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Why 6 Republican Senators Think You Don't Need Faster Broadband (cio.com)
itwbennett writes: Broadband in the United States still lags behind similar service in other industrialized countries, so Congress made broadband expansion a national priority, and it offers subsidies, mostly in rural areas, to help providers expand their offerings,' writes Bill Snyder. And that's where an effort by the big ISPs and a group of senators to change the definition of broadband comes in. Of course, the ISPs want the threshold to be as low as possible so it's easier for them to qualify for government subsidies. In a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, dated January 21, 2016, the senators called the current broadband benchmark of 25 Mbps downstream and 3 Mbps upstream 'arbitrary' and said that users don't need that kind of speed anyway. '[W]e are aware of few applications that require download speeds of 25 Mbps.' the senators wrote, missing the simple fact that many users have multiple connected devices.
Isn't it closer to "Why 6 Republican Senators Are Repeating Cable ISP Lobbyists' Talking Points on Why You Don't Need Faster Broadband"?
by different lobby group than congressmen from Democrat party. New at 11
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25Mbps doesn't cut it in a household with everyone using the Internet.
and my family are a heavy user.
No, no you're not. I telework from home. I have to kick off data file downloads the night before so that they're hopefully here by morning.
Data files that are sampled at 1 MHz that need to be analyzed. I max out my 25Mbit connection constantly. Sending data files back is even worse.
If you want your little part of the country to step into this century and have jobs for this century everyone is going to need 1 Gbit to the home. And as soon as I get 1 Gbit to the home I'm probably going to be asking when 10 Gbit is coming.
If you can get by with 20 Mbit you are not a heavy user.
If anything goes to poor people who have no lobbyist and no campaign contributions it's welfare and is evil.
Capitalism should be pure and not fettered by evil and incompetent gumment interference. Unless there is free money with no strings attached, at which point the more gumment involvement the better.
And if you think it's not free money, just try taking it away. The recipients will start squealing like stuck pigs.
Why is Snark Required?
No, if I'm not mistaken, YOU are expecting your fellow citizens to pay more tax so ISPs can reap more private profit. That's what this is about -- ISPs want more lenient definitions of "broadband" so they can more easily qualify for subsidies extorted from telephone customers .
Or maybe I'm just stepping in a big pile of Poe again.
Honest question - Besides updates or torrents, when do you regularly exceed 10Mbs? I host 6 moderately used servers, have a house with multiple users, and before watching any Netflix tonight my usage is:
Peak Min Average
15.89 Mbps 1.75 kbps 925.23 kbps
And for the month:
Peak Min Average
37.15 Mbps 6.22 kbps 476.25 kbps
Sure, my peak can hit my limit of 35Mbps, but my average? Not even close. Comcast has sold everyone the idea they need 100Mbps to watch movies or something, but in reality that isn't the requirement. I'm not saying that you can't tell the difference from 10Mbs to 25, but that isn't the problem that needs to be solved. The problem is what someone else posted - 2Mbps via high-latency satellite for $hundreds. Solve that first.
Honest question - Besides updates or torrents, when do you regularly exceed 10Mbs? I host 6 moderately used servers, have a house with multiple users, and before watching any Netflix tonight my usage is:
Peak Min Average
15.89 Mbps 1.75 kbps 925.23 kbps
And for the month:
Peak Min Average
37.15 Mbps 6.22 kbps 476.25 kbps
Sure, my peak can hit my limit of 35Mbps, but my average? Not even close. Comcast has sold everyone the idea they need 100Mbps to watch movies or something, but in reality that isn't the requirement. I'm not saying that you can't tell the difference from 10Mbs to 25, but that isn't the problem that needs to be solved. The problem is what someone else posted - 2Mbps via high-latency satellite for $hundreds. Solve that first.
Perfectly reasonable response hit with a -1. Slashdot mods are literally the worse.
What is at question is the minimum data rate required to qualify for subsidies. Quibbling over the actual word used in the regulation text is being overly pedantic and missing the point, especially when considering that words may have multiple meanings which even so are unambiguous in their different contexts. Nobody was debating the definition of the word "broadband" in the regulatory sense when it was defined to mean "at least 4 mbps download data rate and at least 1 mbps upload data rate".
Is this a race or something? Is such "lagging behind" — whether it is even true or not — automatically bad?
Perhaps one of the stupidest things i've read today..... We're basically talking about how the US compares to other counties in the basic medium that allows us to compete as a world economy, so YES, IT IS AUTOMATICALLY VERY FUCKING BAD. You may like the idea of burying your head up your ass and dreaming of 1950, but suggesting our country should be able to compete with the rest of the world while they move ahead and we're stuck looking at the inside of our colon is just stupider than shit.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Of course this is a moving scale over time. Right now, for most people, it's about 5Mbps down per person in the household. Netflix takes 3 Mbps. VOIP phone takes 0.16 Mbps. File downloads are usually limited by the server on the other end. I guess that servers will get faster if most folks have faster download speeds. Simple webpage downloads are limited by latency and broadband has little effect. I would really like to hear the case for speeds over 5Mbps/person.
But that's a different issue from what the official "broadband" definition should be. Government subsidies should only go to companies that are pushing the boundaries. Time Warner should not get money for building more of the same slow service.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition