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FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

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Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#213
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In a major tech hub like San Francisco, where I live, it's possible to get 1gb/1gb in some areas for under $90 As a point of comparison, I live in a small city in Europe (80k population) and we have 10gb/10gb for $60/month. My internal network is only capable of 2.5gbit, but I can upload at that speed indefinitely. I could honestly not imagine going back to ADSL speeds.

You have access to residential internet with 10Gbps up and down? I didn't even know that was a thing.

I've got 25/25Gbps here in Switzerland. I pay ~$65/month.

Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#214

There's a lot of comments on this thread pointing out typical bandwidth usage of popular streaming services, games etc and claiming that there's no need for higher bandwidth connections. There's an important point that I think people are missing, which is that the bandwidth usage of internet services is going to be carefully tuned to balance quality and stability at typical internet speeds. When a large portion of co…

>There's an important point that I think people are missing, which is that the bandwidth usage of internet services is going to be carefully tuned to balance quality and stability at typical internet speeds. ...or the fact that there can be and often are more than one person in a single household.

This was super noticeable for a few years whenever I went back home to visit my parents. I would struggle to load basically anything on my laptop most evenings due to the 5 mpbs or so being split between 3+ devices (although the weak signal in most rooms due to the poor placement of the router that they were not interested in moving somewhere more central didn't help either). Eventually when the pandemic hit and my father started working from home, they quickly discovered that he would not be able to get his work done if my mother was streaming something at the same time, so they ended up upgrading to a more expensive plan, and the next time I visited, I was pleased to find that my issues had vanished.

Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who paid them to build fiber and under what contract?

Telecom act of 1996 paid them to build fiber but they set the speed limits low enough that they could satisfy it with DSL. There’s new DSL tech that’s ~100mbps, so this is that technique again. The fatal flaw in 1996, like today, is not pushing for gigabit, and is one of the major reasons the US is a declining global power. Faster internet access is core infrastructure for participation in the 21st century.

The US is not a declining global power.

Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#216
post #24

With how slowly these proposals roll out, 100/20 won't be enough. As others said, there is a lack of both competition and pricing to worry about too. In a major tech hub like San Francisco, where I live, it's possible to get 1gb/1gb in some areas for under $90, but which those are isn't consistent nor wide spread. Home cell coverage at 100/20 is spotty at best, and there is only one flat rate vendor (T-Mobile Home, n…

Fiber was installed here, and they provide three tiers - 50Mb/s, 100 Mb/s and 1000 Mb/s, for 45, 50, and 55 euro each. We took the 100Mb/s. I have no idea what I would use 1 Gb/s for, using it as definition for broadband would be premature. Than again, Bill Gates said that: '640 kB RAM ought to be enough for anybody'.

At 1Gbps the internet becomes close to indistinguishable from a local network, opening up interesting possibilities like a "NAS" that's actually just the cloud. That extra bandwidth, combined with the low latency of fibre, can make it possible to easily interact with a remote PC as if it's sitting in front of you, so you could do away with a home PC or workstation and use a thin client to access a beefy machine on-demand in some datacenter.

Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#217

I pay $40 for a Verizon FIOS connection. It's marketed as 300Mbps but my speed test just now showed 120Mbps. But it also consistently exceeds 100Mbps on the upstream. It's easily the best home internet connection I've had since the university dorms in the late 90's. They also offer 1Gbps for $70, which is tempting but really unnecessary for my needs. I don't understand why I'm getting such an amazing deal! It's a fix…

Gigabit is so clutch, it's worth it for the satisfaction of being able to download a 30 gig game in less time than it takes to go to the bathroom.

Do game stores even support providing downloads that fast?

Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#218

There's a lot of comments on this thread pointing out typical bandwidth usage of popular streaming services, games etc and claiming that there's no need for higher bandwidth connections. There's an important point that I think people are missing, which is that the bandwidth usage of internet services is going to be carefully tuned to balance quality and stability at typical internet speeds. When a large portion of co…

> There's a lot of comments on this thread pointing out typical bandwidth usage of popular streaming services, games etc and claiming that there's no need for higher bandwidth connections.

You said it, not me. You said there's shills on this thread. That's the only possible motivation to argue there's no need for more bandwidth, there's another reason I came up with but I don't want it to be plagiarized, so I won't say it, they're stuck rehashing the "really sincere" focus group maneuver. It's also because actual bandwidth meaning through a wire has more rights and is better protected from tapping than wireless or radio or what is it now 5G? So the whole game is to funnel people to depending on this little walkie talkie that never turns off and which has no buttons, and is so sophisticated you can't fix it yourself, and has a baseband (that's a whole nother conspiracy theory but it's boring), and it gets GPS readings like every time you don't consent for it to, and that's why they're attacking the pipe, the wire, the cable, the fiber, they want everybody getting a cellular antenna for everything. The wire means having rights, photons it's like, everything goes. Surveillance in fact, they want us all to literally broadcast our eg 911 calls instead of calling them on a landline. They don't like landlines because they're well-litigated, have rights, martyrs died over getting their line tapped or being unable to call 911 just by pressing 911 (there's a case over that, they were meant to dial 9 first, 9911, and victims couldn't get through to emergency service and one died), 5G turns back the martyr clock forty years.

Yeah totally want to get all my needs met by a nagging machine.

Like these guys run their own ISP you think they can't log into a site and tell them both sides of the story? They've been doing it since the 1910's. Or shill robots by this point. I wonder if it counts as public speaking if you're only speaking to robots. Just trying to pass the Cussen Test here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31111806

You said it, not me.

Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#219

There's a lot of comments on this thread pointing out typical bandwidth usage of popular streaming services, games etc and claiming that there's no need for higher bandwidth connections. There's an important point that I think people are missing, which is that the bandwidth usage of internet services is going to be carefully tuned to balance quality and stability at typical internet speeds. When a large portion of co…

There is still a market for Blue rays for precisely this reason, compression does a lot of harm to the image and streaming services often run at 1/4 or less the bitrate. There is also the sound compression as well which is very heavily done on places like Netflix, presumably because their intended audience is watching on a tablet or a low end smart TV that has terrible in built speakers but if you have reasonable addon speakers and especially surround sound the average has clearly gotten worse.

The effect is very dramatic on Youtube and Twitch. Twitch has its ~6mbit/s limit and Youtube limits 1080p to around 10 mbit/s and 4k to about 18mbit/s which is well below the blue ray standard bitrates for these resolutions. You can't even override it with a better quality upload as it always compresses the Video to its standard bitrates. It shows up a lot in game footage where grass often becomes a smudge. The somewhat manipulative use of this recently has been DLSS and FSR. These two technologies effectively hide really well within Youtube's compression, while using them they introduce noticeable artifacts but once compressed by Youtube they largely disappear and appear almost identical to the original image. Soft images due to Temporal Anti Aliasing and reduced resolution also appear relatively normal on Youtube, they just hide in the impact of the compression.

These defaults for ADSL levels of performance of the internet are quite harmful to image and sound quality across a range of services and while those companies might not want to pay for more bandwidth we as customers should want better bitrates for when we play it on devices capable of showing and producing better.

Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telecom act of 1996 paid them to build fiber but they set the speed limits low enough that they could satisfy it with DSL. There’s new DSL tech that’s ~100mbps, so this is that technique again. The fatal flaw in 1996, like today, is not pushing for gigabit, and is one of the major reasons the US is a declining global power. Faster internet access is core infrastructure for participation in the 21st century.

The US is not a declining global power.

Completely based on the lens through which you are viewing it. I myself am American and have seen the quality of life for the average citizen declining in my life time. If I wasn't a part of the new middle class provided by technology, my children would have a worse life than me, combine that with the recidivism displayed by our judiciary recently and some could definitely argue we are declining. But with a user name like that, you already know all that. You might say our gdp and other metrics still show us as a giant on the world stage, I'm sure there are other metrics we can crow about, Yet it feels like little of that is trickling down to our citizens.
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