FCC chair: Speed standard of 25Mbps down, 3Mbps up isn’t good enough anymore::Chair proposes 100Mbps national standard and an evaluation of broadband prices.
It’s 2023. Anything less than symmetrical gigabit is nonsense. We shouldn’t have to settle for overpriced crumbs from ISPs.
Symmetrical gigabit is a bit much for a baseline. Should it be widely available for all, and for a good price? Absolutely. But plenty of people (probably a majority even) could be adequately served by something like 300 down/100 up as a baseline tier.
Let me go ahead and steal a quote from JFK:
“We choose to [build nationwide symmetrical gigabit fiber] in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.”
- John “I hate my worthless nephew RFK Jr.”Fitzpatrick Kennedy
imo the asymmetry only serves to upsell content creators to business plans. I do agree with you on the speeds though, gigabit is a bit overblown for average joe but it should be an option in most places for people that need it (Content Creators, WFH Visual Artists, Garage Startups)
IMO the focus should be on lowering the prices. A lot of people in my country still rely on spotty mobile data as their primary internet. Imagine 100 mbps fiber for $10 a month, that would be awesome.
Lol In Italy I get gigabit for about 6€
Edit: whoops thats for my unlimited calls, text and 150gb 5g mobile plan. I pay a whopping 30€ for actual-unlimited-not-rate-limited-after-a-TB gigabit.
I don’t disagree, but I think even just setting it to 500M symmetrical would be a MASSIVE improvement and a more achievable goal. Few regions right now are equipped for fiber and even fewer homes.
Most homes in the US have a coax connection, and with current tech coax connections can do a little over a gig bandwidth total (up+down). That said, we should be quickly ratcheting up to 500/500 while the fiber rollout hopefully accelerates.
The depressing part is how much fiber is out there, but dark or locked in ridiculous agreements with private owners that will keep it from being the municipal service it deserves to be.
Why does it matter if it’s 500/500 or 1000/1000? Once the fiber is there it makes no difference. In fact, 500Mbit symmetrical is probably more expensive to deploy.
Funny thing is, they are selling vapor. They are renting the usage of equipment, nothing more. There’s no finite amount of internet and you have to use it carefully. Sure there’s limits in that equipment, but essentially prices are all over-inflated. In my shitty little country I have 350/150 for around 15€, 300 channels TV included. For gigabit I’d pay a bit more, around 30€.
Holy shit, there are people still using 25/3? How the heck can you function with that? I’m not entirely facetious: with trackers and ads and “web 2.0” nonsense and way over provisioning , I’ve seen “simple” web sites bog down on much faster connections.
As one data point, my ex had Comcast’s, I think 50/5 or something, and my kids constantly complained about the network over there. Part of it is being spoiled by my true gigabit symmetrical, part of it is the worst company in America, but the reality is that it’s noticeable
Honestly I am really happy when I get such high speeds. 25Mbps feels blazing fast for me. Everything loading/downloading so quickly. An average song in the FLAC 16/44 format would download in just 10 seconds instead of up to 5 minutes.
And there’s already even 10Gbps available. I can’t even imagine that. You could download a whole 4K movie in a matter of seconds!
Anyway, this is what I have:
Image link for compatibility
I can only dream.
well, if you have the money for it, you can get starlink, but its far from cheap. But since you are at cellular network, a 4G receiver with good placement can much improve on those speeds. I assume you are in some signal shadow, and swan never had too good coverage outside large cities… Maybe try some other operator ?
For 13EUR/month I sure could get faster speeds, but also fairly small data limits. Here I get 300GB/month.
Maybe the nearby cell towers are overloaded, I don’t know. But at midnight it can go up to 45Mbps. The speed peaks around 2-3AM.
Also there’s the free national roaming in Orange 2G/3G network. So if I really need faster internet speeds, I can use Orange 3G HSPA+ which is pretty reliable, although with 20GB/month cap.
I think one of the issues I have with “normal” bandwidth is being spoiled by gigabit fiber. I don’t do anything to require that kind of bandwidth, not even close, but it just works. No matter what I do. Every time
Cable internet is notoriously poor and it really is. Sure, your minimum standard high speed internet is mathematically more than I need, “up to” more than I need, but the reality is far worse. I regularly see network lag and high latency, it regularly causes visible issues. It tends to be slow and frustrating even when the advertised speeds shouldn’t be.
If we’re going to set a standard based on advertised speeds, we need to do the same math that providers use to set a more useable standard. Or we can set the standard to actual speeds and watch them scream
My whole family house is on 25/5 in Australia. Most of laptops in the house are 1366x768 (so 720p youtube video) and we use adblockers.
The key is setting up proper queue control on your router (Openwrt + SQM) so that one person downloading or uploading doesn’t ruin the latency for everyone else browsing the web; before I did that a single person downloading a steam game or uploading something to Google drive made the web unbrowsable for everyone. Sadly this only works if your internet connection link speed is stable and reliable.
I’m not entirely facetious: with trackers and ads and “web 2.0” nonsense and way over provisioning , I’ve seen “simple” web sites bog down on much faster connections.
A lot of web 2.0 nonsense slowness is caused by executing megabytes of javascript. Fetching the few MB itself isn’t the bottleneck for us :)
I get like 20mbps down and it’s fine. Netflix only recommends 15 Mbps for 4k streaming. Lol, looking at websites and stuff is certainly not a problem. About the only time speed has ever been an issue is if I need to download a large game on steam. But I attribute that more to developers just being too lazy to actually optimize their games. I shouldn’t need to download 50 gigabytes to play some game when I’m just running at medium settings.
Where are you getting that? This says 15 Mbps.
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306
I’m sure you’re going to have a worse or slower experience particularly when scrubbing, but it should be just adequate.
Here’s an interesting thing- we had Spectrum on copper and we’re semi-rural so it was only about 30/5. Then a local company came in and offered to install fiber in the neighborhood if 40% signed up. Suddenly our Spectrum speeds went up to about 80/10. Then the neighborhood told Spectrum to fuck off and now we have decent fiber speeds. I’m getting 400/400 now and I could get it even faster if I wanted to pay for it.
Yes, let’s pay them to just take the money… for the third time!
Asymmetric speeds are a disgrace. Internet used to be about exchange of content, ideas and collaboration. You consumed, but also contributed. The overall focus on high download low upload is clearly the sign telcos want Internet to be just a troth of content, not much different from cable tv.
