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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?
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.]
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.
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.
... talks up yet another scheme to funnel taxpayer money to big telcos.
Log in or piss off.
"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
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.
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)
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.
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.