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

Mon Jun 6 13:06:50 UTC 2022

"So what happens if the Next Big Thing..." 

I see this said a lot, but it doesn't really mean anything. We are sufficiently close to whatever is likely to come that it can come and bandwidths will have to catch up upon its launch. If we're not that close, then it's unrealistic to pre-build capacity for imaginary developments that never come. 

Napster came out in 1999. Broadband use in 2000 was 1%. 

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

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

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

From: "Michael Thomas" <mike at mtcc.com> 
To: nanog at nanog.org 
Sent: Thursday, June 2, 2022 5:04:58 PM 
Subject: Re: FCC proposes higher speed goals (100/20 Mbps) for USF providers 

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 

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