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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.
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.
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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.
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.
> 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". :)
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.
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.