AT&T and Verizon say 10Mbps is too fast for "broadband," 4Mbps is enough

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- Monty Solomon
  
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9 years ago

Tue, Sep 9, 2014 4:45 AM

AT&T and Verizon say 10Mbps is too fast for "broadband," 4Mbps is enough Cable lobby also implores FCC not to change definition of broadband.

by Jon Brodkin Sept 8 2014 Ars Technica

AT&T and Verizon have asked the Federal Communications Commission not to change its definition of broadband from 4Mbps to 10Mbps, saying many Internet users get by just fine at the lower speeds.

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***** Moderator's Note *****

I suppose this is why the ADSL service I get is called "High speed" instead of "Broadband".

The article says that the FCC condluded that 0.1Mbps was adequate speed for a "High Quality Voice Call", provided only one user was making a call. As with so many things involving the FCC and the Telecomunications Oligopoly, the estimate is theoretically true.

Bill Horne Moderator

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- tlvp
  
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posted
9 years ago

Tue, Sep 9, 2014 5:08 PM

What clowns! I'm just back from S. Korea, where, using 54 Mbps hotel wi-fi, I was able to download a 350 MB ZIP file from a cloud server in well under two minutes, bespeaking internet speed better than 30 Mbps.

Welcome to the 3rd world :-) . Cheers, -- tlvp

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- Fred Goldstein
  
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posted
9 years ago

Thu, Sep 11, 2014 2:04 PM

In this case, AT&T and VZ are probably right, provided that they don't count CMRS mobile (even LTE) as "broadband".

FWIW, full-quality voice only needs 100 kbps -- PCM voice is digitized at 0.064 Mbps and protocol overhead doesn't quite get it to 0.1. So that's fine -- the issue with voice is QoS, its need for low jitter, delay, and loss. You can have a gigabit service and those parameters can still be bad, or a 1 Mbps service where they're good.

What matters is how the definition is used. If the FCC holds that 10 Mbps is the minimum for "unsubsidized competition" for the Connect America Fund, then a place with 4 Mbps service will be deemed "unserved" and ILECs will be offered federal subsidies (from a higher USF tax rate on all of our bills; it's adjusted quarterly to meet requirements, no Congressional intervention required) to build out. The losers will be the rural WISPs who already provide service. Fixed wireless is inexpensive, and is the predominant form of Internet access in many rural areas, but it rarely hits 10 Mbps to any subscriber. Capacity is constrained by both available (unlicensed) spectrum and by power limits (faster speeds need more power -- think energy per bit).

Mobile (CMRS) on the other hand charges ridiculous amounts per byte ($10/GB being common) so it is not a substitute for fixed or wireline services, even if LTE can burst at or above 10 Mbps.