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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.
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!!!
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
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?
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.
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
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?
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.