FCC chair: Speed standard of 25Mbps down, 3Mbps up isn’t good enough anymore::Chair proposes 100Mbps national standard and an evaluation of broadband prices.
FCC chair: Speed standard of 25Mbps down, 3Mbps up isn’t good enough anymore::Chair proposes 100Mbps national standard and an evaluation of broadband prices.
25/3 is way more than fast enough for most people not to notice. Its enough to stream 4k compressed. Maybe we should start measuring broadband in terms of reliability and latency. That has a far larger impact on overall experience.
Broadband in most of the developed world is 100Mbps, with South Korea transitioning to 1Gbps broadband. The point is less “what’s good enough” and more “evaluating internet access as a required utility”.
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Same here in sparsely populated New Zealand. Our house in a small rural town of 100ppl has 4Gbps fibre available (only have signed up for 1Gbps) and that’s run by a wholesaler, you can choose from 20+ ISPs to provide the service, switching between them takes one call and 30min
My point is, reliability, latency, and consistency is what is important. Bandwidth is nearly totally irrelevant for 99% of internet users. A couple years back I ran an entire office of 100 people on a 50 mbit connection. Thats 100 Concurrent users all using their cloud apps to do work. Many of them streaming music while they’re working, some of them are even streaming video while they’re working. It was never an issue for anyone and there was always plenty of bandwidth to go around, because bandwidth does not impact user experience unless you are regularly downloading or uploading massive files. Even on windows patch days where there are updates being downloaded for every computer at once it wasn’t a problem and nobody noticed.
More megabits does not mean better or more reliable access to the internet. Just like how a 100 megapixel camera that costs $200 is not better than a 24 megapixel camera that costs $1000.
Just to prove my point, I restricted my internet bandwidth to 25/3 on my firewall, which means its restricted for the entire home. Every device on the network is sharing the single 25/3 connection. I started streaming a netflix 4k movie, then opened a youtube video concurrently, then started streaming a random TV show from amazon prime. I opened up another concurrent video YT on my phone and ran that concurrently. That is 3 1080p streams and 1 4k stream and I ran out of screens to test with. Then I started streaming music from spotify and apple music both at once. Then, to top it all off I ran a speedtest. I still had 8mbits/sec to spare and any website I went to was still loading instantly. With the connection 100% saturated there was absolutely no interruption in any of the other streams, thanks to QoS which almost every router has nowadays. This is not a hard thing to try yourself and I highly suggest it if you’re open to your opinion being changed.
no it isn’t.
He means a 4k reel of just darkness. Could probably do it at a few hundred FPS and still have some bandwidth to spare.
4k netflix requires 15 megabit: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444
I’ll second this. 4k at 25 mbps might be OK for a sitcom or drama without much action or on-screen movement. But as soon as there’s any action, it’s gonna be a pixelated mess. 25 mbps is kinda the sweet spot for full fidelity 1080p, and I’d much rather watch that than “4K”.
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306 1080p streaming is ~5 mbps. Can you show any streaming service anywhere that uses 25 mbps for 1080p content? Netflix is 15 mbps for 4k so even thats not close.
Here are the bitrates Youtube suggests for uploading content: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en#zippy=%2Cbitrate
If you want full fidelity for all types of content, these are the bitrates you need. Yes, modern encodings can handle more fidelity at lower bitrates. But, I guarantee these numbers are for modern encodings. Older school encodings like UHD BluRay range anywhere from 92 to 144 Mbps.
Streaming platforms want to stream at the absolute lowest bitrate possible, and they absolutely compromise quality for lower bitrates to save on bandwidth.
It would have taken a few seconds for you to double check and see how incorrect that is. Yes, youtube absolutely accepts very high bitrate uploads to their platform, however once they process and store the video it is highly compressed, as with every single streaming platform out there.
My current laptop won’t play 8k 60 due to hardware limitations but I just tested with 4k60, the highest res youtube video I could find and I went back to my firewall to restrict my global bandwidth to 25/3 mbit/sec. As you can see from the screenshot and debug information it is playing 100% fine in its native res at 60 fps. Note in the screenshot that my connection speed is currently limited to about 20k kbits/sec and that it dropped a whopping 8 entire frames. It drops just as many frames on startup streaming if I uncap the connection.
If my hardware was able to do it there is absolutely more than enough bandwidth there to stream it in 8k given that 8k should be 4x 4k streams.
Side note, I even uploaded this image in less than a second on that “too slow” 3mbps restriction.
First, let’s assume we’re all intelligent people here and not be condescending.
I am not saying it’s not possible to view high resolution content at 25 mbps. I am saying that certain content just can’t encode at full fidelity at 25 mbps. In my experience, high action scenes with tons of entropy to encode do not compress well. And those scenes degrade and become muddy or pixelated at lower bitrates. Do you need it for the entire stream? No. But sadly, to save on bandwidth many streaming services also severely limit how much buffering their clients will do.
Even all this said. We’re talking about 10’s of megabits of difference. Significant portions of the world have managed to offer gigabit internet to practically everyone in their jurisdiction. And yet, we’re here in the dark ages with 25/3. And sure, you could say “American has significantly more rural areas, those customers are hard to serve.” But, I’ve got family in coal-country West Virginia that have gigabit fiber. There are no technical hurdles. These companies just don’t want to upgrade their infrastructure.
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The benefit of the 4k is that you get HDR. On a good TV, that’s far more noticable than the resolution improvement and certainly worth it.
But then you’re looking at 60-100 Mbps bit rate for good quality (50-80 GB file size for most movies).
thats upload. Netflix 4k is no more than 20 mbps. Typically around 16-18. Its easy to confirm this yourself by looking at your bandwidth usage by streaming said content.
https://help.netflix.com/en/node/13444 15 mbps is more than enough in reality.
Modern websites as bloated as they are are still a few megabytes at most, and many of the larger assets are cached locally so they’re only loaded once. on a 25 mbit connection thats less than a 1 second load time. The vast majority of the time the website server you’re talking to is never even going to provide you with that amount of bandwidth upstream anyway. You will notice absolutely zero difference in browsing and day-to-day usage at 25 vs 1000 mbit provided you have the same latency. Watching a youtube video on your phone is maybe 1-2 megabits/sec. Thats about 15-20 concurrent streams on 25 mbit which I don’t think most people are doing regularly.
All im saying is for the average user latency matters way more. A 25 mbit cable/dsl connection is massively better than a 200 mbit satellite connection.
The reality is that it’s not, most importantly because the advertised “up to” speed might rarely be achieved. However even simple websites are now horribly overburdened with ads and trackers and “live updates” and “lazy downloading” that it’s just not functional at that bandwidth
This is really easy to verify and I think you might be surprised. Open your resource monitor and browse the web, stream videos, etc. My family of 4 with 2 of us working from home with a video streaming on the TV and maybe 30 total wifi devices has averaged 12 mbits/sec down over the past hour. The highest spike was to 30 mbps.