FCC chair: Speed standard of 25Mbps down, 3Mbps up isn’t good enough anymore
arstechnica.com
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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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".
I live in South Korea. I can get 1Gbps virtually anywhere in the country. I get 2.5Gbps easily.
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
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.
no it isn't.
He means a 4k reel of just darkness. Could probably do it at a few hundred FPS and still have some bandwidth to spare.
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).
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.