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."

Comments

Sorry guys, but you are full of shit

[Sycraft-fu]

If you asked them not to change the definition because "broadband" technically refers to how data is transferred (10gbit ethernet is not broadband, despite the speed, it is baseband) then ok, you can be cpt pedantic.

However this is just you lying. 4mbps is not "enough" for the modern Internet. Currently I find the breakpoint to be about 20mbps. That is the point after which normal users won't notice much, if any, improvement. As such, that is my baseline for recommendation to people. 10mbps is serviceable I guess, but is a pain for video streaming. 4mbps would be a real issue, even low bandwidth streams wouldn't work well.

The minimum needs to keep rising. We keep finding more to do with our net connections. These companies are just whiny because they don't want to have to roll out FTTH, they want to keep doing DSL and pretending like that works.

Demographic

[Austerity Empowers]

4/1 is sufficient for my 2 year old daughter, my dead grandmother, and my cat who mostly just wants to chase the mouse around the screen. Pretty much everyone ELSE in the house wants more than that.

AT&T wants to sell the fantasy that people who want more bwidth really just want UVerse TV, not internet bandwidth. Which is false, anti-competitive and in a more rational world would involve lining them up against a wall and allowing "many americans" to stone them.

Re:Demographic

[Seumas]

You'll notice that whenever companies engage in discussions about this sort of thing, they seem to be talking about households of one person. I have no idea how 10MBPS would suffice in a house of, say, four people. If two people are watching HQ videos (netflix, youtube, etc), that's easily 8-10mbps *minimum*. Figure the other two are listening to music and playing online games and maybe you have a guest who is using skype or something... bandwidth just doesn't go very far in today's world, unless you're living like it's still the late 90s as far as your entertainment consumption and communication.

Billions of dollars are at stake

[Anonymous Coward]

If the lower limit for the definition of "broadband" is increased to 10Mbps downloads, half the country currently receiving broadband as required by the Universal Service Fund will suddenly require massive capital improvements to upgrade service in remote areas. This has a knock-on effect for other ISPs advertising higher download speeds, which become a lesser value proposition when the minimum speed is raised.

Why aren't there versions

[ediron2]

Why all this silliness on a moving target. Much like USB 1, 2, and 3, network 'Category' notation and in a human-oriented alternative to the acronym soups for SCSI, PCI and other communication protocols WHY THE HELL AREN'T WE PUSHING FOR a standard that can keep pace and inform users trivially/ steadily:

• B1 - roadband 1 - More than 250Kbps down, 150Kbps up.
• B2 - Broadband 2 - More than 4Mbps down, 500Kbps up
• B3 - Broadband 3 - More than 10Mbps down, 2Mbps up
• ... etc, as time dictates.

Or some other ranges. I don't care about these specific numbers. I just hate that an ISP thinks they deserve to control the definition.

What AT&T says to the consumer..

[Anonymous Coward]

The internet services offered from AT&T's website. Note that 6Mbps/3Mbps "is perfect for general Web surfing and emailing" While 12/18/24 Mbps is "for general Web use, as well as streaming music and video, downloading movies, surfing, and social media."

So AT&T, why do you say one thing to consumers and another to the FCC?

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Re:We really need

[heypete]

American expat in Switzerland here. Using Speedtest.net I get 246.08/15.21 Mbps. I pay the cable company the equivalent of $98 USD/month for 250/15 internet service (no data caps) and cable TV (my wife likes watching US sports, so we have the "all-inclusive" TV package that includes some US sports channels). I originally had the 35/5 plan, but upgraded to the 150/10. They discontinued that plan and switched me to the 250/15 plan, which was only $5/month more.

If I wasn't satisfied with them, Swisscom (major telco) and the electric company each offer fiber-to-the-home, with up to 1000/100 speeds and no caps. There's other options for DSL too, but not nearly as fast.

Comcast, a major US ISP, has a comparably-priced plan that goes from $89/month for the first year to $119/month for the second year and then up to $148/month thereafter. They offer a bunch of TV channels and 25 Mbps internet, plus data caps. That's absurdly awful.

As an American, I find it ridiculous that wholesale bandwidth in the US (e.g. connectivity in a datacenter) is dirt cheap and fast (as an example, Hurricane Electric offers 10GigE transit for $0.45/Mbps) but that retail bandwidth available to end-users is so expensive, slow, and limited by data caps and the like. Things really need to change.

Re:Seriously?

[spire3661]

The upload speed is criminal. If they want to keep it at 4 Mbps, at least force them to make it symmetrical. However, I disagree 4 is sufficient. 100 mbps symmetrical should be the ground floor we shoot for.

Meanwhile. . .

[kimvette]

Meanwhile, other providers are testing 10_G_bps FTTD (fibre to the desktop) for deployment, because they see the future isn't in cable TV but in providing TCP/IP (Internet, basically) connectivity. That is 10x the bandwidth any one PC you can buy off the shelf can handle without adding in a 10GbE server network card. Yes, ten GIGABITS PER SECOND over epon/dpon.

AT&T and Comcrap are just whining and clawing because they know the future is here (streaming video on demand from providers that are NOT THEM) and they don't want it. They should do what my employer is doing and embrace the ISP side of the business as their meat and potatoes and treat cable video as gravy. Cable TV is not only a zero-growth industry, but a dying industry.