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.
Pathetic. The acceptance of this terrible service speed shows how the American public is so isolated they don’t know when they’re being shafted by big business and the politicians the rich and powerful own.
No more lobbying. Institutionalized bribery is killing the American public. Healthcare, food, workplace rights and safety, and quality of services. Everything’s compromised.
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To clear up confusion, 6MBps (MegaByte) down would be equal to 48Mbps (Megabit). So you would be above the mentioned standard.
Or you made typo, then you’re indeed below standard ^^"
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One is a rate of data, the other is an amount.
Mbps means megabits per second.
MB is just megabytes. You can of course turn it into a rate, but then it would be MB/s.
There are 8 bits in a byte, so 100 Mbps would be 12.5 MB/s (divide by 8)
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Here’s an interesting thing- we had Spectrum on copper and we’re semi-rural so it was only about 30/5. Then a local company came in and offered to install fiber in the neighborhood if 40% signed up. Suddenly our Spectrum speeds went up to about 80/10. Then the neighborhood told Spectrum to fuck off and now we have decent fiber speeds. I’m getting 400/400 now and I could get it even faster if I wanted to pay for it.
Yep, typical. Spectrum in my area (like 5-7 years ago) suddenly over doubled everyone’s speeds almost overnight once competition came in. I loved telling them to pound sand as I got symmetrical gigabit installed.
I want fiber internet so bad, I live in a relatively big city for Christ’s sake it shouldn’t take this long
Asymmetric speeds are a disgrace. Internet used to be about exchange of content, ideas and collaboration. You consumed, but also contributed. The overall focus on high download low upload is clearly the sign telcos want Internet to be just a troth of content, not much different from cable tv.
Ajit Pai never raised download speeds? Nooo. You don’t say. Asshole who was against net neutrality didn’t do anything to increase quality of network. Can’t be.
I live in hotels. A good week is when I can measure in Mb and not Kb. A great one is when it’s more than 3mbps on a regular basis.😢
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I have 500Mbps in Spain. Is it that bad in the American cities or is it only like rural Montana that has these speeds?
I live in middle America and oddly enough the rural areas have started getting fiber from utility companies. I live in a town of about 40,000 and the best you can hope for is either DSL from AT&T which is maybe 25Mbps with perfect conditions or Optimum Cable internet which is sold as “Gigabit” that never breaks 400Mbps and cost about $120/mo. I’ve also had to file multiple complaints with the FCC to have issues resolved. My connection for about 6 months was completely unusable when it rained and even after “fixing” the issue I have severely reduced speeds when it rains. It’s an absolute joke and nothing is in place to protect consumers from any of this BS.
It’s widely variable, even in big cities the available ISPs can change depending on what side of a street you’re on. A lot of people are stuck with cable (DOCSIS) providers that run over legacy TV infrastructure and provide wildly asymmetric speeds. This is an excerpt from Xfinity (Comcast):
Xfinity Gigabit Internet service has advanced, next generation technology, with WiFi download speeds of up to 1000 Mbps (up to 1200 Mbps in some areas) and upload speeds of up to 35 Mbps.
There’s a new docsis version right around the corner that will provide symmetric speeds. Comcast is starting to roll it out this year. Cable will be a lot faster in a couple years.
I live in the mountain area, and my friend lives 30m from a multi-million population city, in an area with over 100,000 residents. His best option for internet to this day is hotspotting from his cell. Before that was viable, he only had access to satellite internet. Even semi-rural people here get fucked.
my friend lives 30m from a multi-million population city
It took me a beat to realize this was 30 miles or 30 minutes and not 30 meters.
Ah that’s my bad, should’ve used metric. I meant minutes, but in context it doesn’t really portray that.
Oh, metric isn’t a requirement (although I myself am striving to use it when I remember), just that “m” alone is ambiguous. And in my daily work, a number followed by a single m is meters.
The issue is mostly that it’s highly variable, hard to change without moving, and hard to predict before you actually live somewhere.
The comcast rep will happily take your money to put you on a 200mb plan, but it won’t do shit if the infrastructure in your area is bad, and Comcast (or whoever the isp is) has absolutely zero responsibility to actually provide the promised services. Now you add in that 95% of the population including most of the phone reps working for the ISPs don’t even know the difference between a bit and a byte and it becomes a total crap shoot.
That’s the same here too. My first apartment only had ADSL. In 2015.
I couldn’t even watch Netflix without it stopping to buffer.
I really wish they would put internet speeds on apartment offers etc.
…wow. That’s so shit. Where I live, your internet provider has to have the ability to provide the service or like with every other service provider it’s really open for lawyer action.
This also makes so that internet providers are at the same time keeping their own infrastructure around which in turn makes that yet another selling point (“we have up to 1 gbps in your area!”) and makes them keep it in top-notch condition.
Honestly, it’s highly variable. Generally speaking, more populated areas tend to have much better options for internet and in some large markets even have a degree of competition.
In my case, I live in a town of only 180k or so people. At my home, I am able to get 1.2 gbps download from Comcast. They are the only option in my direct vicinity with this much bandwidth. The alernative is AT&T with only DSL as an option. I don’t remember the top tier. But, it’s considerably slower at maybe 100 mbps or something like that.
I’ve lived in small towns since 2009. 100mps would be a fucking dream come true. The fastest speed I’ve had in the last decade plus is 25mps until we got TMobile home internet, and now I typically get around 50-70. Technically it’s up to 300 with our distance to the tower, but there’s a fucking mountain in between us, so I take what I can get. :/
Can’t figure out how to edit on connect, so I’m just adding:
The best wired internet available to me is dialup (old school 56k, baby). We used a mobile hotspot from PCs for people (if you’re at all low income, seriously check them out. Life changers).
Wow, that’s pretty good for a town of that size. I live in a city of 1.6 Million. I think I might be able to get 1 gbps if I shop around, but I don’t think much more than that is available to normal consumers at least.
My connection is 10/2. Please help me
I was so happy when we finally got a 2nd internet provider where I live. Now both providers offer steep discounts to keep customers. I upgraded my 450mpbs coax connection to 1gbps fiber when the new ISP came to town. My promotional period just ran out, so I called the ISP. They set me up with a new promotion for 2gbps at less than the price I was paying for 1gbps, and at the end of the promotional period it’ll be the same price I was paying for the 1gbps service. Competition ftw!
That’s a dream. A pray for even a single competitor on my street.
Yes, let’s pay them to just take the money… for the third time!
We have 600/600 Mbps… In a third world country smh
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”.
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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
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
Its enough to stream 4k compressed
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).
He means a 4k reel of just darkness. Could probably do it at a few hundred FPS and still have some bandwidth to spare.
