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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.
Since I only have 10 down and 1 up now, 25 and 3 will be quite an improvement.
I guess I don't have broadband after all.
"Broadband" means something specific, and that meaning doesn't shift over time. "High-speed," on the other hand, is much more subjective and liable to shift with the times.
With all the shenanigans lately, perhaps the best way to fix problems with providers and the FCC is to vote for canidates who don't take PAC money. Crony capitalism doesn't seem to be providing the best infrastructure, regulation, or competitive rates.
Have gnu, will travel.
at least they didn't drop it. At this point I wouldn't be surprised by anything this FCC admin does.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
but not even another cold war could inspire this government to be competitive enough to consider a reasonable national broadband standard with the chops to rival even the smallest european nation.
For a party that so champions American Exceptionalism, Ajit sold any idea of it down the crapper when he axed net neutrality in favor of corporate kickbacks. My only hope is that this grinning philistine finds his comeuppance in the history books as one of the feckless imbeciles that sped the nation from innovation.
Good people go to bed earlier.
I'd rather have slow DSL than fast mobile, personally, because my household uses about 300GB/mo.
But the FCC thinks they're interchangable, which is a big problem.
Also 39% of rural Americans don't even have access to the current standard. As a government entity they ought to be focused on that, from a 14th Amendment perspective. If their rules are slowing new deployments, that's an equal protection issue, and the data shows that the Title II rules did just that.
https://www.fcc.gov/reports-re...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Just to avoid getting kicked in the face for agreeing with anything he says, at all...: I hate Pai.
I'd stand in a line just to WATCH him get punched in the face, but 25/3 to meet the requirements of the term 'broadband' for these rural areas with shitty wiring and terrible population density is plenty. 25Mbps downstream is *multiple* 720p or better video streams down and at least 1-2 up. Considering the percentage of Internet traffic that is youtube and facebook and netflix, that's fair math.
Yeah, of course I want my price to go down, but that's NEVER going to happen with any provider, regardless what the FCC declares "broadband" to be. The last thing I want is to subsidize rural areas getting 1Gbps for 1 house per square mile across the whole country. Let the WISPS do it.
I had a sucky sig.
There's no reason to raise the standard if it's already not being met.
Keep it at 25x3. Those of us getting less than 10 or nothing at all need the subsidies. If they raise it to 100 the big companies will just cherry pick the most profitable places near town to upgrade. Those of us truely hurting from the digital devide wont see any improvement.
So what happens when Democrats start taking/continue taking big money from telcos and cable companies? Do you imagine that they'll fix the broadband problem and whip the telcos into line?
We should have never even needed the FCC to step in and police the Internet. The FTC already had a job to do, and it failed. Had we proper competition in ISP markets (read: less crony capitalism) the FTC's intervention would have been far less necessary. That also didn't happen.
Now Democrats - who take money from the telcos just like Republicans - are supposed to fix all of that? Please.
Crony capitalism doesn't seem to be providing the best infrastructure, regulation, or competitive rates.
Government is a reflection on the people who voted and on the people who didn't vote. Infrastructure is vital, but people don't treat it as vital. They are easily distracted and directed. You don't think Donald Trump really cares that players kneel do you? No it is red meat for his base lest their accidentally wake up and smell the smoke.
In fact the times we live in have convinced me of one thing. If Nixon was in power right now, he would never be impeached in a million years.
If anyone wants to make America great again, then, well, that should not be the case, for if the only thing necessarily for evil to flourish is for it to have support in the media, and if we can't change that, well America will never be great again.
Greatness is not built on bullshit, but ethics, principles, sacrifice and hard work, and it is not the ethics principles and hard work of one person, but of countless good men and women. Great broadband requires those things as well. Merely changing the definition is not going to matter much. Our vast system of highways and roads was not built by corporations hoping for a subscription and just allowing the corporations to be more evil is unlikely to change that outcome much.
I only get 1mbps/8mbps max on my dsl often less because the speed fluctuates a lot.
It's tradition, like how we call the Acela "High-Speed Rail"
Kriston
With all the shenanigans lately, perhaps the best way to fix problems with providers and the FCC is to vote for canidates who don't take PAC money.
That would work if we were not in a hyper-partisan environment where they rather have their "team" win even if it requires PAC money. One way to dilute the problem would be to have ranked voting so that multiple candidates from the same party can be on the ballot or we can have real third party choices.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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". :)
There are lots of ways rural areas differ from urban areas, and always will, because no one is willing to pony up the massive amount of subsidies it would take to eliminate the differences:
* With enough subsidies, you could entice world-class theater companies to perform in Bankston, Iowa, population 25.
* With enough subsidies, you could entice airlines to provide scheduled passenger service to every grass airstrip.
* With enough subsidies, you could get a subway built that connects Riverside, Georgia to Funston, Georgia (combined population 461).
It's fortunate that nobody wants to provide these subsidies, because they would be a terrible use of society's finite resources.
But for some reason, there seems to be an automatic assumption among many, having done no cost/benefit analysis, that rural broadband is not like the projects mentioned above; that providing whatever subsidies are necessary to make it the equal of urban broadband ought to commence at once.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
I honestly don't know why one need to have 100Mbps down at home except for multiple 4K streams, but we all know that 4K title library is still very limited. The real problem in this country is not that urban dwellers can't get 100Mbit speed (they can, and in fact they can go up to gigabit speeds in most big cities). The problem is that getting even 25 megabit internet is still very hard in rural America.
Other countries don't allow talking-heads to defame ordinary people and publish fake news. They don't even allow a broadcast network (eg. Fox news) to spread propaganda created by 1 political party. In the USA, the rich don't care and an independent voice (SCOTUS) has even decided such abuse of the truth (and thus, the people) is allowed.
Society is a conflict of the need to fit-in and belong versus 'fuck you, I got mine'. Go too far to the left and nothing gets done. Go too far right and massacres occur, usually of the rich. Most countries spend a lot of money reducing such conflicts. In the USA, such conflict is tolerated because the poor don't kill the rich, they kill each other, thus keeping the rich safe from reality.
and with no network neutrality that can be to the local hub.
Have you ACTUALLY been using the internet lately?
I'm on a 448/96 kbps connection, and there are websites out there that take several minutes to load because of all the crap simple sites want to throw at eyeballs. That's WITH AdBlock, uBlock and Ghostery running.
Many residential users like to play games. On this connection, games like Overwatch, Team Fortress 2, even Heroes of the Storm are so laggy as to be literally unplayable - latency easily hits over 2000 ms. That's not to mention when I want to try a new game or a patch is released; on a good day I download 130-150 MB per hour. And of course, I can forget about doing anything else online while downloading.
I remember getting 256/128 back around the turn of the millennium. I think it was Christmas 2000. And yes, it was awesome fast at the time - but the internet was still geared towards people with 56k modems. Games weren't counted in the tens of GB either, I'm pretty sure the biggest games came on a single DVD back then. Now? You're lucky to find a new (AAA) game that would fit on five DVDs.
If you never do anything other than browse simple websites and check your email then great, but that is NOT how 'most residential users' use the internet.
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I have DSL and am currently syncing at 9 down and 1 up and its plenty for even high quality streams and downloads. For me 25 down and 3 up would be more than adequate provided I can actually GET that speeds at the times I want to use it.
They should keep the definition at 25 x 3 but ban the use of terms like "up to" and require providers to demonstrate that people can actually GET the advertised speed (e.g. via speed tests). For reference, a speed test on my DSL connection shows 7.85 down and 0.87 up (try getting that on a highly congested cable line in peak times when everyone is using it...)
The advertisers will just switch wording to high speed and keep selling snake oil to everyone.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
... ISP's think prices must go up, so this proposition is just a justification to raise prices.
When your base product even doesn't need to match 25/3 trump's administration thinks it's just fine. Keep 'em under control is more their goal.
That's why net neutrality was killed.
Even the EU uses that as a practice nevertheless what they say.
Bach says it all.
Disabling pictures is a bit of a double-edged sword because of how many websites use graphics for all kinds of interfacing - buttons, links, menus, disabling pictures just means loading the page and then loading it again to get the pictures to show.
I also like reading webcomics while eating lunch, and those kinda need pictures to be shown. <.<
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Who cares about neutrality if your speed is capped at 1 byte per second?
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Newsflash: The average of a country doesn't mean everyone has that speed.
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Never gonna happen so long as people keep voting for the person who spends the most on political advertising. They don't always win, but they do often enough that they go to the effort of fundraising. If anything, the death of old media will end that. I'm not hopeful that society will suddenly discover critical thinking or independent research.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Unfortunately the few candidates that propose voting reforms like that, tend to lose the primaries. Same with the ones who oppose gerrymandering.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
You idiot, who gives a fuck about what you think is sufficient for broadband. My original post was about the problems of getting broadband in the rural USA. If you think 768kbps will do, then I guess it will do for you, if all you do is post troll posts on Slashdot. Fuck off and die.
Of all the problems with broadband access, bandwidth is the least of them, much less how FCC defines it. The actual problems are lack of competition, lack of transparency in pricing, deceptive advertising and cost per gigabyte of data. I have DSL. OK, I can't stream video in HD. But as far as downloading and submitting forms, reading news, logging comments and in general "participating in the digital economy", it's fine. I hate to agree with Ajit Pai, but on this issue he's right, we should be concentrating on people who have no broadband access, not raising the bandwidth of people who already have a 25/3 connection.
And what is exactly the point of 1gpbs internet for ALL? 1080p stream on Netflix needs at most 6mbps. 4K stream needs less that four times than that. So what the fuck do you need gigabit for?
The future... & Quality of experience
For right now it would improve overall feel and experience of the web.
Less waiting, less page load time.
Higher quality uncompressed video so there would be zero artifacting from lame compressed formats.
Multiple High quality streams
Better video conferencing experience.
Better video gaming.
Faster downloads of all files.
Less lag during peak times on ones node.
The feel of the web would be much more flawless.
Then there is the evolution of the web and what that will be.
25mbps was fine 10 years ago, but right now even with my 60mbps service things get laggy during peak times.
I no more want us to settle for 10 year old tech now than I would have said we should be satisfied with 56kbps back in 2008.
Let us push for being more advanced than settle for being mediocre.
Oh that's so sweet, you looked up several of my comments to post the same thing.
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Did you ... read my post at all? You wanted to comment to the guy before me, not me. And then you looked up other things I'd said to continue calling me a troll.
Maybe you should go check your meds. You forgot to take them these last few days.
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You are very wrong about something. Either you're talking a data cap, not speed, or you're using the wrong numbers. Because even high speed intra-computer connections (to hard drives/USB3.1 devices) don't get 20% of that speed.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Maybe in your mind when you see advertising broadband means "fast", whatever "fast" means to you today. (Recall the actual broadband consumer connections that started the marketing were 192Kbps and 256Kbps).
For people who actually work with the connections, it's very much like a serial port vs a parallel port. In the 1980s you may have learned that "the parallel port is the fast one", but it won't work to connect a parallel printer to an RS-485 serial port. My RS-485 port is as fast as a Centronics parallel port, but it's the wrong kind of signal.
Serial means it sends the bits on at a time over one wire. Parallel means it sends the signal over several wires at once, as many bits at a time as there are wires. Broadband similarly sends several bits at a time, over several channels on the same wire. It won't work too plug a broadband device into a baseband port, any more than it'll work to plug a serial device into a parallel port. That's true even if you think that parallel means fast.
You've hit precisely when the Trump administration wants to keep the bar for telecommunications low. it inhibits competition in the markets, thereby keeping profits of large, largely monopoly players intact and funneling campaign contributions to the GOP.
Seattle is better connected than those of us on the far side of Puget Sound. In Kitsap county we are restricted to 150 GB/sec for about $70/month unless you start paying much more for enterprise/business service, which can get you up to about 500 GB/sec. Of course, you can always get much less broadband and speed if you don't want to pay the local, largely monopolistic Comcast Communications for service.
Is this the best argument the GOP can use now to pardon itself for its policies with regard to telecommunication services?
To paraphrase a famous Republican "your argument is a like a thin homeopathic soup made by boiling the shadow of a dead pigeon who died from starvation". Obviously, the GOP has come a long way from the day Lincoln was president.
This is precisely why SCOTUS ruled the way it did in Citizen's United. By making money free speech and permitting "dark" untraceable spending on electioneering, it paved the way for large foreign/international corporations to funnel unlimited money into the election process. Now Putin and the Saudis have more to say who gets elected than you do. The irony, of course, is that they are now much better able to fool a sizable fraction of the electorate to vote against their own interests.
Thanks for pointing out that "broadband does not mean fast."
Nonetheless, there's still a problem with your definition of broadband...
The problem is that the 8 Mhz channel-width definition was rather arbitrary. What if a channel had been defined as 24 MHz wide? Then the whole signal would have fit on a single channel, and we'd be back to baseband.
So I still am unaware of any definition of "broadband" that isn't arbitrary (because it in turn depends on another arbitrary definition).
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
they do need options other than: *1-2 MB DSL
I have 1.5 Mbps DSL (and I don't even live in a rural area). It's enough to get a pretty sharp picture when watching Netflix, so I feel no need to upgrade to something faster.
Am I missing something? Do I have needs that I'm not aware of? Why the obsession with more speed than one needs?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
My perspective is the reason we have big servers like YouTube and very few actual publishers is because of the asymmetric down and up speeds. Imagine if you had 25mbps up links? I think many more people were start to publish out of their own homes and offices than do presently. After all... that is why we upload to Youtube, Facebook, etc. We have lots of problems to solve but right now, it seems the biggest problem are the huge monopolies that dictate internet content and policy. The internet needs equal peers which implies greater uplink speeds.
Broadband vs baseband doesn't have anything to with the width of the channel. Baseband, such as 10BaseT and 100BaseT, sends one symbol at a time over one channel. Broadband sends multiple symbols Iver multiple channels, simultaneously.
It's like a four-lane road with four cars traveling along side each other vs a single-lane road, cars in single file. One lane doesn't become four by making it wider.
You may be familiar with the difference between serial communication and parallel. Serial has one wire and sends one symbol (typically one bit) at a time down the wire. Parallel typically has 8 wires, each simultaneously carrying a bit, so an entire byte is flowing simultaneously across the 8 separate wires. Broadband uses multiple SEPARATE channels to send multiple symbols (bits) simultaneously, in parallel.
The Ethernet standards are called 10BaseT, 100BaseT, etc because it is baseband signaling at those speeds. 100 Mbps Baseband over Twisted pair: 100BaseT.
100Base-SX is 100Mbps Baseband over Multimode fiber.
1000BASE-SX is 1000Mbps Baseband over Multimode.
It's not called 100BroadT, because it's not a broadband signal; it's a baseband signal. That's why it's called 100BASE-whatever.
> meaning of words changes over time.
The ignorance of politicians or bureacrats doesn't change the fact that you can't plug an NBase-x device. Into any kind of broadband device and expect it to work.
You CAN plug a 10Base-T device into a 100Base-T device and they can communicate. They use the same plugs and the same signaling.
Baseband and broadband use different kinds of plugs because they are completely incompatible AND THAT HAS NOT CHANGED. Try plugging your Docsis coax into a 100Base-T port and see. It still doesn't work, and never will - whether or not Nancy Pelosi understands that.
Right, fiber standards include 100Base-FX and 1000Base-SX.
Those are 100Mbps Baseband over multimode fiber and 100bps Baseband over single mode fiber.
The "base" in the name 100Base-FX tells you it's Baseband, not broadband.
WiFi is passband - the signal spills over onto other channels.
192 Kbps ISDN is broadband - it uses three 64Kbs channels in parallel.
Frankly, FUCK broadband for Rural America. You shitnozzles voted the retard that put Pai in charge into office. You get what you get.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Keeping the bar low does one other thing - it allows Pai to claim the majority of Americans have at least 2 ISPs that offer broadband and therefore justify removal of Net Neutrality to allow natural competition, even though by the FCC's own numbers that was just over 50% (like 54 or 56%, I believe). When you jump to 100Mbps, only 24% of households have more than one option.
What ISPs can (illegally, but it takes time for the DoJ to catch up and the fines often come way to late) do is charge more for people where they have a monopoly and use cutthroat prices to force out competition where they do have competition. This is the legendary Wal-Mart predatory pricing model that Wal-Mart has been sued for using multiple times to eliminate competition and expand.
As AC states, nobody cares HOW the data gets sent and arrives, only that it gets between point A and point B with the correct data at the other end. I could go on all day about how terrible underlying infrastructure technologies like ATM are for data, but at the end of the day it boils down to "did my data get to its destination at 100Mbps?" And that's all technological laymen like Nancy Pelosi care about.
> As AC states, nobody cares HOW the data gets sent and arrives, only that it gets between point A and point B with the correct data at the other end.
Those who are responsible for making that happen care. The customers (you) care that it happens correctly. You even care about how much jitter there is on your VoIP flow, and how much latency there is on your games, and the packet loss rate on other applications. You all care about that even if you don't know what the words mean (and you don't care about jitter or latency on your Netflix stream).
> "did my data get to its destination at 100Mbps?" And that's all technological laymen like Nancy Pelosi care about.
People who are semi-literate in the most basic facts about networking think they know that the measurement of connection quality is bandwidth. They don't think about latency, jitter, or packet loss, so they are only considering 25% of the quality measurements - and thinking they know what they are talking about. In fact, bandwidth is the LEAST important measurement for real-time connections like VoIP, ssh, or even Google Docs and Slashdot.
Unfortunately, politicians like Nancy and bureacratic politicians like Wheeler write the rules about how we have to route and queue traffic, without knowing what a queue IS. It's quite a mess.
Worse, people who read just the first four pages of Networks for Dummies lobby them to enact EXTREMELY stupid, stupid rules like "you have to treat every packet the samst (as if it's 1974 and we're still using hubs as the main piece of network gear)".
OTOH turning it into a national security/sovereignty issue might be the only way to fix it.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
This anomaly was explained to me by a high-level tech within the bowels of the cable provider's (a big one) service department. He had nothing to sell me, as he was pure tech, helping me to resolve another issue. So he had nothing to lose by revealing the facts. I had pointed out to him that the advertisement stated that I could have any speed I needed, at the time it was needed ("Speeds up to___ on demand!"). Yet, they offered to sell packages at varying speeds, for varying dollar amounts, monthly. Of course, I chose the cheaper option, since I was promised any speed I needed, whenever I needed it. This seemed to me to be a bit odd, but what the heck. He chuckled a bit, then explained that everyone gets the max speed when they first log into a service or website, such as Netflix. But then, after about ten minutes or so, you get throttled back to the speed you pay for. Or less. Suddenly, I understood why Netflix would quickly come on at high-def for about the first ten minutes of a movie, then suddenly paused, and stated that it was 'renegotiating speed', after which 1080p became 720p. Noticeably, every time.
I would be overjoyed if the entire country had access to a minimum of 25 megabit data connections. I see nothing wrong with this being the minimum speed. Heck, not long ago I had fiber giving me 30.
Now, it should be noted I'm on Gigabit personally....
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
So what your saying is, because there's bad traffic in the morning north on Boston on I93, we can no longer call I93 a highway? This is about what is considered the minimum speed we can call it a broadband connection. NOT the speed which is desirable for your specific usage.
And I have to say, last year I was streaming 4k video over a 30 Megabit fiber connection, so I dunno what your doing that you'd consider 60 megabit laggy during peak times. Watching 3 4k connections while torrenting movies?
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
I'm going to have to blame really, really bad translations on what your saying. We're talking line speed here, not data caps.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Gigabit connections in the US are 100+ USD a month, and are only available more urban areas generally. How do they connect to your home?
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
I didn't say anything about calling a highway a highway. Highways and Broadband are entirely different entities on scalability.
It is more about how the cable companies providing the service qualify things. They can say you have a 30mbps connection if you get that at some point during the day. However, once everyone is home and streaming from your node, then things get bogged down on the node you are on and it is unlikely you will be getting anywhere close to 30mbps say at 8-11 at night.
This has always been the case.
I was the first one on my node in Ann Arbor when I had a lovely 3mpbs way back in the day, but after a year I had several hundred people on my same node. I rarely could achieve the speed I started with.
So by saying we should have 1gbps speed, I am talking about on aggregate. I am fairly certain that much like today... when the ISP says you have 1gbps broadband.... it merely means that ideally you have such a speed. However, when everyone in your area is streaming 4k, in the evening, one is highly unlikely to be achieving this.
Right now with 60mbps I often get choked off on my connection and the lone movie or football game I am watching bogs down or chokes off because the streaming happening on my node is much more than my node can handle.
It is more of an ISP problem.
With a 1gbps connection such a thing would be unlikely to happen.