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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 The view of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications is that the FCC's data collection standards are hopelessly outdated, and is proposing a number of updates to their criteria.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.'"
10Mbytes? Why stop there? Fiber will give you 30 easily. The infrastructure upgrade to handle all those 30Mbyte end user connections, but that can be done over years. It won't be long before wireless will be competing successfully with DSL and making dialup seem a bad value.
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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.
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.
That's why it's handy to have a decent gateway which can prioritize TCP ACKs. If they get lost in the muddle your download speeds get hurt. It's covered here. (I link to the OpenBSD pages as that's what I use)
Trolling is a art,
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.
They do the same thing here in Sweden, they say you'll get 24Mbit broadband (DSL) but the uplink is only 1Mbit. Most people only use the Internet for webbrowsing but more and more use it for VoIP, 1Mbit up is awfully slow when you use services like that.
I currently have a 100/100Mbit Internet connection, but they're offering up to 1Gbit in other parts of my city. They won't really get 1Gbit but certainly somewhere around 400Mbit.
For it to be called broadband I think the bandwidth should have to be symmetric, or at least 2:1.
And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
John 8:32(King James Version)
The phone company still has to sell local loops. What was taken away was having to share a loop that they were providing service over. So you can get things like Speakeasy's Oneline service, it just costs about $10/month more than if it was provided on the same loop as you local phone service.
The other stupid change that was made at some point was not allowing CLECs to share the fiber from a CO to a remote terminal. They can get access to the copper loops going from the terminal to people's homes, but they have to pay a lot of money to run their own fiber to make the copper of any value to them.
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.