FCC Officially Raises Minimum Broadband Metric From 25Mbps to 100Mbps
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https://www.pcmag.com/news/fcc-officially-raises-minimum-broadband-metric-from-25mbps-to-100mbps
https://www.pcmag.com/news/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.
There's not a "cap" but beyond 1.2TB you will get moved to low priority on your cell tower, so if there's any network congestion your internet will go to shit.
I've never ran into this issue since I live in a sweet spot thats close to a tower and doesn't have any high occupancy buildings or heavy road traffic that would cause congestion.
Iirc tmo has 2 tiers. One with a smallish cap and one that throttles based on tower capacity when you hit something like 30 or 50tb. I had the 30 day trial and I've considered getting it as a backup to our cable internet, I've held off because most of the time if the cable is out, it's a bigger issue like a power outage that also eventually takes down the towers as well, plus I think where we are there is only one tower that we connect to and when it goes down we switch to another much further away with barely any signal.
I have spectrum gigabit down and they cap us at like 35 up. I'm watching and waiting while 3 companies aside from spectrum and att rollout fiber all over town. I'm hoping that eventually they get to us. We live in the outskirts and one of the companies expanded south from north of us so I have reason to hope they get to us eventually.
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.
I'm "locked in" at t-mo on price and also have my cell phone with t-mobile. If you aren't on a cell phone plan with them I think they were charging $50 a month. I don't know how long they were offering the $30 deal. I swapped to them pretty early on them having it.
As for your port forwarding issue, t mobiles gateway may not offer that, but it has an ethernet port. Why don't you plug your own wifi router into that and set up port forwarding there and then just treat the gateway as a modem?
I already have my own router connected to it, but I'm a very amateur networker. I taught myself pretty much everything I know through tutorials and blog posts. As far as my knowledge extends, there's no way to open public facing ports through the T-Mobile firewall.
My current workaround is just hosting it on my parent's network and using SCP to transfer my linux ISOs to the server. (Which...sidenote...why were we never taught anything about the SCP command in any computer courses in school?)
I don't think tailscale (headscale for foss) requires pf. I could be remembering wrong, so don't hold me to it, but worth a look.
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.
That's all well and good, but I have no need for gigabit. Online games use very little (heck, starcraft worked great on dial up), and streaming only takes 15Mb most of the time. I'm only paying $30 a month. For that, I'm fine with doing something else for a while during the rare occasion I'm downloading some huge pc game or something.
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.
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.
Wait a second? Do they mean 800gig cap? That isn’t going to work. How can you only use 1gb a month? I use than per hour. Allegedly.
If not, they definitely meant 200mb upgraded to 800mb per second lol, if Comcast had 800gb/s internet they would be competing with employee access to direct private fiber peering between the CIA and NSA lol
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.
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.
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 is long overdue, as the last update was 2015, when a democrat was President. The GOP refused to do it, and it took some time to seat a new FCC head due to Republican obstruction.
Gigabyte is coming, just not yet. This is a fine incremental step.
We should’ve had it when we paid for it, instead of telecom execs pocketing the money.
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.
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?
The 500kbps was 15 minutes outside of a metro area of 2.5 million lol
It was decades of CenturyLink making sure no one else moved in on their turf.
Where I'm at now the fiber is a couple of miles away and no cable, but 8Mbps feels lightning fast after CenturyLink lol
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.
kB = kilobytes = 1000 bytes
MB = megabytes = 1000 kB
kiB = kibibytes = 1024 bytes
MiB = mibibytes = 1024 kiB
Generally on hard drive/ssd capacity it will be listed in GiB (Gibibytes). This is the reason a 1 Terabyte drive is actually something like 931 GB showing in your system. Because your system uses GiB and the manufacturer uses GB.
1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes
1GiB = 1,073,741,824 bytes
1 GB =~ 0.931 GiB
Edit: I had it backwards, it is fixed now
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
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.
Found the hard drive manufacturer.
It's 1024. It's always been 1024. It'll always be 1024.
Unless fo course we should start using 17.2GB RAM sticks.
There’s a conflict between the linguistic and practical implications here.
“kilo-“ means 1,000 everywhere. 1,000 is literally the definition of “kilo-“. In theory, it’s a good thing we created “kibi-“ to mean 2^10 (1024).
Why does everyone expect a kilobyte to be 1024 bytes, then? Because “kibi-“ didn’t exist yet, and some dumb fucking IBM(?) engineers decided that 1,000 was close enough to 1,024 and called it a day. That legacy carries over to today, where most people expect “kilo-“ to mean 1024 within the context of computing.
Since product terminology should generally match what the end-user expects it to mean, perhaps we should redefine “kilobyte” to mean 1024 bytes. That runs into another problem, though: if we change it now, when you look at a 512GB SSD, you’ll have to ask, “512 old gigabytes or 512 new gigabytes?”, arguably creating even more of a mess than we already have. That problem is why “kibi-“ was invented in the first place.
It's not just the difference between kilo- and kibi-. It's also the difference between bits and bytes. A kilobit is only 125 eight-bit bytes, whereas a kilobyte is 8,000 bits.
Computers run on binary, base 2. 1000 vs 1024, one is byte aligned(2^10), the other is not.
Thats an irrelevant technical detail for modern storage. We regularly use billions, trillions of bytes. The world has mostly standardized on base 10 for large numbers as it’s easy to understand and convert.
Literally all of the devices I own use this.
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.
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.
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"?
I use to think that until I spent a bit of time with a gamer. 75Gig updates etc... the fuck is in those game ! The whole Netflix library?
So Games, 4K videos etc...
This isn’t really true. An HD movie on Netflix/Hulu/Prime/etc is multi GB. It just doesn’t need to download fast, because anything faster than the bitrate of the movie won’t be perceptible.
But there are also games on platforms like Steam, Epic, PlayStation, etc. These are often very large.
For context, a 4K Blu-ray disc has a maximum transfer rate of 144 Mbps. Most streaming services are compressing much more heavily than that. Closer to 20 or 40 Mbps, depending on the service. They tend to be limited by managing datacenter bandwidth, not end user connections.
While I get that people hate having to download big games over 100Mbps, it's something you do once and then play the game for weeks.
So build the capability and people will use it when they need it. My point still stands that 100Mbps is slow, even if most people are fine with it day to day.
Also, for a family of four, that would mean only 2 of them would be able to watch a 40Mbps HD stream at once. I get that that is relatively rare for 3 people in a family to want to stream at that speed at the same time, but I wouldn’t call something fast if it can’t support even that.
(YouTube recommends a bitrate of 68Mbps for 4K 60fps content and 45Mbps for 4K 30fps. Higher when using HDR.)
Where I'm going with this is that there are much more important things than going significantly over 100Mbps. Quality of service, latency, jumbo MTU sizes, and IPv6 will affect you in many more practical ways. The bandwidth number tends to be used as a proxy (consciously or not) for overall quality issues, but it's not a very good one. That's how we'll end up with 1Gbps connections that will lag worse than a 10Mbps connection from 2003.
Just updates running in the background use an enormous amount, let alone full game downloads.
Twitch and Youtube use a decent amount per hour as well.
A file large enough to take hours, plural, at 100Mbps is more than 90GB. Doing that regularly is definitely not normal usage.
Average 4K BDRIP movie is 60 GB, average AAA game is 60-100+ GB. So you are saying that watching movie once a week and downloading one game is not normal? Using 1 GBit Internet means saving 3-6 hours of time per week.
Watching movies and playing AAA games is normal, sure.
Downloading 4K BDRIPs and a new AAA game every week definitely isn't. Most people probably stream their movies, and even those prone to pirating their content are likely downloading re-encoded copies, not full sized BDRIPs.
On top of that, it's not like you have to sit there and wait for it. You're only really saving that time if it's time you were going to spend sitting and staring at your download progress instead of doing something else.
I'm not saying edge cases don't exist where someone would notice a real difference in having >100Mbps, but it's just that, an edge case.
Most of the time, the idea to watch a film comes to me quite suddenly, so I have to wait until the film is at least partially downloaded before I start watching it. And even downloading an app from the repository takes 10 times less time. And 1000 MBps internet is only 5-10 euros more expensive than 100 MBps.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah it is spectrum, the company is quite irritating and yeah they should be required to show both up and down speeds next to each other. For awhile I had t-mobile internet but the speeds were too inconstant so back to spectrum it was.
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.
They also fall prey to the classic "only one Internet provider" shit because of the whole "whoever pays to have the lines in owns those lines forevermore" shit we have here
It cost Comcast 10k to run a new line half a block to a place I lived 6 years ago, and that was in a rather empty part of my town.
Imagine how much it costs to run lines M I L E S to rural people's homes. Who's even going to try setting up there when someone else already has done it?
My area is controlled by Dems that are pretty lib, but thanks to how expensive it is to start an ISP we have literally 1 option for an almost 75 square mile area for non-sattelite Internet. Their max speed is 100 Mbps synch, and you have to fill out a PDF to get service (including putting s password for your account on said PDF, I put "fuck No im not" for mine for obvious reasons), and their techs will ignore service requests (they installed their stupid rental router and charged me monthly for it despite me saying not to) and lie (they said they couldn't add my owned router to their list multiple times before someone finally took it's fucking MAC address from me)
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.
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
Yeah, I regularly hit about 80MBps (640Mbps) from Steam. I’m pretty close to their San Diego servers, so I get the good pipes. If I was closer, I’d probably be able to hit gigabit speeds.
Yes, but normal websites might not. There’s no reason to if the amount of data being transferred is so small. Even large transfers, particularly streaming video providers, will have trouble feeding data to you at 1 Gbps simply because the network interface on the server might be saturated, the switch it’s connected to might have a slower CPU, the DNS server might be tossing your data into a queue or have a slower CPU itself. There are SO MANY hops between you and whatever data you’re trying to access, and every one of them influences the speed at which data will get to you. I’m not saying gigabit speeds aren’t worth paying for, but not everyone needs those speeds, especially if their ISP’s hardware isn’t up to snuff.