I agree that it would be really nice if it were symmetric. But remember, the definition is for a service that isn’t handicapping people, not for what would be nice to have. Maybe in 10 years we can make it symmetric.
No, I completely disagree. Remember that the whole point is to define the _minimum_ level of service at which people can reliably access “advanced telecommunications capability”. Here’s the definition:
> The term ‘advanced telecommunications capability’ is defined, without regard to any transmission media or technology, as high-speed, switched, broadband telecommunications capability that enables users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications using any technology.
By this definition, 4K video is a reasonable metric to judge whether a broadband service qualifies as an “advanced telecommunications capability” or not. Since the major streaming services all use less than 20Mbps to serve up 4K television, 1000Mbps is clearly not necessary. It certainly is nice to have, but it’s not _necessary_.
I think that fiber access will continue to grow as long as we remove the regulatory barriers that hamper it. Permitting is a big one. Cities often require separate permits for every street, often for every block!
If you have to install anything, then installing fiber is the obvious choice. It has immense headroom for the future; fiber optic cables that carry a gigabit today could easily carry 100,000× that just by buying fancier equipment to install at both ends. The upper limit is currently hundreds of terabits per second, and it goes up every year. We’re nowhere near the theoretical limitations of optical communications technologies. I think that ultimately this means that fiber will win out over coax eventually. But coax has headroom still, and there’s no reason to tear it all out where it’s already in use.
We should increase competition by abolishing local monopolies, but that’s something we should do no matter what level of service we adopt as the definition of broadband.
Most streaming services have extremely bit-starved encodings for their 4k streams and fall far short of the quality that a proper 4k video has.
They are also doing their encode much slower than real-time so they can achieve higher compression rates.
The definition also says "originate and receive" so you need to look at both upload and download bandwidth.
4k also isn't high enough quality for many use cases like VR.
Households also contain multiple devices, so just a single video stream isn't sufficient.
I would argue that by that definition they should be setting the forward-looking threshold as sufficient to both upload and download multiple live 8k video streams simultaneously.
> The definition also says "originate and receive" so you need to look at both upload and download bandwidth.
Yes, I agree that a symmetric definition would be better. The definition we have is pretty good though. The 20Mbps of upload is enough for 4K video streaming. It would be nice to have some more head room so that more than one person in a household could stream at full resolution at the same time, but the market has already solved that problem. Every market where 100×20Mbps broadband is available also makes higher upload speeds available.
> 4k also isn't high enough quality for many use cases like VR.
This is not a good argument. VR relies on local rendering of 3D assets, not streaming video.
> Households also contain multiple devices, so just a single video stream isn't sufficient.
100Mbps has headroom for, let me calculate here, 100/16=6 whole 4K video streams. If your whole family needs more than six simultaneous 4K video streams to live then your family has problems.
> …sufficient to both upload and download multiple live 8k video streams simultaneously.
This is just dumb. 99% of computers can’t even play 8K video; they need specialized hardware just to decode 4K video in real time and the hardware cannot handle 8K video. The cameras for it don’t exist, and neither do the displays. And finally, the FCC definition of broadband is about raising the bandwidth floor, not raising the ceiling. The ceiling is already high enough by far; I can get 50Gbps service at my house if I wanted to pay for it.
But also 8K video would still use less than 100Mbps of bandwidth!
I disagree. I would argue that most people just don’t produce enough data to have a huge need for faster uploads. You would have to produce more than 200 gigabytes of data per day before your backups would take longer than a day to finish:
$ units 20Mbps*24hrs gigabytes
* 216
If you’re an entertainer then you might record more than 200GB of raw video per day, but most people aren’t. You wouldn’t even need a faster connection to _become_ an entertainer, even if you soon wanted one. You could stream 4K video of your antics all day and it would be less than 200GB.
And remember that the definition is about the _minimum_ bandwidth necessary to participate in society, not what you need to be at the peak of your entertainment career. People who do need higher speeds can and will pay extra for them; the FCC definition is not about limiting what products are available. It doesn’t even require anyone to have 100×20Mbps service. The FCC is just trying to get us to a point where we can say that 100% of Americans have _access_ to that level of service, even if they have _subscribed_ to a lower level of service to save money. Since 45 million Americans don’t even have access to 100×20Mbps service we’re still pretty far away from that.
Average household is a family, who arent streaming 4k video or uploading huge backups like i do, and 20Mbps would be fine for me. They typically watch netflix and youtube and doomscroll.
it should be at least 100x100