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Major ISPs Seek To Lower Broadband Definition
denobug sends word that major internet service providers in the US are seeking to redefine the term 'Broadband' to mean a much lower speed than in other developed nations. In recent filings with the FCC, Comcast and AT&T both came out in support of a reduced minimum speed. 'AT&T said regulators should keep in mind that not all applications like voice over internet protocol (VoIP) or streaming video, that require faster speeds, are necessarily needed by unserved Americans.' On the other hand, Verizon argued to maintain the status quo, saying that 'It would be disruptive and introduce confusion if the commission were to now create a new and different definition.' A public interest group called Free Press also filed comments with the FCC, recommending that the bar should be set significantly higher, and evolve in a way that corresponds with technological improvements.
What I got from reading my Verizon DSL service agreement was that they were making no warranty at all concerning the actual throughput on my line, regardless of the advertised speed. And they wonder why I don't want to subscribe to FIOS, which seems to have the same disclaimer. It would be interesting to know if other countries' ISPs commit to provide the advertised throughput.
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell
What ever happened to quality? What ever happened to people, and companies, recognising that lower cost came at the expense of higher quality? What ever happened to production and purchasing being an optimisation problem with price, quality, speed and other factors thrown into the mix?
All I see nowadays is price, price, price. Price is everything. All encompassing, all considering and the sole and only consideration in nigh every walk of life. Companies are gouging their businesses in order to save pennies whilst their products stagnate or regress. Consumers care not for long term value or even short term utility as price is the first and last arbiter in their purchase decisions.
ISPs in the US seek to redefine broadband because they want their packages to be treated like commodities; like wheat and coffee beans. You don't care where the bean comes from, they're all the same. So you buy the cheapest one. If all internet connection packages are "broadband", can you guess what people are going to do? ISPs aren't the only industry that wants to do this, or indeed that is doing it.
Is anyone nowadays interesting in something more than getting, or providing, the cheapest deal. Is there room left nowadays for an ISP that seeks to provide the fastest and widest piplines for people that are willing to pay that much extra. I know I would be. But is that how our society works anymore? Did it ever work like that? Is there simply no room for companies that don't cater to misers? Should we really be blaming the ISPs here, or should we be blaming ourselves?
May the Maths Be with you!
My suggestion to the FCC was for symmetrical bandwidth to be included in the definition. You can't really have cloud-based services, if you can't effectively move data to the cloud.
I'd personally also like to see a 10Mb/s lower bound. This is 2009 after all, and the telecoms have already been paid for 45Mb/s symmetrical bandwidth to everyone.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
AT&T said regulators should keep in mind that not all applications like voice over internet protocol (VoIP) or streaming video, that require faster speeds,
So AT&T says that VoIP requires "faster speeds". Even using G.711 (i.e., uncompressed toll-quality), and including the overhead of the other layers, VoIP requires only ~120kbps. The thing about VoIP is not that it requires high speed, but that it requires low latency.
Once upon a time the string "AT&T" stood for some kind of technical excellence. So, for that matter, did the string "FCC". Now I just want to go hide in a cave while they play their various spin games.
This allows the !@#$%&'s to scale back the amount of infrastructure they need to build out to serve their customers, while still charging everyone exorbitant prices for simple text messages and keep on making a killing for their shareholders. ??? Profit!
F'em.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Dude, you're seriously confused. EVERY signaling system uses multiple frequencies at the same time.
Look up the Shannon-Nyquist Sampling theorem. It establishes that any signal over a single channel is limited by the width of the band that signal can transmit. In particular, you can send less than half as many samples per second as the channel is wide, in hertz.
Telephone modems do NOT use multiple connections. They use a single channel, about as wide as the voice frequencies. DSL does better, pushing the band width (literally the width of the band) up to a few megahertz.
The reason ethernet is faster than a telephone line is merely that the engineering implicit in the ethernet standards (less than 100m cables at the like) ensure that the band used is wide. Things like "inductance" lower a circuit's response to high frequency inputs.
After all, I am strangely colored.
And irrelevant to what we're talking about, which is consumer high-speed internet offerings that have commonly become known as "broadband". I.e., it's a different meaning to the technical term, deal with it.
Surely the job of any US government "internet quango" would be to mandate a continual year-on-year improvement in "broadband speeds", in terms of urban, extra-urban, and rural locations.
I.e., right now you could have: 10/2 for urban, 5/1 for extra-urban, and 2/0.2 for rural. In two years time that could be 50/5, 20/2 and 4/0.5. You would then have a driving force to improve offerings and ensure that something besides "market forces, aka corporate stagnation once they think things are good enough" drove the development of internet service provision.
Comcast wants the FCC to match OCED in defining broadband at 256kbps download. The FCC has previously defined broadband at 200kbps in either direction; in March 2009 they voted to change the lower limit to 768kbps and call the lowest tier "basic broadband". 200kbps to 768kbps is supposed to be called "first generation data". http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9898118-7.html
The rollout of the new definition does not seem to be going well, as recent FCC documents are continuing to use old definitions. From september 2009: http://www.fcc.gov/Forms/Form477/477inst.pdf
Check out http://www.wired.com/gadgets/miscellaneous/magazine/17-09/ff_goodenough It explains why price has become more important than quality to most people. Even if you don't agree with it, it is a good read.
Grammer Nazis - I mod you "troll" unless you actually add something on-topic. Yes, I know I have mispellings in my sig.
Sometimes installing broadband capable equipment in the neighborhood is a lot more expensive and complex than it may seem.
I'm not a telco master, but I have a legitimately acquired SWB CO badge. I know exactly how expensive and complex it is. For the record, I'm guessing that her physical connection is pretty decent, judging by the fact that I can get a 53K dialup connection from her house. You don't normally max out a 56K modem over a pair gain.
Technical issues aside, my first complaint is that they didn't give infrastructure issues as the problem, but are claiming that there's not a need for this expansion. My second complaint is that we've been giving gigadollars to LECs to build out these troublesome areas. Where'd it go? My mom lives a mile outside a city of a quarter million people. If they can't manage to use their money to extend service to someone as relatively close as she is, then there's something wrong.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
In most of New Mexico, comcast sells "high speed internet" as 6Mb/sec and above. they also sell 1Mb/sec internet. The funny thing is, that betwwen 6pm and 12pm, no one gets even 1Mb/sec sustained. So basically the term means " would you like to pay double for no extra speed?". Redefining it down makes sense to me since that is how it is now,
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The one thing that still bugs me is just they still use those bits-per-second thingy.
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