It’s been 20 years since broadband became fairly ubiquitous, there is 0 excuse for telcos to milk us like this, bandwidth gets so much cheaper for them every year.
The 25/3 bar was specifically lowered to that so that 4G LTE would meet this bar and they could claim that 99% of Americans now have access to high-speed Internet for political points.
Realistically, if it were up to me, I’d say anything 25/3 and lower is “low-speed”, between 25/3 and 100/10 is “standard speed”, and set the bar for “high-speed” to mean 100/10 or better. Companies should not be allowed to advertise “blazing-fast high-speed Internet” and then it turns out to be 30/3 ADSL for $50 a month
You might be right, I thought it was actually for adsl, because otherwise post-bells had to roll out fiber or comcast were the only high-speed isp.
The problem is most people can live on 25/3 or less, stick to youtube sd, email, web, etc, it’ll be slow but not ludicrously so, and they won’t complain much.
Not a lot we can do, the limit on bandwidth means we are stopped from creating services that need more bandwidth, which means they’re no reason to get that bandwidth.
HD video is nice, but not a requirement for most people, and ISPs desperately want to keep their customers limited so they can either upsell traditional tv/voice or otherwise keep their customers from adventuring too far outside their walled gardens. AOL both helped deploy and was destroyed by the internet, modern ISPs don’t want to see the same thing happen to them, and honestly most customers use a handful of common sites.
They’ve been stealing taxpayer dollars for 30 years, constantly stalling and delaying and then saying the plans are now outdated and we need more money for the new plans. Repeat every decade. Everyone knows it’s a monopoly with speed/price fixing yet somehow it never improves.
@Foggyfroggy @BrikoX I really wish someone in the FCC /FTC/Federal government in general would put their foot down and say to the industry, “You WILL build broadband everywhere, you WILL make it 100 Mbps at minimum, and you WILL pay for it out of your own pocket.” Nothing less is acceptable.
Can’t speak to Comcast’s evils, but I call my ISP once a year to ask about my speeds and bill. Just got bumped from 200/20 to 1000/?, with a $10 discount. I’m on the edge of town, not technically rural, but close enough.
Not sure the answer to the monopoly thing, but I used to be an internet cable guy, so I can speak to the complexity of having 2 providers where there was only one. The costs are staggering.
Not sure the answer to the monopoly thing,
- make it a publicly owned and operated municipal utility
- make the “last mile” publicly owned infrastructure and private service providers can connect to the data center that connects the last mile
- require that the company who owns and maintains the last mile can not also be a service provider over that last mile infrastructure
The last one is how Texas handles the power grid, so it would need a real regulatory body making sure the private last mile infrastructure is actually maintained, unlike the Texas power grid.
After how ajit pai shilled the fuck out of the chair position I don’t know if I can ever take it seriously again.
Fuck ajit pai, of course.
Data caps are just as fucking evil. Pure greed.
Not just the Philippines. AT&T’s broadband service in the USA comes with a data cap. One of the reasons why I dropped them. Always good to read the fine print.
Yeah we would’ve had it already too if the government didn’t get fleeced. It was about 2010 when the “National Broadband Plan” was unveiled. Part of its goal was 100Mbs to 100M people by 2020.
