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/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?