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Verizon, Cable Lobby Oppose Spec-Bump For Broadband Definition
WheezyJoe writes Responding to the FCC's proposal to raise the definition of broadband from 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream to 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up, the lobby group known as the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) wrote in an FCC filing Thursday that 25Mbps/3Mbps isn't necessary for ordinary people. The lobby alleges that hypothetical use cases offered for showing the need for 25Mbps/3Mbps "dramatically exaggerate the amount of bandwidth needed by the typical broadband user", referring to parties in favor of the increase like Netflix and Public Knowledge. Verizon, for its part, is also lobbying against a faster broadband definition. Much of its territory is still stuck on DSL which is far less capable of 25Mbps/3Mbps speeds than cable technology.
The FCC presently defines broadband as 4Mbps down and 1Mbps up, a definition that hasn't changed since 2010. By comparison, people in Sweden can pay about $40 a month for 100/100 mbps, choosing between more than a dozen competing providers. The FCC is under mandate to determine whether broadband is being deployed to Americans in a reasonable and timely way, and the commission must take action to accelerate deployment if the answer is negative. Raising the definition's speeds provides more impetus to take actions that promote competition and remove barriers to investment, such as a potential move to preempt state laws that restrict municipal broadband projects.
The FCC presently defines broadband as 4Mbps down and 1Mbps up, a definition that hasn't changed since 2010. By comparison, people in Sweden can pay about $40 a month for 100/100 mbps, choosing between more than a dozen competing providers. The FCC is under mandate to determine whether broadband is being deployed to Americans in a reasonable and timely way, and the commission must take action to accelerate deployment if the answer is negative. Raising the definition's speeds provides more impetus to take actions that promote competition and remove barriers to investment, such as a potential move to preempt state laws that restrict municipal broadband projects.
and be grateful we let you buy it, consumer unit #15684132!
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I am not sure that this group of people has any business telling me what I need or don't need.
In the U.S. at least cable needs real competition in the broadband market. This is where the main oposition to growth is. We shouldn't be listening to them about anything at all.
It's too bad we live in a country almost entirely run by lobbyists...
The entrenched operators will spend whatever it takes to protect their monopolies; especially since bandwidth will be the real valuable commodity, not cable channels, as more services begin to offer content separate from a cable subscription. If real competition was introduced they will lose a lot of money and want to prevent that at all costs. The fear Google and local authorities who threaten their monopoly; and want to avoid any federal rules or laws that overturn local actions because it's easier (read cheaper) to influence local politicians than national ones.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
25Mbps/3Mbps isn't necessary for ordinary people
In the early 1940s, IBM's president, Thomas J Watson, reputedly said: "I think there is a world market for about five computers." Oh, boy was he wrong!
Yes, 10gbps internet package
Not 1gbps, but 10gbps
http://www.digitaltrends.com/c...
And America is still talking about 25mbps?
Seriously, these guys are total fart blossoms.
I cannot believe the things they are able to say out loud with a straight face.
25Mbps/3Mbps is barely even usable.
Every time I visit my folks in the US, who have 25Mbps/3Mbps I find it unbearably slow. They pay like 80bucks a month for that ridiculous "broadband" connection. 80Bucks!
Meanwhile, I may 48€ per month for 150/25Mbps. That includes TV and phone too.
Seriously, how the fuck can you guys stand it? Especially when ever tech company is pushing their stupid cloud services. How are going to use a cloud service with your ridiculous dialup speeds?
How are you going to watch HD Netflix? Let alone 4K. Forget about it.
Wait is the FCC implying that the ISP monopolies need to reinvest in new equipment with their profits? Don't they know the executives need new mansions and yachts.
Historically, things always get much, much worse before the 99% freaks out. Very seldom do the ruling class give up any power and improve the situation for the masses to relieve the pressure pot.
Just like the 99%, they also repeat the same mistakes over and over.
The state or state sanctioned telephone company is incentivized to offer better service and is severely penalized if they do not meet those requirements and/or the hardware wiring side is partially decoupled from the services side. In sweden most of these networks are municipal networks that provide fiber to the premises for a low monthly cost because a municipality can easily facilitate a long term non profit oriented recovery time for the expense of wiring everything. Then basically any provider who wants to offer service can using their lines, they just have to pay for their own uplinks and billing system.
We could achieve some of that model here in the states by decoupling the lines from the service, then regulating them like electrical or water utilities so that there is a base amount paid and a certain low but steady profit margin built in. It would also help tremendously if the state and local legislatures had the power or will to actually enforce the agreements set.
I'd love to see how fast Verizon could actually implement fiber in PA if they were told to get the ball moving or we foreclose on the lines that we paid for. 2.1 billion + 20 years of interest should be interesting clawback if they had the political will to enforce it.
What I find utterly insufferable about this 'argument'(if it rises to a level where you can call it that) is how badly it misses the point:
Netflix and a few friends say that 25/3 is needed because a household might be streaming multiple things while running a cloud backup and doing some skyping or something. Verizon et al. say that such usage is atypical, and therefore everyone can take the status quo and like it.
In both cases, the most important bit is being ignored: new uses for bandwidth are not going to emerge(or are going to be academic and deep-pocketed-corporate curiosities) unless there is at least some prospect of bandwidth being available. Does 'today's typical use case' need 25/3? Probably not; because it was developed under the constraints of a market where 25/3 is markedly above average, so anyone developing products and services is condemning themselves to a niche if they require very high bandwidth, especially upstream.
If just doing what you did last year, forever, was good enough, 'broadband' would still involve an acoustic coupler. Chicken/egg.
Ever since the Google Fiber roll out came here, Time Warner has been scrambling to lay down fiber. Their trucks and construction efforts are everywhere now. They are doing this without raising prices... because they can't in the face of competition. Time Warner could have rolled out Fiber over a decade ago, but why spare the expense when there is no competition? With Google coming out of left field, there is now market competition. That's it right there. We don't need an FCC mandate that explicitly defines broadband, we need mandates that create competition.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
25/3 is barely adequate now. It'll be pathetic in a few years when streaming 4k is the norm. And what's with the turtlesque uplink speeds? How are we supposed to "cloud" our lives at 3 megs?
Sometimes it's hilarious listening to those demanding changes in Federal, national standards in the US, who've clearly never travelled outside the coasts and/or packed, urban dorm living...
Being able to stream 18 videos at once is nice. But you got along perfectly well beforehand. Broadband is about reliable, reasonable hardline (except for certain buildout locations where LTE is being petitioned as a replacement) information communication... It's NOT intended as the tail wagging the dog on Millennial cord-cutting.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
There are some technical reasons that the telecom monopoly lobbying groups REALLY don't want broadband to be defined at high speeds. It rules out a wide range of very cheap technologies which can be used to claim that they do provide broadband. At 25/3 you need to offer at least ADSL2+M (ADSL2 won't cut it), DOCSIS systems will be severely limited in the number of subscribers, GPRS is out (you need to move to HSPA) and so on. Setting a very low limit for what is broadband is a perfect way to polish the numbers and make it look like good service is provided at very reasonable prices. We have sold refurbished telecommunication equipment to the US, which was no longer considered competitive in the northern European market, but was state of the art for many parts of the US.
While it is certainly nice to have a place to unload old equipment I don't think it is in the best interest of the USA to play catch up on infrastructure just to help a few telcom companies to keep their profit margins high...
Go fuck yourself.
25 Down 5 up should be the bare minimum allowed. Hell they should also slap on a requirement that it should not cost more than $9.95 a month and "contracts" are now illegal.
If the FCC had any balls at all and was working for the people, they would do this right away.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"Normal cable companies don't need $100/month for Internet, consumer lobby says.
"The consumer lobby is opposed to a cable industry plan to keep sub-standard Internet server at or above $100/month. Cable companies do just fine with lower rates, the Internet Consumer Association wrote on SlashDot this morning. It wasn't that long ago that Internet access was available for one-fifth the rate, and the cost burden to the cable companies to provide service continues to drop as the Internet access piggy-backs on existing cable infrastructure, especially in the face of cable company promotion of so-called 'triple-play' products: television, telephone, and Internet.
"Notably, no party provides any justification for adopting increased tarriffs for providing service. All the companies provide bogus justifications for charges for service that go well beyond the 'current' and regular' amounts that were in place during the dial-up and DSL days."
(I wonder how the NCTA would respond to such an article, were one such as this parody were ever to appear in print)
1. The FCC should establish a "moving definition". Identify a set of peer countries and define U.S. "broadband" relative to some measure of those countries' broadband capability. Maybe "broadband" is "just faster than the slowest peer nation". Or maybe it's "the median among all peer nations". Etc. Revise the standard yearly according to the moving definition.
2. To what extent is Sweden's network access made cheaper by way of public subsidy? The amount of the subsidy should be included in the "price", even if it's less visible.
3. Not everybody streams HD video. If you don't stream HD video then 25/3 is more than adequate. I watch TV shows from Hulu on my laptop over a 6 Mbps DSL connection.
We all have a right to lobby Congress.
The trouble is, most of us do not have the money to hire professionals who have direct access to Congress people because they are ex-Congressmen or know people.
If you or I tried to see a Congressmen, assuming we could even get past security (terrorism yadda yadda yadda), we would get the assistant to the secretary of the assistant to the intern of the Congressmen's assistant. Upon which, we would be told some sort of canned speech about how the Congressmen takes everyone's point of view into consideration and will do what's best for all of his constituents - or some such bullshit.
You need money or some sort of grassroots movement that also gets votes.
See, that's where the Teaparty is an example of an effeective grassroots movement. They riled up a bunch of angry white old people and THEY VOTE.
Occupy Wall Street riled up some young people who DO NOT VOTE.
That is why Tea Party rallies do not get harassed by cops.
Sweden is a heavily socialist country and the odds are much of the broadband infrastructure was either paid for or heavily subsidized with tax money. You can't use their monthly bill as a measure of what they're actually paying, you'd have to add in the tax portion as well which probably makes it cost as much or more than what you give AT&T or Time Warner. Private is always better.
Sweden
Area: 450 sq km - Roughly the size of California
Population: 9.7 Million. 85% of which is Urban (8.2 million)
i.e. The city of New York (8.4 M) with a resource base equal to the state of California.
Yeah, that's an apples-to-apples comparison, for sure.
This is a series of companies telling us that we don't need the best in the world, all the while we have our government leaders telling us that we are the best in the world.
Friedman talked about how our inter connectivity by the internet has pushed globalization to the forefront, and the US has lead because of this. Now that other countries are taking queue from the US, should our broadband providers become lax and accept the status quo, or should we demand to keep growing? I for one feel that we as a nation should demand more of our companies in order to promote growth, and if they feel the need to stop that growth, then they should be displaced. We have already started by cutting cables to the cable television companies because that no longer fits our needs. If we start to see markets stagnate, then we should have a right to ask them to keep growing. The internet has been key to the global dominance of the United States. Why prohibit our growth. Broadband providers companies, why do you hate America?
Place something witty here
Can someone explain why you need a "broadband" definition exactly? And who cares if that 4 Mbps services doesn't meet that definition?
1200 baud should be enough for anyone.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Easy solution for verizon just advertise 25/3 and provide the same old 4. since "Up To" doesn't seem to be regulated problem solved.
Hear me out on this one. I think Verizon's claim that 'most people don't need 25 Mbps' is a good thing. Broadband is supposed to be the fast stuff. The cutting edge, possibly more expensive, but will blow your mind at how fast you load a poorly compressed .gif kind of speed. Broadband isn't supposed to be the mediocre or low end shit that just happens to be lying around because the technology is decades old.
So yes, the average consumer probably doesn't need or use 25 Mbps. But broadband shouldn't be targeting the average user. It should be targeting the user who wants to truly utilize that kind of speed. Verizon doesn't want this to go through so they can claim their antiquated DSL lines are 'broadband' - which to the average American suggests it's cutting edge and super fast, when in reality it's not.
Now I'm gonna flip flop a bit. I also don't think 'broadband' needs to change its minimum speed. If anything, it just needs to have an additional maximum speed(10 Mbps or something). It's anecdotal, so it might not represent the population at large, but from my experience people have already started to associate 'broadband' with 'bullshit'. We all get the flyers in the mail from AT&T and others saying "BROADBAND INTERNET!!!! 6 MBPS!!!! $50!!!!!!!!" After a while people start thinking: "Do I have broadband right now? I have 20 Mbps, but apparently broadband is slower than that. I guess broadband is that old, outdated stuff." I really don't think people, in general, associate broadband with high-speed internet. I think the FCC would be better suited regulating the use of 'high-speed' internet, and similar terminology.
Those who want more bandwidth seem to often quote "In Sweden on may get 100Mbps for $40/month". This quote is somewhat misleading.
94% of Sweden's population "uses the Internet". However, only 32% of the population has fixed broadband connections. Of those, only a portion actually live close enough to a municipal location to have the ability to get 100Mbps broadband. Most of the non-municipal areas are on ADSL or similar connectivity that gets no where near that mythical 100Mbps rate.
Another factoid to consider: Sweden is *much* smaller than the US - both in terms of land area and people. 94% of Sweden's population means 8.7M people. 32% means 2.9M people. The US has 10M people in Los Angeles alone (which is to say, Los Angeles has 400K more people than all of Sweden). In terms of land area, Sweden is 173,732 sq miles while the US is 3.806 million sq miles (which is to say 22 times larger). Provisioning 100Mbps for a fraction of 2.9M people who live in a very restricted geographical zone is hardly the same challenge that we have in the US.
In short, this sort of rhetoric is cherry picking the best situation that exists for a small number of people (some fraction of 2.9M) in a limited geographical area (the core municipal regions of a limited number of cities) and then trying to compare that to the entirety of the US.
The FCC has become the FDA.
"You can't call that 'low fat' now unless X."
Nevermind those carcinogens in the ingredient list, please.
,... and it should be *actual* bandwidth, not marketed bandwidth, so carriers should be rated on the percentage of time they achieve actual broadband.
It is free markets that keeps the US so highly rated among the developed nations in providing internet service to its citizens and, as everyone knows, the US is all about providing infrastructure that encourages competition. Imagine, if you will, how bad it would be if a single corporation were allowed to control access to all the roads in a nation! That corporation could dictate rates and refuse service to any and all who refuse to meet their price. Thankfully the majority in the US have come to the understanding that such travesties must be regulated against.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
The relevant law that the FCC is supposed to be carrying out is more specific than the general term "broadband". Rural areas tend to have slower connections, of course, and the FCC is supposed to measure which areas have usable service and which don't. The law says the FCC is supposed to measure whether areas have an option which:
enable users to originate and receive high-quality voice,
data, graphics, and video telecommunications
Voice: Broadcast AM radio is 25 Khz, which very roughly correlates to 25 Kbps. Copper phone lines (POTS) are 52 Kbps max. So most nay internet connection allows for "high-quality voice", given correct settings in the software.
Data: Faster is always better, but Google or Slashdot will load in 2 seconds on a 4 Mbps connection.
Graphics: Facebook recommends uploading at 1200x600 for "full size" display. Such an image will load full size in 1-2 seconds on a 512 Kbps connection.
Video: Netflix 1080p is 3 Mbps.
So it would seem that the standard the law requires them to use ends up meaning about 3-4 Mbps.
We'd all like faster internet, obviously. Te FCC isn't deciding how fast internet should be. It's deciding how fast is required to "enable high quality voice, data, graphics, and video". 1080p is high-quality video, and that's 3 Mbps.
One of the tell-tale signs of the quality of a country's democracy in the internet age is the difference in upload versus download bandwidth allocated to the average internet user. Do the people get a voice, or is the internet a receive-only medium?
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
Milking aging infrastructure for maximum profit, desperately defending old business models.
Now get off my lawn before I take my buggy whip to you.
Fine to have good bandwidth from an ISP hub (DSLAM or DOCSIS server) but what guarantees it is available?
I have noticed that during the Internet rush hours (mostly evenings 4-10pm, especially Sunday) that many providers underprovision their upward links. (I'm not hitting loaded servers.) I have only a 6/1 and often I cannot get 3/0.5 .
This will be a very local thing and depends on how much the ISP has [over]sold and your neighbors usage (both cable and DSL). YMMV.
Can pay $70.00/month for 1Gbps symmetric fiber...
I! Tego Arcana Dei.
It's amusing how the telecoms can, when addressing consumers, really stress how important and amazing it is to have legitimately high bandwidth (e.g. Comcast telling me that I need at least 50 mbits downstream if more than one person lives in my home) and yet, when addressing regulators, say that most people don't need more than 4 mbits. Not surprising, but amusing. Do they think that regulators don't see their ads?
The whole point is not that you get 50 bajillion exabits a picosecond to a single connection.
It's so your connection can accommodate multiple high-speed connections simultaneously.
You can pull down your Netflix movie while your son is watching YouTube, your daughter is downloading her courseware for next semester and your wife is downloading a new copy of Office she bought from the Microsoft store. All without interfering with one another.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The FCC is reactive, not predictive. They can only see the past, and they use it to define what they do.
When they built the 2010 spec, they were looking at the previous 10 years and the nature of the internet. They could not have accounted for the explosion of Tablets. More importantly in their current update they are not accounting for Internet of Things (IoT) or the smart home. They are designing around the previous decade, not for the next one.
Verizon wants to charge $100/month for giving one shovel of junk instead of two. I sincerely wish they were required to return actual value for the cost at least one year in 10. They are printing money - it isn't like the radio waves cost more than a penny to make. They just want to maintain volume on the press instead of returning value to the economy and technological leadership of the next decade or century. The purpose of government in such a non-pure-capitalist market is to limit monopolies and externalities. In this case the externalities are a few hundred billion dollars per year added to the US economy in the next decade by a capacity for IoT and smart-everything.
...but for fucks sake, stop comparing the US to Sweden (or other Euro countries). Sweden is the size of California and has 9million people in it vs the US's 330million+. You cannot compare the two.
(I wonder how the NCTA would respond to such an article, were one such as this parody were ever to appear in print)
So get a domain, put together a shiny website, and shop the article around to all the wire services you can find...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The companies are correct, most people don't need much bandwidth to surf the web. We don't need the FCC to keep raising the bar, it's silly. You can easily enough find out what speed you're buying.
If they do this dumb shit the companies should just call it "highband" or something, and add $5 a month just for shits and giggles at the FCC.
POTS is 64 kilobits/s in the ideal case, 56 kilobits/s when the path is digital, about 48 kilobits/s when there are analog diplexing amps and such (which continue to go away, thank goodness). But not let's get caught up in nits...
When you talk about video, you are assuming a single stream of high-quality 1080p video. How many American homes have only one television? (Especially when there is such a glut of analog-only TVs available for a song with the switch to over-the-air digital.) (Or as large-format laptops continue to hit the previously-leased used computer stores.) You can easily have two streams in the poorest of homes, one for the alleged "grown-ups" and one for the kids.
When you start talking about VoIP, you need roughly 100 kilobits/s to handle a single voice conversation and side-channel control, considerably more if you have side-channel "whiteboard" traffic. That's per phone conversation. It adds up when your household has a number of people, and more so in SOHO.
And the cable companies in particular want to keep 1990 pricing as much as they can, because Internet is a cash cow for them when they get CCIEs to maintain the network gear -- an absolute necessity when the cables sell 100/100 fiber to larger businesses.
It's about profit and rate of return. And, unlike the other parts of their business, the rate of return on Internet is (for now) unregulated.
I used to have 15 Mbps, and downgraded to 6 Mbps to save money. Never noticed the difference. 3 Mbps would probably be fine too -- plenty good enough for 360p video. Not everybody wants HD. On the other hand, I do feel a huge difference compared to the 1 Mbps my parents have (can't really watch video with that). So I'd define broadband as being ~3 Mbps+.
Some consumers, of course, may benefit from more. Call it broadband HD or broadband+ or something. It's important not to obscure the more important distinction between those stuck on connections too slow for the modern internet and those with broadband.
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Guarantee? What guarantee? Both DSL and cable internet service are provided on a "best effort" basis. If you want a SLA, you have to pay through the nose for it. Guaranteeing a SLA means the provider has to provision dedicated circuit capacity, instead of letting you complete for channel space on a first-come, first-serve basis.
With DSL, the uplink and downlink depends on the DSLAM-to-CO channel capacity, because DSL is implemented using ATM and virtual circuits in fiber rings. The differing up/down rates are a design decision, based on how many of the sub-carriers are assigned in each direction. Oversubscription is the carrier's choice.
True cable service is another story. The downlink is managed by the head-end, so the feed onto the cable can run at top rate. Yes, the more users who are on the subnet in your neighborhood, the slower things can go. The uplink, however, is a single channel shared by a number of sources, so the upstream channel acts like AloahNet back in the 60s: a fractional load can saturate the uplink because of contention. (ThickNet and ThinNet suffered from the same congestion problem...which is why most people use twisted-pair star networks, even in our homes.)
I call BS on this one. I'm on an 10+M connection, and movies are unwatchable. Then again, it has nothing to do with my connection, but the source.
When I was on 768/128, I had to wait for 240p youtube videos to stream. Web browsing was a little slower than higher speeds, but tolerable. If the price was low enough, I'd take 768/128 again.
I don't want higher priced 25/3 to be the new minimum.
I'm really glad I have high speed internet from Suddenlink. I think I get about 50 Mbps, and that's great. I did purposely buy a house in town rather than out in the boonies because things like quick internet and quick access to the grocery store are more important to me than having acreage and scenery. What the FCC is dealing with right now isn't what speed you WANT, but what speed someone whonlives out in the countruly to have acreage for their horses NEEDS in order to survive in the modern world.
>. When you start talking about VoIP, you need roughly 100 kilobits/s to handle a single voice conversation and side-channel control, considerably more if you have side-channel "whiteboard" traffic. That's per phone conversation. It adds up when your household has a number of people, and more so in SOHO.
I'm happy with 64K voice, but let's assume 100K. 3Mbps allows more than 30 simultaneous phone calls in the house. ("More than" because not everyone would be talking at the same instant).
3-4 Mbps also allows two standard definition video streams, or one at 1080p. I don't think the horse owner has a fundamental right to force you and me spend an extra $12,000 to give him more than that. They decided they wanted to live far away from everyone else, and have 20 acres to themselves. That means that to get fiber to their houee, the fiber has to be run across their 20 acres of pasture. That's just a physical fact, and a natural result of their decision to put a mile between them and their neighbor. Who pays for wiring that mile they wanted tonput between themselves and everyone else? If they can already stream HD Netflix, I don't think you should have to pay to upgrade their connection to fiber.
Yeah *most* people don't' need that much bandwidth... to check their dang emails like what everyone was supposed to only be doing in 1999. Hello 2015, UHD is around the corner...
Right now you can actually get near-blueray quality video, from Netflix, and acceptable HD quality from youtube, crunchyroll, and some VOD services (CraveTV/Shomi in Canada, Hulu in the US), provided you have enough downstream bandwidth. Right now you can record/watch 3 HD channels with a 25Mbit connection.
What you can't do is "do something else" with that bandwidth. And that's the problem. For example I might have 3-5Mbit's of upstream bandwidth but that is insufficient to stream even one HD stream, let alone connect a group of them. Have you seen the latest crazes of streaming video games? These require a minimum of 20Mbits of upstream in order for anyone watching it to get HD-quality video from the stream. Your average US connection is 3-5Mbits and thus incapable of even getting a 480p connection.
TV is currently broadcast at 1080i or 720p, which both fit in roughly 8Mbits. To stream a HD quality broadcast to a reflection point (eg livestream, justintv, youtube, picarto) the upstream connection needs to be 2x to 3x higher than the desired quality, otherwise any fast motion will be destroyed in the broadcast. When you watch someone draw on Picarto, for example, you usually can't see the names of the tools being used because the streaming/compression blurs this out. However if you're watching a video game stream, every time the camera pans, you see tearing at the compression level, not the rendering level.
So to come back to the point. The minimum acceptable definition for broadband must enable the user to do the samething upstream that they can do downstream, or in other words a minimum of 50Mbps in a symmetric configuration or 75/25 in an asymmetric configuration for "HD" capable broadband. For SD capable broadband, a lower definition of 25/8 would pass. For upcoming UHD (60Mbits or so in HEVC streams) a 200/64 configuration would be the minimum acceptable (3:1 ratio of UHD HEVC streams @ 60mbps)
The average person, even if they have a UHD setup, is unlikely to have more than 3 running at the same time, but PVR requirements would still require that capacity to be available.
my vDSL modem syncs at 30/3 and I do get that speed when doing a sanctioned speed-test from the ISP website. ... time for a bowl of rice : )
however if downloading from the internet it really goes beyond 4 Mbps (~500 KB/sec).
the interesting part is that going through tor improves my download speeds
Shared media contention (10base2, unswitched 10baseT) collisions are somewhat different from saturated upload throttling download (ACK delays). As you point out, topography can help the former but the latter needs something smarter (QoS?)
I believe the current "cloud" service model puts _much_ heavier stress on upload as devices sync large photo and video files. So asymmetric services are out-of-balance.
Doesn't much matter what the definition is, I don't get it.
Inside city limits, yet. When we got DSL, the installing tech told us to not accept any deal for faster speed, we wouldn't get it. He was right. After a couple years, the phone company doubled the speed (and added to the bill). I still only get 1.5 down.
Two words.
Bull Shit.
The reason is greed. Pure and simple.
I travel to China all the time for work. Even remote places in China have faster internet than the US major cities. China, in case you didn't know it is also pretty damn large.
When Verizon, et al run their computers on 640K of RAM each.
I'm so glad a major part of a major government department has time to argue over definitions of a service for advertising proposes. Everyone who had time to go to those meetings should be fired. If the regulations have to exist, why not just make them advertise the speed offered? Not "we offer broadband" but "we offer 15Mbps" with real fines for lying.
4/1 sounds absolutely acceptable as a baseline for broadband, especially if they plan on mandating broadband as a public utility. That's enough to pay your bills, do social media and some basic video streaming. Are you streaming HD content on every device in your house, NO, but you expect that from what we'd consider a basic service. It should be enough so that you can do necessary things with reasonable efficiency, not having another entertainment box.
X
If you do a little research, you will find that there are many people in the cable TV and ISP business that are saying that we Americans are being massively ripped off with prices that should be 1/4 or less what we are paying now, and that we should be getting much much faster and better service for our money. I believe that this is true. If it was not true, how could cable TV companies and ISPs offer $9.95 to $19.95 per month prices for the first year of service with no contract? They couldn't! I believe that cable TV companies and ISPs would still be making money hand over fist if the monthly rates were capped at the above prices, with no contrants or extra charges allowed.
In most areas there is no competition between cable TV companies or ISPs. Most areas of the U.S. have ONE cable TV provider who is usually also the only ISP (DSL and dial-up don't count, they are far to slow and/or unreliable). I believe that what I have read is correct: We need to seperate the service that procides the infrastructure from the service that provides the content/data.
I also believe that Internet service is a necessity, and should be a public utility which is charged at cost only, and is held to high standards for both speed and reliability.
I pay Charter about 55 bucks a month for 60 down/5 up, and usually get over 64 Mbps downstream. Sure, 5 Mbps may be fine for ONE person using it, but if you have people over as guests, you want to have something a little bit faster than that.
I'm in favor of redefining broadband because I travel a lot. I'm stuck in a motel right now that has free "broadband" wifi. Right now I'm one of only a few guests. I'm lucky to get 1 Mbps downstream. It's also Charter, but I can't figure out why it's so damned slow. Business internet from Charter in this city is 100 Mbps. Surely the motel is not slowing it down on purpose.
Neflix says 3 mbps for SD video
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306
3.0 Megabits per second - Recommended for SD quality
I didn't realize that 3mbps was no longer considered broadband. Now I can say I pay Comcrap $50 for non-broadband service.
I used to have 6mbps, upgraded to 50 mbps saw some improvement but not drastic. (Still couldn't stream 3D Netflix until they paid Comcast to stop throttling them.) But dropping to 3mbps I do notice a signficant difference.
=(
Honestly, I think 10mbps is pretty much a fair speed for most Americans (as most Americans stream these days)
That makes sense, they recommended you have a connection advertised as 3Mbps for SD, 5Mbps for HD. Their HD stream actually USES 3 Mbps as your watching, leaving 2 Mbps of head room.
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Ha! My ISP clearly advertises that I have a dedicated connection where "speeds never go down or change". They even recommend that I can Web Host with my 100/100 connection at home. Should I take them up on that?
This is why we need more competition in the USA. I'm lucky here in the midwest in a rural area where Charter doesn't care.
Forgot to include the 20/20 for $40/month connection which is good for "HD Video Conferences" or the 70/70 for $70. Nothing special about the 70Mb package, I guess they don't quite recommend it for Web hosting, like they do the 100Mb package.