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FCC Officially Approves Change In the Definition of Broadband
halfEvilTech writes As part of its 2015 Broadband Progress Report, the Federal Communications Commission has voted to change the definition of broadband by raising the minimum download speeds needed from 4Mbps to 25Mbps, and the minimum upload speed from 1Mbps to 3Mbps, which effectively triples the number of U.S. households without broadband access. Currently, 6.3 percent of U.S. households don't have access to broadband under the previous 4Mpbs/1Mbps threshold, while another 13.1 percent don't have access to broadband under the new 25Mbps downstream threshold.
What are the practical results of this?
The Swedes and South Koreans laugh at our puny attempts to catch up.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
So, if I get this right, 80% of the US Americans have at least 25MB/s download. This is not really that bad, I have a fiber connection but only subscribe to 20/20 (for 30eur/month) because it's good enough for pretty much anything. From the complaints I hear on Slashot I thought only Google offered more than something like 5MB/s.
PlusFive Slashdot reader for Android. Can post comments.
AT&T is soooooo screwed.
maybe this will make the ISPs move their lazy butt a little and actually upgrade the infrastructure.. .... Oh who am I kidding, it won't.
Now when I say my peak rates are less than 25% of broadband speed, maybe I can get some sympathy
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Broadband is a description of the technology, not of bandwidth. The FCC is a technical organization, so why can't they use the correct name?
John
I used to have broadband, you insensitive clods! Government overreach just stripped it from me at the stroke of a pen!
... when the 3c509 is no longer considered broadband.
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
leading from behind... way behind.
Where does this put DSL? It's right at that limit. No real available upgrade paths.
This morning I had broadband. Now I don't. Thanks Obama!
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
That's less than 4MB/s after overhead - awful handy for downloading multi-GB ISOs, streaming high-def videos, etc.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You can't legislate technology.
Ever read the National Electric Code ?
Correction - less that *3* megabytes per second. 25Mbps = 3.125MBps, minus overhead.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Broadband is a description of the technology, not of bandwidth. The FCC is a technical organization, so why can't they use the correct name?
If you want to split hairs, broadband absolutely does refer to a bandwidth. The frequency band is broad, thus it has more width.
You can try to win the terminology war about data rates vs. frequency ranges, but I think you've pretty much demonstrated that few people understand, much less care, about such distinctions in this context.
Steam and Battle.net updates, Xbox/Playstation/Wii downloads, etc.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Why is this moderated down? This is the question we should be asking when changing legal definitions of things.
What can you now suddenly do on a 25Mbps connection that you couldn't do on a 4Mbps connection that makes it worth changing the legal definition of "broadband Internet access?"
Otherwise this is just the FCC wasting our tax dollars on doing something entirely pointless.
4Mbps is by far good enough for just about anything you'd do online. 25Mbps would allow you to do the same things, only faster. Why bother changing the definition?!
Replace "25Mbps" with "640kb" and maybe you'll see why that was a stupid thing to say.
You can't stream HD video on 4Mbps, you can't get large patches is a reasonable time with 4Mbps, you can't Skype in HD with 1Mbps of upload, it takes forever to seed a cloud backup with 1Mbps (I put a few hundred GB in Crashplan and it took a month, I have more data than that but I had to pick the important data because my upload was so limited), etc.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
This definition change doesnt affect customers really. Although tripling the number of american households without broadband is a convenient means of shaming the administration into pushing for common carrier status, as before this definitional change people like comcast were in fact allowed to call damned near anything they sold broadband and insist it was competitive enough. Administrative definitions of broadband may even hold water in court. For example if my bill continues to state im being charged for broadband at 11 megabit, i can likely sue for false advertising. chances are good though, as other slashdotters have noted, that assholes like time warner and comcast will just amend their 2015 marketing material with a disclaimer that not all speeds are broadband.
The real pisser is in the network. Cable companies have zero incentive to compete even if the common carrier law is passed. Theyve already hung enough cable to render land lines, which could be used like a local DSL hub from fibre to the doorstep, rotted and useless in most buildings. What they can do however is push for local legislation to criminalize using their already well funded and maintained copper for things like Google Fibre.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Uh, they changed the standard so that those who are milking on the USF can't continue to give their customers 1990's internet speeds with your money...
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
even well-populated areas of the US still have limited, unreliable, and gimmick-heavy choices. I'm one.
you are?
So 25Mb is the new broadband minimum?
Just wondering, did Netflix traffic get counted in that determination, or will Netflix service bypass all of this and soon be deemed a mandatory Right, protected under the 28th Amendment?
many of the countries with 100 Mb and gig to the home almost universally do not have for-profit privatized telcos.
they have nationalized telcos, and if the leader of their administration says "run fiber, not wire," they get the money and power to do that.
the rest back up "requests" to speed it up with subsidized dollars to make it work.
in the US, if you can't make your dividends and trench down fiber, the fiber doesn't happen.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Classic ADSL (the original 1998 version) goes to 8M/1M. If all you can get is 3M down, then that's because Verizon sucks. I had a less ambitious 6M/600K for years from AT&T until I upgraded to U-verse last year.
ADSL2+ (Annex M 2008) supports 24M down / 3.3M up and the telco side gear should be compatible with classic ADSL CPE. VDSL1 supports 55M down / 3M up and should also be backward compatible with ADSL. Both of these are probably where FCC got their numbers.
And Verizon also sucks because they're not going to build out any more FIOS.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
It's not truly "high speed internet" until it can pass this test:
http://messagebase.net/Home/Re...
I guess the crux of the matter is with this quote from TFA:
With the US currently ranked 25th in the world in broadband speeds,
With 4Mbps as a limit for "broadband intenet access", you just can't boast about being a leader in internet accessability. And not being able to boast hurts the American psyche.
Because 4k TV is a Basic Human Right. Right?
Dang! In December we finally got broadband access in our area and now they've taken it away. Oh, well. I'll go surf another bitch.
It's not "always wrong, no matter what". It merely lacks incentives and feedbacks to produce what the people actually value. It has power without responsibility. It can be wrong, and suffers nothing. (Was the FCC wrong to make the "standard" 3/1M so long? How has it suffered for that? A business wrong for too long would die.)
"Moon now means any body of matter with more than 10^24 KG of mass that orbits any other body of matter"
So apparently the earth no longer has a moon, but is one... That's not a far-fetched idea considering we have recently redefined the word Planet to be more descriptive.
The other thing is that defining "broadband" is the same fallacy as "the Inuit have 100+ words for snow". FYI - those words are wetsnow drysnow heavysnow ligthsnow bluesnow whitesnow yellowsnow ....
Broad is already defined; band is already defined; and width is already defined.
In relevant context: band is a contiguous set of wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum; width is the size of the band from wave lengths X through Y; broad is a qualitative description of the width of the band - the difference between X and Y. Thusly, broadband and bandwidth have intrinsic definitions that any reasonably intelligent entity familiar with basic English can deduce.
It's nice that a broad band width can carry more streams of information than a narrow one. It's perfectly acceptable for a government to want its citizens to have faster access to information.
IMO, to redefine a word, and not give a definition to subjects newly excluded from the definition is detrimental to society. In the 90's you basically had dial-up internet or broadband internet. These were not great labels, but they did the trick - broadband provided more bandwidth than the POTS networks could provide. These almost made sense. Would we ever see "dial-up" internet to mean only 33.6kbps or more? What happens to the people still using 28.8
What do we have with this new definition? Anyone who is somehow newly exposed to the word cannot use previous knowledge to understand its meaning. There are still users on dial-up, there are users with broadband capable of > 25Mbps down & 3Mbps up, but what about those users that are not on dial-up and have less 25Mbps down? What kind of internet connection do they have? It's not narrowband.
I think a better solution is leave the word broadband alone, and use more words to provide more description: e.g. "broadband" = "( ! dial-up ) && ( over phone || cable networks )", "basic braodband" = less than 1Mbps; "broadband-1" = >= 1Mbps && up to "broadband-3" = >= 3Mbps && ... && up to "broadband-100" = >= 100Mbps. In the future we can redefine broadband-100 to include an "up to broadband-X" clause and create a new broadband-X.
At least we had the decency to give Pluto the word dwarfplanet.
P.S. - I really hate that /. comments prevent me from using a single character to say "less than", and two characters to say "less than or equal to".
Maybe that was the meaning behind the title, s/he was stating that the following comment was dumb.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Does this mean the Google Fiber free tier will be upgraded from 5mbps to 25mbps? They were just above the line before, and now well below it. (granted, if I lived in a Google Fiber area, you would bet your ass off I'd have the gigabit connection!)
That couldn't possibly be a real APK post, it was entirely too short, and didn't have enough random Bold CAPSLOCK text.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Seems correct. In this case, the situation is entirely faked. The "definition of broadband" did not change.
The "definition" being discussed is only the electrical connection speed. The actual information delivery speed can be anything a huge, abusive company wants.
What matters is the delivery speed. Supposedly the speed of the connection I am testing is "25 Mbps". SpeedTest.net says the speed is more than "50 Mbps".
The actual information delivery speed measured by numion.com is:
Kilobits/second (Kilobytes/second)
Surfspeed inside United States: 239.24 (29.90)
Surfspeed average (worldwide): 198.64 (24.83)
Surfspeed outside United States: 187.24 (23.40)
A local city leader told me it costs "$400,000" to get elected. Any government that requires leaders to spend huge amounts of money to be elected isn't actually a democracy.
Are you certain of that ? I know lots of people that have mistaken beliefs about just how much technical merit really counts.
The only thing they're regulating is how government money is being handed out to telecom companies. You government is evil people are so odd.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Anyway, realized I was being too terse again, The electrical code and government regulation are the applicable metaphors as opposed to physics. Cable companies don't build out because they feel they can use the money better elsewhere. Governments can force them to build out, by taking away their monopolies if they don't.
It's mostly an economic/political question where broadband gets deployed.
can some one explain this part to me... "effectively triples the number of US households without broadband access. ... 6.3 percent ...13.1 percent "
And nothing about how our /etc/hosts files can convert our 4Mbps connections to 25Mbps, thereby instantly giving us broadband
Also, why are we still using asymmetric definitions of broadband, given that our newer usage - particularly FaceTime, Skype, VOIP, et al - require speeds to be same in either direction?
... a few months ago. Now, all of a sudden, I'm without broadband again.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
How long before the Democrats start running around telling us how horrible it is that do few Americans have access to broadband internet access, and then they will roll out a solution, based on increasing taxes on the rich to fund a massive infrastructure investment that just so happens to include almost exclusively Democrat contributors.
We saw this with the 2008 race to invest in green energy, remember Solyndra?
Ken
6.3 + 13.1 = 19.4%
That means just over 80% of Ameticans DO have access to High-speed broadband internet service.
Reminds me of the 85% of Americans that were pleased with their healthcare coverage, before Democrats convinced us we needed to light our hair on fire and turn the healthcare industry on it's ear to address the 15% without healthcare coverage..
Ken
Shouldn't monthly (or periodic) download caps be included in the official definition of "broadband?" Otherwise I can see a really good way of gaming this definition.
ADSL is very dependent on your local loop length. Higher loop to CO or micro-CO, lower achievable speeds. 8M ADSL was supported on people with something like 5000 feet of copper to the DSLAM (CO), which is damn near impossible for most people who don't live practically next door to one (that 5000 feet of copper doesn't go so far when it starts all the twists and turns needed to make it to each house or unit). There are newer standards now that will tolerate longer loops, but as far as many DSL companies are concerned "why change what isn't broken. The current standard is fine for our customers, because they can't get anything else anyway."
One of these days i'm going to find this 'peer' guy and reset HIS connection!
There are plenty of parties out there that don't have their heads as far up their asses as Libertarians do.
Ok so they changed the definition of what "broadband" is. Now the question is what will they do to help all those who have no access to high speed internet? Or those who are stuck with the crappy DSL services that run on copper networks that provided like Verizon let degrade? I don't see how changing this definition will help the situation of the sub par internet servicesin the US. Big deal Verizon can't call their DSL "Broadband" anymore, they will use a new term and nothing will change.
I'm a sockpuppet? That is interesting. Who am I a sockpuppet for?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Brand new sock puppet? I think you have poor estimating skills as my account is around 5 years old.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
The change in definition means that the percentages of households that have more than one option for broadband has plummeted. Before this, asshat providers like Comcast could claim that there was ample competition and choice for consumers but now it will be undeniable that they have effective monopolies for true broadband in many markets. Props to FCC for making the move. Undoubtedly, it will be appealed as a delaying tactic, even though the FCC is fully within their purview to make the decision.
My 5Mbps connection is giving me a solid 0.2Mbps per the nearest SpeedTest servers....
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
Funny, cause neither of those made any sense to say I couldn't prove him wrong. Heck, the second link I wasn't even in.
Why do you think I am trying to prove anything?
Also, you seem to not understand what a sockpuppet is. If you believe I am a sockpuppet, what is my main account?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?