Ars TechnicaFCC chair: Speed standard of 25Mbps down, 3Mbps up isn’t good enough anymore
Chair proposes 100Mbps national standard and an evaluation of broadband prices.
p0q@arstechnica I don't even get the current "standard" speeds but somehow my price regularly goes up (speed hasn't gone up in years). ISPs are monopolies, especially in rural America.
QCATOPR 
@p0q @arstechnica I just checked: "up to" 18Mbps for $85/month from AT&T. There's also a "cost recovery fee" (apparently the $40 billion in government giveaways to telcos over the past decade to build out broadband wasn't enough.)
Joseph A. Langley@timjclevenger @p0q @arstechnica
AT&T offers 6 Mbps down / 766 Kbps up to us only because we're existing. They said they are not accepting any more wired customers where I live.
AT&T offers 6 Mbps down / 766 Kbps up to us only because we're existing. They said they are not accepting any more wired customers where I live.
@p0q that's a common practice for cable internet. I think ISPs claim there's a significant costs to upkeep the infrastructure. If you would qualify for fiber optic internet (from pure fiber - AT&T Fiber, Google Fiber, Verizon FiOS etc), the situation magically no longer applies. No contract, no yearly price increase, no data cap, no speed variation (you can typically occupy 100% of capacity 100% of time), no unsymmetrical internet (upload/download are identical).
k cavaliere@arstechnica So long as #internet access is controlled by programming corporations, internet only service will always suffer. What happened to independent ISP's? Even mobile companies rely on a cable/fiber backbone controlled by these companies. Something is very wrong.
infosec zathras@arstechnica My good friend Jim Troutman (twitter.com/troutman) has been involved with ISP operations and saying this for years, if not decades.
His manifesto for 2021 pretty much spells it out. The FCC is behind the times.
MNeko@arstechnica 25 megs? We're still getting 12 megs here... :P
@arstechnica maybe FCC should just modify their standard to target fiber optic internet, symmetrical speed minimum of 500 Mbps, and no data cap as the common standard lol.
Cost would probably be significant for rural areas though. Although, that should be what the infrastructure bill's internet portion mainly targeting...
Matthew Miller20Mbps upload, though?
Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) 
@mattdm @arstechnica There's still large pockets of the country that only have DSL-based technology available to them. Or even worse, wireless. Symmetric is almost impossible in those circumstances unless the FCC makes it a policy to push for high quality wired broadband *everywhere*.
That's what I think they should do. Doesn't need to be symmetric, just — at least twice that.
Shane Pinnell@arstechnica @loftus we are too far behind in accessible broadband. We need, at least, a generational leap in performance, 25Mbps → 100Mbps still leaves us behind. Fiber to the home should be the standard, and not just fiber to the affluent homes.
@arstechnica that should be the minimum. All ISPs are rolling out gigabit fibre.