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Comment by kevin_thibedeau | Hacker News Reader

They fought to have anything faster than ISDN classified as "broadband". Now they get to pay the price for letting the copper rot.

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This is an important piece of context, thank you for pointing this out. Exactly - you can't classify things one way in certain contexts, but then want things viewed differently (in this case - ADSL not viewed as broadband so not included in broadband aggregate speeds) when it no longer suits you.

Broadband has always meant "faster than dial-up".

The FCC has defined broadband as 25/3 Mbps since 2015. Prior to that it was 4/1 Mbps. The first FCC definition of broadband was established in 1996 as 200/200 Kbps. You can't really play loosey goosey with the definition. The service is either fast enough to be considered broadband or it isn't. The delivery method is irrelevant.

Honestly, by 2018 it should be something like 50/50 or 100/50 as a minimum.

Broadband has nothing to do with speed.

No. It didn't.

If you can't even watch a video at DVD quality, it's not broadband in a meaningful way.

4K only needs 10Mb.

I wouldn't be mad if the FCC standard was still 10Mb.

But I prefer it increasing the way it has been. The downlink, at least. Minimum uplink should be at least a quarter of minimum downlink, if not higher.

And I disagree that 4K only needs 10Mb. I think youtube uses about that much, and it very much does not reach the full potential of 4K. Netflix uses about 16 with HEVC, with massive amounts of server time spent optimizing every second. And they recommend your connection be 25. And if you wanted to watch a live stream of the same quality you'd need far more bandwidth to make it work.

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