18 ms·

100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say

447 points by caution 6y ago

Panino 6y ago
> The funding is going to a mix of cable, fiber, and fixed wireless providers, plus SpaceX's Starlink satellite network. I think cable providers should be left out. They were already gifted many billions of dollars in the past for this same basic purpose but they pocketed the money. They can just use the free money they've already been given. Instead, the funding should go to existing munipical fiber ISPs to expand their coverage. Give money to people with a proven track record of doing what you want, not people with a proven track record of keeping the money for themselves. I'm on municipal fiber and it's amazing.
- technofiend 6y ago
  >They were already gifted many billions of dollars in the past for this same basic purpose but they pocketed the money. They can just use the free money they've already been given. I mean they could but they wont, and there was no reason to with Ajit Pai running the place. I daresay they'll have to be sued into compliance to do it now. Not that I object to that: they need to refund the taxpayers' money or do what they promised with it.
  - smegger001 6y ago
    >they need to refund the taxpayers' money or do what they promised with it. plus interest.
  - gabereiser 6y ago
    They’ll just claim something something 5G and will be back in the feds good graces. Honestly the cable industry is a monopoly and has grown beyond government oversight. This needs to change but we don’t have any other option than nullifying anti-municipal fiber laws and start laying down new lines.
    - bredren 6y ago
      This is why starlink is so important. I can not wait to stop paying Comcast.
      - new_realist 6y ago
        Why don’t you move to 5G now?
        Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
        Most of America doesn't have true (mm wave) 5g. About 1/3 of America lacks "5g" entirely. Assuming one does have access it's not financially prudent for most households to buy into 5g when the caps are as low as 100gb/mo. https://www.androidauthority.com/where-is-5g-available-in-the-us-1140484/ https://www.androidauthority.com/where-is-5g-available-in-th...
        fulafel 6y ago
        Nitpick: mm-wave is just one of the dozen things that are in the 5G cornucopia of random technologies, it's not more or less "true 5G" than eg 5G edge computing.
        gabereiser 6y ago
        In America 4>5 so we’ve appropriated “5G” to mean the mm-wave wireless transmission. There are still large pockets of the US on data caps as low as 10gb. Throttled connections. Asymmetric networks. All so we can be nickel and dimed to death on fees, privilege, bundles, and in some cases double paying for content.
        smichel17 6y ago
        It's funny to me, reading "as low as 10gb". I used 45MB of data last month, and 9 of that was the Android OS. (And, yes, 4.33GB on wifi, of which 186MB was the OS). I know other people use their phones way more than I do, it's just a different world to me, where data limits are a thing to think about.
  - lostapathy 6y ago
    > there was no reason to with Ajit Pai running the place This problem goes back WAY farther than Ajit Pai.
- markovbot 6y ago
  for-profit corporations should not own our communications infrastructure.
  - dheera 6y ago
    I don't see an inherent problem with for-profit companies owning infrastructure, but it needs to not be monopolized and it needs to not be owned by a bunch of public market shareholders and hedge funds who don't even use the product. Utility monopolies and public companies rarely put customers first.
  - sigstoat 6y ago
    can they own our food production infrastructure? how about our clothing industry? home construction? those all represent far more fundamental human needs than communication.
    - TulliusCicero 6y ago
      Those things all have much more redundancy than comms. The US has three mobile internet providers (there's also MVNO's, but they use the same physical infrastructure as the big three), and any given home will usually only have access to two or three landline ISP's in terms of infra (e.g. cable, DSL, fiber). In contrast, food can be shipped in to a city from innumerable farms, ditto for clothing. Home construction, there's lot of different home builders around, it's not a natural monopoly like communication. For food production, I don't really have to trust any particular two or three farming companies -- if they fuck up, food can be shipped in from elsewhere. Whereas if my local ISP's are exploitative or simply incompetent, what's my recourse?
    - jayd16 6y ago
      No one has monopoly control of the infrastructure in those industries. Anyone can buy and farm land, textile plants, etc. Its not possible to simply lay more conduit and compete.
    - function_seven 6y ago
      What "infrastructure" means needs to be nailed down before this can be discussed. Internet service is seen as something in the same league as roads, power, water, and other utilities. Things that require public rights of way, extensive digging, cooperations among many jurisdictions or land owners, and special rules to make it all possible. Clothing, food, and construction are all businesses that don't require that level of centralized coordination. Anyone can open their own bakery, or buy a farm. Anyone can set up sewing machines and purchase fabric, or get a contractors' license and start nailing sticks of wood together. Government still sets standards, of course. But these businesses don't have inherent monopolies the same way infrastructure businesses do.
- rayiner 6y ago
  > They were already gifted many billions of dollars in the past for this same basic purpose but they pocketed the money. Very little government money has been spent on broadband. Federal funding for broadband dates back only to the Obama administration. And cable companies have largely not received this money. You’re thinking of something else.
  - chromaton 6y ago
    To avoid another repeated thread, just read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556 I just realized that you were posting on that thread as well.
    - rayiner 6y ago
      Whatever conclusions you reach from the points made in that thread, there is an important additional point here. That thread is talking about telephone companies. OP is talking about cable. We tend to think of both of them as just “broadband” today, but the regulatory structure is totally different. The central premise of the notion that telephone companies received “billions of dollars from the government” is that the government lifted rate regulation on telephone companies in the 1990s. Rate regulation told the companies what they could charge for local phone service. The argument is that phone companies made $200 billion more than they would have had had those regulations remained in place. I disagree with that assertion for phone companies, as addressed in the thread above. But even on its own merits that argument is not applicable to cable companies. Cable companies weren’t rate regulated (except that in some places there is a regulated minimum television service they must provide at a government-specified price). There was no government action in the 1990s that contemplated subsidies to create incentives for cable companies to build fiber.
  - greedo 6y ago
    I think the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was supposed to help improve Internet access through its Universal Service provision. Of course all the telecoms pocketed the money and didn't do shit. https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service
- mixmastamyk 6y ago
  How much does it cost? Here Spectrum keeps upping the cost during the pandemic, now at $75/m for decent bandwidth.
  - spaceisballer 6y ago
    We have either DSL or Comcast. 300/10mbps costs $100. Total rip-off but that’s the price of our county signing a 10 year exclusive deal with them. Now it’s expired but nobody is going to bring business in.
  - epmaybe 6y ago
    In my area there was good competition with the new fiber infrastructure, so Spectrum offered $30/mo for two years with 400/25
- totalZero 6y ago
  If the issue is link speed symmetry, then cable should be out of the running entirely. Even my phone offers better upload speed than cable in my neighborhood. Same for my parents' place across the country. New money should go to fiber, satellite, wireless, or nothing at all.
  - plantain 6y ago
    DOCSIS 3 (from 2006) can do 100/100 over cable - it's the decision of the provider not the technology.
    - CKN23-ARIN 6y ago
      It's at least somewhat inherent to the technology. DOCSIS download channels are shared among subscribers; upload channels are allocated exclusively per-subscriber. This architecture provides economic incentives for the provider to provision asymmetric circuits rather than symmetric ones.
    - supertrope 6y ago
      100 Mbps up requires expanding the uplink band from 5-42MHz to 85MHz. That requires changing outdoor components like amplifier and filters, and upgrading millions of cable TV boxes, splitters and modems inside customers' homes. The combined cost of hiring more technicians and buying boxes might approach the cost of upgrading to fiber. Altice USA decided to skip DOCSIS 3.1 and start dragging fiber.
      - StillBored 6y ago
        Which is all stuff they are doing anyway. Cable modems, even when not integrated with wifi don't last more than a couple years before someone adds a couple more channels, or tweaks the spec. Etc, Docsis 3.1 modems were available in the local best buy for probably 5+ years before my cable company would even provision them in docsis 3.0 modes. They might have some excuses with the amps, but again, those can be upgraded as they age out/die too. This was the excuse 20 years ago when the amps didn't allow any upstream signals through in many areas. If a cable company hasn't been preparing/slowly rolling out new equipment as soon as the specs are available that is their own fault. Like any other technology you either get on the train, or you get left behind.
- jjcm 6y ago
  Including cable providers is fine. The issue is how this money is structured. It needs to be a loan where the debt is forgiven once you reach certain milestones. The issue with the money earlier was there wasn't any teeth when it came to enforcing what was to be done with the funds. Make the loan be equally competitive - any company can apply for any amount of money, and a small amount of the loan is forgiven per user they bring above the 100/100 mark (with possibly a bonus to rural users). Any backbone infrastructure created with these loans needs to be peerable as well.
- Phylter 6y ago
  Cable isn't the only problem, companies like AT&T are too. I don't think the money has to go to municipal fiber though. I'm currently in a rural city running 1Gbps/1Gbps with no data caps because of a small company got extra funding.
- fossuser 6y ago
  With Starlink I think the competition will get more real for them. In the rare markets with actual competition the shitty cable companies provide at least okay service. In Palo Alto I can get 1gbps down/35mbps up on Comcast for $89 (with 1TB data cap I have to pay $50 extra to remove). That's not too bad. They also offer a 2gbps down and up service called gigabit pro, but it requires installation and it's pretty expensive: https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/fs6un2/comcast_gigabit_pro/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/fs6un2/comc.... It's also hard to get because the reps on the phone are not well trained and don't know about it. This is only because there are a few internet options here. Where I grew up there is one provider (Spectrum, was Time Warner, and Adelphia before that), the service is bad and the price is at least double. I recently moved to SF and I'm in a newer building with Google Fiber Webpass, it's 1gbps down and up with no cap for $57/month - it's awesome. The worst part about Comcast (ignoring the 35mbps up which is pretty bad) is everything around the service. Their website is extremely hostile. It's impossible to do anything online. Their pricing is heavily obscured. They push shitty TV packages I don't want or care about. It's hard to cancel without going through retention. Google Webpass? I signed up online in 5min, connected my own equipment and was good to go. Hopefully with real competition the old services will either get competitive or die. I don't really care which.
  - martinald 6y ago
    This. I think the really confusing thing is why so few new entrants have joined the US telecom market. There is masses of cheap capital to build these networks out. Most of Europe seems to be moving to this kind of model: A cable TV provider using DOCSIS or FTTH (and expanding their footprint) Existing incumbent telco providing service via VDSL/FTTH (rapidly rolling out FTTH) New "altnets" (as they are called here) doing new build FTTH (like webpass in the US, but they are not just aimed at apartment buildings). This has led to really significant competition. In portugal I have access to at least 1 FTTH and DOCSIS3.1. In London the same, my last flat actually had the option of 2 seperate FTTH providers (not sharing infrastructure) plus DOCSIS based cable. I think the altnets are the key to forcing investment by the otherwise duopolistic incumbent telcos and cable companies. I think what the FCC should be looking at is how to allow altnets to roll out service quicker. There is so much state/municipal legislation that I imagine that is the main blocker of doing this at scale.
- amelius 6y ago
  Or always pay them after they complete a part of the network instead of upfront?
penagwin 6y ago
100Mbps up as a standard? One can only dream. Comcast's highest residential offer is 1Gbps down (yeah right) and 35 mbps up. My other option is DSL with Att, a max of like 30Mbps down...
- drewg123 6y ago
  It seems to have become less common for providers to advertise upload speeds. I was helping a friend pick a plan from a non-comcast cable provider, and she had to call to ask about the upload speeds, as the information was not on the web.
  - lazide 6y ago
    It’s because they’re universally terrible, and don’t help sell the product. If it’s slow uploading photos, support can sell them on upgrading to the next highest plan to ‘go faster’ - congrats your uplink speed is now 5mbs instead of 3mbs isn’t as impressive as ‘we upgraded you to 1gig!’. The only folks who know to ask and care about upload speeds already know Comcast is terrible, and are going to try to figure any way to avoid them.
mrtweetyhack 6y ago
Let's make basic internet(10Mbps down/1Mbps up. just throwing out some numbers ) free and anything faster, you can pay for.
everlost 6y ago
Strange how "broadband" and "high speed internet" can have a different meaning in various parts of the country. For ex: a 10 mbps dsl line is considered "high speed" in New Hampshire.
- jonwachob91 6y ago
  The article addresses the issues of multiple agencies with multiple definitions of broadband, specifically mentioning that the Dept of Agriculture has a definition of 10/1.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    10/1? Whats I am suppose to do with that, wipe my ass? How am meant to backup my pc? Might as well send my data on Sd card by post.
- supertrope 6y ago
  When broadband became a regulated term, those ISPs falling short of the low bar set by the US Government rebranded their product to HSI.
bentcorner 6y ago
Nice to see. I would have hoped to see more of a mention around latency. A lot of tools are sensitive to this and a theoretically fat pipe is not useful if you have 100ms+ latencies.
- thaeli 6y ago
  Also data caps. A fast connection with a 20Gb monthly data cap (common for LTE) still isn't usable as household broadband.
- guntars 6y ago
  Latency is the real killer. I used HughesNet satellite internet while travelling for a while and it has a 650ms round trip. Even sites built by talented and well compensated engineers would sometimes be completely unusable. For example, YoutubeTV used to download the video data in tiny little sub 1MB chunks, each from a seemingly separate CDN endpoint. The result was that each chunk needed a DNS roundtrip and then another one or two for SSL handshaking so it would take at a minimum 1.5 - 2 seconds to even start downloading the data. Needless to say, it was not usable. Moral of the story - latency and roundtrips are the devil and some users have it extra bad, but if you make it work for them, it's going to be amazing for everyone else too.
- ncallaway 6y ago
  The FCC has been skeptical of the latency of Starlink offerings, which are well below 100ms. See https://www.pcmag.com/news/fcc-has-serious-doubts-spacex-starlink-can-deliver-a-low-latency-internet https://www.pcmag.com/news/fcc-has-serious-doubts-spacex-sta... for an example. So, it might be that the senators aren't pushing that because the FCC has already been on the ball for latency, and pushing to keep latencies down around 30-40ms
- donmcronald 6y ago
  Based on my anecdotal observations online, developers don't even understand the impact of latency, so it's not surprising it gets omitted.
ortusdux 6y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26343394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26343394
IndySun 6y ago
https://surfshark.com/blog/worlds-worst-internet-is-least-affordable https://surfshark.com/blog/worlds-worst-internet-is-least-af...
IndySun 6y ago
Also of interest https://www.cable.co.uk/broadband/speed/worldwide-speed-league/ https://www.cable.co.uk/broadband/speed/worldwide-speed-leag... https://www.cable.co.uk/broadband/pricing/worldwide-comparison/ https://www.cable.co.uk/broadband/pricing/worldwide-comparis...
- bydo 6y ago
  According to that map download speeds are nearly twice as fast in the US as they are in South Korea? I don't know where their data is coming from but that sounds awfully suspect.
  - IndySun 6y ago
    It depends on who you trust to supply accurate data. South Korea do have some good numbers, but their average might surprise you.
bigpumpkin 6y ago
Hopefully they also address network stability, which can be more important for video streaming than the bandwidth speed.
xsdf 6y ago
25/3Mbs is like the poverty line of internet speeds nowadays. Below that it would be hard to much of anything given how much data we send now.
totalZero 6y ago
Imagine how good our network technology policy would be if the Senate weren't run by septagenarians and octogenarian. I fear that data caps for home internet will become standard. There is no technological reason for these caps. For wireless, they could be defended by arguing that companies only get to use so much spectrum because of FCC laws. But the only limit for home internet is the ISP's willingness to deploy equipment and install cable/fiber runs. That's exactly what customers are paying them to do.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dmos62 6y ago
  This statement could be made about a lot of things: > Imagine how good [most policies] would be if the Senate weren't run by septagenarians and octogenarian.
- ChrisLomont 6y ago
  > Imagine how good our network technology policy would be if the Senate weren't run by septagenarians and octogenarian. The ages of the senators proposing this are 76 (Joe Manchin), 76 (Angus King), 65 (Rob Portman), and 56 (Michael Bennet). 3 of the 4 are older than the median Senator age. None of the 4 are in the youngest 25%. Image how good our opinions of the Senate would be if we based them in facts.
  - relaxing 6y ago
    The comment was about who runs the senate, not the proposers. Of the individuals you named, only Manchin has any chairmanships.
    - ChrisLomont 6y ago
      Nearly every single bill in Congress is introduced by non-chairmen, so this is an odd misdirection. Bills in both the entire session and in each subcommittee are voted on by members. And again, this demonstrates that mocking old people as somehow the problem is factually unsupportable by the facts.
blunte 6y ago
Yes they should, but what will happen is websites and apps will get fatter and sloppier until the end result is slow, laggy performance. It's a bit like doubling your salary and increasing your spending by more than double. That seems to be how website and app development behaves. Imagine if bandwidth increased, latency decreased (approaching theoritical minimums), and websites/apps were built with a strict (but appropriately flexible) network budget. Perhaps the best catchphrase here is "weakest link". Even with 500+ mbps up and down, and pihole blocking a lot of ads, and noscript blocking some analytics and other trackers, a lot of web experiences are underwhelming. Also, the recent fascinating post about how someone sped up GTA 5 online illustrates how the weakest link can be so weak that it ruins everything.
- blunte 6y ago
  Fascinating. Within seconds of posting my parent, the negatives rolled in. I guess my post was scanned as saying "no, don't increase bandwidth". Far from it.
  - blunte 6y ago
    There's something going on here that is organized toward some goal, but it doesn't make sense. Usually troll farms work for financial interests, but my comment wasn't taking any side. If the votes came from thinking HN readers, I would have expected refutory responses. (meta) It's reasonable that we don't see who downvoted us, but it would be very interesting to see the karma of each account that downvoted.
    - greedo 6y ago
      I didn't vote you down, but your comment didn't really add a lot of value. It's like whenever expanding roads come up, people say "but this encourages more traffic!" True, but not really the point.
      - blunte 6y ago
        But this is HN, and a lot of us are responsible for the state of web browsing! (Plus a lot are junior and have not considered these performance topics.) Absolutely everyone's connection to the internet should be fast and unfiltered, but if the supply side doesn't behave responsibly, the gains will be lost. (edit-added) And let's pause a moment to consider actual bandwidth needs. viop, video calls, and 1080 streaming all need less than 10mbps. Online gaming usually benefits more from low latency than from bandwidth. Honestly, only downloading files (app and OS updates) really benefits from bandwidth above 10mbps. And to be fair, now that phone, app, and OS updates are 1GB+, there is some value in increasing bandwidth. Most day to day problems come from unreliable networks, where latency spikes, or from heavily throttled upload speeds which effectively tie up the overall connection. And finally, the issue is not in forcing providers to offer reasonable performance, but instead to undo the last 20 years of corporate-government cozying which has been allowed to increase dramatically in the US. This has resulted in effective monopolies with high prices and low performance - and no alternatives.
canada2us 6y ago
Hopefully this will pass. For residential, Comcast only advertises download speed, leaving upload speed like 1996. Comcast has a bad reputation but there is only 1 ISP available to my address. No competition.
- p1mrx 6y ago
  Comcast was around 1500/128 kbps in 1998, 6000/384 kbps in 2007, and I currently have 300/15 Mbps, so we've made some progress since 1996.
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
I find terms such as “broadband” and “high definition” that need to be updated every so often to be incredibly useless. Numbers and units exist for a reason. If one wish to speak of 100 Mib/s, then one should simply do so. — that way, I, and everyone else, knows exactly what is going on.
- Arrath 6y ago
  I ran into this on a government contract that wanted videos of certain things submitted in, per specification, "high definition digital video" okay 1080/60 it is. Oh, no that's too big for them to email to their antiquated consultants, turns out they want 15MiB max video clips. Well to do that I had to step down to 720/30. Which they then complained wasn't clear enough for their uses. Three rounds of RFI later I'm back as square one, they've defined HD as 1080/60 and they say they'll figure out how to distribute the clips. Just annoying as all get out when they could have started with clear language (numbers) to begin with.
reddotX 6y ago
in Romania you can't even get lower than 100Mbs at the largest internet providers (even 100Mbs in some cases) https://www.digi.ro/servicii/internet https://www.digi.ro/servicii/internet
- ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  I'm I reading that right that a "940/450 Mbps" fiber plan is ~$10 a month??
  - Medox 6y ago
    Yes. And very good coverage too. Even my parents in a small village have fiber at those prices, since 5 years now. We are basically a giant Lan party since the 2000's and should get a Netflix special/documentary with this script: https://np.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/2ct58s/average_internet_speed_in_eu_by_country/cjiyt5n/?context=3 https://np.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/2ct58s/average_inter...
  - nybble41 6y ago
    It looks that way to me (40 LEI ~= $9.81 USD). Personally I'm more impressed that they advertise a 200/100 Mbps minimum speed. I'm not sure I've ever seen a minimum speed listed by a US residential ISP. If you're very lucky they'll tell you the average speed to expect and not a theoretical maximum. They also didn't say anything about data caps, though there could be something in the contracts. I don't read Romanian myself and the PDFs of the contracts are time-consuming to manually reformat and feed into Google Translate. (Text selection goes across the page, not down each column, so it interleaves the columns.) But those minimum speeds—which BTW are guaranteed in the contracts—and no data caps would imply an oversubscription rate of only 4-5x. One question to ask would be whether they are getting a subsidy to provide service at those rates. The subscriber might not be paying the full cost, or at least not up front.
    - NullPrefix 6y ago
      >They also didn't say anything about data caps I doubt they have any.
kryogen1c 6y ago
Lets try and suss out some of the multiple issues with US internet: -regulating ISPs as a free market is, to be hyperbolic, a disaster. there is effectively a monopoly in most parts of the country. -25/3 Mbps is a very reasonable speed for most people. the issue is that its provided on a best effort basis that is never maintained for long, if at all. netflix says thats enough to stream UHD[0] -FTA: "Those data points likely undercount the number of unserved Americans because the FCC lets ISPs count an entire census block as served even if it can serve just one home in the block" hilarious - what else is there to say. -FTA: "The senators are also frustrated by differing standards across agencies. [...] the FCC defines [...] Alternatively, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines" why is this the federal government's job again? the internet is clearly not an enumerated power. is this the interstate commerce clause that keeps on giving in action again? i think decentralizing federal power would help alleviate a lot of the existential dread vis a vi corruption that many americans are feeling. all in all, this reeks of regulatory capture to me. if we're gonna have a serious discussion about internet infrastructure, i think the starting point is how we classify ISPs and where in the city-state-federal hierarchy the responsibility lies. changing a 25 to a 100 is a cool bullet on a resume, but i dont think this is the low handing fruit here. [0]https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306
- kgermino 6y ago
  > -regulating ISPs as a free market is, to be hyperbolic, a disaster. there is effectively a monopoly in most parts of the country. > all in all, this reeks of regulatory capture to me. if we're gonna have a serious discussion about internet infrastructure, i think the starting point is how we classify ISPs and where in the city-state-federal hierarchy the responsibility lies. changing a 26 to a 100 is a cool bullet on a resume, but i dont think this is the low handing fruit here. The distributed regulation is the biggest problem IMO. ISPs are generally granted explicit or effective monopolies by local governments. Local competition is difficult enough for a utility business, but city governments make it effectively impossible in many places. Then there's a few big players who are able to claim competition and get lenient regulation at the federal level.
  - 6y ago
CKN23-ARIN 6y ago
The letter specifically calls for symmetrical speeds of at least 100Mbps. Let's hope that this is the death of PON-based FTTH.
- CodeBeater 6y ago
  I'm not trying to be aggressive here (specially since I'm WAY out of my lane when it comes to networking), but what's wrong with PON?
  - CKN23-ARIN 6y ago
    It's asymmetric, providing far less upload capacity than download.
    - vel0city 6y ago
      It doesn't have to be. I'm on a PON, I've got symmetrical upload speeds.
    - ralph84 6y ago
      It can be, but the two biggest PON operators in the US (AT&T and Verizon) offer symmetric speeds.
      - toast0 6y ago
        AT&T fiber in San Jose was GPON which is a 2.5 G down/1.25G up, split to several households (where I was, it was sixish lots per pole, but some lots had several units, and I'm not sure if the fiber to the pole was split earlier). They sell 1g/1g service on that, and it's clearly oversubscribed heavier on upload than download. 2:1 down:up is way better than most DSL ratios, and I usually saw better up than down speeds.
- kondro 6y ago
  PON doesn't require asymmetry. It's just a way of coupling to fiber without requiring a power.
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
While we're at it, let's prevent ISPs from disallowing us to run a business on our home internet. Why should it matter to them how we use our bits? Sell us on a support plan and higher uptime, sure, but there's no reason we should be disallowed from private enterprise because we're not "paying for a business account".
- TLightful 6y ago
  Wow, is that a thing in the US? Home of capitalism! Sorry to hear that.
  - simfree 6y ago
    Yep, ISP blacklist addresses as large enterprise businesses only, or Small/Medium Business only and do not permit residential internet installation even when the property is rezoned or has been converted to residential.
  - aksss 6y ago
    My ISP doesn’t prohibit doing business over the connection or hosting services for commercial gain, with the exception of reselling internet access - like using your broadband connection as a paid hotspot for anonymous customers is disallowed in ToS.
terrywang 6y ago
Paying A$90 (~70 USD) for broadband based on HFC to freestanding house, 100Mbps (downstream) / 40Mbps (upstream), hit by outages from time to time as ISPs are simply NBN resellers, which in turn is a wrapper on top of Telstra's infrastructure. Will be keen to see how Starlink rollout goes down-under.
- simfree 6y ago
  Isn't Telstra just an NBN reseller at this point? IIRC that was why they were planning to start pushing cellular home internet, as they own their cellular assets outright, whereas NBN bought the wireline assets and charges them per customer.
- hnick 6y ago
  NBN has had an order of magnitude more outages in the last few years than ADSL2 ever had for me. Maybe it's limited to HFC, but I doubt it. One time I got an outage report for work being done, but the internet only went down when they left for the day and messed something up on their way out.
OakNinja 6y ago
I had 100/100 back in 2002. Now, I have 10000/10000 symmetrical fiber which sets me back ~$45/month. This article (and discussion) make me feel privileged :)
devwastaken 6y ago
One great thing about higher upload is the ability to host your own content, be a tor node, release decentralized software platforms that can actually work. Imagine if people could just buy a premade raspi that hosted their social media page, ddns, etc.
codecamper 6y ago
In the little podunk Hungarian village.. middle of nowhere. Farmers and hunters. 300Mbps $15 / month
martin_bech 6y ago
Hi from the developed world.. just checked, the slowest available broadband here is 200Mpbs/20Mpbs. Default is 200/200, I and most people I know went with 1000/1000Mpbs.
- pottertheotter 6y ago
  It is that way in some areas that have competition, but not many. I'm curious where you are at? And how much is 1000/1000 per month?
  - martin_bech 6y ago
    Denmark, my isp is 40usd pr month 1000/1000Mpbs.
    - pottertheotter 6y ago
      Thanks for the response! I'm quite jealous. The lowest I've seen for symmetrical 1Gbps here is ~$65, and that's rare. Any chance I could ask you a few questions about internet access in Denmark? I'm working towards some local improvements here in the U.S. and curious to get some more data points. If you email me at hnPotterTheOtter ~ gmail it will go to my normal email address.
  - Scandiravian 6y ago
    Also from DK. I have a 1000/1000 connection for approximately 20$ per month There was talks about upgrading to 10gbit/10gbit for 30$, since the infrastructure can deliver that, but since consumer hardware is still stuck at 1gbit it was postponed until there's actually a market for it
    - pottertheotter 6y ago
      Thanks for the response! I'm quite jealous. The lowest I've seen in the U.S. for symmetrical 1Gbps is ~$65, and that's rare. Even more rare is 10Gbps, and the cheapest I've seen is $250. The best I can get is 940/35, for $120/month :( Any chance I could ask you a few questions about internet access in Denmark? I'm working towards some local improvements here in the U.S. and curious to get some more data points. If you email me at hnPotterTheOtter ~ gmail it will go to my normal email address.
LinuxBender 6y ago
Somewhat related, if you would like to query any location in the U.S. and see internet speeds, the government has a site for it. [1] I am using that to decide where to move. Use the pull down menu to change from coordinates to address. You can put in a street address. [1] - https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/#/ https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/#/
- beachtaxidriver 6y ago
  At least in my case that map is overly optimistic. It reports two additional providers that won't actually make the installation. I've tried. Charter only.
  - LinuxBender 6y ago
    It makes me wonder how often ISP's are misreporting to the FCC about coverage.
    - LinuxBender 6y ago
      I found this [1] form that might be a place to submit inaccuracies of their map, maybe. [1] - https://www.fcc.gov/information-required-when-filing-information-quality-comment https://www.fcc.gov/information-required-when-filing-informa...
908B64B197 6y ago
25/3 is a little sad for modern computing. It's ok for video streaming and conference calls. And I guess that's the minimal threshold. But with more and more services and offerings in the cloud, especially iCloud that just happily backs-up data out of the box and OneDrive 1TB corporate plan it's not going to win any awards. With the pandemic and the changes in work from home habits, if I was a small town mayor I'd be rolling out fiber right now like there's no tomorrow. Big upfront costs but it instantly boosts the value of every property covered and attracts a new demographic that's not tied to any specific geographic location. Even with folks doing part time work from home, the additional time spent in the town during work days means that commercial real-estate will appreciate as well. Easy as that.
- tbihl 6y ago
  Unfortunately, mayors haven't been seeing a lot of resources to work with this year. First priority will always be to stop the bleeding. And, of course, printing money isn't an option for them, so the opportunity will mostly be missed.
  - 908B64B197 6y ago
    > And, of course, printing money isn't an option for them They can always borrow, and make up for it in higher property taxes.
jonplackett 6y ago
100 upload would be amazing. I'm in central London and can only get 15mbps upload despite 350mbps down. Is this the same ratio in the US? My friends in mainland Europe seem to have much more symmetrical up/down streams
- LeoPanthera 6y ago
  I'm in the SF bay area and have a cable connection which is advertised as 1000/40, but in practice its actually 900/25.
- noahtallen 6y ago
  I live in Portland, OR and pay $30 for 240mbps down, 6mbps up. It’s part of “Comcast communities”, which is something the apartment complex signed on to for everyone here. A bit cheaper than normal, I suspect.
avereveard 6y ago
I know what I'd do with a 100mbs, split it with 5 people and pay a fifth
partingshots 6y ago
It’s a point to note that without Google Fiber bashing in traditional telecom, we’d still be at 10Mbps upload/download being deemed “blazing fast internet”. Keep that in mind the next time you pay your monthly bill for AT&T/Time Warner/Comcast/Verizon. They could’ve given you gigabit speeds the entire time.
lmilcin 6y ago
I live in Poland and I am BAFFLED at how bad internet in US, supposedly one of the most developed countries on Earth, is. I have commercial (ie high priority), 600Mbit/120Mbit broadband with extremely stable (under 15ms, over 99% of th time) round trip to most of the Poland, for equivalent of 20 USD per month. I know its not the same everywhere in Poland, but consider I also have three mobile internet plans. One of them is 4G limited to 20Mbit but unlimited monthly transfer, for 5 USD per month. This is also quite stable and allows me to comfortably work remotely from almost every place in Poland and serves me as a backup link.
- Clubber 6y ago
  I live in Poland and I am BAFFLED at how bad ________ in US. You could replace that with a lot of things unfortunately. If you put "and expensive" at the end, it would probably be just as correct.
  - clairity 6y ago
    it’s not baffling. we decided to glamorize billionaires rather than the amazing country we could have had if we’d stopped at millionaires as the height of (economic) status and reasonable wealth accumulation. a billionaire simply cannot allocate capital as efficiently as a thousand millionaires, so we choke on our own collective greed.
  - xyst 6y ago
    namely healthcare. it's an absolute disaster if you have to do anything beyond the simple "annual health examinations." I literally hate going to the doctor because the various billing departments are often nightmares to deal with.
    - Talanes 6y ago
      I literally haven't been to the doctor in four years, because the last time I went in for an X-ray they charged me immediately, and then later sent a bill for some more charges on the same X-ray. My insurance and medical provider are the same entity, which I thought was supposed to avoid this exact situation. Now I just avoid any medical treatment unless it is completely unavoidable, because I have absolutely no trust that the costs won't just be suddenly upgraded afterwords.
benlivengood 6y ago
An interesting parallel is how much water/sewer, electricity, and natural gas connections cost. Cities have been providing these for centuries now and it's generally about $30-$50 base cost per month to connect to the utilities. This is for physical infrastructure requiring continual maintenance and treatment plants and movement of physical goods. Internet service is almost static once installed; fiber lasts for decades (barring visits from backhoes) and the networking equipment can be fairly centralized and doesn't cost a lot to keep the lights on. It's insane that ISPs charge the rates that they do. Multi-mode SFPs are $50, switches are low thousands for enterprise grade, a couple long range 100G SFPs are another thousand. $50/month * 48 ports in a neighborhood pays that off pretty fast. Fiber can't be any harder to install than fluid-filled pipes or electrical cables.
morpheos137 6y ago
I would say very few residential customers need more than 10Mbps upload. For 100Mbps you could run about 50 Zooms simultaneously. Who does that? Unless you are massively uploading (likely illegal content) who needs greater than 10Mbps upstream at home?
- fletchowns 6y ago
  It's not hard to generate a large volume of data with today's digital cameras (video & still). Backing that up to the cloud at 10 Mbps takes forever. Oh you want to switch cloud backup providers now? It will be another year before your initial backup completes.
- fomine3 6y ago
  Then we lose ability to develop new services that requires uplink bandwidth. Even now, there are services that need such bandwidth like cloud storages, YouTube.
  - morpheos137 6y ago
    This is kind of the whole problem with the world right now in multiple areas. We have a delusion that we are in a post scarcity age. I watch modern youtube videos on my 14 year old thinkpad on 802.11b wifi without issue. It works fine, seriously.
- lazide 6y ago
  Yeah, why would I try to do an online backup of my data in less than a day? Or transfer high res video files somewhere? Or (gasp) host something? The current ISP setup is based on a consumer only model of the internet which benefits the big corps and stifles anyone trying to actually DO anything but consume.
huachimingo 6y ago
Just implement IPv6 and make connections more stable. And use consistent scales. MiB =/= MB, and 100Mbps means 12.5 MB/s.
xyst 6y ago
wow - our internet is that bad we set a low fucking bar
flemhans 6y ago
I remember having 100 Mbps up/down in 1998. That's 23 years ago :D
- aksss 6y ago
  I think that’s exceptional for 1998. Where was the service address (work vs home, city), what kind of service, and how much?
BooneJS 6y ago
This would be 100 Mbps faster than the non-existent cable that stopped 4 miles from my dad’s home in Wisconsin. They went down a rural road 40 years ago hooking up houses who wanted and stopped when they reached a home that said no. They had wireless for a while but the company shut down. Starlink is his only real hope.
adamzegelin 6y ago
While we're at it, can we convince the Australian govt. too please? Something like 10/5 is considered "fast enough".
bdw5204 6y ago
I've had a symmetrical gigabit connection for the past year and a half and there's no way I'd go back to anything slower. The peace of mind from not having to worry about something in the background slowing down your connection and the ability to download digital games faster than the physical copies could be installed from the disc is just too valuable. Improving internet for America outside of the cities means investing in the infrastructure to upgrade it. It also means outlawing the data cap scam and banning ISPs from overselling their bandwidth because high speed internet is useless if you can't actually use it. Its the same principle as banning junk health insurance plans that are useless when you actually need medical care: fraud should be illegal even if it "saves some people some money".
happytiger 6y ago
No 1Gbps should be the standard for wired and 300mbps for wireless and satellite. We’re not exactly leaping into the future with this effort — we are barely catching up. If the US wants to continue to lead the world we need high speed internet.
uneekname 6y ago
As someone whose website (and most of the websites I visit) has a relatively small footprint, 100/100Mbps would be more than comfortable for me to host and surf on
xyzelement 6y ago
I am genuinely perplexed reading the comments here about how bad US internet is. Knock on wood, I have basically never felt bandwidth or latency constrained in practical terms once the dial-up days ended. I forget what plan I pay for with my cable provider but I just tested to 200 Megabit down and 18 up. That sounds low compared to numbers people throw around here but in reality my wife and I are able to Zoom or stream at the same time, browse in parallel and basically never feel any impact of latency. Basically, everything we want to do in real time works in real time and anything large I want to download (eg: linux ISOs) takes just a few seconds. Whatever numbers we are throwing around for comparison just don't seem to be practical concerns. We're in NYC. With COVID, my coworkers scattered all over the US - east, west and south. Nobody put in a particular effort to look for places based on connectivity quality and yet everyone is able to WFH fine. Everyone moved to either be close to family, to a warmer client, or to skiing and the mountains. And yet somehow everyone ended up with great connectivity that allows us to seamlessly run a large and successful firm. It's just funny to hear people complain about how bad things are when in reality everything works mainly fine. Like - really - what are you actually unable to do? (I am genuinely curious) My internet bill is $38 in NYC by the way. RCN cable. One final thing - it's nonsensical for people to say "I have X connectivity and I am in a Central European village." Obviously... the us installed its infrastructure before you did and it works well enough so we're not going to tear it out and replace it for no reason. You didn't have connectivity until much later so of course you're currently using newer technology. At some point we'll have to upgrade ours and leap ahead of you again.
- noahtallen 6y ago
  > We're in NYC Exactly, this conversation is about how terrible internet is when you aren’t in the most densely populated urban areas. Yes, it’s mostly fine in cities and even ok inside some small towns. It’s usually terrible when you live outside of the small-town city limits and not on a state highway. > and it works well enough so we’re not going to tear it out Your 200Mbps connection is definitely not on original infrastructure. For the 50 million plus people living with DSL connections which get barely 6mbps download on a good day, they would not agree that the older infra we have “works fine”. I know many people with this story because I’m from a part of the country like that — drive across America, and you’ll see that nearly everywhere is very sparsely populated. That covers a lot of people! You might be able to experience this yourself eventually if you go on a road trip and stay at a hotel not in a large city. I don’t think it’s nonsensical to suggest that the US could also be building out a nationwide fiber network, and I think we should be striving towards that.
Proven 6y ago
Busybodies at ArsTechica should trash the central-planning idea but as all good statists do they want to fine tune it.
trissylegs 6y ago
Australia has been bee-lining towards faster internet for over a decard. (Which was somewhat sabotaged but changing the "All FTTP" to FTTN leaving most suburbs with substantially worse internet) I just got upgraded to 1000/50... Yes that's 1 Gigabit down and 50 megabits up. This can actually break if your download requires too much Request headers (eg Range requests) it will choke on the upload when downloading at full speed.
fireball_blaze 6y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26343394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26343394
amundsentb 6y ago
I heard someone even less qualified to comment (can you believe it?) said that 1Tbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard. shrug
raspyberr 6y ago
While I'm all for this. Won't this mean websites and SaaS applications will get EVEN more heavy?
gigatexal 6y ago
This legislation is dead if it doesn't prevent local munis from kowtowing to incumbant ISPs and thwarting municipal fiber. That's what we need: a ton more competition from the municipalities in this space given that I think broadband should be a public good like the highway system is.
cyberlab 6y ago
Would people saturate their connection for a long duration of time streaming 4K or whatever? I know for me I am what's called 'extremely online', but I use the web intermittently, and don't saturate my connection streaming NSFW content for 12 hour intervals. When I need it, my 100Mbps connection is there for me, when I need to download an ISO or whatever, but that's the only time I use the fast connection. The rest is all low-bandwidth activity (surfing twitter, checking email etc).

447 points by caution 6y ago

> The funding is going to a mix of cable, fiber, and fixed wireless providers, plus SpaceX's Starlink satellite network. I think cable providers should be left out. They were already gifted many billions of dollars in the past for this same basic purpose but they pocketed the money. They can just use the free money they've already been given. Instead, the funding should go to existing munipical fiber ISPs to expand their coverage. Give money to people with a proven track record of doing what you want, not people with a proven track record of keeping the money for themselves. I'm on municipal fiber and it's amazing.

technofiend 6y ago
>They were already gifted many billions of dollars in the past for this same basic purpose but they pocketed the money. They can just use the free money they've already been given. I mean they could but they wont, and there was no reason to with Ajit Pai running the place. I daresay they'll have to be sued into compliance to do it now. Not that I object to that: they need to refund the taxpayers' money or do what they promised with it.
- smegger001 6y ago
  >they need to refund the taxpayers' money or do what they promised with it. plus interest.
- gabereiser 6y ago
  They’ll just claim something something 5G and will be back in the feds good graces. Honestly the cable industry is a monopoly and has grown beyond government oversight. This needs to change but we don’t have any other option than nullifying anti-municipal fiber laws and start laying down new lines.
  - bredren 6y ago
    This is why starlink is so important. I can not wait to stop paying Comcast.
    - new_realist 6y ago
      Why don’t you move to 5G now?
      - Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
        Most of America doesn't have true (mm wave) 5g. About 1/3 of America lacks "5g" entirely. Assuming one does have access it's not financially prudent for most households to buy into 5g when the caps are as low as 100gb/mo. https://www.androidauthority.com/where-is-5g-available-in-the-us-1140484/ https://www.androidauthority.com/where-is-5g-available-in-th...
        fulafel 6y ago
        Nitpick: mm-wave is just one of the dozen things that are in the 5G cornucopia of random technologies, it's not more or less "true 5G" than eg 5G edge computing.
        gabereiser 6y ago
        In America 4>5 so we’ve appropriated “5G” to mean the mm-wave wireless transmission. There are still large pockets of the US on data caps as low as 10gb. Throttled connections. Asymmetric networks. All so we can be nickel and dimed to death on fees, privilege, bundles, and in some cases double paying for content.
        smichel17 6y ago
        It's funny to me, reading "as low as 10gb". I used 45MB of data last month, and 9 of that was the Android OS. (And, yes, 4.33GB on wifi, of which 186MB was the OS). I know other people use their phones way more than I do, it's just a different world to me, where data limits are a thing to think about.
- lostapathy 6y ago
  > there was no reason to with Ajit Pai running the place This problem goes back WAY farther than Ajit Pai.
markovbot 6y ago
for-profit corporations should not own our communications infrastructure.
- dheera 6y ago
  I don't see an inherent problem with for-profit companies owning infrastructure, but it needs to not be monopolized and it needs to not be owned by a bunch of public market shareholders and hedge funds who don't even use the product. Utility monopolies and public companies rarely put customers first.
- sigstoat 6y ago
  can they own our food production infrastructure? how about our clothing industry? home construction? those all represent far more fundamental human needs than communication.
  - TulliusCicero 6y ago
    Those things all have much more redundancy than comms. The US has three mobile internet providers (there's also MVNO's, but they use the same physical infrastructure as the big three), and any given home will usually only have access to two or three landline ISP's in terms of infra (e.g. cable, DSL, fiber). In contrast, food can be shipped in to a city from innumerable farms, ditto for clothing. Home construction, there's lot of different home builders around, it's not a natural monopoly like communication. For food production, I don't really have to trust any particular two or three farming companies -- if they fuck up, food can be shipped in from elsewhere. Whereas if my local ISP's are exploitative or simply incompetent, what's my recourse?
  - jayd16 6y ago
    No one has monopoly control of the infrastructure in those industries. Anyone can buy and farm land, textile plants, etc. Its not possible to simply lay more conduit and compete.
  - function_seven 6y ago
    What "infrastructure" means needs to be nailed down before this can be discussed. Internet service is seen as something in the same league as roads, power, water, and other utilities. Things that require public rights of way, extensive digging, cooperations among many jurisdictions or land owners, and special rules to make it all possible. Clothing, food, and construction are all businesses that don't require that level of centralized coordination. Anyone can open their own bakery, or buy a farm. Anyone can set up sewing machines and purchase fabric, or get a contractors' license and start nailing sticks of wood together. Government still sets standards, of course. But these businesses don't have inherent monopolies the same way infrastructure businesses do.
rayiner 6y ago
> They were already gifted many billions of dollars in the past for this same basic purpose but they pocketed the money. Very little government money has been spent on broadband. Federal funding for broadband dates back only to the Obama administration. And cable companies have largely not received this money. You’re thinking of something else.
- chromaton 6y ago
  To avoid another repeated thread, just read this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556 I just realized that you were posting on that thread as well.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    Whatever conclusions you reach from the points made in that thread, there is an important additional point here. That thread is talking about telephone companies. OP is talking about cable. We tend to think of both of them as just “broadband” today, but the regulatory structure is totally different. The central premise of the notion that telephone companies received “billions of dollars from the government” is that the government lifted rate regulation on telephone companies in the 1990s. Rate regulation told the companies what they could charge for local phone service. The argument is that phone companies made $200 billion more than they would have had had those regulations remained in place. I disagree with that assertion for phone companies, as addressed in the thread above. But even on its own merits that argument is not applicable to cable companies. Cable companies weren’t rate regulated (except that in some places there is a regulated minimum television service they must provide at a government-specified price). There was no government action in the 1990s that contemplated subsidies to create incentives for cable companies to build fiber.
- greedo 6y ago
  I think the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was supposed to help improve Internet access through its Universal Service provision. Of course all the telecoms pocketed the money and didn't do shit. https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service https://www.fcc.gov/general/universal-service
mixmastamyk 6y ago
How much does it cost? Here Spectrum keeps upping the cost during the pandemic, now at $75/m for decent bandwidth.
- spaceisballer 6y ago
  We have either DSL or Comcast. 300/10mbps costs $100. Total rip-off but that’s the price of our county signing a 10 year exclusive deal with them. Now it’s expired but nobody is going to bring business in.
- epmaybe 6y ago
  In my area there was good competition with the new fiber infrastructure, so Spectrum offered $30/mo for two years with 400/25
totalZero 6y ago
If the issue is link speed symmetry, then cable should be out of the running entirely. Even my phone offers better upload speed than cable in my neighborhood. Same for my parents' place across the country. New money should go to fiber, satellite, wireless, or nothing at all.
- plantain 6y ago
  DOCSIS 3 (from 2006) can do 100/100 over cable - it's the decision of the provider not the technology.
  - CKN23-ARIN 6y ago
    It's at least somewhat inherent to the technology. DOCSIS download channels are shared among subscribers; upload channels are allocated exclusively per-subscriber. This architecture provides economic incentives for the provider to provision asymmetric circuits rather than symmetric ones.
  - supertrope 6y ago
    100 Mbps up requires expanding the uplink band from 5-42MHz to 85MHz. That requires changing outdoor components like amplifier and filters, and upgrading millions of cable TV boxes, splitters and modems inside customers' homes. The combined cost of hiring more technicians and buying boxes might approach the cost of upgrading to fiber. Altice USA decided to skip DOCSIS 3.1 and start dragging fiber.
    - StillBored 6y ago
      Which is all stuff they are doing anyway. Cable modems, even when not integrated with wifi don't last more than a couple years before someone adds a couple more channels, or tweaks the spec. Etc, Docsis 3.1 modems were available in the local best buy for probably 5+ years before my cable company would even provision them in docsis 3.0 modes. They might have some excuses with the amps, but again, those can be upgraded as they age out/die too. This was the excuse 20 years ago when the amps didn't allow any upstream signals through in many areas. If a cable company hasn't been preparing/slowly rolling out new equipment as soon as the specs are available that is their own fault. Like any other technology you either get on the train, or you get left behind.
jjcm 6y ago
Including cable providers is fine. The issue is how this money is structured. It needs to be a loan where the debt is forgiven once you reach certain milestones. The issue with the money earlier was there wasn't any teeth when it came to enforcing what was to be done with the funds. Make the loan be equally competitive - any company can apply for any amount of money, and a small amount of the loan is forgiven per user they bring above the 100/100 mark (with possibly a bonus to rural users). Any backbone infrastructure created with these loans needs to be peerable as well.
Phylter 6y ago
Cable isn't the only problem, companies like AT&T are too. I don't think the money has to go to municipal fiber though. I'm currently in a rural city running 1Gbps/1Gbps with no data caps because of a small company got extra funding.
fossuser 6y ago
With Starlink I think the competition will get more real for them. In the rare markets with actual competition the shitty cable companies provide at least okay service. In Palo Alto I can get 1gbps down/35mbps up on Comcast for $89 (with 1TB data cap I have to pay $50 extra to remove). That's not too bad. They also offer a 2gbps down and up service called gigabit pro, but it requires installation and it's pretty expensive: https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/fs6un2/comcast_gigabit_pro/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/fs6un2/comc.... It's also hard to get because the reps on the phone are not well trained and don't know about it. This is only because there are a few internet options here. Where I grew up there is one provider (Spectrum, was Time Warner, and Adelphia before that), the service is bad and the price is at least double. I recently moved to SF and I'm in a newer building with Google Fiber Webpass, it's 1gbps down and up with no cap for $57/month - it's awesome. The worst part about Comcast (ignoring the 35mbps up which is pretty bad) is everything around the service. Their website is extremely hostile. It's impossible to do anything online. Their pricing is heavily obscured. They push shitty TV packages I don't want or care about. It's hard to cancel without going through retention. Google Webpass? I signed up online in 5min, connected my own equipment and was good to go. Hopefully with real competition the old services will either get competitive or die. I don't really care which.
- martinald 6y ago
  This. I think the really confusing thing is why so few new entrants have joined the US telecom market. There is masses of cheap capital to build these networks out. Most of Europe seems to be moving to this kind of model: A cable TV provider using DOCSIS or FTTH (and expanding their footprint) Existing incumbent telco providing service via VDSL/FTTH (rapidly rolling out FTTH) New "altnets" (as they are called here) doing new build FTTH (like webpass in the US, but they are not just aimed at apartment buildings). This has led to really significant competition. In portugal I have access to at least 1 FTTH and DOCSIS3.1. In London the same, my last flat actually had the option of 2 seperate FTTH providers (not sharing infrastructure) plus DOCSIS based cable. I think the altnets are the key to forcing investment by the otherwise duopolistic incumbent telcos and cable companies. I think what the FCC should be looking at is how to allow altnets to roll out service quicker. There is so much state/municipal legislation that I imagine that is the main blocker of doing this at scale.
amelius 6y ago
Or always pay them after they complete a part of the network instead of upfront?

penagwin 6y ago

100Mbps up as a standard? One can only dream. Comcast's highest residential offer is 1Gbps down (yeah right) and 35 mbps up. My other option is DSL with Att, a max of like 30Mbps down...

drewg123 6y ago
It seems to have become less common for providers to advertise upload speeds. I was helping a friend pick a plan from a non-comcast cable provider, and she had to call to ask about the upload speeds, as the information was not on the web.
- lazide 6y ago
  It’s because they’re universally terrible, and don’t help sell the product. If it’s slow uploading photos, support can sell them on upgrading to the next highest plan to ‘go faster’ - congrats your uplink speed is now 5mbs instead of 3mbs isn’t as impressive as ‘we upgraded you to 1gig!’. The only folks who know to ask and care about upload speeds already know Comcast is terrible, and are going to try to figure any way to avoid them.

mrtweetyhack 6y ago

Let's make basic internet(10Mbps down/1Mbps up. just throwing out some numbers ) free and anything faster, you can pay for.

everlost 6y ago

Strange how "broadband" and "high speed internet" can have a different meaning in various parts of the country. For ex: a 10 mbps dsl line is considered "high speed" in New Hampshire.

jonwachob91 6y ago
The article addresses the issues of multiple agencies with multiple definitions of broadband, specifically mentioning that the Dept of Agriculture has a definition of 10/1.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  10/1? Whats I am suppose to do with that, wipe my ass? How am meant to backup my pc? Might as well send my data on Sd card by post.
supertrope 6y ago
When broadband became a regulated term, those ISPs falling short of the low bar set by the US Government rebranded their product to HSI.

bentcorner 6y ago

Nice to see. I would have hoped to see more of a mention around latency. A lot of tools are sensitive to this and a theoretically fat pipe is not useful if you have 100ms+ latencies.

thaeli 6y ago
Also data caps. A fast connection with a 20Gb monthly data cap (common for LTE) still isn't usable as household broadband.
guntars 6y ago
Latency is the real killer. I used HughesNet satellite internet while travelling for a while and it has a 650ms round trip. Even sites built by talented and well compensated engineers would sometimes be completely unusable. For example, YoutubeTV used to download the video data in tiny little sub 1MB chunks, each from a seemingly separate CDN endpoint. The result was that each chunk needed a DNS roundtrip and then another one or two for SSL handshaking so it would take at a minimum 1.5 - 2 seconds to even start downloading the data. Needless to say, it was not usable. Moral of the story - latency and roundtrips are the devil and some users have it extra bad, but if you make it work for them, it's going to be amazing for everyone else too.
ncallaway 6y ago
The FCC has been skeptical of the latency of Starlink offerings, which are well below 100ms. See https://www.pcmag.com/news/fcc-has-serious-doubts-spacex-starlink-can-deliver-a-low-latency-internet https://www.pcmag.com/news/fcc-has-serious-doubts-spacex-sta... for an example. So, it might be that the senators aren't pushing that because the FCC has already been on the ball for latency, and pushing to keep latencies down around 30-40ms
donmcronald 6y ago
Based on my anecdotal observations online, developers don't even understand the impact of latency, so it's not surprising it gets omitted.

ortusdux 6y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26343394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26343394

IndySun 6y ago

https://surfshark.com/blog/worlds-worst-internet-is-least-affordable https://surfshark.com/blog/worlds-worst-internet-is-least-af...

IndySun 6y ago

Also of interest https://www.cable.co.uk/broadband/speed/worldwide-speed-league/ https://www.cable.co.uk/broadband/speed/worldwide-speed-leag... https://www.cable.co.uk/broadband/pricing/worldwide-comparison/ https://www.cable.co.uk/broadband/pricing/worldwide-comparis...

bydo 6y ago
According to that map download speeds are nearly twice as fast in the US as they are in South Korea? I don't know where their data is coming from but that sounds awfully suspect.
- IndySun 6y ago
  It depends on who you trust to supply accurate data. South Korea do have some good numbers, but their average might surprise you.

bigpumpkin 6y ago

Hopefully they also address network stability, which can be more important for video streaming than the bandwidth speed.

xsdf 6y ago

25/3Mbs is like the poverty line of internet speeds nowadays. Below that it would be hard to much of anything given how much data we send now.

totalZero 6y ago

Imagine how good our network technology policy would be if the Senate weren't run by septagenarians and octogenarian. I fear that data caps for home internet will become standard. There is no technological reason for these caps. For wireless, they could be defended by arguing that companies only get to use so much spectrum because of FCC laws. But the only limit for home internet is the ISP's willingness to deploy equipment and install cable/fiber runs. That's exactly what customers are paying them to do.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
dmos62 6y ago
This statement could be made about a lot of things: > Imagine how good [most policies] would be if the Senate weren't run by septagenarians and octogenarian.
ChrisLomont 6y ago
> Imagine how good our network technology policy would be if the Senate weren't run by septagenarians and octogenarian. The ages of the senators proposing this are 76 (Joe Manchin), 76 (Angus King), 65 (Rob Portman), and 56 (Michael Bennet). 3 of the 4 are older than the median Senator age. None of the 4 are in the youngest 25%. Image how good our opinions of the Senate would be if we based them in facts.
- relaxing 6y ago
  The comment was about who runs the senate, not the proposers. Of the individuals you named, only Manchin has any chairmanships.
  - ChrisLomont 6y ago
    Nearly every single bill in Congress is introduced by non-chairmen, so this is an odd misdirection. Bills in both the entire session and in each subcommittee are voted on by members. And again, this demonstrates that mocking old people as somehow the problem is factually unsupportable by the facts.

blunte 6y ago

Yes they should, but what will happen is websites and apps will get fatter and sloppier until the end result is slow, laggy performance. It's a bit like doubling your salary and increasing your spending by more than double. That seems to be how website and app development behaves. Imagine if bandwidth increased, latency decreased (approaching theoritical minimums), and websites/apps were built with a strict (but appropriately flexible) network budget. Perhaps the best catchphrase here is "weakest link". Even with 500+ mbps up and down, and pihole blocking a lot of ads, and noscript blocking some analytics and other trackers, a lot of web experiences are underwhelming. Also, the recent fascinating post about how someone sped up GTA 5 online illustrates how the weakest link can be so weak that it ruins everything.

blunte 6y ago
Fascinating. Within seconds of posting my parent, the negatives rolled in. I guess my post was scanned as saying "no, don't increase bandwidth". Far from it.
- blunte 6y ago
  There's something going on here that is organized toward some goal, but it doesn't make sense. Usually troll farms work for financial interests, but my comment wasn't taking any side. If the votes came from thinking HN readers, I would have expected refutory responses. (meta) It's reasonable that we don't see who downvoted us, but it would be very interesting to see the karma of each account that downvoted.
  - greedo 6y ago
    I didn't vote you down, but your comment didn't really add a lot of value. It's like whenever expanding roads come up, people say "but this encourages more traffic!" True, but not really the point.
    - blunte 6y ago
      But this is HN, and a lot of us are responsible for the state of web browsing! (Plus a lot are junior and have not considered these performance topics.) Absolutely everyone's connection to the internet should be fast and unfiltered, but if the supply side doesn't behave responsibly, the gains will be lost. (edit-added) And let's pause a moment to consider actual bandwidth needs. viop, video calls, and 1080 streaming all need less than 10mbps. Online gaming usually benefits more from low latency than from bandwidth. Honestly, only downloading files (app and OS updates) really benefits from bandwidth above 10mbps. And to be fair, now that phone, app, and OS updates are 1GB+, there is some value in increasing bandwidth. Most day to day problems come from unreliable networks, where latency spikes, or from heavily throttled upload speeds which effectively tie up the overall connection. And finally, the issue is not in forcing providers to offer reasonable performance, but instead to undo the last 20 years of corporate-government cozying which has been allowed to increase dramatically in the US. This has resulted in effective monopolies with high prices and low performance - and no alternatives.

canada2us 6y ago

Hopefully this will pass. For residential, Comcast only advertises download speed, leaving upload speed like 1996. Comcast has a bad reputation but there is only 1 ISP available to my address. No competition.

p1mrx 6y ago
Comcast was around 1500/128 kbps in 1998, 6000/384 kbps in 2007, and I currently have 300/15 Mbps, so we've made some progress since 1996.

Blikkentrekker 6y ago

I find terms such as “broadband” and “high definition” that need to be updated every so often to be incredibly useless. Numbers and units exist for a reason. If one wish to speak of 100 Mib/s, then one should simply do so. — that way, I, and everyone else, knows exactly what is going on.

Arrath 6y ago
I ran into this on a government contract that wanted videos of certain things submitted in, per specification, "high definition digital video" okay 1080/60 it is. Oh, no that's too big for them to email to their antiquated consultants, turns out they want 15MiB max video clips. Well to do that I had to step down to 720/30. Which they then complained wasn't clear enough for their uses. Three rounds of RFI later I'm back as square one, they've defined HD as 1080/60 and they say they'll figure out how to distribute the clips. Just annoying as all get out when they could have started with clear language (numbers) to begin with.

reddotX 6y ago

in Romania you can't even get lower than 100Mbs at the largest internet providers (even 100Mbs in some cases) https://www.digi.ro/servicii/internet https://www.digi.ro/servicii/internet

ed25519FUUU 6y ago
I'm I reading that right that a "940/450 Mbps" fiber plan is ~$10 a month??
- Medox 6y ago
  Yes. And very good coverage too. Even my parents in a small village have fiber at those prices, since 5 years now. We are basically a giant Lan party since the 2000's and should get a Netflix special/documentary with this script: https://np.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/2ct58s/average_internet_speed_in_eu_by_country/cjiyt5n/?context=3 https://np.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/2ct58s/average_inter...
- nybble41 6y ago
  It looks that way to me (40 LEI ~= $9.81 USD). Personally I'm more impressed that they advertise a 200/100 Mbps minimum speed. I'm not sure I've ever seen a minimum speed listed by a US residential ISP. If you're very lucky they'll tell you the average speed to expect and not a theoretical maximum. They also didn't say anything about data caps, though there could be something in the contracts. I don't read Romanian myself and the PDFs of the contracts are time-consuming to manually reformat and feed into Google Translate. (Text selection goes across the page, not down each column, so it interleaves the columns.) But those minimum speeds—which BTW are guaranteed in the contracts—and no data caps would imply an oversubscription rate of only 4-5x. One question to ask would be whether they are getting a subsidy to provide service at those rates. The subscriber might not be paying the full cost, or at least not up front.
  - NullPrefix 6y ago
    >They also didn't say anything about data caps I doubt they have any.

kryogen1c 6y ago

Lets try and suss out some of the multiple issues with US internet: -regulating ISPs as a free market is, to be hyperbolic, a disaster. there is effectively a monopoly in most parts of the country. -25/3 Mbps is a very reasonable speed for most people. the issue is that its provided on a best effort basis that is never maintained for long, if at all. netflix says thats enough to stream UHD[0] -FTA: "Those data points likely undercount the number of unserved Americans because the FCC lets ISPs count an entire census block as served even if it can serve just one home in the block" hilarious - what else is there to say. -FTA: "The senators are also frustrated by differing standards across agencies. [...] the FCC defines [...] Alternatively, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines" why is this the federal government's job again? the internet is clearly not an enumerated power. is this the interstate commerce clause that keeps on giving in action again? i think decentralizing federal power would help alleviate a lot of the existential dread vis a vi corruption that many americans are feeling. all in all, this reeks of regulatory capture to me. if we're gonna have a serious discussion about internet infrastructure, i think the starting point is how we classify ISPs and where in the city-state-federal hierarchy the responsibility lies. changing a 25 to a 100 is a cool bullet on a resume, but i dont think this is the low handing fruit here. [0]https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306

kgermino 6y ago
> -regulating ISPs as a free market is, to be hyperbolic, a disaster. there is effectively a monopoly in most parts of the country. > all in all, this reeks of regulatory capture to me. if we're gonna have a serious discussion about internet infrastructure, i think the starting point is how we classify ISPs and where in the city-state-federal hierarchy the responsibility lies. changing a 26 to a 100 is a cool bullet on a resume, but i dont think this is the low handing fruit here. The distributed regulation is the biggest problem IMO. ISPs are generally granted explicit or effective monopolies by local governments. Local competition is difficult enough for a utility business, but city governments make it effectively impossible in many places. Then there's a few big players who are able to claim competition and get lenient regulation at the federal level.
- 6y ago

CKN23-ARIN 6y ago

The letter specifically calls for symmetrical speeds of at least 100Mbps. Let's hope that this is the death of PON-based FTTH.

CodeBeater 6y ago
I'm not trying to be aggressive here (specially since I'm WAY out of my lane when it comes to networking), but what's wrong with PON?
- CKN23-ARIN 6y ago
  It's asymmetric, providing far less upload capacity than download.
  - vel0city 6y ago
    It doesn't have to be. I'm on a PON, I've got symmetrical upload speeds.
  - ralph84 6y ago
    It can be, but the two biggest PON operators in the US (AT&T and Verizon) offer symmetric speeds.
    - toast0 6y ago
      AT&T fiber in San Jose was GPON which is a 2.5 G down/1.25G up, split to several households (where I was, it was sixish lots per pole, but some lots had several units, and I'm not sure if the fiber to the pole was split earlier). They sell 1g/1g service on that, and it's clearly oversubscribed heavier on upload than download. 2:1 down:up is way better than most DSL ratios, and I usually saw better up than down speeds.
kondro 6y ago
PON doesn't require asymmetry. It's just a way of coupling to fiber without requiring a power.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

While we're at it, let's prevent ISPs from disallowing us to run a business on our home internet. Why should it matter to them how we use our bits? Sell us on a support plan and higher uptime, sure, but there's no reason we should be disallowed from private enterprise because we're not "paying for a business account".

TLightful 6y ago
Wow, is that a thing in the US? Home of capitalism! Sorry to hear that.
- simfree 6y ago
  Yep, ISP blacklist addresses as large enterprise businesses only, or Small/Medium Business only and do not permit residential internet installation even when the property is rezoned or has been converted to residential.
- aksss 6y ago
  My ISP doesn’t prohibit doing business over the connection or hosting services for commercial gain, with the exception of reselling internet access - like using your broadband connection as a paid hotspot for anonymous customers is disallowed in ToS.

terrywang 6y ago

Paying A$90 (~70 USD) for broadband based on HFC to freestanding house, 100Mbps (downstream) / 40Mbps (upstream), hit by outages from time to time as ISPs are simply NBN resellers, which in turn is a wrapper on top of Telstra's infrastructure. Will be keen to see how Starlink rollout goes down-under.

simfree 6y ago
Isn't Telstra just an NBN reseller at this point? IIRC that was why they were planning to start pushing cellular home internet, as they own their cellular assets outright, whereas NBN bought the wireline assets and charges them per customer.
hnick 6y ago
NBN has had an order of magnitude more outages in the last few years than ADSL2 ever had for me. Maybe it's limited to HFC, but I doubt it. One time I got an outage report for work being done, but the internet only went down when they left for the day and messed something up on their way out.

OakNinja 6y ago

I had 100/100 back in 2002. Now, I have 10000/10000 symmetrical fiber which sets me back ~$45/month. This article (and discussion) make me feel privileged :)

devwastaken 6y ago

One great thing about higher upload is the ability to host your own content, be a tor node, release decentralized software platforms that can actually work. Imagine if people could just buy a premade raspi that hosted their social media page, ddns, etc.

codecamper 6y ago

In the little podunk Hungarian village.. middle of nowhere. Farmers and hunters. 300Mbps $15 / month

martin_bech 6y ago

Hi from the developed world.. just checked, the slowest available broadband here is 200Mpbs/20Mpbs. Default is 200/200, I and most people I know went with 1000/1000Mpbs.

pottertheotter 6y ago
It is that way in some areas that have competition, but not many. I'm curious where you are at? And how much is 1000/1000 per month?
- martin_bech 6y ago
  Denmark, my isp is 40usd pr month 1000/1000Mpbs.
  - pottertheotter 6y ago
    Thanks for the response! I'm quite jealous. The lowest I've seen for symmetrical 1Gbps here is ~$65, and that's rare. Any chance I could ask you a few questions about internet access in Denmark? I'm working towards some local improvements here in the U.S. and curious to get some more data points. If you email me at hnPotterTheOtter ~ gmail it will go to my normal email address.
- Scandiravian 6y ago
  Also from DK. I have a 1000/1000 connection for approximately 20$ per month There was talks about upgrading to 10gbit/10gbit for 30$, since the infrastructure can deliver that, but since consumer hardware is still stuck at 1gbit it was postponed until there's actually a market for it
  - pottertheotter 6y ago
    Thanks for the response! I'm quite jealous. The lowest I've seen in the U.S. for symmetrical 1Gbps is ~$65, and that's rare. Even more rare is 10Gbps, and the cheapest I've seen is $250. The best I can get is 940/35, for $120/month :( Any chance I could ask you a few questions about internet access in Denmark? I'm working towards some local improvements here in the U.S. and curious to get some more data points. If you email me at hnPotterTheOtter ~ gmail it will go to my normal email address.

LinuxBender 6y ago

Somewhat related, if you would like to query any location in the U.S. and see internet speeds, the government has a site for it. [1] I am using that to decide where to move. Use the pull down menu to change from coordinates to address. You can put in a street address. [1] - https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/#/ https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/#/

beachtaxidriver 6y ago
At least in my case that map is overly optimistic. It reports two additional providers that won't actually make the installation. I've tried. Charter only.
- LinuxBender 6y ago
  It makes me wonder how often ISP's are misreporting to the FCC about coverage.
  - LinuxBender 6y ago
    I found this [1] form that might be a place to submit inaccuracies of their map, maybe. [1] - https://www.fcc.gov/information-required-when-filing-information-quality-comment https://www.fcc.gov/information-required-when-filing-informa...

908B64B197 6y ago

25/3 is a little sad for modern computing. It's ok for video streaming and conference calls. And I guess that's the minimal threshold. But with more and more services and offerings in the cloud, especially iCloud that just happily backs-up data out of the box and OneDrive 1TB corporate plan it's not going to win any awards. With the pandemic and the changes in work from home habits, if I was a small town mayor I'd be rolling out fiber right now like there's no tomorrow. Big upfront costs but it instantly boosts the value of every property covered and attracts a new demographic that's not tied to any specific geographic location. Even with folks doing part time work from home, the additional time spent in the town during work days means that commercial real-estate will appreciate as well. Easy as that.

tbihl 6y ago
Unfortunately, mayors haven't been seeing a lot of resources to work with this year. First priority will always be to stop the bleeding. And, of course, printing money isn't an option for them, so the opportunity will mostly be missed.
- 908B64B197 6y ago
  > And, of course, printing money isn't an option for them They can always borrow, and make up for it in higher property taxes.

jonplackett 6y ago

100 upload would be amazing. I'm in central London and can only get 15mbps upload despite 350mbps down. Is this the same ratio in the US? My friends in mainland Europe seem to have much more symmetrical up/down streams

LeoPanthera 6y ago
I'm in the SF bay area and have a cable connection which is advertised as 1000/40, but in practice its actually 900/25.
noahtallen 6y ago
I live in Portland, OR and pay $30 for 240mbps down, 6mbps up. It’s part of “Comcast communities”, which is something the apartment complex signed on to for everyone here. A bit cheaper than normal, I suspect.

avereveard 6y ago

I know what I'd do with a 100mbs, split it with 5 people and pay a fifth

partingshots 6y ago

It’s a point to note that without Google Fiber bashing in traditional telecom, we’d still be at 10Mbps upload/download being deemed “blazing fast internet”. Keep that in mind the next time you pay your monthly bill for AT&T/Time Warner/Comcast/Verizon. They could’ve given you gigabit speeds the entire time.

lmilcin 6y ago

I live in Poland and I am BAFFLED at how bad internet in US, supposedly one of the most developed countries on Earth, is. I have commercial (ie high priority), 600Mbit/120Mbit broadband with extremely stable (under 15ms, over 99% of th time) round trip to most of the Poland, for equivalent of 20 USD per month. I know its not the same everywhere in Poland, but consider I also have three mobile internet plans. One of them is 4G limited to 20Mbit but unlimited monthly transfer, for 5 USD per month. This is also quite stable and allows me to comfortably work remotely from almost every place in Poland and serves me as a backup link.

Clubber 6y ago
I live in Poland and I am BAFFLED at how bad ________ in US. You could replace that with a lot of things unfortunately. If you put "and expensive" at the end, it would probably be just as correct.
- clairity 6y ago
  it’s not baffling. we decided to glamorize billionaires rather than the amazing country we could have had if we’d stopped at millionaires as the height of (economic) status and reasonable wealth accumulation. a billionaire simply cannot allocate capital as efficiently as a thousand millionaires, so we choke on our own collective greed.
- xyst 6y ago
  namely healthcare. it's an absolute disaster if you have to do anything beyond the simple "annual health examinations." I literally hate going to the doctor because the various billing departments are often nightmares to deal with.
  - Talanes 6y ago
    I literally haven't been to the doctor in four years, because the last time I went in for an X-ray they charged me immediately, and then later sent a bill for some more charges on the same X-ray. My insurance and medical provider are the same entity, which I thought was supposed to avoid this exact situation. Now I just avoid any medical treatment unless it is completely unavoidable, because I have absolutely no trust that the costs won't just be suddenly upgraded afterwords.

benlivengood 6y ago

An interesting parallel is how much water/sewer, electricity, and natural gas connections cost. Cities have been providing these for centuries now and it's generally about $30-$50 base cost per month to connect to the utilities. This is for physical infrastructure requiring continual maintenance and treatment plants and movement of physical goods. Internet service is almost static once installed; fiber lasts for decades (barring visits from backhoes) and the networking equipment can be fairly centralized and doesn't cost a lot to keep the lights on. It's insane that ISPs charge the rates that they do. Multi-mode SFPs are $50, switches are low thousands for enterprise grade, a couple long range 100G SFPs are another thousand. $50/month * 48 ports in a neighborhood pays that off pretty fast. Fiber can't be any harder to install than fluid-filled pipes or electrical cables.

morpheos137 6y ago

I would say very few residential customers need more than 10Mbps upload. For 100Mbps you could run about 50 Zooms simultaneously. Who does that? Unless you are massively uploading (likely illegal content) who needs greater than 10Mbps upstream at home?

fletchowns 6y ago
It's not hard to generate a large volume of data with today's digital cameras (video & still). Backing that up to the cloud at 10 Mbps takes forever. Oh you want to switch cloud backup providers now? It will be another year before your initial backup completes.
fomine3 6y ago
Then we lose ability to develop new services that requires uplink bandwidth. Even now, there are services that need such bandwidth like cloud storages, YouTube.
- morpheos137 6y ago
  This is kind of the whole problem with the world right now in multiple areas. We have a delusion that we are in a post scarcity age. I watch modern youtube videos on my 14 year old thinkpad on 802.11b wifi without issue. It works fine, seriously.
lazide 6y ago
Yeah, why would I try to do an online backup of my data in less than a day? Or transfer high res video files somewhere? Or (gasp) host something? The current ISP setup is based on a consumer only model of the internet which benefits the big corps and stifles anyone trying to actually DO anything but consume.

huachimingo 6y ago

Just implement IPv6 and make connections more stable. And use consistent scales. MiB =/= MB, and 100Mbps means 12.5 MB/s.

xyst 6y ago

wow - our internet is that bad we set a low fucking bar

flemhans 6y ago

I remember having 100 Mbps up/down in 1998. That's 23 years ago :D

aksss 6y ago
I think that’s exceptional for 1998. Where was the service address (work vs home, city), what kind of service, and how much?

BooneJS 6y ago

This would be 100 Mbps faster than the non-existent cable that stopped 4 miles from my dad’s home in Wisconsin. They went down a rural road 40 years ago hooking up houses who wanted and stopped when they reached a home that said no. They had wireless for a while but the company shut down. Starlink is his only real hope.

adamzegelin 6y ago

While we're at it, can we convince the Australian govt. too please? Something like 10/5 is considered "fast enough".

bdw5204 6y ago

I've had a symmetrical gigabit connection for the past year and a half and there's no way I'd go back to anything slower. The peace of mind from not having to worry about something in the background slowing down your connection and the ability to download digital games faster than the physical copies could be installed from the disc is just too valuable. Improving internet for America outside of the cities means investing in the infrastructure to upgrade it. It also means outlawing the data cap scam and banning ISPs from overselling their bandwidth because high speed internet is useless if you can't actually use it. Its the same principle as banning junk health insurance plans that are useless when you actually need medical care: fraud should be illegal even if it "saves some people some money".

happytiger 6y ago

No 1Gbps should be the standard for wired and 300mbps for wireless and satellite. We’re not exactly leaping into the future with this effort — we are barely catching up. If the US wants to continue to lead the world we need high speed internet.

uneekname 6y ago

As someone whose website (and most of the websites I visit) has a relatively small footprint, 100/100Mbps would be more than comfortable for me to host and surf on

xyzelement 6y ago

I am genuinely perplexed reading the comments here about how bad US internet is. Knock on wood, I have basically never felt bandwidth or latency constrained in practical terms once the dial-up days ended. I forget what plan I pay for with my cable provider but I just tested to 200 Megabit down and 18 up. That sounds low compared to numbers people throw around here but in reality my wife and I are able to Zoom or stream at the same time, browse in parallel and basically never feel any impact of latency. Basically, everything we want to do in real time works in real time and anything large I want to download (eg: linux ISOs) takes just a few seconds. Whatever numbers we are throwing around for comparison just don't seem to be practical concerns. We're in NYC. With COVID, my coworkers scattered all over the US - east, west and south. Nobody put in a particular effort to look for places based on connectivity quality and yet everyone is able to WFH fine. Everyone moved to either be close to family, to a warmer client, or to skiing and the mountains. And yet somehow everyone ended up with great connectivity that allows us to seamlessly run a large and successful firm. It's just funny to hear people complain about how bad things are when in reality everything works mainly fine. Like - really - what are you actually unable to do? (I am genuinely curious) My internet bill is $38 in NYC by the way. RCN cable. One final thing - it's nonsensical for people to say "I have X connectivity and I am in a Central European village." Obviously... the us installed its infrastructure before you did and it works well enough so we're not going to tear it out and replace it for no reason. You didn't have connectivity until much later so of course you're currently using newer technology. At some point we'll have to upgrade ours and leap ahead of you again.

noahtallen 6y ago
> We're in NYC Exactly, this conversation is about how terrible internet is when you aren’t in the most densely populated urban areas. Yes, it’s mostly fine in cities and even ok inside some small towns. It’s usually terrible when you live outside of the small-town city limits and not on a state highway. > and it works well enough so we’re not going to tear it out Your 200Mbps connection is definitely not on original infrastructure. For the 50 million plus people living with DSL connections which get barely 6mbps download on a good day, they would not agree that the older infra we have “works fine”. I know many people with this story because I’m from a part of the country like that — drive across America, and you’ll see that nearly everywhere is very sparsely populated. That covers a lot of people! You might be able to experience this yourself eventually if you go on a road trip and stay at a hotel not in a large city. I don’t think it’s nonsensical to suggest that the US could also be building out a nationwide fiber network, and I think we should be striving towards that.

Proven 6y ago

Busybodies at ArsTechica should trash the central-planning idea but as all good statists do they want to fine tune it.

trissylegs 6y ago

Australia has been bee-lining towards faster internet for over a decard. (Which was somewhat sabotaged but changing the "All FTTP" to FTTN leaving most suburbs with substantially worse internet) I just got upgraded to 1000/50... Yes that's 1 Gigabit down and 50 megabits up. This can actually break if your download requires too much Request headers (eg Range requests) it will choke on the upload when downloading at full speed.

fireball_blaze 6y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26343394 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26343394

amundsentb 6y ago

I heard someone even less qualified to comment (can you believe it?) said that 1Tbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard. shrug

raspyberr 6y ago

While I'm all for this. Won't this mean websites and SaaS applications will get EVEN more heavy?

gigatexal 6y ago

This legislation is dead if it doesn't prevent local munis from kowtowing to incumbant ISPs and thwarting municipal fiber. That's what we need: a ton more competition from the municipalities in this space given that I think broadband should be a public good like the highway system is.

cyberlab 6y ago

Would people saturate their connection for a long duration of time streaming 4K or whatever? I know for me I am what's called 'extremely online', but I use the web intermittently, and don't saturate my connection streaming NSFW content for 12 hour intervals. When I need it, my 100Mbps connection is there for me, when I need to download an ISO or whatever, but that's the only time I use the fast connection. The rest is all low-bandwidth activity (surfing twitter, checking email etc).