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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

#61
post #32

The problem, in the USA for most people, is Comcast. Downspeed hardly matters. It's been plenty for decades. Upload speed has stagnated. I uploaded as fast in 2003 as I do now in 2022. And as others have said, it's not so much about 1 fast provider as many providers and choice. In my comcast monopoly my plan started at $60/mo in 2011 and without any changes on my end and no change in my upload speed that price has in…

I was curious about the upload issue recently and learned that it is because of limitations of the old cable infrastructure. You presumably receive your internet over coax (which can still provide really good download speeds, I was surprised when my gigabit internet package came and it only had a coax port instead of fiber). Cable TV is pretty much all downloads, with only a small portion of the bandwidth reserved fo…

In Denmark I had 300Mbit/s coax/cable broadband. I think the upload was about 30Mbit/s.

It was then upgraded to 1000Mbit/s down, 250Mbit/s up, with no change to the cost, IIRC. A technician installed a frequency (?) splitter of some sort, one side for TV and the other Internet.

He remarked that my socket was nicely accessible, so I think he'd been doing this hundreds of times.

(I may have paid an engineer call-out fee for this, I can't really remember. It was 2 years ago.)

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

#63
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.

Not in the US :'(

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

#64
post #13

No. This is insanity. Faster speed will mean that providers will charge more. I am perfectly fine with 25 Mbps. I was fine with 10 Mbps too until they eliminated that level and I was forced to pay more. Edit: why disagree?

I pay 15$ for 500/300 megabit. It's a monopoly that gouges your prices, not competition or mandated high speeds.

mandating higher speeds is how you preserve monopolies

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

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would much rather have the govt provide incentives for there to be more than one provider. In the UK, ISPs are forced to lease their last-mile lines to anyone who wants to provide internet service. This results in a decent amount of competition.

If, say, Comcast had to lease their last mile, why wouldn’t they charge an arm and a leg to whoever was trying to sell internet? I don’t see how this would bring prices down meaningfully.

The law says they must lease to themselves at the same cost.

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

#66

The problem, in the USA for most people, is Comcast. Downspeed hardly matters. It's been plenty for decades. Upload speed has stagnated. I uploaded as fast in 2003 as I do now in 2022. And as others have said, it's not so much about 1 fast provider as many providers and choice. In my comcast monopoly my plan started at $60/mo in 2011 and without any changes on my end and no change in my upload speed that price has in…

Hopefully starlink will raise the bar with competition

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

#67

What resources does a 100 Mbps connection give access to that a 25 Mbps connection does not? You don't need 100 Mbps to access educational content. Khan Academy looks fine in 1080p. And even if it didn't, Netflix says their 4K streams only need 15 Mbps. You don't need 100 Mbps to be a remote knowledge worker. Video calls need a stable connection with low latency—I wish more people used ethernet—but that connection do…

Everyone's needs are different. Yes, a lot of people can get along just fine with 20 megabit up and down, and you are spot on that latency may be the worse issue.

In my case, my work requires me to frequently upload files of about 15GB in size. On my old cable connection - which did provide gigabit downloads - the uploads were capped at 30 megabits. So it took about two hours to upload one of these files, with people waiting for it.

Now that I have a symmetric gigabit fiber connection, these files take only 10 minutes to upload. That's a game changer.

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

#68
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…

> Fast crypto transactions?

Is client bandwidth a limiting factor in crypto transactions?

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

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tbf, the updates can just take longer to download. Higher speed does not enable them as such, which is what the op asked. Similar for steam - spending extra hour for a download ahead of time is... fine for me.

Great that it's fine for you. Is the fact that you enjoy waiting for downloads a reason to push the same suffering on others?

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