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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
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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.
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.
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.
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