
FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds - cmurf
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/fcc-report-finds-almost-no-broadband-competition-at-100mbps-speeds/?amp=1
======
toomanybeersies
I used to ask why anyone would ever need 100 Mbps, until I got 100 Mbps. Then
I said the same about gigabit, until I got gigabit.

Now I've moved from New Zealand, with its amazing internet infrastructure, to
Australia, where I'm lucky to get 10 Mbps, and it keeps dropping out. I
couldn't even download a folder from Dropbox last night because my connection
was too slow and flaky.

It should be the priority for governments on all levels, from town halls up to
parliament/congress/whoever is at the top, to improve internet infrastructure
to at least 100 Mbps. This is especially important for less populated areas if
they don't want to wither and die out in the information economy.

What the USA needs is a grassroots movement to improve internet
infrastructure. 120 years ago, telecommunications pioneers used barbed wire
fences to build their own telephone infrastructure [1], this needs to happen
again for the internet, but telecom companies apparently block this from
happening.

[1] [https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-
telephone-...](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-telephone-
lines-homesteaders-prairie-america-history)

~~~
MrBuddyCasino
What can you do with 1gb that you couldn‘t do with 100mb? I got 50mb and for
the first time can‘t think of a reason to upgrade.

~~~
lostmsu
At those speeds, its nice to start thinking about decentralization. At a GB
speed, your network is about as fast as a typical HDD. So whatever you store
on an HDD can now be twice as fast to load if your friend has the same thing.

It would actually be way better, than HDD, because you could do smaller
requests. Hard drives take about 10ms to respond to a random access. Your
friends could have the thing on SSD or even cached in memory. So you'll get a
significant speed up.

------
kimmel
I am currently out in the sticks in the U.S. near a major interstate highway.
I have one option for wired internet which is DSL. The max speed is 5Mbps down
and 0.5Mbps up. I have a choice between 2 wireless companies that will gladly
lock me into a 2 year contract at ~$100 a month with a bandwidth cap of
200-300 GB a month. I have asked around and it has been this way for ~10 years
and the local ISP has no intention of an infrastructure upgrade. I check the
broadbandnow website every month and there are no new options. This is the
free market most of the people living in rural America deal with. I previously
lived in a major city and had 100Mbps down and 30Mbps up with no data caps.

Now think about how slow that is. I have to wait for Youtube to buffer up and
Netflix/Hulu were so unusable I canceled my service. Watching anything live
only works at the lowest possible resolution. VOIP is completely unreliable
and gaming is spotty at best. The last time I had internet options this slow
was the end of the 90s. Using census data there are 10,000+s of people out
here dealing with this garbage level service.

The U.S. government defines broadband as 25Mbps down and 3Mbps upload at a
minimum. I currently do not have broadband internet.

~~~
trevyn
What speed is your LTE?

~~~
kimmel
According to a chart of the local LTE mobile internet options the max speed is
10Mbps. The fast test on my phone just reported the max speed as 1.9Mbps.

------
rhino369
43% with less than two choices for 25mbit is more concerning. 25mbit is around
what you'd need for a family of four without being bandwidth crunched all the
time.

~~~
mhays
I'm curious why you think 25 mbps is what you'd need for a family of four? Is
there some sort of data out there for this?

Netflix states you need 3.5 mbps for SD, 5.0 mbps for HD.[0] With a family of
four, does this means everyone could be watching HD Netflix, and do various
other browsing simultaneously, and still be under 25mbps? If so, wouldn't
25mbps be far above what a family of four would need "without being bandwidth
crunched all the time"? (Assuming that HD video would be the most data-
intensive thing) Especially since, likely more often than not, everyone in the
house will not be streaming HD video simultaneously.

The reason why I state this is because, while I get more speed is always
better, we seem to often state X mbps is the bare minimum that should be
achieved, but never say why. It makes it seem we are letting the perfect, or
great, be the enemy of the good in some scenarios. For instance, if 10, 15, or
20 mbps is perfectly fine for most households, then shouldn't we use those
numbers instead?

[0]:
[https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306](https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306)

~~~
woodruffw
> Assuming that HD video would be the most data-intensive thing

I think this is the wrong assumption to make. I have a 30mbps-ish plan right
now, and I can slow my apartment's connection down to a crawl by initiating a
large download.

25mbps might be enough for a family of four whose connections are _consistent_
, but I'd wager that the average home's traffic is more on the bursty side.

~~~
rhino369
That could be solved with better QoS on the router right?

Obviously a download from a good server will saturate a 100mbps line, but so
what? Other than video games and massive file backups, 25mbit is fairly fast.
I pay for faster, but it's only a marginal improvement.

~~~
woodruffw
Better QoS on consumer routers would definitely help, but it's not a panacea
-- ballooning website sizes also lead to bursty network conditions, and I
wouldn't be surprised if my router's QoS is configured to prioritize HTTP(S)
connections. Same goes for automatic updates.

Edit: I meant to add this:

We have the ability to provide (or at least develop) 100mbps connections to
the vast majority of Americans, and we recognize that Internet transfers
aren't getting any smaller. It's good to look at ways to improve the status
quo (e.g., QoS), but we should also be looking to change the status quo
itself.

~~~
mhays
Your edit is essentially the point of my original post. Yes, if we can get
100mbps for the vast majority of Americans, that would be awesome. But, if the
vast majority of Americans would be fine right now with 10-15-20mbps, wouldn't
it be better to analyze our national broadband capabilities based on that
benchmark? From what I understand, 100mbps is overkill, so why use that as a
benchmark?

I come at this with the thinking that, it's not "us" that's building out the
infrastructure, but the telco companies. So, really what we are doing is
analyzing the build-outs telcos are doing, and judging whether it is good
enough or not. Is it really fair to say that, if there aren't 3+ telcos
providing 100mbps, but there are 3+ providing 15mbps, that's not good enough?

~~~
woodruffw
Well, I disagree that the vast majority of Americans are fine with
10/15/20mbps. They might get by with it, but I'm sure they notice their
streams buffer or drop in quality when they do (or their system does)
something bursty.

In light of the obscene amount of money that taxpayers have sunk into ISPs,
there's no need for that. They may be the ones building the infrastructure,
but they're taking advantage of us along the way.

------
mnm1
This reminds me of the former Romanian dictator's comment that his people
simply just did not need color tv. I didn't think I'd ever see that kind of
stupidity from the US Congress and regulators. Busting up monopolies is
clearly no longer in fashion.

~~~
utellme
Сhaushesku considered that people doesn't need a TV at all, so blackouts
became usual thing.

By the way, I don't think it's all about monopolies. It's just expenses,
companies should invest huge amounts of cash just to reach last mile. Who will
take such risks after some company already built infrastructure which you can
just double and hope for underbidding your opponents?

~~~
mkhalil
Well for starters, municipalities could compete.

Unfortunately for us consumers, Comcast has lobbied pretty well and made it
against the law for municipalities to start their own ISP.

------
LogicX
Surprisingly, in Myrtle Beach, SC we have multiple high speed providers
choices: HTC (as in htcinc.net, a local telco cooperative offering gigabit
fiber), or Spectrum, who just minutes ago I heard for the first time that
their new default tier in our area is 100mbps. Not sure if they go much hiher
though, because a few years ago TWC was going to offer 300mbps cable service,
and then the Spectrum merger cancelled that expansion.

Either way, I'm happy with my high speed fiber service. And I likely have
competition to thank.

~~~
juliangoldsmith
>a few years ago TWC was going to offer 300mbps cable service, and then the
Spectrum merger cancelled that expansion.

Are you sure they don't offer that? I live in Charlotte, and that's what I
have.

~~~
scottwernervt
They are also bringing gigabit by end of 2018:
[https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2018/02/chart...](https://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2018/02/charter-promises-gigabit-internet-to-virtually-all-
customers-this-year/)

~~~
ehPReth
Not sure I’d call 940/35Mbps gigabit (better providers use that to refer to
1/1Gbps — Charter’s marketing wank doesn’t sit too well :/)

~~~
FireBeyond
Comcast is at 1gbps/35mbps.

What's the overhead of ACKs? It feels to me that you probably couldn't
saturate the connection without getting buffer bloated by ACK traffic, at
which point can it really be called 'gigabit' if it's not theoretically
attainable?

~~~
juliangoldsmith
ACKs are TCP, not IP. They only claim 1gbps for IP traffic, not TCP.

------
microcolonel
While it's healthy to understand these stats, consider that some people
knowingly move to places which are not thoroughly served by broadband
providers, and some of them don't really care.

I know and talk to enough people who knew, in advance of making a choice to
move, that they were moving somewhere with absolutely no home terrestrial
broadband, and did so anyway. Often mobile (or even satellite, which is
generally quite limited in terms of upstream bandwidth and latency) internet
is enough for them, or the pros of living there outweigh that con; many
_could_ arrange to bridge to a neighbour fairly cheaply through directional
radio but neglect to because, again, it doesn't bother them all that much.

Home terrestrial broadband is a commodity, not a right, nor even a necessity
(though some may like to frame it as such). It is more important to be
employed, out of prison, fed, and housed, than it is to binge watch the last
remaining bottom-of-the-barrel content on Netflix. As improvements to codecs
roll out, even more people on the same slower connections will have access to
high quality video (and the ability to share it), which is the major strain on
those connections in the first place, and it won't take people forcing others
to give a damn about broadband.

~~~
s73v3r_
But did they move because of the lack of broadband, or in spite of it?

And by the standards of your last paragraph, anything beyond a nutrient slurry
would be considered a luxury. Not a compelling argument.

------
marpstar
In my area (Midwest USA), you can only get 100Mbps or more from either

A) Cable company. In my case Mediacom. B) Fiber, which is also offered by
Mediacom as well as some rural providers to select locations.

DSL is barely 20Mbps around here, and you can't even get 10Mbps service in
some spots two miles off US 20. As someone who'd like to buy a home in the
country, I find this lack of coverage a much bigger issue. Forget competition,
there's practically no service at all.

~~~
rayiner
Much of my county doesn’t even have water and sewer pipes. People just spend
the thousands to tens of thousands of dollars needed to build septic systems
and wells and accept that is the trade off for living in the country.

~~~
freehunter
You say that like it's a bad thing. Wells and septic systems are so common
that I would struggle to believe they're a "trade off".

Where I grew up (on well water and a septic tank), people couldn't believe
that city folk _pay_ for their water, and what's more, that they pay to have
it _go down the drain!_

A septic tank costs ~$5k and will last for 40 years. Over the lifetime of a
septic tank, my city water bill will have cost me $24,000.

~~~
wiredfool
Yes, and occasionally, you might have to get a guy with a backhoe to come out
and do some work. That's $1000. That's assuming that you don't need a new
line, which would take a perc test and a new permit. All the while the guy
with the backhoe is looking at your system and wondering how it ever worked or
got signed off in the first place.

It's several hundred to get it pumped every couple of years, I think I'm
remembering in the range of $600 and just shy of 3 years between pumpings.

Then the well needs power, and someone needs to do the generator in a power
outage, or you get to chip in for a spiffy one with an autostart, and the only
time the well head ever acts up is on national holidays when if you can get
someone out, it's 3x overtime.

You know, I kind of like city water now.

~~~
freehunter
You say that like city water never needs maintenance. My neighbor had roots
growing into his pipes from a tree on city property, but since the pipes were
on private property he had to have them replaced on his own dime, and also fix
the flooding in the house from the backed-up sewer line.

I'm not arguing that septic tanks are better, and I apologize that many people
reading my comment seem to think I am. What I'm arguing is that septic tanks
are not uncommon. On the contrary, basically everyone outside of city limits
is using one.

~~~
Broken_Hippo
Most cities I lived in serviced the lines up to the point they entered the
house, though. Not as much to worry about.

~~~
vonmoltke
All the cities I have lived in would only serice lines up to and including the
meter. Everything downstream of the meter was the property owner's
responsibility.

------
godzillabrennus
I'm a short term renter who tends to move somewhere new about once a year
inside of the USA for work. I have been choosing where to live primarily
around the speed of the ISP available in the building. I have had 1Gbit for
the last two years and would never want to downgrade.

It's a national embarrassment that we don't have this kind of access in more
places.

------
pascalxus
For those in the east bay, Bay area, looking for another provider, keep an eye
on this one:
[https://www.lmi.net/services/internet/phiber/](https://www.lmi.net/services/internet/phiber/)

They claim 50$/mo (60 after first year) for speeds up to 1 GB/sec. But, its
not available yet, but will be sometime in 2018, they say.

Here's another one, I'm looking into:
[https://common.net/](https://common.net/)

unfortunately, alot of these aren't ready yet in my area

~~~
rpearl
sonic.net is also doing gigabit in the bay area, including expanding to the
east bay.

We have it at my home in San Francisco and it's been rock solid so far. It was
slated for December 2017 but we got it even earlier, in October.

~~~
glup
IIRC LMI resells Sonic (at least for DSL, not sure about fiber).

------
MrVitaliy
It's not broadband for me, it's monthly data caps. I can stream 4 different
netflix shows, on 50Mbps, and blow through 1TB monthly cap in 3 weeks. No
point of getting even faster connection.

~~~
oneplane
Where in the world do you live that you still have data caps?

~~~
dragonwriter
IIRC, most US broadband providers have published data caps (and had secret
unpublished ones before the FCC’s transparency rules, the one bit of the
earliest Net Neutrality regulation that wasn't struck down, forced them to be
disclosed.)

------
mikeytown2
Comcast recently upped my speed from 75/5 to 150/5\. My downloads still top
out around 40 on non speed testing sites. I’m looking for something else that
has better upload speed; I started with 20/5 on Comcast and over the last 5
years the speed has been going up on paper. I have a 32/8 channel modem
attached to a ubiquiti gateway on gigabit Ethernet, so the bottleneck is on
the Comcast side. Advertised speeds only match reality for a select few sites
that are used for speed testing from my experience.

------
nodesocket
I recently moved to Nashville and signed up for the AT&T gigabit offering
which is 1Gbps up and down with unlimited data for $80 a month (what a deal).

Wireless devices cap out at around 400Mbps on Speedtest.net because they hit
wireless throughput maximums. My iMac which is attached to my AirPort Time
Capsule via CAT6 pushes around 700Mbps up and down. I'm fairly certain I am
not being capped, just that Speedtest.net POP's probably can't push that much
bandwidth to max out my 1Gbps connection.

~~~
ktsmith
Your contract with AT&T probably only guarantees you 70% of the advertised
speed. I've never had an issue with speedtest.net POPs being able to handle
gigabit tests. I have lots of experience with underperforming AT&T connections
of all kinds. I would try another speed test site if you think that is the
bottleneck.

~~~
nodesocket
@bigjimmyk3 brought up a great point. Most consumer routers can't push 1Gbps
fully. Also, I am actually routing through two routers. The first being the
AT&T supplied router/modem combo, then that flows into an Apple AirPort Time
Capsule in bridge mode. All CAT6 cabling.

------
thekingshorses
I pay $75 for 7/0.768Mbps and $220 for 50/10Mbps for 2 business lines.

My only option is Spectrum cable. They are offering 100Mbps fiber for
$770/month if sign up for 5 years contract.

~~~
inetknght
$770/mo for 5 years contract? I assume that's on your business lines and has a
service level agreement with it?

~~~
dboreham
Not the parent, but yes (we used to have fiber service from Charter). It's
also symmetrical so 100Mbits up, which is an order of magnitude faster than
their residential copper service. The 5 year commit is to cover their cost
stringing fiber from the closest splice point to your facility (could be
several blocks). If you can peer with them in a building that is already
fiber-fed on their network, the cost should be lower.

------
segmondy
Last year, I was talking to friends in Africa with Internet faster than mine
and cheaper to boot! WTF!

------
JohnTHaller
I live in NYC and only have a single option over 15Mbps.

------
8bitsrule
Free market. ;-{

