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.

Comments

Re:Think?

[Anonymous Coward]

By changing the definition of broadband from 4 down to 25 down, you're basically going to kill rural markets with additional regulation that barely can provide what they do now, which is 4mbs down if you're lucky. You idiots ranting here seem to be under the belief that all ISP's have to do is flip a few switches and voila! 25/3 for everyone! It's going to take massive investment from ISP to upgrade You'll feel differently when you're broadband bill doubles and you'll be paying much higher federal fees to subsidize rural ISPs. All for standard which most American households won't use. They don't even pay for it now when its available in their area, what makes you think they'll use it later?

Re: Think?

[cvdwl]

"The highway works as long as nobody drives on it?!"

More than 80% of their speed, more than 90% of the time. So, let's say that 10% of the time it was at or below 80%. Now let's say that a day has 24 hours. So only 2.4 (call it 2) hours of the day was the connection more than 20% below advertised, possibly much more. Now let's say that that occurs when EVERYONE IS USING IT. The system fails under peak load, i'e. when it's being used. So most users will experience failure.

Would you accept internet that is completely nonfunctional from 6-8PM every day? That satisfies your criterion above.

It's not like nobodies using the system when it's down. The system is down because it's being used. This is not an acceptable failure mode.