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Maybe Americans Don't Need Fast Home Internet Service, FCC Suggests (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via Ars Technica: Americans might not need a fast home Internet connection, the Federal Communications Commission suggests in a new document. Instead, mobile Internet via a smartphone might be all people need. The suggestion comes in the FCC's annual inquiry into broadband availability. Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband (or more formally, "advanced telecommunications capability") is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion. If the FCC finds that broadband isn't being deployed quickly enough to everyone, it is required by law to "take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market."
The FCC found during George W. Bush's presidency that fast Internet service was being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion. But during the Obama administration, the FCC determined repeatedly that broadband isn't reaching Americans fast enough, pointing in particular to lagging deployment in rural areas. These analyses did not consider mobile broadband to be a full replacement for a home (or "fixed") Internet connection via cable, fiber, or some other technology. Last year, the FCC updated its analysis with a conclusion that Americans need home and mobile access. Because home Internet connections and smartphones have different capabilities and limitations, Americans should have access to both instead of just one or the other, the FCC concluded under then-Chairman Tom Wheeler. The report goes on to add that with Republican Ajit Pai as chairman of the FCC, "the FCC seems poised to change that policy by declaring that mobile broadband with speeds of 10Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream is all one needs." Furthermore, "In doing so, the FCC could conclude that broadband is already being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion, and thus the organization would take fewer steps to promote deployment and competition."
The FCC found during George W. Bush's presidency that fast Internet service was being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion. But during the Obama administration, the FCC determined repeatedly that broadband isn't reaching Americans fast enough, pointing in particular to lagging deployment in rural areas. These analyses did not consider mobile broadband to be a full replacement for a home (or "fixed") Internet connection via cable, fiber, or some other technology. Last year, the FCC updated its analysis with a conclusion that Americans need home and mobile access. Because home Internet connections and smartphones have different capabilities and limitations, Americans should have access to both instead of just one or the other, the FCC concluded under then-Chairman Tom Wheeler. The report goes on to add that with Republican Ajit Pai as chairman of the FCC, "the FCC seems poised to change that policy by declaring that mobile broadband with speeds of 10Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream is all one needs." Furthermore, "In doing so, the FCC could conclude that broadband is already being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion, and thus the organization would take fewer steps to promote deployment and competition."
Considering something adequate for federal policy is different than 'all people need'.
Americans don't need life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I'd like my internet to move at least as fast as your goalposts, at all times, Pai.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
If you wanted to improve broadband speeds in the U.S. the best solution would be to make it illegal for states or cities to sell monopoly rights to various cable companies or other entities and to allow for cities to form their own municipal providers or networks if they want to.
If the rest of the world has gigabit fiber at home, services will be optimized for that, and you will be excluded with your mobile plan.
to each according to his needs" - Abraham Lincoln
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The guest wireless network at the government facility I work at has a download speed of 30Mbps and an upload speed of 70Mbps. O_o
I for one would take reliability over speed. Reliability is a big problem with our current 1.4 choices of providers.
Table-ized A.I.
Maybe mobile would be a solution if we didn't have such horrendous internet on our cell phones or the data caps / throttling of most providers.
... to fit the lack of solution.
If you lower the bar, that means you're already meeting requirements, and you don't need to work as hard.
Brilliant!
Just change the definition of "Great".
#DeleteChrome
Americans don't need Pai and the telecom c-level criminals and fraudsters he calls "masters" to continue breathing, both Thomas Jefferson and the people on this Internet suggest.
Gee. Why did we bother moving beyond ISDN? I mean that was teh awesome. You could even get two lines for twice the price.
Would it be helpful to point out that South Korea has gigabit service now to most homes? In the United states we can't have that it seems because MAGA or something.
My Comcast service has >100Mbit download and has been very reliable. Enough so that I can do video Skype and WebEx to Asian and European countries where they permit it. Why would anyone accept anything less than that as a baseline?
The FCC board members should be required by law to use the speed they deem "adequate" for others at home and at work.
Is it possible that this is the cable companies lobbying the FCC to try and make sure people don't have the bandwidth to stream all their TV shows and cut the cord? The funny thing is, these cable companies are the same ones providing the Internet in most cases so they're not actually losing the customer.
Internet access in the US is already a joke compared with most other industrialized nations, and has been for years now.
Not content with showing their contempt for the citizenry with their net neutrality positions, now they're arguing that the US should remain in the backwater as a matter of official policy?
This is ridiculous. We already pay more for less than other nations, and the FCC wants us to pay even more for even less.
No! No! No! Everyone should contact them and encourage them not to do this. There are lots of 'apps' in development that require faster bandwidth. We need healthy competition to provide inexpensive broadband all over the U.S. Innovation should be encouraged until providers stop throttling.. More fiber please.
You know if we disconnect the NSA we could achieve terabit/second speeds.
Is a PoS human being. I mean that in the most apolitical way possible. He does not just suck at his job. . . he sucks at being an individual member of our species. The less he "tries" the better off the human race will be. . . Seriously, we would be better off just paying him off at this point to not do anything else (I guess we would have to pay him more than what he currently is no doubt collecting to screw us over. . .).
"Ajit Pai" should now be the technical term for extremely painful and angry jock-itch between the upper thigh and testicles. . . We've got a real bad case of Ajit Pai. . . something really nasty. . .
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
I think the FBI / NSA internet filters are having trouble tapping everybody's high speed line.. So they regulate it lower so FBI/NSA can keep up...
I don't think I've ever heard anyone under the age of 70 say "Gee I wish my Internet was slower"
10MB down is pretty close to being the minimum I'd ever want to try and use these days.
If you have more than 1 user, or are a 4K streaming service user, you'll be pretty disappointed with 10MB.
Instead of backtracking from their previous 25MB down, as a benchmark, why not come up with a plan to actually improve service?
There are still many places in the US where 1MB down isn't possible to purchase.
"640K ought to be enough for anybody" - Bill Gates, Seattle, 1981
But hilarious comparison aside, these clowns are just trying to find a way to justify the universally-hated stance that we don't need net neutrality. Mr T's just in the business of appointing yes-men that either always agree with him or get replaced immediately, Pai's just one of the team - there's no point in trying to reason with that, you'll never get anywhere. Not with facts, not with evidence, not with contrary public opinion of any magnitude. These people haven't been hired to be experts or critical thinkers, they were hired to be yes-men, and none of your facts matter.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Hey, this reminds me. I'm moving to the California central coast in a few weeks and I'm not familiar with any of the broadband providers there. I have Comcast at the moment here in Houston, and they're pretty good. I refuse to go back to AT&T DSL because it sucked so bad and I hate AT&T.
There's Charter, and Norwest and DirectTV and some local guys who probably do mostly businesses. Anybody have experience with Charter? Are they OK? Any suggestions for providers?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Not actually as crazy as it sounds...
Also, remember that common American propaganda is that American's don't need an education, like Bill Gates and the other drop-out wonders that are elevated (based on their personal connections) to the ruling class. Just give everyone a universal basic income and if all Americans don't bother to make a business doing things that require no skills, the US dollar will become worthless, allowing a country that values hard-work to get more recognition.
Ugh, what a shill that Ajit Pai is. Really? This is your solution to poor adoption of broadband wired internet connections? Push everyone onto mobile broadband with nasty data caps, throttling and overage charges?
Really? Could you at least sort of even try to appear to not be a total Verizon shill? Wow.
Well, Trump did say he'd Make America Great Again. He just didn't tell us which parts of America. All he's done in my book is Make America Groan Again. And again. And again. And again.
We have no mobile, no cell service either. Also no cable. Only service option is local telco which is very expensive and not very fast. No satellite either due to the mountains.
When Cox pissed me off by suspended my service and wanted to charge a fee for non-payment of bill (even though I've been on auto-pay against my "paid off in full every month" credit card for the last eleven years) I got to wondering why I was paying these jerks when I had an iPhone in my pocket that was on an unlimited plan. Even more so, why were they trying to extort an additional fee from me when I've never been credited a single dollar for all the times their service was unavailable.
So, I bought a bluetooth keyboard, a docking cable for HDMI, and a used AppleTV so I could use my iPhone more efficiently when at home. When I need to jack in a laptop or desktop, I tether by USB or Wifi sharing.
I've had a couple of annoying things that have to be worked around, such as the inability to use cellular data for internet when connected to the AppleTV by wifi and the 100MB limitation for downloading iOS and app updates over the cellular network. I just download movies instead of streaming them and use my work iPhone to wifi tether my personal one for large updates (iOS only cares that I'm connected by Wifi for large updates, not the quality or speed of the Wifi).
Saves me $1000 a year and makes me laugh a little when I hear news articles about "unplugging"..... where they just mean unplugging cable TV and not unplugging cable broadband data. I'm living just fine without a ground line of any kind.
By the way, my theory about Cox is that they noticed my data use dropped to zero for over a month (while I was taking care of my dad through some serious health stuff) and thought they could sneak in a disconnect for fraudulent reasons in order to extort some more money from me. When I called to disconnect, they transferred me to their Retention Department. However, all those idiots wanted to do was upsell me into a higher tier package. I kept telling them I didn't want more of their crappy service and had to finally ask, "What is it going to take to get you to disconnect me today?"
Yeah, perhaps after the Utah NSA installation is done we will be allowed to have faster internet, like the rest of the world.
Ashit Pai McFuckface wants to actively make America suck even more when it comes to broadband?
I guess with Trump in power this is just par for the course. Make America Fail Again. Let's sabotage our infrastructure, our education, our science, and technology. Let's redefine broadband to dial-up speeds and pretend that's "good enough" while every other developed country gets 1 Gb fiber. That will certainly put us ahead in the world.
America. We've got the best substandard you can buy.
~X~
This is the literal translation of Ajit Pai's policy concerning availability of broadband in the U.S.
Why does the FCC hate the American people so much?
Oh no Citizen, you misunderstand! The FCC loves the American people! Because the Telecoms hoover money out of their pockets for overpriced underperforming Internet connectivity, and they put that money right into Ajit Pai's pocket! The FCC wouldn't be able to make their yacht payments without the American people!
Three times worse than cable internet. Matters for gaming.
This article seems to make me feel the FCC is copping an attitude of "Let them eat cake" for us peasants.
If this is good enough for everyone, how about the government throttles down the network connection for every device on their network to those speeds. Maybe also include these throttles to all devices in the home internet service of all federal employees. What's that? Your 3:00 a.m. Tweets not going out? Your staff's paychecks missed the bank's deadline for direct deposit? All the ATM's around the capital are offline due to inadequate bandwidth? Aww, poor baby. Now you know how the folks that elected you into office are impacted by these "incredible" laws to make Amurrica grate again.
Once their grandkids start bitching them out for screwing up their Netflix and video games, they might wake up and quit imposing unworkable standards on free enterprise.
I think the real reason for this is to knock out the standards that were being considered during the Obama administrations reign.
Imposing a standard that takes no one's future needs into consideration is even worse than a goal to increase speeds by a future deadline, however lofty you feel they may be. The speeds targets are there for a reason, to allow for future innovation by future start-up businesses which will utilize that bandwidth. By the time that they wake up, realize the mistake and start planning improvements to the network, the growing pains will be horrendous and way more costly.
Sort term savings in exchange for upgrades that are way, way more expensive down the line. But what do they care, they will sell off their stock in these companies before then. That will be someone else's problem.
Simple, it is a war on access to knowledge for the masses. Keep them less informed and they are more easily manipulated.
Seriously.
Congress, please pass a law requiring all internet providers in the United States to limit the TOTAL bandwidth of Ajit Pai to 10Mbps down / 1Mbps up.
If it's good enough for the goose...
The FCC is run by a guy who works(ed?) for Verizon. That's why. Simple corruption.
I don't respond to AC's.
This country stopped valuing hard work a long time ago.
It is a very common misconception that the poor don't work hard despite working two or three jobs. Even in the IT world this happens. I am salaried, if I work my butt off I am paid the same and the company will find any excuse not to give me my bonus. I make too much to get overtime too.
This is incredibly common, at least in the IT world I have the option of moving on to a less abusive employer but the devil you know is often better than the one you don't.
Make no mistake about it, the rich regularly screw over those economically beneath them. Yes, some poor and middle class people don't try that hard but in my personal experience at least they are the exception to the rule.
Seeing as how Pai is exclusively beholden to his telecom controllers, this looks suspiciously like a specious reason derived to avoid pushing telecom's into expanding availability into areas where they'd at best break even. :"Sure! We'll just come up with a wonky report that says people don't even need it! ...That job still lined up for me once I get pushed out for doing all this?"
TC : "Hey Pai, we want to make a bunch of money instead of wasting time on this availability directive."
Pai
I'm thinking they just want the US to be weak and vulnerable to Russia.
How about stop making America weaker than other First World Nations and get us all 100 Gbps Internet 3?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You are suggesting people who use cellular for internet are getting lower speeds.
Well obviously the ones whom this pertains to are the rural users, right? Since in larger cities you can just get a cable modem or DSL lines...
Well I am here to tell you, for truly rural users where MAYBE they can get a DSL line, cellular internet is a godsend as it is 10-100x faster than what they can get today.
My mother lives not that far outside a major city, but all she could get was DSL - a weak line that often capped out at something like 50k/sec.
That's no typo, that's not MB/s, it was literally at times about like using a modem.
It was so slow she could only use a very old Netflix client on the original AppleTV because modern players would just give up.
I finally ended up getting her a T-Mobile hotspot, because it tests at her house my phone was getting 2 MB/s download. The actual hotspot does an even better job, getting more like 3-5 MB/s download and a respectable 2MB/s or so up.
After just a month of testing both, she scrapped the DSL line (which cost about the same as the mobile hotspot per month).
Now there is a downside - A fairly low data cap compared to most cable modem or DSL plans, she has about 10GB of data per month after which the connection slows. But that has been enough to stream all the Netflix she wants and do occasional device software updates.
So do not claim you are some champion of speed by scoffing at cellular internet. For rural users I am now convinced it is the final solution rather than running expensive cable that will never be maintained well. Instead work on regulations for something like mandatorily higher data caps for those that truly live in remote locations and have to rely on cellular for internet,
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What is wrong with saying Rural users are better served by cellular internet, when they can get MUCH faster speeds? Sure the data caps are bad, but the why not push to get those raised for rural users instead of damning rural users to an even worse cable model hell than city users have... At least you can choose cellular providers!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Our employees all have CrashPlan ProE software on their laptops so we can keep a constant backup of their desktop items, documents folder and so on. The last time I had a computer crash, it was while someone was traveling out of town to visit clients. I was able to overnight them a replacement laptop but they still needed to restore their personal data to it. The Internet access was so slow at their hotel and at the various coffee houses or restaurants in the area they attempted to use, they simply couldn't restore all of the data they needed before they needed access to it. (They had about 160GB of content including email archives.)
With all of the people using OneDrive, DropBox, Google Drive, and other such services for cloud storage? This surely comes up much more often than just in the situations where someone uses CrashPlan as a backup solution.
A 10mb down/1mb up link is NOT going to allow easy and quick access to your data, especially if you're actually using the computer, doing other Internet-related activities on it, while you're trying to do this in the background. I would really want more than a 1mb upload speed link to feel comfortable about things like video conference calls, too. These govt. morons declaring what's "fast enough" for Americans are probably just web surfing and declaring that the pages seem to pull up at a satisfactory speed. Absolutely no regard for all of the other things people use a net connection for, or the fact that whole families share these links in many cases!
Australia used this excuse back when they were number 38 in the global internet speeds. Where are they now? No one knows because Akamai only publish the top 50.
Just came here to visit. Currently staying 4km from the city center of 2.5million people and downloading at the blazing speeds of 10mbps, only 1/5th of my *upload* speed back in Europe.
Don't cut the cord yet Americans. Netflix doesn't do well at these speeds.
My mother lives about fifteen miles outside of a major city.
I got her a wireless hotspot because it is 100x faster than her DSL line was. The DSL speed was not going to change anytime soon...
Also, how do you know your parents cannot get cellular data than where they are? Have you tried a wireless hotspot? They offer better caption and transmission than smart phones do. There are even re-transmitters you can buy - expensive, but if you want faster speed...
There is no question in my mind now rural users are better served by cellular internet. You can choose providers (unlike DSL or cable). You have faster speeds than any poorly maintained last mile out in the hinterlands will ever grant you. The ONLY downside is data caps but that is where the government could mandate relief if it so chose, and I would be in agreement with anyone living outside of a major metro area getting mandatory larger data caps for internet from mobile tethering or a hotspot (even if your plan has no limits they often have limits on allowed tethering data per month - usually the same as the hotspot maximums).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How fast is the Internet connection that Ajit Pai has in his home? Anyone want to make a bet that it faster than a 10Mbps downstream and 1Mbps upstream?
Yet another republican plan... to bring us back to the middle ages as fast as possible. Next the FCC will say that smoke signals are good enough.
If you're ten miles from Waco, and if Waco has high speed cellular emanating from a tower that is local to the city, then you can definitely get it ten miles away.
You'll need a directional high-gain antenna, and perhaps a little height above ground, but you can certainly do it if those two ifs are true.
The antennas in cellphones are, in a word, hilariously poor performers. You can do considerably better fairly easily and inexpensively (plus, it's a one-time cost.)
Having said that, likely you can also put up a high-gain wifi antenna as well and catch some decent wifi from... somewhere within line of sight. So higher is, as always with this kind of thing, better. This approach is questionable, ethically, unless you make an agreement with the wifi owner, and may be illegal as well. Technically, however, it's not a big deal. Hams do this kind of longish distance wifi with old cans and a wire probe connected to the wifi modem. Works great.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If the FCC makes a determination that a particular bandwidth, X, is adequate, then time for them to live by that decision. I'd be happy to support a law that says no official in the FCC may have an internet connection faster than X. This includes when they are at work and at home. Mobile or wireless. The only time they can have a taste of something faster is when offered for free by a restaurant.
Seems fair, right?
"Make America Great again" by officially lowering the standards and declaring America great again is a sound strategy.
Internet access in the US is already a joke compared with most other industrialized nations, and has been for years now.
I see that claim a lot, but the data seems contrary, in that the US is ahead of most of the EU, and most of the rest of the world.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
need safe water to drink, clean air to breathe, health care, education, bridges that don't fall down, roads without pot holes, or any of that other crap the government previously forced upon us, either.
All we need are nukes and bankers who are free to create wealth for all of us. And that wall between us and Mexico...
I purposely downgraded my internet to 10/1 to save money. I don't miss faster service at all. It would be better for the government to focus on getting broadband to the rural people still stuck on dialup/satellite than to focus on increasing the speed of broadband.
This space intentionally left blank
He is the biggest douche in the universe.
So, most customers don't *need* blazing fast speeds...The thing is, people *want* it, and in a capitalist society, you service the market. The problem is, the big ISPs have lobbied to crush any competition, meaning the market that desires blazing fast speed can't get it. They can't even *set it up* to offer it to others. THAT is the problem people have with the big ISPs.
this isn't really hard. We elected somebody who's pro-business/anti-consumer. This is absolutely nothing we should have expected. Trump and his party have decades of this behavior. There's a joke about face eating leopards making the rounds that explains the phenomenon more humorously.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
taxpayer dollars.
but shouldn't you be more angry at the man who empowered him, e.g. Donald Trump? Or the party that empowered him (the Republicans)? He was picked to do a job because the folks who picked him knew he'd do it and now he's doing it. It's like getting mad at a red light camera. You shouldn't be mad at the camera, you should be mad at the bastards that put it there.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
On raw average it's not bad, but that's heavily skewed by relatively few high end users. If you sort by number with >4 Mbit/s you find the US is lagging behind most of Europe. 20% can't get that in the US today.
Basically, the average of US internet connections isn't bad, but the average US citizen has bad internet.
she has about 10GB of data per month after which the connection slows.
For rural users I am now convinced it is the final solution
yeah I work at home and I use 10 GB every day, you suck
By choice or enforced? Lots of my neighbors like Dish. They are also older (above 50) or retired, and as long as they can get Facebook, Youtube, and e-mail they are happy. A better metric would be how many people in the US cannot get anything faster than 4 Mbps, rather than how many actually choose that...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The tel-cos are never going to get more than 40% service penetration if the FCC keeps moving the goalposts for 'broadband'.
Since service penetration has been a constant for 20 years, the FCC isn't doing its job of ensuring that tel-cos met current and future demand.
Go Fuck Yourself.
The FCC needs a better excuse for not doing their job.
Without cable at home, my phone would be near worthless. According to my phone, I'm using over 30GB a month of data. Luckily less than 2 is over cellular. If it wasn't for that fact, my phone plan would cost more than my current plan plus my home internet.
And I don't want to hear about MetroPCS or other "unlimited" providers. My partner has that. I can't stand the 3G throttling after the first couple of GBs.
The vast bulk of my phone internet usage goes over WiFi. Even my phone calls go over WiFi because I'm in some sort of a cellular shadow that causes the cellular to drop calls despite being in a major US city.
If I look at the whole of our usage, we're steadily over 200 GB / month - with no illegal downloading or other semi-unusual usage. That's just Youtube, Netflix, etc. for a three person family. No way that is going over cellular with my budget.
So the FCC is an organization who's authority is to act on people's behalf re: communication and to also to regulate those providing communicative services.
Since when were they authorized to decide for the people what is "adaquate"?
For a light internet usage home, maybe few MB/s is good enough. A home with a few teens needs a lot more. But for a guy like me who runs multiple massive computing operations from home... the FCC doesn't have a damn clue what I need, now does it? So just like any other service and products... offering multiple quality levels and letting the customers decide what they want is how authorized/reasonable/knowledgable people would want to "regulate".
With many unlimited data plans, one gets fast speeds for around the first 22 GB. That means at 10 Mbps, one gets full speed for about 5 hours a month. (The contract is probably worse if you use a hotspot.) That should be enough for anyone.
Chris Mesterharm
There's also the problem of cellular dead zones, bandwidth saturation, even weather can drop your LTE to 2G
I was worried about that too, but even very powerful storms seems to have little effect on my mother's LTE connection - she was able to watch Netflix at all times and never noticed a slowdown.
I've also driven through plenty of huge storms and not taken more than a bar off my phone...
Dead spots are indeed an issue but coverage has been expanding for some time now, and is getting pretty decent. I was recently driving around Wyoming/Montana/Idaho recently and there were very few locations with no signal... the mountains still are the spottiest areas for sure. But in those areas it't not like you are often able to get cable or DSL either. Expanding cellular will reach them long before cables do.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Just curious to know how fast an internet connection the average adult American needs. And for non-Americans?
I bet the NSA wants us to have faster internet!
Why is paying for your internet the FCC's problem?
Hell no American's don't need no internet at all !
All we need to communicate is a 45 and some whisky.
Get them while they're sharp!
"thus the organization would take fewer steps to promote deployment and competition"
I think it's high time this Ajit Pai guy left the scene. This is just dumb.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
that I live in a country where broadband web access is in the basic rights, just like flowing water and heating.
Well that fits neatly with Trump's treating the presidency as a monarchy. Anything that doesn't help people organize is good policy for autocrats.
Sure, people will have internet and phones anyway, for now, but there's no political need for *more* grassroots co-operation.
Come to think of it, mobile internet access is adequate for Twitter. And that's all anyone should need, right? Case closed.
etc. etc.
(Yeah, I know - but while not true, it gives the idea)
Nuff said.
10Mbit is enough to stream video and audio at acceptable levels. Very few ISP's allow you to run your own servers or have a static IP#. Why would you need 1Gb/1Gb or even 100Mb/100Mb?
Change the rules and let people run their own servers at home and people will surely need 1Gbit lines but that is not going to happen because profits. Fuck that it would benefit humanity as a whole.
Charge each ISP a tax based on factors like cost and minimum speed and use that money to support free municipal broadband. Make cost something none of them can compete on. Make them compete with product and customer service.
Well, "Cannot get" is interesting - I technically can get an incredibly fast internet connection. All I need to do is pay a few million to install the network.
I'd say what we should really be looking at is price points - dollars per (megabits per second). The fact that your neighbors like Dish indicates that you've got stupidly expensive internet. Compare, eg. NL where 20 euros a month will get you 20mbps. Hell, my parents in the UK get 17mbps for around the same price.
In the US we get taken to the cleaners for our internet. It's more expensive and slower than the industrialized world.
There are also data caps.
This is what happens when we get a big telecom lawyer as FCC chief. He puts the country on the backseat behind corporate profit.
This man cannot and will not meet the needs of the country. He's trying to make us a third world nation.
My parents are rural but they have neighbors close to a town, etc. Not super backwoods rural either. They cannot get DSL, Cable, or anything other than mobile. And mobile connections are so slow....
I think people are mis-interpreting this. We aren't talking about streaming Netflix or porn, we are talking about basic human right/need as we have choosen to define it. The speeds they are looking at are more than enough to deal with government websites, like the DMV/secretary of state that have moved so many operations online. It is more than enough to deal with banks & other companies moving payments online, instead of having offices. It is enough to find/read news, and speak freely, as free citizens should want to do. It is most definitely NOT about streaming 4K Game of Thrones, downloading new game content, or cat videos.
Need vs Want.
Yes, the standard will change, as websites add more trackers and such get added to websites, and more sites switch to higher resolution images and fancier interfaces. Connections will have to get better over time with more connections coming from IoT.
Nah, it's not that bad... I have 100Mbps for $70/month, including all taxes. This is Spectrum cable, in Ventura County. My neighbors pay about $60/month for DISH with lots of TV channels as well. It's not that expensive when you consider it's a lot more than just Internet. In reality, most of the US probably doesn't need more than 8-10 Mbps, even if they demand more. It's plenty fast for their Facebook/Twitter/Instagram/E-mail/Youtube/Netflix fixes.
And the empirical data stands - we have better Internet speeds than most of the rest of the world, coming in between 13th and 10th place overall (per Akamai numbers). Better than almost all of Europe, better than most of the rest of the world. Our average speeds are actually quite good, with only a few "real" countries ahead of us (places like Hong Kong, Switzerland, Denmark - where they tend to be super city-states in terms of size [quite tiny] and population [quite large]).
Not everyone needs or uses massive bandwidth, like lots of us /. nerds. And now with unlimited data on cell phones becoming the norm, well - some devices are probably never connecting to the home WIFI network anymore. I know I often forget to switch my WIFI back on when I get back home from a business trip, but with unlimited Verizon data, I get plenty of bandwidth on my phone that I don't even realize I'm not on WIFI. Meaning even less demand on my cable modem - it's now serving a few less devices (mine and my wife's) for its duties.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
"It's not that bad, we just pay twice as much for far less half the service! They call it 'bundled' so I pay for a bunch of stuff I don't want". You're getting ripped off big time. Seriously - Europe 20 euros - 20mbits. USA 60 dollars gets you a trickle. You posting under a sockpuppet here Ajit?
And no, we don't have better internet speeds than most of the world. I already explained that - we come in around 39th for percentage with over 4mbps. That's far far below a lot of "real" countries.
Everyone might not "need" bandwidth, but the economy of the future will require a growing number to have it. Your last paragraph reads like a Verizon ad. I used Verizon, I got absolutely shafted for cash.
It's amazing how people can continue to apologize for a system that costs more and delivers less. If there were any "free market" here, the European internet companies would eat the US market up in a blink.
Maybe Americans don't need huge corporations, or the US government as a whole. Break up the corporations, and shut down DC.
Who said it was?
The problem is that the FCC is taking active measures to ensure that I'll be paying the highest possible amount.
It really depends on the the device you are using and what you are using it for. If you're streaming 4K video onto your phone, you're seriously wasting bandwidth.
You can't go by average. What is the median? The last report I saw placed the US in the 31st place.
The FCC clearly has no idea just how long it took for this article to load...
There are new subdivisions going up near my parents house....where they can get 3MB dsl. The new homes down the road should get awesome internet another 1000ft down the line, right?
I'm surprised the NSA isn't pushing for better broadband for everyone.
Your facts are correct but you left out all the important stuff. Should we be surprised?
Yes, Wheeler was an industry insider and faced lots of skepticism as a result. The thing is, he showed that he actually cared about consumers and worked as a responsible head of the FCC. His job performance at the FCC led to an upgrade in his assessment, as it should be.
If you were the "personal responsibility" type you likely claim to be, this would be seen as the world working correctly. Instead you try to bury all that and claim that the FCC itself is broken. Except, we have prior evidence that it can be highly functional. With a competent and responsible person in charge.
The issue here is Ajit Pai. And the Trump administration who hired Pai. Your comments are lame and need to be ignored as political hash. It's typical of the political Right to break a system then attempt to use that deliberate breakage as evidence the entire system is broken and can never work correctly.
In what corporation would a bad hire be used as evidence that the corporation itself should go out of business?
My advertised DSL speed is "up to" 12Mbps down. I usually get close to that.
It's enough for me to telecommute while my family watches a Youtube video and 2 minimum quality Netflix streams.
I know for a fact my mom doesn't need that much bandwidth.
I think declaring it unacceptable for the great rural stretches of the country is unrealistic.
Ajit Pai is just laying the groundwork for his bosses at mono-comm so that they can focus only on high profit markets.
Trump: Hey Ajit, announce something idiotic. I need to take some attention away from this whole North Korea thing.
Ajit: Already way ahead of you.
This is the United States, a very wealthy and large modern democracy. We should have better internet speeds than most of the rest of the world.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Fuck the FCC
We need fast internet it's not your job to tell us how fast we get our content.
Take your censorship and suppression of free speech and gtfo out of my country.
Akamai Q3 numbers don't seem to support this. Certainly nations which are smaller geographically , and with more condensed populations have better internet on average. That makes sense. It is easier to string cable to cover a small area where most people live close together than in a nation which is very large and has a dispersed population.
I would love to see connection speed normalized over population numbers and dispersion to get a meaningful picture of what's going on.
Maybe Amerika doesn't need a "FCC"?
Technically that's all you Need.. Oh and protection from the elements.
But is that all we're trying to achieve?
It seems we've heard this kind of logic before.... Republicans: lowering standards again!
Correct, and we do! The data says so. It's interesting to see people rail against the actual facts because they feel it's not quite right...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
My mother lived off in the forest, 10 miles from the closest town in north central Minnesota. She had dial-up and there were no faster options. Then she got a new neighbor. Evidently he worked for the local phone company as a pretty high level important manager. My mother and her neighbors quickly got DSL because of the new neighbor.
Where I live there is essentially no wireless signal, so there is no data.
Oh nevermind he just opened his mouth as he was getting on his knees when another media exec walked in. Sure looks like a little grease has been being passed around the FCC ever since he stepped in.
In politics, whenever people are said to "need" something (houses, healthcare, education, air conditioning, computers, smartphones, internet, etc.) in practice it means that we the people are required by the government to pay for these things, for anyone who "can't afford" them on their own. Yes, we need all those things to varying degrees. Should all of these things be paid for by taxpayers for those who don't have them? The government isn't smart enough to distinguish between people who are too lazy to earn the money they need for these things, and those who truly are helpless. So we all end up paying for both groups.
Context please:
^^^ spends a truckload of cash on a 4K TV, wont foot the bill for the internet connection to drive it.
I have the fastest Internet available in my [residential] area.
Best internet that he's willing to pay for.
The price of "the internet connection to drive it" exceeds the price of "a 4K TV" by at least an order of magnitude. Therefore, the price of "a 4K TV" is not "a truckload" by comparison.
I bet if you tried harder you could find someone to sell it to you, too.
If you were in that situation, and the reply were "$1000 per month" or "we offer service to businesses, not homes" or "sure, but you're responsible for obtaining all right-of-way permits from the city and paying to bury the fiber", what would be your next step?
How are you paying for said "photographic printing service" and "video publishing service"? If it resembles revenue from subscribers, clients, or advertisers, then you are running a home business, and you can consider subscribing to business Internet at your home. If your ISP won't offer business Internet to homes, then please name and shame the ISP that shows disrespect for the environment by banning telecommuting.
I'm saying that "better than most of the rest of the world" is an insufficient goal for the US. You hit a bit of a sore spot for me, and if I overreacted I apologize.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Correct, and we do! The data says so. It's interesting to see people rail against the actual facts because they feel it's not quite right...
I wager it's part of the Trump effect. If you look into the data, it shows that the fastest US states are DC (counted as a state in the data, when it doesn't even contain a million people) and mostly liberal areas (NY and east coast states are in the top 10, Cali is 11th). Those states drag the average of the whole country up.
Without them, the average of the rest of the states don't look so good (not bad, but not good either). So when people from the rest of the country hear data, they treat it the same way as the data on Obamacare or climate science: it's just leftist propaganda coming from liberal elitists living in the cities who don't know wtf is going on with the rest of the country, spread by the fake news MSM. Sad!
I can see the end of paying for internet twice. I find it absurd to pay for home internet and also pay for mobile internet. Why can't a person pay for internet once and just use it wherever they want?
Getting a "mobile hot spot" device would allow people to pay for internet once and use it at home as well as away. There are plenty of people doing this, particularly people in rural settings where other high speed access is non-existent.
The problem is that cellular providers offer "unlimited" data but it isn't truly unlimited. They begin throttling after a paltry amount in a month, something around 20 or 25 gigs.
Also the data service is of course expensive for what you get, the up-side being it is available everywhere.
What the FCC needs to focus on is improving the world of mobile data. Encouraging the lowering of prices, increasing of speed, eliminating data caps and throttling.
My crystal ball is telling me that SOME DAY, mobile data will be all there is, paying for home-only internet service will be like having a dialup modem - long forgotten.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
Make America Dial-up Again!
...given the Luddites that the politicians have placed at the helm of the FCC!
I have no doubt that these turkeys have only one goal: to further restrict the access to a quality, high bandwidth Internet connection to the high rollers in the financial industry, and for other paternalistic traditional purveyors of limited and targeted information access points.
This does not bode well for a functioning and just democratic process in the U.S.A.
PlaynBass
For over a decade there has been FCC encouragement for last mile internet service to be upgraded to allow true broadband to homes. Now, someone is saying that cellular data speeds, reminiscent of old dial up modem speeds, are sufficient for consumers.
Or, is it a bit of corporate self interest of the major internet providers to NOT have to upgrade hardware to handle higher broadband throughput? After all, they are trying to get net neutrality killed so they can throttle any content providers that doesn't pay them for full speed access. Yes, AT&T and Comcast, I'm talking about you.
BTW, 12mbps is just fine for two people checking email and one streaming Netflix. If you have a larger household and HD streaming Amazon Prime going on while two play an online RPG and another person is in the home office dumping work documents to a cloud share point ... 12mbps doesn't cut it. And I still think AT&T Uverse requiring a TV package to be eligible to buy an unlimited data plan is a (insert your favorite biological function epithet) business practice.
NRRPT/RCT