Slashdot Mirror
AT&T Says 10Mbps Is Too Fast For "Broadband," 4Mbps Is Enough
An anonymous reader writes AT&T and Verizon have asked the FCC not to change the definition of broadband from 4Mbps to 10Mbps, contending that "10Mbps service exceeds what many Americans need today to enable basic, high-quality transmissions." From the article: "Individual cable companies did not submit comments to the FCC, but their representative, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), agrees with AT&T and Verizon. 'The Commission should not change the baseline broadband speed threshold from 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream because a 4/1 Mbps connection is still sufficient to perform the primary functions identified in section 706 [of the Telecommunications Act]—high-quality voice, video, and data,' the NCTA wrote."
The US is 22nd in the world for broadband speed.. Latvia and Romania are ahead of us.
TFS mentions high quality video. You're not streaming high quality video with 10 or even 20Mbps.
Netflix recommends 5Mbps for HD streaming, so you are wrong.
I live in the middle of the UK.
Just tried speedtest.net and I got:
ping 9ms
download 61.98Mbps
upload 3.04Mbps
This is Virgin Broadband using fiberoptic to the home.
Now I realise that some Americans think Europe is one huge socialist hell, but the monopolistic behavior of American ISPs to define the market by their own capability or inability is just jaw-droppingly bad.
And before anyone criticizes me, I like America a lot.
Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
Using Blu-ray as the "gold" standard, you will often see h264 streams in the 15-30Mbps range with peaks at just over 40Mbps (audio and video combined).
I've seen Netflix streams in full 1080p hit 7-9Mbps.
VUDU's HDX format will hit 10Mbps fairly regularly. They're the highest quality service I've used to date.
These services don't match physical media quality yet in an effort to work with as many users as possible. When I can stream multiple Blu-ray quality movies at once (not uncommon for a family to stream 2 or more videos to different rooms) I'll consider broadband infrastructure as "sufficient". Until then, there's plenty of room for improvement.
Where I live I could purchase service with 90 down and 9 up. Assuming I could fully utilize that (and I highly doubt I actually could which is why I've not upgraded), that could just barely do 3 Blu-ray quality streams. Not bad! However, I live in the middle of a large city, so I don't consider my options typical. I've also experienced plenty of nights where the 20Mbps service I do have is fighting upstream congestion and can't even pull 3Mbps from any video service. Not sure adding 70 more Mbps to my apartment is going to alleviate that.
So, 5Mbps will get you an average quality 720p stream. We can do better.
Since I didn't link to it before... Here is the average speed of a given stream to the end user for August 2014 in the US: http://ispspeedindex.netflix.c...
Cablevision tops the list at a meer 3.11 Mbps...
Verizon DSL holds the bottom at 1.31 Mbps...
If you average those it is 2.21 Mbps as the mid point for US streaming speed...
Google numbers are very area specific, or I'd link to those as well.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
I disagree. Can't remember the article, but somewhere recenly there was an article talking about the average web page size these days being about 1.7M, with 1M of that being images.
Try using a metered service sometime like a prepaid hotspot with 3G or above. You can blow through 100M easily in half an hour just looking at news sites with no video, just images and text.
Your apparent point, that ISP rates are proportional to population density, is also wrong. Remote areas of Finland and Sweden have very low population density, yet still have more bandwidth and better prices than some large American cities.
Norway here, I just have to gloat a little, since our numbers just spiked (Norwegian) last quarter.
US population density: 32.43 pop./km^2
Norway population density: 15.6 pop./km^2
80,1% of households have fixed broadband
Mean speed: 23.1 Mbit/s
Median speed: 17.8 Mbit/s
No caps on fixed broadband
A few select areas already have gigabit, more are rolling out as new fiber nodes are ready while the old are mostly 100 Mbit/s. Actually one company has said they'll deliver 10 gigabit if anyone is willing to pay ($2300/month) but nobody's taken them up on that offer. If I won big in the lottery that'd be on my list though, lol.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
To add a bit to this:
Sweden alone is slightly larger than California, and less than a third of the population of California. Or, to compare with the US east coast: Take all of New England, and New York(the state), and Pennsylvania, then add roughly 4k km2 from another state, and you have Sweden. You have a large portion of people in some major metropolitan areas... And then there's a lot of people spread just about everywhere.
But Sweden has done a heavy investment into municipal and some nationwide infrastructure that companies can rent into to provide service, to the point that you can get fiber connections in places where no US ISP would even think about it.
Such as this place: http://goo.gl/maps/XYkNZ
In that little village almost as far north as you can go in Sweden, with a population of around 300, you can get 100Mb/s symmetrical at a fairly decent price, even by Swedish standards.