37 ms·

Americans don’t need fast home Internet service, FCC suggests

277 points by JacksonGariety 9y ago

iokevins 9y ago
Fix link so it points to article top, instead of comments (?) https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/08/maybe-americans-dont-need-fast-home-internet-service-fcc-suggests/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/08/maybe...
- LyalinDotCom 9y ago
  Yeah you have to click full story button to see article
rndmize 9y ago
> But during the Obama administration, the FCC determined repeatedly that broadband isn't reaching Americans fast enough, pointing in particular to lagging deployment in rural areas. No skin off my back. I already have internet service significantly better than the FCC broadband definition, and my core concern in this space is net neutrality. Rural areas are the ones that will be negatively affected by this kind of policy change in the coming years. You get what you vote for in this case.
- forapurpose 9y ago
  > No skin off my back How many customers have trouble accessing your website or service? How many potential customers, vendors, partners, employees etc have limited education and income because they lack basic resources?
  - s73ver 9y ago
    Part of the problem, I suspect, is that most startups only target cities, and those who live in them.
  - rndmize 9y ago
    Rural areas went strongly for Trump and the Republicans, and now Republican appointees are making policy decisions that will have negative effects on those areas. The conclusion I draw from this is that those voters either don't care about their internet speeds, or they do but value other things more and vote with those in mind (or maybe they think the market will take care of it). Regardless, they're getting what they voted for, and it doesn't affect me. Side note - the US population is heavily urban/suburban, so even if I was running some kind of internet-based business, the loss from ignoring/losing rural areas is something like ~25% of the population; imo it doesn't really matter that much.
    - thatcat 9y ago
      An alternative might be that they are slowing independent media penetration in rural areas. If internet speeds are ~ 1-2 mbps then streaming HD isn't smooth, but all the digital over the air broadcast FOX / NBC / ABC are available in HD for free.
iokevins 9y ago
California Assembly Bill 1665 attempted to something similar: "Both Frontier and AT&T maintain antiquated DSL systems that serve millions of Californians who live in communities that don’t have sufficient revenue potential. Low income and low density communities in other words." http://www.tellusventure.com/blog/california-bill-magically-improves-broadband-service-to-280000-homes/ http://www.tellusventure.com/blog/california-bill-magically-... AB 1665 seems on hold until legislators return on August 21: http://www.tellusventure.com/blog/hostile-takeover-of-california-broadband-subsidies-on-ice-for-now/ http://www.tellusventure.com/blog/hostile-takeover-of-califo...
chank 9y ago
Great so we can let ISPs off the hook for all the money we've already given them for faster service they haven't provided. This is how our government works folks.
- sxates 9y ago
  It's mostly how our Republican governments work.
  - ganoushoreilly 9y ago
    Both sides are guilty of this, anyone who believe one party is less in it for fame, power, and money, than the other is just as naive as those that voted in our current president.
    - leereeves 9y ago
      > just as naive as those that voted in our current president. So you feel both sides are guilty, but not Hillary?
    - jetpks 9y ago
      > Both sides are guilty of this, This republican excuse for poor government is so tired. Further, from the third paragraph in the article: > But during the Obama administration, the FCC determined repeatedly that broadband isn't reaching Americans fast enough, pointing in particular to lagging deployment in rural areas. So no, it's not really both sides here. There is very clearly one side doing a shit job.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
    - pilsetnieks 9y ago
      It's a false equivalency. One party's appointee fought for net neutrality and tried to regulated the ISPs as a utility; the other's is now actively dismantling everything his predecessor had accomplished, not even trying to pretend it's not in the ISPs' interests.
stevefeinstein 9y ago
The sentiment, that Americans don't NEED fast home internet is probably more accurate than not. It's not relevant though. Need has never been the driving force in the market. It's want, and if people want it, there's no reason they shouldn't have it. Why would the head of the FCC care if people need high speed? Only if he were in the pocket of the ISP's. Then he'd need a way to NOT create rules that mandates high speed internet. And if it's not a requirement, then it's up to the business to charge whatever they want without regulation. It's insidious, and quite clever albeit evil.
- xoa 9y ago
  >The sentiment, that Americans don't NEED fast home internet is probably more accurate than not. No, it's total bullshit, except in the pedantic "well, humans don't NEED electricity/medicine/communications/synthetic shelter/[anything since we wandered the plains of Africa and had a life expectancy in the 40s]" sense. Fast, symmetrical end point Internet is of massive importance and in not just direct but emergent ways that a surprising number of people, even on HN, don't seem to consider. Think for example of many of the concerns that have been raised over the last few years here about how the net has become ever more centralized, or about the difficulties of efforts like Tor. A lot of the core driver for that comes down to lack of end point bandwidth vs demands. If symmetrical gigabit connections were the rule rather then the exception, it'd be possible once again for significantly sized services run directly. Obviously if a service grew large enough they'd eventually need to move towards the core, but for a lot of people it'd completely eliminate the need for many current colo and cloud offerings. Would you be happy going back to thinnet or 10BASE-T on your LAN? Everything that runs there could run over the net with more bandwidth, latency only becomes a significant issue over extremely long distances. More bandwidth also means more can start to be devoted to meta-content issues like privacy. If we consider 25 Mbps to be a target for many services say, then onion routing networks are hard to make use of because they tend to impose significant overhead and be limited by slow nodes (particularly as even someone with a "enough" 25 Mbps connection themselves often would not be willing to allow all of that to be used by the larger network). But if everyone had 1000 Mbps (or more) to play with, then they could easily devote a bunch of that to sharing networks, take even a 90% overhead hit, and still have as much bandwidth as they needed. Just as more power in CPUs/GPUs has allowed us to not merely run things faster, but optimize towards the value of human time vs computer time, more bandwidth "then needed" represents leeway to optimize towards goals beyond the bare necessities. Seriously, giving everyone (or close enough) fast, symmetrical connections should be one of the absolute highest priorities of anyone concerned about market competition, centralized control, privacy, and so on. It'd be one of the best investments America could make, just as national electrification, telephone, and roads were.
geff82 9y ago
One more little sign America is more and more retiring its leadership in the world, opening doors for other nations to be more developed? In a time where many European countries aim at providing 100Mbit as a minimum in the next years and thus also open rural areas for economic development, decision/opinions as the one described in the article seem ludicrous. Of course, providing net infrastructure in the US with its huge size is a challenge. Yet, in a country like Sweden with similar population density, 100Mbit is already kind of the basic minimum even in remote areas. Here in my town in Germany we had super slow internet until 3 years ago. Now I can choose up to 400Mbit from different providers (100Mbit DSL or up to 400Mbit cable). Connectivity skyrocketed and it does in many other European areas. Now the US decides to lower standards? Is it the same kind of thinking as "we don't need high speed trains, we will have Hyperloop in 50 years", just adapted to "everything will be mobile one day"?
- mtanski 9y ago
  Feels like we're not even trying to pretend like we're reaching for greatness. I am far less in love with the country then I once was; there is little audacity to reach for more as a country on many fronts (infrastructure, healthcare, education, general well being, connectivity).
  - JBlue42 9y ago
    That's the thing. We talk a big game, think technology can solve anything, but then when it comes down to basics, we say "Nah, too hard...too much space, etc etc".
    - losteric 9y ago
      Plus war. So much endless mindless war... Since 2001, America has spent an average of ~$300 billion dollars per year on the nebulous war in the Middle East. Terrorists are media-hyped paper cuts compared to over 1 million Americans a year dying due to heart disease and cancer ($11B/y federal R&D) - not to mention Alzheimers, diabetes, obesity... and, to be blunt, you and almost everyone you know will probably die from one of those diseases. For perspective: on average terrorism kills ~79 Americans per year (including 9/11). There are 121 American suicides per day. The math doesn't make sense on any level. $300B/y killing people thousands of miles away and directly fueling increased hatred towards our nation... and a mere $11B/y invested in heard disease + cancer, which saves millions of citizen's at home. Even pie-in-the-sky research like fusion is a better investment. Fusion would solve or mitigate large global problems, including terrorism, yet it receives a mere 1/1000th the funding level as our wars. The real problem is we keep voting for the establishment parties because we believe that "3rd party will never win" dogma both parties roll out. Remember this: Nobody won the 2016 popular vote. 40% of Americans didn't vote last year, 30% voted Trump, 30% voted Clinton - and many of those 30% were compromise voters that would have preferred a different primary candidate, or simply voted against the opponent's candidate. This is democracy. If we want something different, we have to vote for someone different.
just2n 9y ago
The title seems a little clickbaity. It seems all that's being said is the FCC is recommending a reasonable minimum, not a maximum. I don't think it makes sense to run gig fiber connections to rural homes unless someone is footing the bill, but they definitely should have some internet capability, and 10/1 mobile and 25/3 direct seems at least minimally viable. This title makes it sound like the FCC is advocating that speeds above those are unnecessary for anyone, as if they're coming for your network speed. I don't get the sensationalism here, this hardly even seems newsworthy.
- rahkiin 9y ago
  Except telcos in the USA only do the bare minimum. Anything above that will have a huge pricetag or just not be available in many areas. So people with internet at current minimum will see their speeds lowered.
- phd514 9y ago
  Precisely. They're just saying that the current situation doesn't warrant regulatory intervention. In most metro areas, 100Mbps is pretty readily available due to market forces rather than regulation and competition among fiber providers is pushing speeds into the 1Gbps range in many areas.
- qubitcoder 9y ago
  While not exactly rural, I certainly enjoy having rock-solid gigabit fiber here in Rome, Georgia (via AT&T Fiber). And while mobile networks are improving, I can't envision mobile as an adequate replacement to dedicated fiber, at least currently. Especially given the variability in signal strength and speed. Not to mention data caps and throttling are also pre And just because a cell provider purports to offer LTE within a geographic area, that doesn't translate to LTE being available and reliable within and throughout your residence. In the past, I frequently experienced downgrades to 3G and Edge, with only intermittent LTE availability. I don't think we're in disagreement; I just wanted to share my perspective.
tempodox 9y ago
I'm just flabbergasted by this preposterous proposition.
- coldtea 9y ago
  Are you? Or did you just wanted to use several $10 words in a row?
deleted 9y ago
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norea-armozel 9y ago
I wonder how long until Pai adds extra regulatory requirements for utility cooperatives that will spring up to kick the telcos out of the rural areas? I'm not joking about that notion since the telcos really hate cooperatives that spring up and replace or compete with them.
noonespecial 9y ago
We didn't need anything faster than dial-up for the web of 1999. It's all the things yet unimagined that ubiquitous high speed internet would enable that's the real tragedy here. The complete failure of imagination of today's "leaders" is very disheartening.
- zanny 9y ago
  Modern American "conservatism" (or at least Trumpism) isn't even about holding ground on the present, its backpedaling to the past. The audience that eats up this rhetoric want to reverse entropy and will destroying anything they can to get a facsimile of it.
  - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
    Your problems with monopolies and regulatory capture started way before Trump came along.
    - croon 9y ago
      But the curve got a whole lot worse.
- apozem 9y ago
  This is an excellent point. The FCC's shameful cowing to ISPs has a huge opportunity cost to consumers. Greater connectivity creates new business opportunities. Uber would be impossible without smartphones and reliable data. Netflix would be a DVD company without high-speed home internet. When the FCC tells us we "don't need" better internet, it forecloses whole new categories of businesses.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    Re: Uber, the US has more wireless broadband subscriptions per capita, according to the OECD, than anyone but Japan and Finland (basically tied with Sweden). Re: Netflix, we just broke into the top 10 on Akamai's ranking of average connection speed. On both metrics, we blow away the other big Western democracies (the U.K., France, and Germany).
danjoc 9y ago
It's too bad internet speeds went nowhere under President Obama's administration. According to Wikipedia, internet speeds are currently faster in Mongolia and Romania than in the US. I hope the change in leadership and changing regulations will help the US regain its competitive edge.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- plandis 9y ago
  It's great you have your own opinion, but if you're going to claim that internet access and bandwidth did not improve at all in the past 8 years you should probably back that up with reputable data.
  - danjoc 9y ago
    >if you're going to claim that internet access and bandwidth did not improve at all in the past 8 years I don't see where I said that. If you'd like a data point, then look no further than the ultimate failure of Google Fiber. The largest internet company in the US can't successfully deploy fiber. Meanwhile in Japan, fiber is available almost everywhere, even in rural Hokkaido. I don't want to be stranded on slow internet while the rest of the world races away to faster and faster speeds. I hope president Trump's strategy to Make America Great Again works out, and we get fast internet here too. Whatever the previous administration's plan was, it clearly wasn't working.
hiisukun 9y ago
Unfortunately, a similar position is held by the NBN here in Australia (National broadband network), and indeed appears to be held by some members of the government. This has been a long standing position even prior to the NBN existing, resulting in almost two decades of delays and debates in replacing half century old copper phone lines that provide much of the people's internet. I wouldn't wish such lengthy technological delays on another country, so I hope this gets sorted out rather quicker than our issues have been.
- ianhowson 9y ago
  The irony is that in Australia, mobile broadband is superior to wired in most areas. Dear USA: please do not use this as evidence for mobile broadband's inherent superiority. I recently moved to Germany and am on what is considered a slow DSL link: 32Mbps down, 8Mbps up. It's wonderful and life changing compared with the 4/1Mbps Telstra DSL I used to have.
  - cJ0th 9y ago
    The situation in Germany isn't perfect though. If you live in a more rural area it is not unlikely that there is no DSL available at all.
dboreham 9y ago
The need for high throughput residential connections is almost entirely driven by use of video streaming services (Netflix etc). So if you assume people don't need those (e.g. if you are a satellite tv company) then this makes sense.
mnm1 9y ago
Fuck Pai. More and more Americans are working from home. That alone is reason enough that we need fast broadband. I know he doesn't care about people and their needs but scum like him are at least usually persuaded by business arguments so I'm making one here. He's not a representative of anyone. He was not elected. It's not his job to decide what Americans want. The only way to fix this FCC travesty is to get rid of the pro business, anti citizen scum who appointed him.
- Florin_Andrei 9y ago
  > I know he doesn't care about people and their needs but scum like him are at least usually persuaded by business arguments I think Pai is the kind of scum that's only persuaded by what's filling up his own intestines. He's not on some kind of Peter Thiel-level of cerebral, cold-hearted business mastery. He's just a big fat leech that somehow managed to climb the ladder far too high for anyone's good.
malchow 9y ago
Clickbait headline. FCC expresses possibility that in the near-future wireless connectivity may be more important to consumer internet users. Admitting "we don't know which way this industry is going to go" is probably a healthy thing for government to do.
- deleted 9y ago
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- khedoros1 9y ago
  The headline's accurate, IMO. The FCC is seeking comment on whether slower mobile connections should be considered sufficient when measuring overall broadband internet access deployment. 25Mbps/3Mbps wired is already an unambitious requirement, and Pai dissents from it having been raised from a previous 4/1 requirement, and suggests that a 10/1 mobile connection would be enough. The whole proposal sounds like they just want to lower the bar to what's available now and toss up the "Mission Accomplished" banner.
  - e9 9y ago
    I don't think you read actual proposal by FCC. They seem to suggest set 25/3 as a minimum and don't say anything about maximum. Their goal is a bit different from what you are thinking, their goal is to make sure every single person in USA has access to reasonable speed. You want 1gbit internet, but if that comes at a cost of some people in rural America to not have internet then it doesn't fit their goal. Therefore statement like "if we only had one choice of 25/3, we'd take it" can be easily taken out of context. They are clearly suggesting minimum and not maximum.
    - khedoros1 9y ago
      You're right, I didn't read the FCC proposal; I'm basing my information on the article itself. If the facts in the article are that far off of what the proposal itself says, then I'm confused why the whole post hasn't been flagged to oblivion.
deleted 9y ago
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ams6110 9y ago
10Mbps is more than I've had at home up until very recently. It's fine for me; I work mostly in plain text and prefer it whenver there's an option. But undertand many people want more. Don't understand the FCC weighing in one way or the other. Should be up to private enterprise to provide what customers want to pay for. Get rid of the local monopolies, get out of the way, and watch what happens.
rsj_hn 9y ago
We are seriously becoming a third world country. - 5300 water systems in violation of lead rules: http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/28/us/epa-lead-in-u-s-water-systems/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/28/us/epa-lead-in-u-s-water-syste... - rank 16 in road quality http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-sad-state-of-americas-roads/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-sad-state-of-americas-roads/ -expensive, slow mobile phone service compared to rest of the world http://time.com/money/3633758/wireless-cost-us-world-ofcom/ http://time.com/money/3633758/wireless-cost-us-world-ofcom/ - Piss Poor electrical grid, with an increasing number of outages http://insideenergy.org/2014/08/18/power-outages-on-the-rise-across-the-u-s/ http://insideenergy.org/2014/08/18/power-outages-on-the-rise... - 1 out of 9 bridges are structurally deficient https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/06/19/transportation-for-american-us-bridges-repair/2434369/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/06/19/transp... - rising death rates for prime age whites due to massive drug epidemic, obesity, and loneliness http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/03/23/521083335/the-forces-driving-middle-aged-white-peoples-deaths-of-despair http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/03/23/52108333... - highest incarceration rate in the world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra... - highest first day infant mortality in the industrialized world http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-has-highest-first-day-infant-mortality-out-of-industrialized-world-group-reports/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-has-highest-first-day-infant-... - U.S. adults rank below average in basic educational skills https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/08/us-adults-rank-below-average-global-survey-basic-education-skills https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/08/us-adults-ran... - Expensive, broken healthcare system that bankrupts families. We spend twice OECD average on a percent GDP basis with below average results https://www.oecd.org/unitedstates/Health-at-a-Glance-2015-Key-Findings-UNITED-STATES.pdf https://www.oecd.org/unitedstates/Health-at-a-Glance-2015-Ke... - Expensive, broken tertiary education system that bankrupts students. We spend twice OECD average on tertiary education and get poor results. https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/spending-on-tertiary-education.htm https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/spending-on-tertiary-educa... - Awful, expensive secondary education system compared to rest of industrialized world https://data.oecd.org/pisa/mathematics-performance-pisa.htm https://data.oecd.org/pisa/mathematics-performance-pisa.htm - Slow, expensive broadband compared to rest of the world http://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-falls-behind-rest-of-the-worlds-broadband-download-speeds-2017-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-falls-behind-rest-of-t... -all of the above probably contributes to us ending up poorer (in terms of median wealth) than other industrialized nations even though per capita GDP is high and taxes are low http://www.middleclasspoliticaleconomist.com/2012/07/us-trails-at-least-15-oecd-countries-in.html http://www.middleclasspoliticaleconomist.com/2012/07/us-trai...
drallison 9y ago
The FCC is wrong. The Internet is intertwingled with everything we do these days. I live in non-urban Montana at the end of a DSL line suffering "bandwidth exhaust", a term my ISP (CenturyLink) coined to describe what happens when they sell "high speed" Internet to many customers but do not adequately provision their DSL network to support them. This shortfall is being fixed, but progress is glacial. How to bring everyone on-board the Internet is still a work in progress.
matt_wulfeck 9y ago
I was recently fortunate enough to upgrade to 1Gb symmetrical fiber. I can say that it is absolutely fantastic. You really can do things you never did before: 1. I can host time-machine backups for my entire family on my home server, allow them to have off-site backups. 2. I can provide openVPN service for my entire family when they're outside of the home. I can also browse full-time on my own openVPN client at full-speed. 3. I can seed legitimate torrents for far, far longer than I normally would. For example, new Ubuntu releases. 4. I "donate" some of my bandwidth to other people and projects, allowing them to host files from my home. 5. I can test and host my own websites/services from my house. If it gets a little traction it won't destroy my entire internet. These are all things that simply were not possible when I was with Comcast, with only 10 Mb/s upload and bandwidth caps. If we completely deregulate internet I'm afraid they will be impossible for most everyone.
- mistersquid 9y ago
  Your list of things is fantastic and I could see the benefit of each and every one of them. But here's the issue. When you tell non-tech-savvy people about "provid[ing] openVPN service for [your] entire family" they go wall-eyed. That's the best-case scenario. In the worst case scenario (e.g. politicians and telecom execs), people become suspicious about what you might be hiding. Increasingly (for going on 50 years now), the US is an authoritarian state with low tolerance for people who insist on exercising the rights granted them in the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. (I'm thinking of the right be secure against illegal searches expressed in the 4th Amendment and the use of cryptography as a munition protected by the Second Amendment.)
  - orbitingpluto 9y ago
    All odd, because the argument ultimately boils down to, "I don't want to wait for X to download."
- voltagex_ 9y ago
  >1. I can host time-machine backups for my entire family on my home server, allow them to have off-site backups. What upstream speed do your family have? I've got the equipment and the bandwidth to do this, but my family have <1 megabit upstream available.
shmerl 9y ago
Yeah, corruption runs amok. May be Americans don't need corrupted FCC more?
basicplus2 9y ago
More likely the FCC is doing the bidding of those who wish to squash competition.
bdickason 9y ago
As someone who lives in a very expensive area, I would happily live in a more rural or less populated area if there was decent infrastructure to do so. I don't think that internet alone is the solution, but faster internet across the country is one of the hurdles for remote work and (theoretically) better distribution of the population. I know that a lot of other pieces have to fall into place to make this happen, but the entire country wired with strong backbones and last mile service will definitely help.
drawkbox 9y ago
The internet innovation spirit in the US is high but the companies in charge, and oversight, are on the milk it train. Cable and broadband companies were massively innovating in the 90s and early 2000s, now they are focusing on their 'innovation' on pricing and milking it by: slowing things down, data capping it, lobbying for more monopoly control, trying to get access to your private info and constant pricing games. All of these actions are due to lack of product innovation and to make up for lost revenues of not just increasing capacity and speeds thus offering a better product people will pay more for. All we can hope for is another disruptive network innovation that puts them in the rear-view or adds some competition like Google Fiber did or others. Google Fiber had an amazing impact to pricing and speeds in any market they entered. For the most part broadband has been lagging on real innovation and expansion, in favor of MBA metric pricing games and value extraction for some time.
zeep 9y ago
Symmetrical 2Gbps, which is offered by Comcast in some regions, is probably too fast for 99.99% of consumers... but it is nice if you have the option
imron 9y ago
sigh they're taking a leaf out of the Australian government's book.
smsm42 9y ago
> the 25/3 Mbps standard we propose would not even allow for a single stream of 1080p video conferencing, much less 4K video conferencing. Could somebody explain to me why one needs 4K for video conferencing? No, I mean it'd be nice to have tons of bandwidth, but why 4K video conference is an absolute necessity? The article kinda makes it sound like not having 4K video conferencing is the state of absolute depravity and without it it can't be even called proper internet service. Can anybody explain it to me?
- Strom 9y ago
  Nobody needs 4K video conferencing, or any video conferencing at all. It's just nice to have, and 4K is nicer to have than 1080p, which is nicer than 240p. 4k deserves more of a mention than say 16K because that's what the current high-end mainstream screens/recorders use.
  - smsm42 9y ago
    Everybody having dedicated OC-24 line would be even better. But it is presented as if it were some kind of bare necessity, not exuberant luxury. > that's what the current high-end mainstream screens/recorders use. But not for video conferencing, unless your are shooting cinema-class movies over videoconference.
    - Strom 9y ago
      Yes video conferencing doesn't use 4K as commonly as other video equipment of the same luxury class. It's an example of technology being held back by low internet speeds. One example of many, and the theory is that there are even more unknown examples of tech being held back by low speeds. 4K video conferencing was specifically chosen for legal reasons. The quote is from politician who is talking about this because it shows a mismatch between what's happening and how advanced telecommunications capability is defined in the statute. It gives them a leg to stand on. Don't read too much into it. This is about faster internet, not an effort to specifically deliver 4K video conferencing to humanity.
smsm42 9y ago
Also, could somebody explain to me what is the function of FCC in setting those "standard" speeds? > This would also be the first time that the FCC has set a broadband speed standard for mobile; at 10Mbps/1Mbps, it would be less than half as fast as the FCC's home broadband speed standard of 25Mbps/3Mbps. I mean, what that "standard" does? Is it prohibited to sell connection slower than this? Clearly not, since there tons of home internet offers slower than 25/3. So what is the meaning of this standard, what consequences does it have? Of course the press, who is supposed to inform me, is too busy trying to propagandize me and forgets to explain what that all actually means. Could fellow HNians fill the gap?
- speedz 9y ago
  Money, the answer is always money. The speed standard is used to funnel money to the incumbents. The incumbents are supposed to improve and/or upgrade their speeds or coverage to match these standards in return for these subsidies, but reality has a way to get in the way. In practice the incumbents pocket the money and deliver whatever they feel like.
  - smsm42 9y ago
    If this is true, then the meaning of the article is "FCC was going to spend tons of money to bribe ISPs into upgrading everybody to unrealistically high speeds, but instead they decided they would spend slightly less money to have ISPs to upgrade everybody to still unrealistically high speeds, but slightly lower, which wouldn't be happening in any case because there's no enough infrastructure to support it".
    - speedz 9y ago
      I don't quite follow your argument. Which speeds are unrealistically high?
      - smsm42 9y ago
        Looking at current offers and infrastructure, expecting everybody to be hooked up to minimum 25/3 line IMO is unrealistic.
mpolichette 9y ago
Yeah and the telecoms are going to charge for each device... with my home connection. I can serve all my devices locally from one trunk... With mobile I have to have a data plan for each device...
lnx01 9y ago
And this is why Kenya has faster average mobile internet than the USA.
heisenbit 9y ago
A lot of people did not read this article: It is about mobile. It is actually about mobile home access. Generally: - mobile coverage in the home is different from outside of the home. The primary focus of radio planning was outdoor coverage and the networks reflect this. I suspect this is about having a mobile access point at a fixed location which helps a little via antenna and positioning vs. a cell phone. - mobile networks have been planned with totally different traffic assumptions and those are literally cemented into base-station locations. - mobile is a shared medium with low constraints. It will be hard to guarantee minimum rates. Much harder than for fixed networks. There is a reason for the data caps - if there were not then competition would have long eliminated them. - disincentives for scale: Providing data rates for one home may be easy. But if all the neighbors hop on that bandwagon then things get more difficult. It is possible in principle but the cost for universal mobile access service and these bandwidth guarantees with the current technology may be quite high at this time. Anecdotal evidence of localized solutions also in other countries exist but can anyone point to a place where such a service has been deployed in a large country?
rabboRubble 9y ago
American's don't need modern fancy cars either. We have surreys, wagons, and horseless carriages too. (The sarcasm is real. Claiming that home internet access is unneeded implies a fundamental misunderstanding, a regressive misunderstanding, of how society has transformed in the past 20 years.)
chemmail 9y ago
I get by with 0.9mbps so F you all.
A1phab3t 9y ago
This is about suppressing information availability and opportunity in rural areas. Sorry financially-challenged rural dweller, you only have a phone with a fixed data allowance. I guess you'll need to continue relying on old media for your information needs. Have fun with whatever the public library has to offer-- oh by the way we're cutting the library from our budget. Oh and those of you who, despite our best efforts, discovered that you can learn a knowledge trade and work from home, staying near your family and friends, bringing money into the local economy rather than move to a city? Sorry, it's not in our political interest to allow you to broaden your horizons.

Fix link so it points to article top, instead of comments (?) https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/08/maybe-americans-dont-need-fast-home-internet-service-fcc-suggests/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/08/maybe...

LyalinDotCom 9y ago
Yeah you have to click full story button to see article

rndmize 9y ago

> But during the Obama administration, the FCC determined repeatedly that broadband isn't reaching Americans fast enough, pointing in particular to lagging deployment in rural areas. No skin off my back. I already have internet service significantly better than the FCC broadband definition, and my core concern in this space is net neutrality. Rural areas are the ones that will be negatively affected by this kind of policy change in the coming years. You get what you vote for in this case.

forapurpose 9y ago
> No skin off my back How many customers have trouble accessing your website or service? How many potential customers, vendors, partners, employees etc have limited education and income because they lack basic resources?
- s73ver 9y ago
  Part of the problem, I suspect, is that most startups only target cities, and those who live in them.
- rndmize 9y ago
  Rural areas went strongly for Trump and the Republicans, and now Republican appointees are making policy decisions that will have negative effects on those areas. The conclusion I draw from this is that those voters either don't care about their internet speeds, or they do but value other things more and vote with those in mind (or maybe they think the market will take care of it). Regardless, they're getting what they voted for, and it doesn't affect me. Side note - the US population is heavily urban/suburban, so even if I was running some kind of internet-based business, the loss from ignoring/losing rural areas is something like ~25% of the population; imo it doesn't really matter that much.
  - thatcat 9y ago
    An alternative might be that they are slowing independent media penetration in rural areas. If internet speeds are ~ 1-2 mbps then streaming HD isn't smooth, but all the digital over the air broadcast FOX / NBC / ABC are available in HD for free.

iokevins 9y ago

California Assembly Bill 1665 attempted to something similar: "Both Frontier and AT&T maintain antiquated DSL systems that serve millions of Californians who live in communities that don’t have sufficient revenue potential. Low income and low density communities in other words." http://www.tellusventure.com/blog/california-bill-magically-improves-broadband-service-to-280000-homes/ http://www.tellusventure.com/blog/california-bill-magically-... AB 1665 seems on hold until legislators return on August 21: http://www.tellusventure.com/blog/hostile-takeover-of-california-broadband-subsidies-on-ice-for-now/ http://www.tellusventure.com/blog/hostile-takeover-of-califo...

chank 9y ago

Great so we can let ISPs off the hook for all the money we've already given them for faster service they haven't provided. This is how our government works folks.

sxates 9y ago
It's mostly how our Republican governments work.
- ganoushoreilly 9y ago
  Both sides are guilty of this, anyone who believe one party is less in it for fame, power, and money, than the other is just as naive as those that voted in our current president.
  - leereeves 9y ago
    > just as naive as those that voted in our current president. So you feel both sides are guilty, but not Hillary?
  - jetpks 9y ago
    > Both sides are guilty of this, This republican excuse for poor government is so tired. Further, from the third paragraph in the article: > But during the Obama administration, the FCC determined repeatedly that broadband isn't reaching Americans fast enough, pointing in particular to lagging deployment in rural areas. So no, it's not really both sides here. There is very clearly one side doing a shit job.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - pilsetnieks 9y ago
    It's a false equivalency. One party's appointee fought for net neutrality and tried to regulated the ISPs as a utility; the other's is now actively dismantling everything his predecessor had accomplished, not even trying to pretend it's not in the ISPs' interests.

stevefeinstein 9y ago

The sentiment, that Americans don't NEED fast home internet is probably more accurate than not. It's not relevant though. Need has never been the driving force in the market. It's want, and if people want it, there's no reason they shouldn't have it. Why would the head of the FCC care if people need high speed? Only if he were in the pocket of the ISP's. Then he'd need a way to NOT create rules that mandates high speed internet. And if it's not a requirement, then it's up to the business to charge whatever they want without regulation. It's insidious, and quite clever albeit evil.

xoa 9y ago
>The sentiment, that Americans don't NEED fast home internet is probably more accurate than not. No, it's total bullshit, except in the pedantic "well, humans don't NEED electricity/medicine/communications/synthetic shelter/[anything since we wandered the plains of Africa and had a life expectancy in the 40s]" sense. Fast, symmetrical end point Internet is of massive importance and in not just direct but emergent ways that a surprising number of people, even on HN, don't seem to consider. Think for example of many of the concerns that have been raised over the last few years here about how the net has become ever more centralized, or about the difficulties of efforts like Tor. A lot of the core driver for that comes down to lack of end point bandwidth vs demands. If symmetrical gigabit connections were the rule rather then the exception, it'd be possible once again for significantly sized services run directly. Obviously if a service grew large enough they'd eventually need to move towards the core, but for a lot of people it'd completely eliminate the need for many current colo and cloud offerings. Would you be happy going back to thinnet or 10BASE-T on your LAN? Everything that runs there could run over the net with more bandwidth, latency only becomes a significant issue over extremely long distances. More bandwidth also means more can start to be devoted to meta-content issues like privacy. If we consider 25 Mbps to be a target for many services say, then onion routing networks are hard to make use of because they tend to impose significant overhead and be limited by slow nodes (particularly as even someone with a "enough" 25 Mbps connection themselves often would not be willing to allow all of that to be used by the larger network). But if everyone had 1000 Mbps (or more) to play with, then they could easily devote a bunch of that to sharing networks, take even a 90% overhead hit, and still have as much bandwidth as they needed. Just as more power in CPUs/GPUs has allowed us to not merely run things faster, but optimize towards the value of human time vs computer time, more bandwidth "then needed" represents leeway to optimize towards goals beyond the bare necessities. Seriously, giving everyone (or close enough) fast, symmetrical connections should be one of the absolute highest priorities of anyone concerned about market competition, centralized control, privacy, and so on. It'd be one of the best investments America could make, just as national electrification, telephone, and roads were.

geff82 9y ago

One more little sign America is more and more retiring its leadership in the world, opening doors for other nations to be more developed? In a time where many European countries aim at providing 100Mbit as a minimum in the next years and thus also open rural areas for economic development, decision/opinions as the one described in the article seem ludicrous. Of course, providing net infrastructure in the US with its huge size is a challenge. Yet, in a country like Sweden with similar population density, 100Mbit is already kind of the basic minimum even in remote areas. Here in my town in Germany we had super slow internet until 3 years ago. Now I can choose up to 400Mbit from different providers (100Mbit DSL or up to 400Mbit cable). Connectivity skyrocketed and it does in many other European areas. Now the US decides to lower standards? Is it the same kind of thinking as "we don't need high speed trains, we will have Hyperloop in 50 years", just adapted to "everything will be mobile one day"?

mtanski 9y ago
Feels like we're not even trying to pretend like we're reaching for greatness. I am far less in love with the country then I once was; there is little audacity to reach for more as a country on many fronts (infrastructure, healthcare, education, general well being, connectivity).
- JBlue42 9y ago
  That's the thing. We talk a big game, think technology can solve anything, but then when it comes down to basics, we say "Nah, too hard...too much space, etc etc".
  - losteric 9y ago
    Plus war. So much endless mindless war... Since 2001, America has spent an average of ~$300 billion dollars per year on the nebulous war in the Middle East. Terrorists are media-hyped paper cuts compared to over 1 million Americans a year dying due to heart disease and cancer ($11B/y federal R&D) - not to mention Alzheimers, diabetes, obesity... and, to be blunt, you and almost everyone you know will probably die from one of those diseases. For perspective: on average terrorism kills ~79 Americans per year (including 9/11). There are 121 American suicides per day. The math doesn't make sense on any level. $300B/y killing people thousands of miles away and directly fueling increased hatred towards our nation... and a mere $11B/y invested in heard disease + cancer, which saves millions of citizen's at home. Even pie-in-the-sky research like fusion is a better investment. Fusion would solve or mitigate large global problems, including terrorism, yet it receives a mere 1/1000th the funding level as our wars. The real problem is we keep voting for the establishment parties because we believe that "3rd party will never win" dogma both parties roll out. Remember this: Nobody won the 2016 popular vote. 40% of Americans didn't vote last year, 30% voted Trump, 30% voted Clinton - and many of those 30% were compromise voters that would have preferred a different primary candidate, or simply voted against the opponent's candidate. This is democracy. If we want something different, we have to vote for someone different.

just2n 9y ago

The title seems a little clickbaity. It seems all that's being said is the FCC is recommending a reasonable minimum, not a maximum. I don't think it makes sense to run gig fiber connections to rural homes unless someone is footing the bill, but they definitely should have some internet capability, and 10/1 mobile and 25/3 direct seems at least minimally viable. This title makes it sound like the FCC is advocating that speeds above those are unnecessary for anyone, as if they're coming for your network speed. I don't get the sensationalism here, this hardly even seems newsworthy.

rahkiin 9y ago
Except telcos in the USA only do the bare minimum. Anything above that will have a huge pricetag or just not be available in many areas. So people with internet at current minimum will see their speeds lowered.
phd514 9y ago
Precisely. They're just saying that the current situation doesn't warrant regulatory intervention. In most metro areas, 100Mbps is pretty readily available due to market forces rather than regulation and competition among fiber providers is pushing speeds into the 1Gbps range in many areas.
qubitcoder 9y ago
While not exactly rural, I certainly enjoy having rock-solid gigabit fiber here in Rome, Georgia (via AT&T Fiber). And while mobile networks are improving, I can't envision mobile as an adequate replacement to dedicated fiber, at least currently. Especially given the variability in signal strength and speed. Not to mention data caps and throttling are also pre And just because a cell provider purports to offer LTE within a geographic area, that doesn't translate to LTE being available and reliable within and throughout your residence. In the past, I frequently experienced downgrades to 3G and Edge, with only intermittent LTE availability. I don't think we're in disagreement; I just wanted to share my perspective.

tempodox 9y ago

I'm just flabbergasted by this preposterous proposition.

coldtea 9y ago
Are you? Or did you just wanted to use several $10 words in a row?

deleted 9y ago

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norea-armozel 9y ago

I wonder how long until Pai adds extra regulatory requirements for utility cooperatives that will spring up to kick the telcos out of the rural areas? I'm not joking about that notion since the telcos really hate cooperatives that spring up and replace or compete with them.

noonespecial 9y ago

We didn't need anything faster than dial-up for the web of 1999. It's all the things yet unimagined that ubiquitous high speed internet would enable that's the real tragedy here. The complete failure of imagination of today's "leaders" is very disheartening.

zanny 9y ago
Modern American "conservatism" (or at least Trumpism) isn't even about holding ground on the present, its backpedaling to the past. The audience that eats up this rhetoric want to reverse entropy and will destroying anything they can to get a facsimile of it.
- tonyedgecombe 9y ago
  Your problems with monopolies and regulatory capture started way before Trump came along.
  - croon 9y ago
    But the curve got a whole lot worse.
apozem 9y ago
This is an excellent point. The FCC's shameful cowing to ISPs has a huge opportunity cost to consumers. Greater connectivity creates new business opportunities. Uber would be impossible without smartphones and reliable data. Netflix would be a DVD company without high-speed home internet. When the FCC tells us we "don't need" better internet, it forecloses whole new categories of businesses.
- rayiner 9y ago
  Re: Uber, the US has more wireless broadband subscriptions per capita, according to the OECD, than anyone but Japan and Finland (basically tied with Sweden). Re: Netflix, we just broke into the top 10 on Akamai's ranking of average connection speed. On both metrics, we blow away the other big Western democracies (the U.K., France, and Germany).

danjoc 9y ago

It's too bad internet speeds went nowhere under President Obama's administration. According to Wikipedia, internet speeds are currently faster in Mongolia and Romania than in the US. I hope the change in leadership and changing regulations will help the US regain its competitive edge.

deleted 9y ago
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plandis 9y ago
It's great you have your own opinion, but if you're going to claim that internet access and bandwidth did not improve at all in the past 8 years you should probably back that up with reputable data.
- danjoc 9y ago
  >if you're going to claim that internet access and bandwidth did not improve at all in the past 8 years I don't see where I said that. If you'd like a data point, then look no further than the ultimate failure of Google Fiber. The largest internet company in the US can't successfully deploy fiber. Meanwhile in Japan, fiber is available almost everywhere, even in rural Hokkaido. I don't want to be stranded on slow internet while the rest of the world races away to faster and faster speeds. I hope president Trump's strategy to Make America Great Again works out, and we get fast internet here too. Whatever the previous administration's plan was, it clearly wasn't working.

hiisukun 9y ago

Unfortunately, a similar position is held by the NBN here in Australia (National broadband network), and indeed appears to be held by some members of the government. This has been a long standing position even prior to the NBN existing, resulting in almost two decades of delays and debates in replacing half century old copper phone lines that provide much of the people's internet. I wouldn't wish such lengthy technological delays on another country, so I hope this gets sorted out rather quicker than our issues have been.

ianhowson 9y ago
The irony is that in Australia, mobile broadband is superior to wired in most areas. Dear USA: please do not use this as evidence for mobile broadband's inherent superiority. I recently moved to Germany and am on what is considered a slow DSL link: 32Mbps down, 8Mbps up. It's wonderful and life changing compared with the 4/1Mbps Telstra DSL I used to have.
- cJ0th 9y ago
  The situation in Germany isn't perfect though. If you live in a more rural area it is not unlikely that there is no DSL available at all.

dboreham 9y ago

The need for high throughput residential connections is almost entirely driven by use of video streaming services (Netflix etc). So if you assume people don't need those (e.g. if you are a satellite tv company) then this makes sense.

mnm1 9y ago

Fuck Pai. More and more Americans are working from home. That alone is reason enough that we need fast broadband. I know he doesn't care about people and their needs but scum like him are at least usually persuaded by business arguments so I'm making one here. He's not a representative of anyone. He was not elected. It's not his job to decide what Americans want. The only way to fix this FCC travesty is to get rid of the pro business, anti citizen scum who appointed him.

Florin_Andrei 9y ago
> I know he doesn't care about people and their needs but scum like him are at least usually persuaded by business arguments I think Pai is the kind of scum that's only persuaded by what's filling up his own intestines. He's not on some kind of Peter Thiel-level of cerebral, cold-hearted business mastery. He's just a big fat leech that somehow managed to climb the ladder far too high for anyone's good.

malchow 9y ago

Clickbait headline. FCC expresses possibility that in the near-future wireless connectivity may be more important to consumer internet users. Admitting "we don't know which way this industry is going to go" is probably a healthy thing for government to do.

deleted 9y ago
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khedoros1 9y ago
The headline's accurate, IMO. The FCC is seeking comment on whether slower mobile connections should be considered sufficient when measuring overall broadband internet access deployment. 25Mbps/3Mbps wired is already an unambitious requirement, and Pai dissents from it having been raised from a previous 4/1 requirement, and suggests that a 10/1 mobile connection would be enough. The whole proposal sounds like they just want to lower the bar to what's available now and toss up the "Mission Accomplished" banner.
- e9 9y ago
  I don't think you read actual proposal by FCC. They seem to suggest set 25/3 as a minimum and don't say anything about maximum. Their goal is a bit different from what you are thinking, their goal is to make sure every single person in USA has access to reasonable speed. You want 1gbit internet, but if that comes at a cost of some people in rural America to not have internet then it doesn't fit their goal. Therefore statement like "if we only had one choice of 25/3, we'd take it" can be easily taken out of context. They are clearly suggesting minimum and not maximum.
  - khedoros1 9y ago
    You're right, I didn't read the FCC proposal; I'm basing my information on the article itself. If the facts in the article are that far off of what the proposal itself says, then I'm confused why the whole post hasn't been flagged to oblivion.

deleted 9y ago

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ams6110 9y ago

10Mbps is more than I've had at home up until very recently. It's fine for me; I work mostly in plain text and prefer it whenver there's an option. But undertand many people want more. Don't understand the FCC weighing in one way or the other. Should be up to private enterprise to provide what customers want to pay for. Get rid of the local monopolies, get out of the way, and watch what happens.

rsj_hn 9y ago

We are seriously becoming a third world country. - 5300 water systems in violation of lead rules: http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/28/us/epa-lead-in-u-s-water-systems/index.html http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/28/us/epa-lead-in-u-s-water-syste... - rank 16 in road quality http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-sad-state-of-americas-roads/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-sad-state-of-americas-roads/ -expensive, slow mobile phone service compared to rest of the world http://time.com/money/3633758/wireless-cost-us-world-ofcom/ http://time.com/money/3633758/wireless-cost-us-world-ofcom/ - Piss Poor electrical grid, with an increasing number of outages http://insideenergy.org/2014/08/18/power-outages-on-the-rise-across-the-u-s/ http://insideenergy.org/2014/08/18/power-outages-on-the-rise... - 1 out of 9 bridges are structurally deficient https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/06/19/transportation-for-american-us-bridges-repair/2434369/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/06/19/transp... - rising death rates for prime age whites due to massive drug epidemic, obesity, and loneliness http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/03/23/521083335/the-forces-driving-middle-aged-white-peoples-deaths-of-despair http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/03/23/52108333... - highest incarceration rate in the world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_ra... - highest first day infant mortality in the industrialized world http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-has-highest-first-day-infant-mortality-out-of-industrialized-world-group-reports/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-has-highest-first-day-infant-... - U.S. adults rank below average in basic educational skills https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/08/us-adults-rank-below-average-global-survey-basic-education-skills https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/08/us-adults-ran... - Expensive, broken healthcare system that bankrupts families. We spend twice OECD average on a percent GDP basis with below average results https://www.oecd.org/unitedstates/Health-at-a-Glance-2015-Key-Findings-UNITED-STATES.pdf https://www.oecd.org/unitedstates/Health-at-a-Glance-2015-Ke... - Expensive, broken tertiary education system that bankrupts students. We spend twice OECD average on tertiary education and get poor results. https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/spending-on-tertiary-education.htm https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/spending-on-tertiary-educa... - Awful, expensive secondary education system compared to rest of industrialized world https://data.oecd.org/pisa/mathematics-performance-pisa.htm https://data.oecd.org/pisa/mathematics-performance-pisa.htm - Slow, expensive broadband compared to rest of the world http://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-falls-behind-rest-of-the-worlds-broadband-download-speeds-2017-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-falls-behind-rest-of-t... -all of the above probably contributes to us ending up poorer (in terms of median wealth) than other industrialized nations even though per capita GDP is high and taxes are low http://www.middleclasspoliticaleconomist.com/2012/07/us-trails-at-least-15-oecd-countries-in.html http://www.middleclasspoliticaleconomist.com/2012/07/us-trai...

drallison 9y ago

The FCC is wrong. The Internet is intertwingled with everything we do these days. I live in non-urban Montana at the end of a DSL line suffering "bandwidth exhaust", a term my ISP (CenturyLink) coined to describe what happens when they sell "high speed" Internet to many customers but do not adequately provision their DSL network to support them. This shortfall is being fixed, but progress is glacial. How to bring everyone on-board the Internet is still a work in progress.

matt_wulfeck 9y ago

I was recently fortunate enough to upgrade to 1Gb symmetrical fiber. I can say that it is absolutely fantastic. You really can do things you never did before: 1. I can host time-machine backups for my entire family on my home server, allow them to have off-site backups. 2. I can provide openVPN service for my entire family when they're outside of the home. I can also browse full-time on my own openVPN client at full-speed. 3. I can seed legitimate torrents for far, far longer than I normally would. For example, new Ubuntu releases. 4. I "donate" some of my bandwidth to other people and projects, allowing them to host files from my home. 5. I can test and host my own websites/services from my house. If it gets a little traction it won't destroy my entire internet. These are all things that simply were not possible when I was with Comcast, with only 10 Mb/s upload and bandwidth caps. If we completely deregulate internet I'm afraid they will be impossible for most everyone.

mistersquid 9y ago
Your list of things is fantastic and I could see the benefit of each and every one of them. But here's the issue. When you tell non-tech-savvy people about "provid[ing] openVPN service for [your] entire family" they go wall-eyed. That's the best-case scenario. In the worst case scenario (e.g. politicians and telecom execs), people become suspicious about what you might be hiding. Increasingly (for going on 50 years now), the US is an authoritarian state with low tolerance for people who insist on exercising the rights granted them in the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. (I'm thinking of the right be secure against illegal searches expressed in the 4th Amendment and the use of cryptography as a munition protected by the Second Amendment.)
- orbitingpluto 9y ago
  All odd, because the argument ultimately boils down to, "I don't want to wait for X to download."
voltagex_ 9y ago
>1. I can host time-machine backups for my entire family on my home server, allow them to have off-site backups. What upstream speed do your family have? I've got the equipment and the bandwidth to do this, but my family have <1 megabit upstream available.

shmerl 9y ago

Yeah, corruption runs amok. May be Americans don't need corrupted FCC more?

basicplus2 9y ago

More likely the FCC is doing the bidding of those who wish to squash competition.

bdickason 9y ago

As someone who lives in a very expensive area, I would happily live in a more rural or less populated area if there was decent infrastructure to do so. I don't think that internet alone is the solution, but faster internet across the country is one of the hurdles for remote work and (theoretically) better distribution of the population. I know that a lot of other pieces have to fall into place to make this happen, but the entire country wired with strong backbones and last mile service will definitely help.

drawkbox 9y ago

The internet innovation spirit in the US is high but the companies in charge, and oversight, are on the milk it train. Cable and broadband companies were massively innovating in the 90s and early 2000s, now they are focusing on their 'innovation' on pricing and milking it by: slowing things down, data capping it, lobbying for more monopoly control, trying to get access to your private info and constant pricing games. All of these actions are due to lack of product innovation and to make up for lost revenues of not just increasing capacity and speeds thus offering a better product people will pay more for. All we can hope for is another disruptive network innovation that puts them in the rear-view or adds some competition like Google Fiber did or others. Google Fiber had an amazing impact to pricing and speeds in any market they entered. For the most part broadband has been lagging on real innovation and expansion, in favor of MBA metric pricing games and value extraction for some time.

zeep 9y ago

Symmetrical 2Gbps, which is offered by Comcast in some regions, is probably too fast for 99.99% of consumers... but it is nice if you have the option

imron 9y ago

sigh they're taking a leaf out of the Australian government's book.

smsm42 9y ago

> the 25/3 Mbps standard we propose would not even allow for a single stream of 1080p video conferencing, much less 4K video conferencing. Could somebody explain to me why one needs 4K for video conferencing? No, I mean it'd be nice to have tons of bandwidth, but why 4K video conference is an absolute necessity? The article kinda makes it sound like not having 4K video conferencing is the state of absolute depravity and without it it can't be even called proper internet service. Can anybody explain it to me?

Strom 9y ago
Nobody needs 4K video conferencing, or any video conferencing at all. It's just nice to have, and 4K is nicer to have than 1080p, which is nicer than 240p. 4k deserves more of a mention than say 16K because that's what the current high-end mainstream screens/recorders use.
- smsm42 9y ago
  Everybody having dedicated OC-24 line would be even better. But it is presented as if it were some kind of bare necessity, not exuberant luxury. > that's what the current high-end mainstream screens/recorders use. But not for video conferencing, unless your are shooting cinema-class movies over videoconference.
  - Strom 9y ago
    Yes video conferencing doesn't use 4K as commonly as other video equipment of the same luxury class. It's an example of technology being held back by low internet speeds. One example of many, and the theory is that there are even more unknown examples of tech being held back by low speeds. 4K video conferencing was specifically chosen for legal reasons. The quote is from politician who is talking about this because it shows a mismatch between what's happening and how advanced telecommunications capability is defined in the statute. It gives them a leg to stand on. Don't read too much into it. This is about faster internet, not an effort to specifically deliver 4K video conferencing to humanity.

smsm42 9y ago

Also, could somebody explain to me what is the function of FCC in setting those "standard" speeds? > This would also be the first time that the FCC has set a broadband speed standard for mobile; at 10Mbps/1Mbps, it would be less than half as fast as the FCC's home broadband speed standard of 25Mbps/3Mbps. I mean, what that "standard" does? Is it prohibited to sell connection slower than this? Clearly not, since there tons of home internet offers slower than 25/3. So what is the meaning of this standard, what consequences does it have? Of course the press, who is supposed to inform me, is too busy trying to propagandize me and forgets to explain what that all actually means. Could fellow HNians fill the gap?

speedz 9y ago
Money, the answer is always money. The speed standard is used to funnel money to the incumbents. The incumbents are supposed to improve and/or upgrade their speeds or coverage to match these standards in return for these subsidies, but reality has a way to get in the way. In practice the incumbents pocket the money and deliver whatever they feel like.
- smsm42 9y ago
  If this is true, then the meaning of the article is "FCC was going to spend tons of money to bribe ISPs into upgrading everybody to unrealistically high speeds, but instead they decided they would spend slightly less money to have ISPs to upgrade everybody to still unrealistically high speeds, but slightly lower, which wouldn't be happening in any case because there's no enough infrastructure to support it".
  - speedz 9y ago
    I don't quite follow your argument. Which speeds are unrealistically high?
    - smsm42 9y ago
      Looking at current offers and infrastructure, expecting everybody to be hooked up to minimum 25/3 line IMO is unrealistic.

mpolichette 9y ago

Yeah and the telecoms are going to charge for each device... with my home connection. I can serve all my devices locally from one trunk... With mobile I have to have a data plan for each device...

lnx01 9y ago

And this is why Kenya has faster average mobile internet than the USA.

heisenbit 9y ago

A lot of people did not read this article: It is about mobile. It is actually about mobile home access. Generally: - mobile coverage in the home is different from outside of the home. The primary focus of radio planning was outdoor coverage and the networks reflect this. I suspect this is about having a mobile access point at a fixed location which helps a little via antenna and positioning vs. a cell phone. - mobile networks have been planned with totally different traffic assumptions and those are literally cemented into base-station locations. - mobile is a shared medium with low constraints. It will be hard to guarantee minimum rates. Much harder than for fixed networks. There is a reason for the data caps - if there were not then competition would have long eliminated them. - disincentives for scale: Providing data rates for one home may be easy. But if all the neighbors hop on that bandwagon then things get more difficult. It is possible in principle but the cost for universal mobile access service and these bandwidth guarantees with the current technology may be quite high at this time. Anecdotal evidence of localized solutions also in other countries exist but can anyone point to a place where such a service has been deployed in a large country?

rabboRubble 9y ago

American's don't need modern fancy cars either. We have surreys, wagons, and horseless carriages too. (The sarcasm is real. Claiming that home internet access is unneeded implies a fundamental misunderstanding, a regressive misunderstanding, of how society has transformed in the past 20 years.)

chemmail 9y ago

I get by with 0.9mbps so F you all.

A1phab3t 9y ago

This is about suppressing information availability and opportunity in rural areas. Sorry financially-challenged rural dweller, you only have a phone with a fixed data allowance. I guess you'll need to continue relying on old media for your information needs. Have fun with whatever the public library has to offer-- oh by the way we're cutting the library from our budget. Oh and those of you who, despite our best efforts, discovered that you can learn a knowledge trade and work from home, staying near your family and friends, bringing money into the local economy rather than move to a city? Sorry, it's not in our political interest to allow you to broaden your horizons.