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posted by mrpg on Saturday November 24 2018, @06:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the I-have-1Mb dept.

Ajit Pai wants to raise rural broadband speeds from 10Mbps to 25Mbps

The Federal Communications Commission is planning to raise the rural broadband standard from 10Mbps to 25Mbps in a move that would require faster Internet speeds in certain government-subsidized networks.

The FCC's Connect America Fund (CAF) distributes more than $1.5 billion a year to AT&T, CenturyLink, and other carriers to bring broadband to sparsely populated areas. Carriers that use CAF money to build networks must provide speeds of at least 10Mbps for downloads and 1Mbps for uploads. The minimum speed requirement was last raised in December 2014.

Today, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said he's proposing raising that standard from 10Mbps/1Mbps to 25Mbps/3Mbps. "[W]'re recognizing that rural Americans need and deserve high-quality services by increasing the target speeds for subsidized deployments from 10/1 Mbps to 25/3 Mbps," Pai wrote in a blog post that describes agenda items for the FCC's December 12 meeting.

[...] The new 25Mbps/3Mbps standard will apply to future projects but won't necessarily apply to broadband projects that are already receiving funding. For ongoing projects, the FCC will use incentives to try to raise speeds. More money will be offered to carriers that agree to upgrade speeds to 25Mbps/3Mbps, a senior FCC official said in a conference call with reporters.

[...] When Democrat Tom Wheeler was FCC chair, Pai supported the commission's 2014 decision to raise the speed benchmark from 4Mbps/1Mbps to 10Mbps/1Mbps but said that the FCC should have also provided carriers with more years of funding to account for the upgrade. Pai opposed Wheeler's 2015 decision to raise a nationwide broadband standard to 25Mbps/3Mbps. Pai said at the time that 25/3Mbps was too high and criticized the Wheeler-led majority for using different standards, namely the 25Mbps/3Mbps standard for judging nationwide broadband deployment progress and the lower standard in rural projects subsidized by the government. As chair, Pai in 2017 floated a proposal that would lower broadband standards, but he changed course after a backlash.

In other words, more money will be given to established ISPs in order to improve rural service, but the improvements probably won't be verified.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 25 2018, @05:47PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 25 2018, @05:47PM (#766216)

    i want more upload bandwidth. these download heavy plans are an anti competitive ploy designed to keep content production(for lack of a better term) in the hands of the few. they want all home users being mindless consumers of an internet they reduce to tv. if people had more/equal upload bandwidth more things could be hosted out of the data centers, which likely scares the shit out of the powers that be. it's sad that people don't demand better, but they are too busy swiping on the ipads.

  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday November 26 2018, @02:54AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday November 26 2018, @02:54AM (#766349) Journal

    Google Fiber provided 1 Gbps down, and 1 Gbps up. Symmetrical. But the lofty predictions about it changing the industry turned out to be false. It provided competition in just a handful of cities. Only satellite-based Starlink can save rural America now.

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    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]