Gigabyte Internet

Comcast is slowly rolling out gigabit internet, but Google seems to be moving much slower than predicted. In January of this year, the FCC redefined broadband to mean 25 Mbps or higher speed.

Despite claiming that the government's definition of "broadband" shouldn't have been increased to 25Mbps,Verizon is now phasing out its 25Mbps fiber service and making 50Mbps the default minimum. So I used 25 and 50 Mbps as the most common breakpoints.

I am not sure what the standard is for fiber. From advertisements it seems to be 100 Mbps. Many ads concentrate on the vastly increased upload speeds.

Things seem to be different down here....

At home I consistently score 10 Mbps. I think that's perfectly fine, as I can stream Netflix HD without a hiccup. But I just ran Speedtest,net at work and scored 68.18 Mbps download and 95.80 Mbps upload.

Now, I know upload speeds are usually a fraction of the download speeds. Ours might be different on purpose, if the ISP can do such things, because we often upload effing big documents for online government contests.

If I had speeds like this back in the late 90s when a 56.6 Kbps modem was seen as "fast," I think I could have downloaded the whole internet in a week :) Of course, I'd have had nowhere to store it...

Quote: Nareed

Things seem to be different down here....

https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/state-of-the-internet/akamai-q1-2016-state-of-the-internet-infographic-americas.pdf

According to this report 1Q2016 Mexico, Argentina, Chile lead Latin America with 7.1-7.3 Mbps average internet. Canada is at 14.3 Mbps average and USA is 15.3 Mbps.
The FCC decision to revise the definition of a "broadband connection" to 25 Mbps was meant to provide incentives to bring up the average.

Speeds vary... the first mile and last mile have always been the slowest and most expensive. Signals move vertically in skyscrapers faster than they move by ethernet or fibre cables on the various floors of the skyscraper. Bluetooth gets faster and stronger and more ubiquitous everyday. I don't know just how fast a refrigerator needs to talk to a milk bottle but I'm sure this Internet of Things will be boasting about speeds although it will never really matter.

If your reruns of I love Lucy are delayed... you notice it. Otherwise I dont think anyone but bookies and stock traders really give a hoot. How fast can your car go on the racetrack is irrelevant in city traffic with cops all over the place, but it matters to you and the car salesman to some degree.

Europe favors wireless over cable because tearing up ancient cobblestone alleys is bad for tourism.

Carbon just beat out silicon for cost and speed, so things may change. Graphene is now the new in thing for this quantum speed stuff that is going to leave everyone in the dust and frighten the NSA because anyone will be able to decrypt a 200,000 digit prime number in seventeen minutes and intercept your recipe for pot brownies. Signal is end to end encryption and Moxie Marlinspike doesn't believe in backdoors so everyone is starting to use it. He even overhead some seventy year old geezer explaining to a techie kid how to install Signal for automatic Tor to Tor encryption.

Well, enough musing... I have to go repair the string on my tin can intercom and feed the gerbil that powers my ancient computer while I read about speckle tracking.