31–40 of 221 posts
FYI to all commenters: the current FCC chair was nominated by Trump>Biden>Trump and unanimously confirmed by the Senate all 3 times.
AT&T Fiber or Verizon Fios will tend to start at $60-90/month as an "introductory" price where your bill just keeps going up $10-20/months every yera unless you go through the dance of calling up and threatening to cancel every year. So you could be paying $140/month when a new customer is being charged half that.
Chattanooga, TN has long been known for its excellent and affordable fiber Internet [1].
We know what works: it's municipal broadband not national ISPs. We've known this for a long time but we somehow refuse to recognize it, in part because national ISPs have successfully bought and paid for legislators to create a moat through things like onerous regulation or outright banning of building muncipal broadband.
But why is this so? It's economics and incredibly simple. You see when a town or city or county owns the Internet infrastructure, you've removed the profit motive. Put another way, the workers own the means of production.
When you have a national ISP, some pension funds and shareholders own the means of production. And what do they demand? Ever-increasing profits. And how do profits increase? By raising prices and cutting costs.
There is absolutely no reason Internet access should cost $100/month.
And we see this same pattern play out in every market. It's the end state of capitalism.
This seems to be good for Starlink at the expense of the fiber providers?
I think this isn't as bad as people make of out to be. The 100/20 goal is perfectly fine for the vast majority of users. The only thing really supporting the old goal of gigabit connections was fiber. I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas. Fiber plans tend to be expensive and mostly available in the areas that already have usable high speed options. If we really want t…
> I think this isn't as bad as people make of out to be. The 100/20 goal is perfectly fine for the vast majority of users 640K was "perfectly fine" for most people, too. 100/20 is barely enough for a household of 3-5 "light" users. The US already has abysmal broadband speed/bandwidth/latency metrics compared to the rest of the developed world and settling for 2010's version of "fast" in 2025 is ... not how we're goin…
Well they voted for it, so I'll stick to my fiber in my big city and they can fend for themselves and pay $90/month for 10 up 1 down or whatever while I pay $40 for 1 gig....
With the snide remarks aside, why expand copper or fiber into rural areas when we can just let SpaceX and others launch satellites and provide a potentially better service?
I'm sympathetic to a goal of "have really, really fast Internet service" but maybe there is a better regulatory framework for increasing competition both urban/suburban and rural areas.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where do you live? Because Starlink is double my current internet plan for half the bandwidth and at least 10x in latency. I am not seeing a plan on Starlink’s website that is lower than $120 a month for unlimited data. I live in rural Ohio.
It depends where you live what you get. I was able to get $80/mo Residential Lite service which should top out at 150 but I routinely see 400+ mbit down. Latency is around 20-25ms on average for me. My lake home is in Central MN.
This seems to be good for Starlink at the expense of the fiber providers?
- Elon is still stoking the Epstein stuff on Twitter as we speak
It’s not good for Starlink for that reason. We are inside the belly of fascism, so your question reads like someone oblivious, with all due respect.
thanks government we love slow and expensive.
"we" = the corporations: "yes, quite right"
sigh
This seems to be good for Starlink at the expense of the fiber providers?
The new FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is very pro-Starlink. Honestly Starlink is the best rural Internet access in the short term but any government subsidies going into Starlink are not going into fiber which has higher speed long term.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technically Tesla was the first major company globally starting a trend. Aka leading.
By that definition, we haven't been leading for years since the Chinese are cranking them out much faster than Tesla. What if we want to be a world leader in satellite internet coverage? Is that a goal you support? Because that's part of what these changes are about.