r/LinusTechTips • u/MojoPhett • Aug 20 '26
WAN Show Possible WAN Shown Topic: 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/The FCC claims it's trying to be "technologically neutral"
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u/CouldBeWorse_Iguess Aug 20 '26
Should also ban cars. It's not fair for horses as they are slower.
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u/F9-0021 Aug 20 '26
Pure corruption and corporate welfare in favor of Starlink. Instead of Starlink having to get better to compete with fiber, they just stop fiber.
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u/cool-- Aug 20 '26
The idiots voted for republicans.
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u/that_dutch_dude Aug 20 '26
Lets rephrase that:
The People voted for republicans.
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u/bushs-left-shoe Aug 20 '26
And your average voter is a dumbass who consistently supports people and policies against their interests and the interests of society at large
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u/Sharp-kun Aug 20 '26
And here's me contemplating upgrading my 2gbps to 5.
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u/Painted-Arcana Aug 20 '26
Honestly once my contract is up im probably dropping my service from gigabit to 500.
I just dont feel i use it hard enough for gigabit. I'll see what the deals are at the time obviously though
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u/ElPlatanoDelBronx Aug 20 '26
Most people are fine with 30, as long as it's an actual stable 30. A household of 4-5 people is fine with 100. Anything beyond that is honestly just a nice to have, but you won't really see any difference day to day with what the vast majority of people use the internet for.
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u/TEG24601 Aug 20 '26
Working for an ISP, 100Mbps upload is not enough for a lot of people. For downloading, 100 is great, unless you are streaming 4K content to 4 TVs at once and want to do anything else. Between OneDrive, iCloud Drive, iCloud Photos, Carbonite, Google Drive, and all of the other cloud storage that people use without understanding, they will totally saturate and kill a 100Mbps connection. Of those services, Carbonite, Dropbox, and OneDrive are the only ones I'm aware that you can actually limit their bandwidth. The others will just ruin a 100Mbps connection. Not consistently, but often enough that most customers I deal with with 100Mbps, really should have 300 (our next tier) or higher. I suspect that the services themselves have limits on their side for each download connection to 100-150Mbps, because no one with 300 or Gig+ ever calls in with bandwidth issues, only those on the 100Mbps plan.
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u/ElPlatanoDelBronx Aug 20 '26
I run an ISP, you are absolutely correct that it's not enough for everybody, but (assuming you have to deal with customer's problems) you see generally the customers that do have problems with their bandwidth, not the ones that don't. The vast majority of people use Netflix, WhatsApp, and social media in general and don't care about backing up anything, so they do occasionally pass that 30 Mbps mark for sure, but not enough to actually feel a true connection saturation, and almost never will with a 100Mbps since Netflix and Youtube generally only have small spikes to 30Mbps if you're streaming 4K specifically.
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u/TEG24601 Aug 20 '26
I get what you are saying, but at least with my ISP, it is a $10 difference between 100 and 300, for peace of mind. And the worst are when people come to visit, and they kill the connection because iCloud photos decided upload multiple multi-gig files and saturate the upload. And OneDrive coming on after each update doesn't help either.
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u/ElPlatanoDelBronx Aug 20 '26
Oh, absolutely, the price difference is negligible. I operate in a developing country so bandwidth consumption in general is a bit lower here, but the pricing for all plans is very close. The difference between the lowest plan, 30 Mbps, and the highest plan, 500 Mbps, is $40 USD, and the difference between 300 and 500, is $12. Most people absolutely should not get the lowest plan, but a lot of them look at us like we're mechanics just trying to upsell them and provide them with something that they don't need.
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u/TEG24601 Aug 20 '26
I got scolded, thankfully by a vendor and not someone in the company, when I told them that part of my job was to ensure that customers didn't pay more than they had to, or get bandwidth and equipment they didn't need. It is sort of an unofficial policy of my department, stealing it from Miracle on 34th Street, we aren't going to oversell you, but we will describe the advantages and disadvantages of various options, given use, competency, and our local weather/power issues... and always advise people to not cheap out when they buy their own WiFi router, lest they wish to learn to reprogram it 3-5 times a year after a storm causes enough power blips to wipe out the stored settings.
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u/ElPlatanoDelBronx Aug 20 '26
Absolutely, we have a policy here that if it's determined that it's a bandwidth issue that the customer is reporting to recommend a plan that suits them, and let them try it for free for a week so they can see it's that. 9 times out of 10 they keep the plan, and don't have to present them with too many options since free almost always get a yes, and they get to see first hand that that was the issue.
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u/TEG24601 Aug 20 '26
We used to do 30 day trials for higher speeds. I don't know if we still do or not, I just know it was a PITA if we had to bond DSL customers to get them that faster speeds.
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u/snkiz Aug 20 '26
You just limit connections from the router. One my network no one device can have more then 90%
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u/TEG24601 Aug 20 '26 edited Aug 20 '26
Most consumer routers don't have that option. Commercial or advanced like Unifi, yes. But your run of the mill Asus, Netgear, etc, doesn't have those options.
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u/snkiz Aug 20 '26
Yes they do, most ISP routers don't.
I have a cheap gl-inet pocket router. It can do it.
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u/IWillDetoxify Aug 20 '26
Why wire up 100 when we could do 1000, or 5000? We will require more and more bandwidth as time goes on, there's definitely reason to have more than a 100 Mbps, especially when it costs barely more to install.
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u/ElPlatanoDelBronx Aug 20 '26
Like wire a physical limitation? Absolutely none, but just paying for a service like fiber where you can go from 30 Mbps to 1 Gbps by just asking is fine. The networks should be built from the beginning with as much bandwidth as they can install reasonably, but having a mandate where everyone needs to have 1 Gbps is not reasonable at all. If they make it 100 Mbps minimum that'd be more than enough.
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u/CMRC23 Aug 20 '26
I have fibre but with the thick walls in my old house and my motherboard the max I can get is 300mbps. But id go back to 10mbps in a heartbeat if it fixed the constant, daily cut outs I get for ~2 to 5 minutes, every 2 hours
And no I can't get it fixed because I dont pay for it, my dad does, and he wont hear my complaints
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u/Painted-Arcana Aug 20 '26
u cant hard wire?
I use a deco mesh wirelessly and its pretty great even wirelessly. Also in an old british house.
Pretty consistently sit at 800-900 down which is basically the same as wired.
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u/adude00 Aug 20 '26
I have 10gbit at home and… it’s mostly wasted.
I upgraded the lan (router, gaming pc and server) but it’s mostly unused.
I don’t think ever saved more than a few seconds over a single gigabit line.
Those Speedtest tough…
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u/sls35work Aug 24 '26
I can't even imagine the use case, but if you have this for home use and you see a difference in response time, you have a noise/jitter issue. not a speed issue. I have a business asynchronous DSL 100/100 and it beats my all my friends gigabit connections because I do not have latency from the pole to my house.
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u/traumadog001 Aug 20 '26
If the FCC wants to be "technologically neutral", at what point will they require transmission speeds to be limited to what people can do with signal flags or smoke signals?
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u/voxnemo Aug 20 '26
This is the moment the Trump administration ebraces DEI, with technolgies and companies but not people!?!?
So, they will do forced DEI (not even the good merit based kind) to ensure that slower technologies are included and not "excluded". This is absurd but so on brand. Holding the country back to ensure corporate profits.
I want to be surprised but I am just not.
Also, while I think a lot of people will point to Starlink (and it probably is helped some) my guess is this is TMO, VZW, and ATT who both want to abondon copper and avoid fiber build outs. This allows them to make their shitty, slow, and often unreliable wireless networks the only option for home internet.
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u/ShiningPr1sm Aug 20 '26
suggesting it is unfair to slower technologies
...this sounds like the DMA, punishing successful ventures to make the ones that suck feel better.
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u/HeidenShadows Aug 20 '26
Sounds like all the cable and satellite internet providers have lobbied together. Spectrum is becoming very toxic. They just raised my bill up another $10 for half the speed of gigabit fiber so I've made the switch to fiber provided by my electric company. $100/mo for 400/20 that isn't reliable because of tourist congestion is the last straw.
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u/bluehawk232 Aug 20 '26
This is a factor why I think this push to discless games is absurd when many americans would still struggle to download many AAA titles.
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u/jenny_905 Aug 20 '26
Gigabit is simple, GPON kit is cheap, reliable and the rollout just need the fibre to be strung.
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u/Whatscheiser Aug 20 '26
I mean when you think about it cars were really unfair to the horse and buggy trade.
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u/Indolent_Bard Aug 21 '26
setting the new standard by which to judge whether deployment is reasonable and timely.
Okay, but why does the government need to judge that?
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u/Remarkable_Reason976 Aug 20 '26
From the perspective of the general internet user who only cares if their "wifi" is running, they have no need for gigabit speeds.
Most people DO NOT need 1gbps. In fact I would say most people would do just fine with 100mbps and would never know the difference.
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u/paw345 Aug 20 '26
Not really. You kind of want to have that 1 Gb/s or 0.5 Gb/s for a household. Sure an individual user might not need much more than 100Mb/s but often there are multiple users in house and often heavy internet usage time overlaps.
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u/Remarkable_Reason976 Aug 20 '26
Again, most people that subscribe to a gigabit internet package "because its fast" have none of the devices in their home wired. They connect it to wifi and get at best 1/5th the speed they're paying for.
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u/paw345 Aug 20 '26
Sure, but now days wifi works at gigabit speeds, and again it's not that a single device and single user needs all that bandwidth, but it's shared among a few people in the house. Gigabit is just a nice "I have internet and don't need to worry about it" package. While 100 Mb/s will not be enough nowadays.
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u/OkInfluence36 Aug 20 '26
My wifi 7 devices would disagree
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u/archeybald Aug 20 '26
While I'm not (entirely) agreeing with the commenter you are replying to, I would also argue that we as people who frequent LTT and it's subreddit are probably not the average user.
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u/OkInfluence36 Aug 20 '26
Oh yes I agree, but funnily enough the decision to get wifi 7 was made by a very non technical family member
They understand that slow wifi bad and big wifi number good lmao
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u/archeybald Aug 20 '26
You know, if one can get the more tech illiterate in the family to at least recognize bigger number better, I think most of us who are the family computer guy would call that a win. Lol
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u/Remarkable_Reason976 Aug 20 '26
Ask your neighbor Mary across the street if she knows what "wifi 7" is and come back. In fact ask 10 random people that you come across today if they know what "wifi 7" is.
I am not talking about people who understand their internet connection and how to get the most out of it. I'm talking about the 99.9% of other people who only care if it works.
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u/Spider-Thwip Aug 20 '26
My ISP give me a WiFi 7 router, with a 10gigabit ethernet port on it.
I get 2.5gigabit up and down for £35 a month.
I don't pay anything extra for the router.
This is just standard consumer kit now, you guys are getting scammed in America.
What is the point of all the technical innovation that happens in the USA if nobody but the rich benefit from it?
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u/Obvious-Jacket-3770 Aug 20 '26
Wifi has come a long way... Chances are you are getting 90% to 100% of your speed on Wifi these days.
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u/Remarkable_Reason976 Aug 20 '26
If you're sitting 20 feet from your router maybe. In a 2000 sq ft multi story home (which tends to be the norm in a rural area) you're not getting 90% - 100% of the speed.
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u/Obvious-Jacket-3770 Aug 20 '26
Sure if its an old home with thick walls, then again you probably won't have Ethernet either.
Most 2k sqft homes have no issue with wifi on tech from the last few years at least. My home is 4000sqft and I can tell you first hand that I have zero issues with 2 AP's.
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u/FlarblesGarbles Aug 20 '26
You don't have to saturate a line with a single device to benefit from gigabit. I've got 8Gb, and I'm not saturating it with a single device that often.
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u/F9-0021 Aug 20 '26
LMAO, I get 2.5Gb fiber for the same price I used to get Starlink. You can be sure that the difference between 100-300Mbps and 2.5Gbps is very noticeable.
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u/brown_felt_hat Aug 20 '26
Hey buddy - you already paid for it. Telecoms have been paid billions upon billions to lay fiber to every household in America, and they just... Didn't. And complacency like this is why corps will continue to do whatever the hell they want, because of people moaning that "it's good enough"
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u/jcole4lsu Aug 20 '26
Yup. There are 0 wired devices in my house. I could pay for gig Internet but what's the point? You need roughly 25mb for 4k streaming which is the most common use. Just multiply that but number of devices in use then add a little overhead for junk like IOT devices and that's all you need
250mb will suffice for most households. I have 500mb fiber and it's all I'll ever need
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u/Remarkable_Reason976 Aug 20 '26
THANK YOU! And you're someone who actually knows how to manage their connection. My comment here is talking about the 99.9% of people who only care about one metric "is my Wifi working"...
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y Aug 20 '26
This is 100% just to promote services like Starlink. As good as satellite internet is for extremely remote areas, the vast majority of places in the United States aren't that remote.
If they can have Fiber internet in Fort Albany Ontario on James Bay, then the entirety of the US apart from maybe some places in Alaska and their overseas Pacific Islands can deploy proper fiber internet.