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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]

#361
post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to wikipedia the average monthly salary in Peru is $502 US. $37 per month doesn't seem that cheap to me.

As another point of comparison, a new ISP in my area of London is offering symmetric gigabit fiber for £25/month or around $30/month (USD).

Your country requires ISPs to share and rent lines. That does a great deal for competition and lowering prices

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

#362
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…

If you're in the bracket of "100 mbps down is fine for me" then you most likely do not care about the upload speed at all. About the only advantage for the average person would be "Your iCloud backup goes faster".

1gig/500meg would be a huge step forward. I'm currently on the highest most bestest plan that my ISP (Astound) offers. And it's 1.2gig down, 50 mbps up. That's not a typo, FIFTY up. I'm a techy and even I know I don't need 1.2gig down. My house is wired with CAT6 because I dragged it around, but my main switch is still gig. So... I can't even enjoy the increased download. The only reason I stepped to that highest plan was to get more upload than the 20mbps they previously offered.

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

#363
post #338

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 conferencin…

Upload speed is just a cash grab. It is a way to segregate price-sensitive residential vs price-insensitive business customers who can then be charged enormous amounts.

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. That is not at all how ISPs distinguish between residential/consumer and commercial customers at all. It's almost always entirely dependent on the transport being used (DOCSIS, twisted pair, fiber, etc.)

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

#364

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 the almost 20 years I've had Comcast they've increased speeds numerous times without increasing prices.

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

#365
post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder what at upload speed will the acks be congested and prevent full download speeds from occurring.

Is that even possible with SACK?

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

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it actually be that much less costly to give you 20-25 vs 75, though? My uninformed assumption was that it was largely artificial once you get to a low enough speed.

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…

Because they are for-profit organizations and thus greedy. Pretty easy.

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

#367

I started with Comcast with 12Mbps service. Over time, they increased the base speed they offer to 20, 25, 50, and now 75. They have done this because they want to have x% of their customers on "broadband", per the federal definition. This is all well and good, but they keep increasing the price, and refuse to offer lower-tier service. I probably wouldn't want 12Mbps anymore, but 20 or 25 would suffice. I wish I coul…

> I'm all for prodding companies to move to faster speeds, but there should still be room for consumer choice.

There certainly should be consumer choice, but in your case another problem is that the amount you pay Comcast for 75 Mbps download now should be no more than what you paid for 12 Mbps before. As I wrote in a different comment [1]:

> It's not reasonable for big ISPs like Comcast to offer me 300 megabits download 15 megabits upload for $70 a month (might've been $90, but assume $70) while EPB of Chattanooga [1] offers 1 gigabit symmetrical for $67.99 a month. What speed any individual actually needs doesn't have to come into the picture. In matters of consumer protection, the principle of the thing matters just as much as actual consumer needs.

(Ignore the [1] inside the quoted paragraph above. I'm leaving it in for Ctrl-F purposes.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38105873

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

#368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FCC requires ISPs to publish information about their network management practices. That's how you get sites like this: https://www.xfinity.com/networkmanagement I do wish this was required to be easily accessible from the marketing pages. Usually it takes some digging to find it. But at least they do have to make these numbers public.

>The FCC determined that Comcast’s Xfinity Internet broadband Internet access services deliver, on average, over 100 percent of their advertised downstream and upstream speeds during the busiest periods of the day, known as "peak" times, during sustained testing. Peak times are Monday through Friday from 7:00pm to 11:00pm local time. >Latency is typically measured in milliseconds, and generally has no significant imp…

People getting their contracted speeds from a company they generally despise probably aren't going to come out of the woodwork to write supporting comments.

Note they're not saying 100% of customers got their rated speeds, but the average customer got over 100% of their rated speeds. So, say the 50th percentile customer pays for 100M, they actually got 102M, boom, that metric is met. However easily 25%+ of customers didn't get their rated speeds during that peak period.

Some people ranting on an internet forum isn't high quality data of overall network metrics.

For a lot of residential customers, once latency is good enough it doesn't really matter. Once you get down below like 30 or so milliseconds, a lot of consumer applications just won't be any different. I could have 80ms latency to HN and my experience of the site would be roughly the same. Not saying all residential applications don't care about latency <30ms, but generally speaking the vast majority have very little difference at the moment. Watching a streaming movie, loading a web page, doom scrolling social media, etc are all going to be the exact same experience at 2ms or 10ms or 30ms. This is changing though, and I do prefer having such low latency with my residential fiber connection.

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

#369
post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Palo Alto just unveiled another fiber to the home plan to be ready by Jan 2025 in one select neighborhood (that I live just outside of, dammit). This plan will definitely come to fruition just like all the other ones since the 90s

It boggles my mind that Google Fiber has been available in Austin, TX for 10 years but is still not available in the communities next door to Google HQ.

Probably due to the extreme level of veto-ism in the Bay Area. Everyone wants internet, but if 5 people complaining about yards or roads being dug up can get work to stop indefinitely, costs are going through the roof. There's far more uncertainty in that political environment than anywhere else.

For reference, I live in a small town of ~6,000 people, and we're getting fiber laid. For the longest time we only had 25mbps, and then a new provider came in with coaxial and offered 200mbps (with a data cap), and now a third is laying fiber.

Our average income is $34k/year, so it's not because we have more money than the opulent Bay Area.

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

#370
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…

If you're in the bracket of "100 mbps down is fine for me" then you most likely do not care about the upload speed at all. About the only advantage for the average person would be "Your iCloud backup goes faster". 1gig/500meg would be a huge step forward. I'm currently on the highest most bestest plan that my ISP (Astound) offers. And it's 1.2gig down, 50 mbps up. That's not a typo, FIFTY up. I'm a techy and even I k…

> If you're in the bracket of "100 mbps down is fine for me" then you most likely do not care about the upload speed at all.

Personally I'd trade my current speeds (800 / 20) for 100 / 100 in a heartbeat. There's just ... not that much I can do with more than 100 down. That's fast enough to stream a Blu-ray disc directly off of a web server. It's fast enough that package updates on Linux take longer to install than they do to download.

Can I theoretically use more? Sure, it's nice to be able to download files or update Steam games a little faster. But 20 Mbps up is killing me. Backing up a drive to cloud server can take hours or days.

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