New minimum speed for US broadband connections

Tue Jun 1 17:33:52 UTC 2021

"Why is 100/100 seen as problematic to the industry players?" 

In rural settings, it's low density, so you're spending a bunch of money with a low probability of getting any return. Also, a low probability that the customer cares. 

" There's an underlying, I think, assumption that people won't use access speed/bandwidth that keeps coming up." 

On a 95th% basis, no, they don't use it. 

On shorter time spans, sure. Does it really matter, though? If I can put a 100 meg file into Dropbox in under a second versus 10 seconds, does that really matter? If Netflix gets my form submission in 0.01 seconds instead of .1 seconds, does it matter? 

I think you'll find few to argue against "faster is better." The argument is at what price? At what perceived benefit? 

Show me an average end-user that can tell the difference between a 10 meg upload and a 1 gig upload, aside from media-heavy professionals or the one-time full backup of a phone, PC, etc. Okay, show me two of them, ten of them... 

99% of the end-users I know can't tell the difference in any amount of speed above 5 megs. It then just either works or doesn't work. 

----- 
Mike Hammett 
Intelligent Computing Solutions 
http://www.ics-il.com 

Midwest-IX 
http://www.midwest-ix.com 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Christopher Morrow" <morrowc.lists at gmail.com> 
To: "Mike Hammett" <nanog at ics-il.net> 
Cc: aaron1 at gvtc.com, "nanog list" <nanog at nanog.org> 
Sent: Tuesday, June 1, 2021 12:14:43 PM 
Subject: Re: New minimum speed for US broadband connections 

On Tue, Jun 1, 2021 at 12:44 PM Mike Hammett < nanog at ics-il.net > wrote: 

That is true, but if no one uses it, is it really gone? 

There's an underlying, I think, assumption that people won't use access speed/bandwidth that keeps coming up. 
I don't think this is an accurate assumption. I don't think it's really ever been accurate. 

There are a bunch of examples in this thread of reasons why 'more than X' is a good thing for the end-user, and that average usage over time is a bad metric to use in the discussion. At the very least the ability to get around/out-of serialization delays and microburst behavior is beneficial to the end-user. 

Maybe the question that's not asked (but should be) is: 
"Why is 100/100 seen as problematic to the industry players?" 

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