Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
So why are they helping companies get corporate welfare?
*checks calendar* oh wait, they must need donations for their upcoming election. Nevermind.
The core Republican political philosophy (before the insane took over the nut house) is that the proper role of government is to make sure the rich get richer quicker.
Of course they would never win elections if they ran on that platform, so they pretend they're actually about anything and everything else, in order sucker people into voting against their own self interests. But you see it in almost everything they do.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
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..
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
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
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.
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.
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.
I live in a country that has already leap-frogged America by *AVOIDING* the Big Government solutions you are advocating.
Bullshit. You live in a country where the government enabled a monopoly to control the infrastructure and for the time being you are seeing the benefit. If history has taught us anything, it is that this will change.
Businesses don't exist to keep their customers happy, that's not our job. We do what we do to keep our investors happy and if that means squeezing the customer for every last drop of blood we can get, we damn well do it.
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?
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
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.
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.
because they got campaign financing and lobbying from entrenched ISPs?
That and the fact that Republicans have gone full pants-on-head retarded recently.
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
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.
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.