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FCC to eliminate gigabit speed goal and scrap analysis of broadband prices

arstechnica.com

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Re: FCC to eliminate gigabit speed goal and scrap analysis of broadband prices

#101

Post by dlcarrier »

runako wrote: post #84
dlcarrier wrote: post #44

You can always tell how tech savvy someone is, buy how much bandwidth they don't buy. They don't fall for the marketing/lobbying of the big incumbent ISPs. Anyone I've known worth their salt in networking cares about latency far more than speed. Historically upload speeds on asymmetrical plans were a problem too, but since people have started to work from home, most cable/fiber/wireless internet providers' lowest pla…

> how tech savvy someone is > rare power users I would expect a lot of overlap between these two groups! Extremely common things tech people do that benefit greatly from high-bandwidth connections: - disk backup to the cloud - use Docker - have a household with multiple HD TVs (Netflix recommends 30Mbps per stream) - software installs/updates as a brief interlude instead of an ordeal Essentially, high-bandwidth conne…

Saturating even a 100 megabit connection to a cloud provider gets really expensive, really fast. That's 45 gigabytes/hr. Only a subset of power users are going to have daily or even weekly sustained full-speed transfers of that size, and 100 Mbps is usually the bottom tier plan, from a US telco.

Even if you are doing that to initially back up your network or install Call of Duty, after the initial usage you're only making differential updates, unless something goes very wrong, which hopefully doesn't happen even once a month.

For some users, it may be worth an extra $1000/yr to get the gigabit plan instead of 100 megabit, so that a Call of Duty install could theoretically happen in tens minutes instead of an hour or two, but really it's going to take an hour for your computer to decompress and write the data. Everyone else paying that $1000/yr extra is just wasting their money.

Also, Netflix only uses 16 Mbps at most, for a 4K video which is only a small portion of their catalog and only available to their top-tier subscribers. The extra bandwidth is a recommendation to allow for other users to still use the network and also to account for a special case of high latency that used to occur when saturating the connection on the fastest plans some ISPs offered. Here's some good research into actual streaming usage: https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/ (It's WSJ, but there's no paywall)

On top of that, the cheapest plans offered by most telecoms in the US are over 100 megabit, so you still get a guaranteed three 4K streams Netflix without issue, but realistically could pull off double that.

Re: FCC to eliminate gigabit speed goal and scrap analysis of broadband prices

#102

Post by mvdtnz »

lenerdenator wrote: post #99
timewizard wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I mean, most people didn't vote for Project 2025, which is exactly what Trump is implementing, despite having lied about not knowing about it during the campaign. Also, I'm wondering why we suddenly now care about democracy; if we did in 2016, Trump wouldn't have had a first term. If we had after his conviction, the judge in NY state would have taken the jury's democratic decision seriously and handed him to the maxi…

Come on. There was plenty of media attention around Project 2025 before the election. This is exactly what people voted for.

Re: FCC to eliminate gigabit speed goal and scrap analysis of broadband prices

#103

Post by lenerdenator »

mvdtnz wrote: post #102
lenerdenator wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, most people didn't vote for Project 2025, which is exactly what Trump is implementing, despite having lied about not knowing about it during the campaign. Also, I'm wondering why we suddenly now care about democracy; if we did in 2016, Trump wouldn't have had a first term. If we had after his conviction, the judge in NY state would have taken the jury's democratic decision seriously and handed him to the maxi…

Come on. There was plenty of media attention around Project 2025 before the election. This is exactly what people voted for.

And a lot of it surrounded how Trump denied it.

Re: FCC to eliminate gigabit speed goal and scrap analysis of broadband prices

#104

Post by conradev »

CesareBorgia wrote: post #3

This seems to be good for Starlink at the expense of the fiber providers?

Yeah, a regulatory goal that can be met by FiOS today but will take Starlink billions to get there does not seem like the correct way to allocate federal funds.

Brendan Carr's has critiqued federal broadband spending: too much spent on rebuilding existing networks to be faster, not enough going towards new build out. This is because upgrading wealthy customers' internet leads to increased profit, and there is less money in serving the underserved. Several states have tried fighting the telecom companies on what they've delivered and I think the worst case was a slap on the wrist.

Starlink and 5G are likely increasing broadband coverage far faster than fiber, which is a big goal of federal broadband spending.

Re: FCC to eliminate gigabit speed goal and scrap analysis of broadband prices

#105

Post by dlcarrier »

kstrauser wrote: post #95
dlcarrier wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're all using the same equipment, regardless of the tier you sign up for. The firmware in your modem or their router limits the maximum packet rate, but individual packets and small groups of packets are always traveling at gigabit speeds, regardless of the speed cap. That difference in latency isn't even what matters; it's the latency from the various types of modems. With the direct connection of fiber providers…

This is called being “confidently incorrect”. As mentioned above, I have those millisecond-class pings at 200x faster than that piddling 50Mbit pipe (for $60/month). There’s no imaginable advantage to getting a slower, more expensive connection.

I was just being unclear.

Everyone from your fiber provider is getting fiber-class latency, regardless of the plan's max speed. The fiber ISP in my area uses 10 gig ONTs for everyone, and limits each plan's speed with PPPoE. This is pretty common, and likely yours is doing the same.

On the other hand, everyone using the cable provider in my area, whether on their fastest or slowest plan, is getting the same tens of milliseconds of DOCSIS 3.1 latency, on a node that has tens to hundreds of gigabits of bandwidth but is using TDMA and FDMA to share it between a few hundred users.

My point is that the lowest-tier subscriber from your fiber ISP is getting magnitudes lower latency than the top-tier subscriber from my cable ISP. If either of the switch plans, but don't switch ISPs, they'll have the same latency.

Re: FCC to eliminate gigabit speed goal and scrap analysis of broadband prices

#108

Post by dlcarrier »

jedberg wrote: post #53
dlcarrier wrote: post #44

You can always tell how tech savvy someone is, buy how much bandwidth they don't buy. They don't fall for the marketing/lobbying of the big incumbent ISPs. Anyone I've known worth their salt in networking cares about latency far more than speed. Historically upload speeds on asymmetrical plans were a problem too, but since people have started to work from home, most cable/fiber/wireless internet providers' lowest pla…

I don't know about where you live, but by far the lowest latency option for me is symmetric gigabit. And my options jump from 200/20 to 1000/1000, and 200/20 was for sure not enough for everyone to stream and video chat at the same time.

Multiple video chats can saturate 20 Mbps up, but if they offered 200/200 it would be more than plenty. Them not offering reasonable plans in between a little to low and way too high doesn't mean that it couldn't exist, it just means that they aren't offering it, likely because they have paid your local government to prohibit any competition, allowing them to force a large portion of their customer base to use a more expensive plan than they need, because no one else is going to offer a reasonable one.

Re: FCC to eliminate gigabit speed goal and scrap analysis of broadband prices

#109

Post by bubblethink »

To be the devil's advocate, the previous admin also squandered a lot of broadband money away in a pattern that seems common to all Democratic infra projects. See https://reason.com/2024/06/27/why-has-joe-bidens-42-billion-... . Neither party is good at this. The FCC broadband map and the b/w labels (previous admin) are nice though.

Re: FCC to eliminate gigabit speed goal and scrap analysis of broadband prices

#110

Post by jonhohle »

gigatexal wrote: post #107

What a win for the Telcos. What a loss for all of America. If only municipal broadband/fiber was given the chance to grow there’d be real competition.

Telcos were given billions to expand and improve broadband for decades and never did it. If the FCC has scrapped the goal are they also scrapping the handouts? If so, it’s long overdue.
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