16 ms·

US Senators call on FCC to raise broadband definition to 100Mbs down and up

540 points by fireball_blaze 6y ago

LinuxBender 6y ago
“Going forward, we should make every effort to spend limited federal dollars on broadband networks capable of providing sufficient download and upload speeds and quality,” Does this definition held by the FCC actually map to any legal qualifications for federal subsidies to ISP's, or is this just a nice gesture?
- ganzsz 6y ago
  I believe the definition of broadband is mostly relevant when future grants and contracts are handed out by gov. So could help for new business, but I don't think it will be used in existing connections. But to me it is not entirely clear in the article.
ortusdux 6y ago
My local broadband provider admitted to me that they could offer symmetric 1 gig service, but are choosing not to. The current max a residential customer can purchase is 1 gig down, 25Mbs up. The monthly non-discount rate is $180, with $110/month possible with certain promotions. It is an extra 10$/month to go from 20Mbs up to 25Mbs. Starlink is doing well here.
- plouffy 6y ago
  Good lord, $180 a month ?!! In the UK it's £62 (~87$), though it's not widely available.
  - ericmay 6y ago
    It really depends on where you live. Where I live (Ohio, U.S.), 1GB down is $65/month.
    - fetus8 6y ago
      Municipal ISP here in Colorado, is offering 1GB Up/Down for $50 a month.
  - ortusdux 6y ago
    It's one of those situations where most customers call at the end of their 1 year promotional period and pretend to threaten to cancel, gets transferred to customer retention, and resign for another year at the discount rate.
  - dia80 6y ago
    I'm enjoying 900Mb symmetric from G-network for 48GBP / month. It's been pretty good so far although I wonder if it'll get slow as more people join.
  - avianlyric 6y ago
    Enjoying 1Gbs symmetric for £40/month ($56) with Hyperoptic in London. I feel for my US counterparts.
    - iamben 6y ago
      Some of my London friends are using this. Crazy good value and the CS is excellent. We've just moved from 20/2 Talktalk to 200/20 with Virgin for the same price (£30/month). Pretty sure you can get Hyperoptic a couple of streets away, but openreach hasn't got to us yet (hence Virgin). With all the home Zoom calls, TalkTalk was killing me. In 2021 it was frustratingly slow.
    - rayiner 6y ago
      > I feel for my US counterparts. You're comparing London to Middle of Nowhere USA. Gigabit symmetric for $80/month is available all over D.C. (More expensive than London, but incomes here are higher too.)
      - makomk 6y ago
        Not even London as a whole either, I think Hyperoptic mostly only serves high-rise flats with the density to make the install costs justifiable.
      - hogFeast 6y ago
        Yep, live in Middle of Nowhere (ish) UK...I pay £30 for 70mbps, and am very happy. I moved recently from a larger town nearby, there I paid the same price for 20mbps (and it was horrendous service, up/down all day). I live 20 miles from a fairly large city, there is a gigabit loop there...only high rises, average speeds in the city are 70bmps (which is why I feel lucky, I am right next to an exchange). The fibre rollout was completely botched in the UK. BT (the former monopoly) was investing in TV and mobile, the govt has caught up with them now (and agreed to CPI+5% rate increases) but all through the 2010s, the only fibre investment was a startup that did a lot but was obviously limited by capital (CityFibre, just acquired by Goldman Sachs...so that should go well). The sector was also gunshy after the fallout from the late 90s: a big company invested heavily in fast internet and tried to overlay BT's network, it got taken to the woodshed. The only place with consistently fast speeds over 100mbps is a small town/city on the East coast called Hull, due to a quirk of history they are the only place that is outside the BT monopoly (the monopoly there was run by KCom) so they got investment, and pretty much nowhere else did. I am aware of the issues in the US but the UK is not a good example. As said above, telecoms policy through the whole of the 2010s was seriously mismanaged. We will catch up but we aren't a good example (most of the UK population is densely packed into England, which is the size of Alabama but with over 10x the population...even Scotland, which is roughly the size and population density of Alabama, has 75% of the population in 5% of the land...it shouldn't be hard).
- djrogers 6y ago
  $180 is crazy, even for the US - for less than $100 I'm getting 1GB symmetric (which in practice has been a true 1Gb down, ~300mb up). Then again, I am currently lucky enough to be able to choose between a hone company and a cable company. At my last house, the cable company was my only option and service was not nearly as good (1gb/50).
  - pedrocr 6y ago
    > 1GB symmetric (which in practice has been a true 1Gb down, ~300mb up) > service was not nearly as good (1gb/50) Units gore. From context you almost certainly mean Gb/s and Mb/s. mb and gb are weird units that although technically possible don't apply here. GB is possible in this context but probably not what you meant. From context this is mostly understandable, but it makes it harder to follow.
  - wincy 6y ago
    Crazy, I get 1gb up and down for $70 a month. It’s a shame Google Fiber didn’t continue to grow, they’re such a great internet provider.
    - cashewchoo 6y ago
      Agreed. I lived in a fiber city for five years and absolutely loved having gfiber as my ISP.
    - mywittyname 6y ago
      You don't even need GF for those prices. My local Bell is $65/mo for 1Gbit symmetrical.
    - the_only_law 6y ago
      Jesus, I pay that much for Spectrum's "up to" 100mbps. Right now speed test is showing me anywhere from .04 to around 40 down and about 10 up, but admittedly, my Wifi setup is less than optimal. There's only a single upgrade package "up to" 400 down.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
- FpUser 6y ago
  Toronto Bell: I pay $112.99 including taxes for symmetric 1 gig and static IP. I got it on 3 years promotion with the promise to extend on the same terms.
- wjp3 6y ago
  Just adding another data point: AT&T fiber - 1G/1G for $115/mo. Austin, TX. Edit: actually get those speeds both ways (~980/980)
- paulirwin 6y ago
  It is frustrating that people in an area with 1Gbps down are able to sign up for Starlink while I'm still waiting. I would pay $500/mo for Starlink right now. Currently paying $45/mo for "20Mbps/2Mbps" VDSL, $70/mo for "25Mbps/5Mbps" fixed wireless, and $110/mo for 100GB of 45Mbps/10Mbps LTE with $10/10GB overage, to barely stay online in semi-rural America, and I'm technically even in a greater metro area. The only way I can have a reliable video call is by using LTE data. The fact that my household meets the current FCC definition of broadband, such that companies feel like they don't have to invest further because they've met their goal, would be laughable if it weren't so infuriating. I would be over the moon excited for 25Mbps reliable upload, and 100+Mbps download.
  - fastball 6y ago
    FYI, I'm currently rural and using Ubifi[1], which is $99 per month for truly Unlimited data on LTE. Might be worth looking into. [1] https://www.ubifi.net/ https://www.ubifi.net/
- graton 6y ago
  I use Ziply Fiber in Oregon/Washington and get 1Gbps up/down for $60/month (including taxes/fees). Pretty happy about that to be honest. I consider myself relatively lucky.
Just1689 6y ago
I live in South Africa. Myself and all my friends are sitting on around 100 Mbps up/down uncapped unshaped, no fair use policy each at around $100 USD monthly. A few of my friends are on Gigabit down, 200 up. How is America behind on this? Everything is hosted there and cached there. Is it big business lobbying politicians to prevent them from having to compete? In South Africa we have dozens on ISPs and as an economy we're probably not far off from one US state. The competition has been great for consumers.
- suchire 6y ago
  Geographic monopolies. Most households have only one broadband provider they can choose, with satellite or DSL as the only other fallback
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - pirate787 6y ago
    They are political monopolies, not geographic. Congress created a telephony and cable video regulatory regime based on monopolies to subsidize the buildout of those technologies. Congress has only halfheartedly moved away from this system because cable and telecom are the largest political donor groups. Some states have made progress moving to more competitive models but for the most part the system is a rats nest of federal, state, and local regulations designed to block competition.
    - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > Congress has only halfheartedly moved away from this system because cable and telecom are the largest political donor groups The benefit telcos provide Congress are in letting them target employment and benefits. There are few other industries where a Congressperson can reliably create X jobs and headline benefits for their district, specifically and tangibly. That, much more than campaign contributions, explains their clout. (People tend to vastly over-estimate the value of campaign contributions. They're lifeblood to challengers. But for incumbents, they largely have value in not going to challengers than as a direct benefit.)
PostThisTooFast 6y ago
Years ago I read many complaints about how the U.S. government handed out hundreds of millions of dollars to telcos (in what form I don't know or remember) to build out their fiber networks, but they just never did it... and kept the money. Now I can't find any reference to that at all. Does that scenario sound familiar to anyone?
- nitrogen 6y ago
  Does that scenario sound familiar to anyone? Yes, something from the 90s. I'm sure HN user rayiner has posted an argument for why that isn't true, so maybe search comment history for fiber or broadband or subsidy to find arguments and the surrounding counterarguments?
- fat_pikachu 6y ago
  Related HN thread that the other commenter was referencing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556
- dralley 6y ago
  They laid the fiber, they just didn't use it (for consumers). Google Fiber started out by just buying up a bunch of unused fiber lines that had been sitting there for years.
juskrey 6y ago
As a usual thing for this type of thread, waiting for guys from Eastern Europe with 1G/1G for $10 a month..
javagram 6y ago
The 3mbps upload speed for 25/3 does seem too slow with the rise of Zoom and other tools that can actually use the upload. Defining broadband as 25/10 or above would make more sense. 25/10 is plenty for work applications. 100Mbps upload seems pretty unnecessary for the vast majority of uses unless the FCC had a goal of promoting BitTorrent and other p2p sharing. I have gigabit 1000/1000 from fios now and it does let me download games from steam faster though.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  I don’t trust non symmetric connections advertised speeds in the first place, but 100Mbps is the minimum a family would need for multiple video calls and offsite backups.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    I'm on a 7-person Zoom call with 15 fps video and 1 fps 4K screen-sharing right now. The quality is excellent. The real time stats are 300-314 kb/s upstream and 1350-1411 kb/s downstream. Even if zoom is incorrectly using kb to mean bytes (instead of bits), that's ~3 Mbps of upstream required per video call.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      Yes, and when a US cable company advertises 25Mbps, they mean they will give you 25Mbps for 5 minutes which they take from the whole neighborhoods' 50Mbps, and then throttle you down after that to god knows what. If it's not fiber, I assume there's tons of overhead/lying with the numbers.
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        I pay for 200/10 Mbps and out of hundreds of tests, I have never gotten less than 235/11 and usually get 260/12 on hybrid cable (fiber backbone, DOCSIS 3.0 32x8 local loop) from Comcast.
me551ah 6y ago
For comparison, in India I pay 54$ a month for 1Gbps symmetric broadband. On speedtest, I get about ~700mbps download and ~800mbps upload.
- reportingsjr 6y ago
  This is pretty close to what you'll pay/get in a lot of US urban areas as well. $65/mo for 1Gbps symmetric here in Cincinnati, Ohio.
- aero-glide2 6y ago
  Which company? Hathway offers only till 100Mbps in my area
bradleyjg 6y ago
In a letter to government leaders Thursday, a bipartisan group of senators called for a quadrupling of base high-speed broadband delivery speeds making 100Mbps down and 100Mbps up the new base for high-speed broadband. Why are Senators writing letters to the Executive branch? The Executive branch enforces the laws that the Legislative branch writes. If Senators want a different definition they should do their damn jobs for once and write some laws.
- betterunix2 6y ago
  That is simplistic. The legislative branch allows the executive branch to define things like this because the executive branch can move faster, unconstrained by the politics of the legislative process. If the legislature had voted on a specific definition of broadband, it would always be out of date, because in the time needed to update the definition the technology would have already advanced. Instead the legislature performs oversight of the executive branch agencies that exercise the power they have been granted; this letter is part of the oversight process, basically the senators saying, "Hey, we intended for you to keep this definition up to date and feel you are not doing so."
  - bradleyjg 6y ago
    It doesn’t take years to pass a bill. In fact a bill can be passed more quickly than a regulation because it just takes a few votes whereas with a regulation there are unavoidable notice and comment periods. I’d say that your “this is necessary for efficiency reasons” model is, if not simplistic, than at least naive. We’ve moved to a system where Congress has abdicated the legislative role almost entirely not because it is impossible for legislatures to legislate (after all some countries combine the legislature and executive) but because feckless Members of Congress have found that doing nothing except carping from the sidelines is a pretty good gig.
    - betterunix2 6y ago
      A bill can be passed quickly, but most bills are not. I once met with the staff of some senators (bipartisan) to explain something I had worked on to inform a bill they were pushing -- it was years ago, the bill has languished despite being pushed the entire time. One reason the bill has gone nowhere was lobbying pressure by some other companies who did not want to be forced to use the technology the bill would mandate, and that lobbying came with tons of misinformation. Congress almost never moves quickly. Parties have grand strategies that sometimes involve stalling good legislation. Deals have to made. Ideological disagreements can spill over or supersede rational analysis. That is the nature of politics, it has been the case since the first days of the Republic and it was the case in the governments that preceded the USA.
nimos 6y ago
Please do. Had to go up to full gigabit down with xfinity to get 35 up. Next highest was 15 I think? Not that you can figure that out easily - their website doesn't list upload speeds. Or maybe it does - the website is terrible to navigate, slow and I got 404s off their main internet landing page. Anyhow at the risk of this turning into a multi page rant about comcast I'll cut back to upload speed. I see it as upload is for creation and download is for consumption. What do the cable companies want people to be doing? If you look at the popularity of twitch/youtube/(things I'm too old and unhip to know about) it is a direct threat to cable/traditional content creation. I'd wager the current state of affairs holds a lot of people back from getting into content creation, especially poorer/larger families who have to share a limited connection.
- lettergram 6y ago
  Reason I went AT&T fiber was actually the dual up and down. I get 1Gbps up which helps uploading photos, videos, etc.
  - nimos 6y ago
    Choices were between xfinity and sonic dsl (25 down) for my building. Nob Hill SF. Tried to get monkeybrains or webpass to install in building but didn't hear back from either.
    - lettergram 6y ago
      I used to live in Alameda, internet is way better where I’m at now in rural Illinois tbh. I think the corruption in many places are what seriously hamper development of fiber networks.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- vondur 6y ago
  I think the upload limit has something to do with the Docsis protocol that most of their equipment operates (cable TV) under. I believe that the newer version protocol (Docsics 4) should allow for much greater speeds, up and down. I have no idea how long it will take these companies to update to this version.
culopatin 6y ago
If 100 up is too far away, at least make it 50.
- Black101 6y ago
  Or even 25 symmetrical...
  - hansel_der 6y ago
    not sure if you are joking. but yea, 25 symmetric would be vastly supperior for a wfh scenario than 25/1
    - Black101 6y ago
      not joking... I think that they make this asymmetrical mostly to up-sale the business plans
stu2010 6y ago
Unless I'm missing something about existing coax cable deployments, this would practically force large-scale fiber buildout. Cable isn't built to service symmetrical speeds, and more than that I don't think that most residential workloads benefit significantly from it. I do think that in the era of Zoom, a household could use ~20mbps upload, and I guess if we're trying to be forward looking, 100mbps is a target that's achievable right now (with fiber buildout).
- betterunix2 6y ago
  "this would practically force large-scale fiber buildout" Sounds good, I think it is pretty obvious that fiber is the future of wired connections. Comcast is already beginning to offer fiber service to achieve symmetric speeds and Verizon is planning a large-scale upgrade of its fiber optic endpoints to offer higher speeds (above gigabit service). If the industry needs a small regulatory nudge to move forward with this, great, let's do it.
- jcrawfordor 6y ago
  DOCSIS 3.1 is capable of 10gbps down, 1gbps up, and the currently less common 4.0 is capable of 10gbps down and 6gbps up. This is equivalent to and often better than a typical FttH PON media (which in the most common form are capable of 1gbps symmetric per string only). The major constraint preventing high upstream speeds is legacy equipment in cable carrier networks; there is progress on changing this but not especially fast. Regulatory action to require high upstream speeds for broadband incentives could significantly speed things up.
  - packetlost 6y ago
    The protocol may support it, but remember that the bandwidth shared across and entire neighborhood or market is still only as good as the CMTS is capable of supporting, which is nowhere near that.
    - jcrawfordor 6y ago
      PON faces the exact same constraint, and because the core of most cable carrier networks is carrier fiber my experience is that new-installation CMTS typically have better transit (multi-gbps fiber) than PON (1gbps fiber common). This is for smaller municipal PON carriers, I know less about major operations like AT&T's and Verizon's.
minikites 6y ago
Utilities like water, electricity, and broadband should be nationalized and run by the public, for the public. They all require extensive physical infrastructure and "competition" doesn't work because the barriers to entry are so high.
antattack 6y ago
100Mbps UP will never happen because large uploads are considered undesirable. Providers want us to consume not produce content.
- bluedino 6y ago
  Usage patterns don't make sense to allocate bandwidth equally for up/down.
  - Jonnax 6y ago
    Well I'm sitting here with my 1000/1000 internet connection and I couldn't be happier. I'm always amazed how users will demand less for their money.
  - fireball_blaze 6y ago
    "640k ought to be enough for anyone"
  - kradroy 6y ago
    "[Old] Usage patterns don't make sense to allocate bandwidth equally for up/down." In the past 5 years the amount of video and streaming (pre-recorded and live) has exploded. And remote/WFH culture is advancing. It's time for US internet providers to catch up.
- josho 6y ago
  Sure, but we are seeing more services that benefit from faster upload. Eg. Video conferencing, cloud storage. So we have more use cases than ever before that benefit from symmetric speeds.
- deleted 6y ago
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deleted 6y ago
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justinwp 6y ago
Please write your senator! [DONE] CO - Bennet (Thanking him) [DONE] CO - Hickenlooper (Urging him to support)
krob 6y ago
my fiancee, her family. lives in Mecca, Ca, not too far from indio, ca, which is where the Cochella festival is, and they can only get ATT ADSL2, they get 6mbit/1.5mbit and it's a joke. using even tmobile 4g only gets you 10mbit for a few seconds via bursting speeds.
xiii1408 6y ago
One of the benefits of home fiber that people rarely talk about is the low latency. On my fiber connection, I get around ~2ms ping to the nearest data center. On my parents' cable internet, it's around ~25ms ping. (I am not up-to-date on the latest DOCSIS versions, etc., and it's possible some cable companies might do better than this.) This ~20ms makes a small but noticeable difference in how quickly web pages load, how smooth video conferencing and VoIP are, and how fluid online gaming is.
josefresco 6y ago
100MBs up and down would be great, but not if we have data caps! Who wants a faster car when you'll just reach the "end of the road" sooner? Policy: https://www.xfinity.com/learn/internet-service/data https://www.xfinity.com/learn/internet-service/data News: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/11/comcasts-data-cap-finally-goes-nationwide-in-expansion-to-12-more-states/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/11/comca... Update: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/comcast-responds-to-pressure-cancels-data-cap-in-northeast-us-until-2022/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/comcast-responds...
- vel0city 6y ago
  I'll start off by saying I don't like caps, I don't think they accurately solve the problem they're trying to solve. This is not to be construed in defense of caps, but only to acknowledge they do currently exist for many. Lets say a provider sells all plans with a 1TB cap. I have an options of 1Mbit, 10Mbit, 100Mbit, and gigabit, I'll take the gigabit plan nearly every time assuming the price is fine. Because while I still only have a 1TB cap actually getting the data I want will be faster. Most consumers have extremely bursty throughput needs, having a faster plan still benefits them even if there's the same cap. Why would you want a car capable of going 60 miles an hour when a car that only goes 10 miles an hour will still get you there? Because it saves you time.
  - josefresco 6y ago
    > Why would you want a car capable of going 60 miles an hour when a car that only goes 10 miles an hour will still get you there? Because it saves you time. The analogy isn't perfect but let's play... What if your Ferrari just stopped working each month once it went 100 miles? Sure it saved you time when it was working, but now you can't use your Ferrari AT ALL for 2/3 of the month. What about if you need to get milk later in the month? Doctors appointment? etc. To expand on this, what if your kids drove the Ferrari, full throttle. They might reach that 100 mile limit in one day! That's how data works now. Netflix, YouTube and others detect my fast connection, and throttle the quality up, thereby exhausting my cap quicker. Exhausting my cap at high speed in 2 days doesn't benefit me for the remaining 28 days of the month. This would be solved if I had better controls over this behavior from either my ISP, device, service or local network.
superbaconman 6y ago
It was last year maybe, just before the pandemic hit, Comcast doubled my download speed but also cut my upload in half. They spun the change as a 'free' upgrade, but in reality my download speed was fine before; My gaming, outbound streaming, and work use cases all suffered massively due to the change.
gz5 6y ago
Let's not be fooled by the messaging. This is the wired broadband telcos/cablecos not wanting low orbit satellite providers to be eligible for federal money. Starlink is scaring them. Perhaps the prospects of CBRS as well. This is anti-competition in an area in which we desperately need competition, and therefore should be fought against, no matter how good it sounds.
cblconfederate 6y ago
Upload speeds can become a massive vector for de-cloudification of personal data
- hansel_der 6y ago
  right, who could possibly be against that </s>
u678u 6y ago
> sitting at 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up since 2015 we should increase the upload speed, but 100Mbs is overkill. I had gigabit fiber for 3 years before I realized I never went anywhere near that. I switched to 100/100 now and no one even noticed, that's with the whole family working/schooling from home. I'm pretty sure 50/50 would be fine. The biggest issues are data caps and upload speeds.
- ip26 6y ago
  If you've got fiber to the home, there's not much reason not to have symmetric gigabit though...
  - war1025 6y ago
    I have fiber to the home, and I'd have to say the cost structure is a great reason not to have gigabit service. We have the base package, which is advertised at 50/50 and is generally right on target. Plus no data caps. I am extremely satisfied.
  - u678u 6y ago
    I save $20 a month by having 100 instead of 1000.
- hanniabu 6y ago
  > 100Mbs is overkill Not really considering this probably won't be updated for another 20 years
  - war1025 6y ago
    Just did a quick search, found this [1] article. The 25/3 definition was set in 2015 It had been set to 4/1 in 2010 In 1996 the original definition was 200k/200k. This seems to be a moving target and there is no reason to believe it won't continue to be updated. [1] https://broadbandnow.com/report/fcc-broadband-definition/ https://broadbandnow.com/report/fcc-broadband-definition/
    - 6y ago
williesleg 6y ago
100Mbps would be great up, they can suck more of my personal information more quickly.
seattle_spring 6y ago
Am I the only person that sees this move as a ruse by established cable providers to disqualify Starlink from federal funding?
rectang 6y ago
This sounds great — it is worth doing. Cynically, I wonder if providers will play games with latency: 100Mbs down and up, but it takes multiple seconds for each packet to arrive.
outworlder 6y ago
This is sorely needed. As it is, ISPs provide barely enough bandwidth to get ACK packets up. Given that we are now expected to work (and study) from home, it doesn't take much to saturate a connection.
thaeli 6y ago
Symmetric home bandwidth is a nice idea, but it's not how almost any residential infrastructure is built out. Even "symmetric" gigabit fiber usually isn't (yes I know there are a few FTTH networks using Metro Ethernet etc, but that's rare) since GPON is still asymmetric at the neighborhood level. Everyone on a single OLT port, very similar to how DOCSIS capacity is shared among a coaxial local segment in hybrid fiber/coax cable networks. The reality is that residential customers use more download than upload on their last mile connection, bandwidth is always a limited resource that must be allocated, and engineering tradeoffs will always be made. Is 3mbit up insufficient? It's workable right now, but barely. I do think that has good reason, and the capacity exists, to rise in the near future. But moving to symmetric is just going to result in more oversubscription on the upload side, and banking on how real-world most users don't actually fill their upload. I'd also be concerned about the impacts on rural internet access innovation under this. Yes, "innovation" has too often been an excuse for refusing to build out physical plant; but the market has responded with new options which can provide over 25/3 to deep rural customers at a price point which can be profitable. The biggest threat to customers here is overly restrictive data caps - 20 gigs/month is not a usable quantity even if it's delivered at 100mbit! It's likely that some degree of data cap, at least a soft/deprioritization cap, will always be a fixture of most RF based last-mile access. That's unfortunate but that will always be constrained to the frequencies available. There are some hard decisions there, and points to the need to have a definition of what a sufficient data cap is. Realistically, if you want broadband with no data caps (or only "top 1% of all users" type caps such as most "no cap" urban/suburban residential ISPs use) then there would need to be actual fiber to the premises run everywhere. That's a rural electrification level project.. which we already mandated and paid for big chunks of with the incumbent telcos, then let them pocket the money and not build out the network. Sigh. It's probably too late to claw any of that back or enforce those old mandates, so we're stuck with finding other ways to do it. (And even those broken promises only covered part of the country to begin with..)
birdyrooster 6y ago
Streaming companies are not going to like this. If only this happened I could imagine a new, glorious wave of piracy.
Maxburn 6y ago
I would love to have 100/100. Currently dealing with 100/10 and life isn't too bad until I want to do off site backups, that takes forever.
mchusma 6y ago
The question here is not really "is more speed better?" Of course more is better if there were no tradeoffs. The question this is asking is "what level should the federal government subsidize connections, particularly in rural areas." 25 down, 3 up is plenty for 99.9% of internet users. It's ok to tell people that if they want faster speeds they have to pay for it. I am in a city with about 40mb down, 5mb up, 3 kids all doing zoom calls/video all day and internet is basically never constrained.
- DerpyBaby123 6y ago
  >25 down, 3 up is plenty for 99.9% of internet users. Is it? What data makes you so confident about this? If I buy a 25 max down, 3 max up connection, what speed will you actually be able to use - it is unlikely in my experience to be regularly hit those max speeds.
- therealdrag0 6y ago
  Yeah SLA is more important at that point. I've lived in apartments/had-service that would only slowdown/drop like once a month and I've had service that's dropped nearly every day. The later is incredibly frustrating.
- fat_pikachu 6y ago
  This does the opposite actually, it forced the federal government to de-prioritize areas with worse service in favor of areas with good but not as good as 100/100 service. There are parts of the US that don't even have access to 15/3. This reclassification would put them in the same group as people with 75 up and down.
blendergeek 6y ago
Better yet, broadband should be defined as having no data caps.
hamiltont 6y ago
Very in favor of modernizing the definition, very not in favor of subsidizing any network buildout -- if a provider is not offering broadband under the new definition that is not (in my eyes) a problem the government needs to step in to fix, it's simply being honest about our nation's network infra capabilities. Sure, we can incentivize providers for reaching certain percentage rollouts under the new definition, but history shows us we should not consider schemes to help finance those buildouts. Internet is not currently a utility, so unless we make it a proper utility with proper regulation before handing over money, the federal government is historically not capable of resisting lobbying pressure aimed at remove the teeth from similar subsidized buildout agreements. In almost all cases the money has disappeared without significant real world improvements. For example, using the money intended for buildout to instead pay lobbyers to re-change the definition of broadband, thereby actualizing some stated goal of "75% of service area covered by broadband", and then pocketing the difference between the actual buildout costs and the lobbying costs. If we offer a financing without regulation, we may as well move the money straight into the exec bonus category and totally ignore improving infra
mkching 6y ago
I live in a semi-rural area and work from home in tech. I am within range of LTE towers, but only T-Mo will serve my area and the connection remains spotty even with a $1000 signal booster. It is frustrating to see initiatives like this that do not address the actual problems that make work difficult. My throughput is about 25 down / 3 up when it works, and this feels fine to me. What I do need is a ping that stays under 100ms reliably, even when downloading or streaming. I can usually get 60ms or so, but it jumps up to 1000ms for short periods of time regularly for no reason. This interferes with any sort of voip calling severely. Just as importantly, data caps should be at least 500GB, and clearly unlimited would be better yet. Plans that offer under 100GB of data are used up very quickly if doing anything more than the bare minimum.
trynumber9 6y ago
while they're at it they should specify broadband means no data caps
husamia 6y ago
Why?

“Going forward, we should make every effort to spend limited federal dollars on broadband networks capable of providing sufficient download and upload speeds and quality,” Does this definition held by the FCC actually map to any legal qualifications for federal subsidies to ISP's, or is this just a nice gesture?

ganzsz 6y ago
I believe the definition of broadband is mostly relevant when future grants and contracts are handed out by gov. So could help for new business, but I don't think it will be used in existing connections. But to me it is not entirely clear in the article.

ortusdux 6y ago

My local broadband provider admitted to me that they could offer symmetric 1 gig service, but are choosing not to. The current max a residential customer can purchase is 1 gig down, 25Mbs up. The monthly non-discount rate is $180, with $110/month possible with certain promotions. It is an extra 10$/month to go from 20Mbs up to 25Mbs. Starlink is doing well here.

plouffy 6y ago
Good lord, $180 a month ?!! In the UK it's £62 (~87$), though it's not widely available.
- ericmay 6y ago
  It really depends on where you live. Where I live (Ohio, U.S.), 1GB down is $65/month.
  - fetus8 6y ago
    Municipal ISP here in Colorado, is offering 1GB Up/Down for $50 a month.
- ortusdux 6y ago
  It's one of those situations where most customers call at the end of their 1 year promotional period and pretend to threaten to cancel, gets transferred to customer retention, and resign for another year at the discount rate.
- dia80 6y ago
  I'm enjoying 900Mb symmetric from G-network for 48GBP / month. It's been pretty good so far although I wonder if it'll get slow as more people join.
- avianlyric 6y ago
  Enjoying 1Gbs symmetric for £40/month ($56) with Hyperoptic in London. I feel for my US counterparts.
  - iamben 6y ago
    Some of my London friends are using this. Crazy good value and the CS is excellent. We've just moved from 20/2 Talktalk to 200/20 with Virgin for the same price (£30/month). Pretty sure you can get Hyperoptic a couple of streets away, but openreach hasn't got to us yet (hence Virgin). With all the home Zoom calls, TalkTalk was killing me. In 2021 it was frustratingly slow.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    > I feel for my US counterparts. You're comparing London to Middle of Nowhere USA. Gigabit symmetric for $80/month is available all over D.C. (More expensive than London, but incomes here are higher too.)
    - makomk 6y ago
      Not even London as a whole either, I think Hyperoptic mostly only serves high-rise flats with the density to make the install costs justifiable.
    - hogFeast 6y ago
      Yep, live in Middle of Nowhere (ish) UK...I pay £30 for 70mbps, and am very happy. I moved recently from a larger town nearby, there I paid the same price for 20mbps (and it was horrendous service, up/down all day). I live 20 miles from a fairly large city, there is a gigabit loop there...only high rises, average speeds in the city are 70bmps (which is why I feel lucky, I am right next to an exchange). The fibre rollout was completely botched in the UK. BT (the former monopoly) was investing in TV and mobile, the govt has caught up with them now (and agreed to CPI+5% rate increases) but all through the 2010s, the only fibre investment was a startup that did a lot but was obviously limited by capital (CityFibre, just acquired by Goldman Sachs...so that should go well). The sector was also gunshy after the fallout from the late 90s: a big company invested heavily in fast internet and tried to overlay BT's network, it got taken to the woodshed. The only place with consistently fast speeds over 100mbps is a small town/city on the East coast called Hull, due to a quirk of history they are the only place that is outside the BT monopoly (the monopoly there was run by KCom) so they got investment, and pretty much nowhere else did. I am aware of the issues in the US but the UK is not a good example. As said above, telecoms policy through the whole of the 2010s was seriously mismanaged. We will catch up but we aren't a good example (most of the UK population is densely packed into England, which is the size of Alabama but with over 10x the population...even Scotland, which is roughly the size and population density of Alabama, has 75% of the population in 5% of the land...it shouldn't be hard).
djrogers 6y ago
$180 is crazy, even for the US - for less than $100 I'm getting 1GB symmetric (which in practice has been a true 1Gb down, ~300mb up). Then again, I am currently lucky enough to be able to choose between a hone company and a cable company. At my last house, the cable company was my only option and service was not nearly as good (1gb/50).
- pedrocr 6y ago
  > 1GB symmetric (which in practice has been a true 1Gb down, ~300mb up) > service was not nearly as good (1gb/50) Units gore. From context you almost certainly mean Gb/s and Mb/s. mb and gb are weird units that although technically possible don't apply here. GB is possible in this context but probably not what you meant. From context this is mostly understandable, but it makes it harder to follow.
- wincy 6y ago
  Crazy, I get 1gb up and down for $70 a month. It’s a shame Google Fiber didn’t continue to grow, they’re such a great internet provider.
  - cashewchoo 6y ago
    Agreed. I lived in a fiber city for five years and absolutely loved having gfiber as my ISP.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    You don't even need GF for those prices. My local Bell is $65/mo for 1Gbit symmetrical.
  - the_only_law 6y ago
    Jesus, I pay that much for Spectrum's "up to" 100mbps. Right now speed test is showing me anywhere from .04 to around 40 down and about 10 up, but admittedly, my Wifi setup is less than optimal. There's only a single upgrade package "up to" 400 down.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
FpUser 6y ago
Toronto Bell: I pay $112.99 including taxes for symmetric 1 gig and static IP. I got it on 3 years promotion with the promise to extend on the same terms.
wjp3 6y ago
Just adding another data point: AT&T fiber - 1G/1G for $115/mo. Austin, TX. Edit: actually get those speeds both ways (~980/980)
paulirwin 6y ago
It is frustrating that people in an area with 1Gbps down are able to sign up for Starlink while I'm still waiting. I would pay $500/mo for Starlink right now. Currently paying $45/mo for "20Mbps/2Mbps" VDSL, $70/mo for "25Mbps/5Mbps" fixed wireless, and $110/mo for 100GB of 45Mbps/10Mbps LTE with $10/10GB overage, to barely stay online in semi-rural America, and I'm technically even in a greater metro area. The only way I can have a reliable video call is by using LTE data. The fact that my household meets the current FCC definition of broadband, such that companies feel like they don't have to invest further because they've met their goal, would be laughable if it weren't so infuriating. I would be over the moon excited for 25Mbps reliable upload, and 100+Mbps download.
- fastball 6y ago
  FYI, I'm currently rural and using Ubifi[1], which is $99 per month for truly Unlimited data on LTE. Might be worth looking into. [1] https://www.ubifi.net/ https://www.ubifi.net/
graton 6y ago
I use Ziply Fiber in Oregon/Washington and get 1Gbps up/down for $60/month (including taxes/fees). Pretty happy about that to be honest. I consider myself relatively lucky.

Just1689 6y ago

I live in South Africa. Myself and all my friends are sitting on around 100 Mbps up/down uncapped unshaped, no fair use policy each at around $100 USD monthly. A few of my friends are on Gigabit down, 200 up. How is America behind on this? Everything is hosted there and cached there. Is it big business lobbying politicians to prevent them from having to compete? In South Africa we have dozens on ISPs and as an economy we're probably not far off from one US state. The competition has been great for consumers.

suchire 6y ago
Geographic monopolies. Most households have only one broadband provider they can choose, with satellite or DSL as the only other fallback
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- pirate787 6y ago
  They are political monopolies, not geographic. Congress created a telephony and cable video regulatory regime based on monopolies to subsidize the buildout of those technologies. Congress has only halfheartedly moved away from this system because cable and telecom are the largest political donor groups. Some states have made progress moving to more competitive models but for the most part the system is a rats nest of federal, state, and local regulations designed to block competition.
  - JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > Congress has only halfheartedly moved away from this system because cable and telecom are the largest political donor groups The benefit telcos provide Congress are in letting them target employment and benefits. There are few other industries where a Congressperson can reliably create X jobs and headline benefits for their district, specifically and tangibly. That, much more than campaign contributions, explains their clout. (People tend to vastly over-estimate the value of campaign contributions. They're lifeblood to challengers. But for incumbents, they largely have value in not going to challengers than as a direct benefit.)

PostThisTooFast 6y ago

Years ago I read many complaints about how the U.S. government handed out hundreds of millions of dollars to telcos (in what form I don't know or remember) to build out their fiber networks, but they just never did it... and kept the money. Now I can't find any reference to that at all. Does that scenario sound familiar to anyone?

nitrogen 6y ago
Does that scenario sound familiar to anyone? Yes, something from the 90s. I'm sure HN user rayiner has posted an argument for why that isn't true, so maybe search comment history for fiber or broadband or subsidy to find arguments and the surrounding counterarguments?
fat_pikachu 6y ago
Related HN thread that the other commenter was referencing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556
dralley 6y ago
They laid the fiber, they just didn't use it (for consumers). Google Fiber started out by just buying up a bunch of unused fiber lines that had been sitting there for years.

juskrey 6y ago

As a usual thing for this type of thread, waiting for guys from Eastern Europe with 1G/1G for $10 a month..

javagram 6y ago

The 3mbps upload speed for 25/3 does seem too slow with the rise of Zoom and other tools that can actually use the upload. Defining broadband as 25/10 or above would make more sense. 25/10 is plenty for work applications. 100Mbps upload seems pretty unnecessary for the vast majority of uses unless the FCC had a goal of promoting BitTorrent and other p2p sharing. I have gigabit 1000/1000 from fios now and it does let me download games from steam faster though.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
I don’t trust non symmetric connections advertised speeds in the first place, but 100Mbps is the minimum a family would need for multiple video calls and offsite backups.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  I'm on a 7-person Zoom call with 15 fps video and 1 fps 4K screen-sharing right now. The quality is excellent. The real time stats are 300-314 kb/s upstream and 1350-1411 kb/s downstream. Even if zoom is incorrectly using kb to mean bytes (instead of bits), that's ~3 Mbps of upstream required per video call.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Yes, and when a US cable company advertises 25Mbps, they mean they will give you 25Mbps for 5 minutes which they take from the whole neighborhoods' 50Mbps, and then throttle you down after that to god knows what. If it's not fiber, I assume there's tons of overhead/lying with the numbers.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      I pay for 200/10 Mbps and out of hundreds of tests, I have never gotten less than 235/11 and usually get 260/12 on hybrid cable (fiber backbone, DOCSIS 3.0 32x8 local loop) from Comcast.

me551ah 6y ago

For comparison, in India I pay 54$ a month for 1Gbps symmetric broadband. On speedtest, I get about ~700mbps download and ~800mbps upload.

reportingsjr 6y ago
This is pretty close to what you'll pay/get in a lot of US urban areas as well. $65/mo for 1Gbps symmetric here in Cincinnati, Ohio.
aero-glide2 6y ago
Which company? Hathway offers only till 100Mbps in my area

bradleyjg 6y ago

In a letter to government leaders Thursday, a bipartisan group of senators called for a quadrupling of base high-speed broadband delivery speeds making 100Mbps down and 100Mbps up the new base for high-speed broadband. Why are Senators writing letters to the Executive branch? The Executive branch enforces the laws that the Legislative branch writes. If Senators want a different definition they should do their damn jobs for once and write some laws.

betterunix2 6y ago
That is simplistic. The legislative branch allows the executive branch to define things like this because the executive branch can move faster, unconstrained by the politics of the legislative process. If the legislature had voted on a specific definition of broadband, it would always be out of date, because in the time needed to update the definition the technology would have already advanced. Instead the legislature performs oversight of the executive branch agencies that exercise the power they have been granted; this letter is part of the oversight process, basically the senators saying, "Hey, we intended for you to keep this definition up to date and feel you are not doing so."
- bradleyjg 6y ago
  It doesn’t take years to pass a bill. In fact a bill can be passed more quickly than a regulation because it just takes a few votes whereas with a regulation there are unavoidable notice and comment periods. I’d say that your “this is necessary for efficiency reasons” model is, if not simplistic, than at least naive. We’ve moved to a system where Congress has abdicated the legislative role almost entirely not because it is impossible for legislatures to legislate (after all some countries combine the legislature and executive) but because feckless Members of Congress have found that doing nothing except carping from the sidelines is a pretty good gig.
  - betterunix2 6y ago
    A bill can be passed quickly, but most bills are not. I once met with the staff of some senators (bipartisan) to explain something I had worked on to inform a bill they were pushing -- it was years ago, the bill has languished despite being pushed the entire time. One reason the bill has gone nowhere was lobbying pressure by some other companies who did not want to be forced to use the technology the bill would mandate, and that lobbying came with tons of misinformation. Congress almost never moves quickly. Parties have grand strategies that sometimes involve stalling good legislation. Deals have to made. Ideological disagreements can spill over or supersede rational analysis. That is the nature of politics, it has been the case since the first days of the Republic and it was the case in the governments that preceded the USA.

nimos 6y ago

Please do. Had to go up to full gigabit down with xfinity to get 35 up. Next highest was 15 I think? Not that you can figure that out easily - their website doesn't list upload speeds. Or maybe it does - the website is terrible to navigate, slow and I got 404s off their main internet landing page. Anyhow at the risk of this turning into a multi page rant about comcast I'll cut back to upload speed. I see it as upload is for creation and download is for consumption. What do the cable companies want people to be doing? If you look at the popularity of twitch/youtube/(things I'm too old and unhip to know about) it is a direct threat to cable/traditional content creation. I'd wager the current state of affairs holds a lot of people back from getting into content creation, especially poorer/larger families who have to share a limited connection.

lettergram 6y ago
Reason I went AT&T fiber was actually the dual up and down. I get 1Gbps up which helps uploading photos, videos, etc.
- nimos 6y ago
  Choices were between xfinity and sonic dsl (25 down) for my building. Nob Hill SF. Tried to get monkeybrains or webpass to install in building but didn't hear back from either.
  - lettergram 6y ago
    I used to live in Alameda, internet is way better where I’m at now in rural Illinois tbh. I think the corruption in many places are what seriously hamper development of fiber networks.
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vondur 6y ago
I think the upload limit has something to do with the Docsis protocol that most of their equipment operates (cable TV) under. I believe that the newer version protocol (Docsics 4) should allow for much greater speeds, up and down. I have no idea how long it will take these companies to update to this version.

culopatin 6y ago

If 100 up is too far away, at least make it 50.

Black101 6y ago
Or even 25 symmetrical...
- hansel_der 6y ago
  not sure if you are joking. but yea, 25 symmetric would be vastly supperior for a wfh scenario than 25/1
  - Black101 6y ago
    not joking... I think that they make this asymmetrical mostly to up-sale the business plans

stu2010 6y ago

Unless I'm missing something about existing coax cable deployments, this would practically force large-scale fiber buildout. Cable isn't built to service symmetrical speeds, and more than that I don't think that most residential workloads benefit significantly from it. I do think that in the era of Zoom, a household could use ~20mbps upload, and I guess if we're trying to be forward looking, 100mbps is a target that's achievable right now (with fiber buildout).

betterunix2 6y ago
"this would practically force large-scale fiber buildout" Sounds good, I think it is pretty obvious that fiber is the future of wired connections. Comcast is already beginning to offer fiber service to achieve symmetric speeds and Verizon is planning a large-scale upgrade of its fiber optic endpoints to offer higher speeds (above gigabit service). If the industry needs a small regulatory nudge to move forward with this, great, let's do it.
jcrawfordor 6y ago
DOCSIS 3.1 is capable of 10gbps down, 1gbps up, and the currently less common 4.0 is capable of 10gbps down and 6gbps up. This is equivalent to and often better than a typical FttH PON media (which in the most common form are capable of 1gbps symmetric per string only). The major constraint preventing high upstream speeds is legacy equipment in cable carrier networks; there is progress on changing this but not especially fast. Regulatory action to require high upstream speeds for broadband incentives could significantly speed things up.
- packetlost 6y ago
  The protocol may support it, but remember that the bandwidth shared across and entire neighborhood or market is still only as good as the CMTS is capable of supporting, which is nowhere near that.
  - jcrawfordor 6y ago
    PON faces the exact same constraint, and because the core of most cable carrier networks is carrier fiber my experience is that new-installation CMTS typically have better transit (multi-gbps fiber) than PON (1gbps fiber common). This is for smaller municipal PON carriers, I know less about major operations like AT&T's and Verizon's.

minikites 6y ago

Utilities like water, electricity, and broadband should be nationalized and run by the public, for the public. They all require extensive physical infrastructure and "competition" doesn't work because the barriers to entry are so high.

antattack 6y ago

100Mbps UP will never happen because large uploads are considered undesirable. Providers want us to consume not produce content.

bluedino 6y ago
Usage patterns don't make sense to allocate bandwidth equally for up/down.
- Jonnax 6y ago
  Well I'm sitting here with my 1000/1000 internet connection and I couldn't be happier. I'm always amazed how users will demand less for their money.
- fireball_blaze 6y ago
  "640k ought to be enough for anyone"
- kradroy 6y ago
  "[Old] Usage patterns don't make sense to allocate bandwidth equally for up/down." In the past 5 years the amount of video and streaming (pre-recorded and live) has exploded. And remote/WFH culture is advancing. It's time for US internet providers to catch up.
josho 6y ago
Sure, but we are seeing more services that benefit from faster upload. Eg. Video conferencing, cloud storage. So we have more use cases than ever before that benefit from symmetric speeds.
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justinwp 6y ago

Please write your senator! [DONE] CO - Bennet (Thanking him) [DONE] CO - Hickenlooper (Urging him to support)

krob 6y ago

my fiancee, her family. lives in Mecca, Ca, not too far from indio, ca, which is where the Cochella festival is, and they can only get ATT ADSL2, they get 6mbit/1.5mbit and it's a joke. using even tmobile 4g only gets you 10mbit for a few seconds via bursting speeds.

xiii1408 6y ago

One of the benefits of home fiber that people rarely talk about is the low latency. On my fiber connection, I get around ~2ms ping to the nearest data center. On my parents' cable internet, it's around ~25ms ping. (I am not up-to-date on the latest DOCSIS versions, etc., and it's possible some cable companies might do better than this.) This ~20ms makes a small but noticeable difference in how quickly web pages load, how smooth video conferencing and VoIP are, and how fluid online gaming is.

josefresco 6y ago

100MBs up and down would be great, but not if we have data caps! Who wants a faster car when you'll just reach the "end of the road" sooner? Policy: https://www.xfinity.com/learn/internet-service/data https://www.xfinity.com/learn/internet-service/data News: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/11/comcasts-data-cap-finally-goes-nationwide-in-expansion-to-12-more-states/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/11/comca... Update: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/comcast-responds-to-pressure-cancels-data-cap-in-northeast-us-until-2022/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/02/comcast-responds...

vel0city 6y ago
I'll start off by saying I don't like caps, I don't think they accurately solve the problem they're trying to solve. This is not to be construed in defense of caps, but only to acknowledge they do currently exist for many. Lets say a provider sells all plans with a 1TB cap. I have an options of 1Mbit, 10Mbit, 100Mbit, and gigabit, I'll take the gigabit plan nearly every time assuming the price is fine. Because while I still only have a 1TB cap actually getting the data I want will be faster. Most consumers have extremely bursty throughput needs, having a faster plan still benefits them even if there's the same cap. Why would you want a car capable of going 60 miles an hour when a car that only goes 10 miles an hour will still get you there? Because it saves you time.
- josefresco 6y ago
  > Why would you want a car capable of going 60 miles an hour when a car that only goes 10 miles an hour will still get you there? Because it saves you time. The analogy isn't perfect but let's play... What if your Ferrari just stopped working each month once it went 100 miles? Sure it saved you time when it was working, but now you can't use your Ferrari AT ALL for 2/3 of the month. What about if you need to get milk later in the month? Doctors appointment? etc. To expand on this, what if your kids drove the Ferrari, full throttle. They might reach that 100 mile limit in one day! That's how data works now. Netflix, YouTube and others detect my fast connection, and throttle the quality up, thereby exhausting my cap quicker. Exhausting my cap at high speed in 2 days doesn't benefit me for the remaining 28 days of the month. This would be solved if I had better controls over this behavior from either my ISP, device, service or local network.

superbaconman 6y ago

It was last year maybe, just before the pandemic hit, Comcast doubled my download speed but also cut my upload in half. They spun the change as a 'free' upgrade, but in reality my download speed was fine before; My gaming, outbound streaming, and work use cases all suffered massively due to the change.

gz5 6y ago

Let's not be fooled by the messaging. This is the wired broadband telcos/cablecos not wanting low orbit satellite providers to be eligible for federal money. Starlink is scaring them. Perhaps the prospects of CBRS as well. This is anti-competition in an area in which we desperately need competition, and therefore should be fought against, no matter how good it sounds.

cblconfederate 6y ago

Upload speeds can become a massive vector for de-cloudification of personal data

hansel_der 6y ago
right, who could possibly be against that </s>

u678u 6y ago

> sitting at 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up since 2015 we should increase the upload speed, but 100Mbs is overkill. I had gigabit fiber for 3 years before I realized I never went anywhere near that. I switched to 100/100 now and no one even noticed, that's with the whole family working/schooling from home. I'm pretty sure 50/50 would be fine. The biggest issues are data caps and upload speeds.

ip26 6y ago
If you've got fiber to the home, there's not much reason not to have symmetric gigabit though...
- war1025 6y ago
  I have fiber to the home, and I'd have to say the cost structure is a great reason not to have gigabit service. We have the base package, which is advertised at 50/50 and is generally right on target. Plus no data caps. I am extremely satisfied.
- u678u 6y ago
  I save $20 a month by having 100 instead of 1000.
hanniabu 6y ago
> 100Mbs is overkill Not really considering this probably won't be updated for another 20 years
- war1025 6y ago
  Just did a quick search, found this [1] article. The 25/3 definition was set in 2015 It had been set to 4/1 in 2010 In 1996 the original definition was 200k/200k. This seems to be a moving target and there is no reason to believe it won't continue to be updated. [1] https://broadbandnow.com/report/fcc-broadband-definition/ https://broadbandnow.com/report/fcc-broadband-definition/
  - 6y ago

williesleg 6y ago

100Mbps would be great up, they can suck more of my personal information more quickly.

seattle_spring 6y ago

Am I the only person that sees this move as a ruse by established cable providers to disqualify Starlink from federal funding?

rectang 6y ago

This sounds great — it is worth doing. Cynically, I wonder if providers will play games with latency: 100Mbs down and up, but it takes multiple seconds for each packet to arrive.

outworlder 6y ago

This is sorely needed. As it is, ISPs provide barely enough bandwidth to get ACK packets up. Given that we are now expected to work (and study) from home, it doesn't take much to saturate a connection.

thaeli 6y ago

Symmetric home bandwidth is a nice idea, but it's not how almost any residential infrastructure is built out. Even "symmetric" gigabit fiber usually isn't (yes I know there are a few FTTH networks using Metro Ethernet etc, but that's rare) since GPON is still asymmetric at the neighborhood level. Everyone on a single OLT port, very similar to how DOCSIS capacity is shared among a coaxial local segment in hybrid fiber/coax cable networks. The reality is that residential customers use more download than upload on their last mile connection, bandwidth is always a limited resource that must be allocated, and engineering tradeoffs will always be made. Is 3mbit up insufficient? It's workable right now, but barely. I do think that has good reason, and the capacity exists, to rise in the near future. But moving to symmetric is just going to result in more oversubscription on the upload side, and banking on how real-world most users don't actually fill their upload. I'd also be concerned about the impacts on rural internet access innovation under this. Yes, "innovation" has too often been an excuse for refusing to build out physical plant; but the market has responded with new options which can provide over 25/3 to deep rural customers at a price point which can be profitable. The biggest threat to customers here is overly restrictive data caps - 20 gigs/month is not a usable quantity even if it's delivered at 100mbit! It's likely that some degree of data cap, at least a soft/deprioritization cap, will always be a fixture of most RF based last-mile access. That's unfortunate but that will always be constrained to the frequencies available. There are some hard decisions there, and points to the need to have a definition of what a sufficient data cap is. Realistically, if you want broadband with no data caps (or only "top 1% of all users" type caps such as most "no cap" urban/suburban residential ISPs use) then there would need to be actual fiber to the premises run everywhere. That's a rural electrification level project.. which we already mandated and paid for big chunks of with the incumbent telcos, then let them pocket the money and not build out the network. Sigh. It's probably too late to claw any of that back or enforce those old mandates, so we're stuck with finding other ways to do it. (And even those broken promises only covered part of the country to begin with..)

birdyrooster 6y ago

Streaming companies are not going to like this. If only this happened I could imagine a new, glorious wave of piracy.

Maxburn 6y ago

I would love to have 100/100. Currently dealing with 100/10 and life isn't too bad until I want to do off site backups, that takes forever.

mchusma 6y ago

The question here is not really "is more speed better?" Of course more is better if there were no tradeoffs. The question this is asking is "what level should the federal government subsidize connections, particularly in rural areas." 25 down, 3 up is plenty for 99.9% of internet users. It's ok to tell people that if they want faster speeds they have to pay for it. I am in a city with about 40mb down, 5mb up, 3 kids all doing zoom calls/video all day and internet is basically never constrained.

DerpyBaby123 6y ago
>25 down, 3 up is plenty for 99.9% of internet users. Is it? What data makes you so confident about this? If I buy a 25 max down, 3 max up connection, what speed will you actually be able to use - it is unlikely in my experience to be regularly hit those max speeds.
therealdrag0 6y ago
Yeah SLA is more important at that point. I've lived in apartments/had-service that would only slowdown/drop like once a month and I've had service that's dropped nearly every day. The later is incredibly frustrating.
fat_pikachu 6y ago
This does the opposite actually, it forced the federal government to de-prioritize areas with worse service in favor of areas with good but not as good as 100/100 service. There are parts of the US that don't even have access to 15/3. This reclassification would put them in the same group as people with 75 up and down.

blendergeek 6y ago

Better yet, broadband should be defined as having no data caps.

hamiltont 6y ago

Very in favor of modernizing the definition, very not in favor of subsidizing any network buildout -- if a provider is not offering broadband under the new definition that is not (in my eyes) a problem the government needs to step in to fix, it's simply being honest about our nation's network infra capabilities. Sure, we can incentivize providers for reaching certain percentage rollouts under the new definition, but history shows us we should not consider schemes to help finance those buildouts. Internet is not currently a utility, so unless we make it a proper utility with proper regulation before handing over money, the federal government is historically not capable of resisting lobbying pressure aimed at remove the teeth from similar subsidized buildout agreements. In almost all cases the money has disappeared without significant real world improvements. For example, using the money intended for buildout to instead pay lobbyers to re-change the definition of broadband, thereby actualizing some stated goal of "75% of service area covered by broadband", and then pocketing the difference between the actual buildout costs and the lobbying costs. If we offer a financing without regulation, we may as well move the money straight into the exec bonus category and totally ignore improving infra

mkching 6y ago

I live in a semi-rural area and work from home in tech. I am within range of LTE towers, but only T-Mo will serve my area and the connection remains spotty even with a $1000 signal booster. It is frustrating to see initiatives like this that do not address the actual problems that make work difficult. My throughput is about 25 down / 3 up when it works, and this feels fine to me. What I do need is a ping that stays under 100ms reliably, even when downloading or streaming. I can usually get 60ms or so, but it jumps up to 1000ms for short periods of time regularly for no reason. This interferes with any sort of voip calling severely. Just as importantly, data caps should be at least 500GB, and clearly unlimited would be better yet. Plans that offer under 100GB of data are used up very quickly if doing anything more than the bare minimum.

trynumber9 6y ago

while they're at it they should specify broadband means no data caps

husamia 6y ago

Why?