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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.
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
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.
Karl Marx you halfwit.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
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 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.
Shirley, you're not serious!
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
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~
No! No! No! Everyone should contact them and encourage them not to do this.
They have shown that couldn't give less of a shit what the people actually want. Telling them is pointless.
At this point, the best option is to constantly raise hell with your congresscritter. Congress can absolutely force the FCC to do the right thing, no matter how much the FCC doesn't want to.
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.
The FCC is run by a guy who works(ed?) for Verizon. That's why. Simple corruption.
I don't respond to AC's.
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
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.
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
"You keep what you kill" - Mahatma Gandhi
Have gnu, will travel.
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.
Oh geez. I was afraid of that. The more I look at it, the more it appears I don't have any other choice now.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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/
I tried - I got a standard republican response that Obama's policies stifled innovation and competition and that is the reason the FCC must repeal those rules/laws.
Not surprising I didn't get an answer when I asked why we didn't have innovation or competition under the previous republican administration.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
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/
There is Spectrum. I have it, it's about $70/month with all the taxes added in. I have my own Netgear cable modem and an Orbi system for WIFI in home. I consistently get Speedtest.net results of 12-14 ms pings, 116-120 Mbps down and 20-25 Mbps up. Not bad for the price I pay...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
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!
Thank you. In my town (San Luis Obispo), there is something called "Charter-Spectrum". I'll check them out but they get bad marks for customer service, which is par for every cable company.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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
I bet the NSA wants us to have faster internet!
Why is paying for your internet the FCC's problem?
Precisely. I had problems with Charter-Spectrum (merged a while ago) , for the first year. Unstable connections, speed really low, etc. I went and bought my own modem for $80 and it solved every problem. Just upgraded to the Orbi 2 hub system and I have 100+ Mbps WIFI throughout my home and backyard. Don't use the cable company's modem - buy your own, it is much more stable and faster. Their combined offerings (Ubee and Arris) are essentially junk. Never got over 50 Mbps with their modems (and that was right after a "tech" came and reset everything), usually down in the teens to low 20s. New modem - 5X the speeds...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
You've already been really helpful, but would you mind telling me which cable modem you bought? I'm looking at the Orbi 2 system right now and I'll think I'm gonna order it.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
I got a Netgear CM700. Available at Fry's. Just a single Ethernet output, so that runs straight to the Orbi base unit. Super easy to setup, a quick 5 minute call to Spectrum and it was running spectacularly.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Come to think of it, mobile internet access is adequate for Twitter. And that's all anyone should need, right? Case closed.
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!
In this scenario, Comcast is like a pineapple, so a pinecone is actually preferable.
Cheap storage VM.
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.
Thank you, friend. You've made me feel better. I do prefer pinecones to pineapples when it comes to things in my butt.
Anyway, I've already scheduled the Charter-Spectrum service for when I arrive in Morro Bay.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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
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!
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
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
...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
Ideally, jokes should be funny in some way. Otherwise they are indistinguishable from stupidity.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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