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

Three nines is completely unacceptable

Less than 9 hrs of downtime per year is unacceptable for consumer internet?

Why isn't 3 9's acceptable for residential home internet? That's less than 9 hours of downtime a year, 44 minutes/month.

Sure, I'd like 4 or even 5 9's, but I don't want to pay for it -- each additional 9 is exponentially more expensive to guarantee, and few people are willing to pay for that much reliability for their own network gear.

I'd be fine with 99.9% availability to my house. That means it's down for at most 9 hours per year. That's probably on par with how much my electricity goes out during an average winter.

But what they mean by "99.9% network-wide availability" and what I mean by "99.9% availability to my house" are very, very different things.

3 9s is completely fine. Internet is not subject to the 911 uptime requirements.

3 9s is essentially an outage or two from a major storm. That’s fine for residential internet.

our neighborhood barely got one nine last year

Internet it available less than 10% of the year where you live ?

You can and should challenge the map then. The FCC actually has a means to do that and does respond. Ideally get an email follow up stating speeds, frontier has a habit of refusing to create a paper trail.

https://help.bdc.fcc.gov/hc/en-us/articles/10476040597787-Ho...

The FCC is working on an internet service notice format “modeled after the FDA nutrition labels” [1].

[1] https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels

I don't see three 9's as being unreasonable for home internet at all, getting more reliability than that is non-trivial and most people have redundancy in the form of internet on their phones or can buy a second line.

Zoom recommends 3.8Mbps for uploading 1080p video. Being able to do 1080p video conferencing is an expectation of broadband. Raising the definition of broadband to meet this basic requirement is clearly a win.

I do think 25Mbps up is more than what's required for a large number of households (>33%). I have advised family that 15Mbps is adequate when they needed to do office work from home. Perhaps the only good thing about this is that it will force ISPs to upgrade their infrastructure, but I'm worried the cost of that will be passed onto consumers at a time when inflation has already taken a toll on budgets.

On coax/cable lines like Charter/Spectrum, the upload speed limit is due to protocol/DOCSIS limitations. Supposedly the new version of DOCSIS fixes this/allows for symmetrical service, and Spectrum has been rolling it out for a while now. Still waiting for it where I'm at...

For coaxial cable, I assume they will still allocate the same 50Mbps upload between 200 houses, and then let you get a 25Mbps burst for a few seconds by taking it from others.

Makes sense why Xfinity just emailed me that they graciously decided to “double my upload speed completely free of charge”

What’s interesting is I’ve been pushing 20-25 up for the last month or so.

I get, realistically, like 30Mbps up with Spectrum with their 1Gb plan. At my last place they had a smaller competitor that did 1Gb up and down, so they changed existing 1Gb plans to the same. Now I live 8 minutes away from there and it's not an option! But competition is coming to my building soon so I can only hope.

My Comcast gigabit internet is only 25Mbps up. I'm pretty unhappy about it, as somebody who regularly has to push large docker images and wait forever each time.

How much do you pay for internet? Maybe you should be directing your ire elsewhere.

I currently pay $60/month for 600 down.

An ISP that actually struggles to provide 100mbps down at a reasonable rate, today, is simply one that refuses to update their hardware. 100mbps is not hard to achieve with semi-modern hardware.

I know of ISPs servicing remote small communities with 1gbps down at $100/month. 300 down for $30/month.

… WAit, how, precisely, does this make housing more expensive? Like, what is the method of action?

25->100 is more of a luxury then a necessity

Not if you work remotely.

25mbps being "broadband" is a bit of a joke, a single 4k stream can exceed that. 100mbps is about what is needed for todays "broadband" applications.

Raising the floor to 20mbps for uploads is also fairly important for more practical things, having to backup a laptop at 3mbps was wholly impractical. 20mbps is a good bump if you're running some backups overnight, or uploading a 4k video file.

I don't see any reason to raise the definition of bandwidth higher for the next decade though. But I should stress, the amount of money needed to make these upgrades is pretty marginal in the grand scheme of things, we're not talking about replacing a ton of last mile wiring.

what would you propose instead? would you keep it the same?

Changing the definition of something for statistical purposes is over-regulation?

You're all getting scammed.

I pay 29€ for 1000/100 (2/3ms to first hop) but the contract is a few years old. I could upgrade to 2500/500 at the same price.

This is a wild thing to comment.

Nothing is stopping internet providers from selling internet below broadband standard and many do. Changing the exact meaning of broadband allows the government to raise the standard of service people receive and pressure ISPs to be better. Now ISPs have to be at 100/20 minimum otherwise they will not be able to receive grants or other government funding.

It isn't over regulation to mandate ISPs who take government money to meet some pretty basic speed requirements. 100/20mbit isn't even a high bar.

Yes - same from Xfinity

I got the same message, also from Xfinity. It does sort of make me wonder: If the FCC declared broadband to be 100/50, would I have 50mbps upload speeds this morning?

To me, this seems to be a clear positive outcome of the FCC's change: Xfinity had this capacity, the FCC raised their standards, and now all(?) Xfinity customers have increased upload speeds for zero additional cost. Seems like pretty much a best-case result of this metric increase.

Edit: Formerly 200/10, now 300/20. Email arrived 10am today.

"We appreciate providing you with the bare minimum, as required by statute."

Same here. I thought they sent that email out to incentivize me not to move to fiber. Turns out that FCC is the reason.

Verizon bumped me to gigabit for no good reason a few years ago. I think I had only signed up for 50 initially. I clocked it at 800/800 but I'm not going to complain.

Same!

Cox _just_ sent out a similarly-phrased email (Subject: Enjoy this gift of faster internet, <me>) saying they bumped my upload speed from 35->100mbps. I didn't expect that given the new minimum upload speed is 20mbps

The only thing personally I want is the same upload speed as download. So I can connect to my home server and download/upload stuff from it.

My experience is that only a few applications will max out my 115Mbit/s connection, and given I have semi-decent kit and a decent ISP using the full bandwidth doesn't have a big impact on latency so I can be streaming, downloading, and have multiple people video-calling and that's fine.

My experience is that people rarely feel constrained by bandwidth because everyone is fighting to optimize every last bit, often using varying techniques that sacrifice quality. Not a single video calling app that I’ve used recently feels like it’s actually delivering good video to me. They're all bitcrushed. They work for some meetings at work, but I would really love a much higher bandwidth connection for screen sharing on Discord and practically every streaming app.

Latency is also important: don’t get me wrong about that. But the fact that I have 1Gbps and I can’t get high bitrate video down kills me.

This is not at all accurate when considering that internet access for one home is on average for 3 people, not 1, and internet is now used for work which requires video streaming and large file downloads.

Have you set up bufferbloat prevention on your router? You would restrict your router to only say 100mbps, to avoid saturating the connection.

And latency under load is an even more important measure.

The definition appears to be more for the government than marketing.

Raising the speed metric is important because it helps the commission determine which areas in the country are receiving adequate internet speeds, and if more government funding is necessary. In 2015, the FCC raised the metric from 4Mbps/1Mbps to 25Mbps/3Mbps. But since then, US senators, government watchdogs, and FCC officials have urged the commission to raise the metric even higher, citing the US’s growing reliance on internet services and apps.

Personally, I can't remember the last piece of marketing that tried to sell me "broadband" internet. They all say "high speed" internet.

Anyway, the 15/3mbps down/up I get in the Oregon countryside is indeed high speed compared to the 5/1mbps down/up I had smack in the middle of the Los Angeles suburbs.

There’s a reasonable practical difference between 25Mbit/sec and 100; in particular, 25 isn’t _really_ good enough for 4K streaming.

_Today_, most consumers aren’t going to be that bothered between the difference between 100 and 1000. But that’s today; the sensible telecoms regulator thinks on a longer scale, because otherwise they just have to revisit the whole thing in a decade.

In Ireland we’re on our third try; the first saw a lot of subsidised satellite and fixed wireless in rural areas, the second, better fixed wireless (a minimum latency requirement killed off the satellite option), and FTTC; in the third, they do seem to have finally decided to stop screwing about, and are rolling out FTTH in otherwise-poorly-served rural areas.

(From a practical point of view, I do get that a state rural fibre wholesaler probably would not fly politically in the US, but this approach of repeatedly easing the minimum standard up is ultimately kinda wasteful.)

Consumers don't. Monopolistic corporations filing paperwork to get their hands on tax dollars probably do. Thankfully for them, the FCC is about as toothless and captured as you can get, so it probably even only barely matters to them.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of people have $30 wifi routers that are incorrectly configured and positioned behind a concrete wall in the garage. So 100mbps comes into their house, but their laptops, TVs and phones see 20mbps.

Why would they have the routers in their garage instead of in their house? Most houses that have cable have cable outlets inside the house, since the reason cable was originally put in was to support cable TV and generally people have their TVs in the house.

Strange logic IMO.

Internet service providers already receive money from the government through grants, loans, and other programs. Opposing increasing the pretty low requirements on ISPs who already receive this money just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Millions of people are getting an increase in their internet speed (including many in this thread!) at the flip of a switch. Seems like a pretty big win.

Anecdotally, Comcast has a 50mbps plan in my neighborhood for $20/month. If I needed more than that, I would gladly pay for it... affordability isn't the issue

Nothing is stopping Comcast from still offering that plan to you. They just can't call it broadband or keep receiving money from the government. They now have to provide a slightly better service if they want to keep receiving those federal funds.

There's also a huge amount of government money going into rural connectivity. It seems to me that StarLink is an ideal solution to this. Rather than running lots of cable to houses that are miles apart, give people subsidies to get StarLink. But if you make legislation that StarLink isn't "broadband", then the money needs to go to the incumbents, who will want billions of dollars in subsidies to lay expensive cables to service a small number of people. If I had to guess, some of those large players might have lobbied for this change, because they want some of that $18 billion pie that the FCC authorized for rural broadband expansion [1].

Sorry this just silly. We already run electricity to basically everywhere so hanging some extra fiber on the polls that already exist isn't really hard. Rural electric coops exist and have been rolling out fiber across their existing power network with great success! Starlink is not a serious solution to providing reliable, fast broadband to rural America. It doesn't have the capacity to meet the needs of rural America either. Put aside the long term future concerns of starlink (whose satellites are all in LEO and have to constantly be replaced) the price argument alone isn't great. The local electric coop that covers 9 rural counties near me offers a base plan of 100mbit up and down at $70 a month via fiber. Starlink is $120 a month for a speed that varies between 250mbit to less than 40mbit. Internet speed demands are only going to increase so we should keep in mind the ability to scale up; which is an area fiber wins at again. We already have the polls and electric coops ready to serve rural America. No need to gamble on a more risky and worse product like starlink.

Worrying about subsidies for "incumbents" while in the next sentence suggesting subsiding for Starlink/Elon is pretty funny!

but I have some involvement in my city's digital equity community, so I have some insight into what this translates to for local governments and community organizations. Now what will happen is someone at the county level in charge of digital infrastructure will look at at a map and say "oh no, 40% of our population doesn't have broadband, and 20% don't even have access to broadband".

GOOD. They should be looking at it! If 40% of the county can't get a basic 100mbit/20mbit internet package then something should be done to address that. DOCSIS has been able to push multi gbit speeds over coax for a decade so I don't buy it Comcast or whoever in your county can't provide 100/20.

Starlink is giving me over 150 up and 20 down during peak hours in a waitlist / oversubscribed area with a previous generation modem. They more than meet the new definition for broadband.

However, it doesn't scale nearly as well as just running fiber to the home, either in number of subscribers, or in per-home cost.

Some relatives live in an area with a phone co-op, and they ran trenchless underground fiber to each home in their service area. Population density is something like 1.2 people per square mile, and median income is ~ $20K. Monthly rates are extremely low. I watched the installers. It was two people and they were covering a good fraction of a mile per day. Equipment and material costs are negligible. There are communities in the SF bay area that are outside of telco monopoly territory. Trenching fiber here (in the mountains) runs something like $10K/house, which is $27/month when you amortize the cost out over 30 years.

The equity / subsidy programs I've seen are always just handouts for large ISPs that have established monopolies and that refuse to reinvest even a small fraction of their monthly revenue into network upgrades.

Establishing municipal broadband or broadband co-ops and giving them automatic right-of-way priority over the incumbents would fix this problem overnight. Either there would be a second fiber network that didn't suck, or the incumbents would actually invest in their networks.

I oppose this. 100mbps just isn't what most people need.

It's a quality of life improvement. :/

Have you ever seen an HN thread with so much pro-regulation sentiment?

Yes, when the service in question is a physical monopoly where there is no choice except to move.

I have said on several occasions that this is getting out of hand. I was perfectly happy with 20 down, and am now forced to buy 75 because that is the lowest tier that Comcast offers. They keep pushing up the minimum rate so that they can show a high rate of "compliance" with the ever-increasing broadband standard. And of course, they push the price up with every speed increase.

The prevailing sentiment on average across HN is regulate where competition is stifled (monopolistic practices by Apple, Google) or it is a public good (utility threads on PG&E come to mind, homegrown broadband, public transportation) or the law is being broken (copyright, fair use, open source violations).

Using a wide brush to paint all of HN and similarly all of gov't regulation is what leads to cognitive dissonance where there is nuance.

I’m not sure what you’re trying to say. HN isn’t a singular entity, a lot of people here have different opinions.

Almost everyone in the world is in favor of some form of regulation of businesses.

Yes. Literally every thread about monopolies.

We are in the 45 million. When we moved here over a decade ago we were told by TDS that they were expanding their service and should be able to provide us with 50Mbs 'soon'. 10 years later we are still 5Mbs (3 in real-world situations). With no plan to expand here ever. Fortunately, the local electric company got a grant and is rolling out 1Gbs fiber to 100% of their customers. TDS couldn't do it because it wasn't 'profitable'. The electric company is fast-tracking the build-out and we should have service less than 18 months after they started.

So they would like to get to the level of Romania.

Despite living in a city, I was one of those 45 million until pretty recently. Due to some weird network topography, I only had one option, spectrum, and it never worked very well, and they never were very incentivized to fix it.

Now that 5G Internet exists, I am paying $25 a month for 300 Mb access and my life is better. I debated over years just because of the inability to get decent Internet at home.

What's wrong with 40mbs? I honestly don't need more than 20. The only time I even notice faster speeds is when my podcasts download.

I'm curious what types of situations require more than 40mbps, and why the inability to do those tasks would mean that someone doesn't haver "real broadband access". I was pushed from 50 to 75 a while back and seriously hardly notice it.

25Mbit/sec isn’t really good enough for 4K video.

Good thing the FCC doesn't control Ireland, or I'd no longer be able to declare that I have broadband via satellite! Well, part of the time, anyway.

I mean, you can call it what you want, but it’s under the minimum standard set by the NBP in 2012 (30Mbit, 25ms). Fortunately, if that’s the best you can get, you’re almost certainly in an NBI intervention area, so a minimum of 500Mbit via FTTH should be available to you at some point.

You can check here: https://nbi.ie/map/

That's when you get Starlink.

Huh, what’s that, ADSL1 or something?

Got it too. Strikes me as extremely disingenuous. I feel like they shouldn't even be allowed to represent this as a decision they made out of the goodness of their hearts. Makes me hate them even more, which is pretty amazing because I had thought we already bottomed out.

Always kinda spin any forced regulation as if it comes from the goodness of the ISP's heart.

Either way, good. 100 is a reasonable minimum for modern society. Now if only I could get a steady connection on T-mobile.

edit: I meant: will your monthly bill go down?

I "splurged" for 100mbit and now it seems like it might be the bottom tier.

I’d sure like to know this, as we’re on Optimum 100, which isn’t sold to new customers anymore.

Also of note, some uploads might actually go up substantially - a bunch of people on 100 down plans have seen uploads cut to almost nothing, e.g, 35 -> 5.

Time will tell.

I was going to say that, then I noticed people are arguing about the "number of 9s of availability". You guys have WHAT?

It's always funny sad when I try to open a link on fcc.gov or congress.gov and get blocked by an impassible cloudflare wall. You'd think these services would be important enough to have a non-default cloudflare configuration.

Here's a mirror of the text I grabbed from another computer/IP for anyone else getting blocked:

    FCC INCREASES BROADBAND SPEED BENCHMARK
    Annual Agency Assessment of High-Speed Internet Service Deployment    Establishes New Standard to Better Reflect the Broadband Needs of American Households
    -- 
    WASHINGTON, March 14, 2024—The Federal Communications Commission today adopted its annual assessment of whether advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion across the U.S.  In addition to deployment, the Report considers broadband affordability, adoption, availability, and equitable access, when determining whether broadband is being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion to “all Americans.”  The Commission’s Report, issued pursuant to section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, raises the Commission’s benchmark for high-speed fixed broadband to download speeds of 100 megabits per second and upload speeds of 20 megabits per second – a four-fold increase from the 25/3 Mbps benchmark set by the Commission in 2015.

    The increase in the Commission’s fixed speed benchmark for advanced telecommunications capability is based on the standards now used in multiple federal and state programs (such as NTIA’s BEAD Program and multiple USF programs), consumer usage patterns, and what is actually available from and marketed by internet service providers.  

    The Report concludes that advanced telecommunications capability is not being deployed in a reasonable and timely fashion based on the total number of Americans, Americans in rural areas, and people living on Tribal lands who lack access to such capability, and the fact that these gaps in deployment are not closing rapidly enough.

    Using the agency’s Broadband Data Collection deployment data for the first time rather than FCC Form 477 data, the Report shows that, as of December 2022:
    · Fixed terrestrial broadband service (excluding satellite) has not been physically deployed to approximately 24 million Americans, including almost 28% of Americans in rural areas, and more than 23% of people living on Tribal lands;  
    · Mobile 5G-NR coverage has not been physically deployed at minimum speeds of 35/3 Mbps to roughly 9% of all Americans, to almost 36% of Americans in rural areas, and to more than 20% of people living on Tribal lands;  
    · 45 million Americans lack access to both 100/20 Mbps fixed service and 35/3 Mbps mobile 5G-NR service; and
    · Based on the new 1 Gbps per 1,000 students and staff short-term benchmark for schools and classrooms, 74% of school districts meet this goal.  

    The Report also sets a 1 Gbps/500 Mbps long-term goal for broadband speeds to give stakeholders a collective goal towards which to strive – a better, faster, more robust system of communication for American consumers.

    Action by the Commission March 14, 2024 by Report (FCC 24-27).  Chairwoman Rosenworcel, Commissioners Starks and Gomez approving.  Commissioners Carr and Simington dissenting.  Chairwoman Rosenworcel, Commissioners Carr, Starks, Simington, and Gomez issuing separate statements.

    GN Docket No. 22-270