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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"
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.
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.
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 .
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All of Europe is about 1/2 the size of the US. Size matters.
Area of Europe: 10.18 million km
Area of USA: 9.827 million km
So "All of Europe" is slightly larger than the USA, not "half the size".
The map you use as a citation is NOT a map of Europe. It is not even a map of the European Union.
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.
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
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.
I don't disagree about basic connectivity. I personally know plenty of people in those difficult last mile areas who would *love* to have a 4Mbit/sec downstream wired internet connection. But the difficult last miles are why we pay things like USF fees, we do things like grant monopolies, we provide tax breaks and other subsidies to those who claim they are going to provide that connectivity to the exurban and rural areas.
There was a high-profile examination of a similar situation, in New Jersey I believe, where the ILEC had taken millions in tax breaks and subsidies to provide universal broadband in their area of monopoly. Those deals dated back two decades, yet many areas of that state are still served by central offices that aren't even DSL capable. That's unacceptable. HEVC be damned, when you can't even get "broadband" (however you'd care to define it) to begin with. I'm fortunate enough to live in a suburban area in a large megalopolis served by Comcast. If it weren't for them, I'd be on a DSL line from a carrier I won't name that got stuck with the rotted physical plant left behind by the same company that took the money and ran in NJ.
Note that these same ILECs are the ones that fight tooth and nail against community and cooperative broadband in every state they do business in. If it weren't for the subsidies, tax breaks, and government-granted monopolies many of these areas would still have no POTS or electricity for that matter. The rest of the areas, the ones served by telephone and electricity cooperatives, never even got that until they did it themselves. This isn't about free market capitalism, it's about having a reliable national communications infrastructure. As it stands for broadband, the ILECs can't even do it when they have it handed to them on a silver platter.
I understand the last mile challenges are fierce, and I'm from the flat heartland of America. I know it's worse in more rural, less populated areas than I have seen anywhere even in my state. But I have no sympathy for these telcos. If we found a way to provide those folks with electricity and POTS, we can do it with fiber. Fiber runs are better suited for rural areas than copper, anyway, as the loss is negligible in comparison over longer distances. And if you are going to roll new lines, metal ones are so 20th century anyway. The rest of the world is moving on. Do we really want our rural brothers and sisters to be stuck with copper? I say make the definition of broadband 100Mbit! And force the telcos taking subsidies to get the goddamned job done or at the bare minimum, get the fuck out of the way and let a cooperative or muni do it who can and stop buying legislation to screw over the good folks out in the sticks.
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...
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."
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
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.
Hungary here, I'm getting 120/15 Mbps for less than $30 a month in Budapest. I originally had 240/60 Mbps ($35) but it was not really worth it since most servers (and peers) can rarely deliver more than 90-110 Mbps at a time, even though it actually tested 248 on a [compteting ISP's] speed test.
[SHOW SOME LENIENCY TOWARDS
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.
The area of the EU, which is likely what the OP was actually discussing ...
The OP explicitly wrote "all of Europe".
The important part is the population density.
No! That is NOT important. Only the density is specific locations is important. It makes no sense for rates in downtown Philadelphia to be high because there is a lot of empty land in Arizona.
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...