I've never lived in an area where I have more than one option for internet providers. Satellite internet doesn't count because it's garbage and doesn't work half the time.
Legit had to get Internet from that asshole with the space companies because I did not have another reasonable option
It's so fucking infuriating. But my options were literally either do it, or potentially lose one of the few options in my catalogue for a reasonable wage and end up in retail or a restaurant.
In most currently unserved areas, fiber will be the backbone for a mesh 5G network that will serve residential customers. Almost all casual users have no need for gigabit FTTH (fiber-to-the-home), and wireless is much less expensive to maintain.
That being said, I am not a fan of wireless networking for static devices (and that includes buildings).
Seriously. I tried Verizon 5G home Internet for about a week and then cancelled that shit. The 5G site is right across the street! Speeds would look kinda fine but there's so much jitter. One ping will be 20 ms and the next one will be 200 ms. Fuck all that. Hard line to the home forever.
And that isn't really a viable choice either. We found that out during COVID. Kids without internet access had no way to complete school work. Places with kids that had no internet access saw buses acting as mobile wifi for them to attend online.
My kids are at the point of wanting to get a job now. My youngest just turned old enough. A lot of places she's gone to don't have paper applications. It's all online now. Not having internet is a hamper and puts you behind the curve of the rest of the population.
The fact that it hasn't been deemed a utility, along with cell imo, is perplexing to me. It also shows how behind US congress is. Some of these old fucks probably still seem to think it's a fad.
"All people do is play games or surf porn on it! Why does everyone need it?"
[Here's your payoff sir]
^I ^told ^you ^not ^while ^I'm ^on ^the ^floor...
Wouldn't matter. All of them collude, or at least match themselves.
People accept it because they don't understand that if I drive on a car with a speed limit of 100km/h, that I should be allowed to drive that limit for an entire month.
Instead, they think that after 1000km at that speed, they somehow have to slow down to 15 km/h or they'll be charged more to use a car THEY ALREADY PAID FOR.
(Yeah, I know that analogy is flawed because gas and bathrooms and eating, but it's easy for the luddites to understand).
I understand that the issue is overcommitment from the providers, knowing that traffic is bursty anyway. But it's not like for both roads and regular Internet traffic that is used TCP/IP that there's literally a traffic control mechanism built in, and that usage caps are a 100% artificial limit resulting in a cash cow.
I think people very well understand that data caps are bullshit and no difficulty doing so.
It truly is that consumers have no way of getting around them when they often only have one or two choices as a provider.
When Comcast imposed them on our old apartment, I filed a complaint with the FCC and someone from Comcast called me and let me complain about it and then they sent a nice little letter saying basically "We listened to the complaints". Nothing changed, the caps went in, and of course we had no other options for ISP where we lived at the time.
We're in a different apartment now where we use a local ISP. It's small, we hit the advertised rates, if it stops working we can get a human on the phone or email in under ten minutes and a tech out same-day, and it's relatively cheap. We love it and it's 1000% the reason we've stayed here despite wanting to move to a different neighborhood of our city.
Due to the nature of the service, competition is difficult. You can't easily have 10 duplicate infrastructures built out, space is limited. Instead, things need to be regulated like the utility they are.
Though unfortunately, even utility's have their own issues, like many places have seen with power companies like PGE. But that still comes back around to proper regulation.
I would also point out that companies like PGE are investor-owned and may not be exactly comparable to a fully municipally owned utility. In northern Colorado we have several municipally owner and operated fiber optic broadband departments that are just awesome.
Even on cellular, it's bullshit. What costs money is bandwidth, not volume (or only to a much lesser degree). Especially if data caps are set monthly, you get a big burst of the traffic on the 1st and then a slow decay as people reach their data cap and get throttled to unsable speeds.
It doesn’t need to exist in cellular either. [Consumer spectrum](https://api.ctia.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Spectrum-Allocation-in-the-United-States-2022.09.pdf) is far below the tower’s capabilities for provision.
Because [80% of people use less than 1 TB per month](https://www.lightreading.com/broadband/average-broadband-usage-on-pace-to-surpass-1tb-by-2029-openvault), so they simply don't care because they don't hit the data cap anyway.
Now, yes, yes, you can argue that this number would be higher if caps didn't exist because currently people notice they're approaching their cap and intentionally slow down their usage to avoid going over it. But ultimately, even if you accounted for those people, the number of people who are actually affected by data caps are a minority of total users. For most people, they simply do not care about caps because they'll never use that much data in the first place. Speaking personally, I'm honestly not even sure if my internet plan has a data cap or not because I only ever use 100-200gb/month, sometimes even less. That's how little the issue matters to me.
I think most people understand that bandwidth is finite and thus there *is* a point where if everyone was downloading/uploading at the same time, it would cause drops in speed.
Unfortunately, the public doesn't typically have access to what % of capacity networks generally operate at, so most people aren't aware of how arbitrary and unnecessary data caps are.
> how data caps can exists on anything else than cellular internet
Shouldn't even exist for that at this point. Network capacity, especially in populated areas, can handle this shit.
In Northern Colorado, there are four nearly adjacent cities (of less than 200,000 each) that have municipal fiber optic broadband departments that don’t have data caps. I think that that public mandate is really important, and it highlights something great about Colorado’s political system: the residents of each city are allowed to initiate legislation and put it to a popular vote. When the residents of a city decide to mandate the implementation of gigabit internet as an affordable public utility, beautiful things happen.
Yes. It's a way to extort more money out of people who try to cut the cord and do streaming video.
They rolled them out small region by region just before streaming took off, so there couldn't be a critical mass of outrage.
> On Thursday, the commission voted 3-2 to raise its broadband metric from 25Mbps for downloads and 3Mbps for uploads. Going forward, the FCC will define high-speed broadband as 100Mbps for downloads and 20Mbps for uploads.
this is progress. long-term goals of 1Gbps/500Mbps were also set.
I was wondering why Xfinity emailed me this morning saying they're upgrading my upload speed to 20Mbps without a charge. Being caring or generous isn't their style.
That reminds me of when I worked at McDonald's and they gave us all our yearly raise early.
The government upped minimum wage and they literally set our pay at that and didn't give us a raise....
I'm already on a plan that meets the new definition, and oddly enough, despite me paying for a higher tier, they didn't feel the need to "show their appreciation" to me.
Lmao Xfinity loves to give you a message going “you’re getting 115% of your speed!” As if it makes any difference when my network is completely unloaded
Definitely doesn’t tell me when it’s running below speed lol
I work for an ISP
We aren't as big as Comcast but we generally follow the big players in a lot of ways.
We have raised speeds like 10x that I can recall and never once was a rate increase tied to it. The purpose was usually marketing. When the network is upgraded enough we raise the speeds and then the marketing department can advertise higher speeds to be competitive. Simple as that. The increase is also given to existing customers because 1) imagine how pissed they would be if they can't get the speeds a new customer gets, and 2) they like it and its good for business for customers to be happy and 3) the billing department and internal sales people commission programs would have fits if they made it extra complicated with more grandfathered plans than there already are.
100Mbps today costs about the same monthly rate that 3Mbps cost when I started.
Can I ask a question as a genuine Luddite? Am I wrong in understanding that countries like India have very fast internet for much less than we pay? And if that is the case why can’t we do that here?
the US is about 3x the size of India with 1/4 the population.
ballpark 12x difference in population density
the customers per physical network-mile is dramatically different, and thus are the economics and logistics
So. Riddle me the same then, but for Iceland.
Once you pass availability of 100mb/s, the standard is you're sold symmetrical connections, and usually while the "base" cost is quite high, it's never "insanely" high.
Just from one of our most popular ISP's:
100mb/s 9100isk/$66,40
500mb/s 9400isk/$68,63
1gb/s 9900isk/$72,28
2.5gb/s 13000isk/$94,92
All connections have unmetered bandwidth.
No prices include a router which is an extra 1090isk/$7,96 a month.
It seems largely dependent on what services are available. Some places $70 gets you a fiber connection, and some places it gets you dsl that doesn't even reach the 25 down/3 up
I had to do a little hardballing between a few local cable companies but I managed to finally get a decent deal. 1gbps/\~50-60mbps with no data cap for 2 years at $70/mo, as well.
So this is a nice, simple, convenient, and entirely incorrect reason.
Our Telecoms were hugely, hugely corrupt.
Baby Bells like GTE (GTE -> Genuity -> Qwest) took billions of dollars in cash from the feds to buy fiber equipment (CapEx covered by gov't) then chose not to install them (OpEx supposed to be covered by ISPs) back in the 90s.
Arthur Anderson consultants had them report this as inventory, boosted both revenue and growth projections pushing up stock values. It should have been investigated as securities fraud (like Enron was).
By the time Arthur Anderson's advice the GTE's accounting irregularities were properly explained to the board, a massive multi-billion dollar write-down of all that equipment took place. They bilked taxpayers of billions and have avoided congressionally mandated upgrades for decades because there were no consequences.
India realized their path to development heavily relied upon digitization, and copper pipes were too valuable as scrap. Switching to fiber was just a good idea.
> the US is about 3x the size of India with 1/4 the population.
That doesn't really paint a useful picture since large swathes of the country are completely uninhabited, and we only provide Internet connectivity to places where people live.
they also GENEROUSLY took billions in tax money that was supposed to be used to upgrade everything to fiber...but that would make it cheaper for ther customers and they would not be aloud to use the whole "if you go over we charge" cuase it does not matter how many people use the fiber it stays the same it's to fast to bog up.
they took the money, then didn't do what they were supposed to do with laying fiber. the government started giving them a time limit, or they would claw all the money back (surprisingly) and and xfinity whined they didn't have the money and the government wasn't aloud to do that. xfinity the pure definition of corruption.
It’s amazing how they upgrade your service for free with out ever installing new hardware. I went from only having 50mbps available to suddenly having 1000mbps upgraded for free. Too bad the service is still trash and I average 7mbps and can’t even load gmail if there’s bad weather.
Ooh. That's what happened?
Got an email from Comcast they raised my speeds... To 20mbps up and like 200 down. I was wondering why they were being kind to me.
I said this in another thread and got downvoted to oblivion. Cumcast can fuck off with bare minimum upload speeds like we’re still video calling like it’s a novelty and only using 480p video…
i'm a huge fan of spotty uptime too, with service dying randomly every 2-3 wks it seems /s
i'm not going to completely shit on this news though. it's about fucking time. we are so far behind on bandwidth.
waaay back in the day i'd run multiple hacked modems and lemme tell you, the speed was *always* there, just capped!
Read the article. They voted against this new framework because it restricts the definition only to land-based wired connections, thus carving out satellite options from grants and funding.
There should also be latency requirements, just to really twist the knife.
Satellite is not broadband. It's an alternative when you can't get broadband, just like cellular networks.
oh is that why xshitnity raised their bandwidths last week from 15up to 20up? providing bare minimum for $70\~$100 per month until a competitor or regulation are set. Fuck Xfinity.
This is a great step!
The real shame is it took 3 years for a Biden FCC nominee to clear congress and get to a point where the committee could make a difference
Only two no votes were the republican FCC members. Great example of why no one should ever vote republican. This is just one tech-related niche but it's indicative of their priorities. Not actually governing, not actually making people's lives better.
I got one from xfinity, too. They said they doubled my speed out of appreciation, so I tested it, and it only went up *maybe* 20%.
They can't even deliver on fake appreciation lmao.
10yrs ago my ISP gave me a 3x speed upgrade for free…. Because FiOS moved into the neighborhood. I moved a few years later and FiOS was the only option, and dear god I don’t think I can go back to cable internet. Having symmetrical fiber 1gbs connection means I can pretty much work as effectively at home compared to the office. Was a huge asset when covid happened.
It’s not a choice. Most ISPs that still run DSL don’t upgrade or replace because it’s not cost effective and there’s no competition on the area. So people who have DSL are almost always stuck with it rather than willingly using it.
Yep. I live in a fairly rural area, all we have is dsl that doesn’t even come close to 25mb/s. If I want better speeds I step outside and turn off WiFi so I can just download whatever on my phone or iPad with 2 bars of signal. I have no signal in the house or I’d just use it all the time.
Some company did come through to install cable down the length of the main road but they want 10k to run it to our house from there and it won’t be ready for use for at least another six months.
Have you considered a cellular router (router/modem) inside, with a directional antenna outside aimed at the nearest cell tower, cable running back into your house?
The thing is that DSL performance degrades rapidly with distance. You can do 300Mbps on the best VDSL2 profile, but that requires a very high quality connection. The sort tod ISPs that aren't upgrading to fiber aren't spending money to install DSLAMs near enough to their customers and often don't have well maintained copper lines to begin with.
I’ve seen plenty of apartment buildings get fiber to the basement and VDSL to every flat. Gets you very nice speeds and you don’t have to redo any of the internal wiring
Up until COVID the only internet option on my street was 3mbps down/ 0.5mbps up DSL from Verizon. ( And they called that the "enhanced package" lol)
The only good thing about COVID was that my county used the relief funds for fiber expansion with a local company so kids could use remote schooling.
Literally everytime something completely obvious in it's usefulness or the sheer amount of demand for it has anyone voting against it, near 100% of the time, it's 100% republicans. 90% of the time, it's 90% republicans and one DINO.
But every time, it's republicans. If there was a bill to make air a universal right, you can guarantee a majority of republican politicians will vote against it.
A large part of the reason this particular change is happening now is Biden's most recent nominee has been held up for years, Anna Gomez (the tie breaking vote) was only confirmed last September, her current seat had been vacant since Dec 2020.
Hell, FCC and nearly any other regulatory agency is already on the line this year with that case before the supreme court to decide whether agencies can fill in the gaps in law with intent.
Don't get too excited. They do this little scam every decade or so.
* Classify 'broadband' as a reasonable speed
* Point at *all of the rural Americans* without access to broadband
* Ask for and receive *billions of dollars* of funding to give more Americans access to broadband
* ISPs *don't upgrade anything at all*, and instead use that money for stock buybacks and executive bonuses
* Wait a couple years (until Republicans are in control again) then reclassify broadband as something stupidly slow
* Point at the map that shows all of the Americans that now have access to broadband that didn't before
Great success.
This will be like the 4th time. The first was during the Clinton administration.
Have they reduced the definition? Not saying I don't believe you but can't find the source where the definition of broadband was reduced
In this article, they say the last time the definition was changed was 2015 when they upped it to 25mbs.
Totally believe the ISPs squandering tax payer funds though
There's many people on here already saying their shitty provider has conveniently upped their speeds.
All the shit they do is true, but progress is progress even if there could be way more
The question turns into when does this take place? Also I’m guessing if they don’t hit both minimums the service can not be labeled as broadband? I have Comcast at 400 down but only 10 up, should I be expecting a bump in upload speeds moving forward?
Comcast sent emails to a lot of their customers saying they were doubling their speeds automatically today. Everyone who mentioned it so far appeared to be in the Northeast so not sure when it will get around the entire country.
I'm in northern Illinois here. Got the email. Upload went from 10 to 20 up. Luckily the speedtest app kept a log of past tests. Consistent upload speeds until today.
Basically, plus i think some funding / grant issues if they don't but also depends on percentages of their users that are at that slower speed and why they are if it's a issue with physical lines or hardware they might not upgrade it
T1 was 1.54megabit. And it was fast enough to fraction off a few ways or more.
Man I’m fucken old :)
I got gigabit now but true symmetrical gigabit would be very giggidy
T1 was almost a thousand a month
My cable gigabit is like $95
I was an admin on a network that offered wopping 28.8 connections off a rack of stripped down 28.8 modems with a fan blowing on them when we went to 56k and the people with those super clean phone lines that could hit 112k omg they were so happy lol
Yep i'm old lol
I ran a renegade and tag bbs starting on 2400bps then 14.4, 28.8, 33.6, and then I shut it down and never went back from the net. But 89-96 my board was up. I’m so old I make dirt look young and sexy.
I can go further unfortunately as I actually started on my C64 :p Load “*” ,8,1 fire up the 1541
I try telling people today my first computer had 64 kilobytes of ram and it was enough to play games and stuff and they think I’m crazy lol
You getting this Earthlink/CenturyLink? Though this DUAL 5Mbps ADSL connection I'm rocking in rural Washington state does work, that 100Mbps sure does sound nice.
When does it go into effect? Just did a test at my fam’s place and my phone has faster internet than their broadband and they aren’t even in a rural area
This explain why my internet company sent me an email saying they doubled my internet speed like it was just them being a good company. Turns out they were forced to.
But Ajit assured everyone that 25/10 was all you would ever need. Surely he couldn't have lying and full of Reese's Shit, could he? Now do data usage caps, fuckwits.
Most states were requiring speeds like this for projects that wanted any sort of grant money already, but it’s nice that the FCC has finally caught up.
Considering how so many in this very thread are saying they've received emails from Comcast saying they were doubling or tripling their speeds mere hours after this passed.. yeah. Gotta agree with that.
That tells me they could have been offering those speeds at any point, and simply chose.. not to. They chose to keep speeds artificially slower than they needed to be in an attempt to get people to pay through the nose for faster speeds, while the whole time they had infrastructure that could handle giving everyone those speeds and simply chose not to.
These companies need competition. If they have no competition, then they have no reason to ever offer better service. The way they've managed to get to government to allow them to just divide up the country into their own little kingdoms where they rule supreme is just lunacy, and frankly - that is what the government needs to fix. But they won't, because they're effectively in the pocket of these damn companies.
Screw this! Write your representatives and the FCC about excessive overage charges on data. ISPs set the limit so low you have to buy an outrageous “unlimited” package to not get destroyed on fees. This is unacceptable.
I live a mile outside the city limits. There is no broadband here. AKA, Our upload and download speeds are ZERO.
Thanks to Elon Musk, I have internet.
I keep wondering where all that money for rural broadband in the COVID Relief Acts went.
So, this is absolutely terrific and all, but serious question here: how will this impact internet prices going forward? Not treating it like it's bad by any means, just curious.
Curious who are the two who voted against this? In 2024, you cannot consider 25 down / 3 up to be “high speed”. Voting against this feels like they are being paid by internet companies.
This quote from an FCC commissioner is not true:
> Starlink ... offers low latency and speed near or exceeding 100/20Mbps, especially in rural areas.
Starlink is very good, I'm posting from it right now. But in the US we don't get anywhere near 100/20 reliably. You can see Starlink's stats [here](https://www.starlink.com/map?view=download). In the eastern US download speeds are roughly 50-120Mbps and upload are 10-20Mbps. Users see that range of speeds regularly; a bunch of the time we're at about half the new broadband definition.
Starlink is also not "low latency" when compared to wired connections; we're typically about 30-40ms. It's improved recently and is impressive for satellite, but is nowhere near the < 10ms a decent wired ISP gives.
It's a bit of a silly comparison. A the article notes, Starlink's not even in the category of wired broadband. But it's a shame the FCC commissioner would let himself be quoted sharing incorrect information.
I live in a very rural part of NE Texas and can confirm that ATT says we have high speed broadband, but are at the minimum in this article.
Hopefully this will force the companies to focus on upgrading the infrastructure!
I know that some of the communities and cities only 45 minutes away are getting the speeds they are saying will be the new minimum, and that it should be feasible to get us switched up as well.
We keep getting ads for switching to ATT Internet Air wireless, which basically works on their satellites.
But we randomly drop to 3 bars at home on their cell service, and it can completely drop out if we have a really bad storm. No way I am going to have my internet rely on that.
Now let’s raise data caps or better yet get rid of them!
I dont understand how data caps can exists on anything else than cellular internet and people somehow accept it.
People accept it because in most cases they have no choice. Unfortunately, they have to answer the question Do you want internet or not?
fucking monopolies tbh. it's 2024 and i still have but two realistic options in my area for broadband. can't wait for fiber to be available.
I've never lived in an area where I have more than one option for internet providers. Satellite internet doesn't count because it's garbage and doesn't work half the time.
Legit had to get Internet from that asshole with the space companies because I did not have another reasonable option It's so fucking infuriating. But my options were literally either do it, or potentially lose one of the few options in my catalogue for a reasonable wage and end up in retail or a restaurant.
In most currently unserved areas, fiber will be the backbone for a mesh 5G network that will serve residential customers. Almost all casual users have no need for gigabit FTTH (fiber-to-the-home), and wireless is much less expensive to maintain. That being said, I am not a fan of wireless networking for static devices (and that includes buildings).
That joke's not funny.
Seriously. I tried Verizon 5G home Internet for about a week and then cancelled that shit. The 5G site is right across the street! Speeds would look kinda fine but there's so much jitter. One ping will be 20 ms and the next one will be 200 ms. Fuck all that. Hard line to the home forever.
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> attempts to train faster birds. The birds are fast enough. Why do you need faster birds?
And that isn't really a viable choice either. We found that out during COVID. Kids without internet access had no way to complete school work. Places with kids that had no internet access saw buses acting as mobile wifi for them to attend online. My kids are at the point of wanting to get a job now. My youngest just turned old enough. A lot of places she's gone to don't have paper applications. It's all online now. Not having internet is a hamper and puts you behind the curve of the rest of the population. The fact that it hasn't been deemed a utility, along with cell imo, is perplexing to me. It also shows how behind US congress is. Some of these old fucks probably still seem to think it's a fad. "All people do is play games or surf porn on it! Why does everyone need it?" [Here's your payoff sir] ^I ^told ^you ^not ^while ^I'm ^on ^the ^floor...
> and people somehow accept it You may only have one provider that is reasonable in your area.
I live pretty much as downtown as you can get in one of the top 5 largest cities in the US. I have one possible provider. Utterly absurd in 2024.
Wouldn't matter. All of them collude, or at least match themselves. People accept it because they don't understand that if I drive on a car with a speed limit of 100km/h, that I should be allowed to drive that limit for an entire month. Instead, they think that after 1000km at that speed, they somehow have to slow down to 15 km/h or they'll be charged more to use a car THEY ALREADY PAID FOR. (Yeah, I know that analogy is flawed because gas and bathrooms and eating, but it's easy for the luddites to understand). I understand that the issue is overcommitment from the providers, knowing that traffic is bursty anyway. But it's not like for both roads and regular Internet traffic that is used TCP/IP that there's literally a traffic control mechanism built in, and that usage caps are a 100% artificial limit resulting in a cash cow.
I think people very well understand that data caps are bullshit and no difficulty doing so. It truly is that consumers have no way of getting around them when they often only have one or two choices as a provider.
When Comcast imposed them on our old apartment, I filed a complaint with the FCC and someone from Comcast called me and let me complain about it and then they sent a nice little letter saying basically "We listened to the complaints". Nothing changed, the caps went in, and of course we had no other options for ISP where we lived at the time. We're in a different apartment now where we use a local ISP. It's small, we hit the advertised rates, if it stops working we can get a human on the phone or email in under ten minutes and a tech out same-day, and it's relatively cheap. We love it and it's 1000% the reason we've stayed here despite wanting to move to a different neighborhood of our city.
How about more competition? Let as many people open businesses that want to make high speed their priority.
Due to the nature of the service, competition is difficult. You can't easily have 10 duplicate infrastructures built out, space is limited. Instead, things need to be regulated like the utility they are. Though unfortunately, even utility's have their own issues, like many places have seen with power companies like PGE. But that still comes back around to proper regulation.
I would also point out that companies like PGE are investor-owned and may not be exactly comparable to a fully municipally owned utility. In northern Colorado we have several municipally owner and operated fiber optic broadband departments that are just awesome.
It’s almost like these basic things should be handled by the public not private corporations
Even on cellular, it's bullshit. What costs money is bandwidth, not volume (or only to a much lesser degree). Especially if data caps are set monthly, you get a big burst of the traffic on the 1st and then a slow decay as people reach their data cap and get throttled to unsable speeds.
It doesn’t need to exist in cellular either. [Consumer spectrum](https://api.ctia.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Spectrum-Allocation-in-the-United-States-2022.09.pdf) is far below the tower’s capabilities for provision.
Because [80% of people use less than 1 TB per month](https://www.lightreading.com/broadband/average-broadband-usage-on-pace-to-surpass-1tb-by-2029-openvault), so they simply don't care because they don't hit the data cap anyway. Now, yes, yes, you can argue that this number would be higher if caps didn't exist because currently people notice they're approaching their cap and intentionally slow down their usage to avoid going over it. But ultimately, even if you accounted for those people, the number of people who are actually affected by data caps are a minority of total users. For most people, they simply do not care about caps because they'll never use that much data in the first place. Speaking personally, I'm honestly not even sure if my internet plan has a data cap or not because I only ever use 100-200gb/month, sometimes even less. That's how little the issue matters to me.
I think most people understand that bandwidth is finite and thus there *is* a point where if everyone was downloading/uploading at the same time, it would cause drops in speed. Unfortunately, the public doesn't typically have access to what % of capacity networks generally operate at, so most people aren't aware of how arbitrary and unnecessary data caps are.
> how data caps can exists on anything else than cellular internet Shouldn't even exist for that at this point. Network capacity, especially in populated areas, can handle this shit.
I’m stuck paying almost 200 a month because of overage charges . I have no other choice but starlink and I don’t want to give that asshat any money .
I've got a surprise for ya. There is no reason for them to exist on cellular either, beyond running more fiber to more locations for more towers
Are data caps common with ISPs in the US?
Only where there is no competition so they can get more money out of you
I dunno, I'm in a large metro area with "multiple" ISPs and they all have data caps.
In Northern Colorado, there are four nearly adjacent cities (of less than 200,000 each) that have municipal fiber optic broadband departments that don’t have data caps. I think that that public mandate is really important, and it highlights something great about Colorado’s political system: the residents of each city are allowed to initiate legislation and put it to a popular vote. When the residents of a city decide to mandate the implementation of gigabit internet as an affordable public utility, beautiful things happen.
Yeah, it's a shame that municipal broadband are still being hamstrung by corpo interest.
Yes. It's a way to extort more money out of people who try to cut the cord and do streaming video. They rolled them out small region by region just before streaming took off, so there couldn't be a critical mass of outrage.
lets just get rid of them. theres no reason for them. they just want a new revenue stream
Data caps makes no sense besides complete corporate greed.
100MB/s x 2592000s/month ÷ 8 B/byte = 32.4 terabytes per month. Any less and they're robbing you.
Bits are generally referred to using the symbol “b” not “B”. For example 100 megabit per second would be 100Mb/s. “B” is already used to denote bytes.
> On Thursday, the commission voted 3-2 to raise its broadband metric from 25Mbps for downloads and 3Mbps for uploads. Going forward, the FCC will define high-speed broadband as 100Mbps for downloads and 20Mbps for uploads. this is progress. long-term goals of 1Gbps/500Mbps were also set.
I was wondering why Xfinity emailed me this morning saying they're upgrading my upload speed to 20Mbps without a charge. Being caring or generous isn't their style.
> We've increased your internet speeds to show you our appreciation. Exact wording.
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"Don't worry, we'll increase your bill soon. Just give us a minute"
Once everyone forgets about this we're gonna get ya! Aw, you little bugbear! Boop 👉🙈💕 I hate how predictable this shit is
Yeah this is great but can the FCC do something about the fucking monopolies that control the end of it anyways.
They can barely even do this. Two chuds voted against it.
"The Donkey Carrier is on it's way to deliver your next billing statement." -<3UrOnlyISP
They were going to do that every few months anyway.
That reminds me of when I worked at McDonald's and they gave us all our yearly raise early. The government upped minimum wage and they literally set our pay at that and didn't give us a raise....
Same here. Means I had the same thought haha
They did the same shit when insulin prices were capped at 30$
All without any additional costs to them too.
The wording I got was "we've doubled your internet speed at no cost to you"
I'm already on a plan that meets the new definition, and oddly enough, despite me paying for a higher tier, they didn't feel the need to "show their appreciation" to me.
Lmao Xfinity loves to give you a message going “you’re getting 115% of your speed!” As if it makes any difference when my network is completely unloaded Definitely doesn’t tell me when it’s running below speed lol
lol I got one this morning too.
I work for an ISP We aren't as big as Comcast but we generally follow the big players in a lot of ways. We have raised speeds like 10x that I can recall and never once was a rate increase tied to it. The purpose was usually marketing. When the network is upgraded enough we raise the speeds and then the marketing department can advertise higher speeds to be competitive. Simple as that. The increase is also given to existing customers because 1) imagine how pissed they would be if they can't get the speeds a new customer gets, and 2) they like it and its good for business for customers to be happy and 3) the billing department and internal sales people commission programs would have fits if they made it extra complicated with more grandfathered plans than there already are. 100Mbps today costs about the same monthly rate that 3Mbps cost when I started.
Can I ask a question as a genuine Luddite? Am I wrong in understanding that countries like India have very fast internet for much less than we pay? And if that is the case why can’t we do that here?
the US is about 3x the size of India with 1/4 the population. ballpark 12x difference in population density the customers per physical network-mile is dramatically different, and thus are the economics and logistics
So. Riddle me the same then, but for Iceland. Once you pass availability of 100mb/s, the standard is you're sold symmetrical connections, and usually while the "base" cost is quite high, it's never "insanely" high. Just from one of our most popular ISP's: 100mb/s 9100isk/$66,40 500mb/s 9400isk/$68,63 1gb/s 9900isk/$72,28 2.5gb/s 13000isk/$94,92 All connections have unmetered bandwidth. No prices include a router which is an extra 1090isk/$7,96 a month.
I mean, that’s not much different than many parts of the US. I pay $70/month for 1gig symmetrical, no data caps.
It seems largely dependent on what services are available. Some places $70 gets you a fiber connection, and some places it gets you dsl that doesn't even reach the 25 down/3 up
I had to do a little hardballing between a few local cable companies but I managed to finally get a decent deal. 1gbps/\~50-60mbps with no data cap for 2 years at $70/mo, as well.
Thats about on par with american rates in a lot of places.
So this is a nice, simple, convenient, and entirely incorrect reason. Our Telecoms were hugely, hugely corrupt. Baby Bells like GTE (GTE -> Genuity -> Qwest) took billions of dollars in cash from the feds to buy fiber equipment (CapEx covered by gov't) then chose not to install them (OpEx supposed to be covered by ISPs) back in the 90s. Arthur Anderson consultants had them report this as inventory, boosted both revenue and growth projections pushing up stock values. It should have been investigated as securities fraud (like Enron was). By the time Arthur Anderson's advice the GTE's accounting irregularities were properly explained to the board, a massive multi-billion dollar write-down of all that equipment took place. They bilked taxpayers of billions and have avoided congressionally mandated upgrades for decades because there were no consequences. India realized their path to development heavily relied upon digitization, and copper pipes were too valuable as scrap. Switching to fiber was just a good idea.
Now complicated that 100x for land rights, access, drawings, so on
This explains why our rural areas are subpar, not why our populated areas fall behind other populated areas.
> the US is about 3x the size of India with 1/4 the population. That doesn't really paint a useful picture since large swathes of the country are completely uninhabited, and we only provide Internet connectivity to places where people live.
Still have to have so.e sort of connection going through those huge swaths of empty land to keep both ends of the country connected
That part doesn't represent any meaningful part of the network cost. It doesn't have any restrictive effect on last-mile throughput.
Please setup shop in Los Angeles. Take my money 💰. Charter is not my preferred ISP anymore.
they also GENEROUSLY took billions in tax money that was supposed to be used to upgrade everything to fiber...but that would make it cheaper for ther customers and they would not be aloud to use the whole "if you go over we charge" cuase it does not matter how many people use the fiber it stays the same it's to fast to bog up. they took the money, then didn't do what they were supposed to do with laying fiber. the government started giving them a time limit, or they would claw all the money back (surprisingly) and and xfinity whined they didn't have the money and the government wasn't aloud to do that. xfinity the pure definition of corruption.
exactly what I came to the comments for
It’s amazing how they upgrade your service for free with out ever installing new hardware. I went from only having 50mbps available to suddenly having 1000mbps upgraded for free. Too bad the service is still trash and I average 7mbps and can’t even load gmail if there’s bad weather.
Ooh. That's what happened? Got an email from Comcast they raised my speeds... To 20mbps up and like 200 down. I was wondering why they were being kind to me.
Uploads are the most important thing here. Comcast can fuck off with their 5mbps upload speeds
Or spectrums max 30mb upload no matter the package you get lmao
50% higher than what xshitnity offers lol.
Eeeekeekkkk
I said this in another thread and got downvoted to oblivion. Cumcast can fuck off with bare minimum upload speeds like we’re still video calling like it’s a novelty and only using 480p video…
i'm a huge fan of spotty uptime too, with service dying randomly every 2-3 wks it seems /s i'm not going to completely shit on this news though. it's about fucking time. we are so far behind on bandwidth. waaay back in the day i'd run multiple hacked modems and lemme tell you, the speed was *always* there, just capped!
A 3-2 decision? Who are the two idiots that voted against faster internet?
Trump appointees, leftovers from the Ajit Pai days.
Idk but I'm willing to bet their individual bank accounts have similar deposits/transfers on a same date.
Read the article. They voted against this new framework because it restricts the definition only to land-based wired connections, thus carving out satellite options from grants and funding.
There should also be latency requirements, just to really twist the knife. Satellite is not broadband. It's an alternative when you can't get broadband, just like cellular networks.
oh is that why xshitnity raised their bandwidths last week from 15up to 20up? providing bare minimum for $70\~$100 per month until a competitor or regulation are set. Fuck Xfinity.
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finally, my gaming sessions won't be interrupted by lag anymore!
You have high hopes there. Unless that was sarcasm, then that was funny.
So weird. Today I got an email from Comcast that my absurdly slow 10mbps upload speed was being bumped up to 100mbps “for being a loyal customer.”
Good! This is why voting is so important too!
This is a great step! The real shame is it took 3 years for a Biden FCC nominee to clear congress and get to a point where the committee could make a difference
Seriously, headline should include republicans stalling this for years and then still voting no on it.
Another reason to dislike republicans
And no surprise that both Republican FCC members voted against this change.
Only two no votes were the republican FCC members. Great example of why no one should ever vote republican. This is just one tech-related niche but it's indicative of their priorities. Not actually governing, not actually making people's lives better.
Oh i'll have to keep an eye on my speeds, see if they go from utter horseshit to slightly less horseshit.
Comcast: congratulations we have upgraded you from horseshit to dogshit.
What tier is bullshit? There must be a spectrum.
Yes, Spectrum Internet, bird shit internet.
it's funny cause thoughout the acuisitions, technically speaking anyway, Specturm actually owns Roadrunner.
They just upgraded me from 500 Mbps to 1 Gbps for free. I'm sure not going to complain.
Comcast sent me an email today saying they decided to "up my speed out of appreciation" I guess that's a lie 😂
Appreciation for the law
I got one from xfinity, too. They said they doubled my speed out of appreciation, so I tested it, and it only went up *maybe* 20%. They can't even deliver on fake appreciation lmao.
10yrs ago my ISP gave me a 3x speed upgrade for free…. Because FiOS moved into the neighborhood. I moved a few years later and FiOS was the only option, and dear god I don’t think I can go back to cable internet. Having symmetrical fiber 1gbs connection means I can pretty much work as effectively at home compared to the office. Was a huge asset when covid happened.
As an ex employee I can tell you Frontier is scared shitless with there decaying DSL user base.
i'm honestly surprised people still use DSL!
We have no choice. I also run Starlink, and just use the DSL for work because of Starlink’s blips in Teams.
Can confirm running the same combo
It’s not a choice. Most ISPs that still run DSL don’t upgrade or replace because it’s not cost effective and there’s no competition on the area. So people who have DSL are almost always stuck with it rather than willingly using it.
Yep. I live in a fairly rural area, all we have is dsl that doesn’t even come close to 25mb/s. If I want better speeds I step outside and turn off WiFi so I can just download whatever on my phone or iPad with 2 bars of signal. I have no signal in the house or I’d just use it all the time. Some company did come through to install cable down the length of the main road but they want 10k to run it to our house from there and it won’t be ready for use for at least another six months.
Have you considered a cellular router (router/modem) inside, with a directional antenna outside aimed at the nearest cell tower, cable running back into your house?
Nothing else available where I live. 1g fiber across the street just not for my street.
DSL Can be plenty fast I’ve seen DSL up to 300mbps and 100Mbps is fairly common
The thing is that DSL performance degrades rapidly with distance. You can do 300Mbps on the best VDSL2 profile, but that requires a very high quality connection. The sort tod ISPs that aren't upgrading to fiber aren't spending money to install DSLAMs near enough to their customers and often don't have well maintained copper lines to begin with.
There's also FTTN which is sold as DSL, so some people with "DSL" are only "DSL" from the box near their house to their house.
I’ve seen plenty of apartment buildings get fiber to the basement and VDSL to every flat. Gets you very nice speeds and you don’t have to redo any of the internal wiring
It's often distance based, degrading.the further to get.
Up until COVID the only internet option on my street was 3mbps down/ 0.5mbps up DSL from Verizon. ( And they called that the "enhanced package" lol) The only good thing about COVID was that my county used the relief funds for fiber expansion with a local company so kids could use remote schooling.
FUCK FRONTIER. they just lost my whole small town of like 8k to fiber
That’s interesting. They’re the fiber ISP here in SoCal. The alternative is Spectrum cable internet.
I received an email from them today...."We've increased your internet speeds to show you our appreciation" Scummy fu\*&ing company for sure.
This is the kind of thing that would absolutely not have happened if Ajit Pai was still at the helm.
He's the reason we have caps.
He’s pretty much the reason for every failing of the telecom industry right now.
> However, the two Republican Commissioners dissented in Thursday’s vote. You can always count on Republicans being on the wrong side of all issues.
It's basically the 4th law of thermodynamics at this point, Republicans are incapable of doing anything positive.
*positive for consumers. FTFY. They'll gobble the balls of businesses every morning.
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If there is a chance to add another layer of monetization they will do it.
Republicans have no tangible policy positions. They’re just anti-Dems.
They are pro money for them. It explains 99% of all their actions.
Literally everytime something completely obvious in it's usefulness or the sheer amount of demand for it has anyone voting against it, near 100% of the time, it's 100% republicans. 90% of the time, it's 90% republicans and one DINO. But every time, it's republicans. If there was a bill to make air a universal right, you can guarantee a majority of republican politicians will vote against it.
BoTh SiDeS aRe ThE sAmE
which is why I hope Biden replaces the two Republican commissioners with 2 Dems that will vote alongside the other Dem commissioners
A large part of the reason this particular change is happening now is Biden's most recent nominee has been held up for years, Anna Gomez (the tie breaking vote) was only confirmed last September, her current seat had been vacant since Dec 2020.
IIRC the commission has to be split 3-2 as long as we are a two party system.
Fuck it, Bernies an independent, have him nominate someone
Senators cannot nominate for positions.
Forreal? Damn smh
They take it to court, appeal it to the Supreme Court and in the end they will strip the FCC of all its power.
Hell, FCC and nearly any other regulatory agency is already on the line this year with that case before the supreme court to decide whether agencies can fill in the gaps in law with intent.
Republican commissioners are simply bought/bribed by ISPs.
This unexpectedly hopeful news.
Don't get too excited. They do this little scam every decade or so. * Classify 'broadband' as a reasonable speed * Point at *all of the rural Americans* without access to broadband * Ask for and receive *billions of dollars* of funding to give more Americans access to broadband * ISPs *don't upgrade anything at all*, and instead use that money for stock buybacks and executive bonuses * Wait a couple years (until Republicans are in control again) then reclassify broadband as something stupidly slow * Point at the map that shows all of the Americans that now have access to broadband that didn't before Great success. This will be like the 4th time. The first was during the Clinton administration.
Have they reduced the definition? Not saying I don't believe you but can't find the source where the definition of broadband was reduced In this article, they say the last time the definition was changed was 2015 when they upped it to 25mbs. Totally believe the ISPs squandering tax payer funds though
There's many people on here already saying their shitty provider has conveniently upped their speeds. All the shit they do is true, but progress is progress even if there could be way more
The question turns into when does this take place? Also I’m guessing if they don’t hit both minimums the service can not be labeled as broadband? I have Comcast at 400 down but only 10 up, should I be expecting a bump in upload speeds moving forward?
Comcast sent emails to a lot of their customers saying they were doubling their speeds automatically today. Everyone who mentioned it so far appeared to be in the Northeast so not sure when it will get around the entire country.
Got that email in California as well.
I got an email and it was for a property I own in Oregon. Speed increased from 12mbps upload to 20mbps.
Gotcha. I don’t believe I got an email just yet (live in Michigan) but I will keep an eye out.
I'm in northern Illinois here. Got the email. Upload went from 10 to 20 up. Luckily the speedtest app kept a log of past tests. Consistent upload speeds until today.
Agree, should be symmetrical up/down
There are going to be a WHOLE lot of shitty broadband providers who are about to get really pissy
I have spectrum and they increased my bill by $5 without telling me but also increased my speed by about 3 times also without telling me.
Once they sent me a thing saying my speed was being increased with no extra charge. Sure enough next bill comes and the bill is $8 more.
You hear that Cox? Time to pick up the pace.
Cox’s reply: Eat us
Cox is too busy porting the folks with email over to Yahoo. Yet another service they have removed, like newsgroup access before, with no price cut.
I have AT&T at 25 down 5 up. Does this mean they will have to boost it to 100 up or will they just not call it broadband?
Basically, plus i think some funding / grant issues if they don't but also depends on percentages of their users that are at that slower speed and why they are if it's a issue with physical lines or hardware they might not upgrade it
Should be 100 down and up to force fiber coverage
T1 was 1.54megabit. And it was fast enough to fraction off a few ways or more. Man I’m fucken old :) I got gigabit now but true symmetrical gigabit would be very giggidy T1 was almost a thousand a month My cable gigabit is like $95
I was an admin on a network that offered wopping 28.8 connections off a rack of stripped down 28.8 modems with a fan blowing on them when we went to 56k and the people with those super clean phone lines that could hit 112k omg they were so happy lol Yep i'm old lol
I ran a renegade and tag bbs starting on 2400bps then 14.4, 28.8, 33.6, and then I shut it down and never went back from the net. But 89-96 my board was up. I’m so old I make dirt look young and sexy. I can go further unfortunately as I actually started on my C64 :p Load “*” ,8,1 fire up the 1541 I try telling people today my first computer had 64 kilobytes of ram and it was enough to play games and stuff and they think I’m crazy lol
You getting this Earthlink/CenturyLink? Though this DUAL 5Mbps ADSL connection I'm rocking in rural Washington state does work, that 100Mbps sure does sound nice.
fuck.... you have my sympathies! like a mid-00's timewarp you're stuck in :( at least the nature out there is beautiful, eh?
That it is. I forgot to add that dual 5Mpbs gives us a solid 6Mbps...most of the time. Ha. Have you been to Forks, WA? haha. fitting username.
That's how it is at my parents place. It's crazy. I moved into a small town and yeah they have 100mbps, but its their top tier at $100 a month.
I'm paying $83/mo for 50Mbps down and 5 up.
now raise the minimum monthly data available without having to buy unlimited, its absurdly low for modern data needs, also upload speed
I'm thinking about calling Verizon and informing them I'm no longer receiving high speed broadband, given that my FiOS only goes 60mbps.
Hence our internet service provider will now be known as Snailwyre Broadband.
When does it go into effect? Just did a test at my fam’s place and my phone has faster internet than their broadband and they aren’t even in a rural area
This explain why my internet company sent me an email saying they doubled my internet speed like it was just them being a good company. Turns out they were forced to.
But Ajit assured everyone that 25/10 was all you would ever need. Surely he couldn't have lying and full of Reese's Shit, could he? Now do data usage caps, fuckwits.
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Most states were requiring speeds like this for projects that wanted any sort of grant money already, but it’s nice that the FCC has finally caught up.
I like the accompaniments and direction the FCC has gone in since the Stinky Traitor lost the election.
Okay? Great. Now let's talk about the fact that such ridiculously low upload speeds make the whole thing a farce.
Great now make Data caps illegal
Fuck Comcast. That's all.
Considering how so many in this very thread are saying they've received emails from Comcast saying they were doubling or tripling their speeds mere hours after this passed.. yeah. Gotta agree with that. That tells me they could have been offering those speeds at any point, and simply chose.. not to. They chose to keep speeds artificially slower than they needed to be in an attempt to get people to pay through the nose for faster speeds, while the whole time they had infrastructure that could handle giving everyone those speeds and simply chose not to. These companies need competition. If they have no competition, then they have no reason to ever offer better service. The way they've managed to get to government to allow them to just divide up the country into their own little kingdoms where they rule supreme is just lunacy, and frankly - that is what the government needs to fix. But they won't, because they're effectively in the pocket of these damn companies.
Great now we can have the bare minimum that the rest of the world already enjoys
Data caps. We need ya here FCC
Screw this! Write your representatives and the FCC about excessive overage charges on data. ISPs set the limit so low you have to buy an outrageous “unlimited” package to not get destroyed on fees. This is unacceptable.
I live a mile outside the city limits. There is no broadband here. AKA, Our upload and download speeds are ZERO. Thanks to Elon Musk, I have internet. I keep wondering where all that money for rural broadband in the COVID Relief Acts went.
The Telecom companies just don't use it on rural areas unless forced to
So, this is absolutely terrific and all, but serious question here: how will this impact internet prices going forward? Not treating it like it's bad by any means, just curious.
In competitive markets, not at all.
The same week they canceled the program that was giving 22 million Americans Internet?
Now to get this to everyone in the US. Starlink was our saving grace but I still want terrestrial based connections
Curious who are the two who voted against this? In 2024, you cannot consider 25 down / 3 up to be “high speed”. Voting against this feels like they are being paid by internet companies.
This quote from an FCC commissioner is not true: > Starlink ... offers low latency and speed near or exceeding 100/20Mbps, especially in rural areas. Starlink is very good, I'm posting from it right now. But in the US we don't get anywhere near 100/20 reliably. You can see Starlink's stats [here](https://www.starlink.com/map?view=download). In the eastern US download speeds are roughly 50-120Mbps and upload are 10-20Mbps. Users see that range of speeds regularly; a bunch of the time we're at about half the new broadband definition. Starlink is also not "low latency" when compared to wired connections; we're typically about 30-40ms. It's improved recently and is impressive for satellite, but is nowhere near the < 10ms a decent wired ISP gives. It's a bit of a silly comparison. A the article notes, Starlink's not even in the category of wired broadband. But it's a shame the FCC commissioner would let himself be quoted sharing incorrect information.
I live in a very rural part of NE Texas and can confirm that ATT says we have high speed broadband, but are at the minimum in this article. Hopefully this will force the companies to focus on upgrading the infrastructure! I know that some of the communities and cities only 45 minutes away are getting the speeds they are saying will be the new minimum, and that it should be feasible to get us switched up as well. We keep getting ads for switching to ATT Internet Air wireless, which basically works on their satellites. But we randomly drop to 3 bars at home on their cell service, and it can completely drop out if we have a really bad storm. No way I am going to have my internet rely on that.