FCC chair: Speed standard of 25Mbps down, 3Mbps up isn’t good enough anymore

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 648 points –
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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Its enough to stream 4k compressed

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.