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
    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