> The funding is going to a mix of cable, fiber, and fixed wireless providers, plus SpaceX's Starlink satellite network.<p>I think cable providers should be left out. They were already gifted many billions of dollars in the past for this same basic purpose but they pocketed the money. They can just use the free money they've already been given. Instead, the funding should go to existing munipical fiber ISPs to expand their coverage. Give money to people with a proven track record of doing what you want, not people with a proven track record of keeping the money for themselves.<p>I'm on municipal fiber and it's <i>amazing</i>.
Imagine how good our network technology policy would be if the Senate weren't run by septagenarians and octogenarian.<p>I fear that data caps for home internet will become standard. There is no technological reason for these caps. For wireless, they could be defended by arguing that companies only get to use so much spectrum because of FCC laws. But the only limit for home internet is the ISP's willingness to deploy equipment and install cable/fiber runs. That's exactly what customers are paying them to do.
Lets try and suss out some of the multiple issues with US internet:<p>-regulating ISPs as a free market is, to be hyperbolic, a disaster. there is effectively a monopoly in most parts of the country.<p>-25/3 Mbps is a very reasonable speed for most people. the issue is that its provided on a best effort basis that is never maintained for long, if at all. netflix says thats enough to stream UHD[0]<p>-FTA: "Those data points likely undercount the number of unserved Americans because the FCC lets ISPs count an entire census block as served even if it can serve just one home in the block" hilarious - what else is there to say.<p>-FTA: "The senators are also frustrated by differing standards across agencies. [...] the FCC defines [...] Alternatively, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines" why is this the federal government's job again? the internet is clearly not an enumerated power. is this the interstate commerce clause that keeps on giving in action again? i think decentralizing federal power would help alleviate a lot of the existential dread vis a vi corruption that many americans are feeling.<p>all in all, this reeks of regulatory capture to me. if we're gonna have a serious discussion about internet infrastructure, i think the starting point is how we classify ISPs and where in the city-state-federal hierarchy the responsibility lies. changing a 25 to a 100 is a cool bullet on a resume, but i dont think this is the low handing fruit here.<p>[0]<a href="https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306" rel="nofollow">https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306</a>
I live in Poland and I am <i>BAFFLED</i> at how bad internet in US, supposedly one of the most developed countries on Earth, is.<p>I have commercial (ie high priority), 600Mbit/120Mbit broadband with extremely stable (under 15ms, over 99% of th time) round trip to most of the Poland, for equivalent of 20 USD per month.<p>I know its not the same everywhere in Poland, but consider I also have <i>three</i> mobile internet plans. One of them is 4G limited to 20Mbit but unlimited monthly transfer, for 5 USD per month. This is also quite stable and allows me to comfortably work remotely from almost every place in Poland and serves me as a backup link.
An interesting parallel is how much water/sewer, electricity, and natural gas connections cost. Cities have been providing these for centuries now and it's generally about $30-$50 base cost per month to connect to the utilities. This is for physical infrastructure requiring continual maintenance and treatment plants and movement of physical goods.<p>Internet service is almost static once installed; fiber lasts for decades (barring visits from backhoes) and the networking equipment can be fairly centralized and doesn't cost a lot to keep the lights on. It's insane that ISPs charge the rates that they do. Multi-mode SFPs are $50, switches are low thousands for enterprise grade, a couple long range 100G SFPs are another thousand. $50/month * 48 ports in a neighborhood pays that off pretty fast.<p>Fiber can't be any harder to install than fluid-filled pipes or electrical cables.
Hi from the developed world.. just checked, the slowest available broadband here is 200Mpbs/20Mpbs. Default is 200/200, I and most people I know went with 1000/1000Mpbs.
I've had a symmetrical gigabit connection for the past year and a half and there's no way I'd go back to anything slower. The peace of mind from not having to worry about something in the background slowing down your connection and the ability to download digital games faster than the physical copies could be installed from the disc is just too valuable.<p>Improving internet for America outside of the cities means investing in the infrastructure to upgrade it. It also means outlawing the data cap scam and banning ISPs from overselling their bandwidth because high speed internet is useless if you can't actually use it. Its the same principle as banning junk health insurance plans that are useless when you actually need medical care: fraud should be illegal even if it "saves some people some money".
in Romania you can't even get lower than 100Mbs at the largest internet providers (even 100Mbs in some cases)
<a href="https://www.digi.ro/servicii/internet" rel="nofollow">https://www.digi.ro/servicii/internet</a>
Nice to see. I would have hoped to see more of a mention around latency. A lot of tools are sensitive to this and a theoretically fat pipe is not useful if you have 100ms+ latencies.
No 1Gbps should be the standard for wired and 300mbps for wireless and satellite. We’re not exactly leaping into the future with this effort — we are barely catching up. If the US wants to continue to lead the world we need high speed internet.
100Mbps up as a standard? One can only dream. Comcast's highest residential offer is 1Gbps down (yeah right) and 35 mbps up.<p>My other option is DSL with Att, a max of like 30Mbps down...
One great thing about higher upload is the ability to host your own content, be a tor node, release decentralized software platforms that can actually work.<p>Imagine if people could just buy a premade raspi that hosted their social media page, ddns, etc.
While we're at it, let's prevent ISPs from disallowing us to run a business on our home internet. Why should it matter to them how we use our bits? Sell us on a support plan and higher uptime, sure, but there's no reason we should be disallowed from private enterprise because we're not "paying for a business account".
This would be 100 Mbps faster than the non-existent cable that stopped 4 miles from my dad’s home in Wisconsin. They went down a rural road 40 years ago hooking up houses who wanted and stopped when they reached a home that said no. They had wireless for a while but the company shut down. Starlink is his only real hope.
I would say very few residential customers need more than 10Mbps upload.<p>For 100Mbps you could run about 50 Zooms simultaneously. Who does that?<p>Unless you are massively uploading (likely illegal content) who needs greater than 10Mbps upstream at home?
Hopefully this will pass.<p>For residential, Comcast only advertises download speed, leaving upload speed like 1996.<p>Comcast has a bad reputation but there is only 1 ISP available to my address. No competition.
Paying A$90 (~70 USD) for broadband based on HFC to freestanding house, 100Mbps (downstream) / 40Mbps (upstream), hit by outages from time to time as ISPs are simply NBN resellers, which in turn is a wrapper on top of Telstra's infrastructure. Will be keen to see how Starlink rollout goes down-under.
25/3 is a little sad for modern computing.<p>It's ok for video streaming and conference calls. And I guess that's the minimal threshold. But with more and more services and offerings in the cloud, especially iCloud that just happily backs-up data out of the box and OneDrive 1TB corporate plan it's not going to win any awards.<p>With the pandemic and the changes in work from home habits, if I was a small town mayor I'd be rolling out fiber right now like there's no tomorrow. Big upfront costs but it instantly boosts the value of every property covered and attracts a new demographic that's not tied to any specific geographic location. Even with folks doing part time work from home, the additional time spent in the town during work days means that commercial real-estate will appreciate as well.<p>Easy as that.
Would people saturate their connection for a long duration of time streaming 4K or whatever? I know for me I am what's called 'extremely online', but I use the web intermittently, and don't saturate my connection streaming NSFW content for 12 hour intervals. When I need it, my 100Mbps connection is there for me, when I need to download an ISO or whatever, but that's the only time I use the fast connection. The rest is all low-bandwidth activity (surfing twitter, checking email etc).
Australia has been bee-lining towards faster internet for over a decard. (Which was somewhat sabotaged but changing the "All FTTP" to FTTN leaving most suburbs with substantially worse internet)
I just got upgraded to 1000/50... Yes that's 1 Gigabit down and 50 megabits up.
This <i>can</i> actually break if your download requires too much Request headers (eg Range requests) it will choke on the upload when downloading at full speed.
Somewhat related, if you would like to query any location in the U.S. and see internet speeds, the government has a site for it. [1] I am using that to decide where to move. Use the pull down menu to change from coordinates to address. You can put in a street address.<p>[1] - <a href="https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/#/" rel="nofollow">https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/#/</a>
I had 100/100 back in 2002.<p>Now, I have 10000/10000 symmetrical fiber which sets me back ~$45/month.<p>This article (and discussion) make me feel privileged :)
It’s a point to note that without Google Fiber bashing in traditional telecom, we’d still be at 10Mbps upload/download being deemed “blazing fast internet”.<p>Keep that in mind the next time you pay your monthly bill for AT&T/Time Warner/Comcast/Verizon. They could’ve given you gigabit speeds the entire time.
This legislation is dead if it doesn't prevent local munis from kowtowing to incumbant ISPs and thwarting municipal fiber. That's what we need: a ton more competition from the municipalities in this space given that I think broadband should be a public good like the highway system is.
I am genuinely perplexed reading the comments here about how bad US internet is. Knock on wood, I have basically never felt bandwidth or latency constrained in practical terms once the dial-up days ended.<p>I forget what plan I pay for with my cable provider but I just tested to 200 Megabit down and 18 up. That sounds low compared to numbers people throw around here but in reality my wife and I are able to Zoom or stream at the same time, browse in parallel and basically never feel any impact of latency. Basically, everything we want to do in real time works in real time and anything large I want to download (eg: linux ISOs) takes just a few seconds. Whatever numbers we are throwing around for comparison just don't seem to be practical concerns.<p>We're in NYC. With COVID, my coworkers scattered all over the US - east, west and south. Nobody put in a particular effort to look for places based on connectivity quality and yet everyone is able to WFH fine. Everyone moved to either be close to family, to a warmer client, or to skiing and the mountains. And yet somehow everyone ended up with great connectivity that allows us to seamlessly run a large and successful firm.<p>It's just funny to hear people complain about how bad things are when in reality everything works mainly fine. Like - really - what are you actually unable to do? (I am genuinely curious)<p>My internet bill is $38 in NYC by the way. RCN cable.<p>One final thing - it's nonsensical for people to say "I have X connectivity and I am in a Central European village." Obviously... the us installed its infrastructure before you did and it works well enough so we're not going to tear it out and replace it for no reason. You didn't have connectivity until much later so of course you're currently using newer technology. At some point we'll have to upgrade ours and leap ahead of you again.
Strange how "broadband" and "high speed internet" can have a different meaning in various parts of the country. For ex: a 10 mbps dsl line is considered "high speed" in New Hampshire.
100 upload would be amazing. I'm in central London and can only get 15mbps upload despite 350mbps down.<p>Is this the same ratio in the US? My friends in mainland Europe seem to have much more symmetrical up/down streams
As someone whose website (and most of the websites I visit) has a relatively small footprint, 100/100Mbps would be more than comfortable for me to host and surf on
I heard someone even less qualified to comment (can you believe it?) said that 1Tbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard. <i>shrug</i>
Also of interest<p><a href="https://www.cable.co.uk/broadband/speed/worldwide-speed-league/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cable.co.uk/broadband/speed/worldwide-speed-leag...</a><p><a href="https://www.cable.co.uk/broadband/pricing/worldwide-comparison/" rel="nofollow">https://www.cable.co.uk/broadband/pricing/worldwide-comparis...</a>
I find terms such as “broadband” and “high definition” that need to be updated every so often to be incredibly useless.<p>Numbers and units exist for a reason. If one wish to speak of 100 Mib/s, then one should simply do so. — that way, I, and everyone else, knows exactly what is going on.
Yes they should, but what will happen is websites and apps will get fatter and sloppier until the end result is slow, laggy performance.<p>It's a bit like doubling your salary and increasing your spending by more than double. That seems to be how website and app development behaves.<p>Imagine if bandwidth increased, latency decreased (approaching theoritical minimums), and websites/apps were built with a strict (but appropriately flexible) network budget.<p>Perhaps the best catchphrase here is "weakest link".<p>Even with 500+ mbps up and down, and pihole blocking a lot of ads, and noscript blocking some analytics and other trackers, a lot of web experiences are underwhelming.<p>Also, the recent fascinating post about how someone sped up GTA 5 online illustrates how the weakest link can be so weak that it ruins everything.