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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

#181

Post by supertrope »

izacus wrote: post #118
bubblethink wrote: post #109

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.

Why do you feel the need to be the devils advocate? What do you get from defending this crap?

Playing devil's advocate allows you to improve your own argument and develop strong rebuttals to the other speaker's thesis.

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

#182

Post by ethbr1 »

dartharva wrote: post #167
gigatexal wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

More like it has exposed how completely powerless the electorate in America actually is. The kind of shit the current administration is pulling against all public interest is something politicians of other countries can't even conceive of, because it is systemically impossible in their respective political setups.

If you did a survey worldwide of democracies, I’d be very surprised to find any that didn’t have norm tipping points, where technically things could be pushed if any adherence to previous norms were abandoned.

The irony is that this behavior isn’t exceptional for the US, historically. We’ve just lived through a long recent period (1974-2024) where norms were more respected.

Historically (pre-1900) there were some colossal political anything-goes knife fights within and between the branches of American government.

One consequence of that was the explicit stripping of powers from the executive and substitution of independent boards to check its power. Those were eventually removed in the 80s in a drive to increase efficiency. See history before: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Service_Reform_Act_of_...

I expect that post-Trump, when Democrats regain legislative power, there are going to be a lot of efforts to buttress and expand the role of executive-independent bodies.

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

#183

Post by runako »

dlcarrier wrote: post #101
runako wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

You're right -- saturating a 100Mbps connection is really hard. But I'm not talking about running servers from one's home. The goal isn't to saturate your connection for the month, it's to make it so that if your usage "wants" more bandwidth, it's there for you. I don't know about most people's usage, but I can say that Docker & NPM in particular benefit from a very fast connection.

> which hopefully doesn't happen even once a month.

This is the mindset I was referencing. Nobody thinks about how often their computer has to write to its local disk, and if you have a sufficiently fast Internet connection you can adopt the same carefree attitude towards Internet use.

> an extra $1000/yr

This is the disconnect. In my area, the price gap is much smaller, less than half that. The bigger consideration for us was going to a gig connection was also the only way to get a connection without a usage cap and therefore a predictable bill (Xfinity is the other provider).

Incidentally, it looks like the WSJ test used mobile devices like phones and tablets. AFAIK all the major streamers deliver lower-bandwidth content to those devices by default, so this is not the best test.

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

#184

Post by 93po »

financetechbro wrote: post #173
x-complexity wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do you feel the need to be the devils advocate? What do you get from defending this crap? To prevent this level of monopolar partisanship. Is this action a net-negative for ISP subscribers (i.e. everyone)? Yes. However, this doesn't give any leeway at all in ignoring the past failures of the other side when it comes to this space either. The only (legally advisable) path left is vocal advocacy for its restorati…

Why do you feel the impulse to reply to a question that was not addressed to you?

its an online discussion, the point is to discuss things, these aren't PMs, the nature of online discussion is anyone can jump in anywhere. i dont understand why you have a hostile tone towards this very normal and acceptable situation

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

#185

Post by dontlaugh »

bubblethink wrote: post #109

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.

I think it’s important to point out that the two US parties are almost identical, but I wouldn’t call it “devil’s advocate”. It’s not defending one party to point out both are bad for workers.

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

#186

Post by 93po »

intermerda wrote: post #122
izacus wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you feel the need to be the devils advocate? What do you get from defending this crap?

> I think “logic lord” types are sometimes drawn to contrarian positions because they like the strong emotional reactions that stating those positions induces in other people. It gives them a smug sense that they are dispassionate and logical and everyone else is blinded by emotion. I had saved it from some other social media type. It accurately describes a lot of HN community.

i think what a lot of people experience is frustration around group-think along the lines of "I stubbed my toe, it's someone-i-dont-like's fault". Because thinking that many of the problems with ____ group is unique to that group means that people are going to continue to miss the fact that the people they do support are also guilty of the same thing

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

#188

Post by 93po »

userbinator wrote: post #48

Maybe this will force sites to stop wasting bandwidth and stem the bloat. You should not need a gigabit connection (which I do not even have in all of my home LAN) to browse the Internet. Edit: downvoters, please explain why I need 125MB/s (that's 3 full installations of Windows 95 every second) for normal browsing.

why do you need a car that can do 65MPH? just take the backroads and chat with a friend or something while you drive, 30 MPH is plenty to get anyone anywhere. people made do with horses that did about 5 MPH for over a hundred years and they got around just fine. 30 MPH is, like, at least twice as fast as the horse

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

#189

Post by supertrope »

kingstnap wrote: post #75
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…

There's no reason to artificially limit the speed. If your city has fibre, everyone can have gigabit internet. There's no savings for the ISP to throttle your pipe.

Many fiber ISPs will offer a 1 Gbps/1 Gbps standard plan and a cheaper plan e.g. 100 Mbps/100 Mbps. This allows customers to get fiber broadband even if they do not want to pay $70/mo.

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

#190

Post by baby_souffle »

Larrikin wrote: post #90
userbinator wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100/20 is barely enough for a household of 3-5 "light" users. What the hell are you doing that 100/20 is "barely enough"?

2 younger kids streaming a movie, one parent listening to a podcast in the shower, one parent streaming a YouTube cooking video while making dinner, and an older kid playing any game would completely saturate the network. That is assuming nobody has a phone that is also connected to the network Also its ridiculous to think that is excessive in any way. Imagine what we could have if we had 100 gigabit or 1 terabit. In…

> That is assuming nobody has a phone that is also connected to the network

A buddy of mine has horror stories about what happens when an office full of iPhones all download the same 1+ gig iOS update at the same time.

> Imagine what we could have if we had 100 gigabit or 1 terabit

Exactly my point. I'd rather we not let large ISPs be the ones that decide what is innovative and "fast enough" for us. I want somebody with the power to push them... pushing them to be faster and better.

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