FCC abandons efforts to make U.S. broadband fast and affordable

I live in a place with a municipal telco, and let me tell you, it is night and day. The service is top notch, and it always just works to the point where on the rare occasion that they do have a problem, I spend hours trying to figure out what's wrong with my equipment, because it happens so rarely. It costs more than the local cable company, because the price you pay is actually what it costs to deliver the service, but there are never any wild swings in prices, and when service gets cheaper, you just get upgraded for no additional cost. I wish all companies worked this way.

Also community/municipal owned broadband is illegal in many places thanks to lobbying from the big telcos: https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...

In Japan it was competition that fixed this. The government did something (not sure what) but it was not "funding municipal broadband".

I'd say one thing to do is outlaw the contracts that let governments only approve a single provider.

It was Softbank that brought the competition. In 2001 they started offering 1meg connections for $20 a month. The competition cost 10x. Softbank had aggressive marketing too, putting up booths at neighborhood train stations where they could sign you up and hand you a device on your way home.

The competition lowered their prices to match within a couple of months. Softbank doubled the speed to 2meg, same price. The same pattern. The competition matched price within a few weeks. Softbank raised their speed to 8meg. repeat.

AFAICT it all finally settled (25 years later). Currently $40 for 1gig fiber or $60 for 10gig fiber or $50 for https://www.softbank.jp/internet/sbhikari/

And NTT is competitive https://flets.com/

Yes.

When Democratic Party controlled the federal government, they tried to. It is generally hard to do because it requires funding and passing laws. Another difficulty is that voters don’t reward Democratic Party for their efforts.

It is very easy for Republican Party to revert the changes. Moreover their donors reward the republican politicians for their efforts and their voters don’t punish them for their efforts.

The billions spent on rural broadband excluded Starlink as not technically feasible.

Many other billions have the same issues - I think no one knows how to actually hoover this the way the big co's do?

We've had much faster broadband happening because of commercial competition from scrappy startups and WISPS and fiber folks (think sonic)

I think something like 94% of RDOF/BEAD locations in california were defaulted (ie, awarded but customer actually never got service)?

It's crazy given the 100+ billion or so spent on USF / RDOF / BEAD / etc that they couldn't do $5b - $10b for something like starlink which at least in rural areas is able to serve folks pretty quickly and push hard on that for a bit. The unsubsidized commercial starklink services is already outcompeting the insanely subsidized buildouts (that cost insane amounts per person). Starlink was awarded the funds but then they were revoked.

If you're planning on moving, this list might influence where you want to go:

https://broadbandnow.com/municipal-providers

USA believes it's better than everyone else, it's very inward-looking. It's been quite striking.

Rural broadband mandates were just welfare for the big carriers. There was never intended to be any results or accountability. Consumers have been paying into the fund since 1997 and for that we got richer carriers and a pocketful of bupkiss.

The US doesn't generally do new things anymore. We just shuffle money around into peoples' pockets. So we have plenty of societal wealth to do something like this, even given how large and rural many areas are, but we just don't. Because no one gets reelected because they rolled out bandwidth. They get reelected based on however their party is faring in the battle of the spectacle going on nationally.

Same deal in Prince Edward Island. Very rural, near the coast, cows across the road, but gigabit fibre from Xplorenet who took advantage of government funding.

I'm in the UK on a 900Mbps symmetric for £40 a month.

Turns out regulation can be a good thing - first of all, OpenReach (the infrastructure part of BT that was split up post privatisation) are regulated in how much they can charge other providers for last mile FTTP/C[1]

But then there's also Access to Infrastructure regulation[2], which means duct and pole access isn't up to the telco's (and after all, existing infra was publicly funded, and new infra is often paid for by housing developers). This means I have 2 providers of FTTP to my property - CityFibre and OpenReach (and a third offering DOCSIS cable in Virgin Media).

These combined have led to a thriving market with genuine competition. Whilst most ISP's use the two providers with the most footprint (OpenReach and CityFibre) they compete on things like technical chops (AAISP), Price (the PlusNets of the world) and a mix of the two (Zen).

Regulation, when well designed, leads to more competitive markets.

[1] https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/telecoms-infra... [2] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2016/700/contents

I live in the second largest city in the US. In the distance I can see a switching station that carries a large amount of telecom and internet traffic.

Should be easy to get fiber no? Turns out they want a couple thousand dollars from me to run fiber up my street. Coax it is!

In the US fiber has started to show up in very rural areas now as well. My parents got it last year and I never thought that would happen in my hometown.

It's some small company I never heard of before, back when I lived there Verizon got a ton of government money to do this and just never did, everyone was pissed about that.

Which country? In Germany and Austria you still have DSL cable because the telco monopolies are golf buddies with the politicians.

> No, they didn’t. They decided not to raise the definition of broadband from 100×20 Mbps up to 1Gps.

No, the 100/20Mbps definition was only adopted last year and is being kept for now (though you'll never guess who voted against adopting it and wanted to keep 25/3Mbps!).

The 1000/500Mbps definition that Carr's FCC is trying to eliminate was a long term goal, something that the US should strive for eventually, and therefore federal funding should preferentially go to solutions that can or could eventually provide those speeds.

Carr's proposed rules[1] go well beyond just the definition of high speed broadband, though:

- He wants a stricter reading of the statute that requires a report on the deployment of broadband, reading "whether advanced telecommunications capability is being deployed to all Americans in a reasonable and timely fashion" as strictly referring to anyone making "incremental progress" on deployment, so the reports will shift from reporting coverage where broadband has actually been deployed to calling areas covered if anywhere in an area is working on deploying broadband there

- He also doesn't think "reasonable" access to broadband should include a consideration of the price of using that broadband, so wants to stop collecting pricing information. So long as someone is making incremental progress in an area that would make 100/20Mbps internet available to you at some price, you will now count as covered

- Other proposed changes around mobile speeds and school broadband I haven't been following.

Incidentally, even the 100/20Mbps definition seems at least potentially in danger, as the proposal is requesting comment on whether that's actually the definition they should be using in the future.

[1] https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-413059A1.pdf

> At 100Mbps you can download a 50GB game in just 80 minutes.

100 Mbps is 100x as slow as my internet connection. I would really rather download a giant game in less than a minute, or even a few minutes, than more than an hour.

the USDA, which gives broadband grants, considers an area "served by broadband" if there is a 2 megabit provider in the jerrymandered area. This includes cellular, even if using a fixed or hotspot link would be cost prohibitive.

Look at the coverage maps for rural areas with trees, and you'll see an interesting pattern. They used multi-pathing to their jerrymandering benefit. checkerboard pattern means the USDA says "no grant for you!"

i have no idea when or if the definition changed to 20mbit. there are people here still served by 6mbit - on a good day.

> No, they didn’t. They decided not to raise the definition of broadband from 100×20 Mbps up to 1Gps.

it should be at least 100x100

>4K streaming on Netflix, to pick one salient example, only requires 16Mbps.

Because they compress all their streams to hell to save a few cents and to fit through people's shitty internet connections.

Another side of the coin is no one will ever serve you content at 1gbps. It just won’t happen. I get 500mb down on speedtests and netflix et al regularly throttle me to like 144p quality with constant buffering. I download a game on steam and it throttles to nothing for hours after making some initial good progress.

> We just don’t have any killer applications that need more than 20Mbps.

Sure we do, but large ISPs demand their cut.

Backups. File transfers. Large games. Live 4K video chat. Language models. CAD models. Cloud-based spyware, like smarthome/car/phone/whatever telemetry, or security cameras.

> 4K streaming on Netflix, to pick one salient example, only requires 16Mbps.

So only the living room gets 4K, but family members can't all watch their own 4K streams in their own rooms? Bobby talks during the show, Sally giggles at everything, and Timmy wants everything to be dark while mom & dad want the whole room bright and quiet. Thanks, ISP, for forcing the family together!

> With satellite internet from starlink (and I think amazon is attempting their own version?) I don't see how running internet over wires to rural housing could ever be seen as a good expenditure of money.

That was the same excuse used when nobody wanted to wire rural America for electricity. It was a bad take then and a worse take now.

Wiring those homes with single-mode fiber once will provide modern broadband for at least the next 50 years, if not longer.

Satellite is not and will never be a replacement for fiber.

> I'm not really aware of anyone that is truly without "internet access" as cell phones have basically filled that area in years ago.

Restated otherwise: You are not aware of the millions of Americans whose cell signal is weak to non-existent in places they routinely spend time at.

Having spend several years under the thumb of a rural wireless internet service provider, the thought of all my neighbors sucking up shared Starlink bandwidth to stream Netflix in the evenings makes me nauseous. How is it a reasonable expectation that Starlink can really support entire rural areas?

My rural cabin has access to:

1. 25/2 DSL for $140/month (12 month contract with $40/mo seasonal disconnect)

2. 5G (60/0.03 which was 100/20 last summer until the nearby tower became overloaded).

3. LTE (see above) which I routinely get ~100/30 but which Verizon, at least, will not allow their boxes to use if it can connect via 5G, regardless of usability of the connection.

4. Fiber (100/100) at $89.95 (12m contract with $25/month seasonal disconnect). The fiber has higher speeds, but I didn't price them out. The costs were originally listed at $34.95 before they ran the lines, but they have upped them to $89.95 now that they are run to my lake home.

5. Starlink (supposedly 150/20 for Residential Lite which is available in my area) at $80/month on a month-to-month with purchase of a dish (I got mine refurbished for $135). I am routinely seeing ~400/40 with 25ms ping even though I shouldn't be. That said, the speeds are more variable (low as 120/7).

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I would LOVE for there to be reasonably priced and very stable Internet for month-to-month, but there just isn't except for Starlink--at this point.

> I am curious if good satellite internet will lead to an exodus of people from cities and subdivisions

You seem to be imprinting wireline capacity onto satellite. This will always be an error. A core facet of satellite is it's inherent limited capacity. This has always been the case and no tech is on the horizon that will change this.

Satellite internet has its place but it's never going to be dominant. Any area with high density is better served by wires, and any area with medium density is better served by a combination of wires and cellular internet. Satellite only make economic sense for the truly remote; the astronomical and recurring infrastructure costs are just killer (Starlink satellites last for 5 years, buried fiber lasts for 50 at least (while providing better latency and throughput)).

> Also, I'm not really aware of anyone that is truly without "internet access" as cell phones have basically filled that area in years ago

Unfortunately very much not true. The US is a very large and sparsely populated place. As far as cell and broadband service goes, much of West Virginia, huge chunks of PA, upstate NY, and Maine all have limited or no cell service. In the Midwest the communication infrastructure is often delivered by community co-ops, not corporations, that also deliver electric power. And dont get me started on the vast Western states.

The US has, frankly, an absolutely ludicrous patchwork of providers and infrastructure for telephone, power, and broadband. It looks reasonably peachy when you drive on the Interstate but get off there and youll see how limited it is.

Sat internet would really help people get from zero to 1, but that said, its still kinda crappy compared to fiber. Having the bird in range for 15 minutes until you have to handover to the next bird is not conducive to smooth, glitch free Internet.

> cell phones have basically filled that area in years ago

That doesn't work well in mountainous areas, which are often rural. There are three towers within a couple of miles of my house, but nothing close to line of sight to any of them. ~1/4 mile away I can get full service, but I have none at all at home.

Luckily Comcast / Xfinity rewired our little town a few years ago so we don't have to rely on satellite (not great during the heavy snowstorms and thunderstorms we get). I'd love to use cellular as a backup as we have 3~20 full days of blackouts per year (most of us have generators and/or batteries) and Xfinity goes down 80-90 minutes after a blackout starts.

It's all getting redirected to Starlink