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FCC Proposes To Maintain US Broadband Standard of 25Mbps Down, 3Mbps Up (arstechnica.com)
The FCC is proposing to maintain the U.S. broadband standard at the current level of 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has kept the standard at these speeds since 2017, despite calls to raise it from Democratic Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. This week, Pai proposed keeping the standard the same for another year. Ars Technica reports: The FCC raised the standard from 4Mbps/1Mbps to 25Mbps/3Mbps in January 2015 under then-Chairman Tom Wheeler. Ajit Pai, who was then a commissioner in the FCC's Republican minority, voted against raising the speed standard. As FCC chairman since 2017, Pai has kept the standard at 25Mbps/3Mbps despite calls to raise it from Democratic Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel. This week, he proposed keeping the standard the same for another year. "This inquiry fundamentally errs by proposing to keep our national broadband standard at 25Mbps," Rosenworcel said yesterday. "It is time to be bold and move the national broadband standard from 25 Megabits to 100 Megabits per second. When you factor in price, at this speed the United States is not even close to leading the world. That is not where we should be and if in the future we want to change this we need both a more powerful goal and a plan to reach it. Our failure to commit to that course here is disappointing. I regretfully dissent." While Pai's proposal isn't yet finalized, keeping the current speed standard would likely mean that Pai's FCC will conclude that broadband deployment is already happening fast enough throughout the US. Pai could use that conclusion in attempts to justify further deregulation of the broadband industry.
This is about calling it "Broadband". It doesn't mean they will upgrade your speed. They just can't call the slower junk "broadband". (Also: 25/3 = broadband has existed for a few years already...)
Most slashdot readers don't get it, but rural broadband is hard. Remember rural areas? You know, the places outside of cities?
America is big, and the rural America are really big. Stringing wire and fiber is expensive, and will never be cost-effective.
Let's take Etex.net. They have a service area of 710 square miles. That's about the size of Singapore, with a population density of about 0. There are probably 30,000 potential customers in their service area.
They offer 20Mbps, tops. Are they going to string fiber to everyone? No. Can they do bonded DSL? No. They could run two independent DSL lines and bond at the router? Maybe.
VDSL2 can get 50Mbps at 1,000 meters from the CO. That doesn't get you much when you're out in the boonies. $13k/mile is suburban fiber-per-mile cost, so maybe it's $7k per mile in rural areas. So you can string fiber 20 miles to that guy's house for $140k. How do you make that back?
> Oh please define broadband for us, tell us precisely what it means
In telecommunications, there are three major types of transmission:
Baseband: The signal is in a channel. A baseband signal on channel 3 doesn't significantly interfere with one on channel 4. 100 Mbps is a baseband signal.
Passband: The signal is centered on a channel, but spills over. You may know in wifi channel 1 will interfere with channels 2 and 3. You can, however, use channel 1 and channel 3 for separate signals. You just have some interference if the two stations are close together.
Broadband: The signal is distributed across several channels. Cable TV and internet is a good example. A cable TV channel is 8Mhz wide (if there is a channel at 54Mhz, the next channel is at 62Mhz). That means it can carry up to 8Mhz gross bandwidth without special tricks like quadrature encoding. In order to get more bandwidth, providers send your internet signal over several TV channels simultaneously. (And use other tricks). Of your signal is on channels 100, 101, and 102 there can NOT be another person using channel 102 at exactly the same time. That's difference between passband and broadband.
In the 1990s, ISDN providers started offering service over three or four channels (broadband) rather than the aingle-channel (baseband) transmission than was available before. Using four channels, broadband ISDN could provide four times the bandwidth - 256Kbs.
DSL was similar - around the same time it became possible to bond multiple voice channels into a broadband configuration for DSL. The public noticed that the new services were faster, and they were "broadband", whatever the heck that means. Typical consumers started associating the word "broadband" with "fast".
As I mentioned, 100 Mbps Ethernet is baseband (single-channel), not broadband (multi-channel). Fiber optic is typically baseband, not broadband (remember we're talking per-signal). USB3 is baseband, at 640 Mbps. SATA is baseband, at 6Gbs. Broadband does NOT mean "fast". In fact most of the fastest connections you use are baseband, not broadband. It's just that for a few years in the 1990s the fast connections readily available to consumers happened to be broadband at the time. Not knowing what ISDN even stands for, and not knowing what broadband, passband, and baseband are, many consumers associated the term broadband with fast.
It would actually be just as accurate to call any high speed internet "DSL". In the same time period in the 1990s, the fastest connections for checking consumers were DSL, and broadband, and 4 Mbps, and copper. Neither "DSL", nor "4 Mbps", nor "copper", nor "broadband" mean "fast". They all have specific meanings. If you want a term that means "high speed", rhe correct term is "high speed". :)