The internet needs to be classified as a utility, living without it is just not possible in the world we have created.
I remember the collective shitfit around a decade ago when Obama give out free cell phones to homeless people. It was such a crazy concept to people who have never struggled that yes, you DO need a smartphone to meet your calling, banking and personal management needs. Everything has an online portal. Every job application requires an online portion. It’s how the world works and has worked since the mid 00s.
Ah yes “Obamaphones”
Wait. What?! Obama gave out phones? I was living abroad for the first few years of the Obama administration when smart phones happened. Can you fill me in on this one?
BuT yOu CaN aLwAyS gO tO tHe LiBrArY
The libraries that many of the people who say this are trying to shutter, of course.
The libraries that will allow me a maximum of an hour, maybe two if I’m lucky?
Should be 1gbps asymmetric now, with a near future goal of 1gbps symmetric.
I’d be okay with 200mbps symmetric, with a future goal of 1gbps symmetric. More than ANYTHING, I’m tired of providers providing things like 1gbps down, 10mbps up. And then doing shit like “Here’s you’re 1gbps plan with a 1tb data cap!”
You get a terabyte cap? Jfc, where I live it’s like a few gigs, and that can cost into the hundreds for maybe 25.
Yeah states with Comcast caps you at 1.2TB unless you pay $50 for the unlimited plan, which I don’t think is even offered everywhere. They discount it to $30 if you use their modem.
Mine is $30/mo for unlimited (on top of my plan cost) with my own modem.
Luckily there’s a few FTTH companies that are almost done laying fiber in my area. I’m finally giving comcast the boot.
How much do they charge you to use their modem?
It’s $20 for unlimited here with Comcast, or the business plan which is actually less right now for some reason for the same speeds.
AT&T is unlimited with their gigabit plans or faster. Maybe their 300mbps plan too (heck I guess I’m not sure they have any caps at the moment come to think of it).
It does look like the prices changed recently. I have 2 houses currently with similar plans. My currently living in house is using the Xfinity modem and costs $25 /m but I guess that’s the modem and the unlimited so not too bad.
My other house has my own network system and not using any Comcast hardware and that one is $30/m.
The bad part for me was until recently they refused to give me unlimited (when it cost $50) and I wasn’t able to get it for a while. It just wouldn’t go through. I got my fair share of overage charges cause of it. I’m sure if I spent enough time bitching at support I could get something from it but I don’t have it in me to do that lol
I had to get a fucking business plan to not deal with this BS. Still never got half the speed I’m paying for. The only other option is $100 for DSL.
All right I have 1000 seconds of internet, what a deal
My isp used to offer 10mbps up for like a decade, they have recently downgraded it to 5mbps for new subscribers. I’ve uploaded a few things with it and it’s extremely slow. If it wasn’t that I’m only paying $40 for 1gbps down, I’d have switched.
~500Kb/s. Yay…
Things with caps aren’t terrestrial broadband. You can have caps on cell based networks and still be considered broadband. One of the biggest issues is it companies like Comcast and AT&t will offer broadband service in an area but not necessarily offer only broadband service or not let you buy broadband service about also having their TV. And then they claim they’re serving the area because they have broadband speeds or you can pay a bunch of money to have your service uncapped but that’s not really the point of having a broadband connection available in the area.
Things with caps aren’t terrestrial broadband.
Comcast is Terrestrial Broadband and has a 1tb cap. You are simply wrong.
Comcast has broadband speed plans. They also charge you an extra $30 if you don’t have a TV bundle and then give you an actual broadband plan that’s unlimited. They have also been throwing the unlimited data and router and security bs in more competitive areas but that’s not a nationwide product.
I literally can’t do half of what I want to do online efficiently or in a timely manner because I can barely crack 10 up. I do video work on the side. Takes hours if not days for me to upload something. Even pictures nowadays. Great I’ve got a DSLR for a phone and I can shoot raw. Takes 5 mins to upload a pic.
Worse, they do that crap for my business account. Great for the vpn to the office.
It’s normal for businesses to pay for peak and total bandwidth. That’s one of the reasons why they guarantee speed and availability and should be refunding you if they don’t meet those.
If the federal government is regulating them can we admit they’re a fucking utility already and stop allowing them to gouge prices when they have more money than they could feasibly spend?
Can you imagine if we said “by 2035 every American household in our electric grid will also be connected to the internet at a speed of 1gbps”?
I can imagine it.
I can imagine the next jerk off administration rescinding that goal in the name of private enterprise or whatever bullshit excuse they choose.
We did that in the 90s. We gave ISPs billions to deploy fiber everywhere. It was mostly squandered and 25 years later most Americans still don’t have fiber access.
Well, we didn’t. It wasn’t a utility. Utilities are more regulated by the govt. Thats a big part of why it failed and why electricity succeeded with the same effort in the fucking 1800s.
Does this really matter. We aren’t getting it anyway.
The telcom/cable companies are just going to take the “broadband” money, build out a couple of neighborhoods, claim it is too hard, and then keep all the money.
They have already done it many times. Free taxpayer money with zero repercussions. Why would they do anything different.
I have a lot of experience with rural broadband initiatives, and generally yes, the FCC designation sets the minimums we see in terms of new service delivery to underserved communities. I specifically worked with state and municipal entities to build grant packages to fund infrastructure and these new minimums would be a great help.
We are between towns in western WA state stuck with 10Mb DSL service. There are a lot of us folks. After moving in (the PO said the internet was great, lol), we discovered that doing anything excessive like downloading AND streaming would not work. One thing at a time. We were able to bond two pair and get 20Mb which is workable, but that’s where we sit. Gigabit service is all around us, but we’d have to trench a mile up the road and pay for that to even think about getting a provider to lay a line. Century Link outright laughed at me.
I was able to get T-Mo’s home internet as a backup since we WFH, but it isn’t stellar either.
I live in rural Washington too, in the mountains. There was a local ISP that was terrible and amazingly a very small ISP bought them out from Arizona. The first thing they did was start to run fiber to anyone who wanted it. I went from shit DSL to 1gig up and 1 gig down fiber. To top it all off, they’ve lowered my monthly price once and doubled my bandwidth once… Without even asking, I even emailed them to check if my bill was lower and speed was faster and they were like yep! Mind blown.
Small world, but I helped form many of the broadband action teams in Washington State, and consulted on the broadband plans for each country that was submitted for federal funding. We’re getting there, slowly, but progress is being made.
We really need some upstream minimums as well. That causes so much lag for me. Most plans are 1 up even with 100 down. I have a 200/10 plan now and it’s difficult to do work with the maybe 5 that I get in practice if I’m lucky, especially after overhead from VPN.
Most plans are 1 up even with 100 down
That can’t be right. I thought Australia’s 100/20 plans had pathetic upload speeds but that’s unreal.
Most broadband access in the US is via coax. And the coax companies refuse to let cable TV, and the packages they can bundle, die. So the portion of the coax that would allow for symmetrical service instead brings all the channels you didn’t buy because everyone streams now.
I have Spectrum here in the southeast of the United States. My plan is 300 down 12 up. That pathetic upload speed needs to change for the better.
Here in Sweden most people have optic fiber with AT LEAST 100/100 speeds. You gotta try if you want lower than that / if you want asymmetrical speeds.
Central Europe. 300 mbps is pretty much base, not much pricier than 100mbps. If you get 300 mbps on paper, you are entitled to it fully. Not sure how with rural as they are based on mobile internet more.
Data cap is abstract concept for wired internet here, I was literally shocked to hear it is in place in USA :|
Right now in a lot of states Verizon has a monopoly on symmetrical internet service. I can’t ever switch ISPs because I can’t get 400/400 anywhere else.
God I wish we had that here. We are pretty much stuck with Comcast as the only option in many places since they were granted a monopoly for so long and the phone company never really expanded much. DSL is too slow in most places. Like I think I can only get 100/1 where I am now, but the last place I was at which was not exactly rural at all, was max 12m/768k. In my current place I do have one other option which is another cable provider. They offer the exact same as Comcast for slightly less money, but the primary reason I use them is because they don’t have a monthly data cap. With my wife and I working from home plus our personal streaming, we would exceed the cap and have to pay a significant amount to increase it.
Yeah ISPs are doing rural America really dirty. I didn’t even know monthly data caps existed with home internet until somebody from a rural town mentioned it. The only internet with monthly data caps around here is cell service and even then that’s usually unlimited now.
I do a lot of download and upload and one month I realized I accidentally moved like 30 TB that month.
Yeah I mean right now I’m in a relatively major city in the US (like 750K population), and the previous place I was just inside a major suburb (like 150K population). Rural is just plain screwed.
Is that the Verion 5G modem?
Fios, it’s fiber.
I have Verizon 5g with the ultra wideband service. Tower is on a light post on the street corner, speeds max out around 700/70 for me. 400/400 sounds like Fios which is a fiber service.
How is this possible? Most of network hardware is symmetric. It doesn’t make sense.
In addition to cable being the primary means of providing service in the US which does allow for this, there are two reasons for doing it. First, down is all that is advertised. Up is only mentioned in small print usually. And second, the major ISPs and the content companies have merged so it’s an anti-“piracy” measure. It significantly impacts torrent seeding and hosting sites using residential Internet service.
I could give a shit what they call it. How about enforcing some god damn price restrictions or make data caps illegal? Speed means little otherwise
This actually does keep prices in check. Albeit, a bit backasswardsly.
I may be off on the specifics but it’s something like: Having to offer 100mbps at the lowest rates in (poor neighborhoods) increases the speeds of each tier while keeping the price the same.
Thats great but can we demand some decent UPLOAD to?
cries in 300down measally 10 up
Upload is the biggest nobody gives a fuck in this ISP provider shit despite its importance.
In the linked pdf, it does mention the benchmarks.
- 2015/current standard is 25/3 Mbps.
- Proposed increase to 100/20 Mbps.
- Future goal is 1000/500 Mbps.
And really, 20 mbps at the bottom tier for broadband isn’t all that unreasonable. We’re talking about the floor level here.
Can’t wait til they give another few hundred billion to ISPs who turn it into bonuses instead of infra improvement
As it should have been 5 years ago. Maybe even more.
5 years late but better than never.
Cries in Australian
Laugh in Western European (10Gbps)
Cries in German. (I personally have Speedy Internet but many people I know have internet that really sucks slowly.)
My relative lives in Germany and can confirm that they have potato internet there
Cries in Brexit
cries.
My first thought is you need to buy new network equipment to utilize 10 gbit and new ethernet cables.
Yeah I’d love to have anything near 100Mbps. Currently get 12Mbps on a good day, usually around 6Mbps. This is after spending thousands of dollars to upgrade the connection last year. Australian internet is fucked.
That’s crazy. Here in São Paulo (Brazil), wired internet plans start at 100 Mbps and you’ll often end up with 300+ Mbps, because there’s almost no difference in price.
Faster: Australian for tears
I just don’t get it. Why not making upload speed same as download speed?
the most simple explanation is that total bandwidth is limited and more upload speed they give you the less download speed.
What about full duplex links?
You can still spend more of the links on download if you wanted to
100 mbps? That’s 100 millibits per second, or 0.1 bits per second. I’d certainly hope for better bandwidth than one bit every ten seconds; that’s slower than smoke signals.
I wish we can all move to MB/s and get rid of the endless confusion on names
We should change to mibibits! We need easily factored numbers of 10, not this old powers of 2 stuff! (/s if it wasn’t obvious)
Sarcasm noted, but: mibi/gibi are the powers of 2 version.
We all say megabit or gigabit when talking about internet speeds, but in many cases under the hood it’s actually measured in mibi/gibibits. Just means it’s 2% more when converted into base 10 ;)
Good point on the first part. On the second… There’s very little networking stuff that isn’t pretty much handled in powers of 10 everywhere. I mean, eventually every number gets handled as binary at some point, but otherwise it’s pretty rare for network values to get converted to some power-of-2 number.
Way more common is the stupid bits/bytes confusion.
How about Mebinibbles?
Gibiwords
Mbps, megabits per second, is the standard. No idea why this author opted to use the highly unusual millibit.
👆 Pedant.
👆 Humorless git.
Debate pervert 👆
You’re right, I’m horny for words.
I tried to get it to point to my username (but it’s cool if you want to argue)
No, you didnt
I almost replied saying you had no idea you were talking about, but then I realized… Lol
It should also require allowing incoming connections. Too much ISPs, especially mobile, are gives one-way Internet now. Basically like having a phone line with no phone number.
You should google “CG-NAT” and learn why mobile providers don’t (and simply can’t) provide you a public IP. Get yourself a cheap VPS, set up a reverse proxy, and open all the ports you want.
I know why they do that, lack of v4 space and other reasons. Why we need to push forward with such legislations.
VPS + Wireguard is great. And my DNS provider allows private range IPs as “A” records, so I have subdomains for my different home servers.
You might have figured it out by now, but “megabits per second” is abbreviated as “Mbps” with an uppercase m; yeah, it’s kinda pedantic, but using lowercase means it’s a millibit, which is much, much smaller. The same applies to “gigabits per second,” which should be expressed as “Gbps.”
At any rate, thank you for posting this, it really is good news. And about time they did this, too.
Literally no one means “millibit” when they type mbps…
No one would ever say millibits, because a bit is the smallest meaningful datapoint. It’s a non-existent term, and a very pointless pedantic hill to try to build so that you can die on it
