- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmy.ml
FCC chair: Speed standard of 25Mbps down, 3Mbps up isn’t good enough anymore::Chair proposes 100Mbps national standard and an evaluation of broadband prices.
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I have 500Mbps in Spain. Is it that bad in the American cities or is it only like rural Montana that has these speeds?
The issue is mostly that it’s highly variable, hard to change without moving, and hard to predict before you actually live somewhere.
The comcast rep will happily take your money to put you on a 200mb plan, but it won’t do shit if the infrastructure in your area is bad, and Comcast (or whoever the isp is) has absolutely zero responsibility to actually provide the promised services. Now you add in that 95% of the population including most of the phone reps working for the ISPs don’t even know the difference between a bit and a byte and it becomes a total crap shoot.
…wow. That’s so shit. Where I live, your internet provider has to have the ability to provide the service or like with every other service provider it’s really open for lawyer action.
This also makes so that internet providers are at the same time keeping their own infrastructure around which in turn makes that yet another selling point (“we have up to 1 gbps in your area!”) and makes them keep it in top-notch condition.
That’s the same here too. My first apartment only had ADSL. In 2015.
I couldn’t even watch Netflix without it stopping to buffer.
I really wish they would put internet speeds on apartment offers etc.
I live in the mountain area, and my friend lives 30m from a multi-million population city, in an area with over 100,000 residents. His best option for internet to this day is hotspotting from his cell. Before that was viable, he only had access to satellite internet. Even semi-rural people here get fucked.
my friend lives 30m from a multi-million population city
It took me a beat to realize this was 30 miles or 30 minutes and not 30 meters.
Ah that’s my bad, should’ve used metric. I meant minutes, but in context it doesn’t really portray that.
Oh, metric isn’t a requirement (although I myself am striving to use it when I remember), just that “m” alone is ambiguous. And in my daily work, a number followed by a single m is meters.
Honestly, it’s highly variable. Generally speaking, more populated areas tend to have much better options for internet and in some large markets even have a degree of competition.
In my case, I live in a town of only 180k or so people. At my home, I am able to get 1.2 gbps download from Comcast. They are the only option in my direct vicinity with this much bandwidth. The alernative is AT&T with only DSL as an option. I don’t remember the top tier. But, it’s considerably slower at maybe 100 mbps or something like that.
I’ve lived in small towns since 2009. 100mps would be a fucking dream come true. The fastest speed I’ve had in the last decade plus is 25mps until we got TMobile home internet, and now I typically get around 50-70. Technically it’s up to 300 with our distance to the tower, but there’s a fucking mountain in between us, so I take what I can get. :/
Can’t figure out how to edit on connect, so I’m just adding:
The best wired internet available to me is dialup (old school 56k, baby). We used a mobile hotspot from PCs for people (if you’re at all low income, seriously check them out. Life changers).
Wow, that’s pretty good for a town of that size. I live in a city of 1.6 Million. I think I might be able to get 1 gbps if I shop around, but I don’t think much more than that is available to normal consumers at least.
It’s widely variable, even in big cities the available ISPs can change depending on what side of a street you’re on. A lot of people are stuck with cable (DOCSIS) providers that run over legacy TV infrastructure and provide wildly asymmetric speeds. This is an excerpt from Xfinity (Comcast):
Xfinity Gigabit Internet service has advanced, next generation technology, with WiFi download speeds of up to 1000 Mbps (up to 1200 Mbps in some areas) and upload speeds of up to 35 Mbps.
There’s a new docsis version right around the corner that will provide symmetric speeds. Comcast is starting to roll it out this year. Cable will be a lot faster in a couple years.
I live in middle America and oddly enough the rural areas have started getting fiber from utility companies. I live in a town of about 40,000 and the best you can hope for is either DSL from AT&T which is maybe 25Mbps with perfect conditions or Optimum Cable internet which is sold as “Gigabit” that never breaks 400Mbps and cost about $120/mo. I’ve also had to file multiple complaints with the FCC to have issues resolved. My connection for about 6 months was completely unusable when it rained and even after “fixing” the issue I have severely reduced speeds when it rains. It’s an absolute joke and nothing is in place to protect consumers from any of this BS.
My connection is 10/2. Please help me
Ajit Pai never raised download speeds? Nooo. You don’t say. Asshole who was against net neutrality didn’t do anything to increase quality of network. Can’t be.
standard? I don’t even get higher than 6MB down
To clear up confusion, 6MBps (MegaByte) down would be equal to 48Mbps (Megabit). So you would be above the mentioned standard.
Or you made typo, then you’re indeed below standard ^^"
I think I made a typo and misread the title itself. the full uppercase and lowercasing of data speeds is confusing to me
One is a rate of data, the other is an amount.
Mbps means megabits per second.
MB is just megabytes. You can of course turn it into a rate, but then it would be MB/s.
There are 8 bits in a byte, so 100 Mbps would be 12.5 MB/s (divide by 8)
Thank you for taking the time to explain that! I think I understand the difference now
Pathetic. The acceptance of this terrible service speed shows how the American public is so isolated they don’t know when they’re being shafted by big business and the politicians the rich and powerful own.
No more lobbying. Institutionalized bribery is killing the American public. Healthcare, food, workplace rights and safety, and quality of services. Everything’s compromised.
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Asymmetric speeds are a disgrace. Internet used to be about exchange of content, ideas and collaboration. You consumed, but also contributed. The overall focus on high download low upload is clearly the sign telcos want Internet to be just a troth of content, not much different from cable tv.
I was so happy when we finally got a 2nd internet provider where I live. Now both providers offer steep discounts to keep customers. I upgraded my 450mpbs coax connection to 1gbps fiber when the new ISP came to town. My promotional period just ran out, so I called the ISP. They set me up with a new promotion for 2gbps at less than the price I was paying for 1gbps, and at the end of the promotional period it’ll be the same price I was paying for the 1gbps service. Competition ftw!
That’s a dream. A pray for even a single competitor on my street.
I live in hotels. A good week is when I can measure in Mb and not Kb. A great one is when it’s more than 3mbps on a regular basis.😢
We have 600/600 Mbps… In a third world country smh
25/3 is way more than fast enough for most people not to notice. Its enough to stream 4k compressed. Maybe we should start measuring broadband in terms of reliability and latency. That has a far larger impact on overall experience.
Broadband in most of the developed world is 100Mbps, with South Korea transitioning to 1Gbps broadband. The point is less “what’s good enough” and more “evaluating internet access as a required utility”.
My point is, reliability, latency, and consistency is what is important. Bandwidth is nearly totally irrelevant for 99% of internet users. A couple years back I ran an entire office of 100 people on a 50 mbit connection. Thats 100 Concurrent users all using their cloud apps to do work. Many of them streaming music while they’re working, some of them are even streaming video while they’re working. It was never an issue for anyone and there was always plenty of bandwidth to go around, because bandwidth does not impact user experience unless you are regularly downloading or uploading massive files. Even on windows patch days where there are updates being downloaded for every computer at once it wasn’t a problem and nobody noticed.
More megabits does not mean better or more reliable access to the internet. Just like how a 100 megapixel camera that costs $200 is not better than a 24 megapixel camera that costs $1000.
Just to prove my point, I restricted my internet bandwidth to 25/3 and started streaming netflix, then opened a youtube video concurrently, then started streaming a TV show from amazon prime. I opened up another concurrent video YT on my phone and started streaming that. That is 3 1080p streams and 1 4k stream concurrently and I ran out of screens to test with. Then I started streaming music from spotify and apple music both at once. Then, to top it all off I ran a speedtest. I still had 8mbits/sec to spare and any website I went to was still loading instantly. This is not a hard thing to try yourself and I highly suggest it if you’re open to your opinion being changed.
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Same here in sparsely populated New Zealand. Our house in a small rural town of 100ppl has 4Gbps fibre available (only have signed up for 1Gbps) and that’s run by a wholesaler, you can choose from 20+ ISPs to provide the service, switching between them takes one call and 30min
Its enough to stream 4k compressed
I’ll second this. 4k at 25 mbps might be OK for a sitcom or drama without much action or on-screen movement. But as soon as there’s any action, it’s gonna be a pixelated mess. 25 mbps is kinda the sweet spot for full fidelity 1080p, and I’d much rather watch that than “4K”.
The benefit of the 4k is that you get HDR. On a good TV, that’s far more noticable than the resolution improvement and certainly worth it.
But then you’re looking at 60-100 Mbps bit rate for good quality (50-80 GB file size for most movies).
He means a 4k reel of just darkness. Could probably do it at a few hundred FPS and still have some bandwidth to spare.
thats upload. Netflix 4k is no more than 20 mbps. Typically around 16-18. Its easy to confirm this yourself by looking at your bandwidth usage by streaming said content.
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444 15 mbps is more than enough in reality.
Modern websites as bloated as they are are still a few megabytes at most, and many of the larger assets are cached locally so they’re only loaded once. on a 25 mbit connection thats less than a 1 second load time. The vast majority of the time the website server you’re talking to is never even going to provide you with that amount of bandwidth upstream anyway. You will notice absolutely zero difference in browsing and day-to-day usage at 25 vs 1000 mbit provided you have the same latency. Watching a youtube video on your phone is maybe 1-2 megabits/sec. Thats about 15-20 concurrent streams on 25 mbit which I don’t think most people are doing regularly.
All im saying is for the average user latency matters way more. A 25 mbit cable/dsl connection is massively better than a 200 mbit satellite connection.
The reality is that it’s not, most importantly because the advertised “up to” speed might rarely be achieved. However even simple websites are now horribly overburdened with ads and trackers and “live updates” and “lazy downloading” that it’s just not functional at that bandwidth
This is really easy to verify and I think you might be surprised. Open your resource monitor and browse the web, stream videos, etc. My family of 4 with 2 of us working from home with a video streaming on the TV and maybe 30 total wifi devices has averaged 12 mbits/sec down over the past hour. The highest spike was to 30 mbps.
Yes, let’s pay them to just take the money… for the third time!
I want fiber internet so bad, I live in a relatively big city for Christ’s sake it shouldn’t take this long
It’s 2023. Anything less than symmetrical gigabit is nonsense. We shouldn’t have to settle for overpriced crumbs from ISPs.
IMO the focus should be on lowering the prices. A lot of people in my country still rely on spotty mobile data as their primary internet. Imagine 100 mbps fiber for $10 a month, that would be awesome.
Lol In Italy I get gigabit for about 6€
Edit: whoops thats for my unlimited calls, text and 150gb 5g mobile plan. I pay a whopping 30€ for actual-unlimited-not-rate-limited-after-a-TB gigabit.
A 1 Gbps up/down in Denmark is around 40-50€, and low speeds like 100/100 is more like 25-35€.
Same for Norway and Sweden. Everything is unlimited of course.
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O RLY? Which ISP?
Right, it’s actually 30€ with TIM, recently upgraded from the €15 plan, my bad. Obviously a huge and glaring oversight. Tell me again what people are paying in the states for a percentage of that speed again and reflexively defend the shit system, please. €6 is what I pay for my unlimited calls, text and 150gb mobile data plan.
Though let’s be honest, this is not something generally available.
It is throughout Europe. We’ve been getting hosed in the states for years.
Uh, definitely not the case in a few other countries. Actually, gigabit/6€ would be an extreme outlier: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_price_rankings?displayCurrency=USD&itemId=33®ion=150
https://www.cable.co.uk/broadband/pricing/worldwide-comparison/#speed
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Funny thing is, they are selling vapor. They are renting the usage of equipment, nothing more. There’s no finite amount of internet and you have to use it carefully. Sure there’s limits in that equipment, but essentially prices are all over-inflated. In my shitty little country I have 350/150 for around 15€, 300 channels TV included. For gigabit I’d pay a bit more, around 30€.
Symmetrical gigabit is a bit much for a baseline. Should it be widely available for all, and for a good price? Absolutely. But plenty of people (probably a majority even) could be adequately served by something like 300 down/100 up as a baseline tier.
imo the asymmetry only serves to upsell content creators to business plans. I do agree with you on the speeds though, gigabit is a bit overblown for average joe but it should be an option in most places for people that need it (Content Creators, WFH Visual Artists, Garage Startups)
It’s not about what people need. It’s about building infrastructure for new services and applications.
Besides, digging a trench is digging a trench. Just put in the fiber. It’s 2023.
Today, maybe. But what about in ten years’ time?
Let me go ahead and steal a quote from JFK:
“We choose to [build nationwide symmetrical gigabit fiber] in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.”
- John “I hate my worthless nephew RFK Jr.”Fitzpatrick Kennedy
I don’t disagree, but I think even just setting it to 500M symmetrical would be a MASSIVE improvement and a more achievable goal. Few regions right now are equipped for fiber and even fewer homes.
Most homes in the US have a coax connection, and with current tech coax connections can do a little over a gig bandwidth total (up+down). That said, we should be quickly ratcheting up to 500/500 while the fiber rollout hopefully accelerates.
Why does it matter if it’s 500/500 or 1000/1000? Once the fiber is there it makes no difference. In fact, 500Mbit symmetrical is probably more expensive to deploy.
Once the fiber is there it makes no difference
Because the fiber isn’t there. We could achieve 500/500 on current networks without running fiber to every single home. I’m just saying it’s a good interim goal as we work towards a full fiber rollout.
The depressing part is how much fiber is out there, but dark or locked in ridiculous agreements with private owners that will keep it from being the municipal service it deserves to be.
The last house I owned had fiber in the front yard that the ISP refused to hook up. The entire neighborhood (300+ houses) had the same situation. Verizon laid the fiber, and Frontier refused to let anyone use it.
