Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FCC launches inquiry to increase minimum broadband speed [pdf]

docs.fcc.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 432 posts

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

#211

Post by kaylynb »

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.

1 Gbps is nice when downloading games and updates. Since everything is digital it can be the difference between waiting 30 minutes or 3 hours. IE: You play a game the night it's released/updated or wait until after work the next day.

Upload speed probably makes more sense for more use cases though. I used to have symmetric 1Gbps fiber and never bothered to setup QOS as my upload was never saturated.

I moved and am stuck with "1Gbps" Comcast. Which really means 25Mbps upload. I had to setup qdiscs on my gateway and split my network into tiers to get acceptable upload speeds and latency for the workstations in my home. I maybe have more uploads than 'normal' people, as I have automated backups that store data off-site, but normal people have "backups" in the form of cloud storage I think.

Uploading videos (to YouTube, for example) is painfully slow. I'm simulating living in Australia when I upload a video.

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

#212

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

superb_dev wrote: post #31
endisneigh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically roads should also have caps and/or tolls, so this take is strange. This is partly why gas and excise tax is a thing…

Do you seriously want every road you drive on to charge you? Roads should be a public good that we all benefit from

Personally, that sounds pretty wonderful. Better yet, charge by vehicle weight. I'd like to be able to ride a bike on the road and have everyone think the guy in the car is imposing inconvenience rather than the other way around.

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

#213

Post by layoric »

Australia broadband is not great, but a few years ago I got fibre installed (at my own expense), and since have benefitted from actual competition among ISPs. The little ISP I’m with bills a daily rate which you can change at any point without penalty. Most days I just stay on a 1000/50 for about $3 USD a day, but can change to a range of plans from 50/20 to 1000/400, and it take only a few minutes to apply and kick in.

The monopoly situation I read about in the various areas of the US really sounds like the FCC or another regulator needs to break up region exclusive deals, or something. It feels like Australia, of all places might actually leap frog the US once fibre is more widely available, and that is pretty bad since we have had some of the worst average internet speeds in the developed world at very high prices. Regulatory capture is a plague , and this FCC “proposal” feels like a crumb to delay what sounds like much needed broader disruption of monopolies.

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

#214

Post by jackson1442 »

ska wrote: post #152
danielhep wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you live? It's possible to get gigabit service from a handful of different non Comcast ISPs in most of the city.

Comments said they don't want to pay more for gigabit (that they don't need) just to get reasonable upload speed.

I’m also in Seattle and get symmetric gigabit for $49.99 all in, I’d be surprised if they’re getting 480 from comcast for cheaper. I think my provider is only available for apartment buildings but there’s likely competition from other providers that at least offer symmetric speeds.

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

#215

Post by dghlsakjg »

Willamin wrote: post #62
voakbasda wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, for the same reason that roads used by daily drivers are subsidized by remote workers.

In the US, we tax roads by usage via fuel (gasoline and diesel) tax [^1]. It's a simple solution: the more miles you drive, the more fuel you use; the more fuel you use, the more tax you pay. Vehicles that use more fuel per mile driven tend to be larger and thus cause more wear on the roads. It's not without its faults though. Fuel usage isn't directly related to cost of road maintenance, it's just a very rough appro…

A minority of roadbuilding funds come from fuel taxes in the US. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/states-road-funding...

The additional problem with this is that road wear scales a lot faster than fuel usage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law

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

#216

Post by mcoliver »

Should update the title to 100/20. I still find it amazing that companies can list services without the upload speed (eg Comcast). Of course latency and jitter matter too but that's probably above the heads of a lot of consumers.

Upload and latency increasingly matter more and more and is essential to many work from home endeavors. Whether you are uploading content for work or play, or have a family video conferencing, or a host of other things.

Perhaps the more interesting part of the doc is the future proposal for 1gb/500mb. I understand the engineering tradeoffs and reasoning for the asymmetrical bandwidth on coax/docsis but perhaps it's time to rethink some of that. That would be a good thing.

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

#217

Post by freedomben »

hipadev23 wrote: post #186
danielfoster wrote: post #119

I recently won a credit card dispute over a hotel resort fee. The hotel claimed they had high-speed Internet. The speed was only 2-3 mbps. I was able to use the current FCC definition of high-speed to claim a refund.

Credit cards almost always side with the consumer if you have meaningful spend and very few issues/chargebacks/claims. If you never use the card, and then chargeback, they'll just deny your claim and drop your ass. It's not about the money of the individual charge (for small stuff like this anyway), it's about keeping you happy and spending on the card. I highly doubt the argument itself was relevant whatsoever.

Hasn't worked for me. Chargebacks are pretty much non-existent. The bank will just contact the vendor, ask them if they delivered "the product" and if they just say "yes" (no proof needed, and they always say yes) they deny my claim. I barely even got it back when my kid stole my credit card and gave it to a scammer selling "minecraft accounts."

Maybe I need to find a different bank?

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

#218

Post by gnicholas »

vladslav wrote: post #196
Workaccount2 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In an extreme ironic twist, me, the techie nerd guy, has the slowest internet of the regular-folk friend group of mine. Everyone has got 1Gbps and here I am with 300Mbps.

My friends in third-world countries get faster and less expensive service than me in Silicon Valley. On top of that, there is no fiber connection in my neighborhood, and they've been on fiber for over 5 years. And there is a data cap also. It's just crazy and sad.

Are they in geographic region that is more densely populated? Or an area that was built out more recently? In my last house (also in SV) the choices were between Comcast and AT&T copper. The latter went up to 6/1, so was effectively useless. I'm sure it was laid down decades ago.

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

#219

Post by endisneigh »

paxys wrote: post #199
endisneigh wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

False. A month is a discrete amount of time that yields a potential maximum amount of data downloaded, this amount is clearly related to the bandwidth provided, hence caps. To think otherwise is to falsely believe they support unlimited throughput. Furthermore the bandwidth itself literally is a function of the transmission material and infrastructure, which also isn’t free…

I have a 500 Mbps connection with a 1TB data cap, both pretty standard numbers in the US. If I used the connection at its advertised speeds, I would exhaust my monthly limit in about 4 hours. So no, that relationship is non-existent. The data cap math instead is "99% of our users use < 1TB, so we will charge the rest more because we can".

Or more accurately, to disincentive excessive use. They don’t need a cap to simply charge you more money, they’ve been doing that just fine with or without caps.

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

#220

Post by jakogut »

jacksnipe wrote: post #189
gnicholas wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if there's not a cost difference, why do they keep trying to double my pricing when the base tier goes up? My sense is there is some cost savings at these lower tiers, but more importantly it would prevent ISPs from jacking prices up while using higher speeds as the rationale ("Look, we just tripled your speed, and it only costs double!"). ISPs would be less likely to double prices without any service improveme…

They’ve already trained consumers that higher speeds cost more. They would need a compelling reason to keep costs the same after increasing speeds.

In my area, a competitor just finished installing fiber to my neighborhood, and is offering symmetrical gigabit speeds for less (nearly half the price) than I was paying for 500/20 Mbps to the incumbent cable company before.

The cable company now needs to both increase speeds _and_ lower prices to even keep their existing customers. This is a good place to be, as a customer.

Post reply on HN