FCC Proposes 100Mbps Minimum Home Broadband Speed

oxide7 writes "The US Federal Communications Commission unveiled a plan on Tuesday that would require Internet providers to offer minimum home connection speeds by 2020, a proposal that some telecommunications companies panned as unrealistic. The FCC wants service providers to offer home Internet data transmission speeds of 100 megabits per second to 100 million homes by a decade from now, Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski said."

Comments

That would be all well and good

[dreamchaser]

That would be all well and good if it were the Government's place to mandate minimum speeds. Frankly I'd rather see them focus on keeping the 'net free and neutral or forcing the telcos to expand broadband coverage like they were supposed to after all the incentives they got. Let market forces deal with bandwidth.

Re:That would be all well and good

[kingjoebob]

"Market Forces" you mean let the ISPs charge whatever they want for poor service and very poor speed and uptime? Market forces only work when there is competition, in my area I got once choice. Besides how long does one have to live in this "Market Economy" to realize that big corps will do whatever they can to make a dollar. It is in their best interest to not upgrade their networks and charge out the nose. Change on this magnitude will only come to the masses if the government mandates it, its always been like that it always will.

Re:That would be all well and good

[whisper_jeff]

Let market forces deal with bandwidth.

Yeah, because that really seems to be working out so far. Clearly the competition between the major providers is pushing them to improve and excel.

Re:That would be all well and good

[poetmatt]

can we please drop the average consumer crap? Usage trends for internet are completely unpredictable even on a year to year basis, age group basis, or otherwise. So when people think DSL speeds are good enough, they're trying to define average consumers. It doesn't exist. This is like saying "the average user isn't a gamer" or "the average user just burns bandwidth on youtube" or "the average user just browses the web and sends email".

Also, 10 years from now 100mbps might be not that different from how dsl is now. Really, we already have 50-100mbps connections available in some areas (slowly becoming less spotty), so 10 years from now might be 300mbps or something. Gigabit routers = non issue there. Heck, everyone has at least a 10/100 router at home which can (and is specced to do so) handle 100mbps.

Re:That would be all well and good

[lwsimon]

Odd - Where I live, 500 yards away, they have 8Mbps cable available for $40/mo. The best I can get is 512Kbps DSL for $85/mo. I offered to pay to have the line run up the hill to my home, and got an easement from the landowner to do so, but was stopped when I discovered that it wasn't legal to extend cable coverage outside the prescribed service area.

Get rid of the government "regulation" on this, and I'd have decent internet in a week.

Re:That would be all well and good

[dintlu]

I see this is a sign that the government is realizing the importance of the internet to the future of commerce and national security.

Minimum speed mandates are the first step towards government-maintained infrastructure. By setting a target the telcos will be unable to reach, and buoying consumer expectations to expect this level of service soon, the door is opened for the government to implement solutions for upgrading or providing a portion of the telecommunications infrastructure themselves.

Frankly the telcos have nobody but themselves to blame. They took taxpayer money and instead of spending it on infrastructure upgrades to keep the US competitive with other nations, they sat on their collective asses raking in record profits while the quality of their networks and their customer satisfaction went to shit. If market forces worked, this would be unnecessary.

Re:That would be all well and good

[cgenman]

1. If you read the presentation, he's actually setting the 100 Mbps as a goal, and sets out some "recommendations" for ways to achieve it. No mandates yet.

2. 100Mbps in 10 years from now ought to be a dawdle. Hell, 100Mbps next week would be possible here if the Fios people would install to my building. Japan's average network speed right now is 50 Mbps. US companies know that it would cost them money to upgrade their infrastructure, and with most markets being historically-defined monopolies or oligopoloys, they have no incentive to compete.

3. Of course it's the government's place to mandate minimum speeds and other standards. What do you think the FCC does? "These frequencies use that standard with that much energy. This telephone exchange uses that protocol with these power standards at that transmission rate." They define "broadband" as minimum 750kbps (ha!). If they want to define the "High-Speed Broadband" label as minimum 100Mbps for clarity's sake, and encourage its adoption, that's exactly what they're there for.

Re:That would be all well and good

[hazydave]

That's an easy one to solve... I'd deal with that in a heatbeat. Find a reasonable neighbor, offer to pay for their interent access if they'll let you set up a wireless link. Plain old 802.11g with a couple of Yagi or "coffee can" directional antennas, and you're good for hundreds of feet. Better with 802.11n, but only if you're wiring for MIMO (2 or 3 antennas at either end, and issues with where they're placed if you're optimizing it).

I actually design radios in my day job, and one such device is a mesh router that can run up to about six miles. I've been really tempted to tap real broadband in neighboring towns... the frequencies used, illegal as hell, unless your're police or the military... but tempting anyway.

Re:That would be all well and good

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

It's a two way street. Consumers do whatever they can to squeeze corps. Corps squeeze consumers.

Money is power. Not having money anywhere on the scale of corporations, individuals have two real options. They can organize into unions and organizations; and put up with the corruption that results from concentrating power, or they can vote and the government gets involved.

The government does not need to get involved, they need to get out of the way by removing the monopoly cable companies enjoy.

The problem is most of the monopolies cable companies enjoy are the result of local and state government interference and of limited resourced apportioned by the feds. The feds not getting involved is tantamount to handing over control to the corporations who have too much money to not influence local governments. Moreover, local governments have good reason to get involved, since their involvement is the result of the disaster that happened when they did not get involved in the early days of power distribution. dozens of redundant lines making the place hideous and resulting in one line falling and taking down dozens of others, bringing everyone down to the reliability of the worst player. Learn your history lest you repeat it.

Sorry, there just isn't enough physical space or EM spectrum. The government either needs to handle data pipes the way they do roads, as a government utility, or they need to build the conduits for the pipes and charge data providers the cost.

because its too hard

[Anonymous Coward]

I like how we Americans think its fine that the rest of the world is surpassing us in everything else, bandwidth included.
World's most powerful nation going at the speed of fail.

We're going to MARS!

[VShael]

This is the IT equivalent of Bush's "We're going to Mars" announcement.

It will be followed by actions which will make it impossible. (The equivalent of cutting Nasa's budget and programs)

So my money is on...reducing competition, letting infrastructure fail, and killing net neutrality for the Trifecta.

Who'll give me Vegas odds on these?

Why complain

[Hatta]

In the mid-90s the Telecom industry was given 200 billion dollars to roll out 45 megabit internet across the country. Nothing ever came of it, and the telecom industry got to pocket that $200 billion.

Sounds to me that the telecoms should know a good thing when they hear it.

cap

[vlm]

Hmmm. 100 megabits/sec. At that rate, my 2 gig cap would be reached in

2000 megabytes * 8 bits/byte / 100 megabits per sec = 160 seconds aka 2 minutes 40 seconds

Re:Google!

[Thinboy00]

It'll only catch up when we unbundle, which will never happen as long as they have lobbyists.

This should have been done years ago

[grandpa-geek]

IEEE-USA has been advocating bi-directional gigabit broadband for several years. The telcos have offered dumbed-down, legacy speeds because they are trying to become more closely associated with the entertainment industry than with telecommunications. The entertainment and other content industries do not want the competition that comes when every subscriber can become an originator.

The failure to mandate that broadband is at least 100 mbps places the US way behind other countries and makes our innovators much less able to develop new concepts in broadband-based applications. That is why Japanese who come to the US are said to feel like they are entering a telecommunications third world.

The FCC is moving to have the US join the developed telecommunications world.

Good!!!

This. A thousand times this.

[Shag]

Basically everyone with a phone in the USA has been paying an extra fee for decades now to fund rollout of broadband to rural areas. Not only have the rural areas not gotten it, even a lot of built-up areas don't have it. In fact, when municipalities have tried to create their own high-speed networks, the telcos have gone so far as to sue to prevent it. Taking $200 billion to do something, then making efforts to prevent that something from even happening? Evil.

I'd like the FCC to ask the telcos where the $200 billion went... and if the telcos want to claim things are impossible, maybe the FCC can ask them to give that $200 billion back, since we all know there's a company (Google) that's chomping at the bit to install super-fast FTTH.

Re:DigiTechGuy

[hazydave]

You must be new here.

The Constitution grants the Federal Government the right to pass laws to deal with some things not specifically addressed in the Constitution, and the States rights to deal with others.

Given that radio waves, much less fiber optic internet, had not yet been discovered in 1787, this is a very clear case in which one needs not simply heed the Constitution, but all of the law built on top of it since.

You may now return to drinking that teabagger kool-aid.