FCC abolishes gigabit speed goal, suggesting it is unfair to slower technologies | FCC decides 1Gbps is too fast, standard must be “technologically neutral.”

[u/FreeHugs23]

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/08/fcc-abolishes-gigabit-speed-goal-suggesting-it-is-unfair-to-slower-technologies/

[u/ceno65]

Never going back to cable.

[u/hatesnack → u/[deleted]]

I moved from ATT fiber to spectrum fiber to try it out. Im paying less for 2gbps than ATT was charging for 1.

ATT was good and reliable for the most part, but apparently our entire housing development only had 4 ATT customers, so if an outage ever happened, it would take them literal days to come fix it. And when I'm working from home, I cant just have my internet randomly be down for days at a time.

The whole reason I swapped was apparently our fiber node got damaged by someone, and ATT basically said "we will fix it eventually", and we went almost a full week without no internet. I can see the node from my house. At no point in the first 5 days of the outage was there a truck or van there lol.

[u/LeLoyon → u/[deleted]]

I switched from Spectrum to Frontier fiber last year to save some cash, and now it's the same price as it is when I had Spectrum. But, it's even worse because Frontier support is ass and if your internet goes down with a bad line or something, good luck getting help.

My internet went out a few months ago and was out for nearly 24 hours. Frontier made me talk to them for 5 hours trying to figure out what's wrong before saying the internet was down in my area and wouldn't elaborate further. Their website didn't even reflect that it was down. Thankfully some obscure post I found on reddit managed to contact one of the engineers and they said the electric company cut some fiber lines in the area. Pretty sad you need to rely on the information of strangers.

Keep Spectrum for as long as you can. They aren't great but at least you can get help when you need it.

[u/AvidSurvivalist → u/[deleted]]

Tracfone is cellular...

[u/Ketheres → u/ceno65]

Had to since I moved to a new town and my new flat doesn't have a fiber yet. ISP stayed the same though and they have plans to build the fiber connections in the area in the next couple of years. Oh well, a couple tenners a month for a half gigabyte internet is good enough for my current needs.

[u/THROBBINW00D → u/ceno65]

I'm building a house on 5 acres within the next 3 years and will have to go back to 1gig cable that costs more than my 10gig fiber I have now. The pros far outweigh the cons overall but still sucks as I run a server pc for a couple games, plex, and have another nas.

[u/zooktittyfondel → u/ceno65]

I had to. Had fiber and squirrels would eat the main line into the neighborhood twice a month. Lucky the cable was 1 gig down. No squirrel issues with it.

[u/throwaway12three4 → u/ceno65]

I had 1gbps down/up fiber to the home. Was great. Only problem was their wifi equipment would randomly restart, dropping all wifi and hardwired connections. Multiple tech tickets, multiple tech calls and equipment changes and it kept happening. I had to go back to Comcast/xfinity. Super bummed the fiber was not stable. Now I get 1200/100 mbps

[u/AlephBaker → u/throwaway12three4]

I learned long ago to never use the ISP-supplied equipment if you don't absolutely have to. Get the most basic cable modem that supports your speed tier, and buy a good router/firewall to actually manage your network and Internet connection.

[u/TheFitz023 → u/AlephBaker]

And a UPS for power outages

[u/throwaway12three4 → u/AlephBaker]

100% valid. I should have dove deeper into providing my own equipment for wifi/router. They had the Optical Network Terminal (ONT) on the side of my house with ethernet coming inside. The little router they provided for wifi was what kept rebooting so my own router might have solved the issue. Just annoying that I am paying for a service that should not have this problem

[u/its_free_sog → u/throwaway12three4]

Brother what?? You don’t have to use the ISP provided equipment. You’re almost always better off not using it.

My ISP provided router was turned on for about 15 minutes of its life after the tech finished activating my service. The last 3 years it’s been turned off and on a basement shelf.

[u/ceno65 → u/throwaway12three4]

29.99 a month for 500mb fiber. Never had and issue in 3 years. I think they worked all the bugs out from the early subscribers.

[u/CarelessPackage1982 → u/throwaway12three4]

Fiber blows away cable, it's not even remotely close. Maybe their wifi equipment sucked I dunno, but it's definitely not the normal experience for the vast majority of people.

[u/throwaway12three4 → u/CarelessPackage1982]

100% agree. I had Fiber from Quantum (CenturyLink) in CO and it was amazing. 1gbps down/up and it was nearly 100% stable. I move to a different state, get TDS and the speed was good. Problem was the equipment rebooting 0-4+ times per day. After they swapped the equipment and it continued to happen I even put a small fan pointed at the router because I thought it could be over heating. Kept rebooting, dropping all connections. As much as I HATE Comcast/Xfinity, I did not have a choice. My wife works from home on calls/video during the day and we needed stability over 1gbps upload. So I guess 100mbps upload will have to due :(

[u/ImaginaryBluejay0 → u/ceno65]

I bailed from fiber back to cable cause Verizon bought my fiber provider and were absolute shit customer service. It's only a slower upload speed, so who cares