It depends what adversary I guess. It seems like several middle eastern countries of very different religious bent are quite happy with our military activity. Though they are not usually named as adversaries they certainly are by any rational metric.
I don't think so if they are a nuclear armed nation. If the end result of a nuclear armed conflict is mutual destruction and collapse, the only path towards dominance is economic. And in a pure economic fight a massive overpowered military is just an economic anchor.
If you reduce all those other things you don’t need to reduce their military. You already won, without a battle or any casualties on your side. The decay and rot from the inside will take care of the rest.
Because the answers that come from science are independent of the authoritarian ruler's whims, and that cannot be tolerated, as key to authoritarian rule is that it must be entirely responsive to the whims of the regime.
It is the same reason that completely freaked me out when I read that Lenin and Stalin had directed their death squads to target their most loyal party members first. Why the hell would they do that? It turns out it is because the most loyal party members would object to the dictator's schemes on grounds of ideological principle, and such objections or principled people could not be tolerated. Pure evil, but genius in the context of a dictator's needs.
Thus, every authoritarian regime attacks the intelligent, academic, and scientific worlds. Both Mao and Pol Pot not only executed people with scientific and academic credentials, but merely for wearing glasses which signified people who likely read a lot.
Consistent Anti-Science actions are one of the key signs you are not dealing with a mere political party, but something far worse — a full-on authoritarian takeover.
> Seems they really want to revert everything that made the US a world leader.
Conservatives takes different names in different places. Calling the spade a spade, a more truthful name is 'Reggressives', no matter what the colour on the banner is. The signatures of regressivism is , among others, the yearning for the past, to bring back the old ways of life, the predisposition for worship (idolatry)--be that of imaginary creatures or very wealthy people.
Some of us would find it really hard to imagine why some others would say, "yes please, more oil. I really would love to inhale more toxic fumes". Yet, such people exist. I can't explain why.
I’d argue the current crop of Republican leaders are radical populists (for conservative voters).
While many of their asks mirror traditional Republican social positions, they’re responsive to an economically disadvantaged class in the Republican Party that’s historically been ignored.
And while there’s certainly a lot of backroom dealing to favor business interests, I think it’d be hard to argue that the poor Republican voter has had this much power in the party… ever. (See things like immigration policy, which agribusiness is scared shitless of)
The previous Republican bargain was ‘We say we love god and guns, but let business get on with business, and we’re never going to harm the latter for the former.’
More like it has exposed how completely powerless the electorate in America actually is. The kind of shit the current administration is pulling against all public interest is something politicians of other countries can't even conceive of, because it is systemically impossible in their respective political setups.
If you did a survey worldwide of democracies, I’d be very surprised to find any that didn’t have norm tipping points, where technically things could be pushed if any adherence to previous norms were abandoned.
The irony is that this behavior isn’t exceptional for the US, historically. We’ve just lived through a long recent period (1974-2024) where norms were more respected.
Historically (pre-1900) there were some colossal political anything-goes knife fights within and between the branches of American government.
One consequence of that was the explicit stripping of powers from the executive and substitution of independent boards to check its power. Those were eventually removed in the 80s in a drive to increase efficiency. See history before: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Service_Reform_Act_of_...
I expect that post-Trump, when Democrats regain legislative power, there are going to be a lot of efforts to buttress and expand the role of executive-independent bodies.
Trump isn't neutered, he's doing almost exactly what he promised he would do. Russia certainly did help, what with all the online propaganda and stuff, but attributing his victory to them is a little too easy.
America had this coming for a long time, right from Reagan's plan to unite Republicans behind Christian nationalism to its realization. This was all so predictable.
The Russians have been investing in Trump since the 80s and have been unleashing aggressive Soviet-style propaganda campaigns (minus the communism part) across social media for years now. They were spending as much as $400k a month on payments to bloggers -- just online stuff -- in the run-up to the first Trump election.
Your timelines are a little off but to add more details:
Matt Christiansen, Tayler Hansen, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern are the subjects of the ongoing investigation.
$400k/month was paid out just for Tim Pool for repeating Russian talking points on the Tenet Media youtube channel which should have raised eyebrows for all parties.
There is a LOT of data on Trump/Russia out now. I find it hard to believe anyone informed is still using that. It’s kind of an intellectual red flag my man.
The smarter liberals have moved on to just hating Trump for being himself.
Do the true believers here think that the I formation Gabbard is releasing is fake? We’ve had it for 9 years now about Ohrs and FusionGPS and FBI lying to FISA.
Cut their CEO some some slack. He's a thought leader/rocket mogul/ISP guy/social media but wants to make it a bank for some reason dude/former government sort-of-official/professional gamer/full time twitter shitposter that's also starting a political party and who is responsible for fathering over a dozen children. On second thought, I think I see the problem.
Do you think I wanted to impress you or anyone really? GP was beating a dead horse so I said something. Somehow you ended up caring. I’m almost certain there are better uses of your time. Certainly has no influence on my opinion. Honestly people who hold Hacker News like it’s sacred are exhausting. Your opinions and mine need not mix, just use your thumb to move on?
Socialism with chinese characteristics/ Xi Jinpeng thought is the most successful ideology currently. Free speech/free markets power has decayed since people found ways to exploit them and more powerful people found ways to aid the exploiters.
The US is apparently powerless to exploit our own rare earth resources and fund/subsidize them or lithium production or photovoltaic production, nuclear reactors, or even semiconductor production.
> The US is apparently powerless to exploit our own rare earth resources
The DOD took a direct stake in a US rare earth miner / refiner, in addition to a long term purchase agreement at set prices. Apple also piled on last week (no doubt after some backroom conversations).
> Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed "on a reasonable and timely basis" to all Americans.
Carr says that when looking into whether that is being satisfied the FCC should not consider affordability because section 706 does not contain the word "affordability".
But it also does not contain any words for any of the things he does want the FCC to consider. All it says is "reasonable and timely".
I bet if you polled consumers and asked what they would think it means if they were informed some commercial service or product was available to them on a reasonable basis an overwhelming majority would include in their answer that it means it is available to them at a price they find affordable.
The FCC is a revolving door between industry and regulators. When you understand that the true mission of the FCC is to please big telecom it all starts to make sense. Hence the auctioning off spectrum in huge geographic blocks that only the largest corporations can finance. If the US was really serious about universal broadband there would be a Telecom Ministry doing the cable laying itself or at least local loop unbundling. If we treated roads the same way as broadband we would have private tolled highways near city cores and dirt roads in rural areas.
Of course the angle is disingenuous. "Reasonable" here implies that it's reasonably attainable for customers. This is merely choosing interpretation arbitrarily. Like me saying the sky is green because green is partly comprised of the color blue.
Did I miss the vote we had on broadband speed goals, or whether we should publish prices?
Get outta here with that. Most of Trump's outrageous policies are incredibly unpopular, even among his base. He's just enacting the wildly unpopular Project 2025, which he denied ever hearing of while hiring 70% of its authors into his administration.
> Most of Trump's outrageous policies are incredibly unpopular, even among his base.
News to me. I read liberal and conservative sites; I think you are dead wrong from what I’ve seen.
The most common comment I see on conservative sites is “I voted for this” “This is what I voted for” or some variation. Everything except the handling of the Epstein information.
What a strange accusation. One of the liberal places I read is here, where the discourse usually isn’t that far from Reddit Politics just with more self-righteousness (sometimes, most of the time it’s okay).
Why would you doubt that I read legitimate conservative sites? I read enough to know how brigaded Reddit Conservative is, that’s not real. I spent a lot of time with an actually balanced source of news.
You're outting yourself as an unreliable narrator - HN isn't liberal, it's typical moderate neo-lib.
Youre assuming HN must be liberal because it's somewhat critical of Trump. You're reverse-engineering your position.
HN isn't critical of Trump because they're libs, they're critical of Trump because he's bad and the policy is bad.
I mean, raising the deficit by trillions in exchange for A REDUCTION in public services? How can any conservative American, anywhere, possibly defend that? They didn't vote for that!
Turns out there is larger diversity of thought with conservative voters. Not everyone has to agree or like every action. Immigration alone if it’s handled as it has been will lead to President Vance.
Every poll shows all these things are wildly unpopular among the general public, and very unpopular among Republicans.
It's nearly impossible to define "Trump's base" with any rigor, so no statistics are ever going to directly address that.
The sites you read are either dominated by a few loud minority voices, or are just echo chamber bubbles disconnected from the broader reality of how people feel.
...Well, actually, there's another possible explanation: the people on those sites may feel they need to continue to signal their allegiance to Trump, or lose support/connection from the other people there.
Regardless, your personal experience does not outweigh numerous polls conducted by institutions across the political spectrum.
Wanna bet they will vote again for the same kind of politics? There is no shift in republican or conservative politics or decision making visible. The policies are "unpopular" among those personally affected, but they still blame Biden for that.
I dont know why there is this need to knee jerk excuse replican politicians and voters, trying to cast them sane or seeking rational goal or having moral anger over stuff that literally does not bother then in the slightest.
They wanted this and they are happy it is happening. They will continue so until they themselves are hurt a lot ... and then they will blame democrats.
> Wanna bet they will vote again for the same kind of politics?
Obviously, that is hard to say for sure from issue polls this far from any election, and many of them do, indeed, just vote Republican no matter what.
But the fact that these actions and policies are unpopular, even among Republicans (no matter what Mr. BubbleTime up there wants to believe), when Trump's acts during his first term were much less so, does suggest that there are some lines that many of them do not want to cross. (Even if those lines may be only in opinion, not in action.)
I mean, most people didn't vote for Project 2025, which is exactly what Trump is implementing, despite having lied about not knowing about it during the campaign.
Also, I'm wondering why we suddenly now care about democracy; if we did in 2016, Trump wouldn't have had a first term. If we had after his conviction, the judge in NY state would have taken the jury's democratic decision seriously and handed him to the maximum sentence, presidential election be damned.
I think you got it backward. The morale of our administration isn't what's in danger here, and as far as I can tell, none of them have gotten a beating they deserve.
Telcos were given billions to expand and improve broadband for decades and never did it. If the FCC has scrapped the goal are they also scrapping the handouts? If so, it’s long overdue.
To be the devil's advocate, the previous admin also squandered a lot of broadband money away in a pattern that seems common to all Democratic infra projects. See https://reason.com/2024/06/27/why-has-joe-bidens-42-billion-... . Neither party is good at this. The FCC broadband map and the b/w labels (previous admin) are nice though.
Saying they squandered the money makes it sound like they spent it and got no results. In fact it has not been spent. They were just slow to work out the details for how states could apply and in processing those applications. They got through that and several states had their applications approved and were just waiting for the money to actually start building.
The new administration stopped that and rescinded all the approvals, made various changes to the program (which will result in many areas that would have gotten high speed broadband that would be sufficient for decades getting slower broadband that will be obsolete much sooner), and now everyone has to reapply again.
Kind of bizarre to point to an article that takes a quote from a Republican FCC commissioner at its face value when these people like as easily as you breathe.
Infrastructure projects take time and the project was coming along just fine within its timeline. It's not a coincidence that several red states were the furthest along in the process - https://broadbandnow.com/research/bead-grants. The "delays" in the process were because it prioritized needs rather than grant political favors. Ironically the new rules will set these states back and harm them. It's a recurring pattern.
> I think “logic lord” types are sometimes drawn to contrarian positions because they like the strong emotional reactions that stating those positions induces in other people. It gives them a smug sense that they are dispassionate and logical and everyone else is blinded by emotion.
I had saved it from some other social media type. It accurately describes a lot of HN community.
>I think “logic lord” types are sometimes drawn to contrarian positions because they like the strong emotional reactions that stating those positions induces in other people.
Isn't that a pretty much the definition of an internet troll[0]? I don't disagree, but let's call a spade a spade, okay?
i think what a lot of people experience is frustration around group-think along the lines of "I stubbed my toe, it's someone-i-dont-like's fault". Because thinking that many of the problems with ____ group is unique to that group means that people are going to continue to miss the fact that the people they do support are also guilty of the same thing
> Why do you feel the need to be the devils advocate? What do you get from defending this crap?
To prevent this level of monopolar partisanship.
Is this action a net-negative for ISP subscribers (i.e. everyone)? Yes.
However, this doesn't give any leeway at all in ignoring the past failures of the other side when it comes to this space either. The only (legally advisable) path left is vocal advocacy for its restoration. Doesn't matter who it is, only that this goal is to be achieved.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
its an online discussion, the point is to discuss things, these aren't PMs, the nature of online discussion is anyone can jump in anywhere. i dont understand why you have a hostile tone towards this very normal and acceptable situation
I think it’s important to point out that the two US parties are almost identical, but I wouldn’t call it “devil’s advocate”. It’s not defending one party to point out both are bad for workers.
In Poland I have 1000/300 fiber in my family house village with ~500 people population and same 1000/300 fiber in city I currently live both for 30 USD / month.
It just seems like the later a country got on the internet, the better their infrastructure is, Poland, Bulgaria, etc. all have way better internet than Austria or Germany
Seems like if they built it out after fiber was cheaper and more common, they have it good. Meanwhile, to this day, my parents get, at best, 6mbps down from the ancient, shitty copper infra the telco put up ages ago. Thankfully, other options like various 5G home internet products are a common in rural towns now, at least in the Midwest. But wouldn’t beat fiber!
Germany is a special case actually because they just refused to go on the fiber train and instead kept doubling down on DSL. Goes all the way back to the administration from the 80s and onwards, it's finally changing tho.
Nah, don't buy it. That's a poor excuse for America's bad internet infrastructure and another one of those "it's because we're the first/best/bigger actually".
I live in France, growing up most homes were equipped with ADSL. Optical fiber was rolled slowly but surely over the entire territory, systematically replacing older infrastructure. It's now to the point that everyone I know enjoys fast internet, from the center of Paris to the middle of nowhere.
Here in Ireland I have 1000/100 asymmetric in a medium-ish town, no data caps that I've been able to discover. I pay €40/month. There does not seem to be any options available for a faster upload, which is unfortunate.
I think the slowest speed on offer at the moment is 500 for rural connections. I think everyone except the most rural households (and probably our surrounding islands) have 500meg fibre to the home now.
It keeps that speed at peak times without any issues, low pings, fast download speeds. With such internet connection the server is bottleneck, so if I download Linux distro I often choose torrent download option. There is no official data caps too.
Previously and recently, we've had to fight tooth and nail to make any progress on this and then others like Ajit Pai just flagrantly fake support for destruction of net neutrality.
Well there was that one court ruling that said agencies have to stick to what Congress actually authorized them to do rather than having free reign to reinterpret their own authorizations however they want.
Assuming you’re referring to Chevron/Loper, I fail to see the relevance to this case.
Also, it’s important to remember that Chevron wasn’t “however they want” or to “reinterpret their own authorizations”. It was a doctrine that if the agency (staffed by domain experts responsible for resolving the ambiguity) had a reasonable interpretation of an ambiguity in the law, even if the court thought it had a better opinion, it had to defer to the agency that Congress created and left it up to congress to resolve that ambiguity if they felt the agency did so incorrectly.
First, are the courts actually any better? Constitutionally they have limited jurisdiction in the first place to adjudicate administrative matters, only getting some authority in 1948 from Congress to do such administration.
> In 1974 the Supreme Court stated that deference depends on an administrative interpretation being consistent with the agency's other statements and being consistent with the congressional purpose
So it wasn't that the agency got to set its own bounds - it had to be consistent with all their other statements and with the congressional purpose of the body. So for example, Congress said the EPA had the power to regulate pollution sources but did not define what meant sources or specifically what regulations they could enact. Chevron said "Congress intended the EPA to figure this out so they get to do that". Loper said "actually, Congress needs to spell everything out" which is actually quite a radical idea for administrative legislation which with a stroke of a pen undoes a huge amount of legislation that had been done with Chevron in mind (& before that it was understood to be the case anyway since judges didn't even have power over administrative powers).
That's a pretty reductionist take. Here's what I think is a more reasonable one. If I told you your job was to keep the house clean, but made you come back to me for permission to pick up socks, but told you that absolutely didn't give you permission to pick up shoes, waited 8 months to reply to your request for permission to vacuum, denied you authority to decide what pieces of paper are trash and which are important, and also told you that it wasn't your job to get large muddy dogs out of the house you might think I wasn't serious about having an effectively cleaned house.
And then it turned out that the muddy dog just bought me a new yacht.
If you are thinking of the ruling overturning the Chevron doctrine, that's not what it said. What it said is that courts do not have to defer to the agency's interpretation of an ambiguous statute. The court can make and use apply its own interpretation.
Under Chevron courts were to defer to agency interpretations if the statute was ambiguous and the agency's interpretation was reasonable.
Here is an article that (1) lambasts the 2023 Sackett ruling that a swampy back yard is actually not a navigable waterway; and (2) says that that decision teed up the 2024 Loper decision that got all the headlines: https://minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/6R... , section starting at the page numbered 2863.
Rural fiber at my lake home went from $35/mo for 100/100 to $89.95 this year. On a 12mo contract.
Starlink got my business after VZW forced their 5G boxes to use 5G and not allow forced LTE usage. 5G is unusable there with 60-100/0.03. I force my phone to use LTE and all is well but 5G just does not work.
I hate giving Elon money but it’s the only affordable month-to-month option now.
It depends where you live what you get. I was able to get $80/mo Residential Lite service which should top out at 150 but I routinely see 400+ mbit down. Latency is around 20-25ms on average for me.
Interesting that there is a significant price disparity between locations for what is ostensibly a global service. Central Minnesota isn’t that different in terms of availability of services from my corner of Ohio either. We have 3 fiber providers in the area but even then if you are half a mile out of the service area it can cost a fortune. I just wanted to validate your claim of Starlink’s price competitiveness and at least for my address it is one of the worst offerings available to me at least.
It's not really a global service in terms of service area, it's many many many small service zones. You can only be serviced by the satellites overhead after all.
You're competing for the amount of bandwidth in your cell. If there's more people in your area wanting service, it makes sense it's more expensive. There's a fixed supply and highly variable demand per square mile.
That is the right way of doing it. It does not make any sense to have 3 companies building last-mile infrastructure in a neighbourhood, but you can have multiple service providers competing and using the same cables. But then, public oversight on the de-facto infrastructure monopoly is critical.
Rural telephone cooperatives that moved to fiber tend to provide an alternative in places where cable companies were the dominant urban option. Some of those cable companies also moved to fiber. The service areas end up overlapped and some competition keeps prices in check.
I only have one FTTH connection to my house, but if I stretched I could probably claim “3 fiber providers in the area” - the local cable co does FTTN with 2000/200 service and there’s an independent fibre provider that serves multi-unit buildings in the downtown.
Yeah, a regulatory goal that can be met by FiOS today but will take Starlink billions to get there does not seem like the correct way to allocate federal funds.
Brendan Carr's has critiqued federal broadband spending: too much spent on rebuilding existing networks to be faster, not enough going towards new build out. This is because upgrading wealthy customers' internet leads to increased profit, and there is less money in serving the underserved. Several states have tried fighting the telecom companies on what they've delivered and I think the worst case was a slap on the wrist.
Starlink and 5G are likely increasing broadband coverage far faster than fiber, which is a big goal of federal broadband spending.
The new FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is very pro-Starlink. Honestly Starlink is the best rural Internet access in the short term but any government subsidies going into Starlink are not going into fiber which has higher speed long term.
My building recently got wired up with a local ISP taht is offering gigabit fiber for... $25/month.
AT&T Fiber or Verizon Fios will tend to start at $60-90/month as an "introductory" price where your bill just keeps going up $10-20/months every yera unless you go through the dance of calling up and threatening to cancel every year. So you could be paying $140/month when a new customer is being charged half that.
Chattanooga, TN has long been known for its excellent and affordable fiber Internet [1].
We know what works: it's municipal broadband not national ISPs. We've known this for a long time but we somehow refuse to recognize it, in part because national ISPs have successfully bought and paid for legislators to create a moat through things like onerous regulation or outright banning of building muncipal broadband.
But why is this so? It's economics and incredibly simple. You see when a town or city or county owns the Internet infrastructure, you've removed the profit motive. Put another way, the workers own the means of production.
When you have a national ISP, some pension funds and shareholders own the means of production. And what do they demand? Ever-increasing profits. And how do profits increase? By raising prices and cutting costs.
There is absolutely no reason Internet access should cost $100/month.
And we see this same pattern play out in every market. It's the end state of capitalism.
I live in the SF Bay Area where Sonic offers 10Gbit connections for $60/month. They’re a medium sized local provider with excellent support and great prices, and they’re making money doing it. If “economy of scale” were uncapped, Comcast should be a fraction of that price.
We don't need the FCC to push fast broadband, we need to break up the stranglehold duopoly that phone and cable companies have on cities. If Google can't stomach dealing with them to create more competition, what chance does anyone else have?
From what I can tell senate confirmation means nothing. They ask a bunch of questions to grill them but the answers do not matter, they get confirmed anyway so it's all show to me.
When it’s all said and done, Americans will have to find the courage to admit the Judicial branch was an utter failure. That whole thing was supposed to be immune to political coercion. I say it will take courage because it got rammed into our heads that God made the constitution, and that it’s infallible. It’s a massive failure through and through.
The founding fathers did not protect the branches from each other nearly enough, and certainly did not give the people an end-run mechanism to bypass and fix it.
> it got rammed into our heads that God made the constitution
Article III is light in describing the courts [1]. Our judicial system is mostly a creature of Congress, not the Constitution.
I’m personally a fan of choosing by lot, from the appellate bench, a random slate of justices for each case. (That court of rotating judges would be the one in which “the judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested”.) You could do this entirely through legislation—nothing in the Constitution requires lifetime appointments to a permanent bench.
The problem is that the executive appoints the lower court judges, so the pool is tainted. A solution to this is probably something everyone needs to start thinking about (the whole problem), because a future democrat or sane republican will need to push a reform onto the court. Biden tried to push term limits before he left. Trump is a pen tester and showed all the cracks, so there's going to have to be a massive repair job of our systems.
> problem is that the executive appoints the lower court judges
President nominates judges; he doesn’t appoint without the Senate.
Moreover, “the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments,” a category that includes “Judges of the Supreme Court” [1]. The Congress may, by statute alone, remove the President’s power to appoint SCOTUS justices.
There's a lot that went wrong with the American experiment.
1. The electoral college, which removes voting power from people who live in populated areas in favor of people who don't.
2. A system of governance that doesn't require coalitions and thus also stimulates a 2 party system.
3. No mechanism for federal legislation to occur through solely the actions of the voters. There should be a way for American voters to check the government through a legislative process that allows items to be put on the national ballots outside of congress and the president.
4. If every branch is meant to check every other branch, each branch should have an enforcement arm, so that if they're ignored, physical action can be taken.
Or widespread, self-dealing gerrymandering of Congressional representative districts and taking corporate money by representatives and senators in most states?
FYI to all commenters, take 5 seconds to google Brendan Carr and you will see how much of a partisan, anti-free-speech hack he is. The man wears a gold Trump head pin on his lapel ffs.
As has already been noted by law there can be no more than 3 commissioners from the same party.
Traditionally when a commissioner's term expired and they were from the party that did not control the Presidency the President would ask the other party's Senate leadership who to nominate and would nominate that person.
Also traditionally the Senators of the President's party would vote to approve that nominee.
Biden followed this tradition, as did the Senate Democrats.
I take it you've never lived in an area where Spectrum DOCSIS over copper coax and geostationary satellite internet were the only options available at all?
Maybe this will force sites to stop wasting bandwidth and stem the bloat. You should not need a gigabit connection (which I do not even have in all of my home LAN) to browse the Internet.
Edit: downvoters, please explain why I need 125MB/s (that's 3 full installations of Windows 95 every second) for normal browsing.
why do you need a car that can do 65MPH? just take the backroads and chat with a friend or something while you drive, 30 MPH is plenty to get anyone anywhere. people made do with horses that did about 5 MPH for over a hundred years and they got around just fine. 30 MPH is, like, at least twice as fast as the horse
>Maybe this will force sites to stop wasting bandwidth and stem the bloat. You should not need a gigabit connection (which I do not even have in all of my home LAN) to browse the Internet.
Nope. You don't. But why should I have to pay Google/AWS/Azure/Cloudflare/Digital Ocean/etc./etc./etc. to host my small business/vanity/family chat/photo sharing site, or YouTube to host my barbecue sauce unboxing videos, when symmetrical (okay, 300 up/down would likely be plenty for most of that, but once there's fiber, Gb/sec seems good to me)?
I have no interest in propping up huge companies with hosting fees because other huge companies have no competition.
All that said, I get your point. But my use case is not your use case. Do you get mine?
It's not about what you may or may not need, it's about how much the telecom company is giving back in exchange of being granted a natural monopoly in their covered regions. This rescinding of regulation will only promote rent-seeking and enshittification.
I find the political angles to be boring. The reality out in the actual communities is much more varied and interesting.
For example, the Texas market is going crazy with FTTP providers. Even comcast is starting to get involved by upgrading infra and buying out even worse incumbents. My old house in the Houston area has two competing fiber providers now.
These aren't fly by night operations either. The last provider I had backed their entire last mile infrastructure with standby natural gas generators. I never lost symmetric gigabit internet access despite not having any power or water during Beryl.
At what point do we look at broadband penetration as a solved problem and focus on bigger ones? Unless you live in a radio quiet zone, there is going to be some ability to get online at this point.
I think this isn't as bad as people make of out to be. The 100/20 goal is perfectly fine for the vast majority of users. The only thing really supporting the old goal of gigabit connections was fiber. I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas. Fiber plans tend to be expensive and mostly available in the areas that already have usable high speed options. If we really want to target overall coverage and affordability, then this does make sense.
> I think this isn't as bad as people make of out to be. The 100/20 goal is perfectly fine for the vast majority of users
640K was "perfectly fine" for most people, too.
100/20 is barely enough for a household of 3-5 "light" users. The US already has abysmal broadband speed/bandwidth/latency metrics compared to the rest of the developed world and settling for 2010's version of "fast" in 2025 is ... not how we're going to get better.
> I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas
Why spend money and time to expand copper into rural areas when fiber is the same cost. it's the people/permits/labor that are $$$$. It makes no meaningful difference weather your expensive hbm crew is pulling fiber or copper and we know that copper doesn't go as fast ...
"100/20 is barely enough for a household of 3-5 "light" users."
It's plenty for my household with a similar number of users. We have people working from home, streaming, downloading documents or games, etc with no problem.
"The US already has abysmal broadband speed/bandwidth/latency metrics compared to the rest of the developed world"
Because the countries in the rest of the developed world are about the size of 1 state and have higher urbanization. If you want better coverage for an area this size, then it makes sense to include satellite coverage. The gigabit goal excludes them.
"Why spend money and time to expand copper into rural areas when fiber is the same cost."
They're only the same cost if you're starting from the same location. Copper has better penentration already. Expanding copper might mean adding a couple miles. Expanding to that same location with copper might mean putting in 10-50 miles plus any sort of hub or substation. So yes, equal distance is roughly equal cost, but almost everywhere fiber is put in, it's alongside copper anad thus not increasing coverage nor decreasing costs.
> It's plenty for my household with a similar number of users. We have people working from home, streaming, downloading documents or games, etc with no problem.
I recognize that "no problem" and "as fast as possible" are not the same. 100/20 works for you but once you've seen 1000/20, you really do notice things taking ~10x longer than they need to. It all adds up.
> Copper has better penentration already.
Excluding 56k, twisted-pair copper has absolutely crap throughput unless you're ~500m or less from the 'head-end' which is where your DSL is being turned back into laser pulses. Coax does have better performance/distance compared to twisted pair but now you have a non-trivial network of amps/taps/power-injectors to maintain. DOCSIS really does not like it if there's any issue w/ the coax so you're going to need a small army just to keep the hard-lines in good shape.
I have never seen a PON network get it's throughput cut in half just because somebody didn't screw the cable _all the way_ in to the tap. I see ingress degrading DOCSIS networks all the time though.
At least as far as rural northern CA goes, ATT runs fiber out to plants and then twister pair from there to the customers which are - at most - a few km away. Fiber is already 85% of the way to the customer... let's just finish the job instead of giving everybody a starlink account.
> Why spend money and time to expand copper into rural areas when fiber is the same cost. it's the people/permits/labor that are $$$$. It makes no meaningful difference weather your expensive hbm crew is pulling fiber or copper and we know that copper doesn't go as fast ...
Well they voted for it, so I'll stick to my fiber in my big city and they can fend for themselves and pay $90/month for 10 up 1 down or whatever while I pay $40 for 1 gig....
With the snide remarks aside, why expand copper or fiber into rural areas when we can just let SpaceX and others launch satellites and provide a potentially better service?
I'm sympathetic to a goal of "have really, really fast Internet service" but maybe there is a better regulatory framework for increasing competition both urban/suburban and rural areas.
> why expand copper or fiber into rural areas when we can just let SpaceX and others launch satellites and provide a potentially better service?
Fiber is objectively the right choice for future proofing. Bouncing a radio wave off of cube 300 miles above will _always_ be sub-par compared to a direct fiber connection because the latency is higher. SL May have a slight edge going vast distances since the speed of light is faster in a vacuum compared to glass but for 99.999% of residential ISP needs, fiber-to-the-home is going to offer a more robust pipe that fits more and with less latency.
> but maybe there is a better regulatory framework for increasing competition both urban/suburban and rural areas.
Almost certainly. Regardless, any better solution necessarily exists only in a world where 100/20 isn't "cutting edge" 30 years after it became technically possible.
I didn't vote for all these highways and suburbs either but we live in a democracy. By and large rural voters* voted to cut programs like this, though, and I think it's very fair to point that out.
> Fiber is objectively the right choice for future proofing. Bouncing a radio wave off of cube 300 miles above will _always_ be sub-par compared to a direct fiber connection because the latency is higher.
Yes and no, it depends on the cost. It might not be ideal but I'm also not sure my tax dollars should go to make sure people who live in rural areas have faster Playstation downloads. Do we actually need to physically pay for and build this infrastructure? I'm not necessarily opposed to it, but where is the economic analysis? If we invest $XYZ on this infrastructure what's the expected ROI versus alternatives?
* Just to be clear I don't have any particular problem with "rural voters" and I don't really like these arbitrary groupings of people into Urban, Suburban, Rural but it is what it is.
> Do we actually need to physically pay for and build this infrastructure? I'm not necessarily opposed to it, but where is the economic analysis? If we invest $XYZ on this infrastructure what's the expected ROI versus alternatives?
I wish I had a clear answer and good data on this. My gut tells me that giving more people faster and more reliable access to information is almost certainly going to be worth it in the long run. A few hypotheticals that come to mind:
Some highly paid engineer can live out in the boonies but still work for their high wages. That excess cash is probably going to make it's way into the local economy.
Likewise, rural schools are not know for their performance. That almost certainly could change if better content/curricula was easier to access and distribute. There is a non-zero chance that some breakthrough cure for cancer comes from a smart kid that grew up in a rural area. With crap internet access, that kid almost certainly would not get the education to match their potential.
(or maybe it isn't a cure for cancer, it's the next John Carmack...)
Fiber isn't the only way to level-up access... but it is the easiest to maintain. Other than the very ends of the connection, it's all passive.
No need to to inject power for amplifiers.
No need to keep building/launching satellites and corresponding ground-stations.
Once it's installed, it's more or less maintenance free until a wild backhoe shows up...
2 younger kids streaming a movie, one parent listening to a podcast in the shower, one parent streaming a YouTube cooking video while making dinner, and an older kid playing any game would completely saturate the network. That is assuming nobody has a phone that is also connected to the network
Also its ridiculous to think that is excessive in any way. Imagine what we could have if we had 100 gigabit or 1 terabit. Instead of watching a flat 4k movie, render a full 4k scene in AR.
That YouTube cooking video is probably ~10Mbit. Assuming the kids are watching 4K streaming video, its maybe up to 20Mbit per stream. So, you're at maybe 50Mbit of throughput with all your highest usage things going at once. Your phone being on the Wifi but not actively being used is practically no bandwidth usage. That podcast is anywhere from 320kbps to maybe even 64kbps, practically nothing compared to even one of those video streams which all together are only using half your bandwidth. Same goes with playing an online game, assuming you're not talking cloud rendered its maybe a few hundred Kbit. Rounding up all the other little things, you're looking at using maybe ~60Mbit down. 60% of your bandwidth.
> Instead of watching a flat 4k movie, render a full 4k scene in AR.
It wouldn't take 100-gigabit to make this happen. You can already get this on existing VR headsets today. I watched some basketball games with a Windows Mixed Reality headset nearly a decade ago, and I definitely did not have terabit networking.
2x1080p streams is 10mbit/s 2x4k is 30mbit/s. so below 100mbit/s. Video games don't consume a lot of traffic[] fortnite literally measured in 100s kbps. Video games consume traffic most only when they're updating, then sure you can saturate 100mbit/s, but you also can saturate 10G just as well, so in this case it's about speed, kid can do some chores while it's updating lmao. I initially wanted to skip podcast because...320kbps max? But then thought that not only that, but it's also most likely already downloaded to the device.
[]: destiny 1/2 consume a lot, but that would mean your older child is over 30 and living with you.
That's if you use any streaming service, if you're streaming legally ripped Blu-rays, then yea, 100/20 isn't enough, but those are usually within LAN. And if you're talking seeding/streaming to others, then any asymmetric connection speed will suck.
> That is assuming nobody has a phone that is also connected to the network
A buddy of mine has horror stories about what happens when an office full of iPhones all download the same 1+ gig iOS update at the same time.
> Imagine what we could have if we had 100 gigabit or 1 terabit
Exactly my point. I'd rather we not let large ISPs be the ones that decide what is innovative and "fast enough" for us. I want somebody with the power to push them... pushing them to be faster and better.
The majority of WFH setups are either "remote into a server and work there" (RDP uses a few Mbps at most when streaming HD video, and SSH is basically negligible) or "everything you need is already on your local company-owned machine."
> What the hell are you doing that 100/20 is "barely enough"?
Many things. A partial list in no particular order:
My day job is all SSH so I don't need a wide pipe so much as I need a short pipe. If the pipe is also quite wide, I can reliably stream content while I work. This isn't just music, this is watching the daycare camera feeds.
Every once in a while I need to docker pull a multi-gig image. It's nice when that doesn't take more than 30 seconds. I don't worry about background tasks moving/syncing/backing-up data; there's plenty of headroom!
Some of my hobbies involve _lots_ of data and the less time I spend waiting for that to download is more time I get for actually doing hobbies.
I also have a few scripts that backup other consequential data stores; the biggest one is google takeout for a few accounts. This results in ~ 800 gigs of data from a few different accounts.
The work product from these hobbies and backups is something that I like to back up off site and a 20mbps connection is trivial to saturate for hours as a time.
Every once in a while I'll make some of my excess compute/GPU available to friends so they can render things. The assets involved are not small and a big pipe means that everybody gets the desired result _faster_.
If you give me a faster/wider pipe, I _will_ find a new use for the extra room. I may not be representative of the typical user but I know for sure that I would not have developed my skills to the extent that I have if I had crap internet access.
> The 100/20 goal is perfectly fine for the vast majority of users.
100/20 is fine for one person. But gigabit isn't very hard to achieve and is a far better goal speed for entire households. Gigabit is also a lot more convenient any time a big download is involved.
> The only thing really supporting the old goal of gigabit connections was fiber.
Coax can do it.
> I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas. Fiber plans tend to be expensive and mostly available in the areas that already have usable high speed options.
Shouldn't fiber be a bit easier to run than coax? If you're going to run one data wire to a new area, it should be fiber. And if you can run power you can run data too.
If you're laying a communications cable, you should just do fiber. It can carry any type of traffic at high data rates, and you can upgrade the speed over time by just replacing the optics at the ends rather than having to replace the whole cable. Fiber plans are only expensive if your service level is expensive, or if you have to pay to get the line run to your building
Fiber should be the goal for everyone. Fiber is cheaper and lighter than copper which is why rural areas that haven't had any internet options except 56k on old degraded lines or satellite are finally now getting high speed internet the last few years, usually through co-op fiber startups. It can be hung on power poles, it can be installed with a trencher, and now that horizontal boring machines are incredibly common it can be put under existing infrastructure very easily.
> I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas. Fiber plans tend to be expensive and mostly available in the areas that already have usable high speed options.
This scarcity is artificial. Fiber cabling is not expensive; even the poorest of countries have fiber networks well established in suburban areas.
In India you can have high-speed, even gigabit internet at the price of two pizzas a month.
Coax can come close of the previous FCC gigabit goal. The FCC wanted 1 Gb/s down/500 Mb/s up. Xfinity is currently offering 2 Gb/s down over coax to most of their residential customers. They can only do 200-300 Mb/s up though.
This is changing with newer DOCSIS standards! It's still up to the network provider to choose how many channels they allocate for up vs down. Even in perfect lab conditions, DOCSIS 4 is still about 3:1 ratio down/up (about 5/1.5 gigabit). Fiber is the only medium that makes a 1:1 down/up possible at any meaningful speeds.
You can always tell how tech savvy someone is, buy how much bandwidth they don't buy. They don't fall for the marketing/lobbying of the big incumbent ISPs.
Anyone I've known worth their salt in networking cares about latency far more than speed. Historically upload speeds on asymmetrical plans were a problem too, but since people have started to work from home, most cable/fiber/wireless internet providers' lowest plans offer upload bandwidth at multiple tens of megabits per second, faster than the ingestion speed of most video hosts, and more than enough for a dozen simultaneous HD video conferences, and their dowstream speeds are enough for dozens simultaneous 4K video streams at the highest resolution streaming services provide.
Incumbent ISPs lying about the benefits of gigabit plans, and lobbying for their requirement, is the equivalent of Intel bragging about 5 GHz speeds in the Netburst vs Athlon days. It ran at a higher clock speed, and that sold processors, but they ran slow, because they responded horribly to branching, and were late to the market on 64-bit an monolithic multi-core architectures.
Outside of rare power users, or someone especially impatient for one-off downloads, Gigabit is ridiculous for a large family or small office, and especially overkill for a small family or individual.
I can't stand the government either, and they'll probably replace that rule with one that's even worse, but it was a bad rule to start with.
Not certain I buy this argument - higher throughput tend to require more modern hardware throughout the whole chain, and modern hardware also tends to have better latency than old. So for most people, they will get improvement in both latency and throughput if they would get a gigabit fiber connection. But sure, if you are comparing chains of the same hardware generation, go for latency in most cases.
You're all using the same equipment, regardless of the tier you sign up for. The firmware in your modem or their router limits the maximum packet rate, but individual packets and small groups of packets are always traveling at gigabit speeds, regardless of the speed cap.
That difference in latency isn't even what matters; it's the latency from the various types of modems. With the direct connection of fiber providers, you can often get sub-millisecond latency from nearby collocations, and rarely do ISPs have more than a few milliseconds of latency.
With cable providers, DOCSIS adds ten to twenty milliseconds of latency. You'll get about double that latency With LTE providers and low-eath-orbit satellite providers that have nearby ground stations. With geosynchronous satellite providers, you'll get several hundred milliseconds of latencu.
A 50 Mbps fiber plan will get an order of magnitude lower latency than a gigabit plan from anyone else.
> With cable providers, DOCSIS adds ten to twenty milliseconds of latency
Are you sure? I'm on cable (Xfinity) and ping to 1.1 is varies from 11 to 13 ms, and I see as low as 7.2 ms to some random Xfinity thing that is not at my home but on their network.
I've got an ancient DOCSIS modem, a Motorola MB7621, and my understanding is that newer modems have lower latency than mine.
This is called being “confidently incorrect”. As mentioned above, I have those millisecond-class pings at 200x faster than that piddling 50Mbit pipe (for $60/month). There’s no imaginable advantage to getting a slower, more expensive connection.
Everyone from your fiber provider is getting fiber-class latency, regardless of the plan's max speed. The fiber ISP in my area uses 10 gig ONTs for everyone, and limits each plan's speed with PPPoE. This is pretty common, and likely yours is doing the same.
On the other hand, everyone using the cable provider in my area, whether on their fastest or slowest plan, is getting the same tens of milliseconds of DOCSIS 3.1 latency, on a node that has tens to hundreds of gigabits of bandwidth but is using TDMA and FDMA to share it between a few hundred users.
My point is that the lowest-tier subscriber from your fiber ISP is getting magnitudes lower latency than the top-tier subscriber from my cable ISP. If either of the switch plans, but don't switch ISPs, they'll have the same latency.
I don't know about where you live, but by far the lowest latency option for me is symmetric gigabit. And my options jump from 200/20 to 1000/1000, and 200/20 was for sure not enough for everyone to stream and video chat at the same time.
My wife and I occasionally work while we're visiting her parents. We get away with doing teams calls at the same time on a 15/15 wireless link. Congestion only starts if our son downloads something while watching YT, while we're on calls.
It surprised me, but it works. And despite my 1125/50 connection at home, it surprised me how easy it was to adapt to lower speeds.
That being said, given the option I'd say 200/20 is my preferred minimum.
Multiple video chats can saturate 20 Mbps up, but if they offered 200/200 it would be more than plenty. Them not offering reasonable plans in between a little to low and way too high doesn't mean that it couldn't exist, it just means that they aren't offering it, likely because they have paid your local government to prohibit any competition, allowing them to force a large portion of their customer base to use a more expensive plan than they need, because no one else is going to offer a reasonable one.
Even if you don't _need_ gigabit speeds, in a world in which most fiber has already been laid down and running new fiber is cost-efficient, there is no reason why every home _shouldn't_ be gigabit capable.
Also, Netflix 4K streams at 15Mbps on average. Four phones streaming whatever plus someone or two playing a game is enough to mostly max out a 100 Mbps link. This is a real possibility in the rural settings that qualify for this bill. (Large families in large homes that are heavy TV viewers with nothing to do for miles on end.)
Saturating even a 100 megabit connection to a cloud provider gets really expensive, really fast. That's 45 gigabytes/hr. Only a subset of power users are going to have daily or even weekly sustained full-speed transfers of that size, and 100 Mbps is usually the bottom tier plan, from a US telco.
Even if you are doing that to initially back up your network or install Call of Duty, after the initial usage you're only making differential updates, unless something goes very wrong, which hopefully doesn't happen even once a month.
For some users, it may be worth an extra $1000/yr to get the gigabit plan instead of 100 megabit, so that a Call of Duty install could theoretically happen in tens minutes instead of an hour or two, but really it's going to take an hour for your computer to decompress and write the data. Everyone else paying that $1000/yr extra is just wasting their money.
Also, Netflix only uses 16 Mbps at most, for a 4K video which is only a small portion of their catalog and only available to their top-tier subscribers. The extra bandwidth is a recommendation to allow for other users to still use the network and also to account for a special case of high latency that used to occur when saturating the connection on the fastest plans some ISPs offered. Here's some good research into actual streaming usage: https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/ (It's WSJ, but there's no paywall)
On top of that, the cheapest plans offered by most telecoms in the US are over 100 megabit, so you still get a guaranteed three 4K streams Netflix without issue, but realistically could pull off double that.
You're right -- saturating a 100Mbps connection is really hard. But I'm not talking about running servers from one's home. The goal isn't to saturate your connection for the month, it's to make it so that if your usage "wants" more bandwidth, it's there for you. I don't know about most people's usage, but I can say that Docker & NPM in particular benefit from a very fast connection.
> which hopefully doesn't happen even once a month.
This is the mindset I was referencing. Nobody thinks about how often their computer has to write to its local disk, and if you have a sufficiently fast Internet connection you can adopt the same carefree attitude towards Internet use.
> an extra $1000/yr
This is the disconnect. In my area, the price gap is much smaller, less than half that. The bigger consideration for us was going to a gig connection was also the only way to get a connection without a usage cap and therefore a predictable bill (Xfinity is the other provider).
Incidentally, it looks like the WSJ test used mobile devices like phones and tablets. AFAIK all the major streamers deliver lower-bandwidth content to those devices by default, so this is not the best test.
All other things equal, higher bandwidth links are inherently lower latency.
Propagation delay usually dominates latency, so it's generally not the biggest factor, but on a simple local network with two PCs and a switch, you can expect about 1ms latency with 100BASE-T, and 0.12ms latency with 1000BASE-T.
They're not sending out 100BASE-TX ONTs to lower-tier subscribers. You're all using the same hardware; they're just limiting the packet rate to match the plan.
Regardless, the latency difference between 100BASE-TX and 1000BASE‑T pales in comparison to the difference in modem speeds between different providers' network types.
Fiber providers with an ONT get LAN-like speeds, while cable providers' DOCSIS modems add tens of milliseconds of latency, LTE modems are similar to double that of DOCSIS, and satellite providers range from similar to LTE all the way up to hundreds of milliseconds of latency, depending on the orbit and if there are ground stations nearby.
Again, within any provider, you get the same latency with any the plan, but changing providers can have order-of-magnitude differences.
What had made you suppose fast means laggy? I upgraded to 10Gbit Internet because their fiber is cheaper than the 1Gbit connection. I get 3ms pings to Google, or 5ms on older IPv4.
Fast, low-latency, and cheap is a pretty great combo.
More so, there's diminishing returns above a reasonable speed, and below a reasonable amount of lag, and gigabit speeds are well past that point, but for many ISPs the lag is fixed and before that point.
Which is to say, every major telco offers faster speeds than the majority of their subscribers will ever use, often even on their bottom-teir plans, but a significant portion of ISPs have enough lag to affect their users, even on their top-tier plans.
If you're trying to push telcos toward offering a more useful product, don't set a goal for them to offer higher speeds, which are already high enough for the vast majority of customers, but instead push for low latency, which most telcos cannot provide even between the customer's equipment and the telco's equipment.
Fiber providers have excellent latency, and of course that's what you should get if it's an option, but many subscribers are stuck with telcos that use DOCSIS over a cable network or LTE over a cellular network, and nothing can be done to reduce the latency for current generations of those protocols, but there's no technical reason the protocols couldn't have lower latency, so pushing telcos toward offering lower latency could make it happen, creating an actual useful improvement.
Many fiber ISPs will offer a 1 Gbps/1 Gbps standard plan and a cheaper plan e.g. 100 Mbps/100 Mbps. This allows customers to get fiber broadband even if they do not want to pay $70/mo.
Seems they really want to revert everything that made the US a world leader.
- Reduce science
- Reduce collected data
- Reduce immigration
- Reduce infrastructure
- Reduce adoption of EVs
If an adversarial nation had control of the white house would anyone be able to tell the difference
I think an adversarial nation would reduce military activity far more than the current regime has.
That might be the only difference, though.
It depends what adversary I guess. It seems like several middle eastern countries of very different religious bent are quite happy with our military activity. Though they are not usually named as adversaries they certainly are by any rational metric.
I don't think so if they are a nuclear armed nation. If the end result of a nuclear armed conflict is mutual destruction and collapse, the only path towards dominance is economic. And in a pure economic fight a massive overpowered military is just an economic anchor.
If you reduce all those other things you don’t need to reduce their military. You already won, without a battle or any casualties on your side. The decay and rot from the inside will take care of the rest.
In which case turn the military on the people and expedite the process. /s
It will come, eventually. That usually doesn't need any outside tinkering, it follows naturally in dictatorships.
Talk about one heck of a "Chinese room" scenario ...
Yup
At the core, it is Anti-Science.
Why Anti-Science?
Because the answers that come from science are independent of the authoritarian ruler's whims, and that cannot be tolerated, as key to authoritarian rule is that it must be entirely responsive to the whims of the regime.
It is the same reason that completely freaked me out when I read that Lenin and Stalin had directed their death squads to target their most loyal party members first. Why the hell would they do that? It turns out it is because the most loyal party members would object to the dictator's schemes on grounds of ideological principle, and such objections or principled people could not be tolerated. Pure evil, but genius in the context of a dictator's needs.
Thus, every authoritarian regime attacks the intelligent, academic, and scientific worlds. Both Mao and Pol Pot not only executed people with scientific and academic credentials, but merely for wearing glasses which signified people who likely read a lot.
Consistent Anti-Science actions are one of the key signs you are not dealing with a mere political party, but something far worse — a full-on authoritarian takeover.
Beware.
> Seems they really want to revert everything that made the US a world leader.
Conservatives takes different names in different places. Calling the spade a spade, a more truthful name is 'Reggressives', no matter what the colour on the banner is. The signatures of regressivism is , among others, the yearning for the past, to bring back the old ways of life, the predisposition for worship (idolatry)--be that of imaginary creatures or very wealthy people.
Some of us would find it really hard to imagine why some others would say, "yes please, more oil. I really would love to inhale more toxic fumes". Yet, such people exist. I can't explain why.
I think it’s a stretch to call the current crop of Republican leaders conservatives.
They’re radical reactionaries at best.
I’d argue the current crop of Republican leaders are radical populists (for conservative voters).
While many of their asks mirror traditional Republican social positions, they’re responsive to an economically disadvantaged class in the Republican Party that’s historically been ignored.
And while there’s certainly a lot of backroom dealing to favor business interests, I think it’d be hard to argue that the poor Republican voter has had this much power in the party… ever. (See things like immigration policy, which agribusiness is scared shitless of)
The previous Republican bargain was ‘We say we love god and guns, but let business get on with business, and we’re never going to harm the latter for the former.’
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More like it has exposed how completely powerless the electorate in America actually is. The kind of shit the current administration is pulling against all public interest is something politicians of other countries can't even conceive of, because it is systemically impossible in their respective political setups.
If you did a survey worldwide of democracies, I’d be very surprised to find any that didn’t have norm tipping points, where technically things could be pushed if any adherence to previous norms were abandoned.
The irony is that this behavior isn’t exceptional for the US, historically. We’ve just lived through a long recent period (1974-2024) where norms were more respected.
Historically (pre-1900) there were some colossal political anything-goes knife fights within and between the branches of American government.
One consequence of that was the explicit stripping of powers from the executive and substitution of independent boards to check its power. Those were eventually removed in the 80s in a drive to increase efficiency. See history before: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Service_Reform_Act_of_...
I expect that post-Trump, when Democrats regain legislative power, there are going to be a lot of efforts to buttress and expand the role of executive-independent bodies.
Trump isn't neutered, he's doing almost exactly what he promised he would do. Russia certainly did help, what with all the online propaganda and stuff, but attributing his victory to them is a little too easy.
America had this coming for a long time, right from Reagan's plan to unite Republicans behind Christian nationalism to its realization. This was all so predictable.
Also, Russia had nothing to do with Trump’s 2024 election even if they played a role in 2016.
The Russians have been investing in Trump since the 80s and have been unleashing aggressive Soviet-style propaganda campaigns (minus the communism part) across social media for years now. They were spending as much as $400k a month on payments to bloggers -- just online stuff -- in the run-up to the first Trump election.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Tenet_Media_investigation
Your timelines are a little off but to add more details:
Matt Christiansen, Tayler Hansen, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, Dave Rubin, and Lauren Southern are the subjects of the ongoing investigation.
$400k/month was paid out just for Tim Pool for repeating Russian talking points on the Tenet Media youtube channel which should have raised eyebrows for all parties.
There is a LOT of data on Trump/Russia out now. I find it hard to believe anyone informed is still using that. It’s kind of an intellectual red flag my man.
The smarter liberals have moved on to just hating Trump for being himself.
Do the true believers here think that the I formation Gabbard is releasing is fake? We’ve had it for 9 years now about Ohrs and FusionGPS and FBI lying to FISA.
https://x.com/nicksortor/status/1948007087151190074
I read 25 of the first documents 46 pages. Sure looks bad.
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What did EVs make us a leader in? If I remember right, other countries have much higher adoption.
Technically Tesla was the first major company globally starting a trend. Aka leading.
> Technically Tesla was the first major company globally starting a trend
And China’s dominance in LFP is based on its acquisition of A123’s IP out of bankruptcy [1].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130131031501/http://www.reuter...
Yeah agreed, Tesla showed the world it was possible, but they seem to be failing to maintain their leadership position.
Cut their CEO some some slack. He's a thought leader/rocket mogul/ISP guy/social media but wants to make it a bank for some reason dude/former government sort-of-official/professional gamer/full time twitter shitposter that's also starting a political party and who is responsible for fathering over a dozen children. On second thought, I think I see the problem.
That's pioneer.
By that definition, we haven't been leading for years since the Chinese are cranking them out much faster than Tesla.
What if we want to be a world leader in satellite internet coverage? Is that a goal you support? Because that's part of what these changes are about.
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This is exactly what the US did to Britain. One empire rises, another falls.
Granted, totally.-
PS. See the down votes. Hi, 61398!
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That’s the kind of unkind and rather toxic comment I would expect on Reddit, not HN.
Unimpressed.
Do you think I wanted to impress you or anyone really? GP was beating a dead horse so I said something. Somehow you ended up caring. I’m almost certain there are better uses of your time. Certainly has no influence on my opinion. Honestly people who hold Hacker News like it’s sacred are exhausting. Your opinions and mine need not mix, just use your thumb to move on?
This website is worse than Reddit. Lower your expectations.
That’s not the standard I’ve always had, and I’ve been here from the early days.
You get the community we settle for.
> Lower your expectations.
No. And you'll find people more open to your wishes if you'd avoid the bossy imperative.
By any definition has China not been leading?
Socialism with chinese characteristics/ Xi Jinpeng thought is the most successful ideology currently. Free speech/free markets power has decayed since people found ways to exploit them and more powerful people found ways to aid the exploiters.
The US is apparently powerless to exploit our own rare earth resources and fund/subsidize them or lithium production or photovoltaic production, nuclear reactors, or even semiconductor production.
By any measure that is weak.
> The US is apparently powerless to exploit our own rare earth resources
The DOD took a direct stake in a US rare earth miner / refiner, in addition to a long term purchase agreement at set prices. Apple also piled on last week (no doubt after some backroom conversations).
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/10/pentagon-to-become-largest-s...
Wow. The article notes:
> Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act requires the FCC to determine whether broadband is being deployed "on a reasonable and timely basis" to all Americans.
Carr says that when looking into whether that is being satisfied the FCC should not consider affordability because section 706 does not contain the word "affordability".
But it also does not contain any words for any of the things he does want the FCC to consider. All it says is "reasonable and timely".
I bet if you polled consumers and asked what they would think it means if they were informed some commercial service or product was available to them on a reasonable basis an overwhelming majority would include in their answer that it means it is available to them at a price they find affordable.
The FCC is a revolving door between industry and regulators. When you understand that the true mission of the FCC is to please big telecom it all starts to make sense. Hence the auctioning off spectrum in huge geographic blocks that only the largest corporations can finance. If the US was really serious about universal broadband there would be a Telecom Ministry doing the cable laying itself or at least local loop unbundling. If we treated roads the same way as broadband we would have private tolled highways near city cores and dirt roads in rural areas.
Of course the angle is disingenuous. "Reasonable" here implies that it's reasonably attainable for customers. This is merely choosing interpretation arbitrarily. Like me saying the sky is green because green is partly comprised of the color blue.
Reasonably attainable must also mean affordable. If it is not affordable most people cannot attain it.
Note: affordable and cheap is not the same
Yes that's what I was getting at
> This is merely choosing interpretation arbitrarily
I'm guessing it's not arbitrary at all and it's choosing an interpretation most favorable to the industry that has bribed and captured the agency
As with everything involving this administration, the behavior will continue until an effective negative stimulus is introduced.
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That's the problem, though; no one's applying any negative stimulus at all.
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We seem to have hit the point where a civil engineer 2 brick layers and the town drunk are voting on if beams are necessary.
Did I miss the vote we had on broadband speed goals, or whether we should publish prices?
Get outta here with that. Most of Trump's outrageous policies are incredibly unpopular, even among his base. He's just enacting the wildly unpopular Project 2025, which he denied ever hearing of while hiring 70% of its authors into his administration.
> Most of Trump's outrageous policies are incredibly unpopular, even among his base.
News to me. I read liberal and conservative sites; I think you are dead wrong from what I’ve seen.
The most common comment I see on conservative sites is “I voted for this” “This is what I voted for” or some variation. Everything except the handling of the Epstein information.
How confident are you in the authenticity of posts and comments on these "liberal and conservative sites"?
What a strange accusation. One of the liberal places I read is here, where the discourse usually isn’t that far from Reddit Politics just with more self-righteousness (sometimes, most of the time it’s okay).
Why would you doubt that I read legitimate conservative sites? I read enough to know how brigaded Reddit Conservative is, that’s not real. I spent a lot of time with an actually balanced source of news.
You're outting yourself as an unreliable narrator - HN isn't liberal, it's typical moderate neo-lib.
Youre assuming HN must be liberal because it's somewhat critical of Trump. You're reverse-engineering your position.
HN isn't critical of Trump because they're libs, they're critical of Trump because he's bad and the policy is bad.
I mean, raising the deficit by trillions in exchange for A REDUCTION in public services? How can any conservative American, anywhere, possibly defend that? They didn't vote for that!
> HN isn't liberal
Hot take.
Turns out there is larger diversity of thought with conservative voters. Not everyone has to agree or like every action. Immigration alone if it’s handled as it has been will lead to President Vance.
Anecdote is not the plural of data.
Every poll shows all these things are wildly unpopular among the general public, and very unpopular among Republicans.
It's nearly impossible to define "Trump's base" with any rigor, so no statistics are ever going to directly address that.
The sites you read are either dominated by a few loud minority voices, or are just echo chamber bubbles disconnected from the broader reality of how people feel.
...Well, actually, there's another possible explanation: the people on those sites may feel they need to continue to signal their allegiance to Trump, or lose support/connection from the other people there.
Regardless, your personal experience does not outweigh numerous polls conducted by institutions across the political spectrum.
None of what you said is actually correct, it is what you want to be correct.
> very unpopular among Republicans.
Wanna bet they will vote again for the same kind of politics? There is no shift in republican or conservative politics or decision making visible. The policies are "unpopular" among those personally affected, but they still blame Biden for that.
I dont know why there is this need to knee jerk excuse replican politicians and voters, trying to cast them sane or seeking rational goal or having moral anger over stuff that literally does not bother then in the slightest.
They wanted this and they are happy it is happening. They will continue so until they themselves are hurt a lot ... and then they will blame democrats.
> Wanna bet they will vote again for the same kind of politics?
Obviously, that is hard to say for sure from issue polls this far from any election, and many of them do, indeed, just vote Republican no matter what.
But the fact that these actions and policies are unpopular, even among Republicans (no matter what Mr. BubbleTime up there wants to believe), when Trump's acts during his first term were much less so, does suggest that there are some lines that many of them do not want to cross. (Even if those lines may be only in opinion, not in action.)
I mean, most people didn't vote for Project 2025, which is exactly what Trump is implementing, despite having lied about not knowing about it during the campaign.
Also, I'm wondering why we suddenly now care about democracy; if we did in 2016, Trump wouldn't have had a first term. If we had after his conviction, the judge in NY state would have taken the jury's democratic decision seriously and handed him to the maximum sentence, presidential election be damned.
Come on. There was plenty of media attention around Project 2025 before the election. This is exactly what people voted for.
And a lot of it surrounded how Trump denied it.
From the horse's mouth on national tv:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fov7Mq75gYE
You're absolutely right.
And not a single soul believed him.
No a lot of souls did, that's part of the problem.
I think you got it backward. The morale of our administration isn't what's in danger here, and as far as I can tell, none of them have gotten a beating they deserve.
What a win for the Telcos. What a loss for all of America. If only municipal broadband/fiber was given the chance to grow there’d be real competition.
Telcos were given billions to expand and improve broadband for decades and never did it. If the FCC has scrapped the goal are they also scrapping the handouts? If so, it’s long overdue.
The FCC did not give those handouts, Congress did. 100 or so $10k "gifts" and I'm sure they'll do it again.
While not all, the FCC does give those handouts - https://www.fcc.gov/auction/903
To be the devil's advocate, the previous admin also squandered a lot of broadband money away in a pattern that seems common to all Democratic infra projects. See https://reason.com/2024/06/27/why-has-joe-bidens-42-billion-... . Neither party is good at this. The FCC broadband map and the b/w labels (previous admin) are nice though.
Saying they squandered the money makes it sound like they spent it and got no results. In fact it has not been spent. They were just slow to work out the details for how states could apply and in processing those applications. They got through that and several states had their applications approved and were just waiting for the money to actually start building.
The new administration stopped that and rescinded all the approvals, made various changes to the program (which will result in many areas that would have gotten high speed broadband that would be sufficient for decades getting slower broadband that will be obsolete much sooner), and now everyone has to reapply again.
Kind of bizarre to point to an article that takes a quote from a Republican FCC commissioner at its face value when these people like as easily as you breathe.
Infrastructure projects take time and the project was coming along just fine within its timeline. It's not a coincidence that several red states were the furthest along in the process - https://broadbandnow.com/research/bead-grants. The "delays" in the process were because it prioritized needs rather than grant political favors. Ironically the new rules will set these states back and harm them. It's a recurring pattern.
Why do you feel the need to be the devils advocate? What do you get from defending this crap?
> I think “logic lord” types are sometimes drawn to contrarian positions because they like the strong emotional reactions that stating those positions induces in other people. It gives them a smug sense that they are dispassionate and logical and everyone else is blinded by emotion.
I had saved it from some other social media type. It accurately describes a lot of HN community.
>I think “logic lord” types are sometimes drawn to contrarian positions because they like the strong emotional reactions that stating those positions induces in other people.
Isn't that a pretty much the definition of an internet troll[0]? I don't disagree, but let's call a spade a spade, okay?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(slang)
i think what a lot of people experience is frustration around group-think along the lines of "I stubbed my toe, it's someone-i-dont-like's fault". Because thinking that many of the problems with ____ group is unique to that group means that people are going to continue to miss the fact that the people they do support are also guilty of the same thing
Playing devil's advocate allows you to improve your own argument and develop strong rebuttals to the other speaker's thesis.
> Why do you feel the need to be the devils advocate? What do you get from defending this crap?
To prevent this level of monopolar partisanship.
Is this action a net-negative for ISP subscribers (i.e. everyone)? Yes.
However, this doesn't give any leeway at all in ignoring the past failures of the other side when it comes to this space either. The only (legally advisable) path left is vocal advocacy for its restoration. Doesn't matter who it is, only that this goal is to be achieved.
---
Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
Why do you feel the impulse to reply to a question that was not addressed to you?
its an online discussion, the point is to discuss things, these aren't PMs, the nature of online discussion is anyone can jump in anywhere. i dont understand why you have a hostile tone towards this very normal and acceptable situation
I think it’s important to point out that the two US parties are almost identical, but I wouldn’t call it “devil’s advocate”. It’s not defending one party to point out both are bad for workers.
In Poland I have 1000/300 fiber in my family house village with ~500 people population and same 1000/300 fiber in city I currently live both for 30 USD / month.
It just seems like the later a country got on the internet, the better their infrastructure is, Poland, Bulgaria, etc. all have way better internet than Austria or Germany
Seems like if they built it out after fiber was cheaper and more common, they have it good. Meanwhile, to this day, my parents get, at best, 6mbps down from the ancient, shitty copper infra the telco put up ages ago. Thankfully, other options like various 5G home internet products are a common in rural towns now, at least in the Midwest. But wouldn’t beat fiber!
Germany is a special case actually because they just refused to go on the fiber train and instead kept doubling down on DSL. Goes all the way back to the administration from the 80s and onwards, it's finally changing tho.
Nah, don't buy it. That's a poor excuse for America's bad internet infrastructure and another one of those "it's because we're the first/best/bigger actually".
I live in France, growing up most homes were equipped with ADSL. Optical fiber was rolled slowly but surely over the entire territory, systematically replacing older infrastructure. It's now to the point that everyone I know enjoys fast internet, from the center of Paris to the middle of nowhere.
True, before fiber, 5 years ago, there was ADSL2 connection in my family house.
I have 2.5 gigabits in Belgrade for $15. It's crazy
Here in Ireland I have 1000/100 asymmetric in a medium-ish town, no data caps that I've been able to discover. I pay €40/month. There does not seem to be any options available for a faster upload, which is unfortunate.
I think the slowest speed on offer at the moment is 500 for rural connections. I think everyone except the most rural households (and probably our surrounding islands) have 500meg fibre to the home now.
It's nice.
Data caps? Does it really offer that speed at peak times though? Are oversubscription of backhaul infrastructure disclosed?
In semi-rural hill country TX, 2.5 Gbps symmetric from an internet co-op is $90 USD/month without data caps.
> Data caps?
I'm sorry, is this some American problem I'm too European to understand?
Why the identity bashing? Data caps exist in many countries including Australia.
It keeps that speed at peak times without any issues, low pings, fast download speeds. With such internet connection the server is bottleneck, so if I download Linux distro I often choose torrent download option. There is no official data caps too.
Nice. Any throttling noticed? Or is it such surplus and predictable bandwidth that there's not really any slowness or limitations?
So odd that the FCC would suddenly revert all these rules which were designed to advocate for consumers. Wonder what changed recently?
Republicans are always pro-business first consumers whatever!
Previously and recently, we've had to fight tooth and nail to make any progress on this and then others like Ajit Pai just flagrantly fake support for destruction of net neutrality.
Well there was that one court ruling that said agencies have to stick to what Congress actually authorized them to do rather than having free reign to reinterpret their own authorizations however they want.
Assuming you’re referring to Chevron/Loper, I fail to see the relevance to this case.
Also, it’s important to remember that Chevron wasn’t “however they want” or to “reinterpret their own authorizations”. It was a doctrine that if the agency (staffed by domain experts responsible for resolving the ambiguity) had a reasonable interpretation of an ambiguity in the law, even if the court thought it had a better opinion, it had to defer to the agency that Congress created and left it up to congress to resolve that ambiguity if they felt the agency did so incorrectly.
> It was a doctrine that if the agency (staffed by domain experts responsible for resolving the ambiguity)
This is not an accurate description of what agencies are meant to be experts in.
Their expertise is meant to be in how best to act within their bounds. Which is distinct from deciding what those bounds are.
First, are the courts actually any better? Constitutionally they have limited jurisdiction in the first place to adjudicate administrative matters, only getting some authority in 1948 from Congress to do such administration.
> In 1974 the Supreme Court stated that deference depends on an administrative interpretation being consistent with the agency's other statements and being consistent with the congressional purpose
So it wasn't that the agency got to set its own bounds - it had to be consistent with all their other statements and with the congressional purpose of the body. So for example, Congress said the EPA had the power to regulate pollution sources but did not define what meant sources or specifically what regulations they could enact. Chevron said "Congress intended the EPA to figure this out so they get to do that". Loper said "actually, Congress needs to spell everything out" which is actually quite a radical idea for administrative legislation which with a stroke of a pen undoes a huge amount of legislation that had been done with Chevron in mind (& before that it was understood to be the case anyway since judges didn't even have power over administrative powers).
Their expertise is in science.
That's a pretty reductionist take. Here's what I think is a more reasonable one. If I told you your job was to keep the house clean, but made you come back to me for permission to pick up socks, but told you that absolutely didn't give you permission to pick up shoes, waited 8 months to reply to your request for permission to vacuum, denied you authority to decide what pieces of paper are trash and which are important, and also told you that it wasn't your job to get large muddy dogs out of the house you might think I wasn't serious about having an effectively cleaned house.
And then it turned out that the muddy dog just bought me a new yacht.
Yes. But it's important that you accept the yacht afterwards. If you get the yacht in advance, it's a bribe, you see.
Right. It's a bribe if you accept it in advance. If you accept it afterwards, it's just a salary.
If you are thinking of the ruling overturning the Chevron doctrine, that's not what it said. What it said is that courts do not have to defer to the agency's interpretation of an ambiguous statute. The court can make and use apply its own interpretation.
Under Chevron courts were to defer to agency interpretations if the statute was ambiguous and the agency's interpretation was reasonable.
Here is an article that (1) lambasts the 2023 Sackett ruling that a swampy back yard is actually not a navigable waterway; and (2) says that that decision teed up the 2024 Loper decision that got all the headlines: https://minnesotalawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/6R... , section starting at the page numbered 2863.
This seems to be good for Starlink at the expense of the fiber providers?
Rural fiber at my lake home went from $35/mo for 100/100 to $89.95 this year. On a 12mo contract.
Starlink got my business after VZW forced their 5G boxes to use 5G and not allow forced LTE usage. 5G is unusable there with 60-100/0.03. I force my phone to use LTE and all is well but 5G just does not work.
I hate giving Elon money but it’s the only affordable month-to-month option now.
Where do you live? Because Starlink is double my current internet plan for half the bandwidth and at least 10x in latency.
I am not seeing a plan on Starlink’s website that is lower than $120 a month for unlimited data.
I live in rural Ohio.
It depends where you live what you get. I was able to get $80/mo Residential Lite service which should top out at 150 but I routinely see 400+ mbit down. Latency is around 20-25ms on average for me.
My lake home is in Central MN.
Interesting that there is a significant price disparity between locations for what is ostensibly a global service. Central Minnesota isn’t that different in terms of availability of services from my corner of Ohio either. We have 3 fiber providers in the area but even then if you are half a mile out of the service area it can cost a fortune. I just wanted to validate your claim of Starlink’s price competitiveness and at least for my address it is one of the worst offerings available to me at least.
It's not really a global service in terms of service area, it's many many many small service zones. You can only be serviced by the satellites overhead after all.
You're competing for the amount of bandwidth in your cell. If there's more people in your area wanting service, it makes sense it's more expensive. There's a fixed supply and highly variable demand per square mile.
> Interesting that there is a significant price disparity between locations for what is ostensibly a global service.
… is it? Why wouldn't a corporation use any and all data available to them to price discriminate as hard and as much as they possibly can?
> my corner of Ohio either. We have 3 fiber providers in the area
I … am not sure I believe that. Everywhere I think I have ever lived, broadband is a local monopoly.
In Kitsap county the municipality owned lines can be used via a service contract with any number of service providers. Kinda a monopoly and kinda not.
That is the right way of doing it. It does not make any sense to have 3 companies building last-mile infrastructure in a neighbourhood, but you can have multiple service providers competing and using the same cables. But then, public oversight on the de-facto infrastructure monopoly is critical.
… so it's another Chattanooga. These are highly exceptional cases, compared to most of the nation.
(They seem to work well, from what I've read of them.)
Rural telephone cooperatives that moved to fiber tend to provide an alternative in places where cable companies were the dominant urban option. Some of those cable companies also moved to fiber. The service areas end up overlapped and some competition keeps prices in check.
I only have one FTTH connection to my house, but if I stretched I could probably claim “3 fiber providers in the area” - the local cable co does FTTN with 2000/200 service and there’s an independent fibre provider that serves multi-unit buildings in the downtown.
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Yeah, a regulatory goal that can be met by FiOS today but will take Starlink billions to get there does not seem like the correct way to allocate federal funds.
Brendan Carr's has critiqued federal broadband spending: too much spent on rebuilding existing networks to be faster, not enough going towards new build out. This is because upgrading wealthy customers' internet leads to increased profit, and there is less money in serving the underserved. Several states have tried fighting the telecom companies on what they've delivered and I think the worst case was a slap on the wrist.
Starlink and 5G are likely increasing broadband coverage far faster than fiber, which is a big goal of federal broadband spending.
The new FCC Chairman Brendan Carr is very pro-Starlink. Honestly Starlink is the best rural Internet access in the short term but any government subsidies going into Starlink are not going into fiber which has higher speed long term.
Yeah drawing the right line on what's rural is probably key.
Yeah cause they're not going to have to compete with real bandwidth availability.
given the new shiny one (that hasn't launched) is topping out at 1Tb of downlink (with half of it going to backhaul) and the current units are 80 Gb/s
It's good for incumbent terrestrial cable companies, too.
- They removed WSJ from the White House press pool because of the Epstein story
- Elon is still stoking the Epstein stuff on Twitter as we speak
It’s not good for Starlink for that reason. We are inside the belly of fascism, so your question reads like someone oblivious, with all due respect.
My building recently got wired up with a local ISP taht is offering gigabit fiber for... $25/month.
AT&T Fiber or Verizon Fios will tend to start at $60-90/month as an "introductory" price where your bill just keeps going up $10-20/months every yera unless you go through the dance of calling up and threatening to cancel every year. So you could be paying $140/month when a new customer is being charged half that.
Chattanooga, TN has long been known for its excellent and affordable fiber Internet [1].
We know what works: it's municipal broadband not national ISPs. We've known this for a long time but we somehow refuse to recognize it, in part because national ISPs have successfully bought and paid for legislators to create a moat through things like onerous regulation or outright banning of building muncipal broadband.
But why is this so? It's economics and incredibly simple. You see when a town or city or county owns the Internet infrastructure, you've removed the profit motive. Put another way, the workers own the means of production.
When you have a national ISP, some pension funds and shareholders own the means of production. And what do they demand? Ever-increasing profits. And how do profits increase? By raising prices and cutting costs.
There is absolutely no reason Internet access should cost $100/month.
And we see this same pattern play out in every market. It's the end state of capitalism.
[1]: https://epb.com/fi-speed-internet/
I live in the SF Bay Area where Sonic offers 10Gbit connections for $60/month. They’re a medium sized local provider with excellent support and great prices, and they’re making money doing it. If “economy of scale” were uncapped, Comcast should be a fraction of that price.
Did they raise prices or is it location based? I pay 50
I miss Sonic and DSLExtreme. There's only Spectrum (Charter) and GVEC here.
thanks government we love slow and expensive.
"we" = "we the people": sarcasm
"we" = the corporations: "yes, quite right"
sigh
We don't need the FCC to push fast broadband, we need to break up the stranglehold duopoly that phone and cable companies have on cities. If Google can't stomach dealing with them to create more competition, what chance does anyone else have?
ive always wondered what the end of america would look like
I am so sick of this anti-science, anti-competition, lawless administration.
I cant believe America is a fascist state. it only took 6 months. un fucking believable. Makes me sick.
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44639837
FYI to all commenters: the current FCC chair was nominated by Trump>Biden>Trump and unanimously confirmed by the Senate all 3 times.
From what I can tell senate confirmation means nothing. They ask a bunch of questions to grill them but the answers do not matter, they get confirmed anyway so it's all show to me.
Also, FYI to all commenters: The FCC board is required to have no more than 3 members from a single political party on the board of 5.
Also, FYI to all the commentaters, the admin already tried to fire the two democratic FTC commissioners.
Are there any similar requirements for the Supreme Court?
When it’s all said and done, Americans will have to find the courage to admit the Judicial branch was an utter failure. That whole thing was supposed to be immune to political coercion. I say it will take courage because it got rammed into our heads that God made the constitution, and that it’s infallible. It’s a massive failure through and through.
The founding fathers did not protect the branches from each other nearly enough, and certainly did not give the people an end-run mechanism to bypass and fix it.
> it got rammed into our heads that God made the constitution
Article III is light in describing the courts [1]. Our judicial system is mostly a creature of Congress, not the Constitution.
I’m personally a fan of choosing by lot, from the appellate bench, a random slate of justices for each case. (That court of rotating judges would be the one in which “the judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested”.) You could do this entirely through legislation—nothing in the Constitution requires lifetime appointments to a permanent bench.
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/article-3/
The problem is that the executive appoints the lower court judges, so the pool is tainted. A solution to this is probably something everyone needs to start thinking about (the whole problem), because a future democrat or sane republican will need to push a reform onto the court. Biden tried to push term limits before he left. Trump is a pen tester and showed all the cracks, so there's going to have to be a massive repair job of our systems.
> problem is that the executive appoints the lower court judges
President nominates judges; he doesn’t appoint without the Senate.
Moreover, “the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments,” a category that includes “Judges of the Supreme Court” [1]. The Congress may, by statute alone, remove the President’s power to appoint SCOTUS justices.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appointments_Clause
There's a lot that went wrong with the American experiment.
1. The electoral college, which removes voting power from people who live in populated areas in favor of people who don't.
2. A system of governance that doesn't require coalitions and thus also stimulates a 2 party system.
3. No mechanism for federal legislation to occur through solely the actions of the voters. There should be a way for American voters to check the government through a legislative process that allows items to be put on the national ballots outside of congress and the president.
4. If every branch is meant to check every other branch, each branch should have an enforcement arm, so that if they're ignored, physical action can be taken.
5. citizens united
6. The first amendment protecting disinformation
There's probably more.
Or widespread, self-dealing gerrymandering of Congressional representative districts and taking corporate money by representatives and senators in most states?
This is highly misleading. He was nominated to the commission by both Trump and Biden. He was nominated as chair by Trump this year.
FYI to all commenters, take 5 seconds to google Brendan Carr and you will see how much of a partisan, anti-free-speech hack he is. The man wears a gold Trump head pin on his lapel ffs.
You can't really read anything into that.
As has already been noted by law there can be no more than 3 commissioners from the same party.
Traditionally when a commissioner's term expired and they were from the party that did not control the Presidency the President would ask the other party's Senate leadership who to nominate and would nominate that person.
Also traditionally the Senators of the President's party would vote to approve that nominee.
Biden followed this tradition, as did the Senate Democrats.
All in the pursuit of profit. But we on HN love billionaires and unregulated capitalism.
i absolutely dread the day of the enshitified internet connection.
Maybe this will suddenly be the line where HN people discover that regulations matter when their internet sucks.
/doubt
I take it you've never lived in an area where Spectrum DOCSIS over copper coax and geostationary satellite internet were the only options available at all?
I will let you in a on secret: internet connection in USA been enshitified for a long time.
Maybe this will force sites to stop wasting bandwidth and stem the bloat. You should not need a gigabit connection (which I do not even have in all of my home LAN) to browse the Internet.
Edit: downvoters, please explain why I need 125MB/s (that's 3 full installations of Windows 95 every second) for normal browsing.
You don't need gigabit but resource constraints have never reined in bloat in the past and they won't now.
Apparently you've never heard of the demoscene.
Yeah, constraints are good for art. I was thinking of the commercial world.
why do you need a car that can do 65MPH? just take the backroads and chat with a friend or something while you drive, 30 MPH is plenty to get anyone anywhere. people made do with horses that did about 5 MPH for over a hundred years and they got around just fine. 30 MPH is, like, at least twice as fast as the horse
>Maybe this will force sites to stop wasting bandwidth and stem the bloat. You should not need a gigabit connection (which I do not even have in all of my home LAN) to browse the Internet.
Nope. You don't. But why should I have to pay Google/AWS/Azure/Cloudflare/Digital Ocean/etc./etc./etc. to host my small business/vanity/family chat/photo sharing site, or YouTube to host my barbecue sauce unboxing videos, when symmetrical (okay, 300 up/down would likely be plenty for most of that, but once there's fiber, Gb/sec seems good to me)?
I have no interest in propping up huge companies with hosting fees because other huge companies have no competition.
All that said, I get your point. But my use case is not your use case. Do you get mine?
Edit: Clarified prose.
It's not about what you may or may not need, it's about how much the telecom company is giving back in exchange of being granted a natural monopoly in their covered regions. This rescinding of regulation will only promote rent-seeking and enshittification.
I find the political angles to be boring. The reality out in the actual communities is much more varied and interesting.
For example, the Texas market is going crazy with FTTP providers. Even comcast is starting to get involved by upgrading infra and buying out even worse incumbents. My old house in the Houston area has two competing fiber providers now.
These aren't fly by night operations either. The last provider I had backed their entire last mile infrastructure with standby natural gas generators. I never lost symmetric gigabit internet access despite not having any power or water during Beryl.
At what point do we look at broadband penetration as a solved problem and focus on bigger ones? Unless you live in a radio quiet zone, there is going to be some ability to get online at this point.
I think this isn't as bad as people make of out to be. The 100/20 goal is perfectly fine for the vast majority of users. The only thing really supporting the old goal of gigabit connections was fiber. I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas. Fiber plans tend to be expensive and mostly available in the areas that already have usable high speed options. If we really want to target overall coverage and affordability, then this does make sense.
Edit: why disagree?
> I think this isn't as bad as people make of out to be. The 100/20 goal is perfectly fine for the vast majority of users
640K was "perfectly fine" for most people, too.
100/20 is barely enough for a household of 3-5 "light" users. The US already has abysmal broadband speed/bandwidth/latency metrics compared to the rest of the developed world and settling for 2010's version of "fast" in 2025 is ... not how we're going to get better.
> I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas
Why spend money and time to expand copper into rural areas when fiber is the same cost. it's the people/permits/labor that are $$$$. It makes no meaningful difference weather your expensive hbm crew is pulling fiber or copper and we know that copper doesn't go as fast ...
"100/20 is barely enough for a household of 3-5 "light" users."
It's plenty for my household with a similar number of users. We have people working from home, streaming, downloading documents or games, etc with no problem.
"The US already has abysmal broadband speed/bandwidth/latency metrics compared to the rest of the developed world"
Because the countries in the rest of the developed world are about the size of 1 state and have higher urbanization. If you want better coverage for an area this size, then it makes sense to include satellite coverage. The gigabit goal excludes them.
"Why spend money and time to expand copper into rural areas when fiber is the same cost."
They're only the same cost if you're starting from the same location. Copper has better penentration already. Expanding copper might mean adding a couple miles. Expanding to that same location with copper might mean putting in 10-50 miles plus any sort of hub or substation. So yes, equal distance is roughly equal cost, but almost everywhere fiber is put in, it's alongside copper anad thus not increasing coverage nor decreasing costs.
> It's plenty for my household with a similar number of users. We have people working from home, streaming, downloading documents or games, etc with no problem.
I recognize that "no problem" and "as fast as possible" are not the same. 100/20 works for you but once you've seen 1000/20, you really do notice things taking ~10x longer than they need to. It all adds up.
> Copper has better penentration already.
Excluding 56k, twisted-pair copper has absolutely crap throughput unless you're ~500m or less from the 'head-end' which is where your DSL is being turned back into laser pulses. Coax does have better performance/distance compared to twisted pair but now you have a non-trivial network of amps/taps/power-injectors to maintain. DOCSIS really does not like it if there's any issue w/ the coax so you're going to need a small army just to keep the hard-lines in good shape.
I have never seen a PON network get it's throughput cut in half just because somebody didn't screw the cable _all the way_ in to the tap. I see ingress degrading DOCSIS networks all the time though.
At least as far as rural northern CA goes, ATT runs fiber out to plants and then twister pair from there to the customers which are - at most - a few km away. Fiber is already 85% of the way to the customer... let's just finish the job instead of giving everybody a starlink account.
> Why spend money and time to expand copper into rural areas when fiber is the same cost. it's the people/permits/labor that are $$$$. It makes no meaningful difference weather your expensive hbm crew is pulling fiber or copper and we know that copper doesn't go as fast ...
Well they voted for it, so I'll stick to my fiber in my big city and they can fend for themselves and pay $90/month for 10 up 1 down or whatever while I pay $40 for 1 gig....
With the snide remarks aside, why expand copper or fiber into rural areas when we can just let SpaceX and others launch satellites and provide a potentially better service?
I'm sympathetic to a goal of "have really, really fast Internet service" but maybe there is a better regulatory framework for increasing competition both urban/suburban and rural areas.
> Well they voted for it
Not all of us.
> why expand copper or fiber into rural areas when we can just let SpaceX and others launch satellites and provide a potentially better service?
Fiber is objectively the right choice for future proofing. Bouncing a radio wave off of cube 300 miles above will _always_ be sub-par compared to a direct fiber connection because the latency is higher. SL May have a slight edge going vast distances since the speed of light is faster in a vacuum compared to glass but for 99.999% of residential ISP needs, fiber-to-the-home is going to offer a more robust pipe that fits more and with less latency.
> but maybe there is a better regulatory framework for increasing competition both urban/suburban and rural areas.
Almost certainly. Regardless, any better solution necessarily exists only in a world where 100/20 isn't "cutting edge" 30 years after it became technically possible.
> Not all of us.
I didn't vote for all these highways and suburbs either but we live in a democracy. By and large rural voters* voted to cut programs like this, though, and I think it's very fair to point that out.
> Fiber is objectively the right choice for future proofing. Bouncing a radio wave off of cube 300 miles above will _always_ be sub-par compared to a direct fiber connection because the latency is higher.
Yes and no, it depends on the cost. It might not be ideal but I'm also not sure my tax dollars should go to make sure people who live in rural areas have faster Playstation downloads. Do we actually need to physically pay for and build this infrastructure? I'm not necessarily opposed to it, but where is the economic analysis? If we invest $XYZ on this infrastructure what's the expected ROI versus alternatives?
* Just to be clear I don't have any particular problem with "rural voters" and I don't really like these arbitrary groupings of people into Urban, Suburban, Rural but it is what it is.
> Do we actually need to physically pay for and build this infrastructure? I'm not necessarily opposed to it, but where is the economic analysis? If we invest $XYZ on this infrastructure what's the expected ROI versus alternatives?
I wish I had a clear answer and good data on this. My gut tells me that giving more people faster and more reliable access to information is almost certainly going to be worth it in the long run. A few hypotheticals that come to mind:
Some highly paid engineer can live out in the boonies but still work for their high wages. That excess cash is probably going to make it's way into the local economy.
Likewise, rural schools are not know for their performance. That almost certainly could change if better content/curricula was easier to access and distribute. There is a non-zero chance that some breakthrough cure for cancer comes from a smart kid that grew up in a rural area. With crap internet access, that kid almost certainly would not get the education to match their potential.
(or maybe it isn't a cure for cancer, it's the next John Carmack...)
Fiber isn't the only way to level-up access... but it is the easiest to maintain. Other than the very ends of the connection, it's all passive.
No need to to inject power for amplifiers. No need to keep building/launching satellites and corresponding ground-stations.
Once it's installed, it's more or less maintenance free until a wild backhoe shows up...
100/20 is barely enough for a household of 3-5 "light" users.
What the hell are you doing that 100/20 is "barely enough"?
2 younger kids streaming a movie, one parent listening to a podcast in the shower, one parent streaming a YouTube cooking video while making dinner, and an older kid playing any game would completely saturate the network. That is assuming nobody has a phone that is also connected to the network
Also its ridiculous to think that is excessive in any way. Imagine what we could have if we had 100 gigabit or 1 terabit. Instead of watching a flat 4k movie, render a full 4k scene in AR.
That YouTube cooking video is probably ~10Mbit. Assuming the kids are watching 4K streaming video, its maybe up to 20Mbit per stream. So, you're at maybe 50Mbit of throughput with all your highest usage things going at once. Your phone being on the Wifi but not actively being used is practically no bandwidth usage. That podcast is anywhere from 320kbps to maybe even 64kbps, practically nothing compared to even one of those video streams which all together are only using half your bandwidth. Same goes with playing an online game, assuming you're not talking cloud rendered its maybe a few hundred Kbit. Rounding up all the other little things, you're looking at using maybe ~60Mbit down. 60% of your bandwidth.
> Instead of watching a flat 4k movie, render a full 4k scene in AR.
It wouldn't take 100-gigabit to make this happen. You can already get this on existing VR headsets today. I watched some basketball games with a Windows Mixed Reality headset nearly a decade ago, and I definitely did not have terabit networking.
2x1080p streams is 10mbit/s 2x4k is 30mbit/s. so below 100mbit/s. Video games don't consume a lot of traffic[] fortnite literally measured in 100s kbps. Video games consume traffic most only when they're updating, then sure you can saturate 100mbit/s, but you also can saturate 10G just as well, so in this case it's about speed, kid can do some chores while it's updating lmao. I initially wanted to skip podcast because...320kbps max? But then thought that not only that, but it's also most likely already downloaded to the device.
[]: destiny 1/2 consume a lot, but that would mean your older child is over 30 and living with you.
That's if you use any streaming service, if you're streaming legally ripped Blu-rays, then yea, 100/20 isn't enough, but those are usually within LAN. And if you're talking seeding/streaming to others, then any asymmetric connection speed will suck.
> That is assuming nobody has a phone that is also connected to the network
A buddy of mine has horror stories about what happens when an office full of iPhones all download the same 1+ gig iOS update at the same time.
> Imagine what we could have if we had 100 gigabit or 1 terabit
Exactly my point. I'd rather we not let large ISPs be the ones that decide what is innovative and "fast enough" for us. I want somebody with the power to push them... pushing them to be faster and better.
Work from home? Copy large files?
The majority of WFH setups are either "remote into a server and work there" (RDP uses a few Mbps at most when streaming HD video, and SSH is basically negligible) or "everything you need is already on your local company-owned machine."
> What the hell are you doing that 100/20 is "barely enough"?
Many things. A partial list in no particular order:
My day job is all SSH so I don't need a wide pipe so much as I need a short pipe. If the pipe is also quite wide, I can reliably stream content while I work. This isn't just music, this is watching the daycare camera feeds.
Every once in a while I need to docker pull a multi-gig image. It's nice when that doesn't take more than 30 seconds. I don't worry about background tasks moving/syncing/backing-up data; there's plenty of headroom!
Some of my hobbies involve _lots_ of data and the less time I spend waiting for that to download is more time I get for actually doing hobbies.
I also have a few scripts that backup other consequential data stores; the biggest one is google takeout for a few accounts. This results in ~ 800 gigs of data from a few different accounts.
The work product from these hobbies and backups is something that I like to back up off site and a 20mbps connection is trivial to saturate for hours as a time.
Every once in a while I'll make some of my excess compute/GPU available to friends so they can render things. The assets involved are not small and a big pipe means that everybody gets the desired result _faster_.
If you give me a faster/wider pipe, I _will_ find a new use for the extra room. I may not be representative of the typical user but I know for sure that I would not have developed my skills to the extent that I have if I had crap internet access.
> The 100/20 goal is perfectly fine for the vast majority of users.
100/20 is fine for one person. But gigabit isn't very hard to achieve and is a far better goal speed for entire households. Gigabit is also a lot more convenient any time a big download is involved.
> The only thing really supporting the old goal of gigabit connections was fiber.
Coax can do it.
> I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas. Fiber plans tend to be expensive and mostly available in the areas that already have usable high speed options.
Shouldn't fiber be a bit easier to run than coax? If you're going to run one data wire to a new area, it should be fiber. And if you can run power you can run data too.
If you're laying a communications cable, you should just do fiber. It can carry any type of traffic at high data rates, and you can upgrade the speed over time by just replacing the optics at the ends rather than having to replace the whole cable. Fiber plans are only expensive if your service level is expensive, or if you have to pay to get the line run to your building
Fiber should be the goal for everyone. Fiber is cheaper and lighter than copper which is why rural areas that haven't had any internet options except 56k on old degraded lines or satellite are finally now getting high speed internet the last few years, usually through co-op fiber startups. It can be hung on power poles, it can be installed with a trencher, and now that horizontal boring machines are incredibly common it can be put under existing infrastructure very easily.
> I would rather see the expansion of traditional cable or even satellite to rural areas. Fiber plans tend to be expensive and mostly available in the areas that already have usable high speed options.
This scarcity is artificial. Fiber cabling is not expensive; even the poorest of countries have fiber networks well established in suburban areas.
In India you can have high-speed, even gigabit internet at the price of two pizzas a month.
A country that wants technological leadership needs to aim higher. It needs to do more than the absolute minimum.
Coax can come close of the previous FCC gigabit goal. The FCC wanted 1 Gb/s down/500 Mb/s up. Xfinity is currently offering 2 Gb/s down over coax to most of their residential customers. They can only do 200-300 Mb/s up though.
> They can only do 200-300 Mb/s up though.
This is changing with newer DOCSIS standards! It's still up to the network provider to choose how many channels they allocate for up vs down. Even in perfect lab conditions, DOCSIS 4 is still about 3:1 ratio down/up (about 5/1.5 gigabit). Fiber is the only medium that makes a 1:1 down/up possible at any meaningful speeds.
You can always tell how tech savvy someone is, buy how much bandwidth they don't buy. They don't fall for the marketing/lobbying of the big incumbent ISPs.
Anyone I've known worth their salt in networking cares about latency far more than speed. Historically upload speeds on asymmetrical plans were a problem too, but since people have started to work from home, most cable/fiber/wireless internet providers' lowest plans offer upload bandwidth at multiple tens of megabits per second, faster than the ingestion speed of most video hosts, and more than enough for a dozen simultaneous HD video conferences, and their dowstream speeds are enough for dozens simultaneous 4K video streams at the highest resolution streaming services provide.
Incumbent ISPs lying about the benefits of gigabit plans, and lobbying for their requirement, is the equivalent of Intel bragging about 5 GHz speeds in the Netburst vs Athlon days. It ran at a higher clock speed, and that sold processors, but they ran slow, because they responded horribly to branching, and were late to the market on 64-bit an monolithic multi-core architectures.
Outside of rare power users, or someone especially impatient for one-off downloads, Gigabit is ridiculous for a large family or small office, and especially overkill for a small family or individual.
I can't stand the government either, and they'll probably replace that rule with one that's even worse, but it was a bad rule to start with.
Not certain I buy this argument - higher throughput tend to require more modern hardware throughout the whole chain, and modern hardware also tends to have better latency than old. So for most people, they will get improvement in both latency and throughput if they would get a gigabit fiber connection. But sure, if you are comparing chains of the same hardware generation, go for latency in most cases.
You're all using the same equipment, regardless of the tier you sign up for. The firmware in your modem or their router limits the maximum packet rate, but individual packets and small groups of packets are always traveling at gigabit speeds, regardless of the speed cap.
That difference in latency isn't even what matters; it's the latency from the various types of modems. With the direct connection of fiber providers, you can often get sub-millisecond latency from nearby collocations, and rarely do ISPs have more than a few milliseconds of latency.
With cable providers, DOCSIS adds ten to twenty milliseconds of latency. You'll get about double that latency With LTE providers and low-eath-orbit satellite providers that have nearby ground stations. With geosynchronous satellite providers, you'll get several hundred milliseconds of latencu.
A 50 Mbps fiber plan will get an order of magnitude lower latency than a gigabit plan from anyone else.
> With cable providers, DOCSIS adds ten to twenty milliseconds of latency
Are you sure? I'm on cable (Xfinity) and ping to 1.1 is varies from 11 to 13 ms, and I see as low as 7.2 ms to some random Xfinity thing that is not at my home but on their network.
I've got an ancient DOCSIS modem, a Motorola MB7621, and my understanding is that newer modems have lower latency than mine.
This is called being “confidently incorrect”. As mentioned above, I have those millisecond-class pings at 200x faster than that piddling 50Mbit pipe (for $60/month). There’s no imaginable advantage to getting a slower, more expensive connection.
I was just being unclear.
Everyone from your fiber provider is getting fiber-class latency, regardless of the plan's max speed. The fiber ISP in my area uses 10 gig ONTs for everyone, and limits each plan's speed with PPPoE. This is pretty common, and likely yours is doing the same.
On the other hand, everyone using the cable provider in my area, whether on their fastest or slowest plan, is getting the same tens of milliseconds of DOCSIS 3.1 latency, on a node that has tens to hundreds of gigabits of bandwidth but is using TDMA and FDMA to share it between a few hundred users.
My point is that the lowest-tier subscriber from your fiber ISP is getting magnitudes lower latency than the top-tier subscriber from my cable ISP. If either of the switch plans, but don't switch ISPs, they'll have the same latency.
I don't know about where you live, but by far the lowest latency option for me is symmetric gigabit. And my options jump from 200/20 to 1000/1000, and 200/20 was for sure not enough for everyone to stream and video chat at the same time.
My wife and I occasionally work while we're visiting her parents. We get away with doing teams calls at the same time on a 15/15 wireless link. Congestion only starts if our son downloads something while watching YT, while we're on calls.
It surprised me, but it works. And despite my 1125/50 connection at home, it surprised me how easy it was to adapt to lower speeds.
That being said, given the option I'd say 200/20 is my preferred minimum.
Multiple video chats can saturate 20 Mbps up, but if they offered 200/200 it would be more than plenty. Them not offering reasonable plans in between a little to low and way too high doesn't mean that it couldn't exist, it just means that they aren't offering it, likely because they have paid your local government to prohibit any competition, allowing them to force a large portion of their customer base to use a more expensive plan than they need, because no one else is going to offer a reasonable one.
Even if you don't _need_ gigabit speeds, in a world in which most fiber has already been laid down and running new fiber is cost-efficient, there is no reason why every home _shouldn't_ be gigabit capable.
Also, Netflix 4K streams at 15Mbps on average. Four phones streaming whatever plus someone or two playing a game is enough to mostly max out a 100 Mbps link. This is a real possibility in the rural settings that qualify for this bill. (Large families in large homes that are heavy TV viewers with nothing to do for miles on end.)
> how tech savvy someone is
> rare power users
I would expect a lot of overlap between these two groups! Extremely common things tech people do that benefit greatly from high-bandwidth connections:
- disk backup to the cloud
- use Docker
- have a household with multiple HD TVs (Netflix recommends 30Mbps per stream)
- software installs/updates as a brief interlude instead of an ordeal
Essentially, high-bandwidth connections let you use the Internet like it's functionally infinite instead of something rationed.
Gigabit is practically a requirement if you homelab
Saturating even a 100 megabit connection to a cloud provider gets really expensive, really fast. That's 45 gigabytes/hr. Only a subset of power users are going to have daily or even weekly sustained full-speed transfers of that size, and 100 Mbps is usually the bottom tier plan, from a US telco.
Even if you are doing that to initially back up your network or install Call of Duty, after the initial usage you're only making differential updates, unless something goes very wrong, which hopefully doesn't happen even once a month.
For some users, it may be worth an extra $1000/yr to get the gigabit plan instead of 100 megabit, so that a Call of Duty install could theoretically happen in tens minutes instead of an hour or two, but really it's going to take an hour for your computer to decompress and write the data. Everyone else paying that $1000/yr extra is just wasting their money.
Also, Netflix only uses 16 Mbps at most, for a 4K video which is only a small portion of their catalog and only available to their top-tier subscribers. The extra bandwidth is a recommendation to allow for other users to still use the network and also to account for a special case of high latency that used to occur when saturating the connection on the fastest plans some ISPs offered. Here's some good research into actual streaming usage: https://www.wsj.com/graphics/faster-internet-not-worth-it/ (It's WSJ, but there's no paywall)
On top of that, the cheapest plans offered by most telecoms in the US are over 100 megabit, so you still get a guaranteed three 4K streams Netflix without issue, but realistically could pull off double that.
You're right -- saturating a 100Mbps connection is really hard. But I'm not talking about running servers from one's home. The goal isn't to saturate your connection for the month, it's to make it so that if your usage "wants" more bandwidth, it's there for you. I don't know about most people's usage, but I can say that Docker & NPM in particular benefit from a very fast connection.
> which hopefully doesn't happen even once a month.
This is the mindset I was referencing. Nobody thinks about how often their computer has to write to its local disk, and if you have a sufficiently fast Internet connection you can adopt the same carefree attitude towards Internet use.
> an extra $1000/yr
This is the disconnect. In my area, the price gap is much smaller, less than half that. The bigger consideration for us was going to a gig connection was also the only way to get a connection without a usage cap and therefore a predictable bill (Xfinity is the other provider).
Incidentally, it looks like the WSJ test used mobile devices like phones and tablets. AFAIK all the major streamers deliver lower-bandwidth content to those devices by default, so this is not the best test.
All other things equal, higher bandwidth links are inherently lower latency.
Propagation delay usually dominates latency, so it's generally not the biggest factor, but on a simple local network with two PCs and a switch, you can expect about 1ms latency with 100BASE-T, and 0.12ms latency with 1000BASE-T.
They're not sending out 100BASE-TX ONTs to lower-tier subscribers. You're all using the same hardware; they're just limiting the packet rate to match the plan.
Regardless, the latency difference between 100BASE-TX and 1000BASE‑T pales in comparison to the difference in modem speeds between different providers' network types.
Fiber providers with an ONT get LAN-like speeds, while cable providers' DOCSIS modems add tens of milliseconds of latency, LTE modems are similar to double that of DOCSIS, and satellite providers range from similar to LTE all the way up to hundreds of milliseconds of latency, depending on the orbit and if there are ground stations nearby.
Again, within any provider, you get the same latency with any the plan, but changing providers can have order-of-magnitude differences.
What had made you suppose fast means laggy? I upgraded to 10Gbit Internet because their fiber is cheaper than the 1Gbit connection. I get 3ms pings to Google, or 5ms on older IPv4.
Fast, low-latency, and cheap is a pretty great combo.
More so, there's diminishing returns above a reasonable speed, and below a reasonable amount of lag, and gigabit speeds are well past that point, but for many ISPs the lag is fixed and before that point.
Which is to say, every major telco offers faster speeds than the majority of their subscribers will ever use, often even on their bottom-teir plans, but a significant portion of ISPs have enough lag to affect their users, even on their top-tier plans.
If you're trying to push telcos toward offering a more useful product, don't set a goal for them to offer higher speeds, which are already high enough for the vast majority of customers, but instead push for low latency, which most telcos cannot provide even between the customer's equipment and the telco's equipment.
Fiber providers have excellent latency, and of course that's what you should get if it's an option, but many subscribers are stuck with telcos that use DOCSIS over a cable network or LTE over a cellular network, and nothing can be done to reduce the latency for current generations of those protocols, but there's no technical reason the protocols couldn't have lower latency, so pushing telcos toward offering lower latency could make it happen, creating an actual useful improvement.
There's no reason to artificially limit the speed. If your city has fibre, everyone can have gigabit internet.
There's no savings for the ISP to throttle your pipe.
Many fiber ISPs will offer a 1 Gbps/1 Gbps standard plan and a cheaper plan e.g. 100 Mbps/100 Mbps. This allows customers to get fiber broadband even if they do not want to pay $70/mo.
Most ISPs are guaranteed a monopoly by the local government, so anything they can charge for, they will charge for, because there's no other option.
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