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Honest question: at what point, with real life usage, is 1 Gbps actually necessary for home users? I find that latency rather than throughput is what determines my perceived quality of an Internet connection. But am curious how others think.
This is nice, but with increased speed, they should also require ISPs do not impose a data cap to be considered broadband.
Why shouldn’t there be a cap? Bandwidth isn’t free. It’s sad seeing people on a forum called hacker news having no idea how networking infrastructure works.
Instead we have monopolies that do what all monopolies do in a capitalist organization of the economy: they rent-seek, spend their time and money on lobbying to legislatively exclude competition (eg [2]), do the bare minimum and take public money to roll out broadband but then just not do it (eg [3].
The Internet is the US is objectively awful for most people by the standard of other developed economies [4].
It's ridiculous that people still defend this system.
[1]: https://qz.com/1996234/the-best-broadband-in-the-us-is-in-ch...
[2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-al...
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/veriz...
[4]: https://broadbandnow.com/report/2018-fcc-international-data-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Source? Running things requires labor, labor is getting expensive. Pricing isn’t set on simply the marginal cost of materials…
Running a fully utilized fiber line is.. exactly the same amount of labor as running a 10% utilized one. The cost to track and bill people for caps and let them pay overages though..
Some combination of caps, overage charges, traffic shaping, and edge CDN appliances is needed (Netflix, Akamai, etc). Off peak unlimited is also a potential strategy to drive low priority transfer to low utilization periods. Pick your poison. There is a reason most of Netflix global infra is monster CDN boxes closest to customers.
This is nice, but with increased speed, they should also require ISPs do not impose a data cap to be considered broadband.
This is nice, but with increased speed, they should also require ISPs do not impose a data cap to be considered broadband.
I'm much more excited about the "...and 20 megabits per second for upload". My comcast account for $107/mo with 1.2 TB data transfer cap per month still only has a 5 megabit upload throttle (80/5). I literally had the same upload speed in 2003.
Download only, yes? And what about the busy-Sunday night problem? This seems so besides the point. Cable at an apartment building I visit is often 300mbps, but Sunday evening it can have horrible jitter and lag and much slower speeds. It's incredibly frustrating; common sites can be basically unusable. This also feels like it's setting a bar where most DSL systems wont have any chance of competing. In cities I can be…