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FCC Plan To Lower Broadband Standards Is Met With 'Mobile Only Challenge' (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Broadband consumer advocates have launched a "Mobile Only Challenge" to show U.S. regulators that cellular data should not be considered an adequate replacement for home Internet service. The awareness campaign comes as the Federal Communications Commission is considering a change to the standard it uses to judge whether broadband is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion. While FCC Chairman Ajit Pai hasn't released his final plan yet, the FCC may soon declare that America's broadband deployment problem is solved as long as everyone has access to either fast home Internet or cellular Internet service with download speeds of at least 10Mbps. That would be a change from current FCC policy, which says that everyone should have access to both mobile data and fast home Internet services such as fiber or cable.
"The FCC wants to lower broadband standards," organizers of the Mobile Only Challenge say on the campaign's website. "Pledge to spend one day in January 2018 accessing the Internet only on your mobile device to tell them that's not OK." The Mobile Only Challenge was organized by Public Knowledge, Next Century Cities, New America's Open Technology Institute, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC), and other groups. Participants are encouraged to share their experiences using the #MobileOnly hashtag.
"The FCC wants to lower broadband standards," organizers of the Mobile Only Challenge say on the campaign's website. "Pledge to spend one day in January 2018 accessing the Internet only on your mobile device to tell them that's not OK." The Mobile Only Challenge was organized by Public Knowledge, Next Century Cities, New America's Open Technology Institute, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC), and other groups. Participants are encouraged to share their experiences using the #MobileOnly hashtag.
The FCC is raising the limit from 4/1 to 10/1
It's going up. Not down you fucking liars.
This isn't going to have any effect. Or, maybe even the opposite effect.
The majority of people already consume their internet on mobile devices primarily.
All this is going to do is prove that wireless is adequate for most peoples needs.
#THING_hashtag reminds me of "I need a new PIN number for the ATM machine."
Agreed. Wireless operators are by far the largest isps
+5 Kendall, you self-interested self-shilling social justice warrior for log cabin nazism... Slashdot just wouldn't be the distinctly masturbatory-conservative-snowflake den that it is without spammer accounts like Superfag Kendall.
What am I saying, you don't need anyone else to thumb you up, you'll just create more accounts lol. Are you going for the Peter Thiel of slashdot you self-congratulatory faggot babyeater?
Ummm, 10Mbps internet service isn't exactly slow. That's faster than my crappy AT&T DSL and I can still stream Netflix, etc. just fine even with another user in the home on the internet.
I'd live with fairly reliable 10M LTE for the near term. Some of my rural relatives would dance a jig if they could get it.
The problem comes in with reliability, pricing, and caps. 10/2 cable for $35 a month with effectively no use cap is a very, very different thing from 10/2 LTE for $80 a month that shuts you off at 20 GB (i.e., 4.5 hours of use per month). If you just focus on the 10/2, you are intentionally being blind to the real difference.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Pledge to spend one day in January 2018 accessing the Internet only on your mobile device to tell them that's not OK."
And when the world doesn't come crashing to a halt, these synapse-starved activists will just prove the point that mobile is a perfectly viable alternative in most areas.
Funny thing about the wireless-versus-wired debate. I'm amused to see how my Sprint wireless access point is much faster than AT&T DSL.
... making wrong assumptions. The FCC wants to classify mobile broadband as 10 mbps. They don't want to lower anything. Fake news is really starting to polute the minds of the gullible.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
It seems to me that the FCC has been lowering its standards ever since Ajit took over control. Nothing new here.
During 1992 election time, Jay Leno made joke on Dan Quayle. "How do you improve mileage of US cars?". Dan Quayle's solution was to increase the size of the gallon. Once again they are going to improve broadband coverage in USA by redefining the broadband.
While I suspect it's true that most people use mobile devices primarily, I would love to see figures on how much they use on an LTE service versus over WiFi hotspots. My guess is that the data transfer distribution skews heavily towards WiFi.
I know very few people who constantly use their LTE data.
My mother's only option for network at her rural house was a very old, very poor DSL line that was around 30kBps at times (yes, bot even mbs).
I got her a T-Mobile hotspot, and after that she was about to get a good 5-10MB/s, almost all the time. That meant she could actually watch HD Netflix. That meant she could download photos in a reasonable time. It was a terrific replacement for infrastructure that was going to take many years to get better.
The ONLY downside is not related to physical equipment - the speed is great, what is not great is that there is no way to get more than 10GB of data in a month. You cannot pay them for more than that. It doesn't drop the connection, but it gets really slow after the limit is hit. Binge-On does help because Netflix traffic is excluded, at the cost of getting only 720p streams instead (still much better than what she was able to get before), but even with that over a month 10GB is not quite enough for her, a somewhat non-technical user - for any Slashdot user that cap would be far too low. If they want to regulate anything, make it so that it is at least possible to buy higher data caps at a premium.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
C'mon, everybody! Spend a day stabbing yourself to show Chairman Pai what a maroon he is!
If T-Mobile would give me unlimited tethering at a competitive cost to Spectrum Time Warner that I currently have, I'd drop STW immediately.
Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Google, and all other streaming and content providers should slow Ajit Pai and the other FCC Chairmen's speeds to 28.8kbps and let them see what life without broadband or Net Neutrality is really like.
The Chocolate Ration is increasing to 30 grams a week!
But it actually had a history.
Why bring second device on vacation or pay for hotel WiFi? E-mail, Photos, Netflix (which T-mobile currently includes), everything else works great. Can set up a hotspot if I need bigger screen/keyboard/etc. Using 1GB of data for 3 hours of emails/tweets seems insane, I had 500MB data pass stretch for a week on vacation. Sure, there is some convenience to faster/higher limit home WiFi, but we are talking about a costly government mandate here. Why prop up dying technology when gigabit LTE is around the corner? Also mandate is often for poor areas, and the poor can ill afford two plans and forced cable TV bundling by broadband companies. If you are living on modest means, best to stick to cell plan which you need anyway and make it stretch for all Internet needs.
They didn't care about public sentiment on neutrality, they're certainly not going to care about broadband. They're in this for personal wealth. Progress is for progressives, not reactionaries. Money is the important thing here, and we're not talking about your money.
I live in a major metropolitan area and I dream about 10Mbps speeds on my LTE4 phone. The tower congestion is the rate limiting factor here. If I want good LTE performance, I just need to drive to a rural area where I have a clear shot to the tower and just a few other users. This isn't hyperbole. I get better LTE performance (order of magnitude) off the coast of NJ or rural PA than I do in Washington, DC.
Build more towers damn it!
What we need to do is have both the FCC and Congress limited to 10Mbps for over a month! Wouldn't that be a riot if Russian/Ukranian/Saba hackers switched the BGP map for both FCC and Congress's carriers during that same period? I'm only dreaming of course...
From http://nextcenturycities.org/mobile-only-challenge/:
Pledge to spend one day in January 2018 accessing the internet only on your mobile device
I tried that once. I realized that T-Mobile has some pretty good unlimited high-speed internet access, and I quit my cable internet proved, saving me $50 a month. It's great; I recommend everyone that has a competitive cellular plan make the switch.
I agree so long as the carrier has as good or better back-haul than the local incumbents.
Currently I am paying for (& seem to be actually be getting it!) 150Mbps. Capped at 1 terabyte, bastards. We've come close but not gone over, yet. I do not see cell service replacing it this year. Maybe in the future.
SLOWER TRAFFIC KEEP RIGHT
"Pledge to spend one day in January 2018 accessing the Internet only on your mobile device to tell them that's not OK."
To prove what? To accomplish what? How will the [FCC | ISP | Anyone] know what you did? How exactly does this influence the FCCs decision?
This will be even less effective than Hashtag Activisim, like #BringBackOurGIrls - at least with hashtag activism you can see how many people support you.
Ken
Fire Island, NY is a sand barrier island near NYC. It is covered with vacation homes, and is a nice place to spend a weekend on a beach. When a hurricane took out the existing wireline phone network, Verizon worked very hard to replace it with a cellular network. Same thing here. No messy union employees. No real estate issues. Just a tower put up by contract monkeys.
declare all_my_problems_fixed = true;
Pai is a genius! /s
Meanwhile, my work actually requires me to do something about the problems. Imagine that.
Most here aren't old enough to even remember dial-up. Plus a lot of the techniques we used to cope with dial-up still apply.*
*Or other slow connections like from boats and airplanes.
I have similar concerns as the OP. I've had days where I've used nothing but my LTE service, including tethering my laptop, and it wasn't terrible. This challenge seems like a good way to confuse the issue, rather than convince people the new standard is unacceptable.
10Mbps might be acceptable for most uses, but all of the bullshit surrounding cellular data is not. A single day won't really reveal the true impact of making LTE the minimum standard.
The future is going to be wireless. Wireless is cheaper to maintain. You have maybe hundreds of cell towers in a metro area that need maintenance, rather than tripple digit or more thousands of poles strung with aging cables. I would be very surprised if we wern't nearly 100% wireless for residential connections in the next 20 years.
Even the cable companies see the writing on the wall, just look towards their investments in cellular and other wireless technology.
5G is going to easily bring us multiple hundreds of megabits if not gigabit per second wireless. The writing is on the wall for Coax and ADSL. Fiber could compete, but it seems every time someone attempts a huge fiber roll out it fails. FIOS stopped expanding, Google Fiber stopped expanding. Wires/Fiber is too expensive with what looms on the horizon with wireless. If someone strung up fibers everywhere today they would probably never make back the cost of the infrastructure investment over the next quarter to half century
Fuck Ajit Pai
Fuck Ajit Pai
If cellular packet data were sufficient speed, we would still be using dial up modems because that is all the speed you need. 10mbps cellula, with the packet lag and dropped packets, has throughput more like a 54 kBPS dialup modem and 3G (which most of the country has as a best signal) is like a 14,400 dialup modem. Yeah, you can get some email and stream low-res but you need to be on wifi to an actual broadband connection to do anything serious. When the FCC upped the definition of "broadband" from 12 Mbps to 25 Mbps who remembers the howls from the huge ISP companies because they couldn't market "cheapest hardware" as "broadband" for premium prices any more. Packet radio like cellular network data is wonderful for access in a semi remote area but pails in comparison to the throughput from an actual internet connection.
NRRPT/RCT
Most Cities and public housing already have speeds that exceed this 10/1 standard, what this does is make it so that companies are no longer made to try and provided/build infrastructure to areas where only 5/1 DSL options are available.
Most the U.S.'s sub-poverty line population live in rural areas, and making another policy that reduces incentive for companies to provide infrastructure for them just stagnates those populations for an even longer period. There aren't many jobs in the Rural areas, and if you allow companies to say that cellar access is enough for them, you're going to make it even hard for potential businesses to start up there. Trying to run a business off a cellular hot spot will not meet today's needs.
If I'm missing something, or there is gap in my logic, please inform me otherwise, but I honestly cannot tell how this helps any end user.
Say this Challenge goes ahead and is a great success. Millions of citizens perform the challenge and post their results, and state specifically that they don't like the FCC reclassifying what broadband means.
Do you think this will sway the FCC? Or the administration of the Big Giant Orange Head? They listen only to billionaires, corporate executives, and lobbyists. The majority of citizens already don't like current Administration and FCC policy initiatives concerning the internet.
Cost the problematic people their jobs. Change policy by replacing leadership. That will change things, not marches in the streets that these corporatists just laugh at. The powers that be accuse the protesters of being violent, or radical, or UnAmerican. It's an oligarchy designed for the benefit of rich people.
Even though Ajit Pai won't listen to them, maybe the next FCC chair can look into it after Trump leaves office?
OK, politicians like to be seen as loose, hip and friendly. That makes sense.
However, Leno, Stewart & Colbert are comedians and comedy is their product and comfort zone. Also, every one of those has a history of bringing politicians and serious guests on their shows and having relatively serious conversations with them.
So what was/would be wrong with Dan Quayle joking about increasing the size of a gallon (I don't know the history of that particular anecdote)? What's wrong was, Quayle had an image problem as a lightweight and unserious thinker. He needs to stay away from things that reinforce that image, or at least be very careful with those approaches. At least if you assume Quayle cares about his image, which seems a safe assumption.
So, he can make a joke, but it has to be a clever joke. He can laugh at Leno making that joke (to avoid being seen as uptight) but maybe he then needs to tell some business or personal anecdote. He can even make a joke at his own expense so long as it isn't about him being "dumb".
Also, the recent history of "Republican politicians say[ing] what is obviously a joke" suggests, maybe they are covering up mistakes by claiming they were joking. How can we know this? Statements have been made in non-comedic environments and no one was laughing. Statements have also been made by people not particularly known for being humorous.
Suppose a guy in a bar says something offensive or off-putting to a woman, then claims it was a joke. Do you believe him or not? It's like that.
"The way folks here are reacting you'd think this was slower than dial-up!"
No, we are reacting because we were promised Winning. Lowering standards is called Losing.