• Queen HawlSera
    link
    fedilink
    English
    1532 years ago

    The internet needs to be classified as a utility, living without it is just not possible in the world we have created.

      • ferret
        link
        fedilink
        English
        102 years ago

        The libraries that many of the people who say this are trying to shutter, of course.

      • Queen HawlSera
        link
        fedilink
        English
        22 years ago

        The libraries that will allow me a maximum of an hour, maybe two if I’m lucky?

    • @iforgotmyinstance@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      22 years ago

      I remember the collective shitfit around a decade ago when Obama give out free cell phones to homeless people. It was such a crazy concept to people who have never struggled that yes, you DO need a smartphone to meet your calling, banking and personal management needs. Everything has an online portal. Every job application requires an online portion. It’s how the world works and has worked since the mid 00s.

  • irotsoma
    link
    fedilink
    English
    942 years ago

    We really need some upstream minimums as well. That causes so much lag for me. Most plans are 1 up even with 100 down. I have a 200/10 plan now and it’s difficult to do work with the maybe 5 that I get in practice if I’m lucky, especially after overhead from VPN.

    • @vividspecter@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      17
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      Most plans are 1 up even with 100 down

      That can’t be right. I thought Australia’s 100/20 plans had pathetic upload speeds but that’s unreal.

      • @yuknowhokat@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        122 years ago

        I have Spectrum here in the southeast of the United States. My plan is 300 down 12 up. That pathetic upload speed needs to change for the better.

      • @Lesrid@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        122 years ago

        Most broadband access in the US is via coax. And the coax companies refuse to let cable TV, and the packages they can bundle, die. So the portion of the coax that would allow for symmetrical service instead brings all the channels you didn’t buy because everyone streams now.

      • @bratosch@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        62 years ago

        Here in Sweden most people have optic fiber with AT LEAST 100/100 speeds. You gotta try if you want lower than that / if you want asymmetrical speeds.

    • Encrypt-Keeper
      link
      fedilink
      English
      92 years ago

      Right now in a lot of states Verizon has a monopoly on symmetrical internet service. I can’t ever switch ISPs because I can’t get 400/400 anywhere else.

      • irotsoma
        link
        fedilink
        English
        6
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        God I wish we had that here. We are pretty much stuck with Comcast as the only option in many places since they were granted a monopoly for so long and the phone company never really expanded much. DSL is too slow in most places. Like I think I can only get 100/1 where I am now, but the last place I was at which was not exactly rural at all, was max 12m/768k. In my current place I do have one other option which is another cable provider. They offer the exact same as Comcast for slightly less money, but the primary reason I use them is because they don’t have a monthly data cap. With my wife and I working from home plus our personal streaming, we would exceed the cap and have to pay a significant amount to increase it.

        • Encrypt-Keeper
          link
          fedilink
          English
          4
          edit-2
          2 years ago

          Yeah ISPs are doing rural America really dirty. I didn’t even know monthly data caps existed with home internet until somebody from a rural town mentioned it. The only internet with monthly data caps around here is cell service and even then that’s usually unlimited now.

          I do a lot of download and upload and one month I realized I accidentally moved like 30 TB that month.

            • Encrypt-Keeper
              link
              fedilink
              English
              2
              edit-2
              2 years ago

              I have a home server which is used for quite a bit. Bunch of web apps including storage so downloading stuff to my phone over the internet means upload from my server, also multimedia too (That I actually pay for) via Plex, music, and podcasts. Photo hosting, sharing, and backups.

          • irotsoma
            link
            fedilink
            English
            12 years ago

            Yeah I mean right now I’m in a relatively major city in the US (like 750K population), and the previous place I was just inside a major suburb (like 150K population). Rural is just plain screwed.

        • @bamboo@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          12 years ago

          I have Verizon 5g with the ultra wideband service. Tower is on a light post on the street corner, speeds max out around 700/70 for me. 400/400 sounds like Fios which is a fiber service.

    • @uis@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      -12 years ago

      How is this possible? Most of network hardware is symmetric. It doesn’t make sense.

      • fakeaustinfloyd
        link
        fedilink
        English
        142 years ago

        Cable Internet / DOCSIS splits bandwidth in a way that greatly prioritizes download over upload.

      • irotsoma
        link
        fedilink
        English
        122 years ago

        In addition to cable being the primary means of providing service in the US which does allow for this, there are two reasons for doing it. First, down is all that is advertised. Up is only mentioned in small print usually. And second, the major ISPs and the content companies have merged so it’s an anti-“piracy” measure. It significantly impacts torrent seeding and hosting sites using residential Internet service.

  • TeoTwawki
    link
    fedilink
    English
    732 years ago

    Thats great but can we demand some decent UPLOAD to?

    cries in 300down measally 10 up

    • @Qwaffle_waffle@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      21
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      In the linked pdf, it does mention the benchmarks.

      • 2015/current standard is 25/3 Mbps.
      • Proposed increase to 100/20 Mbps.
      • Future goal is 1000/500 Mbps.
      • Flying Squid
        link
        fedilink
        English
        82 years ago

        And really, 20 mbps at the bottom tier for broadband isn’t all that unreasonable. We’re talking about the floor level here.

        • @privatizetwiddle@lemmy.sdf.org
          link
          fedilink
          English
          142 years ago

          20mbits at bottom tier would be fine, but there are currently top tier cable plans, 1gbps down and still only 10mbps up. Upload speed needs to scale at least proportionallly, if not symmetrically.

    • bitwolf
      link
      fedilink
      English
      16
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      I felt so gaslit by optimum because they advertise 1gbps parallel. But, if you don’t have their fiber offering in your region they’ll happily sell you 1gbps/24mbps for the same price.

      Although, unless I complain, they fail to give me even 300mbps down.

      I miss Google Fiber :(

    • @IndefiniteBen@leminal.space
      link
      fedilink
      English
      22 years ago

      Isn’t that partly a consequence of the cable internet network design? The existing DOCSIS standards are designed to favour download speeds, so the infrastructure doesn’t allow asymmetric connections.

      • @bamboo@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        102 years ago

        If I understand correctly it’s not intrinsic to the DOCSIS standards, it’s just how more or less every cable company chooses to allocate channels. Think like a cable company has 100 channels they may be able to use on a given line, and they choose to put 90 of them on download and 10 on upload (numbers are made up to convey idea). Now they have only a small amount of available upload bandwidth and lots of download, but they could have set it up to be 50/50 to have it be equal.

  • @popemichael@lemmy.sdf.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    272 years ago

    I did telecom work about 5 years ago

    It was shocking the amount of area that depends on a low-quality copper wire infrastructure.

    I don’t know if that changed in 5 years, but companies are going to have a hard time getting that replaced nationwide

    • ainokea
      link
      fedilink
      English
      92 years ago

      We live in a rural area (but only 16 miles from the nearest city) and have copper. We really hope the infrastructure bill will bring real internet to us in our lifetime.

      • @bamboo@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        English
        22 years ago

        If congress passes a bill to improve internet infrastructure, it will be a 10s of billions hand out to ISPs that in turn will do little to nothing to actually improve their infrastructure. Just like when they did it in the 90s to get fiber to most Americans.

    • shastaxc
      link
      fedilink
      English
      32 years ago

      They already got billions from the government to upgrade their infrastructure. It’s on them if they didn’t actually use the money for that by now.

    • @White_Flight@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      -102 years ago

      I would think that per FCC this requirement has loop holes and the minimum 100 Mbps is most likely for only broadband not dial up, so many telecommunication companies will be except

    • @adrian783@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      122 years ago

      the most simple explanation is that total bandwidth is limited and more upload speed they give you the less download speed.

    • @rmuk@feddit.uk
      link
      fedilink
      English
      10
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      On all lines the total amount of available bandwidth has to be split between upload and download. If you’ve got gigabits or even hundreds of megabits to play with then symmetric is great, but on slower connections is makes a world of sense to heavily favour download just because humans are better at consuming information than creating it. Consider how many hours of videos the average person watches per week versus how many they create in the same period. Same for photos, emails, articles, etc. There are people who have parity but they are in a pretty tiny minority.

      That said, I hear there are people in the US getting 300Mb/s down and 10Mb/s up which is pretty fucking nuts.

      • Ada
        link
        fedilink
        English
        32 years ago

        Australia here. 250 down, 20 up

    • @Honytawk@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      42 years ago

      Because regular users need more download than upload, while servers need more upload than download.

  • Redhotkurt
    link
    fedilink
    92 years ago

    You might have figured it out by now, but “megabits per second” is abbreviated as “Mbps” with an uppercase m; yeah, it’s kinda pedantic, but using lowercase means it’s a millibit, which is much, much smaller. The same applies to “gigabits per second,” which should be expressed as “Gbps.”

    At any rate, thank you for posting this, it really is good news. And about time they did this, too.

    • @CmdrShepard@lemmy.one
      link
      fedilink
      English
      62 years ago

      I think it’s common parlance to use Mbps and mbps interchangeably since nothing uses “millibits” as a unit of measurement. More commonly people misuse Mbps and MBps which is incorrect since it signifies bits and bytes.

      • ripcord
        link
        fedilink
        52 years ago

        To avoid the Mb/MB confusion I’ve gotten in the habit of writing Mbit and MByte, so there’s really no ambiguity (like, even if I used them right, it’s reasonable that people might not be sure if I’m using them right or not)

        At least when talking about network-related things, particularly transfer rates. With storage and things it’s way more rare that anyone might be talking about bits.

    • Avanera
      link
      fedilink
      42 years ago

      No one would ever say millibits, because a bit is the smallest meaningful datapoint. It’s a non-existent term, and a very pointless pedantic hill to try to build so that you can die on it

    • @Honytawk@lemmy.zip
      link
      fedilink
      English
      1
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      There is no 1000ths of a 0 or 1.

      Milibit does not exist.

      Network speed is measured in Megabits per second, which is indeed 8 times smaller than Megabyte per second that OSes show when transferring files.

  • @bigredcar@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    72 years ago

    I just hope Ofcom will have a similar idea for the UK. Currently you only have a “universal service obligation” for 10Mbps, and if you can be provided by 4G then Openreach doesn’t have to upgrade your old copper line. Large areas of my city are still copper only.

  • @smileyhead@discuss.tchncs.de
    link
    fedilink
    English
    52 years ago

    It should also require allowing incoming connections. Too much ISPs, especially mobile, are gives one-way Internet now. Basically like having a phone line with no phone number.

  • @SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    3
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    100 mbps? That’s 100 millibits per second, or 0.1 bits per second. I’d certainly hope for better bandwidth than one bit every ten seconds; that’s slower than smoke signals.

    • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)
      link
      fedilink
      English
      4
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      I hover around 3Mbps on download, often falling below 1Mbps during peak hours :-/
      It’s still enough to stream YouTube videos in 360p/480p.

      40Mbps would be damn fast. For me, at least.

      • 56!
        link
        fedilink
        English
        22 years ago

        I usually get 5-10 Mbps download during peak times, which is enough for 720p YT and decent video calls. I really don’t understand why people always need faster and faster internet. Although I just checked, and I’m getting 60 down just now, which is way more than I have ever seen.

    • @gnurd@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      32 years ago

      Same. In a large city no less. With new apartments down the road, less than a quarter mile away, having fiber while we have DSL ffs in our whole neighborhood. No other choices for broadband. Fuck ATT.

        • SaltySalamander
          link
          fedilink
          12 years ago

          I hate you, because ATT’s fiber stops about 1/2 mile from my house. My house has never even been able to get fucking DSL.