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FCC chair: Speed standard of 25Mbps down, 3Mbps up isn’t good enough anymore (arstechnica.com)
submitted 3 years ago by [M, B] to c/technology@lemmy.world
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FCC chair: Speed standard of 25Mbps down, 3Mbps up isn’t good enough anymore::Chair proposes 100Mbps national standard and an evaluation of broadband prices.

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[–] 11 points 3 years ago (5 children)

I have 500Mbps in Spain. Is it that bad in the American cities or is it only like rural Montana that has these speeds?

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  • [–] 10 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    Honestly, it's highly variable. Generally speaking, more populated areas tend to have much better options for internet and in some large markets even have a degree of competition.

    In my case, I live in a town of only 180k or so people. At my home, I am able to get 1.2 gbps download from Comcast. They are the only option in my direct vicinity with this much bandwidth. The alernative is AT&T with only DSL as an option. I don't remember the top tier. But, it's considerably slower at maybe 100 mbps or something like that.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    Wow, that's pretty good for a town of that size. I live in a city of 1.6 Million. I think I might be able to get 1 gbps if I shop around, but I don't think much more than that is available to normal consumers at least.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I've lived in small towns since 2009. 100mps would be a fucking dream come true. The fastest speed I've had in the last decade plus is 25mps until we got TMobile home internet, and now I typically get around 50-70. Technically it's up to 300 with our distance to the tower, but there's a fucking mountain in between us, so I take what I can get. :/

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  • [–] 1 point 3 years ago

    Can't figure out how to edit on connect, so I'm just adding:

    The best wired internet available to me is dialup (old school 56k, baby). We used a mobile hotspot from PCs for people (if you're at all low income, seriously check them out. Life changers).

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  • [–] 9 points 3 years ago (2 children)

    The issue is mostly that it’s highly variable, hard to change without moving, and hard to predict before you actually live somewhere.

    The comcast rep will happily take your money to put you on a 200mb plan, but it won’t do shit if the infrastructure in your area is bad, and Comcast (or whoever the isp is) has absolutely zero responsibility to actually provide the promised services. Now you add in that 95% of the population including most of the phone reps working for the ISPs don’t even know the difference between a bit and a byte and it becomes a total crap shoot.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    ...wow. That's so shit. Where I live, your internet provider has to have the ability to provide the service or like with every other service provider it's really open for lawyer action.

    This also makes so that internet providers are at the same time keeping their own infrastructure around which in turn makes that yet another selling point ("we have up to 1 gbps in your area!") and makes them keep it in top-notch condition.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    I live in the mountain area, and my friend lives 30m from a multi-million population city, in an area with over 100,000 residents. His best option for internet to this day is hotspotting from his cell. Before that was viable, he only had access to satellite internet. Even semi-rural people here get fucked.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    my friend lives 30m from a multi-million population city

    It took me a beat to realize this was 30 miles or 30 minutes and not 30 meters.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    Ah that’s my bad, should’ve used metric. I meant minutes, but in context it doesn’t really portray that.

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  • [–] 5 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    It's widely variable, even in big cities the available ISPs can change depending on what side of a street you're on. A lot of people are stuck with cable (DOCSIS) providers that run over legacy TV infrastructure and provide wildly asymmetric speeds. This is an excerpt from Xfinity (Comcast):

    Xfinity Gigabit Internet service has advanced, next generation technology, with WiFi download speeds of up to 1000 Mbps (up to 1200 Mbps in some areas) and upload speeds of up to 35 Mbps.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 years ago

    There's a new docsis version right around the corner that will provide symmetric speeds. Comcast is starting to roll it out this year. Cable will be a lot faster in a couple years.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 years ago

    I live in middle America and oddly enough the rural areas have started getting fiber from utility companies. I live in a town of about 40,000 and the best you can hope for is either DSL from AT&T which is maybe 25Mbps with perfect conditions or Optimum Cable internet which is sold as "Gigabit" that never breaks 400Mbps and cost about $120/mo. I've also had to file multiple complaints with the FCC to have issues resolved. My connection for about 6 months was completely unusable when it rained and even after "fixing" the issue I have severely reduced speeds when it rains. It's an absolute joke and nothing is in place to protect consumers from any of this BS.

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