from the what-we-have-here-is-a-failure-to-communicate dept.
100Mbps uploads and downloads should be US broadband standard, senators say:
Four US senators called on the Biden administration Thursday to establish a "21st century definition of high-speed broadband" of 100Mbps both upstream and downstream. This would be a big upgrade over the Federal Communications Commission broadband standard of 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream, which was established in 2015 and never updated by former President Trump's FCC chair, Ajit Pai.
Today's letter was sent to FCC Acting Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel and other federal officials by two Democrats, one independent who caucuses with Democrats, and one Republican. Noting that "the pandemic has reinforced the importance of high-speed broadband and underscored the cost of the persistent digital divide in our country," they wrote:
Going forward, we should make every effort to spend limited federal dollars on broadband networks capable of providing sufficient download and upload speeds and quality, including low latency, high reliability, and low network jitter, for modern and emerging uses, like two-way videoconferencing, telehealth, remote learning, health IoT, and smart grid applications. Our goal for new deployment should be symmetrical speeds of 100 megabits per second (Mbps), allowing for limited variation when dictated by geography, topography, or unreasonable cost.
"We should also insist that new networks supported with federal funds meet this higher standard, with limited exceptions for truly hard-to-reach locations," the senators wrote later in the letter. "For years, we have seen billions in taxpayer dollars subsidize network deployments that are outdated as soon as they are complete, lacking in capacity and failing to replace inadequate broadband infrastructure."
The letter was written by Sens. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), Angus King (I-Maine), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.). In addition to Rosenworcel, it was sent to Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, and Director of the National Economic Council Brian Deese.
"Ask any senior who connects with their physician via telemedicine, any farmer hoping to unlock the benefits of precision agriculture, any student who receives livestreamed instruction, or any family where both parents telework and multiple children are remote learning, and they will tell you that many networks fail to come close to 'high-speed' in the year 2021," they wrote. "For any of these functions, upload speeds far greater than 3Mbps are particularly critical. These challenges will not end with the pandemic."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Tuesday March 09 2021, @12:18PM (20 children)
Why should the feds be involved at all? Utilities are generally a matter for local towns or counties. Why should the federal government even be interested, much less spending money on something that should be entirely a local matter?
If a town wants decent prices, then it either builds its own network, or it encourages competition. The quality of available service they have can be an important point for people looking to move. We moved to a tiny mountain town last year - and one of the factors we considered was that the town had arranged for fiber service throughout the town. Now they get our tax dollars, instead of some other town that's still running on copper.
The US needs to reign in the scope of federal activities. They seem to be mostly counterproductive.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday March 09 2021, @12:55PM (9 children)
Does the term "natural monopoly" mean anything to you? Obviously not, I'm being rhetorical here, but, that's why. The tl;dr is that anything that tends toward a natural monopoly needs regulated to make sure its private owners don't grab the entire country by the gonads. It is related to, but not necessarily in sync with, the elasticity of demand for a specific service or good.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2, Touché) by bradley13 on Tuesday March 09 2021, @02:35PM (1 child)
Natural monopoly: sure, that needs regulated. But it can be regulated at the local level. Maybe one town doesn't care, another town wants to auction it off, and a third town insists on competition. Why not? Let each place decide what suits them best.
When big government (State or Federal) gets involved, all that happens is more expensive politicians get bribed, more bureaucracy gets added, and locals lose any control they might have had.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 10 2021, @07:46AM
The 'local level' has 100% failed at addressing this issue, and there aren't enough single-issue voters for this matter to change this. The result is that our Internet infrastructure and ISP market are unmitigated nightmares. Also, some states ban towns and cities from creating their own municipal ISPs.
We should absolutely put a stop to this disaster at the federal level. Force the ISPs to rent out the last mile to competitors like they do in many other countries.
That's not what happened in other countries. Our actual problem right now are Big Corporations, not Big Government.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday March 09 2021, @02:43PM (2 children)
Eh, ISPs aren't a natural monopoly though. Now the literal tubes (fiber, cable, phone lines, pigeons) could be argued to be but that's easily skirted with a single regulation.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @04:20PM (1 child)
And therein lies the problem.
So far, most people have conflated the service with the carrier, as in "internet service" being attached like glue to the cables that carry the service.
But one big solution would be to split those two pieces apart. The physical wires (where the natural monopoly arises, because it is nonsense to wire every house with 17 network wires, 13 CATV wires, and 8 POTS lines) should be cleaved apart from the "ISP/network access" provision part.
The towns should install the network hardware (fiber or whatever) and then the ISP's that provide internet access should just be competitors for being "your choice" in who you use.
We (the US) had exactly this situation, for a short time, after the 1996 telecom law went into effect, with DSL service. The local phone company was the "supplier of the copper wire" but each household was free to choose from many different ISP's for their DSL internet connection. The result: we had multiple ISP's competing to be our "choice" -- with the result that the cost of DSL service plummeted while the speed grew (to the extent that DSL could speed up).
Competition does work, but the regulations need to be such that they foster said competition. Having the last mile natural monopoly be town owned, and having the ISP's compete to be "chosen" is just the right mix of regulation and competition to truly make things work properly.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 10 2021, @01:31AM
Ed Zackery. Which is why you'll pretty much always find me on the side of competition on the rare occasion it's in conflict with free enterprise. Note free enterprise does not include any situation wherein there is a government granted monopoly of any kind.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @06:48PM
"Natural monopoly" isn't so neatly packaged, either as a concept, nor as the proper response.
If you want to claim that something is a natural monopoly according to conventional neo-classical economics, you want to show that it is excludable (i.e. you can prevent free riders, e.g. a train service with ticketing infrastructure) but non-rival (i.e. one person's usage does not diminish another's, e.g. defence of the realm).
A single point-to-point cable is both excludable (you can turn off service for deadbeats) and rival (only one can connect at a time). A cable loop going through a neighbourhood looks as if it's non-rival, and trivially it appears to be, but in actual fact it is significantly rival owing to maximum capacity and networking bottlenecks. A wifi hotspot has substantially the same attributes as the cable loop, give or take personal mobility and external interference sources. That the cable service itself might depend on other resources that are themselves subject to analogous analyses doesn't change these facts; access to utility runs or poles is itself something that can be (and generally is) managed by regulation on the local jurisdictional level.
An inverse concept is the one of where an industry tends to a monopoly owing to the nature of its goods or services. For example, the network effect that meant that Facebook is a substantially different service from Myspace, and being on Myspace does not substitute for a Facebook account owing to the different activity levels on their respective services. In other words, size itself is a feature that tends to promote further growth at the expense of competitors. You could do a further microeconomic analysis on how, for example, Twitter managed to push out a lot of extreme leftists who then went to Mastodon or other parts of the fediverse, thereby giving Mastodon niche network benefits without damaging Twitter's mainstream momentum much.
Naively, people tend to think that the network effect is an extreme case of a non-rival good, but you can have a tragedy of the commons effect where everyone wants to connect to a service, and the value of the service is incrementally greater by the participants, but capacity is limited. A case in point is access to a live rock show where the cultural value in seeing, and being seen, and joining the collective experience is higher for would-be patrons the more of the target audience is sharing the culturally significant moment, but people get turned away in large numbers.
It's also worth pointing out that these definitions do not have bright lines in reality. For example, a fire department can be at least somewhat, circumstantially selective in which houses they attempt to save, versus just containing. Also, regulation tends to create barriers to entry far less flexible than market conditions (often deliberately - an example was the federal government fostering consolidation in the dairy industry). Trademarks and Veblen goods also complicate analysis because in some sense, a trademark is a monopoly licence in miniature.
TL;DR: your definition is a confusion of two different concepts and not applicable to the case in hand in any event, and regulation has a track record of making what you describe probably worse, not better.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Tuesday March 09 2021, @08:03PM (2 children)
Show me a "natural" monopoly that doesn't have some sort of government protection of the monopoly's monopoly, through rights of way, copyright/patent, regulations, direct subsidy and other economic incentives not granted to everybody else. Behind every monopoly is a threat or act of violence, even when lawful. A true natural monopoly has to survive without any of that. It doesn't seem possible.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @09:52PM (1 child)
This is a misunderstanding of the term "natural monopoly".
Economists don't say that something is a natural monopoly when it's taken for granted that one provider will kick everybody else out of the market. Instead you would look at something like a toll road of substantially greater capacity than demand, at a given access price (driven by maintenance needs), requires. It's not rival, because the fact that some other dude is driving the same road means little to you, but it is excludable because you don't have to let anybody through to it. It makes sense to handle that as a monopoly (within the precepts of conventional economics - obviously contractarians would differ here) and accept that adding another road with the same cost structure really won't benefit prospective drivers much, if at all.
What you are describing is something else: an artificial monopoly created by government action, not an industry in which a monopoly is the logical thing to approach.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Wednesday March 10 2021, @02:33AM
By whose authority [youtu.be]?
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday March 09 2021, @01:39PM (3 children)
The feds need to be involved because the feds and the telcos together have screwed everything up so badly. The feds have fed the telcos monetarily, and sided with the telcos in all manner of legal actions. Today, it requires more resources than the average small town can afford to get through the court system. The federal government has repeatedly shot down any attempts by local governments to regulate service, or even to provide service. Podunk, Nowhere, has almost zero chance of doing anything, unless they simply escape notice during construction and deployment.
TL:DR, only the feds can fix the mess they have made.
The exception seems to be fiber networks. Those ISPs laying their own fiber, and not relying on any infrastructure owned by the telephone companies seem to be moving forward nicely. Of course, fiber blows away that 100Mbps threshold.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday March 09 2021, @02:09PM
When I see senators insisting, my heart fills with an immense trust in the brightness of the future.
I really doubt they actually can fix the mess, but there's no other with the authority to do it.
Wiser to bet you'll just see the tomorrow's mess replacing the today's mess.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday March 09 2021, @02:52PM
Nah, the feds only need to be involved because it's by nature interstate commerce and the commerce clause was specifically written to keep silly buggers from being played in such.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Tokolosh on Tuesday March 09 2021, @07:07PM
It always amuses me when the symptoms of government meddling are "fixed" by yet more big government meddling. You end up with the healthcare and education system, and $50 subsidies for internet access which should cost $20.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @02:09PM
Your homepage is zoned swizerland. Why are you posting about U.S. telecom policy?
(Score: 4, Informative) by stormreaver on Tuesday March 09 2021, @02:19PM
The Feds are [saying they are] requiring certain standards to be met by ISP's that take Federal money.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday March 09 2021, @05:13PM
Because the lower powers involved refuse to fix the problem themselves.
This is why the vast majority of all regulation exists.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2, Touché) by fustakrakich on Tuesday March 09 2021, @06:25PM (1 child)
Because the local sheriff is too corrupt.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Touché) by Tokolosh on Tuesday March 09 2021, @07:04PM
A corrupt local sheriff can only screw up his area. The Feds WILL screw up the whole country. Celebrate diversity.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday March 09 2021, @08:03PM
Reining in the state legislatures would also be useful. A number outright ban their towns from providing internet service.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @12:44PM (3 children)
How about the following:
100 peak download,
1/3 of that for peak upload
1/10 of peak for the min speed guaranteed speed
peaks speeds are with few users on the access system
Guaranteed speeds are with all users doing as they wish to operating as much as they want for as long as they want to the exchange point without cap.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @02:51PM
It's more than just speed.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @04:26PM (1 child)
No. Whatever is picked, the speeds need to be symmetric.
Equal up and down, whatever is chosen as the base.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Marand on Tuesday March 09 2021, @08:51PM
I agree. The lack of symmetric bandwidth speeds has been a big part of the march toward a centralised read-only internet where end-users are only able to consume content, not create it; and those that still do create have to go through various content silos because it's not viable to host or share even small content directly. This is no surprise considering that the big ISPs are also involved in multimedia as well, so it's in their best interest to limit creation and encourage consumption and their policies reflect that. Clauses preventing hosting your own services and content and massively asymmetric data rates make it clear what they want users to do.
I currently get something like 300 down, 10 up where I live, which is a fucking insult. I can load video from multiple sources simultaneously but if I want to stream a game to a couple friends I have to go through something like twitch (or build my own) because I only have enough upstream to send watchable video to one person. Can't even self-host dedicated game servers for a decently large player base any more when it used to be viable. I used to live in an area that could get FiOS and had symmetric 100/100 ages ago, and even before that symmetric bandwidth was the norm for anything but ADSL. Then, after the ISPs and content producers started merging, they started giving people more download while starving them of upstream.
It sucks, and has been ignored forever because most people didn't understand or care due to not needing it at home and it not being a problem at work. Then people started having to work at home because of the pandemic and they started noticing how ISPs have been doing them wrong and now they care.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @02:01PM
As far as Comcast is concerned, I already "have" 100Mbs service, since that is the speed my ethernet connects to their network at. The capacity issue is oversubscription rate. Further the carriers "oops! information services" run their own "speed measurement" tools which are completely fraudulent. So this is just eyewash.
If the fed wants to get involved, what they aught to do is get the department of weights and measures to put ping servers at the peering points. That way they can mandate throughput that actually means something, rather than just haggle over some new service definition that has no actual meaning.
Which is what "broadband" actually is. The term "broadband" is used to describe Internet service, specifically because "Internet" has an actual meaning, and "broadband" doesn't. So they use the latter, to ensure that vendors are not obligated to provide the former.
(Score: 3, Touché) by crafoo on Tuesday March 09 2021, @02:45PM
There is that funny word again, "should". Should is a weak, powerless plea to those that actually wield power to agree with your values and principles. You might as well lay your neck at their boot.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @04:02PM (4 children)
What about broadband caps. 100Mb/sec has limited use if you can only download 1 TB per month. That amounts to an average speed of only 3.04414 Mb/sec. The 100 Mb/sec is just the Max speed, we need to look at the overall average speed and the cost per speed and to do that we need to consider broadband caps.
Net neutrality is also important.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @05:22PM
Very true. The regulations should also require "no data caps".
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday March 09 2021, @06:19PM
Caps are like shouting, don't use them.
What we should demand is are ISPs (and hosting companies) as common carriers with a dumb pipe of 100 meg up and down, but not necessarily at the same time.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 10 2021, @02:25AM (1 child)
and, if you really think about it, my ISP should pay Youtube and Netflix for providing me with the content that I use to justify paying my ISP for Internet service. My ISP should consider what percentage of my time is spent on Youtube, what percentage of my time is spent on Youtube, etc... and pay these services a portion of what I pay my ISP depending on how much time I spent on each website.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 10 2021, @02:28AM
err ... what percentage of my time is spent on Soylentnews, what percentage of my time is spent on Youtube, etc... *
Soylentnews and Youtube are providing my ISP with a service. That shouldn't be for free. They should be paid ... by my ISP.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ElizabethGreene on Tuesday March 09 2021, @04:31PM (1 child)
You would logically think this means that everyone would get reasonable access to 100/100mbps up/down internet.
In practice what will happen is that areas that would have been built out for 3/20 internet because of distance to COs will instead have no access option instead.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @05:27PM
All too true. The monopoly providers (comcast/att) will simply argue it is not technically possible to provide that speed, and will opt to provide no service at all.
And 20/3, even if slow, is better than 0/0.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @05:04PM (4 children)
Here in the center of the Capitol of California, less than 1 mile from the Capitol building in a dense residential area, in what is supposed to be the State that is the tech capitol of the entire world.. the top AT&T download rate available on my street (a major residential street) is (sit down for this...) 5Mbps (yes, you saw that right).
100Mbps as a target...lol... heck, first the US has to get out of third world internet speeds in the centers of its major cities..
what a joke infrastructure in this country has become..
(BTW, the only other choice is Comcast, capped, so useless as well)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @08:15PM (3 children)
That doesn’t sound right, I’m originally from Sacramento and we had 100/100Mbps fiber for about 20 years (Originally through a company called WinFirst, which was later bought out by Surewest). My family upgraded to 1000/1000Mbps through ATT about 3 years ago, which is the same speed as what I have here in the Bay Area.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @09:17PM (2 children)
It's right...
Some areas of midtown were never upgraded.
I've called and confirmed, after checking their website.
No fiber, only dsl and the co is far..
So 5mbps down and 900kbps up is all you get.
In the center of the Capitol of California
... wow
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @09:19PM
A bunch of blocks on the north side of Q street near the coop..
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Wednesday March 10 2021, @02:12AM
There are parts of Los Angeles in the same boat. In fact I know someone in Inglewood who last I checked could only get 1.2mpbs.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday March 09 2021, @06:16PM
Somebody's looking for karma, and maybe a contract
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @06:19PM
There's always a fly-covered turd in the ointment.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by anotherblackhat on Tuesday March 09 2021, @07:12PM (2 children)
Gee, senators want to redefine what the term "broadband" means, so they can retroactively change something, who'da thunk?
Granted, words mean what we agree they mean, and we can change our minds, but come on.
Instead of changing the definition of broadband, define terms for different levels of service, and then use those terms.
Or if you're unable to do it yourself, then appoint an entity to define the terms, or better yet, give the job to an already existing entity like the bureau of weights and measures.
That way we companies can't weasel "100Mbps down, 128kbps up with 51% guaranteed uptime and less than 200ms ping times" and call it "broadband"
Don't relabel broadband as 100Mbps, call it "hectoband", and let 25Mbps be "2.5 Dekaband" or something like that.
If you want every American to have hectoband, then change the laws to say hectoband, or pass new laws to subsidize that particular level of service.
And where the hell is 100Mbps coming from anyway? Has anybody actually attempted to determine what people actually need?
I bet most Americans would be better served with reliable 10Mbps symmetric than with 100Mbps down and 250kbps up.
But instead of guessing, how about we actually ask those people in the sticks what they want internet for, and ask engineers how much bandwidth they need to do that.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hendrikboom on Tuesday March 09 2021, @08:11PM (1 child)
It's the reliability that affects video meetings. Having high speed most of the time, but frequent 10-second dropouts isn't my idea of reliability. It's enough to make an information-dense mathematics presentation into gibberish.
Miss a definition and you're lost.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday March 11 2021, @02:13AM
I wish we would all get used to periodic drops for this reason. Dense math is something I never could follow in a lecture because my attention wanders uncontrollably from time to time. But I do well with less synchronous data sources, like books or pre-recorded lectures. Well enough to run circles around the poor saps trying to follow the geezer with no interest in proper pedagogy, if I may brag.
Point is though, I know I'm not the only one that has issues with this teaching style. Lots of people do. Most of them never figure out how to source their own supplemental material like I do.
Maybe instead of chasing the live video lecture, we should innovate. More stuff like Khan Academy, with all the definitions left on screen, things paced appropriately, reasonable video lengths, and the ability to pause, rewind, and speed up (1.5x or 2x). Even better, improve the comprehensibility of written materials.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 09 2021, @09:17PM
heh! numbers again!
srsly who cares about numbers? we need TUNNELS and pipes and stuff, preferably in form and shape of 'em tiny glass strings... and probably LAWS and stuff that govern how these discreet geophysical lines need to reach uninterrupted from points to points, and ENABLES country-wide (i think it's called "federal?" in usa?") people and communities that want to make these real uninterrupted lines from point A to point B happen!
pshaw, who cares about numbers :)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by shortscreen on Tuesday March 09 2021, @10:36PM (2 children)
Questions that matter: 1) does it cost an arm and a leg? 2) is there a cap? 3) what is banned in the ToS?
(Score: 1) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday March 10 2021, @01:40AM
My ISP's answers: 1) No, fiddy bucks. Our bank gets annoyed if we put bloody limbs in the night drop slot. 2) Yes, the one imposed by math in the form of max_bits_per_second x number_of_seconds_in_a_billing_cycle. 3) Nothing. Banning something would be silly when we're not watching to see if you do it in the first place.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by kazzie on Wednesday March 10 2021, @08:01AM
Killing a crew member who isn't in a red shirt.