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

Mon Jun 6 16:27:54 UTC 2022

On Mon Jun 06, 2022 at 09:44:20AM -0500, Mike Hammett wrote:
> " I find it sad that so many would argue for never needing anything 
> more than we have today." 
> 
> Few to none are doing that.

I must have read different posts.

> Upgrades are an organic part of the process. Some places they're
> hard, but most places they're comparatively easy. Let's stop
> putting the cart before the horse just to feel good about
> ourselves. That's too expensive. 

I'm not clear what you're suggesting should not be done, I agree with
you, upgrades are good, make them worthwhile ones.

> "totally fail to provide the same to everyone." 
> 
> Why should that be desirable? 

I dunno, maybe it'd be nice if we could provide services to
everyone not just the fortunate few who happen to be in the
good locations? A larger market is good for business, no?
Maybe the less fortunate would do better with access to
the same resources others have.

> "If we had moved to fibre everywhere then perhaps" 
> 
> Negative. DOCSIS works well enough. Modern DSL implementations are good enough. Fixed wireless in many cases is good enough. Next gen satellite is good enough. 

Not really. Those have been just about managing to keep up to varying
degrees.

DSL totally lost it as increasing speed reduced range, the UK ended up
deploying around 90k street cabinets (and it's a small country) to handle
the reduction from km's to 100m's and still failed on ancient cabling.
Rural got left behind as the distance between premises is greater than
the range of a cab. I've deployed FTTH over the last few years to
people who were still on 0.5 - 1MB/s DSL, this was common in rural areas
(lots are installing FTTH now)

Satellite has always been a dissapointment, LEO may do better but is
a huge investment so furthers my point that we do need to invest in
steps up.

FWA has always been a stop gap, largely limited by having to
use shared spectrum here. On my FWA network the advent of 60GHz
is great but for PTMP is too short range for our rural premises.

All are lacking in upload speed, we found that out fairly
quickly in the pandemic when there was a sudden change in
use patterns from what people thought would be fine forever.

> "If you build it they will come." 
> 
> So then build the hypothetical content that needs this? 

Have been. We were looking at turning off UK terrestrial broadcast
in the late 2020s but fibre deployment was insufficient to provide
equivalent coverage. That's changing, fibre is going in all over so
we're looking at mid 2030s or so before we can start making
proper use of IP only distribution and the extra capabilities it
provides.

> Gigabit download level service is available to enough (at least in the
> US) that if such a downstream heavy service were on our doorstep, it
> would work for most Americans.

That's really good then, problem solved.

> Once people got tired of being proven that you need such forward-looking
> downstream capacity in the regulatory world

That's back to cart before horse, no? Did people not get the
Gigabit due to such pressure? Why would it not be good to do the
same for upload?

> they just moved to upstream and cried wolf there too. Yes, many services
> do have mildly inadequate upstream, but certainly not anything to change
> the regulatory environment over. 

Or moved on to the next problem. I think they are setting the goal too
low if it's expected to accomodate a longer term change to home working. 

If your home is where you work, rest, and play why not symmetrical?

brandon