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The FCC Is Preparing To Weaken the Definition of Broadband (dslreports.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from DSLReports: Under Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act, the FCC is required to consistently measure whether broadband is being deployed to all Americans uniformly and "in a reasonable and timely fashion." If the FCC finds that broadband isn't being deployed quickly enough to the public, the agency 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." Unfortunately whenever the FCC is stocked by revolving door regulators all-too-focused on pleasing the likes of AT&T, Verizon and Comcast -- this dedication to expanding coverage and competition often tends to waver.
What's more, regulators beholden to regional duopolies often take things one-step further -- by trying to manipulate data to suggest that broadband is faster, cheaper, and more evenly deployed than it actually is. We saw this under former FCC boss Michael Powell (now the top lobbyist for the cable industry), and more recently when the industry cried incessantly when the base definition of broadband was bumped to 25 Mbps downstream, 4 Mbps upstream. We're about to see this effort take shape once again as the FCC prepares to vote in February for a new proposal that would dramatically weaken the definition of broadband. How? Under this new proposal, any area able to obtain wireless speeds of at least 10 Mbps down, 1 Mbps would be deemed good enough for American consumers, pre-empting any need to prod industry to speed up or expand broadband coverage.
What's more, regulators beholden to regional duopolies often take things one-step further -- by trying to manipulate data to suggest that broadband is faster, cheaper, and more evenly deployed than it actually is. We saw this under former FCC boss Michael Powell (now the top lobbyist for the cable industry), and more recently when the industry cried incessantly when the base definition of broadband was bumped to 25 Mbps downstream, 4 Mbps upstream. We're about to see this effort take shape once again as the FCC prepares to vote in February for a new proposal that would dramatically weaken the definition of broadband. How? Under this new proposal, any area able to obtain wireless speeds of at least 10 Mbps down, 1 Mbps would be deemed good enough for American consumers, pre-empting any need to prod industry to speed up or expand broadband coverage.
So it no longer means "Frequency-Division Multiplexing"?
It also blows my mind how many people in the field don't know the difference between broadband and baseband.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
ACs that pretend to know analog modem tech should mostly just shut up. Millennials don't know the history well enough to even get the numbers right.
And sadly, unless you go down the satellite option with it's high latency and severe bandwidth caps; 10mbs is still out of reach for a large portion of americans geographically. And those in population centers to actually have true broadband available, it's going to get prohibitively expensive as the cable companies try making up for lost TV subscription revenue.
Repealing Net Neutrality may be the first step in a five-step plan from cable companies to combat their competition and cord-cutters:
Thoughts?
All this fuss over the FCC, FTC, and Net neutrality is stupid and unproductive.
What's holding back internet speed and greater access is local monopolies. Even if the FCC did, "take immediate action to accelerate deployment of such capability by removing barriers to infrastructure investment and by promoting competition in the telecommunications market." It still wouldn't enable a city or small business from starting their own internet provider company and put up lines in neighborhoods.
Simply eliminate all local monopolies on internet access and you will see all manner of companies jumping into the fray.
BTW, these monopolies are created by local governments. So instead of whining about the Feds, call up City Hall and give them a ration of shit.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
But honestly 10 megabits is perfectly fine. I live in rural Mississippi and have a 10 mbps cable connection that loads everything perfectly fine from emails and websites all the way up to 720p netflix steaming. The 25down/4up definition is only 2 years old, and going to 10down/1up as a modification will still be much better than the pre-2015 definition of only 4down/1up.
So much wrong and stupid with this statement I dont know where to begin..
1. Some of us might like 1080p or 4k video streams
2. Try streaming more than 1 video at a time, your 10 mbps will top out fast. And dont get me started on how horrible a slow upload of 1 mbps is to use.
3. So we should not try to excel, we should do the absolute bare minimum. Making america great again eh?
As the rest of the developed world tries to convert to stupidity as well, don't fear being left behind. Look the British do not even have a functioning government, dream of their Empire and try to leave the EU. Other countries like Poland and Austria are working towards abolishing human rights and separation of power (three branches of government). So no worries. However, if you hoped that the rest of the world will help you getting out of that misery, not gonna happen. Instead we will follow your brave example.
Not true 14400 is a standard speed. And for a long time was the speed of fax machines.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
So you don't have kids or family staying? At Thanksgiving at my sister's house there are 6 kids and 10 adults. One TV and dozens of laptops and tablets. Being able to stream 2-4 streams at a time is normal.
My house only has 50mbs but I can watch things stutter when we have a large party
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
I visited my mother (in rural France) over Christmas, where she gets about 10/1. I'd agree that 10Mb/s down is pretty reasonable as an absolute minimum, but 1Mb/s up is quite painful.
In 2002, I was in a shared house where we decided to pay extra to get the 1Mb/s service from the cable company (their default was 512Kb/s). I stayed on their top tier until it got to 10Mb/s. At that point, I stayed on the 10Mb/s service until it was the cheapest that they offered, then it became 20Mb/s and then 30Mb/s. My most recent move was to a house without cable service, but with FTTH. I'm on their slowest service, which is 54Mb/s down, 9.5Mb/s up. I don't notice much difference between 10 and 54Mb/s downstream, but the difference between 1 and 9.5Mb/s upstream is enormous.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'm neither for nor against this redefinition of terms, but there's two different issues here: (1) what speeds do you need to get access to all the bells and whistles, and (2) what speeds are so slow that the government needs to step in and prod things along. Those two speeds don't necessarily need to be the same.
If you can get 10Mbps down, you can do your homework, access job sites, and all of the other reasons cited as justification for the government being involved in the first place. You can also watch a heck of a lot of cat videos, waste time on Facebook, etc. I get 100Mbps down where I live, and I'm super grateful for it, but part of that is cuz I still remember the 300 baud modem days. :)
Anyway, I don't know if the redefining of terms is being done out of bad motives or not, but there is some potential upside to it. For example, TFA talked about how a good chunk of the US doesn't have even 10Mbps yet, so lowering the "good enough" bar to 10Mbps could help keep the focus on those parts of the country that are the most underserved.
3. So we should not try to excel, we should do the absolute bare minimum. Making america great again eh?
As far as government is involved, the most it ought to mandate is the bare minimum. We have services to make it possible for citizens to have a basic telephone line for little money (in theory anyway, ATT are dicks and find ways to inflate it) because we recognize it as a necessity of modern life. It's how you summon emergency services, for example. A certain minimum level of internet access is necessary to participate in the modern world, and 10 Mbps is probably actually higher than that strictly needs to be. Though I agree with you, 10 is actually pretty meager by modern standards, I also am hard-pressed to think of anything you can't do on the internet with 10 Mbps.
With all that said, it really is pathetic that the nation that invented the internet has so many citizens begging for so little as 10 Mbps. What year is it?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Clearly the answer is "both"
Come blow some modpoints on these comments too, kids. I've got the karma to spend, and I'm happy to do it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
100% broadband penetration, ho! Took 'em long enough.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
The foxes are well and truly running your hen house now. You'd be better off disbanding the FCC altogether.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
and ketchup counts as a vegetable on school lunches!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Adequate for you, but 'broadband' definitions should only ever escalate. Unless the notion that we're being run by a bunch of regressive bastards is true...
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Can we finally disband the FCC and let the ISPs themselves take over their agenda? It's not like anyone really still believes that they're not a 100% subsidiary by now anyway.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
And what happens if the monthly data cap is set to 100 MB before you start paying through the nose?
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
I'm sure I'll be flamed here for this, but I always thought the 25Mbps definition was too high as a "minimum definition." An HD NetFlix stream is 5Mbps. 10Mbps allows two simultaneous HD streams, or one HD stream plus plenty of headroom for other normal activities. I would rather that the FCC define it to be 10Mbps, but actually check that this bandwidth is available consistently during peak usage. The reason to make it as high as 25Mbps is because the telcos rarely actually deliver their promised speeds.
Forgot about 28.8 (same spec as the 33.6K, v.34), which is what my family had when I was growing up in the early 90s. 33.6 and later 56K v.92 seemed like a nice step up.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
I, for whatever reason, felt slightly mislead by the inability of the systems to operate at > 54 kbit/s. However, compression made 56K modems borderline tolerable in a pinch, even into the mid 2000s.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
...former FCC boss Michael Powell (now the top lobbyist for the cable industry)...
to know whom these people actually are working for.
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
Yeah, the public keeps electing the rich people the parties put in front of them to public office, and acting surprised when these same people keep making law that favors the rich, and keep selecting agency officials that favor the rich, and keep further enriching themselves through the system.
So, yeah, it's stupid. Because the voters are stupid. It's been this way since I've been paying attention (the 1960's, and likely long before that.)
This isn't getting fixed by saying "FCC, FTC, and Net neutrality is stupid", though.
Sigh. No, it's not getting fixed by that, either, even if we could do what you say, which we can't, first because we don't make the laws, and second, because we are, as we have demonstrated repeatedly and consistently, utterly unable to get worthy individuals elected who will actually represent the people for public office.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Seriously, who decides how fast is fast? If you want uninterrupted 8K Netflix movies, well, perhaps you should pay more for that because plenty of people are happy with 4K and most people only own an HD TV. Pay more for that level of service. A library probably doesn't need to stream video nor does a Starbucks. Of course, the ISPs aren't too honest about their tier performances. The basic service usually doesn't give you enough data per month to allow for nightly streaming movies. They know this too but their performance charts are nebulous at best until you get dinged for using too much data.
Here in South East Asia everyone is willing to pay the USD10 per month it costs to get 100Mbps fibre, and many are willing to pay USD20 to get 500Mbps. Just how little are you Americans willing to pay that you are still getting 5Mbps?
"Frustrated masses are easily kept under control."
Yea, no. Do you know what a riot is?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
'broadband' definitions should only ever escalate
10Mbps is indeed a significant escalation from the 4MBps that was in place a mere 3 years ago. Wheeler jacked it way too far too fast to serve his political purpose of declaring a scarcity of "broadband" coverage.
To look at a 150% increase from 2015 as "regressive" is about the same as politicians wailing about "spending cuts" when what they really mean is that the spending increase didn't end up being as large as they wanted.
My deepest apologies, I was but a child at the time XD
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
the author of option piece that other sites are pointing to was forced to admit that what he stated was a a guess and there was no facts behind it.
This is almost as bad as all those people claiming that with Title 2 now gone they have been having issues with ISP blocking sites and throttling access. When in fact Title 2 rules are still in effect.
I have 101Mbps down, 10Mbps up cable. It's the highest speed I can get in my area at the consumer level, and comes with a 1TB monthly data cap. I pay $200/month for that, not including taxes.
The only other ISP is the phone company, and it's DSL packages in my area top out at 40Mbps down, 1Mbps up, at $55/month. I used to use them, but it took forever for them to offer anything over 10/1, and the reliability was terrible.
I'm lucky - I have two options, and they're both faster than dialup. Most people in the US only have one option for high speed access, and some don't have any.
I'm not counting satellite access here - 50GB data cap, 25/3 speed, terrible latency - thanks physics! :(, for $50/month.
Some of us are quite willing to pay, and would LOVE to pay one tenth the price for five times the speed.
Because nobody works from home, nobody ever uploads anything to the Internet, and everyone lives alone and has the connection all to themselves.
If you work from home, that's a business expense. Who cares whether it's called "broadband" or not, your employer needs to pay what is required for you to get the job done.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
Simply eliminate all local monopolies on internet access and you will see all manner of companies jumping into the fray.
Exactly how do you think that would play out? It costs HUGE money to build out a wired network and less but still a lot for wireless. We have local monopolies because for the most part they are natural monopolies. Understand what that means before you say any more. You think AT&T or Comcast is going to play nice with a new entrant? Anyone jumping into a market larger than a single community had better have tens of billions in funding to build a (redundant) physical network from scratch. They already tried forcing ISPs to allow competitors on their networks and that went terribly nor did it decrease costs. (Hint: competitors cannot provide services for less money than the company that actually owns the wires and guess which company the wire owners are going to prioritize for repairs and service?)
Now what they should do is pass a regulation so that companies can either provide content or deliver content but not both. And you regulate the pipe providers so that they cannot discriminate among content providers and have to provide services for reasonable and non discriminatory prices just like we do for electricity.
BTW, these monopolies are created by local governments.
No, it was local governments combined with the economics of the product. You can take away the local monopoly but there won't be a rush to compete against already existing incumbents because it is too expensive to build the network. A well regulated monopoly in this case is actually the lowest cost option in most locations.
My broadband supplier is soon upgrading me from 10/100 to 100/100 since that's their lowest offering on media I have. That's sufficient for my needs.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
The problem is that the federal law would be even allowing LESS competition because reasons.
How could it allow less? I have precisely one reasonable ISP option to my house right now. (Comcast in my case) The only "competitor" is Frontier Communications which offers substantially slower DSL service or my other option is to go entirely wireless which would be problematic for various reasons.
What needs to happen is that a law needs to be passed that companies can deliver content or they can deliver the pipe but not both. And the pipe providers need to be regulated to a similar degree as the electric companies to ensure fair and non-discriminatory access at rational prices even to rural areas.
How about the PEP mode that the Trailblazer modems had?
These days if you want a modem with some performance you'd have to get a Pactor 4 modem. Or if you want to get really slow, go JT-65.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
So your position is that you can't make money laying your own lines...like the company that did it previously.
That's absolutely correct. The company that did it previously was a subsidized monopoly. Once the money is already spent to string one set of wires to a house there it considerably weakens the business case to string a second set of wires. The first competitor in has a nearly insurmountable cost advantage over any later competitors. It's one of the cases where more competition does not actually reduce prices.
But if you have the Government standing in the way keeping anyone from even trying, then what's the point?
The government can get out of the way entirely and it would still fail because the services we are talking about are good examples of natural monopolies. Adding competitors . You don't seem to comprehend what a natural monopoly is. Anyone building a new network where Comcast already exists is going to be at an almost insurmountable cost disadvantage.
Case in point...Power companies are researching sending signals over the power line.
They already have a network in place. That is a different situation than trying to build a new one from scratch. Without getting into the weeds I'd welcome more competition but you're talking apples to oranges here.
Other options, erecting local WiFi towers. There could be a perfectly viable business case there.
WiFi? Do you comprehend how short the range for WiFi is? You would have to have a dense population and positively blanket the place with towers. WiFi is a terrible solution where I and many other people live - my nearest neighbor is actually out of range of my base station. Furthermore there are problems with the limited amount of spectrum available for WiFi.
France/Population: 66.9 million (2016)
Texas/Population: 27.86 million (2016)
Texas should have 200Mbps.
#DeleteFacebook
He said PORT speed not MODEM speed.
As in, DB9/DB25 serial ports.
#DeleteFacebook
~{po ~poz~ppo\anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
Have gnu, will travel.
Personally, I am all for leaving it as it is, but I do agree it was a bit much of a leap (at the time), though the previous definition had been there for ~5 years. Their game, as I see it, is basically to rewrite it so that basically everyone already has broadband, in the interest of ISPs not having to do anything to catch up. Even if the leap in definition was arguably excessive, dialing it back after having worked with it for several years is indeed a regression. I will admit that it would be narrow-minded to not consider the points you have made, as I do often forget to travel those lines of thought. A progression like 4-10-20 at the same intervals would've been more palatable to more people, I suspect, but too much conflict leads to each side taking as much as they can whenever they can (which is another issue in itself).
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
So I guess my 110 Baud acoustic coupler modem doesn't qualify. Time for an upgrade!
And the pipe providers need to be regulated to a similar degree as the electric companies to ensure fair and non-discriminatory access at rational prices even to rural areas.
You forgot about free ponies for everyone.
Save your snark. We subsidize rural access to phone service because it is important and have for decades. We should do the same for internet access and I don't mean dial up.
Broadband by whatever definition you choose is really cool to have, but in no way shape form or fashion approaches a basic need.
To most people it is more of a need in today's world than phone service is and phone service is FAR more regulated. Internet service is a utility of national importance and should be regulated as such.
Growing up in a tech-heavy bubble doubtless makes it hard to comprehend how much of society gets along just fine without it.
Well since I'm old enough to pre-date the internet and FAR older than the web I think I have a better handle on what life is like without internet access than most of the people reading this. While it's perfectly possible to get by without internet service, I don't buy the argument that it isn't a utility of the same importance as phone or mail and just a step behind electricity. It's certainly more important than Cable TV.
Replying to myself as this is somewhat a tangent. The other bone to pick on this topic is their efforts to place wireless service at the same level as wired service. They are two completely separate beasts, and in my book, wireless services (probably including WiFi and other non-cellular distribution, but I'd have to think/research before crapping out an opinion on that one) simply cannot meet all of my requirements for a fully usable internet connection. Basically, if birds, weather, RF interference, shared-medium congestion, or other factors largely outside the control of myself and the ISP can semi-reliably degrade the service, it doesn't fit my needs.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Add reading comprehension to his bucket list.
The original AC said "3200baud modem". Why is RS-232 port speed now being discussed when the limiting factor was the baud rate and compression over the telco lines?
FWIW, I downloaded the original shareware version of Doom in December of 1993 from an Apogee BBS over a 14400 bps connection. Put it on two 5.25" floppies and under the Christmas tree for my Dad that year.
Indeed, unpopular *opinion* is indeed unpopular... If I hadn't already posted here, I'd have done something about that.
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Those and a land line may be what passes for "broadband" once Idjit Pai finishes dismantling everything the FCC has previously done.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Baud doesn't equal connection speed either, at least with newer modems such as your 14400 example as a baud can encode more then one bit and peaked at 2400 or 9600, I forget which.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Death: [reads a list] The boy wants a pair of trousers that he doesn't have to share, a huge meat pie, a sugar mouse, "a lot of toys" and a puppy named Scruff.
Albert: Ah, how sweet. I shall wipe away a tear, 'cause what he's getting, see, is this wooden toy and an apple.
Death: But the letter clearly...
Albert: I know. It's the socio-economic factors. The world would be in a hell of a mess, eh, if everyone got what they asked for.
Death: I gave them what they wanted in the store...
Albert: Yeah, well, what good is a god that gives you everything you want?
Death: You have me there.
Albert: It's the HOPE that's important. It's a big part of belief. I mean to say, you give people jam today and they'll just sit and eat it. But jam tomorrow, now... that'll keep them going for ever.
Death: And you mean that because of this the poor get poor things and the rich get rich things?
Albert: Well, yes. That's the meaning of Hogswatch, isn't it, Master?
Death: But I'm the Hogfather! At the moment, I mean.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
If you can get 10Mbps down, you can do your homework, access job sites,
I'll throw-in a glib [citation needed] on that. The "homework" I've seen sometimes is poorly-compressed 1080p-only hour-long lecture videos with extremely poor DRM-riddled players that have issues fast-forwarding if you lose your connection. Yes, it's crap, but it's a Problem for a 10Mbps down connection.
Can you point me to an actual example of this or is it a made up scenario? In particular, I'd like to see a real world example of the ill-encoded lecture that just so happens to work ok at 25Mbps (the old minimum threshold) but doesn't on 10Mbps (the new threshold that has you and others up in arms (hint: it probably doesn't work at 25 Mbps either).
For *any* threshold you want to choose, there is always the potential for somebody out there to do something dumb that makes that speed too low - I could just as easily replace your "1080p-only" with "8k-only", right?
I think it's a dangerous game to attempt to define the minimum threshold of how much of the bells and whistles are "needed".
It's at least as dangerous a game as having the government try to mandate min internet speeds. The government is terrible at so many things, what gives you any confidence at all that it will get this one right, that it will keep it up to date quickly enough, etc., etc.?
You joke about the Libertarian way or whatever, but no small part of the current mess is due to abuse of government, like the Comcasts of the world using the government to prevent municipal broadband. This whole minimum threshold nonsense is little more than trying to put a bandaid on a more fundamental problem.
I'm sure that they brought food and drink to the party, right? It's not unreasonable to ask them to bring their own broadband then either. It's not like there's some physical limitation preventing them from bringing their home connection with them!
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
I currently get about 10-15 Mbps down and after dial-up it is fine for now. The problem is that at one time dial-up was fine, then most people got faster pipes and the web pages grew to fill them up. At the end of my dial-up days with crappy lines, it could take half an hour to load a page (if it didn't fail) and web sites just keep growing to fill the average pipe. In a couple of more years this 10 Mbps may well seem slow.
It's like so much tech, I remember upgrading to 8MBs of memory and it seemed huge. Didn't take long for software to fill it up. Same with my first HD, 40 MBs of storage seemed huge after floppies. Now I have a TB and it doesn't seem that huge. Once again the data grew to fill it up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Oh, absolutely - totally agree. Eventually we'll laugh at the thought of 100Mbps being decent, and so on: just like CPU, RAM, drive space, etc., it seems that usage of your net connection will continue to expand to capacity and then push for higher capacity.
It's a nice thought, and we certainly have the technology available, but where's the profit motive, or even the money/manpower to fulfill that desire?
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Also think of the poor TLAs, imagine the datacenter they'd have to assemble to warehouse all that data... (only modest sarcasm intended)
There is no XUL, only WebExtensions...
Just looked up my countries goals for internet speeds, http://crtc.gc.ca/eng/internet...
With the plan that 90% of Canadians have this by 2021. If a large sparsely populated country can aim for 50/10, a country like the USA should be able to as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
I have a 4G connection. It isn't too bad though with it pissing rain, I do see about half the speed as on a nice day. For very rural areas such as here where we have a brand new cell tower serving the internet to a community of about 200 households, it is one hell of an improvement on dial-up. Still even on a good day it is about 1/5th of my nations goals for access.
If a country larger and with 10% of the population of America can aim for 50/10, America should be able to do the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
And yet, Canada, a developed nation with a lower median income and 1/10th the population density is aiming for everyone to have access to a minimum of 50/10. Rural areas should still have decent speeds, even the ones that are a thousand kms from their neighbouring town.
The economic justification is having to compete in the 21st century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Totally agree. But:
(1) If a big chunk of the US doesn't even have 10Mbps broadband yet, do you think it'd be a good idea for the US to make that a priority in cases where a decision has to be made on what things to focus on? (versus making sure that, say, everybody with 25Mbps gets bumped to 50Mbps) Obviously the ideal is to make it good everywhere, but if push comes to shove, where should the focus be?
(2) In the US, part of the broadband reach problem is precisely due to government involvement (of the bad kind). That the government is setting speed goals of X vs Y is barely meaningful when the much larger problem is that broadband reach has been hampered by the government via garbage like this http://www.telecompetitor.com/... .
And there's a good chance that if the bad type of government involvement went away, a lot of the broadband reach problem would be taken care of automatically. See, for example, Singapore, when the government involvement was modest, fostered growth, but largely stayed out of the way. Singapore doesn't have all of the same challenges that a country like the US has, but it's telling that you can get a 2Gpbs for under 40 USD (https://www.singtelshop.com/shop/fibre-broadband/index.jsf).
Funny but when my family gets together for Thanksgiving we actually sit around and talk to each other. I guess we must be old fashioned but I don't see the point of gathering a large number of people in one place if they are all just going to stare into separate screens.
This micro-aggression invaded somebody's safe space.
This will be quickly followed by a Donald Trump tweet stating how much better the US is now because under him more people have broadband access than under Obama.
"Information wants to be expensive" - Stewart Brand, the same guy who said "Information wants to be free"
I guess you haven't been paying attention:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news...
Funny the changes hasn't even been in effect for a week yet the liberals want to declare failure. Yet they were willing to wait 8 years for Obama to accomplish something and he never did.
we get it, you are the only person in the whole world who actually matters
The people in the cities are always talking about how I don't matter because I live in the sticks, which is a gigantic fuck you to me. Well, fuck y'all back.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Your point #1, of course it is better to upgrade to 10 Mbps for those that have crap now, but as infrastructure gets upgraded, it should have a higher speed. That's how it is working here. 5 weeks back, I had a 26.4 Kbps connection, now I have a 10 Mbps cell connection, due to the Province partially paying for a new cell tower. I also have access to 911 even when the copper thieves strike. Meanwhile a bit closer to town, there is now fiber and it is due to be here in a couple of years. Lots of rural spread out communities are the same, first a cell tower with special deals (250 GB cap vs the 10 GB cap I'd have in town if I went with cellular) for people like me who have no other choice.
The thing is even in rural areas where wireless currently is the best option is to get the fiber closer and closer with the goal of having it most places.
Your point #2, it's insane for the State to stop municipalities from creating their own network, especially in cases where no one else is serving them. Forcing having clear plans for financing and the voters agreement I can see.
Perhaps due to having such low population densities, meaning only one or two over the air TV channels, most every town here has cable and if you have cable now, you probably have decent internet, so we haven't had the problems that happen down there where the cable company doesn't bother to build out but does lobby against towns building their own. Or perhaps it is just a different culture, without the extreme lobbying that happens down there and more of the attitude that the government is to serve the people.
As it is, you guys have it cheap down there compared to here, at least in general. Your internet is cheap, your cell service is cheap, at least compared to here. I pay $85+$12.50 equipment+tax for aprox. 10/1 Mbps internet. Singapore is small, the USA is big, Canada is even bigger. It is just in the nature of infrastructure that it costs more to cover large areas and much of the time there is no business case for more then one provider splitting up the costumer base. Even without the government hampering things, it's expensive and here the government has been trying to get more competition but the return isn't worth it. Plus the telcos are bastards who will rip of their costumers if given a chance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The only opinion that matters is the opinion of the person paying the bill.
All bandwidth is shared by the subscribers. Let's say we have a 10 Mbps link that is used by 10 users. The government then decides that 25 Mbps is the new definition of broadband. The ISP can then change the 10 Mbps link to 25 Mbps and increase the service group to 25 users.
My most recent move was to a house without cable service, but with FTTH. I'm on their slowest service, which is 54Mb/s down, 9.5Mb/s up. I don't notice much difference between 10 and 54Mb/s downstream, but the difference between 1 and 9.5Mb/s upstream is enormous.
On fiber I'd say even 9.5 Mb/s upstream is being a dick. One provider here makes it symmetric like from 50/50 to 1000/1000, the other have nominally asymmetric lines like I'm on 160/15. But in practice for relatively short bursts I see like 500 Mbit+ upstream it only slows down if you exceed some fairly generous bit bucket. With cable, DSL etc. the frequency bands are chosen so you get a lot more downstream than upstream but with fiber it's naturally symmetric just like say a network card. There's no reason to treat upload bandwidth as something rare and expensive. Most people use it so little and so rarely that most likely there's plenty free return capacity as long as it's fiber all the way to the backbone.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
But honestly a bicycle is perfectly fine. I live in an urban center and a bicycle that can reach up to 15 MPH is perfectly fine for riding two miles to work, or half a mile to the store, and it even has a basket that can hold two bags of groceries or a small backpack. I don't understand why anyone would need a car, or why we should build roads to accommodate them.
My point is, everybody's usage case is different and most of us aren't okay with something being just barely good enough.