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.
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.😢
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.
standard? I don’t even get higher than 6MB down
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 ^^"
I think I made a typo and misread the title itself. the full uppercase and lowercasing of data speeds is confusing to me
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)
Thank you for taking the time to explain that! I think I understand the difference now
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.
Holy shit, there are people still using 25/3? How the heck can you function with that? I’m not entirely facetious: with trackers and ads and “web 2.0” nonsense and way over provisioning , I’ve seen “simple” web sites bog down on much faster connections.
As one data point, my ex had Comcast’s, I think 50/5 or something, and my kids constantly complained about the network over there. Part of it is being spoiled by my true gigabit symmetrical, part of it is the worst company in America, but the reality is that it’s noticeable
I live in Germany, most people here have that or less
I have this and find it fine 🤷🏻♂️
I can watch video streaming fine, browse fine, multiple family members.
Yeah fast would be nicer but I don’t really have issues.
I get like 20mbps down and it’s fine. Netflix only recommends 15 Mbps for 4k streaming. Lol, looking at websites and stuff is certainly not a problem. About the only time speed has ever been an issue is if I need to download a large game on steam. But I attribute that more to developers just being too lazy to actually optimize their games. I shouldn’t need to download 50 gigabytes to play some game when I’m just running at medium settings.
4k requires 25mbit, at 15 your going to lose quality or frame rate.
Where are you getting that? This says 15 Mbps.
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306
I’m sure you’re going to have a worse or slower experience particularly when scrubbing, but it should be just adequate.
Honestly I am really happy when I get such high speeds. 25Mbps feels blazing fast for me. Everything loading/downloading so quickly. An average song in the FLAC 16/44 format would download in just 10 seconds instead of up to 5 minutes.
And there’s already even 10Gbps available. I can’t even imagine that. You could download a whole 4K movie in a matter of seconds!
Anyway, this is what I have:
Image link for compatibilityI can only dream.
well, if you have the money for it, you can get starlink, but its far from cheap. But since you are at cellular network, a 4G receiver with good placement can much improve on those speeds. I assume you are in some signal shadow, and swan never had too good coverage outside large cities… Maybe try some other operator ?
For 13EUR/month I sure could get faster speeds, but also fairly small data limits. Here I get 300GB/month.
Maybe the nearby cell towers are overloaded, I don’t know. But at midnight it can go up to 45Mbps. The speed peaks around 2-3AM.
Also there’s the free national roaming in Orange 2G/3G network. So if I really need faster internet speeds, I can use Orange 3G HSPA+ which is pretty reliable, although with 20GB/month cap.Cellular is always overloaded in rural areas. Mobile ISPs always take on more customers than their infrastructure can handle.
I think one of the issues I have with “normal” bandwidth is being spoiled by gigabit fiber. I don’t do anything to require that kind of bandwidth, not even close, but it just works. No matter what I do. Every time
Cable internet is notoriously poor and it really is. Sure, your minimum standard high speed internet is mathematically more than I need, “up to” more than I need, but the reality is far worse. I regularly see network lag and high latency, it regularly causes visible issues. It tends to be slow and frustrating even when the advertised speeds shouldn’t be.
If we’re going to set a standard based on advertised speeds, we need to do the same math that providers use to set a more useable standard. Or we can set the standard to actual speeds and watch them scream
Best connection available in my town is a super overpriced 25/3, but what you actually get is more like 10/0.5. No fiber lines, no other providers around other than satellite, and no demand for more means it’s just stagnant here
My whole family house is on 25/5 in Australia. Most of laptops in the house are 1366x768 (so 720p youtube video) and we use adblockers.
The key is setting up proper queue control on your router (Openwrt + SQM) so that one person downloading or uploading doesn’t ruin the latency for everyone else browsing the web; before I did that a single person downloading a steam game or uploading something to Google drive made the web unbrowsable for everyone. Sadly this only works if your internet connection link speed is stable and reliable.
I’m not entirely facetious: with trackers and ads and “web 2.0” nonsense and way over provisioning , I’ve seen “simple” web sites bog down on much faster connections.
A lot of web 2.0 nonsense slowness is caused by executing megabytes of javascript. Fetching the few MB itself isn’t the bottleneck for us :)
25/3 is perfectly usable for a single user, provided you don’t need to upload stuff. Watching 1080p60 on YouTube only needs slightly over 12 mbps.
I’m not defending the current state of the internet services, just saying it’s not that bad.
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.
deleted by creator
Yes, let’s pay them to just take the money… for the third time!
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.
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
This is really easy to verify and I think you might be surprised. Open your resource monitor and browse the web, stream videos, etc. My family of 4 with 2 of us working from home with a video streaming on the TV and maybe 30 total wifi devices has averaged 12 mbits/sec down over the past hour. The highest spike was to 30 mbps.
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”.
My point is, reliability, latency, and consistency is what is important. Bandwidth is nearly totally irrelevant for 99% of internet users. A couple years back I ran an entire office of 100 people on a 50 mbit connection. Thats 100 Concurrent users all using their cloud apps to do work. Many of them streaming music while they’re working, some of them are even streaming video while they’re working. It was never an issue for anyone and there was always plenty of bandwidth to go around, because bandwidth does not impact user experience unless you are regularly downloading or uploading massive files. Even on windows patch days where there are updates being downloaded for every computer at once it wasn’t a problem and nobody noticed.
More megabits does not mean better or more reliable access to the internet. Just like how a 100 megapixel camera that costs $200 is not better than a 24 megapixel camera that costs $1000.
Just to prove my point, I restricted my internet bandwidth to 25/3 on my firewall, which means its restricted for the entire home. Every device on the network is sharing the single 25/3 connection. I started streaming a netflix 4k movie, then opened a youtube video concurrently, then started streaming a random TV show from amazon prime. I opened up another concurrent video YT on my phone and ran that concurrently. That is 3 1080p streams and 1 4k stream and I ran out of screens to test with. Then I started streaming music from spotify and apple music both at once. Then, to top it all off I ran a speedtest. I still had 8mbits/sec to spare and any website I went to was still loading instantly. With the connection 100% saturated there was absolutely no interruption in any of the other streams, thanks to QoS which almost every router has nowadays. This is not a hard thing to try yourself and I highly suggest it if you’re open to your opinion being changed.
I live in South Korea. I can get 1Gbps virtually anywhere in the country. I get 2.5Gbps easily.
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
My connection is 10/2. Please help me
I want fiber internet so bad, I live in a relatively big city for Christ’s sake it shouldn’t take this long
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.
deleted by creator
They considered that a standard? 25 meg?
Jesus wept. I haven’t had internet that slow in well over a decade here in the UK!
How do they manage things like 150GB game downloads over there, or 3 or 4 people all using the connection at the same time…
I’m in a hotel in London now and am getting less than 10/10. So not necessarily better. I’m an American who normally suffers under Comcast and have 60/25 or so at home.
Not so much a standard as in “everyone should actually use the internet at this speed” but more as in “the bare minimum level, everyone should have at least this speed available (and we’ll help pay to upgrade people stuck at slower speeds)”, I believe.
It was still a low speed for that of course. It apparently hadn’t been raised since the Obama administration (2015).
Rural internet speeds are often… not comparable to more densely populated areas, shall we say. My (European) perspective: I had about ~3 Mbit down (over ADSL) until I moved about a decade ago (on a good day, while paying for “up to 40 Mbit” (IIRC) that the line apparently just could not physically deliver to my house). Meanwhile, 1 km along the road people in town had cable internet (~100 Mbit down).
Luckily, both populations have since benefited from a fiber rollout by a smaller telco, but people in town still got that upgrade about 5 years sooner and without paying a ~€2k connection fee. AFAIK there are still areas in my country where ADSL is the best available…
