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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

#31
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That’s crazy. If my electric was out for that long consistently I’d lose my shit. That’s totally unacceptable.

In an urban area it would be unacceptable. It is not atypical for a rural area.

Re: FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric from 25Mbps to 100Mbps

#32

This is over regulation imo. If you support this then you can’t complain about there not being any low cost housing because it’s regulations akin to this that is increasing the costs. 25->100 is more of a luxury then a necessity

> 25->100 is more of a luxury then a necessity

Not if you work remotely.

Re: FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric from 25Mbps to 100Mbps

#33

tldr; 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.

So they would like to get to the level of Romania.

Re: FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric from 25Mbps to 100Mbps

#34

tldr; 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.

We are in the 45 million. When we moved here over a decade ago we were told by TDS that they were expanding their service and should be able to provide us with 50Mbs 'soon'. 10 years later we are still 5Mbs (3 in real-world situations). With no plan to expand here ever. Fortunately, the local electric company got a grant and is rolling out 1Gbs fiber to 100% of their customers. TDS couldn't do it because it wasn't 'profitable'. The electric company is fast-tracking the build-out and we should have service less than 18 months after they started.

Re: FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric from 25Mbps to 100Mbps

#35
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Three nines is completely unacceptable Less than 9 hrs of downtime per year is unacceptable for consumer internet?

I live in semi-rural Canada and get better service than that, but I would be fine with more downtime. OTOH, I frequently have scheduled power outage times that exceed that metric so it sort of doesn't matter, and that's ignoring unscheduled power outages (a necessary part of life in a temperate rain forest with above ground power). I've taken to keeping a small generator handy to power the modem.

Our Internet + phone service go down if there's a power outage, which implies the cell network also goes down in practice. The tower might be up and on backup power, but it either has nothing to talk to or it's completely overwhelmed.

Re: FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric from 25Mbps to 100Mbps

#36
post #5

With 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 don't see three 9's as being unreasonable for home internet at all, getting more reliability than that is non-trivial and most people have redundancy in the form of internet on their phones or can buy a second line.

Re: FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric from 25Mbps to 100Mbps

#37
post #16
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Three nines is completely unacceptable Less than 9 hrs of downtime per year is unacceptable for consumer internet?

It is when you work from home.

It is? 44 minutes outage per month is critical?

I doubt that's true for most jobs. But yes, there are jobs where it is, and some of us (e.g. me ;) are just finicky about network connectivity. In which case I highly recommend having a fallback connection, with a different modality than the main one. For most of us, that means LTE. Tethering is fine if you can live with But it's not a level of service that I think is reasonable to expect from a single ISP connection. A single construction incident will burn the annual SLO budget, and there's nothing the provider can do about that.

(And of course, it'd still be nice if telcos ran their backends competently. Looking at you, AT&T)

Re: FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric from 25Mbps to 100Mbps

#38
post #8

I 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.…

25Mbit/sec isn’t really good enough for 4K video.

> 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.

I mean, you can call it what you want, but it’s under the minimum standard set by the NBP in 2012 (30Mbit, 25ms). Fortunately, if that’s the best you can get, you’re almost certainly in an NBI intervention area, so a minimum of 500Mbit via FTTH should be available to you at some point.

You can check here: https://nbi.ie/map/

Re: FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric from 25Mbps to 100Mbps

#39

This is over regulation imo. If you support this then you can’t complain about there not being any low cost housing because it’s regulations akin to this that is increasing the costs. 25->100 is more of a luxury then a necessity

How much do you pay for internet? Maybe you should be directing your ire elsewhere.

I currently pay $60/month for 600 down.

An ISP that actually struggles to provide 100mbps down at a reasonable rate, today, is simply one that refuses to update their hardware. 100mbps is not hard to achieve with semi-modern hardware.

I know of ISPs servicing remote small communities with 1gbps down at $100/month. 300 down for $30/month.

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