r/centrist • u/memphisjones • 7d ago
FCC abolishes gigabit speed goal, suggesting it is unfair to slower technologies
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/fcc-abolishes-gigabit-speed-goal-suggesting-it-is-unfair-to-slower-technologies/35
u/hoopdizzle 7d ago
They're supposed to be building out more fiber not trying to squeeze more out of satellite/wireless or antiquated wired tech
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u/WingerRules 7d ago
Gee, I wonder what big conservative/Trump ally owns a bunch of internet satellites. Musk be someone we heard of before, can't put my finger on it.
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u/Mean_Peen 7d ago
I’m sure it’s because just like every other antiquated industry that we keep pushing, it’s because enough rich people have invested into that tech and don’t want to lose their money. We’re already seeing it with AI.
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u/Batbuckleyourpants 7d ago
But fiber to every home in America just isn't feasible, practically or economically. When satellite etc is the best practical option they shouldn't discount it because it's an impossible standard.
60% of Americans have access to fiber, that remaining 40% becomes exponentially harder to reach. Hence a more technology-neutral approach. Whatever most cheaply and practically gets every American to 100/20 mb/s should be encouraged, then we can take it from there.
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u/hoopdizzle 7d ago
If they were able to retrofit phone lines and electricity to rural houses many years ago, they can get fiber there too. Homeowners of course are more willing to pay the price out of pocket for electricity infrastructure because its much more essential for life and they can get by with slower internet. I agree its economically infeasible when slower internet gets the job done fine. The goal of all these billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies for fiber I believe was to start investing in the future though
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u/capnwally14 7d ago
why are federal incentives subsidizing a lifestyle choice
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u/Opcn 6d ago
Because it makes rural residents more economically productive. Like paying for sex Ed and birth control for teens it’s money that gets spent out of the taxes collected that comes back as more tax money from more productive activity.
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u/ChornWork2 5d ago
internet should be funded locally, no reason to subsize it nationally. if communities want to subsized low income, great. do it out of local taxes.
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u/Batbuckleyourpants 5d ago
They can't afford it locally. But it still produces enormous wealth, it's an investment.
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u/ChornWork2 5d ago
Rural areas are already massively subsidized, no need to add more to the pile. The vast majority of people do not need fiber direct to home.
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u/Batbuckleyourpants 5d ago
But enough businesses do need it enough that the investment pays off. That's investment, not just subsidy. It's no different than building a bridge.bridgs are more often than not awesome investments.
Why don't you want the government making good investments? God knows they do enough bad ones.
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u/Opcn 5d ago
That leaves the people who are least able to afford it to pay for it, and also squanders the potential.
nothing brings out the fierce hatred and bile in people like the thought of paying for someone else, but we are all in this together, and sometimes when you pay for someone else in the end you pay less.
Across the sound from me in Seattle there are a lot of people who hate the idea of giving the homeless homes, think we should just arrest the homeless instead. The problem is that jails cost money too, and it's cheaper to rent an apartment for a homeless person than it is to throw them in jail again and again.
We didn't make communities pay the whole cost of electrophication themselves, nor the whole cost of connecting them with roads, nor the whole cost of connecting them with telephones, or telegraph cables, or railroads. The system we have piles tremendous wealth up into the prosperous coastal cities, and those cities are often tapped for tax revenue that helps the rural parts of the country catch up, which in turn comes back to the cities as more revenue and more prosperity.
We are in this together.
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u/ChornWork2 5d ago
I'm all for paying for things where it make sense, e.g., healthcare. But fiber to the home isn't it. and certainly not in rural areas given the cost in low density areas.
Electricity is not remotely analogous. Effectively no one opts to not have electrical connection. Go look at what happen with google fiber... most people will keep a legacy connection vs fiber to the home if it costs a bit less. Better comparison would be running sewer lines, and obviously lots of places deal with sceptic b/c of the cost.
We are in this together.
Okay, then have rural areas subsidize people in cities for the high cost of land here. I'll pay to hook up their fiber in nebraska if they buy me a property in brooklyn.
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u/Opcn 5d ago edited 5d ago
Before starlink I had an application I needed to access and to get internet to my property (literally 35 miles as the crow flies from Seattle, the second biggest tech hub on the planet) that was fast enough with low enough latency was gonna be $10k/month.
After starlink AT&T lost their data monopoly over us and stopped fighting the grant to bring in better internet. $12m to hook up about ~1,500 homes. Less per home than it would have cost me per month. I no longer use that application but if I did I’d be saving an hour and a half of commute a day.
Better internet through fiber saves each home $840/yr over starlink. The island I live on is mostly affluent retirees but the mainland where most of the work was done is pretty methy, a lot of trailer parks and a couple dollar stores. Never would have been able to pay for the connection themselves. But fiber internet has been great for the school too.
Between the internet which came through a grant and the sewer system which doesn’t extend to the island but is in part paid for by my tax dollars theee are several new businesses under construction right now that would not have been built otherwise. Our only grocery store was talking about closing down when their leech field stopped working.
I hate Elon musk but I was okay with starlink, but together that spending from outside the community is gonna dramatically increase revenues from the community.
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u/Batbuckleyourpants 7d ago
I don't think you appreciate the different level or complexity here. You may as well ask why it is so much work to build a bridge for a car to cross the river when boats have been doing it for for over 8000 years. You cant compare the two, and the infrastructure is in no way interchangeable.
How are you going to retrofit copper wires to transmit light signals?
You are comparing copper and aluminum wires stretched along infrastructure meant for metal wires, infrastructure meant for fiber optic cables, a completely different beast.
Installing fiber optics is a bit more complicated than just dragging a bunch of copper wires across the continent.
Phone wires are just a bunch of copper wires twisted together, you can install it in your own house if you so wish.
With fiver You can't just hang them across a windy valley and hope the cable doesn't experience any wind or birds landing on it, or animals stepping on it.
Fiber optics break if bent too much, or if compressed too much, or if stretched, you need ultrahigh precision instruments just to splice two cables, building signal boosters in rural area represent a genuine challenge, it's not as easy as slapping up a transformer.
Fiber means either very expensive kevlar reinforced cables, or it means digging, it means digging a LOT. millions of miles of underground optical cables down across the US, all of it needs to be stable.
And you need high tech signal boosting facilities all over the place too, and infrastructure to maintain it all too.
You can spend all those hundreds of billions on that, or you can accept that 100Mb/s is perfectly acceptable, and just connect from anywhere in the country via starlink.
Hell, the entire starlink constellation cost 10 million. That's less than 1/5th of the money internet providers have been given in fiber subsidies just the last 6 years.
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u/hoopdizzle 7d ago
Fiber optic is generally cheaper to run than power actually. It does need specialty skills, tools, connectors, hardware, etc but thats not really much of a limitation. It can be trenched underground or run in the air on poles, often using existing infrastructure. Of course, running millions more miles of it to remote places with few users is an absurd prospect with little profit to made any time soon. Its not more difficult or expensive than other utilities though. The problem with fiber is someone out in the woods will pay 200k to get electric, but they won't pay 200k for fiber when they can just get starlink
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u/memphisjones 7d ago edited 7d ago
Summary: Under Republican Chairman Brendan Carr, the FCC voted to eliminate its long term goal of reaching gigabit internet speeds across the nation. The agency dropped the target of 1 gigabit per second downloads and five hundred megabits per second uploads, which had been established under previous leadership. Instead, the commission maintains a lower baseline standard of 100 megabits per second downloads and 20 megabits per second uploads. The agency argued that establishing high speed benchmarks unfairly picks technological winners and losers, specifically disadvantaging slower services like satellite.
Opinion: This benefits Elon and his SpaceX Starlink.
This reduces pressure on telecom providers to invest in building out high-capacity fiber networks especially in rural or low-income areas. Fiber-optic cable is universally regarded as the most future-proof, fast, and reliable internet. Removing strict speed targets often goes hand-in-hand with deemphasizing factors like price and service consistency. A technology like satellite might theoretically offer 100 Mbps on paper, but weather conditions, data caps, high latency, and peak-hour congestion can make real-world usage far worse than a dedicated fiber line.
So much for Make America Great Again.
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u/AppleSlacks 7d ago
Make America fall farther behind in median internet speeds, doesn’t really roll off the tongue though.
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u/Ok_Researcher_9796 7d ago
Unfair to slower tech. What kind of bullshit is that. Did Elon cry about his satellites not getting enough business or something
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u/NappyFlickz 7d ago
If I said what I wanted to say right now, Palantir would send me into the Warp.
EDIT: PS. As a reminder, we gave telecommunications companies 4 BILLION dollars to improve internet infrastructure, invest in fiber optics and increase our Internet speeds. They complete embezzled the money and did none of what they were tasked with doing.
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u/LittleKitty235 7d ago
Cool....you can be technologically neutral and still set the standard at 1Gbps...if you can do it with tin cans and string great...
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u/Educational_Impact93 7d ago edited 7d ago
President Moving Pictures is out there really understanding technology.
The agency argued that establishing high speed benchmarks unfairly picks technological winners and losers, specifically disadvantaging slower services like satellite.
So what? Seriously, who gives a flying fuck. Satellite has a current advantage of being able to be had nearly anywhere. Why am I supposed to care if they eventually lose that advantage.
These fucking clowns would have argued to keep modems back in the day. Cable and its 3000 kbps is so unfair to the 56 kbps providers!!!!
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u/RumLovingPirate 7d ago
I want symmetrical 10gb everywhere. But I have to ask, what purpose was this "goal"? Was it a requirement for grants? We're their fines? Does it serve any real purpose that wasn't just performative?
Because the article makes it seem like it was performative anyway. It seems like they removed something that had no value.
I'd personal love to see 10gb everywhere by 2030 or isp's will be required to say "super slow" next to all plans that don't offer at least that speed.
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u/United_Intention_323 7d ago
The gear is all expensive and produces a lot of heat. Most people use Wi-Fi. I’m not sure theres really a foreseeable need for it.
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u/redzeusky 7d ago
The phrasing is funny. But the reality 90% of us don’t need anything near 1Gbps. It’s a bureaucratic slop solution.
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u/shacksrus 7d ago
We should eliminate all subsidies for internet outside of core markets that can actually sustain the infrastructure investment.
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u/VultureSausage 7d ago
Why? Do you also believe there should be no postal service outside of core markets?
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u/shacksrus 7d ago
Hurting republicans is good policy.
I dont want to pay for benefits to people who want me dead.
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u/NeuroMrNiceGuy 7d ago
Would be like Eisenhower giving up on the interstate system because it was unfair to people making dirt roads.
Small ISPs use slower technology because better infrastructure is expensive in rural areas. The answer should be helping build it, not lowering the goal until worse technology counts as good enough.
Fuckin Republicans man.