No, they didn’t. They decided not to raise the definition of broadband from 100×20 Mbps up to 1Gps.
And that’s simply because 100Mbps is actually a lot of bandwidth. We just don’t have any killer applications that need more than 20Mbps. 4K streaming on Netflix, to pick one salient example, only requires 16Mbps. At 100Mbps you can download a 50GB game in just 80 minutes. Sure, it would be nice to have 1Gbps and download the game in 8 minutes, but the definition is about _minimum requirements_, not things that are _nice to have_.
As such the definition we have is actually a good one! If every American had broadband according to this definition we will have actually made real progress. Nobody would be stuck on DSL any more, let alone dialup.
The FCC is still giving grants to anyone who is installing actual broadband in unserved areas, which means anyone installing cable or fiber in areas that don’t have them. It’s just not requiring that every customer have 1Gbps service in order to qualify.
> No, they didn’t. They decided not to raise the definition of broadband from 100×20 Mbps up to 1Gps.
No, the 100/20Mbps definition was only adopted last year and is being kept for now (though you'll never guess who voted against adopting it and wanted to keep 25/3Mbps!).
The 1000/500Mbps definition that Carr's FCC is trying to eliminate was a long term goal, something that the US should strive for eventually, and therefore federal funding should preferentially go to solutions that can or could eventually provide those speeds.
Carr's proposed rules[1] go well beyond just the definition of high speed broadband, though:
- He wants a stricter reading of the statute that requires a report on the deployment of broadband, reading "whether advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion" as strictly referring to anyone making "incremental progress" on deployment, so the reports will shift from reporting coverage where broadband has actually been deployed to calling areas covered if anywhere in an area is working on deploying broadband there
- He also doesn't think "reasonable" access to broadband should include a consideration of the price of using that broadband, so wants to stop collecting pricing information. So long as someone is making incremental progress in an area that would make 100/20Mbps internet available to you at some price, you will now count as covered
- Other proposed changes around mobile speeds and school broadband I haven't been following.
Incidentally, even the 100/20Mbps definition seems at least potentially in danger, as the proposal is requesting comment on whether that's actually the definition they should be using in the future.
> The 1000/500Mbps definition that Carr's FCC is trying to eliminate was a long term goal, something that the US should strive for eventually, and therefore federal funding should preferentially go to solutions that can or could eventually provide those speeds.
Yes, that’s true. But don’t ignore their justification: the laws as passed by Congress say nothing of long term goals other than bringing everyone up to some minimum threshold. The FCC gets to define that threshold, but making up new goals on top of that is not actually supported by the law. Plus, with so much of the country installing fiber it’s already just happening automatically.
> He wants a stricter reading of the statute that requires a report on the deployment of broadband, reading "whether advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion" as strictly referring to anyone making "incremental progress" on deployment, so the reports will shift from reporting coverage where broadband has actually been deployed to calling areas covered if anywhere in an area is working on deploying broadband there
You almost have it right. They want to actually measure improvements in access rather than just the number of people with access. Sure, if the number of people with access goes up then the situation is getting better. But what if all of the improvement is because people are moving to denser areas to get better internet access? It makes complete sense to measure the actual geography of access in addition to just the number of people who can access broadband.
The report states clearly that they intend to base their analysis on the FCC’s Broadband Data Collection <https://www.fcc.gov/BroadbandData>, aka the National Broadband Map. They just want the report to measure improvements to the number of addresses served not just the number of people served.
They also point out that while the National Broadband Map has addresses of every household, it doesn’t actually have any information about the population living at those addresses. It still uses Census Districts to estimate that, assuming that every address in a district houses the same number of people. They’re going to keep using that same estimation method, probably for the foreseeable future.
> Incidentally, even the 100/20Mbps definition seems at least potentially in danger, as the proposal is requesting comment on whether that's actually the definition they should be using in the future.
As I’ve demonstrated, there is significant headroom in the current definition. Would someone with 40×10Mbps DSL (provided using two phone lines) be significantly disadvantaged over someone with 100×20Mbps cable? They’ll still be able to stream 4K television and send HD video. Few ISPs offer this service, but I used to get it from Sonic.net more than a decade ago. I had to jump through some ridiculous hoops to get two actual real functioning telephone lines wired into the same apartment, but it was great. Even 25×3Mbps enables you to stream 4K television and participate in video conferences. The constraints on the quality of that video conference are real, but are they enough to handicap people? Yea, I think so, but it’s clearly a judgement call.
Furthermore there’s no indication that they actually want to change that definition immediately. Agencies are more or less required to invite comment from the public on all of their regulatory decisions:
> IV. A. 18. Broadband Speeds on Which to Report. The discussion in the 2024 Report focused on the availability of fixed broadband at speeds of 100/20 Mbps.⁴³ We propose to again focus our service availability discussion on fixed broadband at speeds of 100/20 Mbps and seek comment on this proposal.
the USDA, which gives broadband grants, considers an area "served by broadband" if there is a 2 megabit provider in the jerrymandered area. This includes cellular, even if using a fixed or hotspot link would be cost prohibitive.
Look at the coverage maps for rural areas with trees, and you'll see an interesting pattern. They used multi-pathing to their jerrymandering benefit. checkerboard pattern means the USDA says "no grant for you!"
i have no idea when or if the definition changed to 20mbit. there are people here still served by 6mbit - on a good day.
That used to be the case, but it isn’t any more. Check out the new broadband map: <https://broadbandmap.fcc.gov/home>; it goes by exact addresses rather than census districts or whatever it used to be.
Please re-read what i said. i said USDA, not FCC. As i tried to start a WISP and could not get any federal funding for it because of the gerrymandering. this was within the last 10 years.
It turns out the USDA changed it. February. of 2024. not 2015 (or whatever). So my information was good until about 18 months ago.
I know it often seems like i have no idea what i am talking about, but i very specifically said USDA.
note: they also changed it so cellular no longer counts, amazing:
> Sufficient access to broadband, as defined in the NOFO published on February 21, 2024, is 25 megabits per second (Mbps) downstream and 3 Mbps upstream (25/3). Mobile/cellular and satellite services will not be considered in making the determination of sufficient access to broadband. Additionally, areas with current broadband service from unlicensed wireless facilities, or have an enforceable commitment associated with unlicensed wireless facilities, are eligible for funding under this notice.
here's the old section (from 2018, you're not paying me to prove exactly the numbers i said, which are older by a year or two):
§ 1738.53 Eligible service area.
(a) A service area may be eligible for assistance as follows:
(1) For loan and loan/grant combinations, the proposed funded service area is completely contained within a rural area. For loan guarantee applications, the proposed funded service area must be contained within an area with a population of 50,000 or less, as defined in 7 U.S.C. 1991(a)(13);
(2) For loan/grant combinations, at least 90 percent of the households in the proposed service area must not have access to broadband service. For loans and loan guarantees, at least 50 percent of the households in the proposed service area must not have access to broadband service;
(3) No part of the proposed funded service area has three or more *incumbent service providers*; and
(4) No part of the proposed funded service area overlaps with the service area of current RUS borrowers or grantees with outstanding obligations. Notwithstanding, after October 1, 2020, the service areas of grantees that are providing service that is *less than 10 Mbps downstream or less than 1 Mbps upstream* will be considered unserved unless, at the time of the proposed application, the grantee has begun to construct broadband facilities that will meet the minimum acceptable level of service established in § 1738.55.
§ 1738.58; (c) Applicants will be asked to remove areas determined to be ineligible from their proposed funded service area. The application will then be evaluated based on what remains if the resultant service territory is de minimis in change. Otherwise, the Applicant will be requested to provide additional information to the Agency relating to the ineligible areas, such as updated pro forma financials. If the Applicant fails to respond, the application may be returned.
please note the starred parts, as well as 1738.58 (c) which explicitly says that it's gunna be gerrymandered.
Ok, apparently the USDA also provides their own separate grants for broadband deployment. How are their weird rules relevant to this discussion of the FCC’s grants program?
I agree that it would be really nice if it were symmetric. But remember, the definition is for a service that isn’t handicapping people, not for what would be nice to have. Maybe in 10 years we can make it symmetric.
No, I completely disagree. Remember that the whole point is to define the _minimum_ level of service at which people can reliably access “advanced telecommunications capability”. Here’s the definition:
> The term ‘advanced telecommunications capability’ is defined, without regard to any transmission media or technology, as high-speed, switched, broadband telecommunications capability that enables users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications using any technology.
By this definition, 4K video is a reasonable metric to judge whether a broadband service qualifies as an “advanced telecommunications capability” or not. Since the major streaming services all use less than 20Mbps to serve up 4K television, 1000Mbps is clearly not necessary. It certainly is nice to have, but it’s not _necessary_.
I think that fiber access will continue to grow as long as we remove the regulatory barriers that hamper it. Permitting is a big one. Cities often require separate permits for every street, often for every block!
If you have to install anything, then installing fiber is the obvious choice. It has immense headroom for the future; fiber optic cables that carry a gigabit today could easily carry 100,000× that just by buying fancier equipment to install at both ends. The upper limit is currently hundreds of terabits per second, and it goes up every year. We’re nowhere near the theoretical limitations of optical communications technologies. I think that ultimately this means that fiber will win out over coax eventually. But coax has headroom still, and there’s no reason to tear it all out where it’s already in use.
We should increase competition by abolishing local monopolies, but that’s something we should do no matter what level of service we adopt as the definition of broadband.
Most streaming services have extremely bit-starved encodings for their 4k streams and fall far short of the quality that a proper 4k video has.
They are also doing their encode much slower than real-time so they can achieve higher compression rates.
The definition also says "originate and receive" so you need to look at both upload and download bandwidth.
4k also isn't high enough quality for many use cases like VR.
Households also contain multiple devices, so just a single video stream isn't sufficient.
I would argue that by that definition they should be setting the forward-looking threshold as sufficient to both upload and download multiple live 8k video streams simultaneously.
> The definition also says "originate and receive" so you need to look at both upload and download bandwidth.
Yes, I agree that a symmetric definition would be better. The definition we have is pretty good though. The 20Mbps of upload is enough for 4K video streaming. It would be nice to have some more head room so that more than one person in a household could stream at full resolution at the same time, but the market has already solved that problem. Every market where 100×20Mbps broadband is available also makes higher upload speeds available.
> 4k also isn't high enough quality for many use cases like VR.
This is not a good argument. VR relies on local rendering of 3D assets, not streaming video.
> Households also contain multiple devices, so just a single video stream isn't sufficient.
100Mbps has headroom for, let me calculate here, 100/16=6 whole 4K video streams. If your whole family needs more than six simultaneous 4K video streams to live then your family has problems.
> …sufficient to both upload and download multiple live 8k video streams simultaneously.
This is just dumb. 99% of computers can’t even play 8K video; they need specialized hardware just to decode 4K video in real time and the hardware cannot handle 8K video. The cameras for it don’t exist, and neither do the displays. And finally, the FCC definition of broadband is about raising the bandwidth floor, not raising the ceiling. The ceiling is already high enough by far; I can get 50Gbps service at my house if I wanted to pay for it.
But also 8K video would still use less than 100Mbps of bandwidth!
I disagree. I would argue that most people just don’t produce enough data to have a huge need for faster uploads. You would have to produce more than 200 gigabytes of data per day before your backups would take longer than a day to finish:
$ units 20Mbps*24hrs gigabytes
* 216
If you’re an entertainer then you might record more than 200GB of raw video per day, but most people aren’t. You wouldn’t even need a faster connection to _become_ an entertainer, even if you soon wanted one. You could stream 4K video of your antics all day and it would be less than 200GB.
And remember that the definition is about the _minimum_ bandwidth necessary to participate in society, not what you need to be at the peak of your entertainment career. People who do need higher speeds can and will pay extra for them; the FCC definition is not about limiting what products are available. It doesn’t even require anyone to have 100×20Mbps service. The FCC is just trying to get us to a point where we can say that 100% of Americans have _access_ to that level of service, even if they have _subscribed_ to a lower level of service to save money. Since 45 million Americans don’t even have access to 100×20Mbps service we’re still pretty far away from that.
Average household is a family, who arent streaming 4k video or uploading huge backups like i do, and 20Mbps would be fine for me. They typically watch netflix and youtube and doomscroll.
> At 100Mbps you can download a 50GB game in just 80 minutes.
100 Mbps is 100x as slow as my internet connection. I would really rather download a giant game in less than a minute, or even a few minutes, than more than an hour.
Of course you want it to be faster rather than slower. But waiting an hour to play your new game is not a handicap. Not compared to dialup, where that same download would take more than 80 days, if it finishes successfully at all:
Actually it’s mostly because we’ve spent the last few decades turning math into compression. Starting with MP3s in 1991 there’s a whole history of amazing improvements to audio and video codecs. We’ve made extremely rapid progress even though the process has frequently been weighed down by ridiculous software patents.
But that said, there’s nothing stopping video streaming services from offering higher bitrates if they think it’s worth it. After all, the FCC standard for broadband is 100Mbps, not 16Mbps. That’s a lot of headroom if you want better quality.
It really is mind blowing to see how much smaller a file with newer compression can be. Had to convert some videos to a codec that would work on my kids chromebook recently. What was a 300 meg video ballooned up to 2 gigs. One of the videos was 130 megs that jumped up to 3.2 gigs. Time lapse video, so I'm sure it had some of the sweet spots for compression. Still, was dramatic how much a modern codec can get that down.
> We just don’t have any killer applications that need more than 20Mbps.
Sure we do, but large ISPs demand their cut.
Backups. File transfers. Large games. Live 4K video chat. Language models. CAD models. Cloud-based spyware, like smarthome/car/phone/whatever telemetry, or security cameras.
> 4K streaming on Netflix, to pick one salient example, only requires 16Mbps.
So only the living room gets 4K, but family members can't all watch their own 4K streams in their own rooms? Bobby talks during the show, Sally giggles at everything, and Timmy wants everything to be dark while mom & dad want the whole room bright and quiet. Thanks, ISP, for forcing the family together!
Remember, we are talking about minimums here, the least common denominator. At 100×20Mbps you are not handicapped like you are if you are stuck on dialup.
Live 4K video chat needs less than 20×20Mbps, but remember also that most people don't have 4K televisions or 4K cameras. Even gamers mostly don’t have 4K monitors! The most recent Steam hardware survey <https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...> shows that just 5% of gamers have a 4K or better display. 55% have 1920×1080. I don’t have similar statistics for televisions or webcams.
The other uses you list require even less bandwidth. Nothing about a language model requires bandwidth. You either interact with it remotely, at a few kilobits per second, or you run it locally using no bandwidth at all. Large games might take an hour to download instead of minutes. Waiting for an hour is not going to handicap you. Most people shouldn’t even pay extra for that. Backups need some bandwidth, but only in proportion to the amount of data you have generated. Most people don’t create hundreds of gigabytes of new files that need to be backed up remotely; the largest files most people create are photographs and videos of family events, vacations, etc. These files can be backed up with no difficulty at 20Mbps.
> So only the living room gets 4K, but family members can't all watch their own 4K streams in their own rooms?
Pay attention and don’t be an idiot! The FCC definition of broadband is 100Mbps down and 20Mbps up. Netflix tops out at 16Mbps down, so those 100Mbps can supply 100/16=6 whole 4K television streams easily. If your family of six people is sitting in six different rooms watching six different television shows then your family has a problem. That problem is not a lack of bandwidth.
Another side of the coin is no one will ever serve you content at 1gbps. It just won’t happen. I get 500mb down on speedtests and netflix et al regularly throttle me to like 144p quality with constant buffering. I download a game on steam and it throttles to nothing for hours after making some initial good progress.
It’s quite rare for the average website to actually hit 1Gbps, that’s certainly true. Nobody makes webpages big enough to hit that speed, or even for that top speed to matter.
But I can download games from Steam at approximately full speed, for example. I subscribe to Ziply Fiber, and they certainly don’t throttle their users or oversubscribe their bandwidth. That said, there are other factors at play as well: can you even maintain 1Gbps to your _hard drive_? Can your computer decompress the downloaded data as fast as it comes in? Steam will slow down the download to match the speed at which it can decompress the data and write it to your disk.
Fiber just came through my area. They offer up to 3Gbps for less than I was paying for Comcast ~500Mbps asymmetric and for more money I can get 5Gbps... but I just signed up for the 500Mbps symmetric and pocket the difference monthly, because what the hell am I going to do with even 1Gbps? My Wifi can't 5Gbps, and all but two network devices in my house use Wifi to get to the internet. My NVMes can nominally do it, but it takes everything firing on all cylinders to actually achieve that. I've still got some spinning rust that is pretty full up at even the 500Mbps. I do run backups to AWS, but that runs in the nighttime anyhow and could still finish a complete non-incremental backup in 4-5 hours at full speed, and I have incrementals anyhow. Sure, the game per month I download from Steam would be ready in 4 minutes instead of 8, but, seriously, how much am I willing to pay for those four minutes? It's not like I'm staring at the progress bar at that point anyhow.
500Mbps is already enough for me to tailscale my house network up and have every single member of my family accessing the house Jellyfin server remotely simultaneously, which is not a realistic amount of load.
100Mbps down is still plenty for most people. 20Mbps up is definitely making some things annoying but most people will still be fine. It's a fine definition of minimum service for "broadband".
even spinning rust should be able to handle ~700 MBit. an SSD is generally on the order of 3 gigabits - even cheap ones can manage 300megabytes per second, which is on the order of 3Gb/s.
Sure, but remember that the disk bandwidth is the _uncompressed_ data. By definition it’ll be at least 2× larger than the compressed data you downloaded, if not more. Steam downloads are commonly disk or cpu limited on 1Gbps connections.
i'll concede you're probably right. In the late 1990s i had a Promise ATA 100mbit IDE card, and i swore that someday, i would have an IDE connection to the internet. Now, my CPE is called a terminal, but it's some proprietary cable from the terminal to the router. And my upstream isn't quite 100mbit (on starlink; it's about 40-50. On at&t 4g LTE it was 30-65mbit/s upstream).
so i'm still not at IDE speeds, yet. maybe on my cellphone in the metro i get that speed, though...
It is really ridiculous how fast our connections are these days, when you stop and actually think about it. Also pretty ridiculous how slow they used to be!
Interesting. Are ISPs known to throttle steam or something. I’ve noticed that steam almost never downloads at the same speed of get doing a speed test. I’ve noticed it many times through out my life, though admittedly I’ve been stuck either way the same ISP across many states.
Steam also extracts while it's downloading and will slow download speeds if there is a healthy buffer of things to extract. If you're downloading a game with thousands of small files to an HDD or even just a cheap SSD chances are you'll be throttled by your own computer's throughput rather than your Internet connection.
Some ISP throttle sustained download, which explains having high test speeds and initially fast downloads that slow down with time. So it might not be Steam per se that they’re throttling, though it’s not impossible.
And that’s simply because 100Mbps is actually a lot of bandwidth. We just don’t have any killer applications that need more than 20Mbps. 4K streaming on Netflix, to pick one salient example, only requires 16Mbps. At 100Mbps you can download a 50GB game in just 80 minutes. Sure, it would be nice to have 1Gbps and download the game in 8 minutes, but the definition is about _minimum requirements_, not things that are _nice to have_.
As such the definition we have is actually a good one! If every American had broadband according to this definition we will have actually made real progress. Nobody would be stuck on DSL any more, let alone dialup.
The FCC is still giving grants to anyone who is installing actual broadband in unserved areas, which means anyone installing cable or fiber in areas that don’t have them. It’s just not requiring that every customer have 1Gbps service in order to qualify.