Don't Criticize Our National Broadband Plan → I'll beat the 3/768 dead horse

Granted, it's not a high number at all, but I'd say that about 95% of everything on the internet can be done perfectly well over a connection that delivers 3 Mbps down and 768 kbps up, with a latency to the nearest major city less than 60ms. For ADSL that means provisioning the link at 3490 kbps down and 894 kbps up, and delivering provisioned speeds 24x7. Granted, these are laughably low numbers for everyone on 20+ Mbit cable connections, but if the above connection was made available to almost everyone in the US (90% or more, maybe 95% or more) at a reasonable price ($50 or less per month either unbundled or with the cost of the minimum bundle included) then everyone AT LEAST would be able to use the internet of today, though more upgrades will be needed to bring things up to par for, say, five years down the road.

3/768 for what? Your average household of 2 adults and 2 children?

What about my college apartment, consisting of 8 college students (including myself). 3/768 is not nearly enough. Cablevision has been supposedly providing us 30/5 (supposedly because, well, at any given moment we get 3/1 due to 'node saturation') and I can tell you: It is NOT enough.

Its better then dial up right? The transition from dial up to 3/768 would be a miracle for alot of people. It might not make you happy but im sure it will make a household with 2 adults and 2 children happy. Im grateful with my 1 mbps down and 40kbps up. Would I love something faster, You bet your ass I would but atleast im out of that dial up hellhole no one wants to be in.

No, no it can not handle 95 percent of everything. Maybe 5-10 years ago.

that's a pitiful target. the US used to be the leader in broadband; now we're hoping the govt will develop a plan to give people 20th century speeds at high prices.

in France, you can get a triple play (20Mbps symmetrical, VOIP, TV) for about $40.

other developed countries have similarly high speeds at much lower prices than the U.S.

how far the mighty have fallen.

Look, even your not on dialup. Nobody is. Anyone who really needs web access and is stuck on dialup has gotten wildblue by now. Its slow, but youtube and microsoft updates is somewhat usable now. With a contract, the equipment is basically free. Today's dialup is satellite, 3G and DSL less so.

The sad part is that this broadband plan is about investing in grandfathered technologies such as DSL.

Nobody is on dialup? I am sure those millions still on AOL would beg to differ.

Either they subscribe to AOL and don't use the dialup portion anymore, or they don't use the public internet, or the public internet is optional in their life, and they would drop it on a dime for financial reasons if they had to.

I was on dial up for years and didnt want to deal with the crap of satellite internet. Satellite internet (for example) is for people in the sticks miles and miles away from society . Not for people less then a mile away from san antonio city limits.

I have fios... 3/768 is dial up to me.

Actually something like low latency 3/1 available at an affordable cost to 99% of U.S. households should be one of the two main goals of the national broadband plan. The other equally important goal should be actual competition rather than comfortable duopolies because that's what is going to lead to the higher speeds. If both goals are met our country won't fall behind the rest of the developed world.

All I have is dialup at my house and no cellular and I can do Microsoft updates and other things on a 19.2k dial connection. I just start the downloads at night and go to bed and when I get up the next morning walla! good to go. Updates finished.

Tell that to my father - he is on dialup and there are MANY more who are.

He has no options and he bought the house he is at many years before broadband was even available.

I would absolutely say the average household can get by just fine with 3\768. I know far too many who are getting by with no issues with 3 down and even 1.5 meg down (like me).

Sounds like you're on 3/1

I'm not saying that 3/768 will do everything you can possibly desire for a ton of people on one connection. But it's a decent "family sized" internet connection as long as your router is smart enough (router, not network) to prioritize surfing and video watching over BitTorrent that Johnny's running in his room.

Have you used satellite? Having used both dialu and satellite there are times when dialup is actually FASTER than sat. Latency is actually less than 200ms with a decent dialup connection...sat is 4-10x that. Also, sat internet starts at $50 per month (WB's $40 promo currently going on doesn't count for much...it'll be gone soon enough and your average cost for the length of the required two-year contract is $45). Your garden-variety DSL/cable services run $30-$40 for a standard tier last I checked.

As for equipment costs, they might be "practically" free (aka $6 per month for 24 months, or $140ish overall) but installation is over $100 most of the time (WB's current special for shipping + installation is $125).

In closing, from my LARGE amount of experience with areas where DSL doesn't reach (thank you very much Verizon...the nearby cooperative may charge $70 for 3M DSL but at least DSL is available pretty much everywhere they have phone service) there are still a surprisingly large number of folks on dialup. Sat internet is a luxury at $50+ per month plus setup fees, whereas dialup is about $10 per month. Guess what grandma gets to check her e-mail? Guess what I downloaded several GB worth of software over until my parents got tired of sharing our phone line with?

That`s probably because they limit their activities to things that actually work on a 3/1.

No - they have no problems and they do not limit. I have yet to find anything I can't do on 1.5 meg. Large downloads can be done over night without issue. Streaming has zero issues as well.

I won't and don;t (and neither do my friends) watch tv or movies online but streaming a TV has (the few times I have done it) has never been an issue. We do not watch movies on the PC - we have TV we do that on and prefer to watch on.

I would bet teh majority of folks in the US would use the internet connection to download files - and for that you do nto need a uber fast 50 meg download.

As of 3 weeks ago I have.Latency means nothing when the average website is 200 or 400 KBs. My thread that I am posting in is 164KB, 52KB of HTML. Satellite will be faster than dialup. I would say satellite is a slow 3G connection in its feeling, or about a 3G connection after average cell tower congestion in an urban area.Close enough, unbundled cable internet with some cable cos can go into the 60s or 70s.So they give you a mortgage/subsidy cellphone style, its basically under $10 a month amortized.Shes checking email, not using the WWW. Shes not a browser. Shes the same as a credit card checker or a MUD player or IM user.But you apparently have a few spare days to wait for that to finish, if you use the connection while its downloading, extended that download into a week or 2. Some people have jobs, or will be left behind when they can't see a youtube video that was posted to review for a conference tomorrow.

True enough, but ... Split the cost of the Internet 8 ways, each contributor kicking in just $20 a month, and you could probably afford the $160 a month for a 50/5 connection. Would that be enough to sate your desire?

For some of us, though, $160 a month is just too much to bear. Knock it back to $40 a month, or so (I prefer $30 a month, but don't know if that is achievable), and I'll sign up. But no way I'll pay even $80 a month for Internet. I'll just find something else to do.

Heard of TubeGrip? I have to use that to get YT videos to download sometimes over "broadband" connections due to congestion somewhere along the line (possibly at Google's servers).

As far as unbundled cable goes, you can get a basic tier for $20-$35 practically everywhere. Here TWC offers RR Standard for $40, no bundles. DSL from Verizon is $20-$43...if you can get it. So sat internet picks up price-wise where DSL/cable leave of, thus killing adoption.

As far as 3G versus satellite goes, look at any 3G reviewer who has moved from satellite. 99% of the time they'll say there's no comparison; unless you're using an overloaded network (thank you very much AT&T...second-least-predictable 3G network out there behind CricKet) your 3G experience will be miles better than satellite. About 22,000 miles better, to be exact.

As for equipment amortization, you only do that if you're a business. If you're a residential user you see the large setup fee and tend to walk away. Speaking of business users, you're right in saying that they'll go for satellite from dialup before residential users. However not all residential users are business users (far from it) and for many $10 dialup plus a $20 phone line (local only, after taxes and fees) is low enough compared to $50 per month plus that same phone line (you can't do VoIP over sat) that they aren't going to make the switch. Sat internet doesn't do double- or triple-play discounts so people will be paying $40+ more per month for it than dialup, $20+ mmore per month if they had a second phone line for internet only.

Satellite is NOT the new dialup because it's not cheap (I haven't seen a dialup plan anywhere outside of AOL above $22 per month in the last eight years or so) and it's very spendy for the initial equipment, whereas dialup might be $50 for a modem (usually more like $20). If you want to say anything is "the next dialup" it's "lite" DSL in areas that have the service for $10-$20 per month when bundled with a phone line as that service is inexpensive on both setup and monthly charges. However lite DSL isn't available beyond 15-22kfeet from the CO (depending on whether you're talking to AT&T or Windstream).

Lastly, DSLReports is a text-heavy site that has very little in the way of essential content other than the HTML page file itself. That sort of thing (a large stream of data that isn't latency sensitive) is what satellite does fairly well. However a website with multiple page elements will tend to choke more unless optimizations are made, since you get hit with a second or two of latency each time you request a page element. So elements smaller than about 20KB will come down faster over dialup than satellite. Don't get me wrong, I'll take sat any day over dialup when it comes to downloading the newest 30MB game file...as long as doing so won't put me over the transfer cap.

Whereas I'd probably eat a $100 per month internet bill if FiOS came to town (I'd buy through DSLExtreme to get the $100 rate). Though I'd probably downgrade to 35/35 when it comes out...different strokes for different folks.

My apartment complex is shared with about twenty other colege students. Most of them (everyone except myself and, some of the time, my roommates) are sharing a Qwest connection that's about 4.2 Mbps down and 700 kbps up. It's not blazing fast (the university connection next door is as long as you plug into Ethernet) but I'm the only one paying for my own internet connection. I have friends on 7M 9really 6M) Qwest and they're fine too. I personally like my 22/5 Comcast but realize that most people don't use the internet as much as I do, and the only benefits I see with the speed are faster downloads and uploads of large files (I could still do them over a slow connection, but it would take longer). Assumiing Qwest's network wasn't jacked up at the time, Hulu would work fine over their 1.5 Mbps tier.

I can definitely find things to do with a 50-100 Mbps connection, however I've yet to find out what more than 1% of the population needs this connection for, right now. Of that 1%, most people aren't actually on that connection. Some can't get it, some can. Those who can say it's too expensive. Well then, you obviously don't need the connection enough...getting 50 Mbps here would require a dedicated fiber circuit and several thousand dollars per month. if you thought that $100 with cable TV was expensive, think again.

As for all websites not being under 500K, that's absolutely correct. Some websites aren't terribly well-designed or wee made specifically for high-speed connections. However a 1 MB web page can be pulled down in a couple of seconds on a 3 Mbps connection, which is acceptable considering that at that point you're looking more at latency and browser rendering speed than connection speed. At least for now. Anything bigger than 1MB or so and you're dealing with streaming meia or large images, which by default take a fair amount of time to load. Not that you can't set a goal that a 12 megapixel low-compressio JPEG load instantly, but we've got to talk about priorities.

As for YouTube, you can run that on a high-quality 384 connection. I believe HD can be run on a few Mbps, 5 Mbps at most. Probably more like 3 Mbps. If you want to find a bandwidth-hungry site Hulu, YouTube, Vmeo, Crackle etc. won't do it; they're optimized for people's current connections.

As for the multiple users bit, see my first point. Also, right now I'm sitting on a 512k conection. If the quality of the connection itself didn't suck so badly and my router had decent QoS the family would have no problem sharing it around. Hopefully we'll be able to get 1 Mbps Verizon DSL in (fingers crossed) and the problem will go away. Two simultaneous YouTube videos plus some background downloads and everything should be just peachy.

My God, people are not all the same as you. Their preferences and habits are quite often different.

Waiting `all night` for something to complete deters people from using it. Make something easy and accessible, and the people will come.

Your attitude is incredibly narrow.

Your arguments are silly and irrelevant. You`ve basically taken a `race to the bottom` approach.

Regardless of what your personal judgment or opinion of the current situation entails, the history of infrastructure construction has demonstrated that use of that infrastructure only truly becomes a necessity after the infrastructure is already built.

If you build it, they will come. Just because you can`t imagine something now, or perhaps simply refuse to, doesn`t mean we should all lower our expectations to satisfy your view of the world.

They are neither. Not that I wouldn't mind 100 Mb/s symmetrical. But if you can't profitably deliver it for less than $40 a month, I don't want it.

Ya got me all wrong.

Companies should be able to offer high-quality service and such, including 50 or 100 Mbps symmetric if they feel like it. If I had money to deploy a fiber optic system in my town right now I'd START with TWC's current tiers, up them by a few megabits, make them symmetric and charge the same price as TWC is right now. So 20 Mbps symmetric for $50, 10 Mbps symmetric for $40. I'd probably add 50 Mbps symmetric around $80, and would subscribe to that tier if I were a customer.

However we're talking about a baseline here (or at least I am). Let's get everyone who wants to walk speedwalking before sending a select few to the moon "just because." I'd rather get 3/768 to ten customers who couldn't get it before than 50/50 to a single customer who can currently get 15/2. Don't get me wrong, technology will benefit from higher broadband speeds, but our big issue is getting the speeds we do have out to everyone.

FWIW the average speed of the top country in the world right now, according to speedtest.net, is "only" about 21 Mbps down and 10 Mbps up. So if we had percentile-based billing with 30/15 Mbps (down and up) as the fixed speed and heavy customers paying more (and lighter customers paying less) that would actually put us on top of the heap...assuming we could bring that to everyone. Which would cost a dozen or two times what the current broadband plan calls for.

Though with Ubiquiti equipment (yay »ubnt.com) I'm guessing you could push out a 10/2 or so service (maybe even 10 Mbps symmetric) to a lot of places for relatively cheap. You just have to have a decent middle mile. Which we might be getting around here...pretty excited about that...

My god - I never said anything about everybody are all not the same - hence the MAJORITY (ie: Not ALL as you suggest). Most people use the web to surf, read emails, and do some streaming radio\tv 1.5 can EASILY deal with that and 3 meg could still do that easily. Gaming online can be dine with 1.5 meg as well - effortlessly. The MINORITY could use uber fast connections to download movies. It makes ZERO sense to give uber fast connections to the majority when teh price point will be wayyyyy to high for the majority who use it as described above. It makes more common and financial sense to roll out basic service first with plans for advanced services that cost more - but I think the amount of folks doing the faster speed for a lot more money (speed is no where near free) will be the minority.

I do not remember the last time I had to wait all night for anything to download - probably the last item was the full install of Americas Army 3 and that only took 4 or so hours.

I found the reading comprehension to be narrow and incomplete.