Live data from Hacker News

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

pcmag.com

111–120 of 233 posts

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

#111
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah. I don't know the exact numbers but having power out for 9 hours a year is not a freak event where I live in semi-rural New England and my impression is that it isn't for my colleagues in North Carolina either. Branches and trees come down on powerlines. I had a big tree come down in a windstorm a few months back. Lucky it didn't hit anything of mine or my neighbor or might have been a couple days.

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

#112

I like they raised the broadband minimum upload speed from 3 to 25Mbps. Spectrum's 300 Mbps broadband is only 10 Mbps up. Let's see how fast they change their statement that "an upload speed of 3 Mbps is enough for most households" [1]. [1: https://www.spectrum.com/resources/internet-wifi/what-is-a-g... ]

On coax/cable lines like Charter/Spectrum, the upload speed limit is due to protocol/DOCSIS limitations. Supposedly the new version of DOCSIS fixes this/allows for symmetrical service, and Spectrum has been rolling it out for a while now. Still waiting for it where I'm at...

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

#113
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.

The average US customer in 2022 averaged 5.5 hours of power disruptions[0]. So somewhere between 3-4 9s.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61303

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

#114
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My electrical utility does not hit 4 nines, maybe not even 3. Water and sewer? Definitely.

5 nines is reasonable for electricity, if you live in an urban area with no extreme weather or other major natural hazards. When I was still living in Helsinki, blackouts were basically an once-in-a-decade thing, and they didn't last long. Today in California, I'm getting 3 nines in an urban area. Those living a couple of blocks further towards the suburbs are not so lucky. And many people in the mountains don't get…

Hey, 3 nines ain’t too bad!

In 2023 our availability only had one nine. We had power ~96% of the year. And it wasn’t like it was a lot of hour long outages that added up or something. Longest was 8 days.

I am not in a dense urban area, but I am connected directly to a line connecting a couple of larger towns along a major highway, so we’re generally restored fairly quickly. During the 8 day outage, quite a few people in the major city nearby were actually still without power when mine was restored.

Maybe unsurprisingly, my internet has actually been vastly _more_ reliable.

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

#115
post #3
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…

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 comm…

Most people don't need 100mbps. Netflix recommends 5mbps for HD and 25mpbs for UHD. As a country, let's make sure that everyone has the ability to watch netflix in HD on 5 TVs simultaneously in one home. Or to watch UHD on a single TV. But if there's a home out there that currently gets 50mbps but the infrastructure for 100mbps isn't in place, do we really want the government throwing money to solve that (non) problem?

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

#116
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The commercial internet services with 4 or 5 9 SLAs have multiple redundant lines to the building to guarantee this and they charge handsomely for it. Otherwise a downed telephone pole or something will automatically bring the service down for a day or more.

BTW I run a serious network at home (Proxmox cluster, all enterprise gear, virtualized router with HA, UPS power) and only target 4 nines on the LAN. System updates and things like server crashes making the router failover to another node cause around 30 minutes worth of network downtime a year. If a core or floor switch fails it'll automatically take me over an hour to swap in a spare and configure it. I don't bother trying for that fifth nine and I'm a very demanding user.

Now if one of you have a consistent 5 nine home system I'd be curious to learn more about it. I'm guessing that would practically be a datacenter setup with CARP, dual switches, etc. - or you're just really really lucky.

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

#117

That explains why I got this email from my broadband provider this morning: >We've increased your internet speeds to show you our appreciation I was wondering what I'd done to deserve it!

Same here. I thought they sent that email out to incentivize me not to move to fiber. Turns out that FCC is the reason.

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

#118
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…

The FCC is working on an internet service notice format “modeled after the FDA nutrition labels” [1]. [1] https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels

Ah, so one with huge amounts of input from lobbyists.

It is ridiculous that nutrition labels are not forced to standardize on something like x/100 grams (even Freedom units would be acceptable). Plus a x/package. None of this 3/8 serving size nonsense.

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

#119

I like they raised the broadband minimum upload speed from 3 to 25Mbps. Spectrum's 300 Mbps broadband is only 10 Mbps up. Let's see how fast they change their statement that "an upload speed of 3 Mbps is enough for most households" [1]. [1: https://www.spectrum.com/resources/internet-wifi/what-is-a-g... ]

On coax/cable lines like Charter/Spectrum, the upload speed limit is due to protocol/DOCSIS limitations. Supposedly the new version of DOCSIS fixes this/allows for symmetrical service, and Spectrum has been rolling it out for a while now. Still waiting for it where I'm at...

I've seen this explanation, but it makes no sense

  ver year  download   upload
  1.0 1997  40 Mbit/s  10 Mbit/s
  1.1 2001  40 Mbit/s  10 Mbit/s
  2.0 2002  40 Mbit/s  30 Mbit/s
  3.0 2006  1 Gbit/s   200 Mbit/s
  3.1 2013  10 Gbit/s  1–2 Gbit/s
  4.0 2017  10 Gbit/s  6 Gbit/s  
the version previous to the "new version" uploads at 1-2gbit/s which is 40-80x the FCC value

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Comparison

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

#120

That explains why I got this email from my broadband provider this morning: >We've increased your internet speeds to show you our appreciation I was wondering what I'd done to deserve it!

Yes - same from Xfinity

I didn't get the same... (same provider)
Post reply on HN