[HN Gopher] FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric from ...
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FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric from 25Mbps to
100Mbps
Author : rosaleia000
Score : 80 points
Date : 2024-03-14 21:04 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pcmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pcmag.com)
| nerdjon wrote:
| Going to be interesting to see how they respond.
|
| Do consumers care or differentiate "broadband" anymore?
|
| Why do I feel like they might just pivot to not using the word
| "broadband" at all anymore and use some internal branding like
| the stupid 10g crap Comcast tried. Thankfully they were told to
| stop but if they are more careful...
| joe_guy wrote:
| The definition appears to be more for the government than
| marketing.
|
| > Raising the speed metric is important because it helps the
| commission determine which areas in the country are receiving
| adequate internet speeds, and if more government funding is
| necessary. In 2015, the FCC raised the metric from 4Mbps/1Mbps
| to 25Mbps/3Mbps. But since then, US senators, government
| watchdogs, and FCC officials have urged the commission to raise
| the metric even higher, citing the US's growing reliance on
| internet services and apps.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Personally, I can't remember the last piece of marketing that
| tried to sell me "broadband" internet. They all say "high
| speed" internet.
|
| Anyway, the 15/3mbps down/up I get in the Oregon countryside is
| indeed high speed compared to the 5/1mbps down/up I had smack
| in the middle of the Los Angeles suburbs.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Consumers don't. Monopolistic corporations filing paperwork to
| get their hands on tax dollars probably do. Thankfully for
| them, the FCC is about as toothless and captured as you can
| get, so it probably even only barely matters to them.
| hedora wrote:
| With how many 9's of availability, and at what latency?
|
| Frontier is advertising 3 nines average network-wide availability
| for their new fiber network. Three nines is completely
| unacceptable, but our neighborhood barely got one nine last year.
|
| Based on their current behavior, there's zero chance of them
| providing the bandwidths they're advertising for the new build
| out, even when the network is completely up and completely idle.
| Currently, if we try to sign up, they say we can get <<1 mbps
| (bits) theoretical. However, the internet coverage maps claim
| they provide broadband service to our address, so they must be
| claiming > 25Mbps to the FCC.
| reaperman wrote:
| I'd be fine with 99.9% availability to my house. That means
| it's down for at most 9 hours per year. That's probably on par
| with how much my electricity goes out during an average winter.
|
| But what they mean by "99.9% network-wide availability" and
| what I mean by "99.9% availability to my house" are very, very
| different things.
| hedora wrote:
| It could also mean nine one hour outages during working hours
| or one out of 1000 web browser requests fail on average.
|
| However, I suspect that the actual availability is extremely
| skewed, given the one nine they delivered to our area.
| reaperman wrote:
| > _It could also mean nine one hour outages during working
| hours or one out of 1000 web browser requests fail on
| average._
|
| Totally fine with both of these, even as someone who works
| from home.
|
| > _However, I suspect that the actual availability is
| extremely skewed, given the one nine they delivered to our
| area._
|
| And this is what I'd find unacceptable.
| oivey wrote:
| That's crazy. If my electric was out for that long
| consistently I'd lose my shit. That's totally unacceptable.
| tanepiper wrote:
| I guess we can count you out the apocalypse then?
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| I was in Kazakhstan for some time. No electricity,
| clean/cold/hot water, heating for days at a time. In winter
| and in summer.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| In an urban area it would be unacceptable. It is not
| atypical for a rural area.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| > Three nines is completely unacceptable
|
| Less than 9 hrs of downtime per year is unacceptable for
| consumer internet?
| jedberg wrote:
| It is when you work from home.
| dwheeler wrote:
| Often you can use cell phone or a coffee shop if it's say 2
| days/year of internet downtime.
|
| If you need it for an emergency call, you need higher
| reliability, but you can prioritize, and I don't know how
| common landlines are any more.
| groby_b wrote:
| It is? 44 minutes outage per month is critical?
|
| I doubt that's true for most jobs. But yes, there are jobs
| where it is, and some of us (e.g. me ;) are just finicky
| about network connectivity. In which case I highly
| recommend having a fallback connection, with a different
| modality than the main one. For most of us, that means LTE.
| Tethering is fine if you can live with <5 min outages, but
| sure, you can also do automated failover.
|
| But it's not a level of service that I think is reasonable
| to expect from a single ISP connection. A single
| construction incident will burn the annual SLO budget, and
| there's nothing the provider can do about that.
|
| (And of course, it'd still be nice if telcos ran their
| backends competently. Looking at you, AT&T)
| jzb wrote:
| I would be annoyed at losing a day or so of work, if the
| outage was all at once - but nine hours a year is
| tolerable. I wish my ISP was that reliable. Hell, I wish my
| power company was that reliable. Where I live it's common
| to have a number of outages longer than eight hours every
| year. Last year a moderate storm caused power outages for a
| couple of days in August affecting thousands.
| hedora wrote:
| Traditionally, it was unacceptable for landline service,
| since it's safety critical. (You need to be able to call
| 911.)
|
| I poked around to try to figure out what the current
| requirements are, and it looks like they've mostly been
| scrapped. "Central office backup power" is required, which
| matches my experience attempting to get terrestrial internet
| or cell service during power outages.
| cogman10 wrote:
| If we limit it to issues that the ISP owns, then I'd say yes.
|
| What does the ISP have that can cause 9 hours worth of
| outages throughout the year? The only thing I could think of
| is the ISP being targeted by a massive DDOS attack.
| wmf wrote:
| It's easy to have a single outage over 9 hours if they wait
| 8 hours to send somebody out.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I live in semi-rural Canada and get better service than that,
| but I would be fine with more downtime.
|
| OTOH, I frequently have scheduled power outage times that
| exceed that metric so it sort of doesn't matter, and that's
| ignoring unscheduled power outages (a necessary part of life
| in a temperate rain forest with above ground power). I've
| taken to keeping a small generator handy to power the modem.
| hedora wrote:
| Our Internet + phone service go down if there's a power
| outage, which implies the cell network also goes down in
| practice. The tower might be up and on backup power, but it
| either has nothing to talk to or it's completely
| overwhelmed.
| simlevesque wrote:
| > our neighborhood barely got one nine last year
|
| Internet it available less than 10% of the year where you live
| ?
| bhelkey wrote:
| One nine should be 90% availability I would imagine.
| hedora wrote:
| It was out for about a month total for some of our neighbors.
| (Repeated outages, not just one.)
| Johnny555 wrote:
| Why isn't 3 9's acceptable for residential home internet?
| That's less than 9 hours of downtime a year, 44 minutes/month.
|
| Sure, I'd like 4 or even 5 9's, but I don't want to pay for it
| -- each additional 9 is exponentially more expensive to
| guarantee, and few people are willing to pay for that much
| reliability for their own network gear.
| Retric wrote:
| Actually averaging 3 9's isn't that bad. However, 3 9's looks
| much worse when you also miss the target.
|
| It's noticeably worse than the target for phones used to be,
| but with cellphones home internet is generally less safety
| critical.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| 3 9s is completely fine. Internet is not subject to the 911
| uptime requirements.
|
| 3 9s is essentially an outage or two from a major storm. That's
| fine for residential internet.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| I don't see three 9's as being unreasonable for home internet
| at all, getting more reliability than that is non-trivial and
| most people have redundancy in the form of internet on their
| phones or can buy a second line.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| tldr;
|
| Today: 100Mbps down / 20Mbps up (45 million Americans lack access
| as of Dec 2022)
|
| 2015 onward: 25Mbps down / 3Mbps up
|
| Pre-2015: 4Mbps down / 1Mbps up
|
| The commission's longterm goal is 1Gbps down / 500Mbps up. These
| distinctions of 'broadband' help determine where to focus
| resources.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| So they would like to get to the level of Romania.
| SteveGerencser wrote:
| We are in the 45 million. When we moved here over a decade ago
| we were told by TDS that they were expanding their service and
| should be able to provide us with 50Mbs 'soon'. 10 years later
| we are still 5Mbs (3 in real-world situations). With no plan to
| expand here ever. Fortunately, the local electric company got a
| grant and is rolling out 1Gbs fiber to 100% of their customers.
| TDS couldn't do it because it wasn't 'profitable'. The electric
| company is fast-tracking the build-out and we should have
| service less than 18 months after they started.
| theodric wrote:
| I appreciate any effort on the part of a government to exert
| pressure on industry to deliver a product to citizens that keeps
| up with the times, but I'm not sure it really matters anymore.
| Any connection that can stream YouTube at an acceptable
| resolution is 'broadband' in my eyes, while someone who's
| rsyncing terabytes daily would probably suck up as much bandwidth
| as they can get and come back for a second helping. Maybe, just
| maybe, everyone has learned the Nerd Words well enough that we
| can simply refer to connection performance by X number of
| megabits per second (probably not).
|
| Good thing the FCC doesn't control Ireland, or I'd no longer be
| able to declare that I have broadband via satellite! Well, part
| of the time, anyway.
| rsynnott wrote:
| 25Mbit/sec isn't really good enough for 4K video.
|
| > Good thing the FCC doesn't control Ireland, or I'd no longer
| be able to declare that I have broadband via satellite! Well,
| part of the time, anyway.
|
| I mean, you can call it what you want, but it's under the
| minimum standard set by the NBP in 2012 (30Mbit, 25ms).
| Fortunately, if that's the best you can get, you're almost
| certainly in an NBI intervention area, so a minimum of 500Mbit
| via FTTH should be available to you at some point.
|
| You can check here: https://nbi.ie/map/
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Official release: https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-increases-
| broadband-speed-b...
| superkuh wrote:
| It's always funny sad when I try to open a link on fcc.gov or
| congress.gov and get blocked by an impassible cloudflare wall.
| You'd think these services would be important enough to have a
| non-default cloudflare configuration.
|
| Here's a mirror of the text I grabbed from another computer/IP
| for anyone else getting blocked: FCC
| INCREASES BROADBAND SPEED BENCHMARK Annual Agency
| Assessment of High-Speed Internet Service Deployment
| Establishes New Standard to Better Reflect the Broadband Needs
| of American Households -- WASHINGTON, March
| 14, 2024--The Federal Communications Commission today adopted
| its annual assessment of whether advanced telecommunications
| capability is being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion
| across the U.S. In addition to deployment, the Report
| considers broadband affordability, adoption, availability, and
| equitable access, when determining whether broadband is being
| deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion to "all Americans."
| The Commission's Report, issued pursuant to section 706 of the
| Telecommunications Act of 1996, raises the Commission's
| benchmark for high-speed fixed broadband to download speeds of
| 100 megabits per second and upload speeds of 20 megabits per
| second - a four-fold increase from the 25/3 Mbps benchmark set
| by the Commission in 2015. The increase in the
| Commission's fixed speed benchmark for advanced
| telecommunications capability is based on the standards now
| used in multiple federal and state programs (such as NTIA's
| BEAD Program and multiple USF programs), consumer usage
| patterns, and what is actually available from and marketed by
| internet service providers. The Report concludes
| that advanced telecommunications capability is not being
| deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion based on the total
| number of Americans, Americans in rural areas, and people
| living on Tribal lands who lack access to such capability, and
| the fact that these gaps in deployment are not closing rapidly
| enough. Using the agency's Broadband Data
| Collection deployment data for the first time rather than FCC
| Form 477 data, the Report shows that, as of December 2022:
| * Fixed terrestrial broadband service (excluding satellite) has
| not been physically deployed to approximately 24 million
| Americans, including almost 28% of Americans in rural areas,
| and more than 23% of people living on Tribal lands; *
| Mobile 5G-NR coverage has not been physically deployed at
| minimum speeds of 35/3 Mbps to roughly 9% of all Americans, to
| almost 36% of Americans in rural areas, and to more than 20% of
| people living on Tribal lands; * 45 million Americans
| lack access to both 100/20 Mbps fixed service and 35/3 Mbps
| mobile 5G-NR service; and * Based on the new 1 Gbps per
| 1,000 students and staff short-term benchmark for schools and
| classrooms, 74% of school districts meet this goal.
| The Report also sets a 1 Gbps/500 Mbps long-term goal for
| broadband speeds to give stakeholders a collective goal towards
| which to strive - a better, faster, more robust system of
| communication for American consumers. Action by
| the Commission March 14, 2024 by Report (FCC 24-27).
| Chairwoman Rosenworcel, Commissioners Starks and Gomez
| approving. Commissioners Carr and Simington dissenting.
| Chairwoman Rosenworcel, Commissioners Carr, Starks, Simington,
| and Gomez issuing separate statements. GN Docket
| No. 22-270
| google234123 wrote:
| This is over regulation imo. If you support this then you can't
| complain about there not being any low cost housing because it's
| regulations akin to this that is increasing the costs.
|
| 25->100 is more of a luxury then a necessity
| rsynnott wrote:
| ... WAit, how, precisely, does this make housing more
| expensive? Like, what is the method of action?
| cogman10 wrote:
| It's the (IMO faulty) theory that all regulations increase
| prices. Sort of like "if you require all houses to meet code,
| you can't have a market for very low quality houses that
| would decrease the prices of mid quality houses".
|
| The problem with this theory, particularly in the case of an
| ISP, is you need an actual free and open market with a large
| amount of competition before it starts making any sense. When
| you talk about things like ISPs which are region locked and
| have low or even no competition then it's meaningless. A
| region locked ISP can (and will) charge pretty much any price
| the market will bear divorced from the actual cost of
| service.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| > 25->100 is more of a luxury then a necessity
|
| Not if you work remotely.
| cogman10 wrote:
| How much do you pay for internet? Maybe you should be directing
| your ire elsewhere.
|
| I currently pay $60/month for 600 down.
|
| An ISP that actually struggles to provide 100mbps down at a
| reasonable rate, today, is simply one that refuses to update
| their hardware. 100mbps is not hard to achieve with semi-modern
| hardware.
|
| I know of ISPs servicing remote small communities with 1gbps
| down at $100/month. 300 down for $30/month.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| 25mbps being "broadband" is a bit of a joke, a single 4k stream
| can exceed that.
|
| Raising the floor to 20mbps for uploads is also fairly
| important for more practical things, having to backup a
| computer at 3mbps was wholly impractical. 20mbps is a good
| amount of speed.
|
| I don't see any reason to raise the definition of bandwidth
| higher for the next decade though.
| Kerbonut wrote:
| Great, now do data caps.
| h4x0rr wrote:
| Mewnwhile germany just raised it to 10Mbps
| snapplebobapple wrote:
| They missed a zero...
| andrewaylett wrote:
| IMNSHO, latency is more important than raw bandwidth, and raw
| bandwidth for consumer Internet is more useful as a latency
| improvement (because the high speed drains the buffers that much
| faster) than for actually using the bandwidth.
|
| If you've got actually decent Internet, or you actually do use
| the bandwidth, great! My experience is that only a few
| applications will max out my 115Mbit/s connection, and _given I
| have semi-decent kit and a decent ISP_ using the full bandwidth
| doesn 't have a big impact on latency so I can be streaming,
| downloading, and have multiple people video-calling and that's
| fine.
|
| Looking at my stats, there's only been a five minute period in
| the past 24h with sustained speeds used of over 20Mbit/s.
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