FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric from 25Mbps to 100Mbps
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Re: FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric from 25Mbps to 100Mbps
#2Going to be interesting to see how they respond.
Do consumers care or differentiate “broadband” anymore?
Why do I feel like they might just pivot to not using the word “broadband” at all anymore and use some internal branding like the stupid 10g crap Comcast tried. Thankfully they were told to stop but if they are more careful…
Re: FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric from 25Mbps to 100Mbps
#3Going to be interesting to see how they respond. Do consumers care or differentiate “broadband” anymore? Why do I feel like they might just pivot to not using the word “broadband” at all anymore and use some internal branding like the stupid 10g crap Comcast tried. Thankfully they were told to stop but if they are more careful…
The definition appears to be more for the government than marketing.
> Raising the speed metric is important because it helps the commission determine which areas in the country are receiving adequate internet speeds, and if more government funding is necessary. In 2015, the FCC raised the metric from 4Mbps/1Mbps to 25Mbps/3Mbps. But since then, US senators, government watchdogs, and FCC officials have urged the commission to raise the metric even higher, citing the US’s growing reliance on internet services and apps.
Re: FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric from 25Mbps to 100Mbps
#4Going to be interesting to see how they respond. Do consumers care or differentiate “broadband” anymore? Why do I feel like they might just pivot to not using the word “broadband” at all anymore and use some internal branding like the stupid 10g crap Comcast tried. Thankfully they were told to stop but if they are more careful…
Personally, I can't remember the last piece of marketing that tried to sell me "broadband" internet. They all say "high speed" internet.
Anyway, the 15/3mbps down/up I get in the Oregon countryside is indeed high speed compared to the 5/1mbps down/up I had smack in the middle of the Los Angeles suburbs.
Re: FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric from 25Mbps to 100Mbps
#5With how many 9's of availability, and at what latency?
Frontier is advertising 3 nines average network-wide availability for their new fiber network. Three nines is completely unacceptable, but our neighborhood barely got one nine last year.
Based on their current behavior, there's zero chance of them providing the bandwidths they're advertising for the new build out, even when the network is completely up and completely idle. Currently, if we try to sign up, they say we can get 25Mbps to the FCC.
Re: FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric from 25Mbps to 100Mbps
#6With how many 9's of availability, and at what latency? Frontier is advertising 3 nines average network-wide availability for their new fiber network. Three nines is completely unacceptable, but our neighborhood barely got one nine last year. Based on their current behavior, there's zero chance of them providing the bandwidths they're advertising for the new build out, even when the network is completely up and compl…
I'd be fine with 99.9% availability to my house. That means it's down for at most 9 hours per year. That's probably on par with how much my electricity goes out during an average winter.
But what they mean by "99.9% network-wide availability" and what I mean by "99.9% availability to my house" are very, very different things.
Re: FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric from 25Mbps to 100Mbps
#7tldr;
Today: 100Mbps down / 20Mbps up (45 million Americans lack access as of Dec 2022)
2015 onward: 25Mbps down / 3Mbps up
Pre-2015: 4Mbps down / 1Mbps up
The commission's longterm goal is 1Gbps down / 500Mbps up. These distinctions of 'broadband' help determine where to focus resources.
Re: FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric from 25Mbps to 100Mbps
#8I appreciate any effort on the part of a government to exert pressure on industry to deliver a product to citizens that keeps up with the times, but I'm not sure it really matters anymore. Any connection that can stream YouTube at an acceptable resolution is 'broadband' in my eyes, while someone who's rsyncing terabytes daily would probably suck up as much bandwidth as they can get and come back for a second helping. Maybe, just maybe, everyone has learned the Nerd Words well enough that we can simply refer to connection performance by X number of megabits per second (probably not).
Good thing the FCC doesn't control Ireland, or I'd no longer be able to declare that I have broadband via satellite! Well, part of the time, anyway.
Re: FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric from 25Mbps to 100Mbps
#9With how many 9's of availability, and at what latency? Frontier is advertising 3 nines average network-wide availability for their new fiber network. Three nines is completely unacceptable, but our neighborhood barely got one nine last year. Based on their current behavior, there's zero chance of them providing the bandwidths they're advertising for the new build out, even when the network is completely up and compl…
> Three nines is completely unacceptable
Less than 9 hrs of downtime per year is unacceptable for consumer internet?
Re: FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric from 25Mbps to 100Mbps
#10With how many 9's of availability, and at what latency? Frontier is advertising 3 nines average network-wide availability for their new fiber network. Three nines is completely unacceptable, but our neighborhood barely got one nine last year. Based on their current behavior, there's zero chance of them providing the bandwidths they're advertising for the new build out, even when the network is completely up and compl…
I'd be fine with 99.9% availability to my house. That means it's down for at most 9 hours per year. That's probably on par with how much my electricity goes out during an average winter. But what they mean by "99.9% network-wide availability" and what I mean by "99.9% availability to my house" are very, very different things.
It could also mean nine one hour outages during working hours or one out of 1000 web browser requests fail on average.
However, I suspect that the actual availability is extremely skewed, given the one nine they delivered to our area.