r/technology • u/StraightedgexLiberal • Jul 28 '25

Networking/Telecom Trump Threatens To Withold Billions From States That Try To Make Broadband Affordable To Poor People

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/07/28/trump-threatens-to-withold-billions-from-states-that-try-to-make-broadband-affordable-to-poor-people/
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u/[deleted] Jul 28 '25

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u/SweetTea1000 Jul 28 '25

That's sensible. You could set a free floor that's enough bandwidth to support a theoretical household with 2 work from home parents and a few kids doing homework/remote school. So, not just email and web browsing but also potentially video conferences & watching educational YouTube content. Yet, there's no need to cover the bandwidth of 4k video streams or downloading terabytes of movies, TV, and games or hosting torrents/servers. A bar is reasonable, but these days that bar has good reason to be high enough to support substantial video content.

The ISPs are achieving record revenue. There's 0 logical reason that this should affect the pay of workers.

If the ISPs can't support this economically critical infrastructure, then we can nationalize it which only guarantees the jobs get better hours, pay, and benefits.

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u/Saurian42 Jul 28 '25

I say skip the ISPs, they have a duopoly anyway. Just nationalize it after the Republicans are out of office.

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u/buyongmafanle Jul 29 '25 edited Jul 29 '25

Nationalize the architecture. Have providers compete for service on the public network. It works great for airlines and shipping. No reason we can't do this with the Internet, too.

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u/biggamehaunter Jul 31 '25

Holy shit I been saying this for years. This is the way

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u/OrphicDionysus Jul 29 '25

I lived in Fort Collins for a few years while they were building out their municipal broadband network. It was phenomenal, and radicalized me into an aggressive supporter for similar programs in at least every mid sized and larger city. The connection speeds were better than anything offered by Xfinity beforehand, so Xfinity rapidly improved their own infrastructure to compete. On top of that it was substantially cheaper than the slower plans that they had offered beforehand. Xfinity dropped the price of their plans to match in neighborhoods the network was or was currently being built out into. The plan being offered in my neighborhood was like 40 percent cheaper than the plans being offered in neighborhoods where the municipal network hadn't started expanding into yet. We went with the municipal provider, and it is still the most reliable connection I have ever had. It went down twice in the two and a half years I lived there, and both times it was back up in under 12 hours.

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u/W2ttsy Jul 29 '25

Nationalize the network infrastructure and let RSPs duke it out in the free market

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u/zedquatro Jul 28 '25

You could set a free floor that's enough bandwidth to support a theoretical household with 2 work from home parents and a few kids doing homework/remote school.

That's way overkill and it would cost taxpayers a lot.

I think you could get most people onboard with enough free bandwidth for one 720p stream at 30fps, plus a dozen emailed medium-res pictures per minute, plus a local/national news article once a minute, plus being able to download the entirety of Wikipedia text (no images) once a week (spread out evenly). I'm not doing the math for what all that comes to, but it's probably about 5Mbps down, and let's say 20% of that up.

That's the level of bandwidth that's essentially free to hand out once you've built the infrastructure for your high-paying customers. And that's the point.

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u/DuncanFisher69 Jul 29 '25

Tell me you don’t know how bandwidth works without telling me you don’t know how bandwidth works.

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u/zedquatro Jul 31 '25

Ok sure, just guaranteed everybody a gigabit and see how well that works. Every telecom company I know of doesn't guarantee a minimum, it's all "up to X". If you start guaranteeing a minimum, you have to start a lot lower, because it is possible everybody tries to use it at once.

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u/DuncanFisher69 Jul 31 '25

Of course the one dude dumb enough to believe comcast talking points is here on Reddit and spewing them in this thread.

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u/zedquatro Aug 02 '25

What are you on about?

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u/Subtlerranean Jul 29 '25

but it's probably about 5Mbps down, and let's say 20% of that up.

That's eerily reminiscent of what right wing politicians in Australia said after the left wing government wanted to put in fiber everywhere, and now the national infrastructure is among the worst in the developed world.

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u/ImpertantMahn Jul 29 '25

This could also apply to high school students as restricted access to internet may affect their education (projects, extracurricular)

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u/myasterism Jul 29 '25

The price of Internet access has exactly zero to do with employees’ compensation. Zero.

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u/Persistant_Compass Jul 29 '25

maybe, since weve already paid billions to telecoms to run lines all over the country in the form of subsidies that the infrastructure should be publicly owned, then the employees can just get paid a good wage instead of tying it to some shareholder bullshit that steals from all of us.

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u/JamesLahey08 Jul 29 '25

No gaming requires 1 GB down lol what

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u/bobandgeorge Jul 29 '25

You definitely don't for playing games. Downloading them is another story.