I remember the collective shitfit around a decade ago when Obama give out free cell phones to homeless people. It was such a crazy concept to people who have never struggled that yes, you DO need a smartphone to meet your calling, banking and personal management needs. Everything has an online portal. Every job application requires an online portion. It's how the world works and has worked since the mid 00s.

I have a lot of experience with rural broadband initiatives, and generally yes, the FCC designation sets the minimums we see in terms of new service delivery to underserved communities. I specifically worked with state and municipal entities to build grant packages to fund infrastructure and these new minimums would be a great help.

Most plans are 1 up even with 100 down

That can't be right. I thought Australia's 100/20 plans had pathetic upload speeds but that's unreal.

Right now in a lot of states Verizon has a monopoly on symmetrical internet service. I can’t ever switch ISPs because I can’t get 400/400 anywhere else.

This actually does keep prices in check. Albeit, a bit backasswardsly.

I may be off on the specifics but it's something like: Having to offer 100mbps at the lowest rates in (poor neighborhoods) increases the speeds of each tier while keeping the price the same.

In the linked pdf, it does mention the benchmarks.

• 2015/current standard is 25/3 Mbps.
• Proposed increase to 100/20 Mbps.
• Future goal is 1000/500 Mbps.

I felt so gaslit by optimum because they advertise 1gbps parallel. But, if you don't have their fiber offering in your region they'll happily sell you 1gbps/24mbps for the same price.

Although, unless I complain, they fail to give me even 300mbps down.

I miss Google Fiber :(

They just won't be able to call it broadband.

We live in a rural area (but only 16 miles from the nearest city) and have copper. We really hope the infrastructure bill will bring real internet to us in our lifetime.

I wish we can all move to MB/s and get rid of the endless confusion on names

Laugh in Western European (10Gbps)

the most simple explanation is that total bandwidth is limited and more upload speed they give you the less download speed.

On all lines the total amount of available bandwidth has to be split between upload and download. If you've got gigabits or even hundreds of megabits to play with then symmetric is great, but on slower connections is makes a world of sense to heavily favour download just because humans are better at consuming information than creating it. Consider how many hours of videos the average person watches per week versus how many they create in the same period. Same for photos, emails, articles, etc. There are people who have parity but they are in a pretty tiny minority.

That said, I hear there are people in the US getting 300Mb/s down and 10Mb/s up which is pretty fucking nuts.

I think it's common parlance to use Mbps and mbps interchangeably since nothing uses "millibits" as a unit of measurement. More commonly people misuse Mbps and MBps which is incorrect since it signifies bits and bytes.

You should google "CG-NAT" and learn why mobile providers don't (and simply can't) provide you a public IP. Get yourself a cheap VPS, set up a reverse proxy, and open all the ports you want.

That's due to there not being enough IPv4 addresses, and IPv6 is... forgotten I guess.