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Broadband Data Improvement Act Clears Committee
MBCook writes "Ars Technica is reporting that the Broadband Data Improvement Act has left committee with a unanimous vote. Among the changes proposed are requiring the definition of 'second generation broadband' (enough to carry HDTV) instead of the current definition of broadband as 200Kbps, and aggregating the data by ZIP+4 instead of just the full ZIP code. The act can now move to the full Senate."
"This bill was written solely to upset the current relatively free market of broadband. "
Because we have an aggressively pro-competition regulating agency in France, you have a dozen way to get broadband in most cities. And you basically can't get anything below ADSL2+ those days.
At the moment I pay 29 euros a month for 24/1Mbps, HDTV service, and free international phone (analog and voip). They also provide me with a free router, Wifi AP, HDTV PVR set top box and analog telephone adaptor.
No cap on data, no filtering whatsoever, no shaping. Quality of service is good, and has been improving steadily. You have the occasional day long outage (two last years, none this year so far), but other than that downloading speeds are stable and pretty much max out my line 24/7.
And the reason for this is that ARCEPT has been given a lot of power to enforce competition in the broadcast market. None of those services are subsidised. They haven't been so successful with cellphone, OTOH. But they're working on it.