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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

#181

Post by AngryData »

SteveGerencser wrote: post #34
JohnTHaller wrote: post #7

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 'p…

I got 1 gig fiber to the home just this last year thanks to a an electric company fiber co-op. Couldn't get DSL before because the lines were so degraded and no one offered it. Until now the only available internet was wireless in a highly forested area.

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

#182

Post by r1ch »

jdminhbg wrote: post #9
hedora wrote: 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…

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

Imagine all your streaming video or calls froze for a few seconds every hour for days on end. 9 hours in one continuous outage is fine, constant short outages are infuriating.

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

#183

Post by RiverCrochet »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #169
gamepsys wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoom recommends 3.8Mbps for uploading 1080p video. Being able to do 1080p video conferencing is an expectation of broadband. Raising the definition of broadband to meet this basic requirement is clearly a win. I do think 25Mbps up is more than what's required for a large number of households (>33%). I have advised family that 15Mbps is adequate when they needed to do office work from home. Perhaps the only good thing…

> I do think 25Mbps up is more than what's required for a large number of households (>33%). I have advised family that 15Mbps is adequate when they needed to do office work from home. Yet my experience when streaming high def video is much better in places with symmetric fiber with much higher upload bandwidth (> 100Mbps) than it ever is in places with coaxial cable bandwidth.

TCP ACKs back up are needed even for downloads and can get crowded if the bandwidth in that direction full or crowded. If those tiny ACKs don't get through downstream may stall. Linux QoS can help, but only if your router is Linux and you can run the appropriate commands on it.

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

#184

Post by Scoundreller »

selectodude wrote: post #158
lolinder wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been coping with 6 Mbps upload speeds from Xfinity for years now. This morning I got an email from them saying they were raising my speeds at no cost, and after a modem restart I'm now getting ~20 Mbps up. This whole time I've been told that Xfinity couldn't provide decent upload speeds because of infrastructure reasons, but now that's been proven a lie.

CATV was designed as a one-way pipe. There are filters everywhere in the network that block inbound traffic because there wasn't much of a reason for cable boxes to need to communicate with the wider network which meant that the bandwidth on the cable that was actually usable for upload bandwidth was orders of magnitude smaller than downloads. As Comcast basically rebuilds their network (fiber to the edge), they're b…

Designed, maybe, but it's not like the cabling is directional.

I thought one of the reasons why DOCSIS was straightforward to rollout was because they only really needed bi-directional amplifiers to do it. Though in the early days of cable internet, some setups used a telephone modem for your uplink.

And if you already had Hybrid-Fibre Coaxial infrastructure (which was rolled out for noise reasons in the pre-data analog days) you were already a step ahead of the game in terms of segmenting nodes/worrying about CPE noise.

Upload is crap because they have to dedicate channels to it at the cost of download channels, and upload has more overhead because of the coordination required.

70s/80s cableTV companies basically won the lottery by being able to re-use their existing last-mile plant for high-value data. Telcos not so much.

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

#185

Post by Scoundreller »

redox99 wrote: post #163
gamepsys wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zoom recommends 3.8Mbps for uploading 1080p video. Being able to do 1080p video conferencing is an expectation of broadband. Raising the definition of broadband to meet this basic requirement is clearly a win. I do think 25Mbps up is more than what's required for a large number of households (>33%). I have advised family that 15Mbps is adequate when they needed to do office work from home. Perhaps the only good thing…

3.8Mbps 1080p is an atrocious bitrate. You'd want at least 6Mbps.

Depends what you're watching. A videoconference with a mostly fixed background and infrequently shapeshifting face or a screenshare won't chew up much.

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

#186

Post by Scoundreller »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #126
notfried wrote: post #85

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... ]

For coaxial cable, I assume they will still allocate the same 50Mbps upload between 200 houses, and then let you get a 25Mbps burst for a few seconds by taking it from others.

Sometimes the issue is legacy CPEs that couldn't access channels that newer ones could (or couldn't bond as many). That's why sometimes a modem upgrade could "unlock" higher speeds.

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

#187

Post by Scoundreller »

cogman10 wrote: post #21
jdminhbg wrote: 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.

Not every year, but Rogers in Canada managed to black itself out across digital TV, corp circuits, home internet, mobile, 3rd party internet providers that used their lines, their own employees, and cellular for the good part of a day (from like 5AM until midnight) nationwide.

Their CTO was on holiday and was unreachable because their phone went into SOS mode and they just assumed it was them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Rogers_Communications_out...

In 2021, their mobile network went down for like 9 hours: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/rogers-identifies-root-caus...

The Nashville AT&T explosion didn't take out the data lines, but took out the electric service. Then the gas company cutoff the gas lines so their backup generators couldn't run (wiki says it was due to fire/water damage, so maybe I have that part wrong). The facility didn't have roll-up generator connections, so they had to figure out how to wire them in at a big time cost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nashville_bombing

In 2003, the "Slammer" worm slowed down ISP's core routers (including Rogers' to the point of not working anymore) with the quantity of small packets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL_Slammer

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

#188

Post by rayiner »

Scoundreller wrote: post #184
selectodude wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CATV was designed as a one-way pipe. There are filters everywhere in the network that block inbound traffic because there wasn't much of a reason for cable boxes to need to communicate with the wider network which meant that the bandwidth on the cable that was actually usable for upload bandwidth was orders of magnitude smaller than downloads. As Comcast basically rebuilds their network (fiber to the edge), they're b…

Designed, maybe, but it's not like the cabling is directional. I thought one of the reasons why DOCSIS was straightforward to rollout was because they only really needed bi-directional amplifiers to do it. Though in the early days of cable internet, some setups used a telephone modem for your uplink. And if you already had Hybrid-Fibre Coaxial infrastructure (which was rolled out for noise reasons in the pre-data ana…

The wires weren’t unidirectional but the amplifiers were. Amplifiers capable of full duplex have only come out in the last few years. https://www.telecompetitor.com/comcast-gains-a-key-element-n....

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

#189

Post by darkwizard42 »

kerkeslager wrote: post #167

As it turns out, a lot of HN is a lot more for government regulating business when it affects them personally. Have you ever seen an HN thread with so much pro-regulation sentiment?

The prevailing sentiment on average across HN is regulate where competition is stifled (monopolistic practices by Apple, Google) or it is a public good (utility threads on PG&E come to mind, homegrown broadband, public transportation) or the law is being broken (copyright, fair use, open source violations).

Using a wide brush to paint all of HN and similarly all of gov't regulation is what leads to cognitive dissonance where there is nuance.

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

#190

Post by vel0city »

tzs wrote: post #148
dtnewman wrote: post #110

I oppose this. 100mbps just isn't what most people need. To most readers, this probably sounds innocuous, but I have some involvement in my city's digital equity community, so I have some insight into what this translates to for local governments and community organizations. Now what will happen is someone at the county level in charge of digital infrastructure will look at at a map and say "oh no, 40% of our populat…

> Meanwhile, the vast majority of people have $30 wifi routers that are incorrectly configured and positioned behind a concrete wall in the garage. So 100mbps comes into their house, but their laptops, TVs and phones see 20mbps. Why would they have the routers in their garage instead of in their house? Most houses that have cable have cable outlets inside the house, since the reason cable was originally put in was to…

For a period a lot of FTTH deployments put ONTs in the garage. As some of those networks upgraded CPE ONTs and integrating ONTs into their residential gateways, they often didn't bother actually bringing those fiber runs into the house.

I wouldn't say this is incredibly common though, it really depends on which network and when the original install took place.

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