abusing existing ones? My vote is for "Standardized Fast Ubernet." You can guess what else the acronym might stand for.
There's obviously not enough third party data to sell at these slower rates.
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So who is hotter? Ali or Ali's Sister?
I thought 56K was broadband when I upgraded from my 14.4K modem. Of course, that was back in 1998.
Goatse!
Broadband, as opposed to baseband, is technically defined as anything not at the base frequency of 0Hz. Baseband is at the base frequency and up, broadband is at a higher frequency and up.
FCC can't even seem to get a technicality right.
As long as I can get it paid on the backs of the poor, then I am all for it.
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to think "profiling is worse than the slaughter of innocent people..."
When I was in college back in the triassic period, broadband had nothing to do with transmission rates, but with the fact that multiple channels were transmitted through a single wire (like TV) over a more broad frequency band than single-channel narrowband transmission, regardless of speed. Every time I hear someone say "broadband" in reference to the speed of some sort of internet connection I sort of cringe inside.
One good thing could come out of this. Setting a definition for broadband will reduce misleading "broadband" offers from cable and dsl companies. Either they raise their data rates or they have to call it something else. Most will choose to increase bandwidth since having to admit they are slower would be an advertising nightmare.
Well, to quote the Wikipedia article on broadband, "Broadband is always a relative term, understood according to its context." So by definition if the context changes, the meaning will too.
Back in the day broadband was..? "Not dialup".. but times have changed. News: somehting is new! Wow..
Of course, every day is "Bash Bush and/or Dibold" day on Slashdot. That, and burning heretics who question the truth of the Protocols of the Elders of Global Warming.
Crow T. Trollbot
The definition also needs to specify up/down speeds. I don't consider a satellite connection with 1.5Mbs down and 56K up (phoneline) a broadband connection.
We get 30Mbps as part of us using utilities - gas, water, heat and electricity is reported through a fiberoptic link and we get 30Mb/s (no servers or anything, but email addresses and basic webpage stuff) to the apartment as part of that. If we want to actually pay, we can easily get 100Mb/s with IP-phone (keep our landline number), streaming TV (Tivo over the net, more or less) and a bunch of cable channels served over IP.
As my SO is running her business from home, however, for now we're staying with the normal landlines and fax numbers (though to be fair they have gotten dramatically cheaper the last few years as well).
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
i pay 35/month for broadband, thats adsl over the telephone line with 4mbps download and 256kps upload speed and a monthly volume of 10gig, along with a pop mailbox and 50mb webspace.
768K seems to be a nice low speed broadband. Large downloads are still doable, and youtube videos just take a few more seconds to buffer than on a faster connection. Podcasts are downloaded automatically in the background, so there is little reason for those to have to be super fast. This is just to serve as an example of working broadband internet under 2mb.
broadband isn't broadband unless its at least 2Mbps
broadband isn't broadband unless it's at least 2Mbps
http://xkcd.com/386/
So, Congress wants the FCC to label "broadband" as anything faster than 2mbps? Isn't it convenient that most DSL packages are 1.5mbps down? Comcast would have shitfits if they tried to label broadband as 4, 8, or even 10 mbps down.
But I do like the provision that change how a broadband "served" area are labeled. I'm just waiting for Verizon's FIOS to hit my area.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
wow, 10gig a month? what, do you like just check email or something? That's insane. I thought transfer quotas went out of fashion with swing music.
http://xkcd.com/386/
Well, I guess I don't have broadband at home. I'm currently using 1 MBit down with 125 KBit up. It's not the fastest, but I really don't want to spend $40 a month for internet, since I don't really download videos. I think this is plenty fast for most home users. But I guess that most home users don't need broadband then.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Come on, someone needs to tag this as: seriesoftubes (ducking and running)
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
OF course that 2mbps is the slowest broadband available
but they invented "Slow broadband" as my 128kbps for two main reasons.
One is to collect data from users, and with higher speeds it's difficult to do.
and the second is "TO COLLECt data from users.
PERiod.
?
At least in France, many of the problems were solved by local loop unbundling. I imagine the same would work here.
7 .html
We had local loop unbundling here in the U.S., but then the FCC took it away. Now if you want DSL, it's back to the local phone company -- except for the places where they still have outstanding contracts with independent ISPs (like Speakeasy, etc.), there's no choice.
The FCC's rationale for reneging on the LLU decision was that consumers now had "choice" without it -- between the cable company, and the phone company. The nature of the decision had something to do with classing DSL as a 'data service' as opposed to a 'communications service' or something similarly pedantic, but the upshot was that it didn't require wholesale line leases to competitors, or let them charge more for it, or something.
I can't find a source on it right now, but I distinctly remember reading about it (maybe about a year ago, maybe a bit more).
Finally found some reference to it:
FCC Could Rule on DSL Line Sharing
FCC Halts DSL-Sharing by Telcos
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20040303-348
(Reason I wasn't finding anything is that "LLU" or "Local Loop Unbundling" only seems to be used in the press in the U.K. and Europe; in the 'States they seem to call it 'Line Sharing,' probably to maintain their mandatory 6th-grade reading level.)
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Around here, AT&T and Comcast, among others, have been pushing cheap "broadband" that turns out to be in the 600kbps range. If the hapless FCC is forced to adopt realistic definitions, so much the better for consumers and for the communications industry in the long run. I have yet to find a downside explained in all the lazy cynical-posing comments.
For xDSL users the upper limit is 24Mbps for the downlink here...
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Broadband is a signaling method - as long as the Congress is deciding what speed of Internet connectivity is appropriate, can they also legislate a more appropriate term?
It's all politics. You redefine "broadband" (in this case, the new definition in a way consumers will like, since they want more of it) so that you can say come election time that only x number of homes have broadband, and blame the lack of availability on the previous administration. (Or you can even say that the number of US homes with broadband went down, though that looks worse if you're called on the definition change.) You can fit a single statistic into a good sound byte, but politicians aren't good at fitting an explanation for why the statistic is ridiculous into a sound byte.
This is similar to changing the poverty formula--or any other similar metric--in advance of an election.
What kind of SCSI do you have?
SCSI-1
Fast SCSI
Fast Wide SCSI
Ultra SCSI(1.5)
Ultra SCSI(3)
Wide Ultra SCSI
Wide Ultra SCSI(1.5)
Wide Ultra SCSI(3)
Ultra2 SCSI
Wide Ultra2 SCSI
Ultra3 SCSI or Ultra160 SCSI
Ultra320 SCSI
Nah. Just make the term "Broad Band" a standard that is reviewed every 2 years and be done with it. Otherwise, in 20 years we'll be connecting over the Super double wide ultra fast inter tubes of doom .
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
So they're old Korean people?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8:32(King James Version)
Rather than siting down for a minute and actually, you know, thinking about something, or heaven forbid talking to someone who has thought about it, politicians and bureaucrats just up and make laws. It's sort of like Slashdot, except the rule is "legislate first, then maybe think" instead of "post frist ;-, think second".
The most important difference between broadband and not broadband is Always On (or, as we Mediacom customers say, "Sometimes On"). The definition ought to be stated in terms of connect latency: how much difference is there between the time it takes to establish the first connection of a particular online session and the average connection time during a session? If the first is no different than the average, you have broadband.
The next most important attribute is Quality of Service:
The top speed of that connection, and the uplink and downlink speed difference, is important, but less so. Caching, prefetch, and P2P techniques mean that as long as you have anything faster than 9600bps, if it's always on you will have essentially the same online experience as someone with a 2Mbps connection.
Now, with regard to live video audio as a substitute for broadcast media, the faster the better. And 2Mbps is not enough, and is certainly not a magic threshhold, given the QoS concerns above.
sigs, as if you care.
What we need is an FTC rule that advertising any service quality or quantity with the words "up to" or substantially similar language is, by law, considered deceptive. Advertising should have to specify a guaranteed level of service. That would put cable and DSL on the same measurement scale, discourage underprovisioning, and make cellular data transfer rates in ads something you could rely on.
There's precedent for this. At various times in the past, the FTC had to tighten up the definition of "horsepower" for cars and "watts" for audio gear.
I have done speed tests at several different times on my comcast service and typically do no better than 1.5Mbps. I think it is pretty misleading to advertise a 6Mbps connection and get some thing that is 1/4 of that.
I wonder how this would impact CALEA requirements set by the FCC for 'broadband' providers, if it were redefined to 2Mb/s. It might mean stuff under that speed would no longer need to be LI (lawful-intercept) capable. This could have significant cost savings for ISPs for compliance...
The demorats can spout all the nonsense they like. The Republicans can promise broadband for everyone. They are all full of it.
Sad fact is, broadband by any definition is NOT available to vast areas of the good old USA! I am not talking about mountains and deserts either. I am talking about one of the fastest growing counties in the US, only one Central Office away from a metro area.
The telcos take fees for "rural infrastructure" to the tune of millions and what do they do with it? Whiz it away screaming "We are your broadband and entertainment company!" Do they come thru? Absolutely not! Not for the last 9 years they don't and they won't. Sorry, DSL is not available in your area at this time.
So you see it matters not what the FCC says or the government does. The telcos FAIL and REFUSE to provide broadband, even at the slowest recognized "fast" speed from years ago. If we are lucky they keep the POTS line up and our 24K connection works.
I wouldn't mind seeing the rate lowered to 1 Mbps down, but add 1 Mbps minimum up as well and make the rates "as tested, minimum" by some consumer advocate-developed standard, not the advertised jokes. I suspect a lot of people with "3 Mbps cable modems" would find better performance with a T1. Furthermore, it doesn't count as broadband if there's a limit on usage. 1Mbps means the same as 2.6 Tb per month!
"It also asks the National Telecommunications and Information Administration to prepare a map for the web that will show all this data in a searchable, consumer-friendly format." What exactly does this mean? a map like this? http://xkcd.com/c195.html
I have never heard these definitions to which you are referring. I have heard definitions similar to your baseband defintion, with the difference being that baseband signals are complex signals CENTERED at 0 Hz, not signals going from 0 to some other frequency. The terminology I have heard to refer to a signal going from 0 to F1 would be, a 200% bandwidth signal at a center frequency of F1/2. I have never heard anything remotely similar to your broadband definition. Broadband is a relative "bandwidth" term and has nothing to do with the center frequency. I would be curious to hear if other people have heard your definitions, if not I would say it is you that is techically wrong.
I can do 1 Gbit/sec with my station wagon, but the latency kinda sucks.
Also, the MTU (MINIMUM transfer unit) is 4 GB.
Well, 780 MB if you only want to use CDs.
paintball
Seriously, there does need to be regulation in this arena.
I'm sure it may be a bit difficult to measure, but I'd say minimum guaranteed speed at 99.5% uptime, or 1st percentile speed without an uptime guarantee (i.e Obps for less than 99% uptime), should be the maximum allowable advertised speed for any internet connection.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Come on, I hear people bragging about their high bandwidth... I have 1000 mbps at home, but in a lot of ways it is pretty pointless, because the best you can hope for in normal everyday useage is about 1.5 mbps. The fact is, the data speed into your home is limited by the backbone and the ability of servers to actually serve data that fast. There is no way that I am going to be downloading something from a high traffic public server a few thousand kilometers away at higher than 1.5 mbps. My home connection is not the limiting factor in that kind of situation.
Right now, with out major improvements in other areas, giving higher than 1.5 mbps into the home is pretty pointless.
Does this mean that if a hotel charges me $12.95 a day for "broadband", I can get my money back if I'm not getting 2 Mbps? I'm tired of paying for hotel "broadband" connections that are slower than dialup.
Of course, I tend to go to conferences with a lot of other Internet-hungry attendees, but hotels ought to be able to buy more bandwidth with what they're making on these charges.
I'll vote for anyone who delivers the US into a leading high-tech position.
Republicans, Democrats it doesn't matter. As an issue of national security, from the viewpoint of 10 to 100 years in the future, laying fiber to the home or whatever it takes to keep us at the forefront is imperative.
I figure that we'll get the usual screwing on all the other issues, but this will easy to benchmark and enforce.
And to anyone who cracks about "you just want more porn", let me say: you're an idiot and/or not funny.
I'm not sure 56k flies anymore. If your computer is connected to the Internet it needs current patches to keep it afloat. Sure, I know some older folks that pretty much do nothing but email, but every once in a while they venture out on the WWW. And then.... BAM!
{Pop-Up} "Your computer has been infected! Buy Spyware Cleaner Deluxe 2.0 - now with more cleaning power!"
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
I just hate it when I find out the "Internet Service" I was paying for doesn't actually include everything the Internet can offer. If companies want to sell "Internet Service" they shouldn't be allowed to block servers. Call it "Web Service" or something that shows you can't do anything with your Internet connection.
Cable is the best most people can get (yeah, there might be FIOS in a few cities, but I'm in #5 in the US and we sure don't have it; Utah also has UTOPIA, but I don't trust their lawmakers not to screw it up or censor it somehow). There, you get caps like 20 GB / month total transfer, which make it a complete waste, or worse, you go with Comcast and get unknown limits above which they accuse you of piracy and cut you off with no appeal.
Or you can go with DSL. Good luck if you don't live right next to the CO. Damn phone company took an entire MONTH to find a working line for me. How the hell do you not notice that one of the lines you tagged was in use!? T1s are nice, but way out of my price range. $300-$400 a month is a bit much, even if I understand why they price them like that.
Or you can get satellite. Not bad, but your uplink will be crap and your latency painful. Or, heh, you can go back to dial-up. That's great, if you don't use anything but email...
Compare this to almost everywhere else in the first world, where they have local loop unbundling, the telcos are public utilities (rather than deregulated monopolies) and you see that we're *WAY* behind. Japan is awesome: 10 & 100 Mbps connections for less than you pay the cable companies. Other countries, too, have invested in infrastructure and are just plain leaving us behind. In the US? We gave the telcos billions to upgrade things, and just what have they done? Hardly anything, from the looks of it.
So the story here is that the Democrats want to up the standards so that we in the US will have to stop kidding ourselves about the craptastic state of our internet infrastructure? GOOD! I'm sick of the telcos trying to kill things like Net Neutrality and using "deregulation" as a way to become legal monopolies and screw their customers over.
I'm sick of hearing "We don't care, we're the phone company!" and I'll probably give my vote to someone who seems likely to make them eat those words.
Instead of trying to change the definition of broadband, why not just aim for whatever number of households with 2 Mbps or more? And then have the FCC sate how many households have 2 Mbps or more?
I hope their definition is symmetric. There's lots you can do with 2Mbps download but there's lots more you can do with 2Mbps upload. It would be more pertinent for congress to bring back local loop unbundling and to split up companies that sell both content and Internet access (i.e. cable companies and telephone companies now selling TV).
-Riskable
"Those who choose proprietary software will pay for their decision!"
I think they should only use the terms High-Speed and Full-Speed. It make so much sense for USB.
My God. Clearly, hell has now frozen over. I -- *gasp* *choke* support the Democrats in something! It's a sign of the apocolypse!
... is it that bad to want more porn? :(
Also Japan have several operators that offer 100/100 FDDI (=fiber) to home, mostly in urban areas. IIRC, you may get 10M beginning from $25 in Tokyo area, and 100M ethernet or fiber from $45. In Shanghai, China telecom brought 10M conn with $10 to my grandmother/grandfathers house, though speed was very dependant of time of day (users, lots) and while mainland was blinding fast, rest of the world was mostly like 300bps modem (great firewall of china perhaps, dunno - pages like yahoo worked pretty fast).
We have a "fine" local co-op here which provides a 512/256 for $40, a 768/512 for $80, and 1024/512 for $100. Unfortunatly the speeds run about 30% less than the rated line speed. I currently am on the second tier, much more than I'd prefer to pay but on the 512/256 things like you tube were a test of my patience, and forgetabout having the wife on trying to view some videos or something. The second teir seems to be more stable, and less latent, I find gaming works a little better even if the wife is youtubing it up. It's listed on my bill as biz basic, so I think they prioritize the traffic higher on it. Regardless it's crazy. They buy their internet from the telco Iowa Telecom next town over which has 4x the speed at half the price. And my old town of about 8000 people has 10Mbit DSL now. Cable sucks rocks too, only good thing about the co-op is that you can call up the tech pretty much direct since there is like 10 people working in the whole company, no talkin to someone in China or 6 states over or whatever. Tech is a nice guy, but I could definatly use a little more bang for my buck.
The parent post is a helpful visual diagram of how a high-capacity channel enables more traffic.
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
maybe they are trying to kill the t1 market so nobody gets a CIR or 5 "9" 's level of reliability
...I mean.
That means a T1 wouldn't qualify as broadband!
As far as I am concerned, broadband is anything more than you could get through the phone company before the invention of DSL. Which was two ISDN B channels bonded for 128 Kbps bi-di.
And that's the way it was, we paid $400 a month for the priviledge, and we liked it.
The government even made us pay the $15 911 toll on those lines, even though we didn't even OWN an ISDN telephone. (Does anyone??)
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I find that funny, considering it includes an upload rate of 1.544Mb/s--more than you wound normally get with any DSL or cable package--and a guaranteed downstream rate of the same.
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Sweden had this 8 years ago, whats the news bubba?
"Never EVER mess with a jumper you don't know about, even if it's labeled 'sex and free beer'." - Dave Haynie
As clearly 1Mbit is no longer "Broadband the American Way". Nor do I suspect you pay anywhere near as much for the 2Mbit packages but hey, thats the rip off republic for you.
If anything, this will probably just hinder broadband growth across the United States. There are a lot of areas where broadband is currently not available for one reason or another, and this will just be another reason for Verizon, etc. to say, well, we can't feasibly support 2Mbs out here in the boondocks, we're just not going to bother any more than we did before.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
2) Force providers to actually meter the real speeds and report that average. A 3Mbps cable connection that's shared by hordes of gamers/video watchers/porn downloaders isn't really 3Mbps.
3) Force them to report the cap on total download volume and not be able to claim any bps speed greater than that cap/2592000. (2592000 Seconds/30-day month)
Truth in advertising. That said, I've been pretty happy with my 1.5M down/384k up Verizon DSL line, since I can't seem to hit any cap and I actually get close to the rated speed when I test it. Wouldn't count as "broadband" under this rule, but it's good enough for me right now.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Hmmmm....the Internet portion of CALEA, I believe, only applies to providers of broadband Internet. If the House gets its way, does this mean that only ISPs providing 2MB or better Internet connections need to comply with CALEA?
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
...I live out in the country where you can still get a 1200 sq ft little ranch house or a reasonably new doublewide sitting on a full acre of land for 100 grand. Gas is only 3 bucks a gallon, and for $500 I could buy a used 300 hp car or truck OR a 30 MPG car, whichever type of vehicle I need, and plenty to choose from. I can own all the semi auto weapons I want-which I do, because I have enjoyed the shooting sports since i was a kid- and go target shooting for fun without being classed as an immediate felon. I routinely get by with 50 bucks a week full grocery bill for two people and some dogs and cats. I am not forced to live as a termite in some huge high rise smog filled megalopolis, my yard has a variety of nice trees and I have a full sized decent vegetable and flower garden. I have all the TVs and radios and computers and other gadgets I could possibly want, and plenty of room for my pets to run around outside which I, and they, enjoy immensely. I can go for a walk and routinely see wild deer and turkeys and cranes and geese and whatnot, anytime I want. And I only work part time, because I like it that way, no slave to the man action.
but-all I have right now is a dialup connection, but they keep threatening high speed wimax coming soon...and my life is so full I really don't care right now, I am patient, it will get here
hmmm...choices...which is more important...hmmm
Why are Asia and Europe so far behind in all the other things that make life affordable and enjoyable? Note: I am a "stay at home pat", this is just constructive criticism
Sorry to come in and rain on everyone's I'm-more-educated-than-thou parade, but using the term "broadband" to describe the data rate of a communications channel has been perfectly valid parlance since Claude Shannon jump-started Information Theory in 1948. According to the Shannon-Hartley theorem, bandwidth (in the RF sense of the term) and data rate are directly proportional for a given SNR.
;-)
Obviously there's a little hand-waving in that equivalence--for example, with a piss-poor modulation you can manage to use a lot of bandwidth and achieve only a modest data rate. The point, however, is that the people who first applied the term "broadband" in the digital domain were not clueless Congress-critters, as speculated in this thread, but highly-educated engineers contributing to an entirely new and greatly important engineering discipline. In their estimation, discourse was better served by expanding the definition of the term instead of mindless pedantry. So, show a little respect.
The government has, for years, provided grant and low interest loans to any interest able to demonstrate a need and viable plan for broadband deployment in rural areas. This is one of the *good* government programs set up to answer the call for government subsidy type programs (aka Japan, etc). It's helped a lot of rural communities gain broadband access and helped launch many *community* oriented broadband startups.
This is the other boot waiting to kick us all in the head: as soon as the definition of "broadband" changes from 200kbps service to 2Mbps service, the bar is considerably raised - in many cases, to an impossibly high level - for many of the low end community projects these grants have helped launch. This measure will do nothi9ng except help protect the interests of all the big cell companies who fear not having the wireless field to themselves when and if they decide to launch wimax as an alternative to limited range dsl and overpriced satellite services.
I've always felt that the real promise of the Internet was that people could serve up content out of their own homes. Whether that means running my own webserver, or starting my own Internet TV station should be up to me. And you have the telcos and cable companies basically saying "um, yeah sorry but we are going to continue to give you crappy upload speeds even though new tech is available that doesn't have the same limitations, thanks". I actually had some door-to-door salespeople stop by my house the other day from AT&T saying that they had this "Amazing New Product (tm)" that involved them laying down a new fiber infrastructure in my neighborhood and that I could get these huge benefits if I signed up. I asked what the speeds were and the guy told me, with a straight face, 1.5 megabits. I told him I wasn't interested and shut the door in his face.
Don't get me wrong, I understand why this is. The carriers are in bed with media companies that don't want the competition. Meanwhile, the US falls farther and farther behind in broadband tech. It's a sad situation if you ask me - and one I don't see going away anytime soon as long as there is no meaningful competition for last-mile service. Wireless is getting close, though, but has its own share of problems.
Just as an aside, I remember watching an interview of Alan Shugart a while back. In it he said he never intended SCSI to be pronounced "scuzzy". He wanted people to call it "sexy".
The term "broadband" refers to telecommunication that provides multiple channels of data over a single communications medium, typically using some form of frequency or wave division multiplexing, it has absolutely nothing to do with line speed. So you can have 56kbps broadband (the most common example is known as 56k ISDN)* and you can have 2mbps+ and still have broadband.
The term broadband is not defined by ISPs, telcos not cable companies, it's defined by the FCC and no such company can change the definition.
*For those that want to argue that 64k is the slowest ISDN speed, you'd be wrong. ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) is a connection type and is not limited to a specific speed nor is broadband.
I'm about the same distance, and the best they could do for me was 144 kbps IDSL :/
As for the people mentioning fiber, good luck! I'm smack in the middle of one of the largest US cities and there ain't no fiber here. You can get cable, with a crappy 20 GB/month download limit that makes it pointless, but no fiber.
No! No! Wrong thinking! (Local) utilities regulations require uniform service within an area if the franchisee desires to serve any one. Allowing broadband providers to claim that they don't provide service to an area even when they have already gone in and cherry picked the lucrative neighborhoods plays right into their hands.
The people just down the street from me (further from the CO, so distance isn't an excuse) have had DSL since it was originally offered by the local telco. When Verizon bought them out, they made decision to cease DSL expansion in our area (Heck, we can't even get proper POTS service anymore). They are able to to this because, unlike regulated utility service, serving one DSL customer in an area doesn't obligate them to provide service to anyone else. If it was subject to regulations, they would need to file tarrifs with the state utilities commission which establish standard fees for extending their service to anyone willing to pay. In my area, these fees are based on distance along the public right-of-way. Once any utility strings a line in front of your house, only a (standard) service drop charge can apply. They are obligated to maintain their facilities to meet added demand in areas served as a part of their operating costs. In other words, they can't say "Sorry, the cable is full and you'll have to pay for a bigger one".
Please don't let Congress create any more loopholes. We need to treat broadband access just like any other critical infrastructure.
Have gnu, will travel.
Broadband / baseband should revert to their original technical definition to save confusion. Modem access is pretty much gone in the UK, so I don't see the need for such terms any more.
Better to describe internet access as high speed, and define minimum acceptable service levels for sustained access. eg. a minimum sensible service level would be 2Mbit for 99% of the time. This is easily understandable to anyone who needs to know about their connection bandwidth. I would suggest a minimum speed of 2Mbit for at least 98% of the year to be classified as 'high speed'.
Services where traffic shaping is applied should be heavily discounted, or even free. Such services defeat the point of having a high speed internet connection anyway, and are really only suitable for light web browsing.
Service level agreements should be mandatory for all home internet connections to prevent con-merchant ISPs. There are too many borderline criminal ISPs selling products that they don't actually deliver, particularly in America.
That's great and all, but are they going to address the "non-broadband" monopolies? I am SO F'ING SICK of Cox disconnecting me from AIM, throttling my Ubuntu torrents, and making me constantly reboot my cable modem by hand, and there is not ONE OTHER ISP in this area that offers anything other than 56k.
I mean, I'd love to have 2mbs "REAL" broadband, but just having reliable service at 300k would be nice, for now, and maybe having more than one company in this area would help?
I'm not an economist, but by all definitions I'm aware of Cox has a monopoly on broadband in this part of San Diego county. Can congress help me with that first?!?
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Is there anyone on /. or anywhere that doubts the importance of open and accessible roads? Of course not. Can you imagine what a pain it would be if roadways were privately owned and only accessible to those that sign up to use them? Yet we've let the opportunity to allow unfettered access to the internet cable infrastructure slip away and fall into private hands and, well, this is why 200Kbps is considered "broadband". There's simply no incentive to do more.
I'm not suggesting that local or state governments become ISPs. Anyone could be an ISP, but to get their service into a city or state, they would have to lease space on the public wires (or fiber as the case may be).
Verizon is now trying to get Massachusetts to enact legislation that would allow providers (like Verizon) to obtain a statewide franchise for their service, rather than go from city to city and have to deal with the local politicos, who always seem to be demanding more and more. I never thought I'd be rooting for the monopoly, but if it's the way we're going to get the long desired fiber infrastructure, well, so be it. Problem is, that will essentially eliminate competition for communications and it seems we'll be taking a big step backwards.
Obviously, there's much more to such a plan, and it can't be posted in a few sentences on here. I'd like to hear from the tech savvy /.ers and get some reaction to this plan. I am in no way suggesting that state or local government could do a better job than private enterprise. Connectivity is the future, and that future is a long way off for much of the US under the present structure.
== First cross river, then insult alligator.
But its too correct (according to the summary, I didn't RTFA). Something else has to be behind this, given american politics.
It's grandstanding. The FCC was saying this a month ago. When you have the people and the FCC saying the same thing and the legislature hasn't done squat (or anti-squat) then the legislature has to grandstand and "somebody" has to be to blame.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I live in a Utah city with its own fiber network (separate from UTOPIA), and I currently live about one block past the edge of the network. I'm not that bummed about it, though. The speeds they advertise aren't that much faster than my current cable connection, and they're the same price. Plus, it's completely mismanaged and hemorrhaging money. The city's website lists several ISPs, but of those, one of the links they give points to some parked advertising page, and some of the others have broken links all over their pages or they have 1996-style frames. There's only one ISP that looks like it keeps an updated, professional-looking website, but they don't offer any services beyond basic web and e-mail. No IPTV, no VoIP (although they have links to Dish Network and Packet8).
As I understand it, the city is looking for someone to buy up the network. Hopefully they sell it to someone with the vision to actually provide some really useful services, and who will actually expand it one block to my house. As it is, the city has something really great and they don't have a clue what it's for, so all that fiber is just about wasted.
"its" is a posessive
"it's" is a conjunction (it AND is)
get it right, people!
In the mid 1970s, I learned the following:
Narrowband below-64Kb/s
Wideband 64Kb/s-2.0Mb/s
Ultra-Wideband 2.0Mb/s-5.0Mb/s
Ultra-Broadband 5.0Mb/s-2.3Gb/s
Globally Broadband was always defined as
Ultra-Wideband to Ultra-Broadband (2.0Mb/s-2.3Gb/s)
MaBell and Telco marketing defined Wideband for the FCC,
Congress, politicians, and the USA public as Broadband.
Telecommunications folks were never fooled
by the marketing/politician-spin bullshit.
I guess, they continue to prove themselves clueless, and/or
believe they can continue to lie and bullshit US Citizens.
I ain't impressed.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
That and a useful standard to measure by, like the best illustration I can give is Comcast buying @Home.
@home for about 3 years after being available was 10Mb/512Mb up. Put into perspective, some of the huge demos for games took minutes, uploading a CD image to my home machine (from work) took 30mins, tops. So 1MB down,
@home about a year or two before the merger switched the U/L to 256Mb...slower, but workable.
Fast approaching the merger and it soon became 128Mb, and a month later the M became Kb...'scuse ME?'
All the while charging the same or *MORE* (full disclosure: working as a web master, employer paid cable internet bill). Became *IMPOSSIBLE* to do anything worth a fsck. Even remoting in was painful over ssh, much less VNC/RDC.
Picture it, effective download was 1MB and upload was 12Kb (or was it kb?) up.
Because work was paying for it, I could call and get the upload increased to ~96Kb, but the corp office in California would switch it back about 2 or 3 times a week.
During the switch/buyout when it worked it was started at 128Kb up/down. Unhappy techs does note even begin to describe our burning hate, vitriol and screams.
Comes down to "non-tech" people's understanding, i.e. the "cd's worth of info", say 650MB file: at the proposed "to be considered broadband" would that take minutes, hours days or in Comcasts glacial speed, weeks?
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
In San Francisco, at least, they seem to be doing something about this. Apparently the definition of what a "central office" is has changed. Apparently it no longer needs to be some kind of big building; instead it might be an innocuous-looking box at the end of the block. Somebody who's a telco insider will have to give more details than that, because I only know what I was told by one field tech. That, and the fact that about eight years ago I moved from an apartment at one end of this street to one at the other, and then a couple years ago I moved again, back a few blocks up the same street. The first time I moved I kept my same phone number. The second time I moved the phone company told me that I could not keep the same phone number; in fact, I couldn't even have the same prefix. I can only assume that this is to allow the local phone company to roll out DSL more aggressively here in the City.
Breakfast served all day!
I posted GP and I understood that Phoenix is the #5 largest city in the US now. If I'm somehow wrong, it's still the city I meant. I also forgot to mention wireless internet options (Tempe has city-wide wireless). Bad parts? Interference is HORRIBLE. Everyone and their dog has a wireless router thanks to the cable co, and they all interfere badly. Not to mention whatever the hell it was that was trashing the entire band from above--I have a Wi-Spy, I watched these fishbone lines strobe across most of the band, strongest near the higher frequency parts of the wireless spectrum. Oh, and if that's not bad enough, the wireless here is run by morons.
No, I'm not kidding. Morons. Their signup pages are horribly broken. You can't get to them fro set it to remember you by MAC address, you can't get back on. Period. Okay, so I guess I didn't try changing my MAC, but that's too much of a pain. Still couldn't even get to the sign up page. As if you'd want to.
They have a "transparent" proxy that isn't. Yeah, it's supposed to only be there for log in. But I hit it every 30 seconds (possibly due, in part, to interference, but still). It doesn't let you go to the page you actually wanted--it tries to open that in a (blocked) popup. It screws over downloads. I had to make a Perl script that visited Google every 30 seconds (and followed the authentication redirect to their crappy news and advertising page) to download anything.
If you want to use them for anything but an hour of web surfing while you're on your laptop at ASU or in downtown Tempe, you're crazy (and even then, don't do any shopping or log in anywhere). Their stuff is so broken its not even funny. Never mind it's an unencrypted network, absolutely ripe for anyone to sniff if they want to. It was good enough reason for me to get the hell away from it.
So to reiterate, Tempe's city-wide wireless is run by complete morons. It's not a worthwhile option. When I ordered DSL, the sales girl said "You must be desperate." Sadly, she was right.
1.9 Mbps connections will now sell at a premium, because they will not be subject to wire tap. I would pay extra each month for a non-broadband connection and no built-in wiretap.
Transporter_ii
Doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, religion destroys spirituality
The FCC has fairly little independent power; it serves primarily to implement laws passed by Congress. In this case unbundling was part of the 1996 Telecommunications Act passed by Congress. The FCC implemented it and was promptly sued for it. In the U.S., the federal courts have ultimate jurisdiction to interpret legislation, so the FCC was bound by whatever the court ordered. Over the next 10 years it was ordered by the courts to reimplement and reimplement, as suit after suit was filed by the telcos. In 2006 it finally won court approval for its implementation of the unbundling rules, based on a law that was now 10 years old. So if you don't like the way it's done now, look to the courts (and the original, poorly-worded law).
Also: the distinction between a "telecommunications service" and a "data service" is most definitely NOT pedantic. In fact it is the crucial heart of the entire fight over "net neutrality." The two terms are given different definitions and treatments in the 1996 Act--in particular, telecom services are held to common carrier status, while data services are not. Thus when the 9th Federal Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that cable modem is a "data service", it exempted it from common carrier status--essentially granting permission to violate net neutrality.
Now the telcos want DSL classified the same way (it's currently considered a telecom service since it is delivered over phone lines), and they are lobbying extremely hard to get it. Plus, they are rolling out things like FiOS, which as a fiber optic line is considered a data service not a telecom service.
In the U.S., the "net neutrality" we took for granted for years was a direct result of the fact that we accessed the Internet over phone lines, and thus it was a common carrier service according to federal law. Now, with cable and fiber access, this protection is largely gone, and a fight for net neutrality protection must be waged.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I'm so glad American politicians are still so tragically moronic regarding tech. Baseband signalling at 1Gbps? Broadband. Broadband signalling at 199kbps? Baseband.
Broadband and a series of tubes!
It's been a long time.
I remember all that stuff as well, along with no school massacres (no forced drugging of kids either), no random checkpoints to stop at, no security cameras, etc. Money was still ..money! Change was real silver and the paper notes were backed by silver. One of my grandmothers still had an icebox and some guy with a horse and wagon delivered the ice. The only place I saw Air Conditioning was at the movies, and it was a big deal, they advertised that as much as the movie title, and a ticket cost a quarter and there were cartoons before the movies, and sometimes those little news trailers. I even remember a 5 cent phone call, although that switched to a dime when I was still a kid,, but I made a few at a nickle.
Ya, no way to predict the future, but I will give it a SWAG anyway (this is where it gets sucky, but I'll call it like I see it).....50 years from now humans will be lucky to have that level technology that we remember as kids, because of the resource wars that will happen and from biological advances being used extensively in warfare. Forget nukes, it's the biobugs that will do in most humans, that and the accidents from "civilian" genetical modding of plants and animals.
Every technology ever invented by man has suffered bad mistakes, crashes, bugs, snafus and whatnot, but doing it with self replicating live organisms will prove to be disastrous when the accidents occur. Our collective arrogance will be the deciding factor "it's just science, stop being a luddite, nothing bad will happen-trust us!"
uh huh, yep...sure
As much as I really like all tech, I know the bad biological accidents and mistakes and on-purpose advanced weapons are coming. As will the 8 billion humans on a one billion human sized planet. Stuff's gonna happen.
In NZ we have old no greater than 7.6mbps broadband (yet they don't say it's 7.6 they say "Maximum as fast as your line allows").
3 21,00.html
Starting price is like $30/month for "Maximum as fast as your line allows" download/128kbps upload at 200mb monthly data (with caps/speed throttles).
And we're in the midst of unbundling the Telecom NZ owned copper wires so hopefully we'll get something more like >8mbps.
here's a link to Telecom's pricing plans. C'est merde! http://jetstream.xtra.co.nz/chm/0,6858,203086-202
signature is pants
Personally I think the two biggest tech advertising nightmares are the difference between bites and bits and the idea that a kilobyte is 1000 bytes and not 1024. If some sort of standard on those two things can be made it'd be much more important.
If this definition was used in Australia, nobody except the small percentage who are on ADSL2+ would have broadband. The fastest 'broadband' you can get here is 512k from what I see.
Back in ~2000 IIRC Australia had 256kbps, 512kbps, and 1.5mbps "broadband" (DSL only - Cable was faster but with incredibly small quotas). A point of discussion was legislation in the United Kingdom where broadband was, by definition, at least 500kbps. Many in Australia today still use the apt substitute of "fraudband". Half a megabit really isn't too "broad" by today's standards.
So the ISPs wouldn't be able to call 600kbps "broadband" anymore. Half the time I hear them they advertise "high speed" anyways. What's the real point of this?
Communication Workers of America pro-consumer?? Since when is a union pro-consumer?? Union members pay their union to advocate for the union members, not consumers.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I am so grateful that this dialogue finally got around to a serious issue. What makes TCP go is the sliding window protocol, and now that memory is cheap, the window should be potentially very wide. At 2400 Baud, 8 buffers might have been an improvement. Our contemporary computers have unimaginable amounts of ram compared to the old days. We should be able to tune up the protocols on that basis and improve the throughput of the network. IMHO
and they used to offer Internet service over both connections, but recently they've dropped support for Cable modems and now only do DSL
If that means you're stuck with ghetto PPPoE-based DSL, then you have my deepest sympathies. That really sucks.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
So the T1 to my house will no longer be considered "broadband"? I guess I should get cable internet instead...
How strange it is to be anything at all
This would mean my local teleco could still charge $60 a month for 512 kpbs DSL, but at least they wouldn't be able to advertise it as "broadband".
Interesting that by this new law, for the first time a T1 would be considered to be NOT BROADBAND.
Folks complain about the "last mile" all they want, but the mindset that a T1 (which used to, not very long ago, be a big enough pipe for an entire college campus!) is not broadband will make me completely change my mindset!