With this funding, does the FCC require IPv6 and/or dual stack? If not, it could cause a new IPv6 digital divide.
Joe Klein
CAF nor RDOF required IPv6. BEAD doesn’t say anything about IPv6. I seriously doubt v6 gets included into the conversation because even NANOG can’t agree it is needed. The bigger concern are the people that have no connectivity at all (no 1 mbps, no 25/3, no 100/20, no gigabit, etc).
As much as I hate giving C&P/Bell Atlantic/Verizon praise for anything ever, my 1gb FIOS connection reliably delivers 900+mb/s in both directions any time I care to test it. Generally, if I can’t fill the pipe it’s the other end’s lack of available bandwidth.
Thanks,
These people are fictional at this point.
Starlink has changed the equation such that there are basically no places in the continental US that can’t get service which is usable for most internet needs. I have starlink for backup purposes and don’t notice any meaningful practical difference between this and my main connection which is about the same raw speed as starlink. I use it for typical work from home purposes including streaming, voip, and web usage.
If the government is going to fund anything at all anymore, it needs to be fiber all the way to the home which is built and managed in a way that any provider can use it. This probably means a single strand from each home to some concentration point no more than 10km from the home and then a backbone/middle mile supporting several carriers from that point. The position of this concentration point to be determined by the density in the area.
Here in Italy there have been a lot of investments to get better broadband.
Such as government sponsored bundles for areas with no return on investments, for schools etc with a lot of focus on reaching gigabit speeds
The results have been mainly positive even though there are delays.
On the end user side in 2020 one of the largest ISPs started offering 2.5Gbps service
Adds all over and users started asking for it, even though they don’t have a 2.5 nic or router, so now all of the major providers are rolling it out.
Illiad one uped them a couple of months ago pushing a 5Gbps service and now I get people asking me if we offer 5Gbps fiber lines… pure marketing…
I have a 1Gbps/100Mbps line and it is plenty enough for the family rarely do we even get near the limits.
It’s kind of like when I ask for an Italian espresso in the states and get a cup full of coffee, no I just want a very small italian style espresso…
The response is Why? you are paying for it take it all
Bigger is better, even if you don’t need it, reigns supreme.
I grew up in rural Texas where my mother still lives. She has adequate speed internet, the biggest issue is reliability. The whole town (there is only 1 provider) has an outage for about an hour every week. Two weeks ago, there was no internet for 3 days. Cellular service is 4G and not even that reliable for data even on the best days.
I have two fixed wireless Internet connections here. One is 25/5, the other is 35/5. There is no cable, no fiber, no cellular, not even DSL from the phone company. That is reality in metro Denver, CO (actually, the foothills, 25 miles from the state Capitol building).
Regarding Starlink, no, you can’t get it. I paid my deposit a year and a half ago and I am still on the waiting list. Every time that I get close to the date they promise, they change the promise. Maybe I will get Starlink service some time in the future, but, not any time soon.
Oh, yeah, and 25 meg down costs $75 a month. If you want VoIP, that is another $20+.
So not only is it slow, it is expensive too.
So yes, there still is a problem, right here in America. And not just in the boonies.
Mitch
In an ideal world, yes, this is exactly how it would work although there would be some logistical issues.
If you sit in these hearings the various government entities hold and listen to Charter's "Government Affairs Representative" then that is absolutely not true and coax is the wave of the future.
This brings up another issues no one is really talking about and that's affordability. We're about to lower our price on 10G to the home to $50/mo because that was the number the FCC would pay people who qualified. Now they've lowered that subsidy to $30. The pandemic exposed the fact that there are a lot of people out there that just can't afford the current pricing structure. We give a gig away for free with a one time install fee and we had people calling us who's kids were at home for school and they couldn't afford the $25/mo we'd break their $300 install into. We ended up just waiving a ton of fees during those early COVID days.
Aaron
Using anything as “THE” benchmark is absurd… I was suggesting that downloads are a contributing factor to the benchmarks that should be considered.
Owen
I agree that it probably doesn't change much for the ISP's (my rural ISP installing fiber apparently disagrees tho). The thing is that if you're talking about downloads, the game manufacturers will just fill to whatever available capacity the pipes will give so it probably won't ever get better.
I don’t think game manufacturers expand their games based on available download bandwidth. I think that games have gotten richer and the graphics environments and capabilities have improved and content more expansive to a point where yes, games are several BluRays worth of download now instead of being shipped on multiple discs.
However, this isn’t exactly new… Windows used to come on something like 31 3.5” floppies at one point.
However, yes, a download will fill whatever bandwidth is available for as long as the download takes. If you’ve got 1Gpbs, the download will take significantly less time than if you have 100Mbps.
Maybe there a Next Big Thing that will be an even bigger bandwidth eater than video. But I get the bigger limitation these days for a lot of people is latency rather than bandwidth. That of course is harder to deal with.
Latency is a limitation for things that are generally relatively low bandwidth (interactive audio, zoom, etc.).
Higher bandwidth won’t solve the latency problem, but it does actually help some in that it reduces the duration of things other customers do to cause congestion which increases latency.
Owen
Remember, this rulemaking is for 1.1 million locations with the "worst" return on investment. The end of the tail of the long tail. Rural and tribal locations which aren't profitable to provide higher speed broadband.
Yes… Places like San Jose, California, a city of over 1 million people don’t get such protections… Nobody is looking out for or building for us.
These locations have very low customer density, and difficult to serve.
Sure, but if you’re going to require any form of bandwidth that becomes fiber-dependent, there’s no significant cost difference to delivering a gig.
After the Sandwich Isles Communications scandal, gold-plated proposals will be viewed with skepticism. While a proposal may have a lower total cost of ownership over decades, the business case is the cheapest for the first 10 years of subsidies. [massive over-simplification]
If the target is a non-fiber service, then 100/20 might make sense. If Fiber is being installed, then it’s hard to find a rationale for 1Gbps being more expensive than any lower capacity.
Historically, these projects have lack of timely completion (abandoned, incomplete), and bad (overly optimistic?) budgeting.
Like virtually all telecom projects?
Owen
I don’t think game manufacturers expand their games based on available download bandwidth. I think that games have gotten richer and the graphics environments and capabilities have improved and content more expansive to a point where yes, games are several BluRays worth of download now instead of being shipped on multiple discs.
When I was a rural DSL customer, my problem wasn’t necessarily with the size of the games, but rather that you’d have to re-download the entire game every week. It would take almost an entire week to download a game, then by time it’s finally updated they’ve updated a tree texture and you need to download the whole game again. I understand why this happens but customers who didn’t have access to broadband just got the shaft.
I still have a lot of friends who don’t have access to broadband and simply can’t play modern games because of the always-online requirement and constant, huge updates.
If the target is a non-fiber service, then 100/20 might make sense. If Fiber is being installed, then it’s hard to find a rationale for 1Gbps being more expensive than any lower capacity.
The question I have for other operators: if you have a group of customers that subscribe to a 100Mb service, and all of them suddenly switched to a 1Gb service, would you expect an increase in overall bandwidth usage?
I’ve been looking around for some other comments on bandwidth trends but I don’t know how much of that would/should be confidential based on privacy or trade secret.
Latency is a limitation for things that are generally relatively low bandwidth (interactive audio, zoom, etc.).
Higher bandwidth won’t solve the latency problem
+1
IMO as we enter the 'post-gigabit era', an extra 1 Gbps to the home will matter less than 100 ms or 500 ms lower working latency (optimally sub-50 ms, if not sub-25 ms). The past is exclusively speed-focused -- the future will be speed + working latency + reliability/resiliency + consistency of QoE + security/protection + WiFi LAN quality.
Jason
Yes, definitely.
But some of those criteria can be combined into one, namely
"transaction latency," how long it takes to get something
done. Which includes things like uploading a video clip,
or a complicated PowerPoint deck, and (behind the scenes
from the standpoint of the end user) lots of interactions
between various computations and databases (like deciding
what ads to clutter your screen with). So while high speed
won't solve all problems (the speed of light is rather hard
to exceed), it can help alleviate the transaction latency
annoyances by making sure those increasingly large data
transfers that are involved happen quickly.
Andrew
Hello Jason & All ,
Latency is a limitation for things that are generally relatively low bandwidth (interactive audio, zoom, etc.).
Higher bandwidth won?t solve the latency problem+1
You Mean something a little less than ...
My traceroute [v0.94]
replaceme (192.168.253.147) -> Snipped 2022-05-26T13:06:34-0800
Keys: Help Display mode Restart statistics Order of fields quit
Packets Pings
Host Loss% Snt Drop Rcv Last Avg Best Wrst StDev
1. ...Snip...
2. AS??? 192.168.251.1 0.0% 89 0 89 1.3 1.3 0.8 1.9 0.2
3. AS??? 10.5.5.227 1.1% 89 1 88 227.5 123.9 31.1 276.5 69.8
4. AS??? 10.5.5.185 2.2% 89 2 87 43.5 48.7 28.5 72.0 10.3
5. AS??? 10.5.21.241 1.1% 89 1 88 36.6 40.3 30.5 64.3 5.7
6. AS??? 10.128.88.234 2.2% 89 2 87 52.9 39.8 31.8 63.8 5.3
7. AS??? 10.128.128.125 10.1% 89 9 80 42.5 40.0 29.6 55.7 4.7
8. AS??? 10.128.118.217 72.7% 89 64 24 36.7 39.6 29.7 49.8 4.8
9. AS??? 10.128.0.166 31.5% 89 28 61 60.0 58.8 45.8 86.5 8.0
10. AS??? 10.128.0.170 85.2% 89 75 13 101.1 81.7 70.7 101.1 9.7
...snip...
Oh , Sorry you were talking about latncy not Packet loss .
While I do understand that icmp responses ARE Low priority the above still gives some useful info . IMO Packet losses like the above are far worse than latency , But as far as an eyeball networks users experience makes absolutely no difference .
IMO as we enter the 'post-gigabit era', an extra 1 Gbps to the home will
matter less than 100 ms or 500 ms lower working latency (optimally sub-50 ms, if not sub-25 ms). The past is exclusively speed-focused -- the future will be
Speed + working latency + reliability/resiliency + consistency of QoE + security/protection + WiFi LAN quality.
One more set of nit's , "security/protection" by who's standard should this be taken from , Eyeball users , Eyeball network Operators , His upstreams , US Gov , Nato , ... ?
Where can each of those mentioned in the above have their input listened too & acted apon ?
I think we have a winner here - we don’t necessarily need 1G down, but we do need to get the upload speeds up to symmetrical 50/50, 100/100 etc… there are enough people putting in HD security cameras and the like that upstream speeds are beginning to be an issue.
Or just basic working from home. Now all the files are "in the cloud", hitting 'save' on a big PowerPoint deck was time to go and make a cup of tea on my VDSL/FTTC that synced around 55/10. Now I'm on 300/300 fibre, it's pretty close to working on local files. (Let's not talk about 16/1.5 ADSL, going even further back, that was time for a quick snooze...)
Cheers,
Tim.
files. (Let's not talk about 16/1.5 ADSL, going even further back, that was time for a quick snooze...)
One doesn’t have to go back… In San Jose, CA, the best DSL available at my location is still 1.5M/384K on a good day. Add water (rain) and it drops to something more like 768K/128K.
USF is great for rural, but it has turned medium density and suburban areas into connectivity wastelands.
Owen
So you haven’t yet installed your home Holodeck?