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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
... lower the bar
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
It is in the FCC's interest to keep lowering the speed required for something to be classified as "broadband". This allows a greater percentage of the country to have "broadband saturation" and thus, it makes the FCC look like they are doing a great job.
These distortions of statistics are already used by the government to great effect in other areas, such as unemployment and GDP, and the public eat it up.
I used to limp along with a standard 28.8K modem; but now with my US Robotics 56K V.92 broadband-enhanced supermodem, I cruise along the Information Superhighway at a blazing 56Kbps! Thanks Comcast!
#DeleteChrome
Trying to educate the masses about the difference between "baseband" "broadband" and "wideband" is pretty much useless at this point, IMHO.
Every industry does this, including my own. It costs less money to pay off politicians or lobbyists than to upgrade the system. My company pays our lobbyists to modify the laws to favor our system vs the competitors. Politicians listen to the lobbyists because it is easier than doing the research themselves, and the only thing we can do is a massive grass roots effort to make things better. I've got to say that I'm just too lazy to start another one of those. Why can't I just elect someone to take care of these things?
Just like the agribusinesses trying to change the definition of "organic" so they can cash in on the trend.
Whatever happened to actually making a good product and letting quality do the heavy lifting on the marketing end? I know sometimes a company is left selling a shit sandwich but it seems like these companies go out of their way to turn their products and services into a shit sandwich before they sell them. It's like these companies are all run by secret coprophages and they're spreading the love.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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!
We've already done a great job at butchering the term anyway. Most usage doesn't correspond with reality.
(if you can't complain about this kind of stuff on a website billing itself as "news for nerds", where can you complain?)
But it just goes to show that carriers feel no need to compete. Most of us have no ability to choose the products we want from them, and with Uncle Sam's help, they can keep us from seeing how lame they really are.
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.
BROADband?
The term's already been redefined. Breadth - despite popular misconception - has little or no direct bearing on network speed.
Sometimes unreliable, the Wikipedia entry on the term "Broadband" is fairly enlightening on the topic - particularly in defining both the term, and its various relative contexts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
http://images.wolfgangsvault.com/images/catalog/detail/RS375-RS.jpg
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
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.
My mom, who lives less than a mile from a local telco's central office, can't get DSL because they don't care to install broadband-capable equipment in her neighborhood. She's just an ignorant rube who doesn't need all that fancy stuff, unlike the AT&T CEO who undoubtedly needs YouTube to download the daily neurosurgery lessons that fill his Renaissance mind, and who needs Skype to talk to his kids who can't afford telephone service.
Know what? Very, very few people need broadband to their house. However, I bet many people want to fully participate in modern society, but are missing the Internet revolution altogether because it's painful over dialup. To hell with Comcast and AT&T for presuming the right to decide which of their customers need certain services, largely basing such decisions on the customers' zip codes.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
An ISP in our area is advertising their Internet connection speed by claiming it is "Fasterizer". They hope that term will confuse the clueless into thinking that their .V92 or tier 1 DSL service is as fast as my 10Mb/s cable connection.
21st Century business is all about three things: lying, stealing and bribing Congress with campaign contributions to make those actions legal. I suspect that they are redefining decades old terms & understandings simply so they can justify a large increase it their rate structure for the same old service.
Fifteen years ago the cable and telcos bribed Congress into outlawing local communities from filling in the service gap the private sector was ignoring: a high speecd fiber optic internet connection that would be a public utility. After recieving $200M from Congress to "finish the job", they promptly pocketed the money and forgot the rest. Congress failed to include a non-performance penalty, so they had nothing to lose by just stealing the money. Had the telcos & cable companies had any ethics the average US internet connection would be 20Mb/s or more and costing less than $30/month. Can't build any multi-million dollar luxury homes in the Bahamas at those rates.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Nobody could expect us to keep up in education or communications with the prime movers of the Technology Universe, Japan and South Korea. It's just not realistic. We should be happy that our roads are paved and are children is learning.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
In Hungary, T-online has announced today that they're rolling out 80mbit FTTH to 180-200k subscribers by the end of the year. (This is a country of 10M).
They've also changed the minimum package from 2 to 5mbit, bumped up the non-fibre/vdsl package to 15mbit and drastically increased the minimum guaranteed bandwidth to 1mbit for the 5mbit connection and to 5mbit for the 15mbit connection.
Personally, I pay 50 EUR / mo for IPTV and 33mbit VDSL. I do not consider anything below 8mbit "broadband" these days.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
The term's already been redefined. Breadth - despite popular misconception - has little or no direct bearing on network speed.
You're confused. The term comes from the mathematical and engineering field called "Information Theory". The key result is called the "Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem", which relates the amount of information a certain amount of spectrum (band width) can carry.
Guess what: 2.4GHz signals can only carry so much information. DSL signals are band limited (that is, there is an upper bound on the frequencies at which DSL modems operate). So are cable modems.
Your link explains this much, so I am not sure why you're confused.
When I subscribed back in 1999, Verizon only offered 768k down/128k up, and the CIR was 16 Kbps bidirectional. That's right -- they promised that my connection would be at least almost half as fast as a 33.6K modem. Except, of course, when it wasn't working.
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.
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
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.
But he's right in spirit. True that larger frequency bands give you more of a particular type of capacity to work with (though it is definitely not the only factor that determines data rate, much less information rate), but broadband the way it's used today is just a marketing or political term. It probably sounds just technical enough to seem modern and hip while being generic enough that providers can throw it around at will. It might as well not mean anything at all now, which I guess is why they seem to be trying to attach some particular data rate to it. You could replace it with "fastiness" and have just as much technical relevance.
Greetings and Salutations.
If we do nothing but whine about it, there will be no reason for the FCC to NOT bow to the desires of their corporate overlords. So...below is a quote of the comment I just sent to the FCC via their comment page:
http://esupport.fcc.gov/askfccapp/extapp/submitMsg.action?dept_id=bband
If the bureaucrats are slashdotted with comments against this, it MAY be enough to not only halt this foolish move, but, get them to RAISE the definition of broadband speed to something "reasonable".
I often wonder why it is that so many other countries can get much faster broadband speeds, at MUCH lower costs than Americans? It could not be because of corporations striving to such as much money out of our pockets for the shareholders, instead of trying to provide the best service possible at the lowest cost now could it?
regards
Dave Mundt
Greetings and Salutations.
I see that there is a push by some broadband providers to LOWER the definition to 1/3 of its current minimum, from 768 mb/s to 256 mb/s. I have to strongly urge that this action NOT be taken, but, rather, that the minimum broadband speed either be left alone, or, preferably raised to 1500 mb/s.
While it may be to the economic advantage of some of these companies to drop the lower limit, there is no benefit and several likely costs and downsides for the consumer. For example:
1) By lowering the minimum speed, it will allow the providers to change their rate structure, increasing the cost for "higher" broadband speeds - so what is an already high cost today will simply increase, likely causing many Americans to have to downgrade their service.
2) Over the past several years the Internet has changed radically in the content available to the browser. It has gone from websites being mainly unadorned text with a few, small pictures, to websites that are very content heavy with much hidden control information sent to the browser, allowing font changes, large images, animations, and other content-rich presentations.
3) The types of content available to the browser have also changed radically in the past few years. Such services as streaming audio and/or video, voice over IP, etc, have made the Internet a much more useful tool for the consumer. However, these technologies will not work at any acceptable level if the minimum broadband speed is dropped below its current levels.
4) Since consumer grade broadband service in the United States is, typically, a "best effort" service offered by the providers, even today there are many cases where the consumer is paying for 1500 mb/s service, but, in reality is receiving much slower speeds, sometimes as low as the 256 mb/s speed that the providers are pushing for. I am sure that, if this lower limit is allowed, then, consumers will quickly see their "broadband" speeds dropping down to the 50 mb/s area, which is no better than the dial-up speeds available with standard modems from the 1980s.
For these and other reasons, I would strongly urge the FCC to refuse to drop the lower communication rates defining broadband, and, instead, would urge that they be raised to the suggested 1500 mb/s.
respectfully
Dave Mundt
YAB - http://blog.beemandave.com/