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4Mbps Still The Standard For One Govt Broadband Grant Program (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader cites an Ars Technica report: Four U.S. senators say that the Internet speed standard for a government grant program shouldn't be stuck at 4Mbps. The Community Connect program run by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) funds broadband deployment in rural communities, but it uses a speed standard of just 4Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream. Even that speed is an increase over the 3Mbps (download and upload combined) standard the program used until just a few weeks ago. US Senators Angus King (I-Maine), Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) say that the USDA didn't raise the standard high enough. In a letter last week to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, the senators questioned the decision to set the grant program's speed threshold below the 10Mbps/1Mbps standard used by a separate USDA loan program. "Earlier this month, USDA upped broadband speed requirements for the Broadband Access Loan Program to 10Mbps, while Community Connect was only upped to 4Mbps," the senators noted. "In order to maintain the programs' relevance in an age of rapidly increasing demand for bandwidth, we strongly urge you to consider updating their broadband speed definitions, particularly the Community Connect Program's Minimum Broadband Service benchmark."
Yeah, because 4Mbps just is not enough for the "working poor" to work on their resumes and send them to would-be employers...
Your anti-indigent bigotry is so strong that you're blinded to the fact that the f-ing article is not about grant programs that target poverty. This is about USDA run programs that push for broadband deployment in rural communities. It is not about paying for poor people's broadband. It's about getting broadband infrastructure deployed into places that are too remote for the free market to find profit in building out broadband infrastructure. Places such as farming communities, which serve a vital role in this country.
Our choices indeed stink, and I live in a well-populated area.
4Mbps is just fine as long as it's reliable, not throttled, and doesn't cost a fortune to get these features.
In short, other issues eclipse max speed in the current market.
Let's make a deal with the telecoms: you can keep 4Mbps as the standard as long as you do 4Mbps right.
Table-ized A.I.
If you are going to force universal service, then 4Mbit should be good enough for anyone getting a subsidy. Anybody that wants better bandwidth should pay the difference in cost themselves! Or, here's an idea: don't let internet service providers charge $100/month for service? Stop internet service providers from bundling cable TV and phone with internet and forcing people to buy all three? Encourage competition instead of allowing mergers and consolidation so that most markets are served with only one or two providers?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
As a person that lives in Bumfuck Idaho, let me say... Yes, yes you should subside high-speed internet, high-speed highways, and good Chinese takeout for me! And while we're at it, can you have them fly in some fresh salmon? The sushi here sucks!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It's incredibly narrow-minded for one to think that:
(1) This grant program is exclusively for "working poor" (or poor people, period) to get Internet access; and
(2) All a poor person would/should/could want to do with the Internet is upload resumes so they can stop being poor / living in rural areas.
This post displays a stunning lack of empathy for people who have made a choice to live in a less densely populated area. First of all, not everyone who lives in a rural area is poor. There are plenty of middle-class and upper-middle-class people who have larger land holdings or have fewer neighbors than the ISPs would ideally prefer for instant ROI. Some of these are technologists, or potential customers of technology companies. They might be gamers, media consumers, software developers, architects, or any number of other professions where access to serious Internet connectivity can be a huge boon.
Not only that, but if their employer is amenable to the arrangement, having access to a modern Internet connection might even allow these people to work from home. This saves them thousands of dollars in fuel per year vs. having to drive many miles into the office, and also prevents the vehicle emissions that would have been necessary for them to get there.
Having access to a very fast Internet pipe can change someone's life in a revolutionary way. It can enable people to embark upon careers that are not possible without a fast Internet connection. To name a few:
- Youtube/Twitch/etc. streamer (gamer, political, scientific/educational, or other content) - not possible without fast upstream because otherwise video upload times make it impractical
- Podcaster - same as video above, but requires less upstream because it's just audio
- Pro gamer - without a fast connection for rapid access to new games and patches, and low latency, one cannot reach the pinnacle of pro gaming, no matter how hard they try (unless you intend to become a pro at a turn-based game where latency is relatively unimportant)
- Remote knowledge worker / engineer - A lot of the top tech companies are hiring talent remotely without regard for where they live. It's only "old world" businesses, and those with extreme security requirements like working for contractors or government touching classified data, that have hard requirements for working on-site. Almost any job in IT, plus many jobs in management, finance and administration, can be done remotely just as well as face to face... but only with good Internet connectivity. If your work output primarily involves taking information in one form (instructions, requirements, source data, whatever) and transforming it into another form (source code, metrics, stats, equations, papers, emails, whatever), you can work remotely if you have a good computer and a fast Internet connection. The remote work movement is helping to conserve a ridiculous amount of transportation fuel, but it can get even better in the future, and fast Internet is a critical first step.
The Internet is not only used for uploading resumes. Stop thinking like someone stuck in 1996, and recognize that this program is intended to open up possibilities for the rural population (about 15% of the US population, over 42 million people per the latest census) that crosses economic class boundaries and would not be possible otherwise. As someone else said, these ISPs simply would never, ever bring service to these remote areas if not for government subsidy, because these areas don't otherwise meet the company's ROI goals. These people should not be penalized for living in rural areas. And by the way, they're paying taxes, too, so it's part of their own tax money that goes to fund these programs.
Because the internet is more than just Netflix?
You may not believe it, but having high-speed internet is a boon for farmers who not only can participate in the real-time commodities market (to which they're supplying), but also obtain weather forecasts and other detailed information in real time so they can adjust how they work their fields to avoid wasting product and even precious resources like water.
Then there's applications like real-time GPS tracking and all sorts of other sensors and monitors.
Then when it's all said and done and the sun goes down, they can Netflix and chill until sunup and it all starts over again.
>> The Community Connect program run by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) funds broadband deployment in rural communities,
And you wonder why our government is neck-dept in debt.
The phone companies have been charging me - and everybody else in the country - a rake-off to pay for deploying high speed internet in rural areas. (It used to be just for phone service but got bumped to cover high-speed internet long ago. I've been paying in for decades, and haven't seen the service yet.)
Is this that money? If not, where did THAT money go?
My retirement house, on the outskirts of a rural village in Nevada, currently has a choice of dialup (32ish KILObits on a good day), cellphone (we're on the LAST TOWER...) or satellite. Even the local WISP - at $80ish/month for their low end product last I looked - doesn't point antennas our way any more, as of last summer. I just did a web search and can't find them any more, so maybe they went belly-up. All I see now is AT&T & Verizon cellphone-based service ($45-$390/month), one cable company (that only covers half the town - and not me), and Dish and HughesNet satellite (with their horrid latency and caps).)
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You don't need high speed internet to get weather forecasts or to get market data.
In this era of high-speed trading, a good, fast, internet connection can make the difference between selling fleece and being fleeced.
If a commodity firm is interested enough in your market to try to game it you MIGHT have a chance with a broadband ISP fed by fiber. But dialup speeds, satellite delays, and even cellphone modem links are right out.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The reasons are because farmers (you know the 'businesses' that do work around you) wanted to join the online revolution except no cable or phone company wanted to develop it out and neither did the (federal and state) governments (under pressure of the telco's) want to give any right of ways to communal Internet coops or local governments to do the same.
So instead the federal government and state governments levied taxes on phone lines, cell phones and Internet services (somewhere in the 90's) to pay telco's and cable companies for the rural development of Internet over "their" (existing, previously government-owned and payed for by taxes in the previous decades) communication lines. The telco's and cable companies have since pocketed enough to develop low cost fiber-to-the-home country-wide 3 times over but continue to run "high speed" service over the same 1950's copper pair while they keep asking the government to redefine 'high speed'. Please note high-speed wouldve been defined at 10Mbps a decade ago and if they maintained the 'progress' originally demanded, they now should've been at least 100Mbps on average. Instead rural community Internet speeds in Africa rival the speeds of US'es.
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So, Mr. "IT Worker", how do you enjoy waiting a minimum of 20 seconds (assuming 100% utilization, no other data flows competing for throughput, no congestion or signal degradation, and zero protocol overhead) to save a 10 MB Excel file to a SMB shared drive?
That was fairly common for remote access situations 5 years ago, and depending on where you lived, DSL even in major urban areas 10 years ago. I survived. Rural is always going to require higher investment for infrastructure. News flash: Road costs scale with length of the road that needs to be built.
How do you enjoy waiting a minimum of 350 seconds (again, assuming no overhead, etc.) to download a 175 MB Eclipse installation?
How is it waiting a day or more to download a major update package for Windows or Office or a distribution upgrade for your GNU/Linux distro (depending on what you use)?
Maybe if idiots stopped with the size creep, he wouldn't *have* to download a 175 MB Eclipse installation? Again, patches have happened in the past and we all managed to survive. Stop building shit that takes up 500 MB when 50MB is fine. Stop creating games that ship on a blu-ray disk and then require a 35GB update file on install.
So, at this point, we have: myself, for whose job a 10 Mbps connection is grossly inadequate; and *you*, for whose job a 4 Mbps connection is apparently adequate or even good. That's a small enough sample as to call either one of our accounts anecdotal.
I've been lucky enough to work at ISPs with their office in space rented from the datacenter for about half of my career, meaning my desktop was basically on-net, a few firewalls away from our core routers. The first time I worked at a location where the office *wasn't* directly connected to the datacenter (20Mbps point-to-point link) was painful, but I survived. More to the point, there's relatively little sysadmin work that *requires* high local connectivity, because doing work on remote systems is an option. It's the spoiled folks that think that they need to download everything from github to their Mac, or don't know how to work over SSH, or think file transfers can't be performed directly, or don't use local http proxies, or local mirrors for ISOs for your org, etc, that don't get it.
The problem is that you can't really look at a population of people overall and just pull a number out of your ass and say "that number is enough for anyone!". When you do that, you are effectively limiting the professions and the types of work that person can pursue from that location. I'm sure I'm not the only one whose job requires a bit more than 4 Mbps, and I'm sure you're not the only one whose job could be accomplished with a 2800 baud modem. There has to be a balance somewhere, but I think it lies a good ways north of 4 Mbps.
Strongly disagree. Remember, you're talking about a *minimum* to qualify. 4Mbps is plenty for textual communication and sufficient for a lot more. This is supposed to be an analog (no pun intended) to the Universal Lifeline Telephone Service, which was about making sure that rural, poor, or remote locations were able to get working dialtone service at a minimum, not that everyone got all the fanciest features everyone could provide.
4Mbps is sufficient "dialtone" broadband internet access. Not great, sufficient.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,