Re: New minimum speed for US broadband connections

[Fred Baker <fredbaker.ietf () gmail com>]

On May 28, 2021, at 11:55 AM, Chris Adams <cma () cmadams net> wrote:
> I know multiple people that had issues with slow Internet during the
> last year as two adults were working from home and 1-3 children were
> also schooling from home.  Parents had to arrange work calls around
> their kids classroom time and around each other's work calls, because of
> limited bandwidth.

The example that comes to mind is my daughter, who has two kids in elementary school (*elementary*, not high school or 
college) from home and a husband working from home. The kids will eventually be in person some subset of the time, but 
they're told to not expect 100%; the hubby is going to be 100% WFH for the foreseeable future. The thing that killed 
the kids wasn't the absolute bit rate, it was data caps - basically, all the families and the school had to upgrade 
service to something with a higher cap or education stopped for part of each month - and the school had a contract that 
supposedly had no cap, but was forced to renegotiate anyway. This isn't out of town, either; it's Walnut Creek 
California, a few blocks from the BART station.

So, yes, all of that.

I'm watching the conversation and thinking of my experience on the FCC TAC 15 years ago. We had someone from an 
intentionally-nameless carrier that was fighting minimum broadband rates with everything he had. His statement was that 
"there is no market above 1 MBPS". In this conversation, I think carriers need to take on board the message that the 
minimum broadband rate in 2015 might not be adequate in 2021. We can argue the distinction between "has a market" and 
"is a universal market minimum", but "there is no market above 10 MBPS per user in the home" is a self-limiting 
discussion.

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