Chair proposes 100Mbps national standard and an evaluation of broadband prices.

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.

  • ramielrowe@lemmy.worldEnglish
    62·
    1 year ago

    I’ll second this. 4k at 25 mbps might be OK for a sitcom or drama without much action or on-screen movement. But as soon as there’s any action, it’s gonna be a pixelated mess. 25 mbps is kinda the sweet spot for full fidelity 1080p, and I’d much rather watch that than “4K”.

    • Galluf@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      The benefit of the 4k is that you get HDR. On a good TV, that’s far more noticable than the resolution improvement and certainly worth it.

      But then you’re looking at 60-100 Mbps bit rate for good quality (50-80 GB file size for most movies).

      • ramielrowe@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 year ago

        Here are the bitrates Youtube suggests for uploading content: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en#zippy=%2Cbitrate

        If you want full fidelity for all types of content, these are the bitrates you need. Yes, modern encodings can handle more fidelity at lower bitrates. But, I guarantee these numbers are for modern encodings. Older school encodings like UHD BluRay range anywhere from 92 to 144 Mbps.

        Streaming platforms want to stream at the absolute lowest bitrate possible, and they absolutely compromise quality for lower bitrates to save on bandwidth.

        • Ocelot@lemmies.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          It would have taken a few seconds for you to double check and see how incorrect that is. Yes, youtube absolutely accepts very high bitrate uploads to their platform, however once they process and store the video it is highly compressed, as with every single streaming platform out there.

          My current laptop won’t play 8k 60 due to hardware limitations but I just tested with 4k60, the highest res youtube video I could find and I went back to my firewall to restrict my global bandwidth to 25/3 mbit/sec. As you can see from the screenshot and debug information it is playing 100% fine in its native res at 60 fps. Note in the screenshot that my connection speed is currently limited to about 20k kbits/sec and that it dropped a whopping 8 entire frames. It drops just as many frames on startup streaming if I uncap the connection.

          If my hardware was able to do it there is absolutely more than enough bandwidth there to stream it in 8k given that 8k should be 4x 4k streams.

          Side note, I even uploaded this image in less than a second on that “too slow” 3mbps restriction.

          • ramielrowe@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            1 year ago

            First, let’s assume we’re all intelligent people here and not be condescending.

            I am not saying it’s not possible to view high resolution content at 25 mbps. I am saying that certain content just can’t encode at full fidelity at 25 mbps. In my experience, high action scenes with tons of entropy to encode do not compress well. And those scenes degrade and become muddy or pixelated at lower bitrates. Do you need it for the entire stream? No. But sadly, to save on bandwidth many streaming services also severely limit how much buffering their clients will do.

            Even all this said. We’re talking about 10’s of megabits of difference. Significant portions of the world have managed to offer gigabit internet to practically everyone in their jurisdiction. And yet, we’re here in the dark ages with 25/3. And sure, you could say “American has significantly more rural areas, those customers are hard to serve.” But, I’ve got family in coal-country West Virginia that have gigabit fiber. There are no technical hurdles. These companies just don’t want to upgrade their infrastructure.

            • Ocelot@lemmies.worldEnglish
              1·
              1 year ago

              Sorry if it seems like I’m being an asshole about it, but spreading bad information is just a major pet peeve of mine.

              The point is, the vast majority of internet customers are more than fine with the current 25/3. I’d wager that the majority of people could be throttled down to 10 mbps and not even notice unless they actually ran a speedtest. I can not find any stream or any piece of content anywhere on the internet that would be inaccessible in a reasonable fashion at 25 mbps. There is absolutely no difference in the experience or access to content on the internet at higher tiers, and there is absolutely no reason for the FCC to step in and redefine a standard if the current one is perfectly fine. I hate ISPs as much as everyone else but I don’t want to see everyone demanding higher bandwidth when what they actually need is a focus on reliability and latency. If 25 mbps is all you can get where you are then that probably means that you are just barely getting a signal from your ISP, which means you are likely to be dropping packets left and right which will undoubtedly make your connection terrible. Mandating and demanding that your ISP increase your bandwidth will only serve to make this issue far worse than it is.

              “Everyone should have access to 100 megabit internet” - This statement is overwhelmingly not useful. “Everyone should have access to internet with 99.9% reliability and average latency under 50ms” - This is what we actually need