“The blue-colored areas are U.S. counties where less than 15% of people are using the internet at a 25Mbps download speed, which is the FCC's definition of high-speed internet.”
The FCC judges by available. Microsoft judges by using. Two very different metrics. I would not expect The Verge’s sophomoric “journalism” to pick up on this.
The FCC considers a service block, which is about 100 square miles, "covered" if the ISPs report that one address has service that meets the 25/3 requirement.
The FCC judges by what the ISPs say, and it doesn't even have to be available beyond one address. Microsoft judges by use.
Really, imagine that, Alaska doesn’t have coverage in most areas. Nor Texas in sparsely populated areas. Go figure. Come on, let’s apply some common sense. Companies aren’t going to invest where it’s not justified.
Also, this is precisely where the SpaceX StarLink is most apt.
According to the FCC's data, nearly the entire US has 25/3 broadband, including those sparse areas in Texas.
Having access and having it are likely very different things...
So are wired connections part of the past or still part of the future?
Wired connections (especially fibre-optic) provide the lowest latency and highest resistance to environmental conditions of any solution we have so far - Starlink's amazing performance notwithstanding. But as Steve Jobs said, convenience beats quality - while I absolutely prefer wired connections I make use of wireless more and more.
“The blue-colored areas are U.S. counties where less than 15% of people are using the internet at a 25Mbps download speed, which is the FCC's definition of high-speed internet.”
The FCC judges by available. Microsoft judges by using. Two very different metrics. I would not expect The Verge’s sophomoric “journalism” to pick up on this.
The FCC considers a service block, which is about 100 square miles, "covered" if the ISPs report that one address has service that meets the 25/3 requirement.
The FCC judges by what the ISPs say, and it doesn't even have to be available beyond one address. Microsoft judges by use.
While it's a fast speed by 1990s standards, 25Mbps is pitiful today given the data requirements of video, which is becoming a larger portion of home users' traffic. In Australia, in a city that is considered "Regional" when it is convenient and simultaneously part of "Greater Sydney" for CoVID-19 tracking, I have 100/40Mbps fibre with "unlimited" data for around A$90 a month. This serves well enough for my business needs and rarely results in service degradation even with a teenager in the house, but I still consider it the bare minimum to qualify as broadband in this day and age. If I could get symmetrical 1Gbps at a reasonable price (say, <A$200pm) I'd jump at it, because then I wouldn't care where data lives - but right now my internal network is much faster than my internet access. If I didn't need to download and upload large files as part of my work then I'd probably stay at 100Mbps.
Gigabit ethernet was introduced as a standard in 1998, and commercially it was cheap enough for home installation by 2001 - twenty years later, it doesn't make sense that 25Mbps is viewed as acceptable, especially by that crazy FCC metric.
The big industry secret of residential fiber, is that it’s not profitable in The USA. All done using subsidies, and back end Enron level scams going on with Verizon, att and those little carriers and investors who fall for the bad deals. The little ones lose in court when they run out of money to fight the big lawfirms. By the 1,000’s, So small they get lost in the news of stock markets. Except in condos and apartments. “Cost per bit” is the driving force behind ISP’s. Fiber has a low cost per bit only for high consumption data centers and business and dense cities. Fiber has high “CpB” in suburbs, regardless if it’s fiber to the node or home. Suburbs with medium traffic volumes coax has the lowest cost per bit. Top tier Coax also is beating top tier fiber on latency and throughput in the US at the moment. No need to mention the 10gb to 100gb DSL tech att never will deploy because CpB is crazy. WWII Microwave relays still exist and are still used by stock markets for ultra low latency vs the “slow” fiber relays. Every ms counts when money is at stake. CpB is over ruled by raw bit latency for that specific use case, even if total capacity of a tower is under 32mb/s. Now compare that with starlink, and the cost per bit reduction of at least 10:1 can’t be matched by any other technology. speed and latency overseas beats fiber undersea cables 2:1. The cost per bit and overseas low latency is why starlink is the single biggest industry change and nobody sees it yet. Let’s consider cellular. Each generation was a 10x cost reduction 0g - 1g - 2G - 3g- 4g, profits increased 10x each jump slightly offset by denser deployments. then mmWave 5G came out at much higher density driving cost per bit close to 2.5g levels. 6G is crazy CpB using 100-300thz equipment with a range of a few meters. Setting them on a backwards profit path of no return. What do ISP’s do when faced with this profit loss problem? First they figure a way to make lower cost 5G stuff that’s not really any better than 4G and sometimes worse (sub 6ghz) Then they lobby the government for more subsidies, send out lawsuits to block competitors with better CpB (starlink), and then start a marketing campaign pushing people to higher priced plans for the same service they already had. Vz and Att do this over and over, using lawsuits to either slow down the competitors or financially bankrupt them all together. When you threaten the profit stream of a company with access to the highest paid lawyers in the world, you better watch out.
I would like to add to my previous rant, satellite tech can provide indoor coverage. Although most people don’t know that’s possible. They generally dont, because again the cost per bit changes to unprofitable. I’ll spare the technical details, but Sat phone companies sparingly use unprofitable CpB indoor signals to page or ring a phone, make them go outdoors to a lower cost per bit signal, hence driving customer usage up and profits. And of course who could forget military sats. Cost per bit really doesn’t matter. “High speed” from a satellite to a submarine is slower than dial up. But in that use case CpB is over ruled by mission requirements. Just showing an extreme example, there is a big difference between “available” to customers and actually “in use” by them.
Comments
The FCC judges by what the ISPs say, and it doesn't even have to be available beyond one address. Microsoft judges by use.
Gigabit ethernet was introduced as a standard in 1998, and commercially it was cheap enough for home installation by 2001 - twenty years later, it doesn't make sense that 25Mbps is viewed as acceptable, especially by that crazy FCC metric.