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

>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.

Nope. You don't. But why should I have to pay Google/AWS/Azure/Cloudflare/Digital Ocean/etc./etc./etc. to host my small business/vanity/family chat/photo sharing site, or YouTube to host my barbecue sauce unboxing videos, when symmetrical (okay, 300 up/down would likely be plenty for most of that, but once there's fiber, Gb/sec seems good to me)?

I have no interest in propping up huge companies with hosting fees because other huge companies have no competition.

All that said, I get your point. But my use case is not your use case. Do you get mine?

Edit: Clarified prose.

> Not all of us.

I didn't vote for all these highways and suburbs either but we live in a democracy. By and large rural voters* voted to cut programs like this, though, and I think it's very fair to point that out.

> Fiber is objectively the right choice for future proofing. Bouncing a radio wave off of cube 300 miles above will _always_ be sub-par compared to a direct fiber connection because the latency is higher.

Yes and no, it depends on the cost. It might not be ideal but I'm also not sure my tax dollars should go to make sure people who live in rural areas have faster Playstation downloads. Do we actually need to physically pay for and build this infrastructure? I'm not necessarily opposed to it, but where is the economic analysis? If we invest $XYZ on this infrastructure what's the expected ROI versus alternatives?

* Just to be clear I don't have any particular problem with "rural voters" and I don't really like these arbitrary groupings of people into Urban, Suburban, Rural but it is what it is.

> Do we actually need to physically pay for and build this infrastructure? I'm not necessarily opposed to it, but where is the economic analysis? If we invest $XYZ on this infrastructure what's the expected ROI versus alternatives?

I wish I had a clear answer and good data on this. My gut tells me that giving more people faster and more reliable access to information is almost certainly going to be worth it in the long run. A few hypotheticals that come to mind:

Some highly paid engineer can live out in the boonies but still work for their high wages. That excess cash is probably going to make it's way into the local economy.

Likewise, rural schools are not know for their performance. That almost certainly could change if better content/curricula was easier to access and distribute. There is a non-zero chance that some breakthrough cure for cancer comes from a smart kid that grew up in a rural area. With crap internet access, that kid almost certainly would not get the education to match their potential.

(or maybe it isn't a cure for cancer, it's the next John Carmack...)

Fiber isn't the only way to level-up access... but it is the easiest to maintain. Other than the very ends of the connection, it's all passive.

No need to to inject power for amplifiers. No need to keep building/launching satellites and corresponding ground-stations.

Once it's installed, it's more or less maintenance free until a wild backhoe shows up...

> What the hell are you doing that 100/20 is "barely enough"?

Many things. A partial list in no particular order:

My day job is all SSH so I don't need a wide pipe so much as I need a short pipe. If the pipe is also quite wide, I can reliably stream content while I work. This isn't just music, this is watching the daycare camera feeds.

Every once in a while I need to docker pull a multi-gig image. It's nice when that doesn't take more than 30 seconds. I don't worry about background tasks moving/syncing/backing-up data; there's plenty of headroom!

Some of my hobbies involve _lots_ of data and the less time I spend waiting for that to download is more time I get for actually doing hobbies.

I also have a few scripts that backup other consequential data stores; the biggest one is google takeout for a few accounts. This results in ~ 800 gigs of data from a few different accounts.

The work product from these hobbies and backups is something that I like to back up off site and a 20mbps connection is trivial to saturate for hours as a time.

Every once in a while I'll make some of my excess compute/GPU available to friends so they can render things. The assets involved are not small and a big pipe means that everybody gets the desired result _faster_.

If you give me a faster/wider pipe, I _will_ find a new use for the extra room. I may not be representative of the typical user but I know for sure that I would not have developed my skills to the extent that I have if I had crap internet access.

You're outting yourself as an unreliable narrator - HN isn't liberal, it's typical moderate neo-lib.

Youre assuming HN must be liberal because it's somewhat critical of Trump. You're reverse-engineering your position.

HN isn't critical of Trump because they're libs, they're critical of Trump because he's bad and the policy is bad.

I mean, raising the deficit by trillions in exchange for A REDUCTION in public services? How can any conservative American, anywhere, possibly defend that? They didn't vote for that!