FCC proposes higher speed goals (100/20 Mbps) for USF providers

Thu Jun 2 22:04:58 UTC 2022

On 6/1/22 1:55 PM, Livingood, Jason via NANOG wrote:
>>> Saying most people don't need more than 25 Mbps is like saying 640k is
>   >> enough for anybody.
>
> The challenge is any definition of capacity (speed) requirements is only a point-in-time gauge of sufficiency given the mix of apps popular at the time & any such point-in-time gauge will look silly in retrospect. ;-) If I were a policy-maker in this space I would "inflation-adjust" the speeds for the future. In order to adapt to recent changes in user behavior and applications, I'd do that on a trailing 2-year basis (not too short nor too long a timeframe) and update the future-need forecast annually. And CAGR could be derived from a sample across multiple networks or countries. In practice, that would mean looking at the CAGR for the last 2 years for US and DS and then projecting that growth rate into future years. So if you say 35% CAGR for both US and DS and project out the commonplace need/usage then 100 Mbps / 10 Mbps becomes as follows below. If some new apps emerge that start driving something like US at a higher CAGR then future years automatically get adjusted on an annual basis.

So what happens if the Next Big Thing requires a lot of upstream? It's 
always been sort of a self-fulfilling prophesy that people won't use a 
lot of upstream because there isn't enough upstream. The pandemic pretty 
much blew that away with video conferencing, etc.

Mike