<story><title>US Senators call on FCC to raise broadband definition to 100Mbs down and up</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/4/22312065/fcc-highspeed-broadband-service-ajit-pai-bennet-angus-king-rob-portman</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nimos</author><text>Please do. Had to go up to full gigabit down with xfinity to get 35 up. Next highest was 15 I think? Not that you can figure that out easily - their website doesn&amp;#x27;t list upload speeds. Or maybe it does - the website is terrible to navigate, slow and I got 404s off their main internet landing page.&lt;p&gt;Anyhow at the risk of this turning into a multi page rant about comcast I&amp;#x27;ll cut back to upload speed. I see it as upload is for creation and download is for consumption. What do the cable companies want people to be doing?&lt;p&gt;If you look at the popularity of twitch&amp;#x2F;youtube&amp;#x2F;(things I&amp;#x27;m too old and unhip to know about) it is a direct threat to cable&amp;#x2F;traditional content creation. I&amp;#x27;d wager the current state of affairs holds a lot of people back from getting into content creation, especially poorer&amp;#x2F;larger families who have to share a limited connection.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jcrawfordor</author><text>Most cable carriers, prominently Comcast, have issues with legacy channel allocations (e.g. for the On Demand feature for legacy Motorola STBs) that conflict with the channel allocations required for the higher upstream speeds supported by DOCSIS 3.0 and 3.1. This results in a de facto situation of upstream speeds being constrained to only a very small portion of the up to 2gbps upstream capability of 3.1, due to only having typically 3 QAM channels for upstream.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, eliminating these issues requires large-scale replacement of not just equipment in the field (nodes and amplifiers which are broadly all being replaced anyway to support Node+Zero architecture) but equipment in customer homes: the legacy STBs. Cable carriers have found in the past that getting people to turn these in to swap out for newer models is excessively expensive in customer goodwill, and less so cost, so there&amp;#x27;s a major technical disincentive to such a change.</text></comment>
<story><title>US Senators call on FCC to raise broadband definition to 100Mbs down and up</title><url>https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/4/22312065/fcc-highspeed-broadband-service-ajit-pai-bennet-angus-king-rob-portman</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>nimos</author><text>Please do. Had to go up to full gigabit down with xfinity to get 35 up. Next highest was 15 I think? Not that you can figure that out easily - their website doesn&amp;#x27;t list upload speeds. Or maybe it does - the website is terrible to navigate, slow and I got 404s off their main internet landing page.&lt;p&gt;Anyhow at the risk of this turning into a multi page rant about comcast I&amp;#x27;ll cut back to upload speed. I see it as upload is for creation and download is for consumption. What do the cable companies want people to be doing?&lt;p&gt;If you look at the popularity of twitch&amp;#x2F;youtube&amp;#x2F;(things I&amp;#x27;m too old and unhip to know about) it is a direct threat to cable&amp;#x2F;traditional content creation. I&amp;#x27;d wager the current state of affairs holds a lot of people back from getting into content creation, especially poorer&amp;#x2F;larger families who have to share a limited connection.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>justapassenger</author><text>You’re overthinking it. I’ve worked at enough big companies to be 100% sure it’s not elaborate, long term evil plan to keep people from competing with them.&lt;p&gt;They do that because it’s cheaper that way for them, and majority of users don’t complain.</text></comment>