FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric From 25Mbps to 100Mbps

Been hearing on the radio all kinds of Comcast ads like "we've raised our internet speeds for free!" I knew there was something else at play.

I'm loving my t mobile 5g gateway in my area. No packet loss, ping around 50, and my last game download held over 200Mbps the entire time for a flat rate of $30 a month. Works a lot better than the cable net I had.
- What's the data cap?
  
  For shit Comcast it is 1TB which is ridiculously low.
  
  Then they also completely lie to your face about your metrics to make it look like you are always constantly almost at the 1TB cap.
  
  My mom in America just had xfinity installed last fall at her house. She barely uses the internet besides web shopping, articles, and some Netflix. Every month she was somehow at 950-980GB. New WiFi password so there isn't an intrusion, her computer was fine, there is no way she is using that much. Comcast just lies to your face to higher data caps. Data caps for internet should be illegal as it is.
- I also have T-Mobile 5G. I once had the luxury of being able to buy fiber 1G up/down before I moved to a new area and that was the absolute best of any ISP I've ever had. Now my only real option with a physical connection is Xfinity copper that was offering 200mbps down 10 mbps up for just $50/mo* terms and conditions apply. $50 is the promotional price for this offer. After one year this offer will expire. Then every year id have to field a call from their promotional dept. offering a 100mbps increase to my speeds for just $5 more per month rather than losing the promotional price and the bill costing $80 with no increase. The straw that broke the camel's back was an attempt to charge an extra $5 a month for using autopay with a debit card. I could save that fee by switching to using my bank's routing number. So I told Comcast 🖕and switched.
  
  My favorite story though is when an Xfinity rep called me to ask about who provides my cell phone service. When I told them that i use Mint mobile and pay $20/mo for 20GB of data or whatever it was at the time, they just straight up told me, "Oh gotcha. Yeah, we can't compete at that price." Then hung up 😂
  
  My only real gripe with T-Mobile so far is that if your price is accurate, then I'm paying an extra $15/mo just based on location despite there being no physical difference in our connection. Also i don't like that I'm unable to do any port forwarding on T-Mobile so it prevents me from running my Jellyfin server and PiHole from home and being able to use it anywhere.
- Threads like this make me cherish my symmetrical gigabit fiber connection all the more.
  
  I hear we'll be getting 2 gigabit in the near future, too.
I’d argue that the main driver for all of this is the increased rollout of fiber. Companies like AT&T started broadly rolling out gigabit plans for what people were paying for sub 50 megabit cable plans. And the lines handled neighborhood network congestion better.

Comcast has to figure out how to be competitive, or they are going to get their asses handed to them.

AT&T and Comcast are both terrible companies with horrible customer service, but fiber is always going to be better than copper.
- I was hoping Starlink would also push traditional providers to be better, but it hasn't gotten its shit together well enough yet to be a real threat. Should have known better than to think Musk would be helpful.
- Except fragility
Nah, they’ve been doing that for years. In the two years since I first got my service at my house I went from 200gig to 800gig with no price increase. It’s p SOP these days when network upgrades take place in your area.
- 800gig? Can I come live with you?

Fuck that, instead of making them increase their imaginary "up to" numbers, make them advertise contractually guaranteed minimums. Id rather have a 25 mb minimum over a 100 mb maximum that usually sits around 8 mb.

When I bought internet services and colocated with major carriers every contract came with a Quality of Service rider that stipulated guaranteed quality and quantity of service. If my metrics fell below those minimums I had recourse. But, I could not extend that to my customers because they were using a shared resource I was providing. In general, though, I agree that there should be a QOS with every user connection.

and 20Mbps for upload

What we actually care about.

100mbps symmetric should be minimum standard. 100mbps down with 10mbps up is worse than remote islands with mud huts. Seriously, I was on a Pacific island that looked like what an after hurricane photo op does, and they had direct access to the fiber cables. So gigabit symmetric internet ONTs glued to the side of huts for a few bucks a month.

100Mb/s is still pretty abysmal.

A 4x increase for download and a 7x increase requirment for upload.

That's a pretty solid improvement, honestly. They also have plans on whne to increase it to 1Gbps down/500Mbps up, so it seems like they are taking it seriously.
- It’s long overdue and gigabit should be standard
- my third world country's internet has a minimum of 100mbps on most internet plans in the cities.
  
  100mbps in the supposed best country in the world is shit, no matter how higher it is than 2003 standards.
lol I've never had anything over 12Mb/s. Currently have 8Mb/s, which costs roughly half than what I use to pay for 500kb/s

I would love to have 100Mb/s. Hell even half that.
- Satellite?
- It's interesting. I have a remote place (not where I live) in the least populated, podunkest county in the state (which is saying something). And we were still able to get fibre and 50Mbps out there (and it could be higher, but not really worth the extra money since it's rarely used).
  
  Still within a couple hours of a big city, though. Guessing you're further away than that, or something?
- That’s enough to watch exactly one 1080p 30fps stream on YouTube and literally nothing else.
100Mb/s is 800Mbps. This is 25Mbps to 100Mbps so 3.125mb/s to 8.33mb/s
- Mbps = Mb/s = Megabits per second.
  
  MBps = MB/s = Megabytes per second.
  
  The p is just the /. It’s the capital or lowercase B that makes the difference.
- 3.125MB/s to 12.5MB/s
  
  He is right though on megabits to megabytes. Internet speed is advertised in bits/s where files and transfer speeds are usually shown in software as megabytes/s

Cool, now make them use bytes as the system of measurement and we'll be on to something.

I fear that will only happen when storage manufacturers are forced to use 1024 bytes per KB like everyone else.

In fairness it's a very longstanding tradition that serial transfer devices measure the speed in bits per second rather than bytes. Bytes used to be variable size, although we settled on eight a long time ago.
- 1024 bytes per KB
  
  Technically, it's 1000 bytes per KB and 1024 bytes per KiB. Hard drive manufacturers are simply using a different unit.
- Base 10 is correct and more understandable by humans. Everyone uses it except Windows and old tools. macOS, Android (AOSP), etc.

Altice (Optimum) took this opportunity to cut upload speeds from 35mbps to 20 under the guise of the "free upgrade". You want your old upload speeds back? Oh that's their most expensive tier now.

I'm dropping them, it was too unreliable for work from home. I pay twice as much now for fios
The "upgrade" they're speaking of is to the cars of all the executives?
Same for my "XFinity" (Comcast) service. Literally the only plan with more than 20 up is the most expensive tier with 1200/35. Sadly, it has been that way for several years... but this year they had no choice but to jack up all rates across the board so the most expensive tier is now $30 more expensive ($90 -> $120). No other competition so... that's that.

I care more for stability and low latency, not so much speed.

Offering me a faster cellular or satellite connections doesn't interest me.

There are features of IPv6 that would help there. I actually think pushing that to be rolled out widely is more important than 1Gbps connections.
What about cable
- He’s a mid Deadpool villain
- Not an option for everyone

*cries in Australian*

100Mbps is still very slow. Much better than 25Mbps, but still slow.

I have symmetric 1Gbps and do a LOT of data transfer (compared to 99.99% of people). And even then I rarely really would need or even notice more than 100Mbps.

For most people, in the real world, why is 100Mbps "very slow"?
- Because downloading large files takes hours instead of minutes
- Because downloading GTA V takes 2 1/2 hours at 100Mbps, and 14 minutes at 1Gbps.
It's amazing how much our views change with time. My dad was definitely a super early adopter of cable when it became available in our area, if I recall it was 16 Mbps which was unreal to me in 2002. I made do with 5 Mbps in uni and it was totally usable.

But now, I've had 1Gbps for years and wow it's so different, changes your habits too. I don't hoard installed games as much, I can pull them down in minutes so why keep something installed if I'm not going to use it?
- I remember thinking, “How am I ever going to fill this 100MB hard drive? That’s so much space!” That was some time around 1997, I think.

My parents pay like 40 dollars per month for 1Mb down and like .2 Mb up

Shit, that should legitimately be illegal.
Do they also have to feed the pigeons carrying the data packets?

Aww, that's cute.

-posted from my 768k $80/mo broadband.

I'd like to see a big government push to provide municipal services in every single metro area and extend it by whatever means into rural communities.

Xfinity keeps raising rates, I'm paying more now for just internet than the cost of basic cable, internet + digital voice was back in the 00s. While around 800 down, it's still only about 40 something up, and has been like that for years and years.

I think we desperately need competition and if the government were to provide it, that'd be just fine.

But only 20 ̶d̶o̶w̶n̶ up !!

!! :-(

up*
It really does suck, where I live the base plan gives you 300mbps down (which I know is pretty fast) but you are limited to 10mbps up. As much as they tout their speeds you'll only get them if you pay top dollar.
- Sounds like Spectrum where I live, on the bright side our 300 down is usually closer to 350 down, but also their 10 up is usually closer to 8. Meanwhile you have to dig to find the upload speeds when you sign up, even though they have the download speeds plastered everywhere. Honestly, there should probably be a rule that ISPs can't list download speeds without upload speeds right next to it.

Here I am getting 5KB/s in California 😏

Where are you? I’ve lived in California my whole life and have had faster speeds than that since 1998.
- I was kidding. I get 900+ Mbps on my phone while I only get about 400 max on my desktop at home. I live north of San Diego

I'm sitting here fine at 30Mbps. Can have two streams no problem.

I went from a 1.5/1 Gbps fibre connection down to a 20/10 Mbps when I moved. There is a MASSIVE difference. Rural internet is dog shit and no one cares
- I honestly believe that is because rural areas are almost always represented by republicans, voted in by majority republican voters. both groups of which are extremely disinclined of making the entirety of human knowledge easily and quickly accessible, because then people might see how much things are better in other countries and start asking questions to their federal representatives.
Your download speed being fast or slow doesn't mean the servers hosting the data you're accessing or the DNS servers between you and that server are going to feed you data at that speed.
- Game stores like Steam and GOG can provide download speeds of up to 1 Gbps or more, also torrents have no speed limits, it depends on the number of seeders
Your connection would not allow streaming one Blu-ray quality video stream, and good luck doing anything else in the connection while that is happening.

If your work sent you a 10gb file and you needed to send it back, it would take you 3 hours to do that. (With a functionally useless connection otherwise while downloading and uploading the file)

Downloading a popular game like baldurs gate 3 would take just under 9 hours.

Downloading it twice (to play with your spouse or kids) + updates, and then watching Netflix (which will cut into your download speed) while you wait for it download would toil away a weekend.

Nevermind the fact that slow Internet literally wastes away your life as you spend more micro moments just staring at blank and partially loaded websites.