Soon, 200kbps Might No Longer Be Considered Broadband
from the 14.4k-seems-like-broadband-when-you're-used-to-2.4 dept
While we wait for the details of President-Elect Obama's "broadband stimulus" package to emerge, one aspect of such a plan hasn't gotten a lot of attention: just exactly what the government will consider to be a broadband connection. For a long time, the FCC considered anything that delivered over 200kbps downstream to be broadband, though last year, it raised the minimum cutoff to 768kbps. It's not a coincidence that's the minimum speed offered by many cable modem or DSL providers, making it seem as if the government standards were shoehorned to fit the market, rather than designed to encourage any growth or higher levels of service. So a key part of any broadband plan will be where the administration sets the bar for what's considered broadband, and what will be eligible for the government benefits. For what it's worth, Qwest has said broadband should be considered to be a minimum of 7Mbps, corresponding to service it's currently rolling out. It doesn't seem likely that the government would make the leap from 768kbps to 7Mbps in one fell swoop, but only by setting the minimum at a reasonable level -- and holding incumbent telcos to their commitments -- will broadband policy stand a chance of being effective.
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Filed Under: broadband, definition
Companies: qwest
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Kbps or KBps?
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Re: Kbps or KBps?
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Re: Kbps or KBps?
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Re: Kbps or KBps?
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Re: Kbps or KBps?
Eh, 25KBps isn't possible on 56k. The b in 56kbps is also just a bit ie. 1/8 of a byte. So the max would be a lowly 7kBps - and let's be honest, no one ever gets 7kBps on dialup. It's more like 3-5kBps on dialup.
(can an admin delete my previous post?)
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a little cold water
But why in the world do we want the government to step in again and mess things up? Is it on the basis of their marvelous track record? Ha! Is it on the basis of their Constitutional authority to tell private companies what they can and cannot do? I don't think so.
In this case, the government came in and officially declared broadband to be what everybody already agreed that it should be. That doesn't hurt companies or consumers. But to do that to try and push companies along before they are ready will only lead to very high costs, as companies struggle to comply with a currently unreasonable standard. This leads to higher prices for the consumer. In the meantime, Qwest gets virtual monopoly status thanks to government intervention.
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Re: a little cold water
The idea of raising it to a higher level, raises the bar for all companies, not just Qwest, to provide broadband connections on par with those in Asia. It would raise the bar to allow the upcoming web starts that are streaming media to have a realistic audience. Problem is, with that much bandwidth open, transfer rates will also increase, meaning the providers will need to raise the minimum bandwidth cap in the future, like Comcast's 250GB.
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Re: Re: a little cold water
Why Cincinnati Bell offers a 768/384kbps and a 5mbps/768kbps connection on dsl and Insight offers a 10mbps and a 20mbps connection.
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Re: a little cold water
And the private companies have done such a great job so far?
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Re: Re: a little cold water
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As far as what is defined as "Broadband", I can't see defining something higher than 1.5Mbps as "Broadband", because then a T1 wouldn't qualify. That seems like it would be pretty sad, that a T1 wouldn't qualify as "Broadband" access.
We need to be realistic, while super high speeds are available in the cities setting a rediculiously high bar of what is broadband only hurts us by making it impossible to deploy those services into rural and suburban environments.
If "Broadband" is 5mbps, how on earth are you going to get that out to a rural subscriber who wants "Broadband" service thirty miles from town?
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Re:
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Now go read a LAN/WAN manual.
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Re: Re: Re:
>Now go read a LAN/WAN manual.
What an inane comment. This discussion doesn't have anything to do with disk space. It has to do with the performance of network connections.
For your refrence, I've ready plenty of documents regarding networking. I run an ISP.
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Re: Re: Re:
Go read your won LAN/WAN manual and you will see that it isn't times 2, 8, 10, or 1000. It's more along the lines of 2 to the power of 10 or 1024. Hence, 1Kb is actually 1024b. Remember computers run in powers of 2.
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Re: Re:
However, when dealing with network speeds it's all in bits. You buy a 1.5 megabit per second T1. You buy 6 megabit per second DSL. A dialup modem is 56 kilobits per second. Your fancy new motherboard has a 1 gigabit per second interface.
It's all measured in bits.
Prefixes are in powers of ten. Kilo is 1000, Mega is 1000000, and Giga is 1000000000.
What confuses you is that your browser or ftp or whatever shows you the throughput in BYTES per second.
You don't buy your connection in bytes per second. You don't shop for network hardware based on specifications in bytes per second. Go read some documentation for a few routers or switches. It won't say "bytes per second" anywhere in there.
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warming the water
I think it's pretty important that we don't let telcos get away with touting what they are delivering in very localized markets as their "standard" when what most folks get is a "watered" down version or even an older technology altogether.
I'm not at all opposed to telcos' offering enhanced services wherever the market can bear the prices, but we are for all practical purposes back to monopoly status in many markets. And those markets need an imposed standard.
FWIW, I doubt that many folks need much more than a few hundred kbps of upstream service. On average, who actually has that much to say? And anything more than 1-2 Mbps of downstream service is just an alternative to broadcasting.
So, I'm down with Matthew's effective position, standardizing the status quo. We might differ when I advocate periodically nudging it upward a bit to keep some small positive pressure on.
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Broadband, did that used to mean something?
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Re: Broadband, did that used to mean something?
What ever happened to Broadband being the concept opposite Baseband? That is Broadband provides a fluctating bandwidth "pool" that is shared by users while Baseband provides fixed bandwidth to each single end user?
Huh? The classical definitions are based off of the frequency range that the signal uses, not how much data can squeeze through it, and certainly not how it's allocated per user.
A baseband signal is (still is!) any signal whose frequency range starts at 0 Hz. Examples of baseband signalling include ethernet (10baseT: 0-20MHz; 100baseT: 0-200MHz; 1000baseT: 0-250MHz) and some CCTV (0-6MHz).
Now, for example, coaxial cable can pass frequencies much higher than 6MHz, and in many cases it's useful to put multiple signals on the same wire. These can be shifted/stacked/etc - a signal at 0-6MHz on one wire can be sent as a signal from 6-12MHz or 12-18MHz on a different wire along with other signals without signal degradation.
Likewise, someone really only needs to hear the 300-3000Hz range of your voice to understand you. Before the age of digital Time Domain Multiplexing (TDM), telephone companies would put multiple voice calls on a single trunk line by shifting their frequency range.
The only difference between those last two examples is the size of the frequency range used. It was common practice to call a signal that used a similar frequency spread as the human voice "narrow" and a signal that used more than that as "broad" (for example, FM Radio uses 200kHz/channel).
More information can be sent across a channel with a wider frequency range than a narrow one, although the usable capacity depends just as much on the signal to noise ratio (for example, GPS squeezes a small trickle of information through a very broadband channel with more noise than signal).
Marketing people have tended to forget about that caveat in their current redefinition of "broadband"/"narrowband" to refer to bitrate. It's already pretty meaningless. Bitrate is a number - the meaning we ascribe to that number will change from one year to the next, so it makes sense not to hide those numbers or evaluate a nation's connectivity in relation to a single threshold.
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7MB is extreme
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Re: 7MB is extreme
it says 7mbps in the brochure, but i guarantee you that you will never see 7mbps. i guarantee you that you will never see 3.5mbps
my cable company (insight communications, northern kentucky) says i connect at 10mbps and while downloads are fast, i barely get 8mbps on a speed test with cincinnati or chicago.
what i think the minimum should specify is not the advertised speed, but the actual service. I.E. if you provide broadband service, and your customers don't see the minimum (768down, etc.) you get shut down by the FCC.
the standard for the speed test can be open and published, and the FCC can conduct "speed audits" at residences and businesses to keep providers honest.
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Re: Re: 7MB is extreme
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Gov. Regs.
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Hey, you live in my Area.. Insight definitely rocks :) I only have 10mb, but the 20 has tempted me on a few occasions.
But I can't see the government wasting money on this, there are more corporate bailouts to do!! But really, shouldn't they be concentrating on using resources for more important needs, like feeding hungry people or something?
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the problem with insight is uplink speed. you only get somewhere between 200k and 600k up. i would gladly trade half my download speed to double my uplink (5mbps down and 2mbs up).
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You expect the toothless stooges at the FCC?
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Broadband
The tragedy behind it is my township has tried using every FCC regulation and every law available to force them to provide service to our area, all to no avail. I'd rather see issues like this get resolved first before defining what broadband actually is.
Sadly AT&T doesn't have the infrastructure and the only alternative is to go through a cell phone carrier's data service. Needless to say I'm lucky if I can get 200kbps for any reasonable length of time. Add to that my provider's DNS servers return a server failure and they don't properly cache the IP leases in their DHCP server, and you have a glimpse into a high-speed dead zone I call home.
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This is what i was thinking too. Setting a progressive minimum will help push things along. Especially if funding was tided into meeting the requirements.
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Shoehorned to meet the existing market
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Speed criteria is download only?
It seems like the legislators still don't get that internet communication is two way.
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Overhead
remember, a 100mpbs ethernet isn't going to do 12.5MB/s of usuable data, but it will do 12.5MB/s of RAW data. There is a LOT of overhead in packets
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broadband used to be 10Mbits/sec up and down
I guess most people must not ever try to "upload" large files to their work computer or post large pictures to sites like flickr. If they did, we'd hear a lot more noise about 128k to 768k uplinks *not* being broadband.
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a modest guideline
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Every once in a while I find a server that I can download from that will saturate my cable line and give me around 15Mbit download speeds. But that's not too often.
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Re:
Of course that assumes you are always doing only one thing at a time with your BB connection. Many of us have more than one family member using the internet at any given time- browsing, Hulu, Bittorrent, VOIP, gaming... so a lot of bandwidth to our house is very helpful
Sure... one individual site may not be able to pump out data fast enough to saturate our BB line, but multiple sites simultaneously *will*.
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Re:
Of course that assumes you are always doing only one thing at a time with your BB connection. Many of us have more than one family member using the internet at any given time- browsing, Hulu, Bittorrent, VOIP, gaming... so a lot of bandwidth to our house is very helpful
Sure... one individual site may not be able to pump out data fast enough to saturate our BB line, but multiple sites simultaneously *will*.
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Soon, 200kbps Might No Longer Be Considered Broadband
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r we gettin xploited
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