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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."
F your ISPs in the US and F your corrupted "FCC"
to emulate the South Koreans and the French. The Internet is now a sold part of daily life. We should be getting the speeds the Koreans and some Europeans countries get for about what they pay. Yes, I know there are variables, but the Internet should ideally be a non-profit venture.
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.
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.
'And it comes with an optional 10 mega byte hard drive! What could you possible do with all that space!?!" A quote someone actually said to me about the original IBM PC. (ya, i'm old).
Give anyone 4 mbps connection who is living in an area that still has dialup as their only option, and ask them if its broadband. If someone works to bring 4/1 mbps connections to more areas, they should be able to advertise it as broadband.
The US is 22nd in the world for broadband speed.. Latvia and Romania are ahead of us.
I think $200k top salary including bonuses far exceeds what many CEO's need for living a basic high quality life. Any more than that would just be wasted on blow and hookers.
Broadband was originallymeant to refer to the signal properties and not the actual speed. Another term used would be wideband. Generally the wider the signal (frequency range), the faster it would be. Go back a few generations of technology and you can see where having dialup would not be broadband, but ISDN and T1 connections would be. The latter would use multiple channels to achieve a greater bandwidth by bonding frequency ranges together. This is more likely the definition AT&T is going by from an engineering standpoint and not a marketing standpoint.
I'm lucky, I have two choices for Broadband in my area, AT&T which delivers 6 mbps service (with an actual throughput of 4.2 mbps) and I can get Comcast service which delivers 50 mbps service with an actual throughput of 70 mbps ... though service fails intermittently (outages haven't been too bad for the last few months ... knocking on wood as I type that).
Both cost about the same monthly. So I will continue to hold my AT&T stock because of the obvious profit margin, but I will buy Comcast service for my household. I have AT&T VOIP landlines so I also pay the extra to have the AT&T DSL (no U-Verse for us) as a backup for those Comcast outages.
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.
When you put an asterick in small text next to it with a footnote that says "assuming that they'll find our TV and movie rental options acceptable and will never want to use Hulu, Netflix, etc."
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:
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.
I use a 28.8 modem from Telix to post on slashdot using Lynx on my DOS machine with 640k of memory and it's blazing fast. Now that's what I call broadband. Should be good enough for anyone.
We'll make great pets
FCC: We're redefining what constitutes "high speed broadband", as the current description is about 10 years old.
TelcomLobby: We're good with what we have now.
FCC: Unfortunately no. Your networks haven't really grown in capacity for the end-user in several years now. And by the new definitions, your service won't qualify as "high speed".
TelcomLobby: We're good with what we have now.
FCC: No, that's what we're telling you, you're not.
TelcomLobby: Uh. Can we just bribe you not to make this change? It might affect our killer bottom line!
While I don't own a gun, it's times like these I wish I fucking did.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
4Mbps = 400KB per second. Which means that the connection could transfer the entire contents of a personal computer's memory (640K) in less than two seconds.
Where I live I have one option other than AT&T, and they cost more for less speed. Instead of defining broadband I think we need to ensure there is competition for ISP's from other ISP's .
Here in Paris (France), we have 1Gbps for less than 30€ (including phone and tv).
http://www.free.fr/adsl/freebox-revolution.html for example.
I just cannot imagine to go back to such turtle speeds you are taking about...
Where this would hit then is in advertising and semantics. Their competitors would be able to advertise "we are the only broadband provider in your area! Call now". That would hurt them.
He'd let us know 640kb/s is enough for anyone.
Korea is now getting 8000 Mb/S, which is like 200x faster than 4mb/s.
I thought we were supposed to be a first world country. Why can't we compete with Korea?
God spoke to me
Not only is 4/1 not nearly enough, it needs to be symmetrical. 20/20 is just barely servicable for a household. 100/100 would be adequate, but 1000/1000 should be the standard. These companies want to stay at 4/1 so they don't have to "waste" any of their cocaine/hooker money on infrastructure.
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?
http://www.att.com/u-verse/shop/index.jsp
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If your an ISP filing FCC form 477 broadband **CURRENTLY** means the following:
Broadband Connection: A wired line or wireless channel that terminates at an end-user location
and enables the end user to receive information from and/or send information to the Internet at
information transfer rates exceeding 200 kbps in at least one direction.
While I don't have much of an opinion about definitions... 4Mbps vs 10Mbps there needs to be consistency throughout. The FCC should not get to pick and chose what broadband means based on where in law/rules the term is used.
Why change the definition? 4 is more than enough to use the Internet and every single one of its major features. I do not even understand why it would currently be 4? As far as I am concerned, this broad post dial-up technology we use is all broadband, regardless of if you have a 1MB connection or a 1GB connection.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
This is simple to determine -- The FCC jsut gets all the CEO's of the companies in question into a room and put them under oath. Then ask them what the bandwidth is to their personal residence and that becomes the definition of "Broadband" for that company. If it's good enough for the CEO's family then it should be good enough for their customers. And if investigative work proves they are getting all "weasel-like" using mifi or something to supplement, then they must do 5x what they claimed before.
Should be enough for anyone . . .
6mbps is about as good as it gets. That's what Youtube and Netflix use for 1080p stuff. So that is the standard you need to worry about for streaming in general. Yes, I know that Blu-ray is higher bitrate, but little if anything streams at that rate. For the web, 6mbps is "high quality". You might not care for that definition, but it is what it is.
Most people here are going to scream, but I work with telcos. There are some really difficult last miles out there. This definition determines federal funding for mass broadband. If it becomes too costly because the definition is too hard to obtain for remote users, then they are just going to stop caring. As far as most slashdot users are concerned, there's enough competition to let capitalism do it's thing. Where this *definition* REALLY comes into play is the minimalist declaration for what someone needs to be a part of the connected world. We still have a lot of work to be done at 4/1 in more rural areas before we can start screaming about 10 being the minimum. Oh and YES, at 480p which is a fine minimalist (twats shut up now) resolution, you could have 2 or 3 streaming sessions, and HEVC is only going to help. Stop being so selfish yo!
DSL or cable depends upon your needs and where you live. I dumped comcast for DSL 18 months ago for DSL because the price of DSL is 15% of what I paid comcast. I have noticed no difference based upon my needs. Per speakeasy my download speed is 6.39Mbps (upload 0.8). So I guess I am ahead of the game, glad comcast/AT&T and all agree with my decision. So no need to go back to comcast since they reaffirmed my decision. (note: comcast is only cable provider in my area)
How can we mandate that AT&T executives must not drive faster than 45mph, which is as fast as you need to go to get basic transportation?
Right now, the transfer rate for 1080p blu-ray is a maximum of 40 Mb/s, so that should be defined as broadband download.
When 4K becomes a de facto standard, it should be increased to 150-200 Mb/s.
The FCC should be given the authority to regulate the terms: high speed, low speed, and medium speed for internet connections.
They should currently designate it:
HIGH SPEED: > 100 Mbs
MEDIUM SPEED: (10 Mbs, 100 Mbs)
LOW SPEED: 10 Mbs
ISPs should not be allowed to use any other qualitative terms to describe the speed of the connection.
If an ISP does not provide 10% of their download stream as upload bandwidth, they should be required to drop down to the next tier (for example, 200 Mb/s download with a 5 Mb/s upload should be described as "medium speed".
The whole "high speed broadband" term is archaic. It goes back to the day where ISDN (64-128 Kbs) or better (basically anything faster than dialup) was "high speed".
You should not be able to describe internet as high speed unless the speed is high enough for the most demanding consumer tasks, such as blu-ray streaming.
What gets me is 10 Mbps is not fast.
We already have 2 ports with 100 GB/s and campuswide have many 40 GB/s ports here at the UW.
We're running Internet 2.
Not the slow backwards Third World internet that thinks 10 Mbps is fast, a speed that Japan and S Korea had A DECADE AGO.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I max out my 75Mbps on a daily basis. I could, of course, live with a bit less, but significantly less and I'd need to find other solutions to some usage areas. For example, I upload full hard drive images to online storage as backups. It takes a good while already at 75Mbps. If I visit someone to watch a movie, I don't bring a selection of Blu-ray discs, I bring my Chromecast and stream a Blu-ray image from my media center at home. That's typically 30-40Mbps. I tried to upgrade my subscription, but it turns out I'll need to wait until my provider upgrades the local switch to gigabit.
I'm not saying my usage is representative of the average home user. But I would still say that 10Mbps is the absolute minimum to qualify as "broadband" today. Broadband didn't use to mean "an Internet connection", but rather "really fast Internet connection". At 10Mbps you can barely stream HD at reasonable quality, something I would say should be considered a normal use case today.
"They" are not Comcast/cable who can provide 10Mbps or higher universally. AT&T and Verizon are stuck with copper line DSL in certain geographies. Even with ADSL2+, the best "they" can "reliably" advertise is 6Mbps.
I say let them have "broadband". The marketing types only have to invent another term, e.g. wideband, ultraband, fastband... speaking of which perhaps I should get out a trademark :)
I agree that 4mbps is generally "good enough" if that's the minimum. But often ISP's make their stated numbers the average, meaning sometimes you may get 2mbps, which is crap, especially for Youtube. (Note that posted videos have been growing in resolution of late, so current metrics may not be worth much soon).
Thus, a compromise may be to require it be at least 4mbps say 95% of the time to qualify as Broadband.
Table-ized A.I.
Well, that's what Google said, but super & ultra are probably different (by a factor of a few thousand pixels?). Either way, it's not enough to do data concurrently with it, let alone ATSC-quality television.
Sure. I routinely transfer stuff with a rate of several megabtyes per second. Ignoring overhead, 4mbps would get me 0.5MB/s at most, and that's down. Upload would be 1/4 of that!!!
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Steam says hello.
Games are large, these days, and I for one enjoy being able to download what I just bought at a reasonable speed.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I'm not sure where you getting mobile out of this -- AT&T is talking about wireline service. They think 10 Mbps is too fast to be counted as wireline broadband.
It's also unclear why you feel entitled to make everyone use the Internet the same way you do.
On their websites they tried to encourage users to pay for the higher speed connections by saying they provide the speeds necessary for streaming video, video conferencing, and video games.
Interestingly enough, I checked to make sure I wasn't putting my foot in my mouth and it appears AT&T changed the way they advertise broadband on their site. I guess they were smart enough to change it so they don't look like giant hypocrites but that's clearly the way they had it set up less than a year ago when I was shopping around for an ISP. It now shows all the tiers and how many seconds it takes for "YouTube, MP3, Video" but it previously showed the lower tier and gave examples of what it could do (Facebook, browse basic internet sites), then the middle tier (stream music, YouTube), and the high tier (video chat, video games, stream HD content). It was a load of shit b/c you could do all those high tier things with the middle tier and probably even the low tier, but I find it interesting they've changed their tune.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
AT&T and Verizon's (FIOS aside) main offerings are stuck at around 6mb/s. This change would mean that all of virtually all of AT&T's residential service and Verizion's non-FIOS residential service would fall out of the broadband category. Neither company wants to spend money on any infrastructure if they don't have to so keeping the status quo definition will save them billions of dollars.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
"They" are not "stuck" with anything, including copper. "They" have the option of rolling out next-gen fiber or HFC just like Big Cable. What's that "they" say? "That" wouldn't be economically viable? Then maybe "they" should have been doing something besides stealing subsidies and pocketing every dime of profit for the last two decades rather than letting their plant rot into oblivion. If "they" were in charge of infrastructure in a first-world country, "they" would be in prison for breach of contract, embezzlement, and neglecting/sabotaging critical national infrastructure.
Living in Metro Manila, Philippines. I have the TOP consumer-grade connection my phone company can offer (no fiber in my neighborhood). Ping: 31ms Down: 5.4mbps Up: 0.94mbps This lets me do all of my work including Skype calls with video and screen sharing, listen to music (iTunes, etc - download or YouTube clips (streaming)), and share it through the household. Sometimes during school holidays I have to lock it down, otherwise the kids leave me about 0.1mbps each way to do my work.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
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.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
The definition of that has changed already, pardon the pun.
It now requires roughly 9Mbps to get high quality video.
Vudu HDX is my benchmark.
They're using their grammar skills there.
I have 1.5 Mbps, and we call it broadband here in Venezuela. Basic 360p Youtube, and netflix (SD) even works.
I would KILL for 10 Mbps, let alone 4 Mbps. You guys are lucky!
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
Congresscritters and the bureaucrats who make the decisions are completely incapable of understanding transmission rates and why 4 vs. 10 matters in the real world.
Instead, we should just tell them that any definition of "broadband" should at *least* pass the smell test of meeting the recommendations for Netflix's service, which is 5Mbps for HD and 25Mbps for Ultra HD.
A Netflix stream of course isn't a standard unit of measure, but it's at least an analogy they might understand.
I needed a good laugh. I suppose as a potential investor, I'm happy to know that his company is woefully unprepared to compete in a rapidly-evolving marketplace. It's kind of surprising to encounter such honesty in this day and age. Of course, he probably doesn't realize that he just admitted his company is woefully unprepared to compete in a rapidly-evolving marketplace, but that's one of the root causes of them being woefully unprepared to compete in this marketplace, isn't it?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
... anything we're used to will be sufficient for what we normally do because what we normally do is limited by current circumstances.
By this logic, we wouldn't have needed electricity or indoor plumbing because at that time few people had wired their homes for electricity, owned light blubs, lamps, or had any of the appliances that use internal plumbing like toilets or showers.
The notion that standards can remain fixed because people don't rely on things they don't have is asinine.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It may be a mistake to get hung up on these definitions. Find and read the FCC documents to learn what these changes actually mean. There are finite limits to the speeds available in certain areas. That is just engineering. But this is not about that. This is about the way things are labeled, regardless of what is or is not available in your area. To the providers, it is about marketing. If they can say "high speed" and sell you dial up speed, then they will. Because people who do not participate in the discussion mostly do not have a clue. They will say, "That sounds nice," and pay their bill without questioning what they might have been able to get if they took the time to figure it out. The key to securing the change is to educate those masses of consumers in ways that will not overwhelm them by talking about the technology. Then those who do understand, can leverage the buying power of those who do not know. When people demand service, it becomes less expensive to sell them something they want, compared to not selling them anything at all and watching their wallets go over to the competition. There needs to be a middle ground, because someone has to repair and maintain the infrastructure. The tricky bit is getting them to act progressively about upgrading that infrastructure. Change is always going to be slow where the infrastructure is old.
Well, not quite, but the lower limit definition need to ratchet up every year. We are consuming ever more data each year, so shouldn't we expect the minimum acceptable "broadband" definition to adjust accordingly?
Oh well, still jaded after all these years...
To be the minimum speed for 'broadband', not too fast for home usage. By redefining the minimum to 10 Mb/sec the FCC gets to claim almost no one has broadband, and then politicians will spout about a 'constitutional right' to 10 Mb/sec broadband, ISPs will relabel current service and boost prices...
Australia's land mass is comparable to that of the US but with roughly half the population of California, however there's more competition between ISP's in rural Ballarat than there is in downtown Los Angeles.\
I just tested my speed on zdnet and it comes out at ~18mbps, a pleasant surprise since it was ~12mbps for many years, the faster speed has not increased my bill. ZDnet also have an informative list of average speeds by nation, spoiler the US can't even keep up with NZ.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Have you seen a map of Europe? All of it, I mean. I have. Your map sure doesn't look like it. Apparently Poland is no longer European? Or Hungary? Or Finland? Etc.
Here's a slightly better example. Just eyeballing, it looks like all of Europe together (including places like Greece and Romania and Finland, etc.) is probably bigger than the lower 48 states of the US.
And please, stop with that ridiculous "population density" canard. Finland has better broadband than the US. Iceland has better broadband than the US. Former Soviet Bloc countries Bulgaria and Romania have better broadband than the US. Heck, even Utah has better broadband than most of the rest of the US, and Utah isn't exactly known as a cheek-by-jowl, high-population center. I live in Seattle, within the city limits in a reasonably dense part of town, and I can only wish I had a 50mbps symmetric up-down connection for $70 a month. Instead, the best deal I could find was an entry-level business plan bundled with phone service at 4mbps down / 1.5mbps up, for roughly $125 a month. Laughably bad, painfully expensive, infuriatingly limited.
The key common thread in the success cases is that the major ISPs don't get to dictate broadband policy. Population density and size of the country pretty much has jack shit to do with the issue (unless you want to go into meta-arguments about the size and density of a polity and how that impacts public policy).
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Just tangentially, it sounds like people living in the parts of town where the previous mayor was talking about implementing municipal broadband all got upgraded infrastructure, probably as the ISP majors tried to argue that municipal broadband wasn't needed. In contrast, I'm in Northgate, still reasonably dense and still well within in the city limits, but our neighborhood was outside of the areas marked for municipal broadband rollout -- and I'm still stuck with 4 down / 1.5 up.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I shake my head when people start to argue over high speeds. My basic Centurylink connection with an 8Mbps connection is enough to stream two movies/shows from Netflix. Service providers have a limited "pipe" to send traffic through and that seems to be the bottleneck, or ISP's filtering come traffic. When I had a 50 Mbps connection the only difference I saw was in downloading an Ubuntu ISO with bittorrent. Either way, they can call it whatever they want, I don't care.
That's most likely because they're shaping your traffic to the video servers. They could easily offer you 10Gbps, if they shape every connection to 100kbps, you'll only get ~1Mbps of useful max out of your connection
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
If everyone had fibre to the home with 1Gb plus the internet would transform in to something that we can't imagine now, The internet is artificiality being held back from what it could be and it is not because of cost.
1Gb is not just for people pirating movies.
Absolutely! High speed (with synchronous upload/download) Internet will change how we interact with each other and the rest of the world. It could be the biggest boon to freedom *ever*. But instead, we have lopsided Internet to re-create the producer/consumer dynamic and limited bandwidth with restrictions on usage (server restrictions, packet gobbling, throttling, usage caps etc., etc., etc.) which only serve to maintain the current power dynamic.
This is a huge issue, and the powers-that-be aren't going to give up easily.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
"As far as most slashdot users are concerned, there's enough competition to let capitalism do it's thing."
I have a choice of crappy DSL that doesn't even meet the current 4 Mbps spec, or Comcast. Thanks capitalism!
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Clickbait story, and it got (most) of you all. You want to get nerds feathers all a fluttering? Tell 'em that their internet speeds might get slower than very fast. (Oh Noes) *facepalm*
Suckers.
This is /. you think we even read TFA? And even if we do, many (if not most of us) are using ad blockers. Suckers? What are you sucking on, AC?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
I'd be happy with 4mb if it were reliable.
Right now I have 3mb at best, and that's with high latency and a heck of a lot of dropped packets. And I have the highest speed that can be delivered, or at least so they tell me.
My justification, was not an excuse for "their" behavior. It was merely pointing out how important marketing is to their efforts and how they'd like to get by calling it "broadband"... clearly my point was missed. FWIW, I hate cable internet more than another other ISP, and refuse to use them.
Synchronous 4 Mb per person, I might go along with...For basic broadband. I believe 4 Mb upload is the recommended minimum upload for both Skype & Google Hangouts. I had forgotten that even AT&T's advertising recommends 6/3 to start.
Should we make 4mb a cap for all connections? How about for backbone connections? How about 4mb max for a connection for a town or city? How about a 4mb limit to hook up schools,? All this does is justify their sticking with DSL in many markets. I won't go into the details, but best I can tell the reason AT&T stuck with DSL was due to the union workers not wanting to deal with fiber. The reasons were: 1. They would not need as many workers to keep fiber running 2. LIghtning destroys copper (and creates more work). I could add some annoyances like: DSL could (and probably does) create RF hash and interference. I don't do 4mb and lower unless I don't have a choice. Needless to say, AT&T is not going to be my choice until they actually get a clue and start rolling out FTTH, like they could have done damn near 20 years ago.
So, I live in the suburb of Kansas City, the eastern side, where perhaps we'll dream about getting Google Fiber in 2016..201, 2018..who knows. Our density isn't as great as the other places they're working. However, I do have Fiber to the Node with AT&T. But, their 'entry level' is still only 3Mbps/768Kbps, not actually 4Mbps/1Mbps.
I can get faster speeds, I know the copper to my home will support 64Mbps at my distance. However, those tiers are above the basic service. So, I'm still waiting for the "basic broadband" to catch up to this mythic 4/1 we're supposed to get. So, I'm guessing if they push to a 10Mbps minimum, I might get something like 6/2 as the base. So, I'm going to throw in with increasing the base.
On the Info-Highway, like when in air-to-air combat: Speed is Life.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
What matters for frist p0st is latency, not bandwidth. Hand in your geek card.
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]â"high-quality voice, video, or data,' the NCTA wrote."
ftfy
Yeah, this is where Eastern Europe laughs their ass off at the "developed" world :)
But it may be some kind of cycle. Today we're in front, but at some point even AT&T will be forced to upgrade their network, while our ISPs will fossilize and then *we* will be the ones behind. I'd say 30 years.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
don't use their own products.
As an example for a common service where 4/1 mbit is problematic you can take Google Hangout. /(assuming that the connectivity is perfect), and I don't think that you'll manage two video chats on 4/1.
Experience shows that 4/1 mbit is kind a certain minimum
The experience comes from our team where some people have 8mbit DSLs, and they usually just turn off video to get reliable and useful audio. Hangouts being bandwidth hogs also pans out with the reported transferred data counters, e.g. a video call can can take a couple of 100MB very quickly (according to this, http://mashable.com/2012/11/14... Hangouts use ~900MB/h)
Now, consider that 1mbit upstream can transfer roughly 350MB/hour (that assumes an networking overhead and calculates with 10bit per byte).
And I am commenting this from my so called 3rd-world country Romania using a 1 Gbps (Fiber to my home directly) connection costing about 19 USD a month with a ton of taxes included. This is the only reason I fear to move in the US, that I will have to pay an arm and a leg for a decent connection...
... if you don't have to share it with family members. If you do not mind not watching content in HD. If your 5Mbps connection is actually stable and always delivering peak. If none of the devices in your house want to suddenly update themselves when you are trying to watch something. If you have have the self discipline and masochistic tendencies that you actually enjoy buying that shiny new game on Steam, and then spending hours waiting for it to download ... while also not being able to do any streaming. Source: I have a 5Mbps/750kbps wireless based connection, and it is the only option in my area. I also have several household members, a preference for watching content in HD, sometimes shitty connection with only 1-3 Mbps, and a bunch of PCs, tablets and mobile phones which may all suddenly decide to use the net.
I don't know; you would think society should be moving forward when it comes to planning and managing infrastructure. In the last century, they were able to deliver electricity, phone lines, paved roads, water, and what not to pretty much everyone. These days, it is a global news event if a couple cities in the US get Gbps home networks (which supposedly they have had for years in e.g. Japan), and fixing a few kilometers of road is a major investment which will drain local infrastructure budgets for a year.
Even today's corrupt authorities should take a page from the Romans' playbook, giving the people "bread & circus". If you want happy citizens, make sure everyone has a fast internet connection.
We need more competition in thr ISP market again,
When all six normal occupants of the house are using the Internet at the same time (imagine that) it spikes far above your 5.43Mpbs usage, mate. Hewaven forbid if anyone comes over to visit, or play games, or simul-cast anything. If I pay for bandwidth I expect its delivery.
broadband was anything over 56kbps dial-up.
PSN (PlayStation Network) says hello as well.
Games are large, these days, and I for one enjoy being able to download what I just bought at a reasonable speed.
There is a growing movement in rural and bedroom communities to stick it to the big carriers by providing FTTH 1gbps service to thier residents as partnerships between the towns and provisioning companies. For instance you can take a look at Wake Forest, NC. One man, a private citizen, started an initiative to get FTTH service into the town and now we will have 1gig service for about a hundred bucks a month. That is twelve dollars less per month than I pay for 50mbps from Time Warner. www.wakeforestfiber.com for reference. unklStewy
How about they focus more on delivering what they sell?
How much bandwidth do you need for a family of four to stream four separate HD movies simultaneously? That would seem to be a practical threshold above which there isn't much benefit. I'd opine then that streaming one movie would be the minimum to call it broadband.
"I bring my Chromecast and stream a Blu-ray image from my media center at home"
And technically, that's not legal.
To which technicality in Norwegian law are you referring? Because I'd be willing to bet a fair bit of cash on you being dead wrong. I can even make a copy, as long as the person I'm giving it to is a friend or family member.
As far as I can recall, Netflix's HD (not 4K) tops out at about 6Mbps. It could be as simple as Netflix deciding that your connection can't handle the higher quality stream and falling back to 2.5Mbps (or your provider throttling Netflix, for that matter). Which is fine for a tablet, but would likely be fairly noticeable on a decently sized TV.
I can but repeat myself. Just because it's an Internet connection that isn't totally useless, does not make it qualify to be described as "broadband" in my mind. For a provider to claim they offer broadband, they should offer 10Mbps as a minimum. If they don't, they're just offering "Internet". This is, of course, entirely my opinion, since there's no firm definition of the term broadband.
AT&T can bite me, I have uVerse with 18Mbps and it chokes on Netflix and youtube. Im with AT&T cause I hate Comcast/Timewarner more and they are cheaper than cable internet as well (not by much). I really hope American politics can have some sense of decency restored. This Citizens united thing has flooded Washington with too much corporate money. Telecoms have no guilt, and theres not enough competition.
That sounds great and all, but it sill makes no difference when the major ISPs won't pay for enough upstream bandwidth to support their customers. I'd like to see the FCC enforce a consumer SLA that guarantees USABLE bandwidth.
Pick another ISP.
The *real* reason ATT would object to 10Mbps as being the baseline for broadband is simply because they still have many, many DSL customers.
Get too far from the switch and you'll never see 10...
FUCK YOU.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Maybe we should update the term "dial-up" to be a minimum of 10Mbps? Dial-up used-to mean blazing fast, back when I got my USR 56K modem. Adjusted for todays usage, 56K back then might be 10Mbps today.
So:
dial-up==10Mbps
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Of course the NCTA would say this, they're lobbying against everything that is good, including Title II, neutrality, unbundling and so on. I've personally been arguing with them about this sort of thing for the past couple of days (and someone else but I forget his name... he called someone a Marxist, I think).
AT&T and VZ (and probably the other DSL loop providers like Frontier, who themselves have been buying a lot of old VZ plant) don't want the definition changed to 10mbit/s because a lot of their lines just won't do 10 megs -- unless you happen to be in one of those service areas where they're deploying FTTC/VDSL, of course.
And even in some of those service areas, the problem is just as much about congestion on their middle-mile as it is about congestion at their network border. My personal anecdote is that until recently, Frontier had all of 2gbit/s to their local exchange. Which serves not just the town it's in, but a number of towns around it, with a combined population of around 100k people, resulting in the service being basically unusable for several hours a day.
I don't think that upgrading all the last-miles (or even the middle-miles) would be terribly expensive and, at the risk of sounding like I'm on their side, in some cases there is willingness on the part of AT&T (or whoever) to do the upgrade. 10Gb modules are pretty inexpensive these days, so since the long-haul fibre is already where it needs to be in the vast majority of cases, all it takes is upgrading the optics. After that comes the hard/expensive part: putting in cabinets all over the place.
Chorus NZ has nearly finished undertaking such a project over the last 7 or so years at a cost of maybe a little over $1bn USD (educated guess) to get a decent chunk of the country served by cabinets. DSL is not speed based there (it's usually usage based unless you buy an "unlimited" plan) so many subscribers are getting ADSL2+ sync rates well over 10mbit/s and most cabinets can serve VDSL to subscribers (so IIRC the practical speed is supposed to be about 70mbit/s). That project has also paved the way for the FTTH deployment that's going on there now.
Back in the US, however, even when there is the willingness to do what is necessary, it can be time-consuming and a bureaucratic nightmare because, despite all the whining of consumers, a lot of the time there is a struggle to get permits to put a cabinet in where it's needed in order to actually upgrade their services because people are too self-involved and object to it being up outside *their* house. Other times it's simply because the city bureaucrats are being daft and not issuing permits because of city utilities (despite the franchise agreements permitting ROW). I've personally been told by city officials "why not just use wireless" when I was trying to get approval for some work.
Granted, in NZ the possibility exists whereby people were given less choice in the planning stage (there will be a cabinet there whether you like it or not, damnit!!), and there is but one infrastructure provider - but perhaps that all needs to happen here too. Better still, if it paves the way to a fibre future, that's something to be excited about.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)
Umm... shouldn't you be saying that exact same thing to the FCC? They're the ones pushing the minimum speeds, with a decent number of customers who don't need it, and sure don't want to subsidize the upgrades for those customers who do.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Dial-up, like broadband, is a term that encompasses various speeds. Just like you wouldn't get away with claiming your 9.6K ISP was "blazingly fast" when everybody else had long since upgraded to 14.4K, you shouldn't get away with using "broadband" as a term unless "broad" really is an applicable adjective. It has been a number of years since 4Mbps qualified.
Perhaps we need tiers of service. 10MBPS or better is broadband. 4-10 is slothband and less than 4 is dead donkeyband. Any service implementing a 'fast lane' shall add the prefix of 'prison' or jailbird to the name on all of their promotional materials.
So Comcast offers jailbird broadband and AT&T offers slothband.
Broadband is broadband, they just need a new category at about 100 Mbps to define who has the good stuff.
"broad" has NOTHING AT ALL to do with how fast the connection is. I could have a communications link using an extremely wide range of frequencies, and still have very slow internet. The opposite of "broad" is "base", and baseband connections happen to be far, far faster.
You may be thinking of wideband, but that's a different term all-together, and not really applicable, because communications can indeed be sped-up considerably without increasing the bandwidth.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
That may be the technical definition, but the colloquial use as pertaining to Internet access is something else. From Wikipedia: "Finally, the term became popularized through the 1990s as a marketing term for Internet access that was faster than dialup access, the original Internet access technology, which was limited to 56 kbit/s. This meaning is only distantly related to its original technical meaning."
...and 4Mbps is still faster than dial-up today.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
And we're full circle. Returning to my original post, what was considered fast way back when, is no longer so today. For the term broadband to retain its meaning of "fast Internet", it needs to refer to speeds that can be considered fairly snappy in today's reality, otherwise you might as well just call it "Internet connection". Which brings me back to my proposal of 10Mbit as a reasonable minimum. Rewind 10 years, and I would've been fine with 4Mbit.
That's what happens when you use circular logic...
I agree. Let's do that just after we upgrade "dial-up" and "ISDN" to high speeds.
Like "broadband", they meant "high speed" once upon a time. As you're saying, since it meant something once, we must force it to continue to mean the same thing, forever.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I suspect you are being willfully obtuse, but in case you're not: dial-up and ISDN have always referred to specific technology. Broadband has meant "not dial-up" and "fast".
For that matter, dial-up has never meant high speed unless including the actual speed.
Broadband has "always referred to specific technology" too.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant