1y ago

FCC to propose a minimum 100mbps to qualify as broadband, with a future goal of 1gbps

docs.fcc.gov /public/attachments/DOC-398168A1.pdf

201 comments

The internet needs to be classified as a utility, living without it is just not possible in the world we have created.
- I remember the collective shitfit around a decade ago when Obama give out free cell phones to homeless people. It was such a crazy concept to people who have never struggled that yes, you DO need a smartphone to meet your calling, banking and personal management needs. Everything has an online portal. Every job application requires an online portion. It's how the world works and has worked since the mid 00s.
  
  Ah yes "Obamaphones"
  
  Wait. What?! Obama gave out phones? I was living abroad for the first few years of the Obama administration when smart phones happened. Can you fill me in on this one?
- BuT yOu CaN aLwAyS gO tO tHe LiBrArY
  
  The libraries that many of the people who say this are trying to shutter, of course.
  
  The libraries that will allow me a maximum of an hour, maybe two if I'm lucky?
- It was until Ajit Pai unraveled that.

Should be 1gbps asymmetric now, with a near future goal of 1gbps symmetric.
- I'd be okay with 200mbps symmetric, with a future goal of 1gbps symmetric. More than ANYTHING, I'm tired of providers providing things like 1gbps down, 10mbps up. And then doing shit like "Here's you're 1gbps plan with a 1tb data cap!"
  
  I really wish symmetric broadband was standard. Having 500 down (as a homelabber especially) means nothing if you have only 25 up 😭
  
  The asymmetrical aspect of cable will be here to stay. Fiber can do it because it was build on a different foundation.
  Copper cable transmits data using electric signals in various frequencies. There are a batch of frequencies reserved for phone and TV. ALL of the tv programming is constantly streamed to your lines whether you have TV or not and whether you pay for it or not. It’s encrypted and is only decrypted by your cable boxes when your provider says they can decrypt it. The phone frequencies are reserved so you can make phone calls and still max out your download.
  So what about the rest of the bandwidth? Well, way back in the early days of cable it was pretty much everyone for themselves. Every company did things its own way. That’s where DOCSIS came in. It’s a platform that allows modem manufacturers to make modems that will work on any cable network that supports Docsis. And the key part is that DOCSIS is always backwards compatible. The network upgrade to 3.1 did not break the old d2 devices.
  When it was developed the download was extremely more necessary than the upload. You’d be sending small single line commands on upload and receiving entire files in download. So more frequencies went to download than upload. In a lab setting 1.0 could reach 40mbps down and 10 up. That’s not what was sold because real life isn’t a lab and there’s loss over large distances. Realistically most people got 10 mb down and upload wasn’t even listed.
  Whats changed? Well today those same download and upload frequencies are still used. We’ve added more around them to deliver higher speeds. But we’ve also kept the same principles that people need more download than upload. Docsis 3.1 was released in 2013. We really didn’t start stressing over upload until Covid and work from home had us on zoom calls all day.
  Docsis 4.0 is technically released but requires quite a bit of overhaul to work with existing networks. We pretty much need to do away with cable tv. That’s why many ISP’s are pushing IPTv. It removes the need for all that bandwidth devoted to just TV. If everyone in a region drops traditional cable for IPTv they can easily switch to d4. D4 does increase upload but does not make it symmetrical.
  Your cable company does not decide their highest tier realistically. It’s the most that medium will offer. It’s gonna be a while too for d4 to be available everywhere. Everyone would need to drop traditional cable (which is honestly a nice move regardless) and people don’t upgrade plans very often. When I worked in tech support I would frequently deal with customers complaining about slow speeds while on plans from 2002.
  
  You get a terabyte cap? Jfc, where I live it’s like a few gigs, and that can cost into the hundreds for maybe 25.
  
  All right I have 1000 seconds of internet, what a deal
  
  My isp used to offer 10mbps up for like a decade, they have recently downgraded it to 5mbps for new subscribers. I've uploaded a few things with it and it's extremely slow. If it wasn't that I'm only paying $40 for 1gbps down, I'd have switched.
  
  Things with caps aren't terrestrial broadband. You can have caps on cell based networks and still be considered broadband. One of the biggest issues is it companies like Comcast and AT&t will offer broadband service in an area but not necessarily offer only broadband service or not let you buy broadband service about also having their TV. And then they claim they're serving the area because they have broadband speeds or you can pay a bunch of money to have your service uncapped but that's not really the point of having a broadband connection available in the area.
  
  Worse, they do that crap for my business account. Great for the vpn to the office.
  
  I literally can't do half of what I want to do online efficiently or in a timely manner because I can barely crack 10 up. I do video work on the side. Takes hours if not days for me to upload something. Even pictures nowadays. Great I've got a DSLR for a phone and I can shoot raw. Takes 5 mins to upload a pic.

Does this really matter. We aren't getting it anyway.
The telcom/cable companies are just going to take the "broadband" money, build out a couple of neighborhoods, claim it is too hard, and then keep all the money.
They have already done it many times. Free taxpayer money with zero repercussions. Why would they do anything different.
- I have a lot of experience with rural broadband initiatives, and generally yes, the FCC designation sets the minimums we see in terms of new service delivery to underserved communities. I specifically worked with state and municipal entities to build grant packages to fund infrastructure and these new minimums would be a great help.
  
  We are between towns in western WA state stuck with 10Mb DSL service. There are a lot of us folks. After moving in (the PO said the internet was great, lol), we discovered that doing anything excessive like downloading AND streaming would not work. One thing at a time. We were able to bond two pair and get 20Mb which is workable, but that's where we sit. Gigabit service is all around us, but we'd have to trench a mile up the road and pay for that to even think about getting a provider to lay a line. Century Link outright laughed at me.
  I was able to get T-Mo's home internet as a backup since we WFH, but it isn't stellar either.

If the federal government is regulating them can we admit they're a fucking utility already and stop allowing them to gouge prices when they have more money than they could feasibly spend?
Can you imagine if we said "by 2035 every American household in our electric grid will also be connected to the internet at a speed of 1gbps"?
- I can imagine it.
  I can imagine the next jerk off administration rescinding that goal in the name of private enterprise or whatever bullshit excuse they choose.
- We did that in the 90s. We gave ISPs billions to deploy fiber everywhere. It was mostly squandered and 25 years later most Americans still don’t have fiber access.
  
  Well, we didn't. It wasn't a utility. Utilities are more regulated by the govt. Thats a big part of why it failed and why electricity succeeded with the same effort in the fucking 1800s.

We really need some upstream minimums as well. That causes so much lag for me. Most plans are 1 up even with 100 down. I have a 200/10 plan now and it's difficult to do work with the maybe 5 that I get in practice if I'm lucky, especially after overhead from VPN.
- Most plans are 1 up even with 100 down
  That can't be right. I thought Australia's 100/20 plans had pathetic upload speeds but that's unreal.
  
  I have Spectrum here in the southeast of the United States. My plan is 300 down 12 up. That pathetic upload speed needs to change for the better.
  
  Most broadband access in the US is via coax. And the coax companies refuse to let cable TV, and the packages they can bundle, die. So the portion of the coax that would allow for symmetrical service instead brings all the channels you didn't buy because everyone streams now.
  
  Here in Sweden most people have optic fiber with AT LEAST 100/100 speeds. You gotta try if you want lower than that / if you want asymmetrical speeds.
- Right now in a lot of states Verizon has a monopoly on symmetrical internet service. I can’t ever switch ISPs because I can’t get 400/400 anywhere else.
  
  God I wish we had that here. We are pretty much stuck with Comcast as the only option in many places since they were granted a monopoly for so long and the phone company never really expanded much. DSL is too slow in most places. Like I think I can only get 100/1 where I am now, but the last place I was at which was not exactly rural at all, was max 12m/768k. In my current place I do have one other option which is another cable provider. They offer the exact same as Comcast for slightly less money, but the primary reason I use them is because they don't have a monthly data cap. With my wife and I working from home plus our personal streaming, we would exceed the cap and have to pay a significant amount to increase it.
  
  Is that the Verion 5G modem?
- How is this possible? Most of network hardware is symmetric. It doesn't make sense.
  
  Cable Internet / DOCSIS splits bandwidth in a way that greatly prioritizes download over upload.
  
  In addition to cable being the primary means of providing service in the US which does allow for this, there are two reasons for doing it. First, down is all that is advertised. Up is only mentioned in small print usually. And second, the major ISPs and the content companies have merged so it's an anti-"piracy" measure. It significantly impacts torrent seeding and hosting sites using residential Internet service.

I could give a shit what they call it. How about enforcing some god damn price restrictions or make data caps illegal? Speed means little otherwise
- This actually does keep prices in check. Albeit, a bit backasswardsly.
  I may be off on the specifics but it's something like: Having to offer 100mbps at the lowest rates in (poor neighborhoods) increases the speeds of each tier while keeping the price the same.

Thats great but can we demand some decent UPLOAD to?
cries in 300down measally 10 up
- In the linked pdf, it does mention the benchmarks.
  2015/current standard is 25/3 Mbps.
  Proposed increase to 100/20 Mbps.
  Future goal is 1000/500 Mbps.
  
  And really, 20 mbps at the bottom tier for broadband isn't all that unreasonable. We're talking about the floor level here.
- I felt so gaslit by optimum because they advertise 1gbps parallel. But, if you don't have their fiber offering in your region they'll happily sell you 1gbps/24mbps for the same price.
  Although, unless I complain, they fail to give me even 300mbps down.
  I miss Google Fiber :(
- Found the Charter/Spectrum customer!
  
  Sitting here with my cool 11 up from spectrum 😎
  
  GIGA-SPEEDS!! ... Such bullshit
- Isn't that partly a consequence of the cable internet network design? The existing DOCSIS standards are designed to favour download speeds, so the infrastructure doesn't allow asymmetric connections.
  
  If I understand correctly it’s not intrinsic to the DOCSIS standards, it’s just how more or less every cable company chooses to allocate channels. Think like a cable company has 100 channels they may be able to use on a given line, and they choose to put 90 of them on download and 10 on upload (numbers are made up to convey idea). Now they have only a small amount of available upload bandwidth and lots of download, but they could have set it up to be 50/50 to have it be equal.

As it should have been 5 years ago. Maybe even more.

5 years late but better than never.

I did telecom work about 5 years ago
It was shocking the amount of area that depends on a low-quality copper wire infrastructure.
I don't know if that changed in 5 years, but companies are going to have a hard time getting that replaced nationwide
- They just won't be able to call it broadband.
- We live in a rural area (but only 16 miles from the nearest city) and have copper. We really hope the infrastructure bill will bring real internet to us in our lifetime.
  
  If congress passes a bill to improve internet infrastructure, it will be a 10s of billions hand out to ISPs that in turn will do little to nothing to actually improve their infrastructure. Just like when they did it in the 90s to get fiber to most Americans.
- They already got billions from the government to upgrade their infrastructure. It's on them if they didn't actually use the money for that by now.
- I would think that per FCC this requirement has loop holes and the minimum 100 Mbps is most likely for only broadband not dial up, so many telecommunication companies will be except

Cries in Australian
- Laugh in Western European (10Gbps)
  
  Cries in Brexit
  
  Cries in German. (I personally have Speedy Internet but many people I know have internet that really sucks slowly.)
  
  My first thought is you need to buy new network equipment to utilize 10 gbit and new ethernet cables.
- Yeah I'd love to have anything near 100Mbps. Currently get 12Mbps on a good day, usually around 6Mbps. This is after spending thousands of dollars to upgrade the connection last year. Australian internet is fucked.
  
  That's crazy. Here in São Paulo (Brazil), wired internet plans start at 100 Mbps and you'll often end up with 300+ Mbps, because there's almost no difference in price.
- Faster: Australian for tears

I just don't get it. Why not making upload speed same as download speed?
- the most simple explanation is that total bandwidth is limited and more upload speed they give you the less download speed.
  
  What about full duplex links?
- On all lines the total amount of available bandwidth has to be split between upload and download. If you've got gigabits or even hundreds of megabits to play with then symmetric is great, but on slower connections is makes a world of sense to heavily favour download just because humans are better at consuming information than creating it. Consider how many hours of videos the average person watches per week versus how many they create in the same period. Same for photos, emails, articles, etc. There are people who have parity but they are in a pretty tiny minority.
  That said, I hear there are people in the US getting 300Mb/s down and 10Mb/s up which is pretty fucking nuts.
  
  Australia here. 250 down, 20 up
- Because regular users need more download than upload, while servers need more upload than download.

100 mbps? That's 100 millibits per second, or 0.1 bits per second. I'd certainly hope for better bandwidth than one bit every ten seconds; that's slower than smoke signals.
- I wish we can all move to MB/s and get rid of the endless confusion on names
  
  We should change to mibibits! We need easily factored numbers of 10, not this old powers of 2 stuff! (/s if it wasn't obvious)
  
  I say we split the different and go for nibbles per fortnight.
  
  The reason we don't is because the network does not care how the files you transfer are formatted.
  It measure the amount of bits it can transfer.
  Whether the file in question is for example a text document (8bit) or a HEIF (10bit)
  
  Mbps, megabits per second, is the standard. No idea why this author opted to use the highly unusual millibit.
- 👆 Pedant.
  
  👆 Humorless git.
- I almost replied saying you had no idea you were talking about, but then I realized.... Lol
- Except that’s like dividing by zero. A millibit is undefined. A bit is the smallest indivisible unit of digital information.
  But capitalization is important to distinguish between b for bit and B for Byte.
  
  No, that's like dividing by 1,000.
  Anyway, computer scientists split the bit back in 1969, which is how we're able to make smaller and smaller computers: the bits are all smaller, so we can pack more into a single potato chip.
  
  Good catch but not quite. bps is a rate so it is allowed to be an abstract expression.
  How many chickens per hour cross the road?
  And more importantly, why.
  
  Information entropy is measured in bits, and the bits are almost always fractional.
  
  If you had really slow Internet, like smoke signals or semaphores across a nation, you could characterize it as millibit:
  1 bit over 1000 seconds = 1 millibit/s.
  But yeah, it's basically meaningless in today's age for Internet speeds.
- The title used the wrong abbreviation and you didn’t read the linked press release. The previous standard was 25/3 Mbps so there’s no reason to downgrade; had you bothered to read the link you’re supposedly commenting on you’d see the new standard is 100/20 Mbps. That’s also laughably low for a regular household with a modicum of modern usage but we can’t really expect much from agencies under regulatory capture.
  
  They were making a joke about units and the use of a lowercase m instead of an uppercase M for Megabits per second.....

You might have figured it out by now, but "megabits per second" is abbreviated as "Mbps" with an uppercase m; yeah, it's kinda pedantic, but using lowercase means it's a millibit, which is much, much smaller. The same applies to "gigabits per second," which should be expressed as "Gbps."
At any rate, thank you for posting this, it really is good news. And about time they did this, too.
- I think it's common parlance to use Mbps and mbps interchangeably since nothing uses "millibits" as a unit of measurement. More commonly people misuse Mbps and MBps which is incorrect since it signifies bits and bytes.
  
  To avoid the Mb/MB confusion I've gotten in the habit of writing Mbit and MByte, so there's really no ambiguity (like, even if I used them right, it's reasonable that people might not be sure if I'm using them right or not)
  At least when talking about network-related things, particularly transfer rates. With storage and things it's way more rare that anyone might be talking about bits.
- No one would ever say millibits, because a bit is the smallest meaningful datapoint. It's a non-existent term, and a very pointless pedantic hill to try to build so that you can die on it
- Literally no one means "millibit" when they type mbps.....
- There is no 1000ths of a 0 or 1.
  Milibit does not exist.
  Network speed is measured in Megabits per second, which is indeed 8 times smaller than Megabyte per second that OSes show when transferring files.

It should also require allowing incoming connections. Too much ISPs, especially mobile, are gives one-way Internet now. Basically like having a phone line with no phone number.
- You should google "CG-NAT" and learn why mobile providers don't (and simply can't) provide you a public IP. Get yourself a cheap VPS, set up a reverse proxy, and open all the ports you want.
  
  I know why they do that, lack of v4 space and other reasons. Why we need to push forward with such legislations.
  
  VPS + Wireguard is great. And my DNS provider allows private range IPs as "A" records, so I have subdomains for my different home servers.
- That's due to there not being enough IPv4 addresses, and IPv6 is... forgotten I guess.
  
  IPv6 is actually widely implemented. Home ISPs are mixed on providing IPv6, but mobile providers widely embrace IPv6, some even running IPv6-only networks that rely on translation services to reach IPv4 destinations. T-Mobile is IPv6-only for example
  
  It is not forgotten. https://youtube.com/watch?v=vo5glK9czIE
  My ISP have full IPv6 support, but block all traffic via firewall...

If I could also get 100mbps for less than $80 a month that'd be great.
- This. 100mbps is great and all except what good is it if people can't afford it.

Slightly off topic but I seriously hope the Dems have a good plan to tell the general public of the US, just how much Biden and his administration has done for good progressive legislation this far.
- They don't.
  Source: They keep not executing the plan

I just hope Ofcom will have a similar idea for the UK. Currently you only have a "universal service obligation" for 10Mbps, and if you can be provided by 4G then Openreach doesn't have to upgrade your old copper line. Large areas of my city are still copper only.

I'm out here living on 10 Mbps up / 1 Mbps down.
I hate living in LATAM.
- I found the HPB
  
  I am sorry, friend, but what does HPB mean?

Go get them FCC! Lets move into the future.

Me over here with 40mbps taking days to download games.
- I hover around 3Mbps on download, often falling below 1Mbps during peak hours :-/
  It's still enough to stream YouTube videos in 360p/480p.
  40Mbps would be damn fast. For me, at least.
  
  I usually get 5-10 Mbps download during peak times, which is enough for 720p YT and decent video calls. I really don't understand why people always need faster and faster internet. Although I just checked, and I'm getting 60 down just now, which is way more than I have ever seen.
  
  Do you live in the boonies?
- Same. In a large city no less. With new apartments down the road, less than a quarter mile away, having fiber while we have DSL ffs in our whole neighborhood. No other choices for broadband. Fuck ATT.
  
  No, I like my ATT 1gbps symmetric with no caps

Thanks Biden

Look less then 2 years ago I was in the upper 20s at the best of times. Fiber rolled in. I got gigabit and its spoiled me very quickly. I'm not sure why I'd need more but I'm sure they'll find a reason eventually.

What are people doing with this high bandwidth?
- A killer ratio on a few trackers.
  
  One day I'll be cool enough to use private trackers. Years of megaseeding and I still don't know where to even look.
- Silly question. Porn of course.
- Ripping YouTube

I just did a speed test. 329 down, 22 up. I pay like 45 bucks a month and it's totally sufficient. I pirate and stream shit all the time, manage a home media server, have a bunch of smart home bullshit. I don't need 100mbps. Not yet at least.

201 comments