The sentiment, that Americans don't NEED fast home internet is probably more accurate than not.
It's not relevant though. Need has never been the driving force in the market. It's want, and if people want it, there's no reason they shouldn't have it.
Why would the head of the FCC care if people need high speed?
Only if he were in the pocket of the ISP's. Then he'd need a way to NOT create rules that mandates high speed internet. And if it's not a requirement, then it's up to the business to charge whatever they want without regulation. It's insidious, and quite clever albeit evil.
>The sentiment, that Americans don't NEED fast home internet is probably more accurate than not.
No, it's total bullshit, except in the pedantic "well, humans don't NEED electricity/medicine/communications/synthetic shelter/[anything since we wandered the plains of Africa and had a life expectancy in the 40s]" sense. Fast, symmetrical end point Internet is of massive importance and in not just direct but emergent ways that a surprising number of people, even on HN, don't seem to consider. Think for example of many of the concerns that have been raised over the last few years here about how the net has become ever more centralized, or about the difficulties of efforts like Tor. A lot of the core driver for that comes down to lack of end point bandwidth vs demands. If symmetrical gigabit connections were the rule rather then the exception, it'd be possible once again for significantly sized services run directly. Obviously if a service grew large enough they'd eventually need to move towards the core, but for a lot of people it'd completely eliminate the need for many current colo and cloud offerings. Would you be happy going back to thinnet or 10BASE-T on your LAN? Everything that runs there could run over the net with more bandwidth, latency only becomes a significant issue over extremely long distances.
More bandwidth also means more can start to be devoted to meta-content issues like privacy. If we consider 25 Mbps to be a target for many services say, then onion routing networks are hard to make use of because they tend to impose significant overhead and be limited by slow nodes (particularly as even someone with a "enough" 25 Mbps connection themselves often would not be willing to allow all of that to be used by the larger network). But if everyone had 1000 Mbps (or more) to play with, then they could easily devote a bunch of that to sharing networks, take even a 90% overhead hit, and still have as much bandwidth as they needed. Just as more power in CPUs/GPUs has allowed us to not merely run things faster, but optimize towards the value of human time vs computer time, more bandwidth "then needed" represents leeway to optimize towards goals beyond the bare necessities.
Seriously, giving everyone (or close enough) fast, symmetrical connections should be one of the absolute highest priorities of anyone concerned about market competition, centralized control, privacy, and so on. It'd be one of the best investments America could make, just as national electrification, telephone, and roads were.
> No, it's total bullshit, except in the pedantic "well, humans don't NEED electricity/medicine/communications/synthetic shelter/[anything since we wandered the plains of Africa and had a life expectancy in the 40s]" sense.
That assertion seems reasonable to me. What does "fast" even mean? Don't know? Then it's a good assertion. You don't need what isn't defined.
This is not the same as "humans don't NEED access to nuclear materials", because the acceptable safety measure is currently 0. So that's also a feasible assertion. The question about tradeoffs and what is practical has to be answered first. Until you say what the minimum is, there's no point arguing about how supposing an upper limit (to what is needed) is wrong.
Simple and objective. "Fast" equals current standard deployed wired LAN speed, so right now about 1 Gbps symmetric (technically WiFi has exceeded this but in practice there is far, far more discrepancy in advertised vs actual WiFi bandwidth). I would be willing to accept arguments about delayed ramp ups and the like, so after 10 Gbps becomes standard industry wide for wired LAN I could see WAN upgrades taking x years, but in basic principle the only difference between WAN and LAN should be latency (should be mostly irrelevant except for special applications and continental/intercontinental distances), SLA/uptime responsibility and guarantees, and who exercises network control.
You're taking a typical argument from incredulity without bothering to actually give this any particular thought. It's frankly pretty simple and certainly not a technological challenge either. What should we be able to use the Internet for? At least the exact same stuff we use our LANs for (plus more). Again, I invite anyone who argues that 1 Gbps or more is "unnecessary" to go right back to 10BASE-T for a month on their home & office networks and see how that works out for them.
So do you need a lot of love and friendship or a little? "Need" of a category type isn't about what that is, it's always a matter of scale. I was speaking to scale, which is why I phrased the example in that manner. Can you stop trying to avoid the question and at least give some answer to my question? What does "fast" mean? What the FCC calls "fast" or some other value measurement?
Do you need food? How much? If you get thinner your TDEE lowers, so you "need" less.
Do you need running water to your house? Hoe much? Our hygiene has in part made us live longer, but maybe we just "need" a few pints a day to drink?
Do you need a refrigerator?
Stop muddying the waters. Internet access is increasingly relevant, and before we had it (as with electricity and running water) we didn't know so. It's not a problem to give people much better, faster and uncapped access, it's only not in the monetary interests of incumbent ISPs and their puppet Ajit.
I would argue it's a necessary right. That's not the issue and I ask again, what does fast mean? It has no intrinsic meaning.
> Stop muddying the waters.
Insisting the terms of a negotiation before taking an agreement is not muddying the issue. It's rationally rigorous and seems to be problematic. That's why it's worth discussing. I'm still waiting.
> Insisting the terms of a negotiation before taking an agreement is not muddying the issue.
Is that why you conveniently disregarded my other questions? If you can't answer those, it should inform you of why your question is disingenuous, which was my point. I'm still waiting.
> Is that why you conveniently disregarded my other questions?
The question is still about degree. Starting with new off-topic propositions to attempt to derail, are for your own entertainment. Since you're just here to argue about anything but the issue at hand, I'll wish you good luck.
The question stands. What does "fast" mean, in regards to need? A natural negotiation before condemning an imagined policy that has not specified limits or prerequisites.
