FCC chair wants to boost broadband standard to 100Mbps

Technology@lemmy.world – 676 points – 12 months ago

FCC chair wants to boost broadband standard to 100Mbps::First refresh of minimums in eight years for the country that invented the internet

My God is American internet awful

If you have 100mbps of non bandwidth capped internet in America, you're doing damn good for yourself.

But what if it costs $95/mo, there are no alternatives and the price has nearly doubled in 10 years from $55?

I sure don't feel that great.

I pay the equivalent of $64 for 1 gigabit.

American internet isn’t all crap. I pay about $70 for Gigabit.

You must live in a large city or near one

You can get business gigabit for $90 a month where I live.

Funny thing is that is the rural option, in town I have to go with Comcast and pay $160 a month for half a gigabit

Scrolled too far down before a mention of Comcast. I was in charge of a handful of locations where we needed broadband. They were geographically diverse enough that we had to go with different options. Comcast was the most expensive, and by a lot. Like 30%, and the slowest in dl/ul by a large margin. Comcast was also the second worst one to deal with. The actual worst one was the faster, slightly less expensive Spectrum. They had by far the worst service. A couple of locations had small DSL companies that were a delight to deal with and reasonably priced, but slow as balls. And then one location had a municipal fiber option that was the cheapest, fastest, and easiest to deal with by far. Like, I swear to god I could call them and talk to a real network engineer that no joke actually knew more than I did. I don't mean this to sound arrogant; I am not great with networking. I'm just saying compared to "yeah, I have that in bridge mode because I don't need router capability I'm running my own" and being answered with something like "whoa I'm going to need to get a supervisor" vs them being like "hey can you open a terminal and..." Yes, yes I can open a terminal.

Oh no, Comcast is a terrible fucking company, we agree there.

Its just that in the city, it is either them, or ATT with literally a DSL connection. Coax, or DSL, that's your options lmao.

You pay $4 more than I do for the same thing (with no bandwidth cap). If you're not out in the sticks, internet is fine here.

It's a lot better than Australian internet. I'm getting 20-50mbps

I had 2Mbps (yes, bits, not bytes) until 2020. Then I moved out. Pretty sure that my parents house still only gets that same speed. And this is in fucking Germany, a pretty densely populated country.

As a Swede, I usually get well above 3 Mbit/s on 3G, and I have a 100/100 Mbit/s fiber that I often use to its full potential, and that's with a VPN on. I really thought Germany had better infrastructure.

I'm sure I'd get a faster speed than that in a piece of string.

Honestly that sounds like the cable was damaged, was that really the actual target speed?

Yes, genuinely target speed. Germany is just incredibly behind when it comes to the internet.

That sucks too...

I can ONLY get 1gbit, where i live. (Denmark)

Denmark is also around 1/200th of the size of the us.

Wow I had that in 2008. Damn that sucks. You can't even stream 4K HDR video.

I'm fine with 1080p tbh. Also If I really wanted to stream 4k I could use data (around 80mbps 4G)

It depends. I grew up in the country and my parents still have to use phone hotspots for internet which works well for streaming but forget about any gaming. I live in a fairly major metropolitan city now and my internet is pretty good, although I've noticed my download speeds get throttled sometimes

It can be, but I live in a semi-rural neighborhood outside of a town that doesn't even have 100,000 people and I'm still getting 400/400 on fiber (and can get higher speeds if I want to pay for them).

In rural areas, yes.

In cities, Gigabit internet is abundant and only mildly expensive. Here in Phoenix I pay $60/mo for 1 Gbps down, 50 Mbps up with no bandwidth cap from Verizon. Not the best but far from "awful".

I live in a major metropolitan city in the us and I pay close to $200 a month for gig down and less than 100up.

You might not have to. Look into fixed 5G internet. So long as you have a view of a tower (which you should in a major metropolitan city; I'm in suburbia and still have 3 within view), speeds and latency are as good as a wired connection. I'd look into it.

I have to run my own cell tower because I live in a literal dead zone.

Edit: I checked Verizon, 90 bucks for 50mbps with a 300gb data limits. Yay.

That sucks. Happens when there's no competition in your area. Verizon is $60 for 1Gbps here, no data cap, because they have to compete with Cox. Greedy bastards.

I pay $65 for 1Gb symmetrical and no cap. But I have options for ISPs. My parents in rural Washington have the option of wireless internet at 10Mbps for $70/month or HughesNet satellite for some ungodly amount with worse speed. Starlink is still not available there.

If you’re going to initiate a new rollout of tech, why rollout already out of date stuff? Just mandate fibre to the prem and 1 gigabit minimum from the start. It will take 15 years to complete anyway!

Government officials in areas where 100 Mbps internet isn’t already available are too busy making sure trans people can’t use the toilet or play high school sports.

They're also waiting for their trans porn to download.

slaps thigh 🤣🪦

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That's way too hard for this country.

How will the isps get another government grant to roll out the next bit of outdated tech?

How will the isps get another government grant to ~~roll out the next bit of outdated tech~~ outright refuse to update any infrastructure and perform stock buybacks instead?

FTFY. Google the Connect America Fund if you want your blood pressure to spike. ISPs are notorious for taking taxpayer money and doing fuck-all with it.

They are fucking all of us with it. Does that count?

They're fucking all with it

Sure, but how is that going to make more money for rich people?

They probably had to fight for that, because the ISPs don't want to.

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How is that not already the standard?

where i live my choices are fixed beam wireless internet that caps out at about 75mbps, at&t dsl that caps at 10mbps, satellite or i guess Starlink

But it's a healthy and competitive market right?

super healthy, very competitive

did i mention that i barely get 5G service at my home but if i walk 100ft down to the street i get service?

Gotta love that, there are technically two providers in my area, no fiber, one of them supports asymmetric gigdown/30 up for $130/month cable and 60 mb dsl fo $70/momth. My mother who lives 15 minutes from me has symmetric gigabit fiber for $70 from the same provider that does DSL for me.

oh same, if i go half a mile down the road to the next housing development they have cable, fiber, dsl, the works at prices equivalent to or less than what i’m paying for the fixed beam wireless connection.

utterly insane

In my small town, we only had 4g lte, but it was quick. That is until 2 months ago, they 'updated the towers' to give us 5g... except now nothing works. My phone shows 5g but I have zero bars and zero service. When I switch phone to lte, it'll show full bars but has zero service. It often completely drops to SOS mode. It's ridiculous. Several people in town have contacted Verizon and the FCC and Verizon's official response has been, "we are aware that service is not optimal in this area, but we currently have no plans to fix it. If you are unhappy with our coverage, we encourage you to switch providers." It's infuriating. They've "updated" the town's service from LTE to broken 5G/nothing at all and said "yeah what're you gonna do about it, leave if you don't like it" knowing that their tower is the only tower in the area.

Might be worth it to look into one of those cellular directional antennas

yeah, i thought about it for a while. ultimately it’s so rarely an issue that i decided not to pursue it, but it’s funny nonetheless

At my house I get 500mbps. My store (40 miles away) gets 15mbps. I pay significantly less at home.

Not just that but you have to pay extra to avoid a data cap on the 15mbps line.

Datacaps are incredibly annoying, they are just a cash grab.

Absolutely. That’s exactly what they are.

What about net neutrality? Does anyone remember net neutrality? I'd like that back please. I'd also like the opportunity to publicly flog Ajit Pai as long as we're dreaming.

I would be content with just stealing his comically oversized Reese's mug.

Remember when he immediately caught shit for his rebuttal video because he used GOT footage without permission?

I literally wrote a bot to spam messages promoting Net Neutrality while that was up for vote.

Sucks it didn't work out, but I surely tried.

That was one of the reasons given for ignoring the comments and killing net neutrality. He would have done it regardless though.

Symmetric, right? Right?!

Not only that, 100Mbps is so 2018. Quit pussy-footing around, FCC, make the standard 1Gbps, both ways. And make bandwidth caps illegal. I'm lucky enough to not have one but for years I had to put up with a 1TB limit from those Cox suckers until Verizon came to town.

Do United States really doesn't want to live in the 21st century does it?

The slowest speed by internet service provider offers is 250mbps.

We spent like 5k per household to get fiber everywhere in the US. Then the companies who were supposed to do it just decided to take the money and not do it.

And the government continues to give them more money. I've figured it out now.

People want better broadband. ISPs promise to broaden internet. Government gives money. ISPs spend a considerable amount of the promise of better broadband in marketing. Doesn't happen. People still want better broadband. ISPs promise again. Government gives more money. ISPs continue spending on marketing.

Over and over.

Yeah that would explain it. We don't have anyone who would have that kind of power.

In my country the big telecom companys were broken up in the mid 90s under anti-competition laws. Most of Europe has either done something similar or never really had a big mega corp in that position to begin with.

It's worth noting that the fastest internet in the world is in South Korea. Because they have their entire network rebuilt a couple of decades ago for some reason probably some war something.

Oh, we broke up the big telecom in the 80s. But the behemoths which arose from those (and there were only 2 or 3 after two decades of mergers) and the cable TV companies which "compete" with them for data customers now are effectively regional monopolies anyway. Once a house has a provider, nobody else is willing to spend the money on fiber in the ground to compete. It's not even regional, really, but community to community or apartment building to apartment building (some of which have kick back deals to the landlord for exclusive service access to all the units). My neighborhood is less than 2km from a very large university with probably a Tb of connectivity. Everyone in my neighborhood has access to Comcast/Xfinity which, until last year ranged from 25/2 to 300/15 service, or Verizon DSL at 7.5Mb/768kbps speeds. There is fiber 300m from my house. I've contacted the fiber provider and talked with the CEO. He said they intend to do the whole town, except the captured apartments, but our neighborhood will be last if it ever gets done at all because the cost to install is higher than the newer and more dense neighborhoods.

I wish my verizon service worked that well. I have the 5g home internet. It's supposed to be 300 mbps, but I do good to get 18 mbps download and 1-2 upload.

Do you have a clear and direct view of the tower with nothing like walls, trees, or buildings blocking it? Did you make sure you're actually getting a 5G connection? These Verizon boxes will drop down to LTE or even 3G without telling you, if you don't have a reliable signal.

Don't put up with a crappy connection. Go to http://192.168.0.1, and make sure that it's showing "5G UW" and at least 3 bars. If not, power cycle the gateway and see if it's able to grab a 5G signal then. Failing that, you're going to have to reposition your gateway. Call Verizon and have them send out someone if you need help. Explain to them that you're getting a only 18Mbps and they'll help you out. They won't even charge you for the service call, either, unlike other ISPs. So you've got nothing to lose.

You know what, I'm just happy some progress is being made if 100 becomes minimum. A lot of rural areas have much less than that. I wish 1gbps was the new minimum though.

Right???

Didn't we already pay for the infrastructure?

is this about that Connect America Fund where the ISPs took all the money and did fuck all

Several times actually.

You'd think that would be criminal

Welcome to the United States, where consumers built the internet infrastructure that monopolies profit from and fight tooth and nail to prevent communities from providing high speed internet to its residents. Capitalism at its most corrupt: privatize profits and socialize capital costs and losses.

Gigabit symmetrical or GTFO.

I pay something like $110/mo for my symmetrical gigabit fiber line (plus static IP). This should be the standard, not 100Mbps.

I pay €32.5 for gigabit, but honestly it's overkill for most people. I only got it because a competitor of my ISP was doing a promotion which got me from a 50 mbit (60-70 in practise) at around the same price to a gigabit for a year.

I honestly only used it to its full potential downloading a tv show because a certain streaming provider who pulled the plug on family sharing decided my house isn't my house and I couldn't watch the shows I paid to watch.

100Mbps?? NOT ENOUGH

I have 150Mbps and pay $570 Mexican Pesos which right now is about $35 USD but last year was $28 USD due to the Peso doing significantly better and the USD kinda crashing.

Still, it's not enough for my client work, piracy and live streaming needs since it's non symmetrical, I only get 30Mbps upload.

I got receipts 📜:

I'm in the UK right now and pay £60-ish for gigabit internet (and 100mbps upload) which usually is actually around 800-900 Mbps, don't know the exact price because it includes a phone system my parents pay for