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Ajit Pai Wants To Raise Rural Broadband Speeds From 10Mbps To 25Mbps (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission is planning to raise the rural broadband standard from 10Mbps to 25Mbps in a move that would require faster Internet speeds in certain government-subsidized networks. The FCC's Connect America Fund (CAF) distributes more than $1.5 billion a year to AT&T, CenturyLink, and other carriers to bring broadband to sparsely populated areas. Carriers that use CAF money to build networks must provide speeds of at least 10Mbps for downloads and 1Mbps for uploads. The minimum speed requirement was last raised in December 2014.
Today, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said he's proposing raising that standard from 10Mbps/1Mbps to 25Mbps/3Mbps. "[W]'re recognizing that rural Americans need and deserve high-quality services by increasing the target speeds for subsidized deployments from 10/1 Mbps to 25/3 Mbps," Pai wrote in a blog post that describes agenda items for the FCC's December 12 meeting. "[T]he program should support high-quality services; rural Americans deserve services that are comparable to those in urban areas," Pai also wrote. The new speeds "will apply to future projects but won't necessarily apply to broadband projects that are already receiving funding," Ars notes. "For ongoing projects, the FCC will use incentives to try to raise speeds. More money will be offered to carriers that agree to upgrade speeds to 25Mbps/3Mbps, a senior FCC official said in a conference call with reporters."
Today, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said he's proposing raising that standard from 10Mbps/1Mbps to 25Mbps/3Mbps. "[W]'re recognizing that rural Americans need and deserve high-quality services by increasing the target speeds for subsidized deployments from 10/1 Mbps to 25/3 Mbps," Pai wrote in a blog post that describes agenda items for the FCC's December 12 meeting. "[T]he program should support high-quality services; rural Americans deserve services that are comparable to those in urban areas," Pai also wrote. The new speeds "will apply to future projects but won't necessarily apply to broadband projects that are already receiving funding," Ars notes. "For ongoing projects, the FCC will use incentives to try to raise speeds. More money will be offered to carriers that agree to upgrade speeds to 25Mbps/3Mbps, a senior FCC official said in a conference call with reporters."
They'll take the money, pad their bottom lines, and continue NOT actually improving the state of rural broadband.
Also, betting the window on actual implementation is so far into the future that this is nothing more than a blatant present to them anyhow.
We plan to boost the definition of broadband to 25Mbps! In 2025!
Implementation? Maybe about the time that 25Gbps is in common use everywhere BUT rural areas!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The definition specifically caters to cable broadband providers who have shitty upstream and infinite downstream.
The actual 706 definition of broadband makes no distinction of any kind between sending and receiving. It is about capabilities not directionality.
If it must take 25 mbit to "receive" high quality voice, data, graphics and video then it must also be true that 25 mbit is required to "originate" the same.
Why are the U.S. taxpayers subsidizing these failing industries? Look at Comcast. They only had $4.3 billion in free cash flow in the second quarter of 2018. Why should we pour more of our hard earned money down the drain for a company which can't survive without its corporate welfare payments?
And what about Verizon? They've only had $26.2 billion in free cash flow so far this year. What a travesty that such a failing company has to beg for money from the taxpayers.
that pushed to LOWER it to 10mbps in the first place?
I live in a fairly well-populated area, and the choices/service sucks royal rotting eggs. If that's the standard, good luck.
Table-ized A.I.
I don't know how we will survive without your high definition, high framerate videos of cows grazing ... God forbid it take more than 15 minutes for you to upload it!
And here is the only reason for this!
"For ongoing projects, the FCC will use incentives to try to raise speeds. More money will be offered to carriers that agree to upgrade speeds to 25Mbps/3Mbps,"
So I noticed you had submitted a project plan to be implemented by 2090 for broadband. Since you have already submitted the plan we will now offer you even more money to make it 25/3.
love the taste, hate the texture
...rural Americans deserve services that are comparable to those in urban areas..."
Why? I am a 'rural American' and even I don't agree with that. I expect that there are costs to living in the middle of nowhere and connectivity is going to be one of them. Besides, as many people have pointed out, we have flushed gobs of public money down that hole before and got nothing. I still don't have the ISDN service out here the industry was subsidized to provide years ago. In fact, the phone service theoretically available out here doesn't even reliably support dial-up. We depend on a radio link to the next town, but that is my problem, not that of 'urban Americans'.
[Actually, the fixed radio link works surprisingly well. Much better than the land-line didn't. Except when there is lightning. Anywhere.]
A free market should sort out an existing government subsidy program?
Commies say the darndest things ...
I'm defiantly not in a Rural area, I'm within about 2 miles of a California State University, but they "best" AT&T can do here is 1.5Mb download. The tech on the phone could only boost that to 1.8Mb if he really tried and it would error out frequently at that speed. So how in the heck are they going to do that for some place 20 miles out of town when they can't even provide that a few miles from their main branch?
Is this another hand out to telecommunication carriers because people are dropping phone and cable services?
Good idea but why not push for 100MB and just be done with it? If you are going to lay a cable to a rural location just make it fibre already. Or, if it's going to be wireless, used fixed 5G or something fast.
signifying no real broadband delivered to people for the most part
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The current standards for the Connect America were kept low so that they could show a map full of territory that is covered with 'high speed broadband Internet access'. The FCC wanted to look good.
Now that we're on the cusp of 5G, the FCC wants to change the rules of the Connect America (Slush) Fund to turn it into a giveaway for 5G wireless providers (such as his former corporate employer).
They need the number to be high enough to knock out many of the existing landline offerings (often local or regional companies), but at the same time low enough not to significantly obligate those 5G providers to offer significantly more than they want to.
It is a delightful balancing act of minimal levels and timing that is used to shift the reward from wired landline providers to wireless providers. I'm sure his sponsors couldn't have asked for anything more.
Fuck Ajit Pai
Fuck Ajit Pai
... talks up yet another scheme to funnel taxpayer money to big telcos.
Log in or piss off.
NT.
In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
"Ajit Pai Wants To Raise Rural Broadband Speeds From 10Mbps To 25Mbps
One way would be to stop impeding municipal districts implimenting their own broadband infrastructure.
Municipal Broadband Is Roadblocked or Outlawed in 20 States
This is simply a "throw them a bone" move from Pai to an incoming Democratic-controlled house of reps. An attempt to not have them call him in an crawl up his ass like they did Zuckerberg.
I had a sucky sig.
I'd be happy to get those speeds here in silicon valley without going to Comcast...
Coming up next! Ajit Pai apologizes profusely for taking the job of selling out his fellow consumers and then resigns in disgrace.
Pay no attention to him. He is just trying to buy his way out of hell.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Raising the speed in rural areas is useless. Every time I call Comcast, CenturyLink or Verizon they say it will cost them 5 million dollars to put the infrastructure the area. Then they say even if every customer in the area subscribed for their most expensive service it would still take 200 years to break even. All of them say it is NOT cost effective to put infrastructure in rural areas. So raising the speed from 10Mb to 25Mb will not help in any way. Forcing these giant ISPs to install the infrastructure would at least provide "a" connection to the internet when there is none now.
You raise some interesting issues, but in the end, what does this proposed change in FCC policy look and smell like? Is this really about how the FCC can best meet the connectivity needs of rural customers? Or something else?
If this was honestly first and foremost about meeting the needs of rural customers, hey, we'd all welcome this! But it looks like the FCC is tinkering (yet again) with the definition of broadband, and this time it seems they're using it with the intention of steering funds.
How? They can define the bandwidth requirements just high enough to be unfavorable to regional competitors who have been building out networks. Yet they don't go too high. They still keep the definition low enough as not to burden those new competitors who have a well-known plan to roll out high speed fixed-wireless technology.
5G promises to be an awesome new technology, and I personally can't wait to see it! But I'd like to see it compete with the wired competitors on more level ground. Not through political lobbying. Not by carving out competition with an arbitrary definition of 5G that artificially tilts the distribution of funds.
It is another story of regulatory capture at the FCC. The FCC was supposed to favor Americans and put limits on corporations. Now the FCC is favoring the corporation they're supposed to regulate and the Americans are just contrived into a justification for doing so.
It is sad and unfortunate for America.
Interesting, considering that the GOP voted over 80% for the Civil Rights Act, well above the rate of the Democrats... I guess all those "disgusted Democrats" left the party which barely voted in favor of the CRA, and joined the party of Lincoln and the overwhelming support of the CRA?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Looks pretty evenly split to me, about as close to 50/50 as you can get. Business tends to donate to both sides, because both sides not only influence legislation, but - as we just saw - can gain control every 2 years.
But if you want to dig into it, you'll find that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama lead the list of recipients of telecom largesse, by a large margin.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The FCC won't permit town's to provide Internet because that unfairly competes, but will pay large sums of money to obscenely rich providers, particularly the ones paying their boss under the table, to alter the throttling settings because then they can avoid neutrality lawsuits by pretending to provide better service.
Besides, the FCC has previously ruled they don't have to provide the rated speed, they only have to advertise it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I also live outside of town, surrounded by farm fields. No need to get your panties in a bunch.
Well not for all the people who now have connections that didnt before....
There is already a gap. A bounty approach will move more to the haves from the have nots.
The conditions on the prison ships were horrible, and half prisoners perished on the journey. The government was giving the ship company a fixed amount per prisoner.
One bureaucrat made one simple rule change. Instead of paying for each prisoner boarding the ship, they paid for each prisoner delivered in Sydney. No other change. Suddenly the casualty rate dropped from 50% to 0% in two months.
If FCC pays it for actual high speed connections made to the customers, instead of promises to improve the speed, this program might work.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You do understand that living in rural areas means you get some things (dark skies, less traffic, imo a generally better quality of life) and don't get others (night life,, multitudes of things to do, corner coffee shops, the best broadband)?
This seems pretty obvious.
-Styopa
Is it me, or is it with each boost in speed, pages load just as slowly, going all the way back to the Days of Yore when 56K modems reigned?
Just like each processor gen barely keeps up with Windows Bloat, each increment in connection speed barely keeps up with rendering annoying video ads with the sound turned way up?
You missed the parts where he said the voters switched after the civil rights acts were passed. And he left out the part where Nixon made that part of his strategy.
From the guy you're responding to:
They just switched political parties after LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act.
At the time of the Civil Rights Act, the Republican party was in favor of the law. After it was signed, the Democrats who opposed the CRA switched parties and become Republicans. If you want to belong to the historical Republican party that elected Lincoln and supported civil rights, have at it, but you're going to have to find a time machine and travel back to before 1964.
The current incarnation of the Republican party is not that. If you judge the current Republican party by the rhetoric and actions of its current leadership, it's a xenophobic homophobic white nationalist party that's trying to turn the country into an isolated authoritarian kleptocracy.
I think you're committing the same logic error. Let me simplify:
Group A contains racists. Group B does not.
Group A barely votes to give blacks lots of rights. Group B overwhelmingly supports giving blacks lots of rights.
Apparently, the meme is that all the racists then left Group A and moved to Group B. They left the more-racist group to join the much LESS racist group. Really? I guess that hard-core conservatives are going to leave the GOP and join the Democrats because John James lost the Michigan senatorial race?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Yeah, I've heard that claim MANY times, but it makes no sense at all. Why would people leave the group that was more racist, to join the group that is less racist? It would be like conservatives leaving the GOP and joining the socialist party because the GOP lost the House. Logic fail.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
They left the more-racist group to join the much LESS racist group.
Yes, that's more or less what happened. Or more to the point, the racists in Group A were clearly losing control of Group A, and saw an opening to seize control of Group B. And then they successfully did.
And please note that this isn't a logic puzzle for us to argue over whether it hypothetically makes sense. This is history. Your argument is a little like looking at the Holocaust and going, "You mean a society has a successful ethnic/cultural group that's contributing to society, and then that society is just going to try to kill them all. Really?"
Yes, really. Make up all the hypotheticals and logic puzzles you want, but it happened.
No, it's not history. Can you point to a racist policy of the GOP? What policy do they support that puts the color of skin ahead of the content of character? I see one side constantly classifying people based upon what gender they believe they are and what their color is - and the other talking about people as a whole.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Your partly right.
Cheap storage VM.
What about video calls from grandparents to kids and vice versa?
Back when the warez scene was distributing standard-definition movies using H.263-derived codecs (DivX or Xvid for downloads and Sorenson Spark for streams), the standard was a 90 minute movie in 700 MiB. That's about 1 Mbps. Modern codecs (H.264, VP8, AV1) can transmit SD video at comparable quality with even lower bitrates than that.
Family vacation uploads?
Backups can happen overnight. In fact, some metered ISPs don't run the meter overnight in order to encourage subscribers to shift usage to less congested hours.
Local sports (i.e. high school)?
The school corporation would buy for each high school a business class connection with sufficient upstream.
I feel like you're setting me up for a sort of "no true scotsman" argument. If I point out a policy, you'll either say, "That's not really a policy" or "That's not really Republican".
But ok, let's see. There's the issue of voter suppression, i.e. setting fairly arbitrary requirements for voting that they know various groups (often an intersection of "poor" and "minority") will have trouble meeting and then selectively enforcing them. There's a similar thing with drug enforcement, which is actually tied into the whole voting thing. You make it illegal for felons to vote, then enforce crimes more rigorously when the suspect is a minority, and bingo, you're suppressing minority votes.
What are the requirements to vote in a Federal election? How do you ensure those requirements are met?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Nah, easier to say "Republicans are racist", absent any facts or logic. It's better to break people down to their gender and skin color rather than the content of their character and their ideas. Diversity is about what you look like, not what you think, according to much of the political Left in the US.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Same here in Seattle. Well, assuming you can even get Comcast since they don't offer service to their entire monopoly area. It's worse when Comcast doesn't offer service and the phone monopoly doesn't have your address in their system.
A friend finally got around that and has 1.5 Mbps DSL now since he ordered a POTS line. His house was built on a lot that was split, and his street number has a B but CenturyLink didn't have it in their system. They're legally obgligated by the state to provide phone service so after complaining to the state, they connected the existing wiring to give him a phone line. He canceled it a few minutes after they got it working then ordered DSL.
Google Search for gop racist policy turned up at least three things. If these aren't enough, I can dig deeper.
First, Republicans favor voter photo ID laws, particularly in environments where the median black or Latino is far less likely to drive or have some other convenient means to travel to the local Bureau of Motor Vehicles branch to obtain an adequate ID. This is despite lack of verifiable evidence that voter fraud is more than negligible.
Second, Republicans are also fairly aggressive at redistricting to manufacture a majority in state legislatures and the House of Representatives. These lines have often been drawn in ways that dilute the vote of majority-minority neighborhoods.
Third, Republicans have been using race-baiting dog whistles used by Lee Atwater and others to win votes.
Google search for democrat racist policy also turns up at least 3 things. If these aren't enough, I can dig deeper.
If voter photo ID is racist, then I guess you must hate: Canada, Mexico, Honduras, Guatamala, Germany, France, Australia, Greece (the birthplace of Democracy), Netherlands, Sweden, India, and nearly every other country. Where voter ID is REQUIRED. I guess they're all racist, eh?
Democrats also gerrymander districts. The oft-shouted "national vote for House!" is, in fact, false. If you look at House representatives per population you'll see that 8 of the top 10, and 14 of the top 20 States in terms of most people per representative are GOP States. Meaning that they are actually under-represented in the US House. California - oft decried as being "shorted" on Representatives - is in the bottom 40%, with more House members per resident than the average State.
Democrats have their own dog whistles, including the aforementioned racism (any more, if you disagree with the Left on anything, you're immediately branded a racist, Nazi, or both), "gun control", "Diversity" (have you seen the recent Andrew Ngo video where he's berated and assaulted by a bunch of white assholes because he's not supporting their "cause of tolerance"?), and many more.
Back to voting. How is requiring proof of identification, racist? It is incredibly explicit in the Constitution - only citizens have the right to vote. When you come into the US, you have to prove citizenship or at least ID and that you have approval to enter. When you want to draw SS, or any Government benefit, you're supposed to provide ID - including immigration/citizenship status. Why is that all OK, but for voting - where it is explicitly called for in the Constitution - not OK? Does that make Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands (and many others) racist hell-holes?
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Your listening to too much right wing caterwauling.
Cheap storage VM.
You want to say that again?
But with proper english grammar?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
[For requiring photo ID to vote,] Does that make Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands (and many others) racist hell-holes?
That depends on a bunch of things. I suspect Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands do better than the United States on at least some of these factors:
- Whether these countries have functioning public transit systems to let citizens travel obtain ID and register to vote. The United States has the motor-voter law, allowing citizens to register when they obtain ID. But they must show up in person at a local branch of the state's Bureau of Motor Vehicles, and much of the USA has dysfunctional or nonexistent public transit.
- How much money the ID authority charges for ID.
- How easy it is for a citizen, particularly a poor citizen who lives in a region (state, province, Land, etc.) other than his or her birth region, to obtain the necessary documents to prove his or her identity to the ID authority. Someone who lives hundreds of miles (hundreds of kilometres) away from the county of birth might find it hard to get a duplicate birth certificate. The U.S. REAL ID Act requires someone who has changed names to produce certified copies of all marriage licenses to show a chain of name changes, which makes it more difficult for multiply divorced women to obtain ID. And unless you have a postpaid utility bill or line of credit in your name, you can't so easily prove state residency.
- How easy it is to get time off from an employer to obtain ID and vote. Many U.S. states have no option to vote early or by mail unless the voter can prove being out of state on Election Day. Workers in low-end jobs often live paycheck to paycheck, with little or no paid leave, and fear being fired for "not being a team player" if they request time off for anything other than a verifiable medical emergency or any other legally protected reason.
What makes you think the have nots will get upgraded instead of just the haves at low speeds? You do realise that selectively focusing on the areas that make the most money is precisely what caused the divide in the first place right?
When X is low the first people to benefit will be those who already have a connection, but one that falls under the broadband benchmark. The cost of implementation would be the lowest and so the required push would be the lowest.
There will come a point where connections incentivised by a bounty of X will start to drop. At this point you increase X. This will push the next rung of consumers into the band of being commercially viable to run a connection. You continue this process until you have reached the maximum X you are willing to subsidise or your connection target has been hit.
The method is effective because it puts all the competing providers in a situation where if they wait too long they will miss out as someone else will jump in and steal the bounty. They all know that a customer is worth $Y once they are connected and will know most people don't churn their ISPs
Inevitably customers that it is cheaper to connect, will get connected first. I honestly can't see a way around this. But, by using a bounty system that slowly increases you will find the lowest price point for each connection.