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posted by mrpg on Saturday January 20 2018, @01:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the no-carrier dept.

The FCC's yearly report of broadband deployment keeps some crucial definitions in place that some feared would be changed or eliminated to ease the responsibilities of internet service providers. The threat of a lowered speed standard and the merging of mobile and fixed broadband services will not be carried out, it seems.

Broadband will continue to be defined as a connection with speeds of 25 megabits down and 3 megabits up. Another proposed definition of 10 down and 1 up was decried by critics as unrealistic for several reasons; not only is it insufficient for many ordinary internet applications, but it would let providers off the hook, because they would be counted as having deployed broadband if it met this lowered standard.

Fortunately, that isn't the case, and the 25/3 standard remains in place.

The other worry was the potential decision to merge mobile with fixed broadband when measuring the quality of internet connections available to people throughout the country.

Had the two been merged, an area might have been considered well-served if it was, for example, in range of an LTE tower (giving decent mobile speeds) but only served by sub-1-megabit DSL. Since it was being considered that only one was required, that underserved area would be considered adequately connected.

But the FCC clearly saw the lack of logic in equating mobile connections and fixed broadband: they're used, tracked, billed and deployed very differently.

[...] The full draft report, when it becomes public, will no doubt contain more interesting information ripe for interpretation, and other commissioners may also weigh in on its successes and shortcomings. In the meantime, it's reassuring that the main worries leading up to it have been addressed.

Source: TechCrunch


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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 20 2018, @02:24PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 20 2018, @02:24PM (#625155)

    Sure, go live in the back woods where you have to run extra cable for miles to be connected to civilization. Then whine to everyone else about under-served rural communities, and make them pay via government mandates. How about redefining "rural" to mean "dial-up only"?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 20 2018, @04:49PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 20 2018, @04:49PM (#625190)

      Don't you have cell phones in backwoodsville? How's your mobile broadband speed?

      If anything, cityfolk should be whining about their lousy LTE coverage, when signal-to-noise ratio is orders of magnitude better in the wide open spaces of ruraltown.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @03:10PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 22 2018, @03:10PM (#626092)

        In three places in my "rural" home I can get up to 2, yes TWO bars.
        If you were on my lawn you might get 3, but I'd be yelling at you to get off it.

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by VLM on Saturday January 20 2018, @05:00PM (1 child)

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Saturday January 20 2018, @05:00PM (#625198)

      Partially insightful. The root of the problem is you get a government license to run a monopoly and you gotta provide service, thats kinda the point of giving you the monopoly.

      We pretend the monopoly license is at multiple levels, municipal, state, federal... its kinda messed up. Pretty much because we have 20K little municipal monopoly contracts which makes it a city issue and with about two companies for all of them which makes it pretty federal level also.

      Its moderately cheap to provide service in rural areas, the real losers of "fake monopoly" would be in the inner city, anyway.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 20 2018, @05:18PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 20 2018, @05:18PM (#625208)

        Its moderately cheap to provide service in rural areas, the real losers of "fake monopoly" would be in the inner city, anyway.

        Nobody wants to do business with inner city poor people who can't afford to pay their bills but they demand lifeline service anyway.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 20 2018, @03:01PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 20 2018, @03:01PM (#625165)

    This is about parallel construction. Now that they are getting sued by 22 states for being corrupt, Im sure they are shredding documents and running around like chickens. Whatever they do henceforth is just whitewash for the pending lawsuit.

    Ajit Pai is good at what he does. But so was Al Capone.

  • (Score: 2) by slap on Saturday January 20 2018, @06:09PM (2 children)

    by slap (5764) on Saturday January 20 2018, @06:09PM (#625224)

    "But the FCC clearly saw the lack of logic in equating mobile connections and fixed broadband: they're used, tracked, billed and deployed very differently."

    It wasn't that Pai didn't see the lack of logic - he figured that it was such a bogus attempt that they couldn't get away with it.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 20 2018, @07:03PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 20 2018, @07:03PM (#625246)

      Shouldn't Net Neutrality propents want "mobile" counted as broadband, and therefore regulated under the same rules? AT&T and Verizon are fucking consumer as hard as anyone, being subsidized to do it and allowed to descriminate data like Comcast could only dream.

    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday January 20 2018, @07:07PM

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Saturday January 20 2018, @07:07PM (#625248) Homepage Journal

      Nah, he probably could have gotten away with it just fine. Which makes me seriously wonder WTF happened behind closed doors.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
  • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Sunday January 21 2018, @03:36AM

    by jmorris (4844) on Sunday January 21 2018, @03:36AM (#625507)

    So what is the service you can't get with 10mbps down? You won't run Netflix in 4K. That is one, what are the other things you can't do with a 10mbps link? If you want to run HD streaming video to every TV in your house you will lose, but that is a stupid thing. At some point we have to just say that. And if somebody is hellbent on doing it anyway they can buy service for each TV in their house like we used to buy multiple phone lines. Or the kids have to suffer the indignity of Sponge Bob and the 84th viewing of Frozen in standard def. The horror. Living rural has a lot of benefits, a lot of things are a lot cheaper. However there are also downsides, cities have advantages too. Some things just cost more when sold in such widely dispersed communities. That is why cable TV isn't even sold outside cities in most places and you see little dishes everywhere.

    Reality isn't fair, reality isn't concerned with your feelz.

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