5 ms·

3Mbps uploads still fast enough for US homes, Ajit Pai says in final report

34 points by elsewhen 6y ago

notyourwork 6y ago
The state of US technology has become embarrassing. How much bandwidth does a zoom video need? Ajit Pai has held back the US and our economy with his action. Edit: the exact Zoom bandwidth specs was rhetorical. Bandwidth should be symmetrical based on how we use it today and 3Mbps is too slow to support a household with multiple users.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  1Mbps for "high quality", 3Mbps for 1080p. By what reasoning is 3Mbps not good enough for average member of the economy?
  - notyourwork 6y ago
    Because a household family uses internet for more then a single zoom video. If I have two kids and work from home, 3Mbps isn’t sufficient to support a house.
    - dariusj18 6y ago
      Or if you have two people at home working and doing web meetings. I've learned that lesson during COVID.
      - onion2k 6y ago
        That problem can be solved very easily and very cheaply with better communication and scheduling rather than any sort of tech though.
        xboxnolifes 6y ago
        Have all companies schedule all of their meetings based on their employee's housemates' meeting schedules in a different company? That doesn't sound very easy.
        dariusj18 6y ago
        That's like saying we should just work different hours. Boom simple solution, just need to get 20 other people on board to work nights instead of days.
- garrettgrimsley 6y ago
  From the Zoom system requirements: 1:1 call * 600kbps (up/down) for high-quality video * 1.2Mbps (up/down) for 720p HD video * Receiving 1080p HD video requires 1.8Mbps (up/down) * Sending 1080p HD video requires 1.8Mbps (up/down) Group call * 800kbps/1.0 Mbps (up/down) for high-quality video * For gallery view and/or 720p HD video: 1.5Mbps/1.5Mbps (up/down) * Receiving 1080p HD video requires 2.5Mbps (up/down) * Sending 1080p HD video requires 3.0Mbps (up/down) https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362023-System-requirements-for-Windows-macOS-and-Linux#:~:text=800kbps%2F1.0%20Mbps%20(up%2F,3.0Mbps%20(up%2Fdown) https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362023-System-r...
  - saltyshake 6y ago
    yes, but most households have more than 1 person living there and sharing the connection for their own Zoom or YouTube.
  - toyg 6y ago
    Now multiply that by 2.53 (average US household size in 2020) and you'll see why 3 Mbps are probably not enough.
    - notyourwork 6y ago
      Exactly my point! Consider a group of college students living together or an average family and we start to realize that its not about a single activity but the multiple parallel needs for the same shared pipe that causes congestion. I find it surprising that so many seem to disagree that this is ridiculously low.
  - cozzyd 6y ago
    I'm surprised the screen-sharing bandwidth required is so low... I guess it must be quite low framerate? Because some of us have giant monitors...
    - 1-more 6y ago
      It's usually pretty easy to compress because you're so often sharing text on a solid background. I'm figuring that there's gotta be a higher bitrate for sharing, say, a movie or video game than sharing my jira board.
kodah 6y ago
3Mbps symmetrical is the bare minimum for an HD Zoom call. That's good enough for one working person. People in cities have gotten the privilege and luxury of routinely getting network upgrades while rural communities are basically left in the dust. I've been stuck out in the country because I got COVID out here and Zoom calls degrade frustratingly fast. One reason is because the only method of delivery that they have is point to point connections, which have a good amount of variability in them despite advancements. When I used to live out here I lived in a different area served by CenturyLink. These lines were incredibly old and in disrepair. So, speed isn't the only problem but slow and unstable is not okay in a day when most things require a consistent connection. So, is it fast enough? I don't think so. I think a policy which stops upgrading cities until a baseline is met in the rest of the country is also appropriate.
- thebean11 6y ago
  > I think a policy which stops upgrading cities until a baseline is met in the rest of the country is also appropriate. What does one thing have to do with the other? Cities aren't in any way preventing improvements elsewhere.
  - inetknght 6y ago
    > Cities aren't in any way preventing improvements elsewhere. Opportunity cost. Why spend your installation technician's time in an unprofitable rural region when you can better-spend their time in a profitable city?
    - hylaride 6y ago
      Well, these rural areas keep electing "free market" republicans, so...
      - kodah 6y ago
        Personally, your argument seems dubious but I'll answer you in earnest. If your argument were true this map would look much different: https://www.fcc.gov/health/maps https://www.fcc.gov/health/maps Local politicians all work just about the same way when it comes to approving an internet provider. Attracting them generally has to do with business incentives, which means if the State and/or Federal government do nothing then you'll get what you have today.
rubicks 6y ago
His argument is predicated on the antiquated assumption that ISP customers can be provisioned primarily as "internet consumers". The adoption of virtual meetings has exposed this notion to be the fallacy it is.
cozzyd 6y ago
I wonder if I'm the only one with better upload than download... $ speedtest Speedtest by Ookla Server: Windstream - Chicago, IL (id = 17384) ISP: Webpass Latency: 0.93 ms (0.10 ms jitter) Download: 847.27 Mbps (data used: 642.6 MB) Upload: 936.79 Mbps (data used: 445.7 MB) Packet Loss: 0.0% (maybe this is because of other users in my building...)
- dx034 6y ago
  Most speedtests aren't designed to test very high speeds. It could just be that the server on the other side was congested.
amelius 6y ago
640K ought to be enough for anybody. And with 3Mbps you can send or receive the contents of your entire RAM in under two seconds.
- t0mbstone 6y ago
  Lemme see... 3 divided by 8 is 0.375, or 375K... In two seconds that equals 750K of data. Yep, the math checks out!
chris_wot 6y ago
Is this guy going to be replaced by someone new in the Biden administration? He's a disaster.
- blueblob 6y ago
  He was appointed by the Obama/Biden administration, so I'm quite ambivalent on the question. I feel like almost everyone in tech wants him to go but I may be just projecting my own bias.
  - Dirlewanger 6y ago
    Surprisingly enough, aside from his grand meme-filled display of repealing Net Neutrality articles, nothing really happened as a result of it.
  - boringg 6y ago
    Appointed by Obama/Biden under Mitch McConnells recommendation. I.e. Obama/Biden wouldn't have been able to get anyone else through with out Mitch McConnells (GOP Senate Leader) green light.
- doitLP 6y ago
  Yes. Was supposed to step down yesterday. https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/11/30/21726645/ajit-pai-fcc-chairman-leaving-net-neutrality https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/11/30/21726645/ajit-pai-fcc-...
- mcraiha 6y ago
  "Biden is most likely to select one of two people: either Edward "Smitty" Smith, a telecom attorney who has worked as a legal adviser to former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration; or Jessica Rosenworcel, the most senior Democratic commissioner at the FCC." https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/who-joe-biden-might-pick-for-the-next-fcc-chair-and-why-62180009 https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...
fat_pikachu 6y ago
I'm going to be the contrarian here and agree with this definition. I think it's more important that the government prioritizes making access to 25/3 available to everyone before making 100/15 (or whatever the new standard is suppose to be) available to the people who already have 25/3.
gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
The enlightened Europeans were begging Netflix to start throttling during the pandemic; the US didn't.
lprd 6y ago
I can safely say that the ISP situation in the US is simply abysmal. I'm an expat here in France and the market for ISP/mobile is pretty great. Companies are very competitive in their offers, and I can switch at any moment since contracts are less common. Whats more, fiber is mostly available throughout the country. Our current administration has an objective of providing even more infrastructure to remote locations. Obviously, US is much larger than France, but I still maintain that it can be vastly improved. Concluding that 3Mbps is _enough_ is not grounded in reality. Lots of people are working from home these days, and I suspect remote work will continue to climb now that companies are becoming more comfortable with that option.
zaroth 6y ago
There’s a lot of country out there in between those two coasts. The FCC has to set a baseline number for what it determines meets the statutory definition of “advanced telecommunications capability”. Practically by definition this number is going to be set based on what’s possible to provide over several miles of copper (long distance DSL). > We find that the current speed benchmark of 25/3Mbps remains an appropriate measure by which to assess whether a fixed service is providing advanced telecommunications capability. We conclude that fixed services with speeds of 25/3Mbps continue to meet the statutory definition of advanced telecommunications capability; that is, such services "enable users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications." The statutory definition is not whether you can download that iOS update in under 30 seconds. I think it’s hard to argue that 25/3Mbps is not a reasonable minimum for “originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video” when the engineering specs for HD streaming are actually within that envelope. You can move the goalposts and say it needs to support 4 concurrent high quality video streams in a single household, but keep in mind the statutory language was written in 2006, and even as of one year ago no one would have reasonably claimed the minimum viable service level should be set anywhere near that high. I think it’s reasonable to say that in light of the massive shift to remote work and remote learning it’s worth reassessing the national minimum standards for broadband across our 3.5 million square miles of land. That’s a job for Congress to change the standard.
phjesusthatguy3 6y ago
I'm not saying I agree with him, but I'm on a 15Mb down 2Mb up cable modem, and everyone's experience got a lot better once I got an OpenWRT-capable router and turned on Smart Queue Management. I frequently have two Rokus streaming 1080p, two laptops on youtube and an old machine in the basement running torrents, plus my phones connected to a PBX hundreds of miles away, and no one complains that their videos hang or their phone calls stutter (that was the real problem before, poor-quality phone calls). I don't honestly understand how it works, but it's amazing[0]. I'm okay with the packet loss in that graph, because I think that's how traffic control does its job? [0]https://imgur.com/a/1vDAtyR https://imgur.com/a/1vDAtyR
- sigmar 6y ago
  rokus, youtube, and phone calls use very little upload. Try doing a couple zoom calls on 2 mbps upload and you'll have issues. A single HD group zoom session requires 3.0 mbps upload according to zoom https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362023-System-Requirements-for-PC-Mac-and-Linux https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362023-System-R...
- crdotson 6y ago
  Same here. I’m on 16/1.5 and I can run a couple of SD video streams outbound with an EdgeRouter and smart queueing. I would certainly love more upstream for uploading pictures, and uploading videos takes overnight, but we can have several people streaming down and at least a couple up.
amelius 6y ago
The internet enabled the dream that we all can be broadcasters, not just big companies. (In some countries other than the US)

34 points by elsewhen 6y ago

The state of US technology has become embarrassing. How much bandwidth does a zoom video need? Ajit Pai has held back the US and our economy with his action. Edit: the exact Zoom bandwidth specs was rhetorical. Bandwidth should be symmetrical based on how we use it today and 3Mbps is too slow to support a household with multiple users.

alisonkisk 6y ago
1Mbps for "high quality", 3Mbps for 1080p. By what reasoning is 3Mbps not good enough for average member of the economy?
- notyourwork 6y ago
  Because a household family uses internet for more then a single zoom video. If I have two kids and work from home, 3Mbps isn’t sufficient to support a house.
  - dariusj18 6y ago
    Or if you have two people at home working and doing web meetings. I've learned that lesson during COVID.
    - onion2k 6y ago
      That problem can be solved very easily and very cheaply with better communication and scheduling rather than any sort of tech though.
      - xboxnolifes 6y ago
        Have all companies schedule all of their meetings based on their employee's housemates' meeting schedules in a different company? That doesn't sound very easy.
      - dariusj18 6y ago
        That's like saying we should just work different hours. Boom simple solution, just need to get 20 other people on board to work nights instead of days.
garrettgrimsley 6y ago
From the Zoom system requirements: 1:1 call * 600kbps (up/down) for high-quality video * 1.2Mbps (up/down) for 720p HD video * Receiving 1080p HD video requires 1.8Mbps (up/down) * Sending 1080p HD video requires 1.8Mbps (up/down) Group call * 800kbps/1.0 Mbps (up/down) for high-quality video * For gallery view and/or 720p HD video: 1.5Mbps/1.5Mbps (up/down) * Receiving 1080p HD video requires 2.5Mbps (up/down) * Sending 1080p HD video requires 3.0Mbps (up/down) https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362023-System-requirements-for-Windows-macOS-and-Linux#:~:text=800kbps%2F1.0%20Mbps%20(up%2F,3.0Mbps%20(up%2Fdown) https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362023-System-r...
- saltyshake 6y ago
  yes, but most households have more than 1 person living there and sharing the connection for their own Zoom or YouTube.
- toyg 6y ago
  Now multiply that by 2.53 (average US household size in 2020) and you'll see why 3 Mbps are probably not enough.
  - notyourwork 6y ago
    Exactly my point! Consider a group of college students living together or an average family and we start to realize that its not about a single activity but the multiple parallel needs for the same shared pipe that causes congestion. I find it surprising that so many seem to disagree that this is ridiculously low.
- cozzyd 6y ago
  I'm surprised the screen-sharing bandwidth required is so low... I guess it must be quite low framerate? Because some of us have giant monitors...
  - 1-more 6y ago
    It's usually pretty easy to compress because you're so often sharing text on a solid background. I'm figuring that there's gotta be a higher bitrate for sharing, say, a movie or video game than sharing my jira board.

kodah 6y ago

3Mbps symmetrical is the bare minimum for an HD Zoom call. That's good enough for one working person. People in cities have gotten the privilege and luxury of routinely getting network upgrades while rural communities are basically left in the dust. I've been stuck out in the country because I got COVID out here and Zoom calls degrade frustratingly fast. One reason is because the only method of delivery that they have is point to point connections, which have a good amount of variability in them despite advancements. When I used to live out here I lived in a different area served by CenturyLink. These lines were incredibly old and in disrepair. So, speed isn't the only problem but slow and unstable is not okay in a day when most things require a consistent connection. So, is it fast enough? I don't think so. I think a policy which stops upgrading cities until a baseline is met in the rest of the country is also appropriate.

thebean11 6y ago
> I think a policy which stops upgrading cities until a baseline is met in the rest of the country is also appropriate. What does one thing have to do with the other? Cities aren't in any way preventing improvements elsewhere.
- inetknght 6y ago
  > Cities aren't in any way preventing improvements elsewhere. Opportunity cost. Why spend your installation technician's time in an unprofitable rural region when you can better-spend their time in a profitable city?
  - hylaride 6y ago
    Well, these rural areas keep electing "free market" republicans, so...
    - kodah 6y ago
      Personally, your argument seems dubious but I'll answer you in earnest. If your argument were true this map would look much different: https://www.fcc.gov/health/maps https://www.fcc.gov/health/maps Local politicians all work just about the same way when it comes to approving an internet provider. Attracting them generally has to do with business incentives, which means if the State and/or Federal government do nothing then you'll get what you have today.

rubicks 6y ago

His argument is predicated on the antiquated assumption that ISP customers can be provisioned primarily as "internet consumers". The adoption of virtual meetings has exposed this notion to be the fallacy it is.

cozzyd 6y ago

I wonder if I'm the only one with better upload than download... $ speedtest Speedtest by Ookla Server: Windstream - Chicago, IL (id = 17384) ISP: Webpass Latency: 0.93 ms (0.10 ms jitter) Download: 847.27 Mbps (data used: 642.6 MB) Upload: 936.79 Mbps (data used: 445.7 MB) Packet Loss: 0.0% (maybe this is because of other users in my building...)

dx034 6y ago
Most speedtests aren't designed to test very high speeds. It could just be that the server on the other side was congested.

amelius 6y ago

640K ought to be enough for anybody. And with 3Mbps you can send or receive the contents of your entire RAM in under two seconds.

t0mbstone 6y ago
Lemme see... 3 divided by 8 is 0.375, or 375K... In two seconds that equals 750K of data. Yep, the math checks out!

chris_wot 6y ago

Is this guy going to be replaced by someone new in the Biden administration? He's a disaster.

blueblob 6y ago
He was appointed by the Obama/Biden administration, so I'm quite ambivalent on the question. I feel like almost everyone in tech wants him to go but I may be just projecting my own bias.
- Dirlewanger 6y ago
  Surprisingly enough, aside from his grand meme-filled display of repealing Net Neutrality articles, nothing really happened as a result of it.
- boringg 6y ago
  Appointed by Obama/Biden under Mitch McConnells recommendation. I.e. Obama/Biden wouldn't have been able to get anyone else through with out Mitch McConnells (GOP Senate Leader) green light.
doitLP 6y ago
Yes. Was supposed to step down yesterday. https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/11/30/21726645/ajit-pai-fcc-chairman-leaving-net-neutrality https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/11/30/21726645/ajit-pai-fcc-...
mcraiha 6y ago
"Biden is most likely to select one of two people: either Edward "Smitty" Smith, a telecom attorney who has worked as a legal adviser to former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler and at the National Telecommunications and Information Administration; or Jessica Rosenworcel, the most senior Democratic commissioner at the FCC." https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights/latest-news-headlines/who-joe-biden-might-pick-for-the-next-fcc-chair-and-why-62180009 https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...

fat_pikachu 6y ago

I'm going to be the contrarian here and agree with this definition. I think it's more important that the government prioritizes making access to 25/3 available to everyone before making 100/15 (or whatever the new standard is suppose to be) available to the people who already have 25/3.

gnusty_gnurc 6y ago

The enlightened Europeans were begging Netflix to start throttling during the pandemic; the US didn't.

lprd 6y ago

I can safely say that the ISP situation in the US is simply abysmal. I'm an expat here in France and the market for ISP/mobile is pretty great. Companies are very competitive in their offers, and I can switch at any moment since contracts are less common. Whats more, fiber is mostly available throughout the country. Our current administration has an objective of providing even more infrastructure to remote locations. Obviously, US is much larger than France, but I still maintain that it can be vastly improved. Concluding that 3Mbps is _enough_ is not grounded in reality. Lots of people are working from home these days, and I suspect remote work will continue to climb now that companies are becoming more comfortable with that option.

zaroth 6y ago

There’s a lot of country out there in between those two coasts. The FCC has to set a baseline number for what it determines meets the statutory definition of “advanced telecommunications capability”. Practically by definition this number is going to be set based on what’s possible to provide over several miles of copper (long distance DSL). > We find that the current speed benchmark of 25/3Mbps remains an appropriate measure by which to assess whether a fixed service is providing advanced telecommunications capability. We conclude that fixed services with speeds of 25/3Mbps continue to meet the statutory definition of advanced telecommunications capability; that is, such services "enable users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications." The statutory definition is not whether you can download that iOS update in under 30 seconds. I think it’s hard to argue that 25/3Mbps is not a reasonable minimum for “originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video” when the engineering specs for HD streaming are actually within that envelope. You can move the goalposts and say it needs to support 4 concurrent high quality video streams in a single household, but keep in mind the statutory language was written in 2006, and even as of one year ago no one would have reasonably claimed the minimum viable service level should be set anywhere near that high. I think it’s reasonable to say that in light of the massive shift to remote work and remote learning it’s worth reassessing the national minimum standards for broadband across our 3.5 million square miles of land. That’s a job for Congress to change the standard.

phjesusthatguy3 6y ago

I'm not saying I agree with him, but I'm on a 15Mb down 2Mb up cable modem, and everyone's experience got a lot better once I got an OpenWRT-capable router and turned on Smart Queue Management. I frequently have two Rokus streaming 1080p, two laptops on youtube and an old machine in the basement running torrents, plus my phones connected to a PBX hundreds of miles away, and no one complains that their videos hang or their phone calls stutter (that was the real problem before, poor-quality phone calls). I don't honestly understand how it works, but it's amazing[0]. I'm okay with the packet loss in that graph, because I think that's how traffic control does its job? [0]https://imgur.com/a/1vDAtyR https://imgur.com/a/1vDAtyR

sigmar 6y ago
rokus, youtube, and phone calls use very little upload. Try doing a couple zoom calls on 2 mbps upload and you'll have issues. A single HD group zoom session requires 3.0 mbps upload according to zoom https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362023-System-Requirements-for-PC-Mac-and-Linux https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362023-System-R...
crdotson 6y ago
Same here. I’m on 16/1.5 and I can run a couple of SD video streams outbound with an EdgeRouter and smart queueing. I would certainly love more upstream for uploading pictures, and uploading videos takes overnight, but we can have several people streaming down and at least a couple up.

amelius 6y ago

The internet enabled the dream that we all can be broadcasters, not just big companies. (In some countries other than the US)