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100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say

arstechnica.com

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Re: 100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say

#41

Post by kgermino »

kryogen1c wrote: post #38

Lets try and suss out some of the multiple issues with US internet: -regulating ISPs as a free market is, to be hyperbolic, a disaster. there is effectively a monopoly in most parts of the country. -25/3 Mbps is a very reasonable speed for most people. the issue is that its provided on a best effort basis that is never maintained for long, if at all. netflix says thats enough to stream UHD[0] -FTA: "Those data points…

> -regulating ISPs as a free market is, to be hyperbolic, a disaster. there is effectively a monopoly in most parts of the country.

> all in all, this reeks of regulatory capture to me. if we're gonna have a serious discussion about internet infrastructure, i think the starting point is how we classify ISPs and where in the city-state-federal hierarchy the responsibility lies. changing a 26 to a 100 is a cool bullet on a resume, but i dont think this is the low handing fruit here.

The distributed regulation is the biggest problem IMO. ISPs are generally granted explicit or effective monopolies by local governments. Local competition is difficult enough for a utility business, but city governments make it effectively impossible in many places. Then there's a few big players who are able to claim competition and get lenient regulation at the federal level.

Re: 100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say

#42

Post by nikanj »

viraptor wrote: post #24
totalZero wrote: post #15

Imagine how good our network technology policy would be if the Senate weren't run by septagenarians and octogenarian. I fear that data caps for home internet will become standard. There is no technological reason for these caps. For wireless, they could be defended by arguing that companies only get to use so much spectrum because of FCC laws. But the only limit for home internet is the ISP's willingness to deploy eq…

There is one reason for some caps, which is that you'll always get oversubscription in the cities, and the caps could reflect that to prevent 100% utilisation. They don't have to be so small that people actually think about them. Basically set it at 1TB for residential for the lowest plan and forget about it.

1TB goes by shockingly fast with 4k video streaming (5-10 gigs per hour) and game updates that weight in at tens of gigs each.

Re: 100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say

#43

Post by pmontra »

blunte wrote: post #18

Yes they should, but what will happen is websites and apps will get fatter and sloppier until the end result is slow, laggy performance. It's a bit like doubling your salary and increasing your spending by more than double. That seems to be how website and app development behaves. Imagine if bandwidth increased, latency decreased (approaching theoritical minimums), and websites/apps were built with a strict (but appr…

Throttle the developers' connection to the staging and production servers down to 25/3 and you'll get very fast sites for everybody ;-)

Re: 100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say

#45

Post by sigstoat »

kryogen1c wrote: post #38

Lets try and suss out some of the multiple issues with US internet: -regulating ISPs as a free market is, to be hyperbolic, a disaster. there is effectively a monopoly in most parts of the country. -25/3 Mbps is a very reasonable speed for most people. the issue is that its provided on a best effort basis that is never maintained for long, if at all. netflix says thats enough to stream UHD[0] -FTA: "Those data points…

> -regulating ISPs as a free market is, to be hyperbolic, a disaster. there is effectively a monopoly in most parts of the country.

starlink is changing that, as these articles and letters are being written.

Re: 100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say

#46

Post by greedo »

rayiner wrote: post #31
Panino wrote: post #3

> The funding is going to a mix of cable, fiber, and fixed wireless providers, plus SpaceX's Starlink satellite network. I think cable providers should be left out. They were already gifted many billions of dollars in the past for this same basic purpose but they pocketed the money. They can just use the free money they've already been given. Instead, the funding should go to existing munipical fiber ISPs to expand t…

> They were already gifted many billions of dollars in the past for this same basic purpose but they pocketed the money. Very little government money has been spent on broadband. Federal funding for broadband dates back only to the Obama administration. And cable companies have largely not received this money. You’re thinking of something else.

I think the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was supposed to help improve Internet access through its Universal Service provision. Of course all the telecoms pocketed the money and didn't do shit.

https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service

Re: 100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say

#47

Post by drewg123 »

penagwin wrote: post #4

100Mbps up as a standard? One can only dream. Comcast's highest residential offer is 1Gbps down (yeah right) and 35 mbps up. My other option is DSL with Att, a max of like 30Mbps down...

It seems to have become less common for providers to advertise upload speeds. I was helping a friend pick a plan from a non-comcast cable provider, and she had to call to ask about the upload speeds, as the information was not on the web.

Re: 100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say

#48

Post by greedo »

rayiner wrote: post #37
totalZero wrote: post #15

Imagine how good our network technology policy would be if the Senate weren't run by septagenarians and octogenarian. I fear that data caps for home internet will become standard. There is no technological reason for these caps. For wireless, they could be defended by arguing that companies only get to use so much spectrum because of FCC laws. But the only limit for home internet is the ISP's willingness to deploy eq…

Are millennials any different? Outside tech, I don’t know anybody who cares about broadband as an aside, except when pushing a different political angle such as inequality.

My kids sure now what a high speed Internet connection is, and they're as far from "tech" as you could imagine. Ask any gamer too...

Re: 100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say

#49

Post by donmcronald »

bentcorner wrote: post #6

Nice to see. I would have hoped to see more of a mention around latency. A lot of tools are sensitive to this and a theoretically fat pipe is not useful if you have 100ms+ latencies.

Based on my anecdotal observations online, developers don't even understand the impact of latency, so it's not surprising it gets omitted.

Re: 100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say

#50

Post by greedo »

blunte wrote: post #35
blunte wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating. Within seconds of posting my parent, the negatives rolled in. I guess my post was scanned as saying "no, don't increase bandwidth". Far from it.

There's something going on here that is organized toward some goal, but it doesn't make sense. Usually troll farms work for financial interests, but my comment wasn't taking any side. If the votes came from thinking HN readers, I would have expected refutory responses. (meta) It's reasonable that we don't see who downvoted us, but it would be very interesting to see the karma of each account that downvoted.

I didn't vote you down, but your comment didn't really add a lot of value. It's like whenever expanding roads come up, people say "but this encourages more traffic!" True, but not really the point.
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