FCC chair: Speed standard of 25Mbps down, 3Mbps up isn’t good enough anymore
FCC chair: Speed standard of 25Mbps down, 3Mbps up isn’t good enough anymore
👏 Make 👏 ALL 👏 connections 👏 Symmetrical 👏
If only it were easy to do. Technical limitations on copper is what causes low upload speeds. ISP’s prioritize the download speed, which is what people utilize the most. As fiber continues to be rolled out it should get better though.
Is there a legit reason they do not do this?
Just to prioritize download in limited bandwidth cables. Like a neighborhood might get 2Gbps total, but instead of doing 1 down 1 up they instead do 1.8 down and .2 up, then split that amongst a bunch of houses.
In the old world of the internet, people didn’t upload much anyway.
Nobody worked from home. Nobody had their phones constantly syncing photos and videos to 1 (or often more) clouds. And even then, the photos and videos that you could take digitally were very low resolution and not very large files. Game consoles weren’t online by default until Xbox Gen 1 (and as an add on for GC and PS2) and PC gamers were a minority (and rarely direct peer-to-peer).
That has changed, and nobody forced ISPs to keep up. In a lot of markets, the Cable ISP is a monopoly and they don’t have to do shit about it.
@dingus @worfamerryman On DSL you have a limited set of frequencies that you can use for either upload or download. So you have to split these frequencies between upload and download. Also the DSL speed is highly depending on the length of the copper between your home and the switch cabinet on the street. (Just remember: DSL is the transmission of high frequencies over unshielded cables that never meant to transmit high frequencies) So the longer the cable, the lower the total possible bandwidth. And most people have a demand for a higher download than upload. So most people will prefer some 16 down, 2 up instead of 8 down and 8 up.
Because they can. Most people's typical usage isn't impacted by low uplink bandwidth. Very few people are uploading 4K content or live streaming or hosting a high traffic webserver from their garage. Less bandwidth means less expense, thus more profit. Capitalism, baby.
Some service-provider level technology is not symmetrical at the access layer. An ISP serving exclusively fiber may have values like below:
GPON (GIGAbit passive optical network): 1.24416 Gigabits/s up, 2.48832 Gigabits/s down
XG-PON (10 gigabit passive optical network): 10G/2.5G
xgS-pon (10g Symmetrical optical network): 10g/10g
Note that on all of these technologies, you are also sharing bandwidth with neighbors on your PON. Sometimes up to 64 subs on one gpon. I think 128 on xgs-pon Until more providers make fiber available, as well as are willing to fork more up for the latest equipment, and reduce the over subscriptions of pons, symmetrical services for everyone just won’t happen.
Will this ever happen at mega providers / baby-bells? Probably never unless a regional or startup pops up, and then they will only attempt compete in that market.
It is pretty dumb to me that symmetrical is not the standard way.
Quick! Give the ISPs a bunch of federal dollars to build out their networks so they can quietly pocket it and do stock buybacks!
Why weren't those monetary subsidies just after the fact instead of just paying out on promises? "You'll get x billion dollars when y% of this area has access to z Mbps." But then again I've heard there's monopolies for that in the USA, instead of actual competition.
But then again I’ve heard there’s monopolies for that in the USA, instead of actual competition.
Government granted monopolies. It's the worst. City / county/ state signs deal with ISP X and give them exclusive rights. Then for some reason they don't spend a lot of time updating anything because they have no competition because of the fucking morons in the government.
Dude, 100Mbps isn't good enough anymore either
What? That’s plenty for the average person.
Meh, it's good enough to be usable. I have 50/10 Mbps down/up and I can watch 1440p videos just fine. What do y'all use your internet for? Do you have like 5 family members watching stuff at the same time?
The average US household has something like 2.5 people in it. It's safe to assume (statistically) that at least two of those people are old enough to consume web content unsupervised.
Then there are edge cases that aren't quite so crazy, like 5 person households where everyone is over the age 14.
So yeah, for one person 50/10 is likely just fine. But for the average household 100/15 is likely closer to baseline.
50/10
good enough to be usable
On a post about how ISPs are literally fucking us all over, overcharging for the most basic connections that are far behind other countries and all you have to say is iT’s UsAbLe lmao
Youre advocating for the SLOWEST avg speed in the nation
Americans are getting nearly 200 Mbps in download speed, but are you?
https://www.allconnect.com/blog/us-internet-speeds-globally
As of May 2023, Ookla’s Speedtest.net shows Americans are getting over 200 Mbps of download speed and about 23 Mbps of upload speed through their fixed broadband connections — good for 6th in the world for median fixed broadband speeds. Considering “fast internet speeds” are generally defined as any download speed above 100 Mbps, Americans are doing quite well by this measure.
In fact, according to a recent Allconnect data report, 9 in 10 households can access at least 100 Mbps speeds.
That’s an incredible improvement from just under a decade ago when the U.S. had an average download speed of just 31 Mbps. In 2013, America ranked 25th among 39 nations for broadband speed.
Sub-100 is not good enough by most standards these days around the world. 50 is not even double the fastest speeds from TEN years ago
We as consumers and citizens deserve better, especially as working from home continues to be a popular and realistic option and our global culture continues to be directly tied to internet culture/media/content.
One major AAA game update will likely break your connection for hours for all intents and purposes.
Bitrate of a 1440p youtube video is going to be around 20mpbs (±4). Your 50 down connection couldn't handle more than 2 streams. The lowest reported bitrate is 16mbps on their support page (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en#zippy=%2Cbitrate). 50/16 = 3.125, with network overhead you'd be VERY lucky to get 3 streams going without stuttering.
It's entirely possible that a family of 5 would run into issues if they're all home and some want to watch videos.
My family of 4 have been Plex trained... So I mitigate a lot of these problems personally.
But it's more likely that the 10 up breaks things even more. One person in the house uploading anything (or participating in zoom/teams/etc calls) will cripple your ability to make ANY request to the internet.
Here in Ukraine we got 1000 mbit even in small villages via optic. For 7.5$/month. For the last 10 years at least. Before that the standard was 100 mbit ethernet. 20 years ago the standard was 30 mbit via coaxial tv cable.
Here in the UK, I can get 1GB up/down for about £30 ($38, or ₴1,434.60).
In the US you're lucky to get those speeds and you're lucky to spend less than $100 for it while also having a data cap of like 10TB/month.
Our government gave cable companies tax cuts and shit to encourage them to provide internet and most of the just bought out their competitors and formed pseudo monopolies.
Must be nice.
from Ukraine too, can confirm.
still using 100mbps because it's dirt cheap and I don't really need more yet.
Since it takes so long to change the “standard” it should be set to 1-2GB per second or have it set to increase by 10-20% per year or something.
Sounds good but there isn't any consumer equipment that can handle 2GB/s. Even 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches are super expensive and I don't think we have anything that can do more than 10Gb/s in the consumer Networking space at all .
No shit. Fuck Ajit Pai.
Biden finally recently got the FCC back to protecting people, and not the damn phone and cable companies. Thank god.
Still a lot of mess to clean up though.
You should start by asking them what they did with the $400 billion (as of 9 years ago) in taxes that we have paid them to build out fiber internet. And yes, you're probably STILL paying this tax.
It's just a speed to be able to say your service is "broadband." There's probably more to that with subsidies and whatnot, but it's not an actual hard requirement.
It hasn’t been “good enough” for a while now.
Man I really hope so. I'm in a 25/3 wasteland. My dad, a town over, is even lower. About 7/0.8.
Meanwhile in the Netherlands, I can choose between several gigabit providers. Symmetrical on fiber or asymmetrical on cable. I've been on gigabit fibre for a couple of years.
You guys are getting 25/3? Damn. Must be nice.
Ok but can we actually get 25/3 first? All raising it does is set low hanging fruit for newly "underserved" areas while there are still plenty of communities for whom 1Mbps terrestrial links would be a miracle.
5-10 down does just fine for streaming and video calls from my experience. My ISP is badly configured, so I get like 15-20 up.
i mean, 5 to 10 megabyte (40-80 Mbps) is better definitely. 25 Mbps is absolutely terrible for my partner and I if they're watching a show and I'm trying to game.
Yes, baby, right back at you.
Finally, it was embarrassing years ago.
