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100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say

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Re: 100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say

#231

Post by maxerickson »

SpaethCo wrote: post #162
lazerpants wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I checked Comcast's 10k report and their margin for the segment including broadband is over 40%, which is crazy but about what you would expect from a de facto monopoly. I don't think forcing them to invest in capex to benefit customers is asking so much when they are making those kinds of margins.

Those margins are misleading because they're _multi_ service operators, and accounting standards require that you can only list direct costs. Revenue is easy: how much did you take in for video? phone? Internet access? Costs are harder because you can only include business line direct costs. Since the cable plant is used by voice, video and data services it's not a direct cost of any of them. Same thing with the serv…

They report all of the services using the cable as a single segment of their business. Of course they are attributing operating costs to that segment.

Like 40% of the segment cost is "programming" (TV), so the internet part of the service likely has even better operating margin than the segment overall (basically, slightly higher revenue than TV with considerably lower costs).

Re: 100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say

#232

Post by ChrisLomont »

relaxing wrote: post #171
ChrisLomont wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine how good our network technology policy would be if the Senate weren't run by septagenarians and octogenarian. The ages of the senators proposing this are 76 (Joe Manchin), 76 (Angus King), 65 (Rob Portman), and 56 (Michael Bennet). 3 of the 4 are older than the median Senator age. None of the 4 are in the youngest 25%. Image how good our opinions of the Senate would be if we based them in facts.

The comment was about who runs the senate, not the proposers. Of the individuals you named, only Manchin has any chairmanships.

Nearly every single bill in Congress is introduced by non-chairmen, so this is an odd misdirection. Bills in both the entire session and in each subcommittee are voted on by members.

And again, this demonstrates that mocking old people as somehow the problem is factually unsupportable by the facts.

Re: 100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say

#233

Post by sbalea »

teach wrote: post #180
lmilcin wrote: post #137

I live in Poland and I am BAFFLED at how bad internet in US, supposedly one of the most developed countries on Earth, is. I have commercial (ie high priority), 600Mbit/120Mbit broadband with extremely stable (under 15ms, over 99% of th time) round trip to most of the Poland, for equivalent of 20 USD per month. I know its not the same everywhere in Poland, but consider I also have three mobile internet plans. One of t…

So Poland has two things going for it: (1) Poland is a LOT smaller than the United States. It's not much bigger than the state of Wyoming, yet it has more than 60x the population. That makes building infrastructure a lot cheaper and more profitable. (2) The US had the Internet FIRST. That's not an advantage when it comes to infrastructure. For example, England had roads hundreds of years before the US did, so roads i…

1. I am tired of hearing this rehashed over and over again. Yes, overall density in US is lower than most countries in Europe, but even high density places like New Jersey still have plenty of spots with only one, overpriced, shitty provider. For example, I am paying $98/mo for 400/40mbps cable, and that's my only wired option. My dad's country side house at the foothills of the Romanian Carpathian mountains gets 900/450mbps FTTH service for $10/mo. 2. Back in the late 90s, both Romania and my NJ neighborhood were at the same point, twisted copper phone lines and cable TV service over coax cable. Yet 20+ years later, the differences are stark. Don't get me started on cell phone service :)

Re: 100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say

#234

Post by LinuxBender »

LinuxBender wrote: post #105
beachtaxidriver wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in my case that map is overly optimistic. It reports two additional providers that won't actually make the installation. I've tried. Charter only.

It makes me wonder how often ISP's are misreporting to the FCC about coverage.

I found this [1] form that might be a place to submit inaccuracies of their map, maybe.

[1] - https://www.fcc.gov/information-required-when-filing-informa...

Re: 100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say

#235

Post by AdamJacobMuller »

supertrope wrote: post #135
plantain wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DOCSIS 3 (from 2006) can do 100/100 over cable - it's the decision of the provider not the technology.

100 Mbps up requires expanding the uplink band from 5-42MHz to 85MHz. That requires changing outdoor components like amplifier and filters, and upgrading millions of cable TV boxes, splitters and modems inside customers' homes. The combined cost of hiring more technicians and buying boxes might approach the cost of upgrading to fiber. Altice USA decided to skip DOCSIS 3.1 and start dragging fiber.

Beyond that it's pulling from a finite pot. Every Hz you allocate to upstream is one less Hz you can allocate to downstream.

Fiber doesn't have this constraint. It's trivial (and common) to deploy a pair to each premise, but, even if you don't want to do that you can shine light in both directions on the same piece of glass and reasonably* run a terabit across a single fiber (not a pair).

Re: 100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say

#236

Post by relaxing »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #232
relaxing wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment was about who runs the senate, not the proposers. Of the individuals you named, only Manchin has any chairmanships.

Nearly every single bill in Congress is introduced by non-chairmen, so this is an odd misdirection. Bills in both the entire session and in each subcommittee are voted on by members. And again, this demonstrates that mocking old people as somehow the problem is factually unsupportable by the facts.

Again, “runs the senate.”

The process of bringing a bill to vote in committee or in session is not nearly as democratic as you imagine.

Re: 100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say

#237

Post by smichel17 »

gabereiser wrote: post #189
fulafel wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nitpick: mm-wave is just one of the dozen things that are in the 5G cornucopia of random technologies, it's not more or less "true 5G" than eg 5G edge computing.

In America 4>5 so we’ve appropriated “5G” to mean the mm-wave wireless transmission. There are still large pockets of the US on data caps as low as 10gb. Throttled connections. Asymmetric networks. All so we can be nickel and dimed to death on fees, privilege, bundles, and in some cases double paying for content.

It's funny to me, reading "as low as 10gb". I used 45MB of data last month, and 9 of that was the Android OS. (And, yes, 4.33GB on wifi, of which 186MB was the OS). I know other people use their phones way more than I do, it's just a different world to me, where data limits are a thing to think about.

Re: 100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say

#238

Post by Red_Leaves_Flyy »

smichel17 wrote: post #237
gabereiser wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In America 4>5 so we’ve appropriated “5G” to mean the mm-wave wireless transmission. There are still large pockets of the US on data caps as low as 10gb. Throttled connections. Asymmetric networks. All so we can be nickel and dimed to death on fees, privilege, bundles, and in some cases double paying for content.

It's funny to me, reading "as low as 10gb". I used 45MB of data last month, and 9 of that was the Android OS. (And, yes, 4.33GB on wifi, of which 186MB was the OS). I know other people use their phones way more than I do, it's just a different world to me, where data limits are a thing to think about.

I use at least 50gb of cellular and a few tb cable internet every month.

Re: 100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say

#239

Post by m463 »

aksss wrote: post #191
m463 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe it's a model to segregate pricing. business costs more, gets good upload. Residential costs less, gets good download. That said, fiber is really really efficient and can put 100 customers utilizing the entire 100m on one strand.

Business costs more because it’s less oversubscribed than resi, also is intended to be more robust in terms of change windows, and depending on your provider may have some best effort SLAs.

Doesn't mean it's not segregated pricing.

Business class in airlines -- goes the same place as coach, but "the service is better". Actually what they've done ist o mindfully take away from coach to stimulate upgrades to business class.

I signed up for business internet just so I could get a static ip address. Other internet services like sonic will give you a static address if you ask.

Re: 100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say

#240

Post by lmilcin »

sbalea wrote: post #233
teach wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Poland has two things going for it: (1) Poland is a LOT smaller than the United States. It's not much bigger than the state of Wyoming, yet it has more than 60x the population. That makes building infrastructure a lot cheaper and more profitable. (2) The US had the Internet FIRST. That's not an advantage when it comes to infrastructure. For example, England had roads hundreds of years before the US did, so roads i…

1. I am tired of hearing this rehashed over and over again. Yes, overall density in US is lower than most countries in Europe, but even high density places like New Jersey still have plenty of spots with only one, overpriced, shitty provider. For example, I am paying $98/mo for 400/40mbps cable, and that's my only wired option. My dad's country side house at the foothills of the Romanian Carpathian mountains gets 900…

That explanation is even more strange if you figure out nothing of the infrastructure from 20 years ago still exists that could explain the difference. Every single active or passive network element must have been changed when technology evolved, likely multiple times.

I have a better explanation, and it is just greedy companies that invest absolute minimum into infrastructure, oversubscribe their internet access and pioneered worst possible customer service just because the customers have no other option.

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