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FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

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Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#71

The problem, in the USA for most people, is Comcast. Downspeed hardly matters. It's been plenty for decades. Upload speed has stagnated. I uploaded as fast in 2003 as I do now in 2022. And as others have said, it's not so much about 1 fast provider as many providers and choice. In my comcast monopoly my plan started at $60/mo in 2011 and without any changes on my end and no change in my upload speed that price has in…

This is such an artificial/politically generated problem too. I used to live in Tennessee and there were several cities with gigabit internet that was created by public funding. Chattanooga did this but was blocked from providing access to those that were in unincorporated areas. Even though the city still provided these people other utilities (electricity, water, gas) and mail. Same thing happened in Tullahoma (city next to where Bonnaroo Music Festival is). Then I remember Google Fiber trying to come in but the state had a law where lines needed to be placed in certain areas (which were of course in use) and that one operator could not lay down lines unless there was a representative from those that already had lines in place (supposedly to protect property). But this obviously led to shenanigans. Similarly when I moved into an apartment I chose the faster city internet but the previous tenant had AT&T. When the utilities company came to turn on my fiber (as they had provided for the apt previously) they found that AT&T had slashed their line, which caused me to have to pay an instillation fee. For a state where the people were so proud and supportive of libertarianism and the free market there sure were a lot of laws that supported or enabled monopolies to run a muck.

There are clearly available solutions and there's room for markets to exist and provide competition but it is very clear that we've set up a system that enables the unregulated monopolistic actions of ISPs.

Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#72
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious about the upload issue recently and learned that it is because of limitations of the old cable infrastructure. You presumably receive your internet over coax (which can still provide really good download speeds, I was surprised when my gigabit internet package came and it only had a coax port instead of fiber). Cable TV is pretty much all downloads, with only a small portion of the bandwidth reserved fo…

In Denmark I had 300Mbit/s coax/cable broadband. I think the upload was about 30Mbit/s. It was then upgraded to 1000Mbit/s down, 250Mbit/s up, with no change to the cost, IIRC. A technician installed a frequency (?) splitter of some sort, one side for TV and the other Internet. He remarked that my socket was nicely accessible, so I think he'd been doing this hundreds of times. (I may have paid an engineer call-out fe…

> a frequency (?) splitter

The term for the thing it does is "frequency division multiplexing"

Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how this is the top comment here. This is a modern equivalent of "640K of memory should be enough for anyone." You're also making your assumptions off of a single device on the network. I don't even know a home that has only one connected device at any given time. It also doesn't consider things like how speed can help an unstable connection as a high speed but with moderate variance can beat out a…

> This is a modern equivalent of "640K of memory should be enough for anyone." If you have a 4 bit CPU, it probably is enough memory for anyone! I think we're focusing on the wrong thing. Download bandwidth is fine; stability, latency, and to some extent upload bandwidth are not. I think a forum of tech literate people should understand the importance of optimizing for the right thing.

But bandwidth does matter when you have multiple devices. On a typical day it is not uncommon for multiple video calls to be going on at the same time in my apt. My roommate and I used to schedule our meetings around one another so that we could have a call with our respective advisors that wasn't choppy. We'd also make sure not to be streaming video at these times either. Bandwidth is 100% part of the problem.

Now I agree that there are other issues like stability, latency, and upload, but it is just naive to dismiss download bandwidth.

Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#74
post #28

FCC needs to care about stability through statistics like packet loss. In my hometown area, the sole DSL provider in my area oversold capacity and it demolished the DSLAM. Ironically, they also took advantage from the Connect America fund to do this. I did connectivity tests to various hosts throughout the days, pings were 500ms+ 40% of the time and packet loss was 1%. I can't be the only one that this happened to.

Yup. Same with one of the local WISPs around here. On top of it all, I think they used some external grant funding to upgrade the last mile links, and cut upload by 90%.

I haven't run a ping test since then, but last time I checked, it was > 1% and 1 second to the internet.

In fairness, they're lobbying for a govt bail out to subsidize their upstream fiber provider.

Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#76
post #34
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious about the upload issue recently and learned that it is because of limitations of the old cable infrastructure. You presumably receive your internet over coax (which can still provide really good download speeds, I was surprised when my gigabit internet package came and it only had a coax port instead of fiber). Cable TV is pretty much all downloads, with only a small portion of the bandwidth reserved fo…

As far as I have heard, they could choose to use N out of M channels for either upload or download and they are choosing to keep it the way it is. Probably they need to keep it that way for other reasons (their own cable-TV signal goes through it). But I know nothing about the electronics/signal-processing involved, so I could be totally wrong.

Most of the TV channels are shit, so it makes no sense to reserve so many channels for them, especially as people are cutting TV service and switching to streaming.

Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#78
post #34
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious about the upload issue recently and learned that it is because of limitations of the old cable infrastructure. You presumably receive your internet over coax (which can still provide really good download speeds, I was surprised when my gigabit internet package came and it only had a coax port instead of fiber). Cable TV is pretty much all downloads, with only a small portion of the bandwidth reserved fo…

As far as I have heard, they could choose to use N out of M channels for either upload or download and they are choosing to keep it the way it is. Probably they need to keep it that way for other reasons (their own cable-TV signal goes through it). But I know nothing about the electronics/signal-processing involved, so I could be totally wrong.

Mostly to slow torrent seeders. A fat up pipe and no data limit means TB after TB go to seed torrents.

Otherwise for 90% of users, 90% of their traffic is download.

Me legit pushing a 2GB docker image gets hit in the crossfire,

Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#79

The problem, in the USA for most people, is Comcast. Downspeed hardly matters. It's been plenty for decades. Upload speed has stagnated. I uploaded as fast in 2003 as I do now in 2022. And as others have said, it's not so much about 1 fast provider as many providers and choice. In my comcast monopoly my plan started at $60/mo in 2011 and without any changes on my end and no change in my upload speed that price has in…

Hopefully starlink will raise the bar with competition

Uploads are about the same 8-20 on the Starlink connection we have at our farm.

Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#80
post #32

The problem, in the USA for most people, is Comcast. Downspeed hardly matters. It's been plenty for decades. Upload speed has stagnated. I uploaded as fast in 2003 as I do now in 2022. And as others have said, it's not so much about 1 fast provider as many providers and choice. In my comcast monopoly my plan started at $60/mo in 2011 and without any changes on my end and no change in my upload speed that price has in…

I was curious about the upload issue recently and learned that it is because of limitations of the old cable infrastructure. You presumably receive your internet over coax (which can still provide really good download speeds, I was surprised when my gigabit internet package came and it only had a coax port instead of fiber). Cable TV is pretty much all downloads, with only a small portion of the bandwidth reserved fo…

Yes, you have it exactly right. The cable infrastructure was built out in the era of "on demand TV", and the coax cable and frequencies they used required some hard choices. Hard in the sense of hardware. Perhaps quite sensibly for the time, they installed hardware filters that allocated most of the spectrum for download.
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