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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

#51
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…

Why isn't 3 9's acceptable for residential home internet? That's less than 9 hours of downtime a year, 44 minutes/month. Sure, I'd like 4 or even 5 9's, but I don't want to pay for it -- each additional 9 is exponentially more expensive to guarantee, and few people are willing to pay for that much reliability for their own network gear.

4 nines is reasonable, 5 nines a good target. ISPs have become utilities, especially since covid.

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

#53
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> our neighborhood barely got one nine last year Internet it available less than 10% of the year where you live ?

One nine should be 90% availability I would imagine.

Yeah that makes sense, I feel stupid now.

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

#54
post #2

Going 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…

There’s a reasonable practical difference between 25Mbit/sec and 100; in particular, 25 isn’t _really_ good enough for 4K streaming.

_Today_, most consumers aren’t going to be that bothered between the difference between 100 and 1000. But that’s today; the sensible telecoms regulator thinks on a longer scale, because otherwise they just have to revisit the whole thing in a decade.

In Ireland we’re on our third try; the first saw a lot of subsidised satellite and fixed wireless in rural areas, the second, better fixed wireless (a minimum latency requirement killed off the satellite option), and FTTC; in the third, they do seem to have finally decided to stop screwing about, and are rolling out FTTH in otherwise-poorly-served rural areas.

(From a practical point of view, I do get that a state rural fibre wholesaler probably would not fly politically in the US, but this approach of repeatedly easing the minimum standard up is ultimately kinda wasteful.)

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

#55
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…

You can and should challenge the map then. The FCC actually has a means to do that and does respond. Ideally get an email follow up stating speeds, frontier has a habit of refusing to create a paper trail.

https://help.bdc.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/articles/10476040597787-Ho...

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

#56
My parents to this day still don't have real broadband access. The best they can get is a bad 4G signal to their rural area. Even Starlink only has speeds of 40mbs in their area. They only live about a mile from a fiber line, but AT&T won't run it over because it would only service maybe 10-15 homes, and there are no cable lines. I think this is more common than people think.

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

#57
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If we limit it to issues that the ISP owns, then I'd say yes. What does the ISP have that can cause 9 hours worth of outages throughout the year? The only thing I could think of is the ISP being targeted by a massive DDOS attack.

An ice storm taking down a utility pole will blow that out of the water for several years.

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

#58

IMNSHO, latency is more important than raw bandwidth, and raw bandwidth for consumer Internet is more useful as a latency improvement (because the high speed drains the buffers that much faster) than for actually using the bandwidth. If you've got actually decent Internet, or you actually do use the bandwidth, great! My experience is that only a few applications will max out my 115Mbit/s connection, and given I have…

And latency under load is an even more important measure.

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

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

… WAit, how, precisely, does this make housing more expensive? Like, what is the method of action?

It's the (IMO faulty) theory that all regulations increase prices. Sort of like "if you require all houses to meet code, you can't have a market for very low quality houses that would decrease the prices of mid quality houses". The problem with this theory, particularly in the case of an ISP, is you need an actual free and open market with a large amount of competition before it starts making any sense. When you talk…

California has at least 24,000 regulations applying to residential housing FYI

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

#60

IMNSHO, latency is more important than raw bandwidth, and raw bandwidth for consumer Internet is more useful as a latency improvement (because the high speed drains the buffers that much faster) than for actually using the bandwidth. If you've got actually decent Internet, or you actually do use the bandwidth, great! My experience is that only a few applications will max out my 115Mbit/s connection, and given I have…

The only thing personally I want is the same upload speed as download. So I can connect to my home server and download/upload stuff from it.
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