Just to prioritize download in limited bandwidth cables. Like a neighborhood might get 2Gbps total, but instead of doing 1 down 1 up they instead do 1.8 down and .2 up, then split that amongst a bunch of houses.

In the old world of the internet, people didn’t upload much anyway.

Nobody worked from home. Nobody had their phones constantly syncing photos and videos to 1 (or often more) clouds. And even then, the photos and videos that you could take digitally were very low resolution and not very large files. Game consoles weren’t online by default until Xbox Gen 1 (and as an add on for GC and PS2) and PC gamers were a minority (and rarely direct peer-to-peer).

That has changed, and nobody forced ISPs to keep up. In a lot of markets, the Cable ISP is a monopoly and they don’t have to do shit about it.

But then again I’ve heard there’s monopolies for that in the USA, instead of actual competition.

Government granted monopolies. It's the worst. City / county/ state signs deal with ISP X and give them exclusive rights. Then for some reason they don't spend a lot of time updating anything because they have no competition because of the fucking morons in the government.

I think person* is the keyword here. Many families have several people concurrently watching streaming video, listening to music, and playing games that are required to have an internet connection. 100Mbps is not enough.

The average US household has something like 2.5 people in it. It's safe to assume (statistically) that at least two of those people are old enough to consume web content unsupervised.

Then there are edge cases that aren't quite so crazy, like 5 person households where everyone is over the age 14.

So yeah, for one person 50/10 is likely just fine. But for the average household 100/15 is likely closer to baseline.

50/10

good enough to be usable

On a post about how ISPs are literally fucking us all over, overcharging for the most basic connections that are far behind other countries and all you have to say is iT’s UsAbLe lmao

Youre advocating for the SLOWEST avg speed in the nation

Americans are getting nearly 200 Mbps in download speed, but are you?

https://www.allconnect.com/blog/us-internet-speeds-globally

As of May 2023, Ookla’s Speedtest.net shows Americans are getting over 200 Mbps of download speed and about 23 Mbps of upload speed through their fixed broadband connections — good for 6th in the world for median fixed broadband speeds. Considering “fast internet speeds” are generally defined as any download speed above 100 Mbps, Americans are doing quite well by this measure.

In fact, according to a recent Allconnect data report, 9 in 10 households can access at least 100 Mbps speeds.

That’s an incredible improvement from just under a decade ago when the U.S. had an average download speed of just 31 Mbps. In 2013, America ranked 25th among 39 nations for broadband speed.

Sub-100 is not good enough by most standards these days around the world. 50 is not even double the fastest speeds from TEN years ago

We as consumers and citizens deserve better, especially as working from home continues to be a popular and realistic option and our global culture continues to be directly tied to internet culture/media/content.

One major AAA game update will likely break your connection for hours for all intents and purposes.

Bitrate of a 1440p youtube video is going to be around 20mpbs (±4). Your 50 down connection couldn't handle more than 2 streams. The lowest reported bitrate is 16mbps on their support page (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en#zippy=%2Cbitrate). 50/16 = 3.125, with network overhead you'd be VERY lucky to get 3 streams going without stuttering.

It's entirely possible that a family of 5 would run into issues if they're all home and some want to watch videos.

My family of 4 have been Plex trained... So I mitigate a lot of these problems personally.

But it's more likely that the 10 up breaks things even more. One person in the house uploading anything (or participating in zoom/teams/etc calls) will cripple your ability to make ANY request to the internet.

Minimum wage (federally) hasn't gone up in almost 15 years

Don’t think they’re gonna undo the damage Pai did though. Dems are always so afraid of undoing the horrors the Reps do. Can’t shake the status quo.

Can I have that problem instead of being stuck to a single ISP that charges more for copper wire service than they do fiber in the places they have it?

I live in podunk nowhere, but if the amount of time since I've had that speed could buy things, I think it'd be old enough to buy cigarettes.

Also I'm surprised CenturyLink is even still alive.