New minimum speed for US broadband connections

Wed Jun 2 17:32:29 UTC 2021

"New applications could be developed, or new ways of using the bandwidth could be possible, if only the bandwidth existed." 

That bandwidth is available to a sufficient number of people that bandwidth availability isn't an impediment to any development. Some people had broadband, then came Napster, then broadband exploded. Obviously it isn't that clear cut. 

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

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

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

From: "Blake Hudson" <blake at ispn.net> 
To: nanog at nanog.org 
Sent: Wednesday, June 2, 2021 9:29:53 AM 
Subject: Re: New minimum speed for US broadband connections 

On 6/1/2021 10:50 PM, Haudy Kazemi via NANOG wrote: 

On bandwidth: perhaps some kind of 80/20 or 90/10 rule could be applied that uses broadly available national peak service speeds as the basis for a formula. An example might be...the basic service tier speed available to 80% of the population is the definition of broadband. When 80% of the population has access to 100/100 Mbps home service, then 100/100 becomes the benchmark. When 80% of the population has access to 1/1 Gbps home service, then 1/1 becomes the benchmark. Areas that don't have service that meets the benchmark would be eligible for future-proof build-out incentives, with incentives exponentially increasing as the area falls further and further behind the benchmark. With 100/100 Mbps as the benchmark, areas that currently are stuck with unreliable 1.5 Mbps/384k DSL should be receiving upgrade priority. And even higher priority if the benchmark has shifted to 1 Gbps. 

I love this idea! I think this may be the most useful nugget in the thread. 

There is a bit of chicken vs egg situation where applications don't use X+1 bandwidth because folks only have X bandwidth. New applications could be developed, or new ways of using the bandwidth could be possible, if only the bandwidth existed. On the other side of the coin, ISPs don't invest in faster speeds and folks don't purchase more than X bandwidth because no applications that exist today requires more than X. The latter is where our current conversation seems to have landed. However, we all know that the trend is towards increasing performance, just at a steady pace and some folks getting a performance bump before others. When the masses gained access to consistent 10M download speeds, suddenly applications that were niche before start becoming ubiquitous (streaming HD video was a good example of this). When the masses gained access to 3M upload, applications like video conferencing suddenly started to became more common place. Unfortunately, the folks that were late in receiving access to these performance thresholds became the digital "have-nots" once these applications become available (they were doing just fine before because everyone around them was doing things differently). 

I tried to think back towards a goal of ensuring that everyone has "good internet" access (or that as few people are left behind as possible), and wondered if a yearly "cost of living" type adjustment was required. However, I think that might land us in an ever competing situation that ultimately may be unproductive. Your sliding scale based on the performance of the most common internet access (an 80% threshold) makes great sense as applications will target the performance level of the large market. An occasional audit of the state of the internet and adjustment to our thresholds for what is considered the norm would be a great way to define where the low end is and lift these folks out of the "poor internet" group and help get them into the "good internet" group. I am now really curious where that threshold would land today. Would we be above or below the current definition of broadband? 

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