New minimum speed for US broadband connections

Wed Jun 2 12:48:40 UTC 2021

On 6/2/21 13:19, Mike Hammett wrote:

> While I don't have any stats to back it up myself, one of my fixed 
> wireless colleagues reported moving nearly a whole neighborhood from 
> 25 meg fixed wireless to 200 - 500 meg fiber. The 95th% usage changed 
> approximately 10%.

It's kind of like self-generating electricity with solar panels and a 
battery... most folk don't understand how electricity works, and simply 
expect things to happen when switches are flicked. So a first-time 
solar/battery DIY'er may assume all inverters are made the same, and 
goes ahead to buy a 1kW system, assuming that he/she is the most 
conservative energy user.

They, then, spend the next 6 months not understanding why it goes dark 
each time they use the hair dryer. So fine, they get a 2kW inverter, and 
now the hair dryer is fine, but it goes dark when they also try to make 
a cup of coffee. So fine, they get a 3kW inverter, but it takes 6hrs to 
charge the battery, which means it never gets charged on a typical 
5-hour sun-hour day.

After finally seeking some expertise, they ditch their 3kW inverter and 
splurge a 6kW system.

They can now make some coffee, dry their hair and charge the battery 
without things going dark. They usually probably live in the 0.7kW - 3kW 
range in the normal course of their day, but they have the option to run 
free without constraint when required.

Closer to home, when we launched a 25Mbps product back in 2015 for under 
US$200/month in Johannesburg for commercial businesses, fibre and CPE 
included, we saw a corresponding increase in cloud service purchases, 
removal of on-premise hardware (especially bandwidth and content 
management systems), and the emergence of social media businesses that 
relied on quick uploading of content. Within 6 months, 85% of those 
companies had upgraded to our 100Mbps service, which cost US$600/month.

Most of those companies either still have their 100Mbps service today, 
or if they upgraded, perhaps only 25% took anything above 500Mbps.

It's about untying people's hands. They won't always be swinging their 
arms about their person 24/7, but they will have the room and freedom to 
do so, when they need to.

Mark.
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