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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
They cooperated to get the SOPA and PIPA stuff we fought against so hard crammed into the TPP so whichever evil side you support remember, this left wing propaganda article brought to you by Slashdot.org!
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
25Mbps doesn't cut it in a household with everyone using the Internet.
Not sure, but if history is any indicator, it will likely include the further restriction of my freedoms for my own good.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
So why are they helping companies get corporate welfare?
*checks calendar* oh wait, they must need donations for their upcoming election. Nevermind.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Our business is suffering because of lack of decent Internet connectivity in our area. These fucking corrupt lying pieces of shit need to quit calling themselves "pro-small business" because that's an outright lie. Has been for as long as I could remember, in fact.
I don't respond to AC's.
We would be ideally suited for the proposed due to our legendary geriatric sexual prowess or because of our boundless predisposition with porn?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
That's 5mbps which is better than what some rural area get. It's like 3.33 T1s.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Restrict their work offices to their definition of broadband. Maybe we will see more productivity out of Congress if their staff spend less time rewriting wikipedia articles.
yea but they watch it on VHS
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.
...has nothing to do with speed. It has to do with transmitting multiple signals over different frequencies.
"a high-capacity transmission technique using a wide range of frequencies, which enables a large number of messages to be communicated simultaneously."
Call it high speed Internet. Please stop fucking up our language.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
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.
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.
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?
Hardening of the artery finally pays off!
Think of the push back from contracts for "collect it all" systems that designed for download speeds of less than 25 Mbps on average?
Did the mil and gov project the US would be stuck on existing coax plans, and POTS copper for a long time?
What was MAINWAY, MARINA, FAIRVIEW, STORMBREW or even back to MAIN CORE keep up but only after another contractor upgrade again?
Thin copper and long POTS networks would have needed a lot of regional collection teams.
On one side are the telcos with too much copper POTS to replace and the other are the contractors who designed collection systems for data over copper speeds.
Would going full optical to or near each user or upgrading coax make "collect it all" more easy for direct collection without needing to buy expensive solutions from existing contractors?
Think of all the local security contractors that could be replaced by one new splitter and location.. if the internet is ever allowed to get too fast.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
You should keep your files on the cloud...more efficient.
I ask myself, if I could get 5 Mbps for $20, 20 Mbps for $40, 100 Mbps for $80 or 1,000 Mbps for $160, which would I chose?
And the answer (for me) is 20 Mbps for $40.
I'd like more, but I'm not willing to pay for it.
The average Slashdotter is likely to pick a higher tier, but the average American?
I bet most would be satisfied with (5Mbps * number_of_people_in_household), and $20/month would look very attractive to many.
In the middle (well, off center to the side a bit), of one of Australia's larger non-capital-cities. Best any telco can give me without 4-digit price tags is 4.5/.5
...
It is far better for me, and the economy, that I continue to slowly download contents over days instead of minutes. My appetite for fresh new content far exceeds the ability of the entrenched traditional content providers to provide it and so thus my taste for new information must be moderated to ensure that some upstart might upset the applecart.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
Broadband needs to be a utility and regulated as such. I've got my fingers crossed that Obama can get that done before he leaves office. Many people, like myself, live in places where the Internet options are 1. Shit 2. Shittier. Internet is too important today to be left to "The Invisible Hand". The barriers to entry are simply too high for there to be any kind of competition, so the government really needs to take care of it.
I don't respond to AC's.
https://www.daines.senate.gov/news/press-releases/daines-calls-on-fcc-to-clarify-broadband-definition
Daines Calls on FCC to Clarify Broadband Definition
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Senator Steve Daines today led five of his Senate colleagues in urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to clarify their inconsistent and arbitrary definitions of broadband, which could detrimentally impact rural Montanans.
The letter is also signed by Roger Wicker (MS), Roy Blunt (MO), Deb Fischer (NE), Ron Johnson (WI) and Cory Gardner (CO).
The senators expressed their concerns that:
The FCC’s arbitrary 25/3 Mbps benchmark speed does not reflect what most Americans consider broadband
The use of this benchmark discourages providers from offering speeds at or above the benchmark
The definition contradicts the broadband definition used in the Open Internet Order
The FCC uses a different benchmark when referring to broadband in rural America
“We are concerned that this arbitrary 25/3 Mbps benchmark fails to accurately capture what most Americans consider broadband, the use of this benchmark discourages broadband providers from offering speeds at or above the benchmark, the definition contradicts the ‘broadband’ definition the Commission used in its Open Internet Order, and that the Commission uses an entirely different benchmark when it comes to rural America,” the senators wrote.
The senators also sought additional clarification of the FCC’s broadband definition in its application to rural consumers: “It is unclear how applying a different definition of broadband to urban and rural areas is consistent with this clear Congressional directive. Nor is it clear how the Commission can justify defining broadband by the 25/3 Mbps benchmark in one context (when assessing the market under section 706), but ignoring this definition when it sought to regulate 'broadband' Internet access providers in its Open Internet Order -- there, essentially including any service above dial-up as ‘broadband’."
Senator Daines’ effort to encourage innovation and gain certainty for rural broadband providers and consumers was applauded by the Montana Telecommunications Association: “The Montana Telecommunications Association (MTA) shares the concerns that Sen. Daines raises in his letter to the FCC. Montana’s rural telecom providers continue to push advanced broadband capabilities to consumers throughout their service areas, including in some instances deploying gigabit services to schools and other anchor institutions in the near future. It is important to recognize that it costs more to deploy broadband infrastructure in rural, remote areas. Given the substantial challenges facing rural telecom providers, regulatory certainty is important in meeting the goals of the federal Telecommunications Act to ensure that all Americans, no matter where they live, have access to reasonably comparable broadband services at reasonably comparable rates. MTA appreciates Sen. Daines raising these points, and looks forward to working with him and the FCC as we deploy broadband infrastructure throughout rural Montana.”
Daines has long worked to improve rural Montanans’ access to broadband and increase transparency and accountability at the FCC. This fall, he introduced the Streamlining and Investing in Broadband Infrastructure Act, which would help increase broadband deployment in rural states.
Daines recently urged the FCC to consider strict enforcement measures and increase transparency for the recently announced Connect America Fund funding, which is intended to expand and support broadband service in rural areas. Daines also introduced the Small Business Broadband Deployment Act of 2015, which would protect Montana small businesses from burdensome FCC regulations.
Read
A local electric co-op is laying fiber to the home of every customer over a 5 year buildout, gig speed available. Rural farmland with great speeds. And a mile away from my house where I get 3 meg on a good day. With trees between me and the closest connection. Ug!
I can easily see a call for fast download speeds, but by setting the upload rate to 3mb, you're excluding ADSL with it's upload of 768k which is likely the only way these customers will every be covered. Not to mention that most wireless technologies would struggle to cover any significant numbers of people at 25/3 but the people we serve with wireless are ecstatic to get 6/3 and we can't get assistance to cover additional rural areas.
Your definition of "heavy user" is definitely different from mine. 12 Mbps is just enough to have a single download from steam while not being able to do anything else. I was on 12 Mbps for a long time, so I speak from experience. When I upgraded to 105 Mbps, the difference was night and day.
All the more reason old people should not be leaders of any stripe.
Take your Geritol, watch Matlock, and have a nap. No, I don't know where your cereal bowl is. No, I don't care that you remember when "this was all farmland". And, no, your time "in the war" isn't a bargaining chip.
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
from my house where I get 3 meg on a good day. With trees between me and the closest connection
Maybe your connection speed varies depending on how many birds are in said trees at a given moment in time ;-)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
When you grow government and inject it into everything several things are GUARANTEED to happen:
1. Everything becomes political.
2. Politicians discover that they can get money and power by promising to regulate, or not regulate, or adjust regulations.
3. Politicians discover that they can raise money and get votes by pointing at all the regulations favored by other politicians and groups....and with so many things in the mix, they can stay in power with very unpopular positions on one set of issues the government is entangled in by pointing at their favorable positions on another set of issues the government is entangled in.
4. A portion of the business community discovers it can make more money by investing in politicians who regulate and hand-out subsidies than they can make from honest competition in a free and open marketplace.
The corruption is not only bi-partisan but it goes in both directions. Examples:
A. Politician says "elect me and I will do {fill in the blank}." This is the obvious one.
B. Politician says "elect me or the other guy will do {fill in the blank}." This is less obvious to some, but just as powerful.
C. Lobbyist says "do {fill in the blank} and I will back you." Like [A] this is the obvious one.
D. Lobbyist says "don't regulate {fill in the blank}." The one we intuitively expect in a market-based economy.
E. Lobbyist says "I encourage you to regulate {fill in the blank}." The one favored by crony capitalists who already have market share, and least noticed by the general public particularly because messaging experts always position it as a "good corporate citizenship" play.
Yes, the telcos have historically been slightly more involved with the Republicans, but the big media companies and their organizations (MPAA ring any bells?) have historically been more involved with the Democrats. The TRUTH is that these big cash-heavy interests buy as many politicians on BOTH sides of the aisle as they need to get what they want, and the ONLY way to stop this is to get government OUT of everything in should never have gotten into in the first place.
That's nice. My local electric co-op is running fiber between all of their substations. But they aren't sharing. The board decided it would be best if they just sold electric.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
They're right about one thing: 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up *is* an arbitrary designation for calling something "broadband". Let's pick 10Gbps full duplex as our definition of broadband instead, before broadband access gets ruled a basic human right.
If more people get 25 MPBs service, more services will be available at 25 MBPs. Chicken and egg Senators, chicken and egg.
I don't buy the proposition people are deriving much value from >10megabit pipes. Even with a half dozen people sharing one 10 mbit pipe at once lack of queue management and round trip latency is why your experience will suck long before available bandwidth is a limiting factor.
There are counter examples... 3 people streaming different HD titles at the same time while playing xbox games, bit torrent, using a cloud backup service and talking on VOIP at once. However it is still a mistake to allow policy to be driven by outliers. Broadband definition is supposed to be a baseline not some ultra performance 1337mbit service tier.
The majority of customers are likely better served going forward if a higher priority is given to more useful characteristics such as quality, latency, upstream bandwidth and COST rather than allowing downstream bandwidth to dominate the broadband definition landscape.
You're right, the words baseband and broadband actually do have definitions, they MEAN something. 10BASE-T, 100BASE-T are so named because they are10 and 100 meg BASEband transmission over telephone cable. Baseband means there is a signal frequency used, the data rate is the signaling rate.
BROADband means multiple channels are used. A cable modem may use four different (tv) channels at 2.5 Mbps signaling rate each to provide 10Mbps of data rate. A T1 is 24 channels of 64kbps each, so it's broadband, as is a 128kbps isdn connection (using two 64kbps channels).
Basic fiber optic connections use a single laser or led clocked at the data rate, so these fiber are baseband, not broadband.
Save in some ways, spend more in others: Analyze your file in the cloud, and you need to pay for processors in the cloud. If you have real processor use, buying your own hardware beats the cloud, price wise, in about 3 months.
We still use Carrier Pigeons for our packets. The speed is okay with a box of 128GB SDHC cards, but the latency is the shits.
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
GOP stuck in the past in the pocket of big business.
to fix it we need to vote Bernie sanders or trump.
Anyone who hasn't been under a rock for the past 25 years knows that Donald Trump is the pocket of big business.
Back in 1985, 2400bps was fast enough for anyone -- users typically didn't need the kind of speed 4800bps (or -- gasp -- 9600bps) gave you.
But you know what? As more bandwidth became available, developers were able to write different kinds of applications to take advantage of it.
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.
Fortunately, I sit here in Canada with a 120Mbps home cable connection, and don't have to give much of a crap about idiot Senators in the US.
Yaz
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".
or slashdot?
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..
If they can get any of these guys (if any are up for re-election) to say it on camera...
30 second ad of normal people frustrated by the load screen while their streaming video has frozen, juxtapositioned with Senator X saying that they don't need faster broadband.
You forgot that the data is compressed in your eye before going through the optic nerve so you're off by about a factor of 4. Look at a 1MP image vs a 10MP image and tell me if you can see the difference. I have a 60Mbps connection and max it all the time, you are not heavy users, also you may need some glasses if you can't distinguish between 700,000 pixels and 8.8million pixels.
Don't know why this got modded down. It is pretty much spot on.
Only in extreme cases, which by definition are the edge cases and therefore not typical of any standard that needs to be legislated by govt.
No... you pretty much had the extent of the "concern" of these senators when you said "regulation." The entire motivation of these changes were to try to keep the US competitive with other countries, which in pretty much every arena possible... from net neutrality, to health care, to education.... these ideologically driven senators don't give a fuck about the US citizens or future generations thereof, nor the infrastructure that they need or will need.
The US is falling behind many other countries in the world not only because other countries are innovating and upping their game, but also because these fucking idiots fossil senators (in general) prefer to be anti-intellectual cretins who don't understand the most basic thing: stupidity doesn't lead to innovation.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
I have 45 Mbps from my phone... (UK)
Requiem for the American Dream
Capitalism should be pure and not fettered by evil and incompetent gumment interference.
We've had examples of that model already and they failed. Walk into any jungle and see how long you last. It's pure, unfettered capitalism at it's finest. Death awaits you at any instant.
This is why we have government, regulations, taxes and subsidies etc, because they work out better for most people than the jungle model you seem to love (but refuse to live in)
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
Agreed
When industries are pushed to do something for the public, they make scary noises like this. They fill the air with FUD and we are to to believe that the internet providers will all be driven out of business.
The auto industry, when asked to install seat belts and basic safety items, said it would be near impossible and ruinously expensive. A few years later, miraculously it all worked fine. Dirt cheap and easy.
The ISPs are no different. They'll have to install better connections eventually. The world demands data.
I have a friend who truly is out in the sticks, and he cannot get usable internet at all. Literally, nothing. He has crappy copper wires, a crappy little local phone company / ISP with legendarily bad service. They'd be better put out of business but instead there's no effective pressure to make them improve.
I couldn't give a hoot if we had either effective monopoly regulation, or truly effective competition, but we have neither. We have ineffective monopolies, crappy service, no power to effect change, high rates and lousy service.
Don't step on the baby.
How about lowering your income to 2000 bucks a month? Most people don't need more than that anyway.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Faster speeds promote a remote workforce, saving money for business, reducing needs for infrastructure (roads) maintenance and upgrades, improve the quality of life of many Americans, and providing increased opportunities for everyone.
That's one way of putting it. Of course, they kind of succeeded last time they wanted a downgrade of definitions and thus services for Americans, so they probably figure this is hat trick. Just pay off some politicians and give them a script and laugh.
If you're curious, let's just say that what we call 3G and 4G in the USA isn't the same as the rest of the world.
Not doing anything for the money they receive makes the subsidies into corporate welfare. Getting paid again for work already done is rent-seeking. The reason why they're getting subsidies is so they can upgrade their infrastructure. Which means they're ready for this improvement in service because they used the last batch of subsidies to do exactly that; right? A concerned politician can give this unwelcome corporate welfare a better name; fraud.
I was not completely clear in making my point. When I said "Capitalism should be pure and not fettered by evil and incompetent gumment interference. ", I was mocking the right wing Republican position. It is their automatic unthinking response and a hallmark of their hypocrisy. I thought that was clear from the context.
Why is Snark Required?
Bizde Türkiye^de Cumhuriyetçilerden çekiyoruz ama yinede Allahmzn sözüne uymalyz. O hiç bir çkar ve menfaat gözetmez imdikiler ooooooo.. http://www.antepevdenevenakliy...
And in the 1930s, you'd be the one telling us that we "had" to vote for either Stalin or Hitler, amirite?
No, in the 1930s, we'd be telling you that we need to provide telecommunications and electrification to just about every single address in the entire country.
Amazingly, we did this and when it came time for the entire country to ramp up production, we were able to meet that demand - unlike what might have happened if we listened to the morons now pushing this shit all over again.
They interpreted 25 Mbps as 25mbps!
"users don't need that kind of speed anyway"
I could probably agree with that - 25/5 would be nice, but not exactly _need_. So, all that is left is for the ISPs to provide oh, say, 8/1 _per_ _user_. Five users in my house, 40/5 would be fine thanks.
Oh wait, that's not what you meant, you don't provide service per user but per household/residence ?
Well, mr ISP and ISP-bought-politicians, stop talking about what a "user" needs and start talking about what a household needs then - can't have it both ways.
Is there ANY place in America where converting anything into a monopoly that is tightly-tied to government has made the customers happy?????
Yes, Chattanooga, to name only one. Just because you have no idea what you're talking about (as evidenced by your above statement) doesn't mean you have an educated opinion. Get a fucking grip, will you?
I agree you have a use-case that needs greater bandwidth. However, for people surfing the web and watching a few movies then 20 Mbit is fine. This must cover most people. I have a 1 Gbit connection at work (which I need) but at home I was on 20 Mbit until November when they bumped me up to 40 Mbit for free. I've never had trouble with 20 Mbit, even though I know how fast a 1 Gbit connection feels.
soylentnews.org
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
My lord, I would love to have 25/5.
I'm still stuck with 5/1 in the area I'm in and even for my wife and I, it's not enough.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
Move to Australian then. We are so advanced that today in 2016 we are building the new fast NBN with... copper
The "right to privacy" that some people assume is part of the Constitution is really just an excuse that activist judges use point to in order to make sure the side they favor wins. Outside that context, it's too hard to define what it means. (By contrast, everyone knows what "freedom of the press" means.) The US doesn't have a monopoly on not being able to define privacy, look at the fight over the EU's Right to be Forgotten law/rule/whatever.
Bork favored a strict interpretation of laws that exist. Congress went through the process of passing a new law to replace the old one, which is fine. What would have been wrong would have been a judge pretending there was a law protecting his video records when there was not.
I agree, dumbing down the spec will make "high speed" available to more people, especially people in fly-over country. I know quite a few people in the midwest burbs who have terrible service. They'd love to get 6/.5 but you helpful people say they have to have 25/5 or nothing, so they're getting nothing.
I still remember when the cable companies would charge you per TV in the house and splitters were against the TOS.
The lack of competition is sad. These companies reap so much in terms of subsidies and do very little to invest that money into infrastructure upgrades.
I recently switched from 20/2 (for $80/mo that includes hardware rental fee) to 30/5 @ $65/mo. Just another sleezy tactic they use, automatically hike your prices until you call and complain, then they magically find a better deal. Even 30/5 @ $65/mo is not that good of a deal in most developed countries.
At 20/2, we could not have 2 simultaneous streams going.. my wife watching youtube videos at 480p and I streaming at 1080.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Basic fiber optic connections use a single laser or led clocked at the data rate, so these fiber are baseband, not broadband.
I was under that the effective frequency spectrum of a visible light frequency transmission was the frequency of the laser (c divided by the wavelength) plus or minus the data rate.
This summary was beautifully designed to attract slashtrolls.
" so Congress made broadband expansion a national priority, and it offers subsidies, mostly in rural areas, to help providers expand their offerings"
As someone who lives in a rural area, I can tell you this is COMPLETE BULLSHIT.
NO ONE I know in any rural area has any decent broadband. I have a choice of about 1 -2 mbps from a radio link, or spotty 4G from a cell booster, and we had to put up a tower and pay for the towers, antennas, boosters, cabling, etc. And I live only 30 miles from the center of a fairly large and high-tech city.
Telecom companies are just lying sacks of shit when they talk about using those subsidies for rural areas. They pocket the money and don't do a damn thing with it.
Netherlands is twice the size of New Jersey. There is a county in my state the size of NJ with a total population of 15,000....
love is just extroverted narcissism
What makes you say 1mbps is fast enough? Do you even go on the internet? So many pages are riddled with advertisements they'll take forever to load. So many pages anymore aren't posting stories; they're posting video.
Maybe if you got out of 1997 and stopped using RealPlayer; you'd realize you can't do anything under a megabit anymore. I realized that in 2005 when I was stuck on sub-megabit internet. Web-pages were a tedious ordeal.
You speak as an idiot; or someone who wants to see internet speeds fall so people will be forced to going back to paying outrageous prices for cable TV.
Who do you work for? Judging by the fact you're too cowardly to post under a name, I can only assume you're some corporate shill. You should have disclosed that; it might have gotten you at least a little respect.
I know of very few places in the country that require much more than median household income to live, so let's adjust Congressional salaries to be pinned to median income.
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
I think you're confusing bandwidth with baud rate. Bandwidth really is measured in bits per second.
That is, in digital communication, 1 hz = 1 bps. There might be some overhead used for error correction and encoding, but that's not the point.
For the life of me, I can't see why this was modded down as "Flamebait." It's a completely valid argument. The lawmakers are, in fact, against the raising of the standards by an executive body, the FCC, not "changing the definition of broadband." The FCC has changed the definition, and this is a legislative check to an arbitrary executive policy, not a strong hand on the brake by a bunch of myopic clods. That's what the summary seems to imply, that they're Luddites. I think it's very biased.
Now that argument may not be sufficient in the minds of people who evangelize for at least 100Mbps down, or the laughably overpriced for underserviced nature of American broadband vs the rest of the industrialized world, but it doesn't make it any less valid.
IMHO, it's _upload_ speeds that should absolutely be better than 1Mbps. I get 10-12Mbps up, and I still have to spend quite a bit of time uploading content to the web, or attaching PDFs to email. Let's shoot for half the download speed at least, eh? (i.e.: 4Mbps down, then 2Mbps up. 25 down, then 12 up, etc.)
Ah yes. You tell my IT department that one. Nothing is hosted in any 'cloud'.
If you don't think he'd act in his own self interest, which is exactly the same interest as his fellow big businesses, then you're a fool.
BTW, this money he supposedly "earned" really ought to be paid out to reimburse the shafted investors in his countless bankrupted ventures. His current wealth is purely a product of gaming the system. In an earlier era, he'd be rotting in debtor's prison at this stage of his life.
That's funny because I just switched ISPs and the sales rep of my new provider was pretty adamant that 50 Mb/s was not going to be enough for a household of one person. At the same time, ISPs are telling senators that households (which likely have more than one person) don't need any more than 25 Mb/s. It sounds like the ISPs are talking out of both sides of their ass.
Don't forget the 1GB Iomega Jaz. That set the standard for "unreliable." ;)
Problem solved.
Oh, and that ad blocking = terism.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
All systems can be gamed. That's why you need to reform them frequently. By that I mean, change the rules as a matter of course every 20 years or so.
Urban vs rural policy is something this country should definitely look into. Something along the lines of "infrastructure districts," slicing up cities into large megalopolis districts, because it's easier to wire a city, and rural into smaller district regions, because it costs more, and giving each appropriate amounts of money for infrastructure. The difference in size of districts might mean that you can give the *same* amount of money to each district. But honestly we should think outside the box and allocate *different* funds by different standards of say, "Class 1, Class 2, and Class 3 districts." Class 1 would be urban. Class 2 would be (comparative to sparse rural) dense rural. Class 3 could be sparse rural. (Additionally, Class 4 could be "pay for a satellite dish," AKA the "fuck it" districts. We could even give satellite service buyers a tax break on it to incentivize).
Differing fund allocation policy would allow for sensibly fewer districts, too, making it easier to administrate.
Frankly, it's high time the Republicans started having to cater to the cities, and vice-versa for the Democrats and rural constituencies. I'm getting sick and tired of half the country getting screwed on the federal level with each shift in power.
because they got campaign financing and lobbying from entrenched ISPs?
That and the fact that Republicans have gone full pants-on-head retarded recently.
Your sentence is missing a word or two, or has a word or two replaced, so it's not entirely clear what you're saying. I -think- you're saying that you think of laser fiber connections as working like FM radio, where the data signal modulates the carrier. The actual frequency would then be the carrier frequency plus or minus the signal. Is that what you're saying?
What makes lasers special is that all of the light is at the same wavelength, so it doesn't disperse. The wavelength or frequency can't be readily modulated. Instead, the laser is pulsed, either directly by turning power on and off, or through a device that blocks the light similar to an LCD screen, called a electro-absorption modulator.
So it's one single frequency, turned on and off.
I don't think most people are close enough to the CO to get 4Mbps in a lot of rural areas. More like you could expect 768Kbps down/768Kbps up SDSL.
25Mbps seems a distinctly "urban" standard, and absolutely pie-in-the-sky for a rural standard. To me, at least.
You're dealing with building off the rail line and pipeline fiber for rural areas, currently, if I'm not mistaken. Honestly, IMHO, the federal government should be doing a massive public infrastructure project running limited fiber trunk lines across rural America, and leaving the "last mile" (which can be more like 20 miles in rural) to the ISPs. Either that or subsidize satellite. We need a real infrastructure plan to solve that problem (good luck getting that from Congress! We can't even maintain our bridges and highways.)
Your sentence is missing a word or two
True: s/under/under the impression/
I -think- you're saying that you think of laser fiber connections as working like FM radio, where the data signal modulates the carrier.
No, AM radio. The amplitude of the radio or light emission is varied over time.
So it's one single frequency, turned on and off.
That's amplitude-shift keying, the special case of AM where only on and off are valid. Like other forms of AM, ASK's bandwidth is theoretically nonzero. Zero bandwidth would be a laser that is never pulsed.
What this country needs to do is split "minimum internet access speed" (I won't misuse "broadband") into regional strategies. Like a minimum guaranteed rate on a frame relay. (Do those still exist?) I'd say 4 regions as a starter.
Class 1 - urban region, easy to wire up; Class 2 - rural dense (vs rural sparse) more difficult, different challenges; Class 3 - rural sparse, probably yet different challenges; Class 4 - screw you, get a satellite dish, you "exceedingly long peninsula."
Then we need different build-out strategies for each region. Get that? Not one strategy for the entire country like apples are oranges, and monkeys are orangutans. A little common sense regarding the different needs of the different regions, instead of this (R) rural, (D) urban, schizophrenic policy. I think 4Mbps/2Mbps up would be "adequate" for a Class 3 infrastructure region. More minimum speed for the higher classes. This is what would be fair, and I think the senators are trying to roll out subsidies to rural areas in particular, so that's why they want to check the higher standard of the FCC policy.
(PS: I say 4Mbps/2Mbps, because I think up should, for the sake of these minimums, be pegged at half of down. If I have 25 down, I should have 12-13 up, not 3, which ludicrously assumes no one in the country is a content creator.)
I think most Slashdotters have a parochial view of what "broadband" should entail, compared to far denser, far smaller, industrialized nations. We definitely pay too much in America, which makes the idea of "subsidizing" ISPs feel a little cynical to many people here.
But I agree in essence. This is a "checks and balances" situation, executive vs legislative, not a Luddite pull on the hand brake as it is characterized. I think the FCC was too aggressive for rural considerations.
Yeah, but that's what, a city of 100,000 people? And you have the NBN to fix that. The project is slow and expensive, but the broadband at the end shouldn't be. Your problem is the international carriers colluding to keep international prices high. The cheapest Internet out of Sydney, last I bought some there, was to get a connection to NZ and out from there. The funny thing is that the NZ Internet mostly goes through Sydney (for anything not in the US). So going to Singapore or Japan, you'd go from Sydney to NZ, back to Sydney and out to international undersea cables to Asia.
And to those outside Australia, Surfer's Paradise isn't a town, Gold Coast is a region that's a suburb of Brisbane. So discounting the sprawl towns part of the "greater" metropolitan areas of a capital, So have fun in Newcastle, NSW.
In the US, the cast majority of area has services you'd expect in the middle of nowhere WA. DSL, maybe, often with speeds under 1Mbps, and dial-up. Dial-up isn't going to die any time soon. There are just too many rural areas, even if nobody lives there.
Learn to love Alaska
There are many millions of folks who believe that both Senate and House salaries are far too high for what they do. Especially for some of the utterly
ridiculous ideas and statements they tend to come up with from time to time.
I mean, they don't really NEED $175k per year ( not even going to go into their retirement and other perks ) to pass laws they don't even bother reading
do they ?
We really need a better method of determining who will make decisions for this country. The one with the most money to throw at a campaign or the
winner of the popularity contest really isn't turning out so well these days. The state of our economy is good evidence of this.
Chuckle. Perhaps we should mandate a very specific PH.D degree plan that would be required for all those who wish to lead this country. Prove they actually
have the snap to handle the job and the intellect to understand it in the first place. At least we would be able to select a qualified candidate if we forced the
education requirements upon them.
You obviously don't understand how digital-analog hybrid neutral networks feed into our perception. Next you'll tell us bullets aren't dangerous because their average velocity over the age of the Universe approaches 0.
It's horribly wrong with a few correct facts. The human brain does continuous integration of past and current information and the eyes do a lot of pre-processing. The eyes don't return all information, only the important information and the brain fills in the holes. 3Mb/s of "bandwidth" of raw data from the eyes is only enough for 4fps of binary monocrome color, yet we see in a vibrant array of colors and can perceive as quickly as 300fps. The analogy is horribly broken to absurdity with only basic common sense.
I can only do about 1 mathematical operation per second if I'm lucky. Would you say the brain is only capable of 1 instruction per second?
The competition makes the vendors fight for market share and pushes them to innovate and look for ways to keep the customers happy - with the vendors that fail ending and new vendors with new choices entering the markets.
The competition fights for the most profitable markets and not only leave out the barren farmlands, but even cities and communities of 10,000 or less where economies of scale don't lead to the highest profits. The problem is, they would still be mildly profitable if they were forced to serve them. But the complete freedom makes it very difficult for someone else to step in and offer that.
No personal responsibility.
I'm convinced our educational system is geared to teach this without actually coming out to say it. Everyone gets a trophy, if a football coach says his players are playing like girls he's likely to be fired for being sexist. Don't offend anyone one (who's not on the approved people to offend list).
If the current clamps being place on the American people actually go far enough to kill the electricity and the TVs and game consoles turn off long enough for people to look around and see what's going on we may actually have a chance to reclaim our republic.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Netflix quotes 3GB/hr. for HD. That's a little over 6Mbps for one HD stream. More than 15Mbps for UHD.
That's not exactly true. It could range anywhere from 2Mbps to 30Mbps. All depends on what level of quality loss you're willing to allow.
Is there ANY place in America where converting anything into a monopoly that is tightly-tied to government has made the customers happy?
I'm pretty happy with my power and natural gas, actually. The roads aren't bad, either. The USPS is pretty good, too. You sound like a real nutter.
I don't respond to AC's.
That's the first time I've seen anyone say "either Sanders or Trump would fix this". You don't often see those two put on the same level.
Examine even your most deeply held beliefs. Nobody is always right.
What's all the fuss? I think 25mbps down, 3mbps up is a good speed for a 'minimum' or a 'standard'. If you want more, pay for it. Each of us has a 'minimum' or 'standard' sized water pipe going to your house. If you decide to add more sinks, showers, toilets, etc. and need more water pressure, you are not 'entitled' to it. You pay for all the work to upgrade. Each of us has a 'standard' sized electrical entrance coming into your house. If you decide you want to start welding, or adding other power hungry devices, you are not 'entitled' to increase your electrical feed capacity, you must 'pay' for an upgrade. Just my thoughts/opinion. Thanks.
And computers have too much memory also. Who would ever need more than 64k? It gives you a glimpse into what sort of mind people like Tom Wheeler and his Republican buddies have. They've effectively completely sat out the last 20 years of tech progress. They have no access- as personal memories - of the lessons, lore, and legends of computing and the internet and consequently lack the shared base of facts upon which sound judgments can be built. They are totally cut off from the weltanschauung of the modernity and are effectively legislating across time, legislating from the past. They have no idea what the cultural refernce I made above refers to. They have no idea of how it is shorthand for the tech insight: "if you built it, they will come" . If you create it, if you allow it, it will be quickly be put to extraordinary use which no one can now foresee, but which will become the stuff of future economic activity ....and the taxes guys like you live off.
Exactly. He's not in their pocket. He is them.
So once he runs the US, he's going to run it like his company.
Or are you implying that he is somehow going to fuck his own company over just so other companies can make a profit?
Doesn't sound logical to me.
So you'd like to see him run the US as his company. Which would mean that the proceeds of the country's economy become the property himself and his cronies, and everyone else works for wages set to a level competitive with offshore labor.
Man, you people are suckers.
More often, they're unironically denying to others what they already have. Such as taxpayer supported cadillac-level healthcare insurance. I'm sure these same six senators have gigabit broadband, and I bet it was a "gift", too. It's the rest of us who don't need it.
-- sudon't
Air-ride Equipped
Satellite is not the solution. For a reasonable antenna size, there is only a limited number of satellites in geostationary orbit that can push through a limited bitrate in the dependably transparent bands of the atmosphere
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Bandwidth is not properly measured in bits per second. Even with single-bit-per-sample encoding, the data rate is 2 bits per Hertz. With fancy encoding schemes, the bitrate/Hz can be much higher: consider 56 kbps on 4 kHz telephone lines.
The concepts are related but they're not the same. Using them interchangeably is confusing and sometimes deceitful.
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You're saying that federal Senators and Representatives need more than text speed in their offices? They should be dealing with issues that can be put into words, not watching cat videos or porn. Internet speed does not affect the valid business of Congress.
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Around here there's a 50Mbps option, which is about right for my usage along with my wife and her friend (who's renting with us). I recently dropped down to 30Mbps and that seems OK thus far.
Lower than that probably wouldn't work well, not necessarily because of the lower bitrate but because it drops the monthly download/upload limit to the point where I risk overages.
Of course, around here 50Mbps is also around $95 so the pricing sucks. The one thing I can say about my ISP (Shaw) is that they do tend to have good uptime and/or tech support though, certainly better than any of their competitors I've dealt with among the big ISP's.
Language evolves is the real point. Just like debugging no longer means removing literal bugs from circuitry. Are you going to argue that one, too?
Tell the Republican senators that reduced speeds will mean that users will not see Big Business' ads.
The proper purpose of a business is very different from the proper business of government. The proper purpose of business is to create value and trade value for money, making money without doing harm (Remember, not doing harm is part of "proper".) The proper purpose of government is to protect people's rights (first and foremost life and property). Wasting money does harm to those who have to pay it, so to avoid harming taxpayers, government should not spend what is not absolutely necessary to protect its citizen's rights.
Trump shows an ongoing opposition to private property rights: he supports unlimited eminent domain, as exemplified by his agreement with the Kelo decision. Trump is what most leftists dishonestly claim all Republicans are: a fascist.
Like Obama, Trump's philosophy is not far from solipsism. He rarely even acknowledges arguments that come from outside his mind.
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Is that it? The faster your fooking Netflix movie loads, the better America's position against China? Seriously? Yes, decent Internet bandwidth is important, but only to a point — you aren't going to triple a worker's productivity by upping their "broadband" from 15Mbps to 45Mbps. You would not even double it — see diminishing returns.
Fix your CAPS LOCK button, ASSHOLE.
I can't parse the above "insightful" part, but, if you really are worried about America's competitiveness, you should be focusing on things like ease of doing business here.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If Congress didn't want advanced communication capability to mean services capable of bi-directional high-quality video conferencing, then they shouldn't have put that definition in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. FCC is following the definition Congress set forth, and you have to draw an arbitrary line somewhere. FCC came up with a number because Congress was too chicken to do so.
The money comes from the ISPs' bank accounts because WE ALREADY FUCKING GAVE THEM ALL THE SUBSIDIES THEY COULD POSSIBLY NEED!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
(By contrast, everyone knows what "freedom of the press" means.)
While your post makes some good points, I do have to take exception to this one line. The first amendment is cited incorrectly in at least 3-4 stories posted on /. today alone. The freedom of the press is used erroneously to snoop into the private lives of civilians all the time, and to break into private events. The right is freedom of the press from government not carte blanche to investigate everything a celebrity does.
In the physical world, there are plenty of things that involve frequencies in the analog sense, and there you find bandwidth in its original meaning. These things include digital transmissions when you consider their physical representation, so it's important to people that design "broadband" modems, for example. They also include completely analog systems such as human hearing. I understand that laypeople often take scientific terms and use them in some vague, narrow and "wrong" sense, but that's far from having the actual scientific language evolve.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
5Mbps for $20, that's for sure. That's more than enough for Netflix.
It depends on how many people in your household watch at once and how big the screens are (such as 480p on a Wii or phone vs. 1080p on a PC or eighth-generation console).
The analogy is horribly broken to absurdity with only basic common sense.
Only if you can't read.
The GP was referring to doing the load at the Data Centre, and merely transmitting the display to your house (ie Remote Desktop/Citrix or similar). 3Mbps is the bandwidth of Hi-def raw video, but most of these technologies can do it for far less with compression (25-50kbps from memory).
So for any argument saying I need X bandwidth to move all my shit to my house and back, the solution is don't move it. keep it in the datacantre and only move the display information.
A T1 is 24 channels of 64kbps each, so it's broadband,
A T1 has a single fixed bit-rate of 1.544 MHz which is mupltiplexed to 24 8-bit frames, 8,000 frames/sec, so it is baseband by your definition. It is not a mix of frequencies.
J
Anyone have a measure of the bandwidth required by Occulus apps? Streaming video for games and porn should take a healthy jump when the next major release of these devices occurs.
Baseband:
A type of data transmission in which digital or analog data is sent over a single unmultiplexed channel, such as an Ethernet LAN.
After it is de-multiplexed, it can be sent over a baseband medium (or a broadband medium). The T1 itself is defined as 24 channels, and is therefore broadband.
I live in Rural Georgia and have 100Mbit service, I lived in rural nebraska and had 70Mbit service .... how much faster do you want it to be?
The new UHD ("4K") streams that some sites are now offering require 15-25Mbps. Reliably, not just once in a while. For one stream.
They do not need more than 64K either...
Other than the difference between the First Amendment and the underlying right, I'm not really clear on what you're saying. Most of the "people being wrong about the First Amendment" that I see claims that the amendment is narrower than it really is.
Can you give an example of Freedom of the Press being used as an excuse to harass private citizens?
Well, we probably *could* get away with slower broadbamd *IF* websites weren't loading their sites with tracking code and worthless cruft.
I would guess that 95% of households never utilize more than 20Mbs, ever. Most of the time, the only way your going to use (notice I said use, not 'need') more than 20Mbps is if you are streaming more than 5 Netflix streams at a time or downloading illegal software/movies. Saying that Americans 'need' over 25Mps is ridiculous. If Americans needed, or even cared for faster speeds, companies would deliver. They would pay more for faster speeds.
Too bad most of you will never know the glorious feeling of 250/250mbps fiber for $55 in a municipal arrangement. The fiber connection is $25 through the municipality and my choice of provider is $35 on top of the fiber. The ping so low. The pipe so fat. mmmm... Fuck these cockold politicians. Don't they know their kiddie porn and chicken'n'waffle recipes are that much more glorious on a REAL internet connection. Maybe they don't use the internet at home or at work. Just an aide to do it for them. Fuck Comcast.
Filter your Law Makers with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Casteism
https://petitions.whitehouse.g...
Casteism
Your problem is the international carriers colluding to keep international prices high.
I usually stay behind 10 years in connectivity speeds and develop appropriately to match that. The only time I was ahead is when DSL first came out and 99% of people where still on 56kbps modems at home. I actually participated as a beta tester for free and I got 2.2mbps/1.1mbps speed for 4 years, half a mile away from the phone exchange. In that era, a T! (1.5mbps/1.5mbps) used to feed the IBM building where I was working and was pretty standard so it felt nice to experiment with the DSL from home.
Today, I am on 10mbps/1mbps and glad with it as mentioned here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.