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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!
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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.
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.
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
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.
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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.
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..
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
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
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