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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.
but.... I would be happy if my parent's rural location could get a consistent 2 Mb/s up and down connection without paying $100/month for high latency satellite.
So, six ignorant Representatives think 25Mb is far too fast for people.
Fine. In order to support this argument, I want to mandate that these six individuals get their own broadband service capped at 10Mb for an entire year. Let's see how quickly their opinions change. After a week of trying to explain to their families that 10Mb is "fast enough", it won't even matter how much corporate grease is on their palms.
> "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."
But you have 3mps bandwidth to your eyes, so why wouldn't you leave the data file server side and analyse it with a remote desktop? You see why the bandwidth to your eyes is the limiting factor. Because if it really was the limiting factor you'd simply process the data and just move the results! Which are limited by your ability to see them!
But more to the point, 25Mbps is the definition of broadband for home users, not for work, you Telework. I pull down a lot of stock data feeds, Bittorrent, and wife and kids watch videos, and we don't get it past 12 at peak, even with my data feeds, and so 25Mbps is fine for a home user.
Be warned that Marco Rubio also supports lowering the broadband standard, and is against net neutrality.
Anything less than 25/5 (and no scumsucking usage cap!) is like having to crawl across a swaying rope bridge on an Interstate Highway.
I've been on 25/5 and on 3/1 and really can't tell much difference because most stuff is oversold to be barely tolerable. I would have no problem with them coming to some reasonable middle ground if they could figure out how to solve the oversold problem**. I currently work from home and I'm on a middle tier package which works fine during the work day but evenings it is barely usable and I've actually had to call in sick on days when the local school district has a snow day because all the neighbor kids are home and using the internet.
** The oversold problem is fixable if they want it to be. Just like fractional reserve banking or landline phones, you require a certain reserve and you build out for peak demand. Yes, this means that you're running at 50% capacity most of the time but then your service is actually usable during peak times. You can also use education, software, and incentives to try to get certain heavy non time critical downloads to happen during times where bandwidth is virtually free.
I live in a small town in India and I have a fibre to home 24Mbps connection for around 20 USD a month with 80GB cap. I can go for a faster connection with a larger cap but I have no use for it as of now.. Surprised the US is still lagging behind in terms of broadband..
So sure -- if you're just browsing /., you probably don't need anything higher than 25Mbps. But saying that's all anyone needs discounts the probability that with more bandwidth, new types of applications and usage scenarios can open up.
Could you give us some examples? Outside extreme cases, the highest bandwidth apps only require 3-4Mpbs (and this has nothing to with any Internet standards, we run high def Apps on our 1Gb LAN and we still have nothing requiring more than 5Mbps. So no, even if you had 1Gbps you couldn't use it if you tried.
Sure I could. I shuttle around AMI images, and do checkouts against large Subversion repos with 11+GB of data in them. I can easily saturate a 1Gb connection.
But that's neither here nor there. If I knew what the next-generation hit application would be, I wouldn't be here chatting with you about it -- I'd be out there writing it. The thing is nobody really knows what sorts of applications we can come up with that benefit from ubiquitous, high bandwidth availability. Perhaps we start working more with applications that can offload their processing needs on-the-fly in a nearly invisible manner. If the network speed were crazy high enough, you could run as if you had completely dynamic RAM online for loads that suddenly require it (that would require an approximately 100Gbps connection, FWIW).
But without those speeds, such applications can't be built. And as they can't be built, we can never know what amazing ideas people could come up with to make use of it. It's like a farmer with a cart and a mule saying "I can move both hay and milk from home to market -- what use would anybody have of an 18 lane paved freeway?". And yet, we have 18 line, paved freeways, and we make use of them all the time.
Yaz