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.
Yes that’s shit.
But also on top of that 25 really means maybe 15, because they also don’t require them to provide the bandwidth they advertise to you.
Yes. We need the numbers to be minimum bitrates and we need at least a 90% uptime for that minimum. If you could rely on your bandwidth to be a specific rate all the time you could pay for less and everyone could get more without more infrastructure upgrades.
Thats good, 25/3 speed is fine for one person, not so much for a household.
Absolutely not. It depends more on what you’re doing, rather than number of people, anyways. One person uploading a video is going to use 99% of the available upload bandwidth.
That’s a traffic shaping problem, not really on the person or service. Streaming would be a better example because that’s immediate and you care about uploading in a timely fashion and best quality, but if you limit your upload bandwidth you can manage it better…
But then again we’re talking about upload, in general, upload only matters in a few situations, latency will be more important, and download is always more noticeable than upload speeds.
Even doing making youtube videos the only reason you need instant fast video upload is if you’re trying to push drama videos, and even then, I’m probably fine with them being slightly limited by that. But ultimately uploading videos is only slightly inconvenient for modern broadband, if it’s that bad, look into how to limit how much bandwidth it takes up, there’s good ways.
It’s literally entirely on the service provider… their upload limits are ridiculously bad.
We have 30 down, can stream multiple devices. I think it’s the “up to” nonsense, actual 30 (not sure I even get that) seems ok.
It’s the upload that’s the problem. 30mbps down is passable; 3mbps up is absurdly slow.
Not only that, but since it’s synchronous, if you’re uploading at nearly 3 Mbps, your download rate absolutely tanks.
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.
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.
@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.
We don’t really think the FCC chair is going to do anything, do we?
There are 4 people in the FCC that get to vote on policy, 2 democrats and 2 republican. The republican ones are just Comcast and att lobbyist. The democrats don’t suck but can’t do anything without a third vote. The president gets to appointment someone to be a tie breaker, but Biden didn’t do it until after midterm so they no longer had the votes to get her approved, and by the time the current one gets through the next election will be happening so nothing will get done. If Biden wins another FCC voter will have to step down and wait for Biden to pick a replacement and Congress gets to approve or Biden losses and the republican appoints another lobbyist.
So no nothing will be done.
