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FCC launches inquiry to increase minimum broadband speed [pdf]

docs.fcc.gov

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Re: FCC launches inquiry to increase minimum broadband speed [pdf]

#51

Post by wongarsu »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #2

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…

With VDSL and supervectoring you can get 250MBit/s, provided you aren't more than a quarter of a mile or so from the multiplexer. Which is probably not cost-effective in most of America due to the low density of suburbia, never mind rural places.

Re: FCC launches inquiry to increase minimum broadband speed [pdf]

#52

Post by CSMastermind »

idiot900 wrote: post #10

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.

Plenty of people work from home and that connection speed can be important when you're uploading a bunch of files while on a video call for example.

Or there's three people in your house all on video calls.

Re: FCC launches inquiry to increase minimum broadband speed [pdf]

#53

Post by phkahler »

paxys wrote: post #36
staringback wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that someone's grandma who hardly uses her connection can subsidize your extreme over-consumption of digital media?

Data packets aren't a limited resource. The costs for your ISP are fixed whether they serve you 1MB or 1TB. Data caps and overage charges are purely a money grab, not some fundamental economic requirement. So no, infrequent users aren't "subsidizing" anyone else.

>> Data packets aren't a limited resource.

No, but bandwidth is. Particularly wireless where you can't just lay down another cable or fiber.

Re: FCC launches inquiry to increase minimum broadband speed [pdf]

#54

Post by antisthenes »

staringback wrote: post #5
andrewmunsell wrote: post #3

This is nice, but with increased speed, they should also require ISPs do not impose a data cap to be considered broadband.

So that someone's grandma who hardly uses her connection can subsidize your extreme over-consumption of digital media?

This is how consumption of any resource works, in any group where the number of people using it is more than 1.

If I drink less water than you, am I subsidizing your water usage. I'd say so!

Not the hill you want to die on, trust me.

Re: FCC launches inquiry to increase minimum broadband speed [pdf]

#55

Post by AussieWog93 »

notyourwork wrote: post #28
andrewmunsell wrote: post #3

This is nice, but with increased speed, they should also require ISPs do not impose a data cap to be considered broadband.

And that speed should be symmetrical. We are continuing to push the boundaries are content going out.

That's what gets me. Is there a technical reason why symmetrical connections would be more expensive than asymm?

Re: FCC launches inquiry to increase minimum broadband speed [pdf]

#56

Post by antisthenes »

rasz wrote: post #46
staringback wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So that someone's grandma who hardly uses her connection can subsidize your extreme over-consumption of digital media?

No, so that ISPs are incentivized to actually invest in bigger pipes.

So it was a series of tubes after all...

Re: FCC launches inquiry to increase minimum broadband speed [pdf]

#57

Post by paxys »

542458 wrote: post #48
paxys wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data packets aren't a limited resource. The costs for your ISP are fixed whether they serve you 1MB or 1TB. Data caps and overage charges are purely a money grab, not some fundamental economic requirement. So no, infrequent users aren't "subsidizing" anyone else.

> The costs for your ISP are fixed whether they serve you 1MB or 1TB. That's only true in a very abstract sense. If everybody went from using 1MB/day to 1TB/day there would be massive congestion issues and costs would increase as ISPs rush to install higher-bandwidth equipment. Put a different way: It is cheaper to construct a network where all subscribers consume only 1MB/day than a network where all subscribers con…

Well it should be true in the concrete sense. If they can't consistently serve you at 100mpbs or whatever else then they shouldn't advertise it. "But everyone else is using it at the same time so too bad" wouldn't work as an excuse in any other industry.

Re: FCC launches inquiry to increase minimum broadband speed [pdf]

#58

Post by jwells89 »

bscphil wrote: post #37

It's 100 Mbps down / 20 Mbps up as the proposal, and 1000 Mbps / 500 Mbps as an eventual goal. I imagine the 20 Mbps upload target is useless for most of us, even those on asymmetric cable, but there's a good chance that if the ISPs were forced to provide 20 Mbps up at their lowest broadband tiers, it would raise the ladder quite a bit. For example, on Comcast I get 800 / 20, but there's also a 400 / 10 tier (and may…

Upload being low is frustrating. In my area Comcast sells “gigabit” service that’s 1000Mbps/20Mbps which seems like it’s explicitly designed to hook less technically aware customers who know “gigabit” is good but not exactly how.

Thankfully there are alternative ISPs here that sell symmetrical gigabit, but that’s definitely not the case everywhere.

Re: FCC launches inquiry to increase minimum broadband speed [pdf]

#59

Post by throitallaway »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #24
vorpalhex wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

Chokepoints are peering exchanges, transit handoffs, and core network gear, which is sized for a percentile of utilization below constant 100%. Having implemented a billing system and utilization monitoring for managed hosting datacenter environment, it is trivial to collect metrics from equipment and bill accordingly. You don't want to nickle and dime or gouge customers, but you do want to ensure proportionality acr…

> There is a reason most of Netflix global infra is monster CDN boxes closest to customers.

Because it would be ridiculously expensive to egress video streams directly from AWS. They've determined that it's cheaper to pay ISPs for rack space.

Re: FCC launches inquiry to increase minimum broadband speed [pdf]

#60

Post by Zigurd »

jmyeet wrote: post #23

Waht the government needs to do (but never will) is make the last mile a municipal utility such as in Chattanooga [1]. 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].…

Municipal ISPs are a good start, and they illustrate how much of your ISP bill goes to debt service from when the commercial ISP bought out competitors.

But you don't have to run a municipal ISP like a commercial ISP. If pricing goes low enough, just make it an amenity, like parks and sidewalks, and fund it that way.

And then you can choose a totally different architecture than a commercial ISP could operate: no network admission barriers, mesh networks, etc.

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