I was recently fortunate enough to upgrade to 1Gb symmetrical fiber. I can say that it is absolutely fantastic. You really can do things you never did before:
1. I can host time-machine backups for my entire family on my home server, allow them to have off-site backups.
2. I can provide openVPN service for my entire family when they're outside of the home. I can also browse full-time on my own openVPN client at full-speed.
3. I can seed legitimate torrents for far, far longer than I normally would. For example, new Ubuntu releases.
4. I "donate" some of my bandwidth to other people and projects, allowing them to host files from my home.
5. I can test and host my own websites/services from my house. If it gets a little traction it won't destroy my entire internet.
These are all things that simply were not possible when I was with Comcast, with only 10 Mb/s upload and bandwidth caps. If we completely deregulate internet I'm afraid they will be impossible for most everyone.
Your list of things is fantastic and I could see the benefit of each and every one of them.
But here's the issue.
When you tell non-tech-savvy people about "provid[ing] openVPN service for [your] entire family" they go wall-eyed. That's the best-case scenario. In the worst case scenario (e.g. politicians and telecom execs), people become suspicious about what you might be hiding.
Increasingly (for going on 50 years now), the US is an authoritarian state with low tolerance for people who insist on exercising the rights granted them in the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. (I'm thinking of the right be secure against illegal searches expressed in the 4th Amendment and the use of cryptography as a munition protected by the Second Amendment.)
I think the largest difference for me is in QoS, not in bandwidth. I generally use 802.11ac so I'm capped at 450mbps of the ~1000 available.
The service is always on, it's always stable, there's no weird routing or congestion latency at peak hours, it's just... functional.
That's what's miraculous about it to me - basically never needing to reset the router or reconfigure things. Internet as reliable as electricity. I literally don't even think about it.
Also the total cost difference is $45 a month for a far more satisfying experience.
If I had a connection anywhere near that fast I'd do (and have done) many of the things listed. The problem for me and many others is that many ISPs don't allow those activities. I work from home and value a solid connection, but I'm on the slowest fiber offered, 20Mb both ways.
I don't need more speed, I need more freedom to use what I have.
6. lightning strikes nearby won't enter your home over fiber like happened to me 4x over coax, losing your modem at best. NC summer thunderstorms are brutal.
This is an excellent point. The FCC's shameful cowing to ISPs has a huge opportunity cost to consumers.
Greater connectivity creates new business opportunities. Uber would be impossible without smartphones and reliable data. Netflix would be a DVD company without high-speed home internet.
When the FCC tells us we "don't need" better internet, it forecloses whole new categories of businesses.
> It's all the things yet unimagined that ubiquitous high speed internet would enable that's the real tragedy here.
And let's not forget that even the things that seem normal and widely available are out of reach for many people: Video streaming, data backups and other tasks just aren't an option for people in underserved areas. Now add a whole family / household and your already inadequately met bandwith equirements multiply.
Modern American "conservatism" (or at least Trumpism) isn't even about holding ground on the present, its backpedaling to the past. The audience that eats up this rhetoric want to reverse entropy and will destroying anything they can to get a facsimile of it.
The internet innovation spirit in the US is high but the companies in charge, and oversight, are on the milk it train.
Cable and broadband companies were massively innovating in the 90s and early 2000s, now they are focusing on their 'innovation' on pricing and milking it by: slowing things down, data capping it, lobbying for more monopoly control, trying to get access to your private info and constant pricing games. All of these actions are due to lack of product innovation and to make up for lost revenues of not just increasing capacity and speeds thus offering a better product people will pay more for.
All we can hope for is another disruptive network innovation that puts them in the rear-view or adds some competition like Google Fiber did or others. Google Fiber had an amazing impact to pricing and speeds in any market they entered. For the most part broadband has been lagging on real innovation and expansion, in favor of MBA metric pricing games and value extraction for some time.
Great so we can let ISPs off the hook for all the money we've already given them for faster service they haven't provided. This is how our government works folks.
Wait, how do you give ISPs money for service faster than their current offerings? Do you mean they are subsidized by the government, but after receiving subsidies to expand bandwidth they do not? Any source to that?
One more little sign America is more and more retiring its leadership in the world, opening doors for other nations to be more developed?
In a time where many European countries aim at providing 100Mbit as a minimum in the next years and thus also open rural areas for economic development, decision/opinions as the one described in the article seem ludicrous. Of course, providing net infrastructure in the US with its huge size is a challenge. Yet, in a country like Sweden with similar population density, 100Mbit is already kind of the basic minimum even in remote areas.
Here in my town in Germany we had super slow internet until 3 years ago. Now I can choose up to 400Mbit from different providers (100Mbit DSL or up to 400Mbit cable). Connectivity skyrocketed and it does in many other European areas. Now the US decides to lower standards? Is it the same kind of thinking as "we don't need high speed trains, we will have Hyperloop in 50 years", just adapted to "everything will be mobile one day"?
Looking at population density alone is misleading; what you really want is population-weighted population density (i.e. how dense are the places where people live). Sweden has large sparsely-populated areas, but almost the whole population is clustered in a handful of major cities. The Stockholm metro area has a quarter of the entire country's population. If the U.S. population were distributed the same way, the D.C. metro area would have 80 million people over an area including Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware. (Instead, it has only 6 million people and the vast majority of those states are rural).
In any event, the U.S.'s proportion of higher-speed connections compares pretty well to Sweden. According to Akamai, in Q4 2016 the U.S. at 42% of connections above 15 mbps. That's less than Sweden (49%) but comparable to Finland (44%). It's way higher than Germany (30%).
America has always had terrible internet access, Congress long ago created monopolies for telephony and cable video and the legacy of those policies are still the problem today (two massive and completely different regulatory regimes and two industries that are totally politicized and the largest political donors).
Similarly Amtrak is a government monopoly disaster, there's no opportunity for private investment in U.S. passenger rail. Wikipedia says there are 1,500 private passenger rail companies in Germany. There are none here, outside of a handful of tourist experience lines. Our privately owned freight rail is, however, the finest in the world.
Feels like we're not even trying to pretend like we're reaching for greatness. I am far less in love with the country then I once was; there is little audacity to reach for more as a country on many fronts (infrastructure, healthcare, education, general well being, connectivity).
Unfortunately, a similar position is held by the NBN here in Australia (National broadband network), and indeed appears to be held by some members of the government.
This has been a long standing position even prior to the NBN existing, resulting in almost two decades of delays and debates in replacing half century old copper phone lines that provide much of the people's internet.
I wouldn't wish such lengthy technological delays on another country, so I hope this gets sorted out rather quicker than our issues have been.
The irony is that in Australia, mobile broadband is superior to wired in most areas.
Dear USA: please do not use this as evidence for mobile broadband's inherent superiority.
I recently moved to Germany and am on what is considered a slow DSL link: 32Mbps down, 8Mbps up. It's wonderful and life changing compared with the 4/1Mbps Telstra DSL I used to have.
California Assembly Bill 1665 attempted to something similar:
"Both Frontier and AT&T maintain antiquated DSL systems that serve millions of Californians who live in communities that don’t have sufficient revenue potential. Low income and low density communities in other words."
> But during the Obama administration, the FCC determined repeatedly that broadband isn't reaching Americans fast enough, pointing in particular to lagging deployment in rural areas.
No skin off my back. I already have internet service significantly better than the FCC broadband definition, and my core concern in this space is net neutrality. Rural areas are the ones that will be negatively affected by this kind of policy change in the coming years. You get what you vote for in this case.
How many customers have trouble accessing your website or service? How many potential customers, vendors, partners, employees etc have limited education and income because they lack basic resources?
Fuck Pai. More and more Americans are working from home. That alone is reason enough that we need fast broadband. I know he doesn't care about people and their needs but scum like him are at least usually persuaded by business arguments so I'm making one here. He's not a representative of anyone. He was not elected. It's not his job to decide what Americans want. The only way to fix this FCC travesty is to get rid of the pro business, anti citizen scum who appointed him.
> I know he doesn't care about people and their needs but scum like him are at least usually persuaded by business arguments
I think Pai is the kind of scum that's only persuaded by what's filling up his own intestines.
He's not on some kind of Peter Thiel-level of cerebral, cold-hearted business mastery. He's just a big fat leech that somehow managed to climb the ladder far too high for anyone's good.
I wonder how long until Pai adds extra regulatory requirements for utility cooperatives that will spring up to kick the telcos out of the rural areas? I'm not joking about that notion since the telcos really hate cooperatives that spring up and replace or compete with them.
As someone who lives in a very expensive area, I would happily live in a more rural or less populated area if there was decent infrastructure to do so. I don't think that internet alone is the solution, but faster internet across the country is one of the hurdles for remote work and (theoretically) better distribution of the population.
I know that a lot of other pieces have to fall into place to make this happen, but the entire country wired with strong backbones and last mile service will definitely help.
The FCC is wrong. The Internet is intertwingled with everything we do these days. I live in non-urban Montana at the end of a DSL line suffering "bandwidth exhaust", a term my ISP (CenturyLink) coined to describe what happens when they sell "high speed" Internet to many customers but do not adequately provision their DSL network to support them. This shortfall is being fixed, but progress is glacial. How to bring everyone on-board the Internet is still a work in progress.
The headline's accurate, IMO. The FCC is seeking comment on whether slower mobile connections should be considered sufficient when measuring overall broadband internet access deployment.
25Mbps/3Mbps wired is already an unambitious requirement, and Pai dissents from it having been raised from a previous 4/1 requirement, and suggests that a 10/1 mobile connection would be enough.
The whole proposal sounds like they just want to lower the bar to what's available now and toss up the "Mission Accomplished" banner.
Yeah and the telecoms are going to charge for each device... with my home connection. I can serve all my devices locally from one trunk... With mobile I have to have a data plan for each device...
A lot of people did not read this article: It is about mobile.
It is actually about mobile home access. Generally:
- mobile coverage in the home is different from outside of the home. The primary focus of radio planning was outdoor coverage and the networks reflect this. I suspect this is about having a mobile access point at a fixed location which helps a little via antenna and positioning vs. a cell phone.
- mobile networks have been planned with totally different traffic assumptions and those are literally cemented into base-station locations.
- mobile is a shared medium with low constraints. It will be hard to guarantee minimum rates. Much harder than for fixed networks. There is a reason for the data caps - if there were not then competition would have long eliminated them.
- disincentives for scale: Providing data rates for one home may be easy. But if all the neighbors hop on that bandwagon then things get more difficult.
It is possible in principle but the cost for universal mobile access service and these bandwidth guarantees with the current technology may be quite high at this time. Anecdotal evidence of localized solutions also in other countries exist but can anyone point to a place where such a service has been deployed in a large country?
This is about suppressing information availability and opportunity in rural areas.
Sorry financially-challenged rural dweller, you only have a phone with a fixed data allowance. I guess you'll need to continue relying on old media for your information needs. Have fun with whatever the public library has to offer-- oh by the way we're cutting the library from our budget.
Oh and those of you who, despite our best efforts, discovered that you can learn a knowledge trade and work from home, staying near your family and friends, bringing money into the local economy rather than move to a city? Sorry, it's not in our political interest to allow you to broaden your horizons.
Also, could somebody explain to me what is the function of FCC in setting those "standard" speeds?
> This would also be the first time that the FCC has set a broadband speed standard for mobile; at 10Mbps/1Mbps, it would be less than half as fast as the FCC's home broadband speed standard of 25Mbps/3Mbps.
I mean, what that "standard" does? Is it prohibited to sell connection slower than this? Clearly not, since there tons of home internet offers slower than 25/3. So what is the meaning of this standard, what consequences does it have? Of course the press, who is supposed to inform me, is too busy trying to propagandize me and forgets to explain what that all actually means. Could fellow HNians fill the gap?
The speed standard is used to funnel money to the incumbents. The incumbents are supposed to improve and/or upgrade their speeds or coverage to match these standards in return for these subsidies, but reality has a way to get in the way. In practice the incumbents pocket the money and deliver whatever they feel like.
The sentiment, that Americans don't NEED fast home internet is probably more accurate than not.
It's not relevant though. Need has never been the driving force in the market. It's want, and if people want it, there's no reason they shouldn't have it.
Why would the head of the FCC care if people need high speed?
Only if he were in the pocket of the ISP's. Then he'd need a way to NOT create rules that mandates high speed internet. And if it's not a requirement, then it's up to the business to charge whatever they want without regulation. It's insidious, and quite clever albeit evil.
>The sentiment, that Americans don't NEED fast home internet is probably more accurate than not.
No, it's total bullshit, except in the pedantic "well, humans don't NEED electricity/medicine/communications/synthetic shelter/[anything since we wandered the plains of Africa and had a life expectancy in the 40s]" sense. Fast, symmetrical end point Internet is of massive importance and in not just direct but emergent ways that a surprising number of people, even on HN, don't seem to consider. Think for example of many of the concerns that have been raised over the last few years here about how the net has become ever more centralized, or about the difficulties of efforts like Tor. A lot of the core driver for that comes down to lack of end point bandwidth vs demands. If symmetrical gigabit connections were the rule rather then the exception, it'd be possible once again for significantly sized services run directly. Obviously if a service grew large enough they'd eventually need to move towards the core, but for a lot of people it'd completely eliminate the need for many current colo and cloud offerings. Would you be happy going back to thinnet or 10BASE-T on your LAN? Everything that runs there could run over the net with more bandwidth, latency only becomes a significant issue over extremely long distances.
More bandwidth also means more can start to be devoted to meta-content issues like privacy. If we consider 25 Mbps to be a target for many services say, then onion routing networks are hard to make use of because they tend to impose significant overhead and be limited by slow nodes (particularly as even someone with a "enough" 25 Mbps connection themselves often would not be willing to allow all of that to be used by the larger network). But if everyone had 1000 Mbps (or more) to play with, then they could easily devote a bunch of that to sharing networks, take even a 90% overhead hit, and still have as much bandwidth as they needed. Just as more power in CPUs/GPUs has allowed us to not merely run things faster, but optimize towards the value of human time vs computer time, more bandwidth "then needed" represents leeway to optimize towards goals beyond the bare necessities.
Seriously, giving everyone (or close enough) fast, symmetrical connections should be one of the absolute highest priorities of anyone concerned about market competition, centralized control, privacy, and so on. It'd be one of the best investments America could make, just as national electrification, telephone, and roads were.
[+] [-] matt_wulfeck|8 years ago|reply
1. I can host time-machine backups for my entire family on my home server, allow them to have off-site backups.
2. I can provide openVPN service for my entire family when they're outside of the home. I can also browse full-time on my own openVPN client at full-speed.
3. I can seed legitimate torrents for far, far longer than I normally would. For example, new Ubuntu releases.
4. I "donate" some of my bandwidth to other people and projects, allowing them to host files from my home.
5. I can test and host my own websites/services from my house. If it gets a little traction it won't destroy my entire internet.
These are all things that simply were not possible when I was with Comcast, with only 10 Mb/s upload and bandwidth caps. If we completely deregulate internet I'm afraid they will be impossible for most everyone.
[+] [-] mistersquid|8 years ago|reply
But here's the issue.
When you tell non-tech-savvy people about "provid[ing] openVPN service for [your] entire family" they go wall-eyed. That's the best-case scenario. In the worst case scenario (e.g. politicians and telecom execs), people become suspicious about what you might be hiding.
Increasingly (for going on 50 years now), the US is an authoritarian state with low tolerance for people who insist on exercising the rights granted them in the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. (I'm thinking of the right be secure against illegal searches expressed in the 4th Amendment and the use of cryptography as a munition protected by the Second Amendment.)
[+] [-] jaggederest|8 years ago|reply
The service is always on, it's always stable, there's no weird routing or congestion latency at peak hours, it's just... functional.
That's what's miraculous about it to me - basically never needing to reset the router or reconfigure things. Internet as reliable as electricity. I literally don't even think about it.
Also the total cost difference is $45 a month for a far more satisfying experience.
[+] [-] twothamendment|8 years ago|reply
I don't need more speed, I need more freedom to use what I have.
[+] [-] voltagex_|8 years ago|reply
What upstream speed do your family have? I've got the equipment and the bandwidth to do this, but my family have <1 megabit upstream available.
[+] [-] lnx01|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] js2|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noonespecial|8 years ago|reply
It's all the things yet unimagined that ubiquitous high speed internet would enable that's the real tragedy here.
The complete failure of imagination of today's "leaders" is very disheartening.
[+] [-] apozem|8 years ago|reply
Greater connectivity creates new business opportunities. Uber would be impossible without smartphones and reliable data. Netflix would be a DVD company without high-speed home internet.
When the FCC tells us we "don't need" better internet, it forecloses whole new categories of businesses.
[+] [-] thirdsun|8 years ago|reply
And let's not forget that even the things that seem normal and widely available are out of reach for many people: Video streaming, data backups and other tasks just aren't an option for people in underserved areas. Now add a whole family / household and your already inadequately met bandwith equirements multiply.
[+] [-] zanny|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1_2__4|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drawkbox|8 years ago|reply
Cable and broadband companies were massively innovating in the 90s and early 2000s, now they are focusing on their 'innovation' on pricing and milking it by: slowing things down, data capping it, lobbying for more monopoly control, trying to get access to your private info and constant pricing games. All of these actions are due to lack of product innovation and to make up for lost revenues of not just increasing capacity and speeds thus offering a better product people will pay more for.
All we can hope for is another disruptive network innovation that puts them in the rear-view or adds some competition like Google Fiber did or others. Google Fiber had an amazing impact to pricing and speeds in any market they entered. For the most part broadband has been lagging on real innovation and expansion, in favor of MBA metric pricing games and value extraction for some time.
[+] [-] chank|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sxates|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smsm42|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danjoc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geff82|8 years ago|reply
In a time where many European countries aim at providing 100Mbit as a minimum in the next years and thus also open rural areas for economic development, decision/opinions as the one described in the article seem ludicrous. Of course, providing net infrastructure in the US with its huge size is a challenge. Yet, in a country like Sweden with similar population density, 100Mbit is already kind of the basic minimum even in remote areas.
Here in my town in Germany we had super slow internet until 3 years ago. Now I can choose up to 400Mbit from different providers (100Mbit DSL or up to 400Mbit cable). Connectivity skyrocketed and it does in many other European areas. Now the US decides to lower standards? Is it the same kind of thinking as "we don't need high speed trains, we will have Hyperloop in 50 years", just adapted to "everything will be mobile one day"?
[+] [-] rayiner|8 years ago|reply
In any event, the U.S.'s proportion of higher-speed connections compares pretty well to Sweden. According to Akamai, in Q4 2016 the U.S. at 42% of connections above 15 mbps. That's less than Sweden (49%) but comparable to Finland (44%). It's way higher than Germany (30%).
[+] [-] mobilefriendly|8 years ago|reply
Similarly Amtrak is a government monopoly disaster, there's no opportunity for private investment in U.S. passenger rail. Wikipedia says there are 1,500 private passenger rail companies in Germany. There are none here, outside of a handful of tourist experience lines. Our privately owned freight rail is, however, the finest in the world.
[+] [-] mtanski|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coldtea|8 years ago|reply
What leadership (except in economy size and military)?
Other nations have been more developed in internet, infrastructure, healthcare, education, work culture, etc for decades.
[+] [-] mtaksrud|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hiisukun|8 years ago|reply
This has been a long standing position even prior to the NBN existing, resulting in almost two decades of delays and debates in replacing half century old copper phone lines that provide much of the people's internet.
I wouldn't wish such lengthy technological delays on another country, so I hope this gets sorted out rather quicker than our issues have been.
[+] [-] ianhowson|8 years ago|reply
Dear USA: please do not use this as evidence for mobile broadband's inherent superiority.
I recently moved to Germany and am on what is considered a slow DSL link: 32Mbps down, 8Mbps up. It's wonderful and life changing compared with the 4/1Mbps Telstra DSL I used to have.
[+] [-] iokevins|8 years ago|reply
"Both Frontier and AT&T maintain antiquated DSL systems that serve millions of Californians who live in communities that don’t have sufficient revenue potential. Low income and low density communities in other words."
http://www.tellusventure.com/blog/california-bill-magically-...
AB 1665 seems on hold until legislators return on August 21:
http://www.tellusventure.com/blog/hostile-takeover-of-califo...
[+] [-] rndmize|8 years ago|reply
No skin off my back. I already have internet service significantly better than the FCC broadband definition, and my core concern in this space is net neutrality. Rural areas are the ones that will be negatively affected by this kind of policy change in the coming years. You get what you vote for in this case.
[+] [-] forapurpose|8 years ago|reply
How many customers have trouble accessing your website or service? How many potential customers, vendors, partners, employees etc have limited education and income because they lack basic resources?
[+] [-] mnm1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Florin_Andrei|8 years ago|reply
I think Pai is the kind of scum that's only persuaded by what's filling up his own intestines.
He's not on some kind of Peter Thiel-level of cerebral, cold-hearted business mastery. He's just a big fat leech that somehow managed to climb the ladder far too high for anyone's good.
[+] [-] iokevins|8 years ago|reply
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/08/maybe...
[+] [-] LyalinDotCom|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] norea-armozel|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bdickason|8 years ago|reply
I know that a lot of other pieces have to fall into place to make this happen, but the entire country wired with strong backbones and last mile service will definitely help.
[+] [-] drallison|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malchow|8 years ago|reply
FCC expresses possibility that in the near-future wireless connectivity may be more important to consumer internet users.
Admitting "we don't know which way this industry is going to go" is probably a healthy thing for government to do.
[+] [-] khedoros1|8 years ago|reply
25Mbps/3Mbps wired is already an unambitious requirement, and Pai dissents from it having been raised from a previous 4/1 requirement, and suggests that a 10/1 mobile connection would be enough.
The whole proposal sounds like they just want to lower the bar to what's available now and toss up the "Mission Accomplished" banner.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mpolichette|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] heisenbit|8 years ago|reply
It is actually about mobile home access. Generally:
- mobile coverage in the home is different from outside of the home. The primary focus of radio planning was outdoor coverage and the networks reflect this. I suspect this is about having a mobile access point at a fixed location which helps a little via antenna and positioning vs. a cell phone.
- mobile networks have been planned with totally different traffic assumptions and those are literally cemented into base-station locations.
- mobile is a shared medium with low constraints. It will be hard to guarantee minimum rates. Much harder than for fixed networks. There is a reason for the data caps - if there were not then competition would have long eliminated them.
- disincentives for scale: Providing data rates for one home may be easy. But if all the neighbors hop on that bandwagon then things get more difficult.
It is possible in principle but the cost for universal mobile access service and these bandwidth guarantees with the current technology may be quite high at this time. Anecdotal evidence of localized solutions also in other countries exist but can anyone point to a place where such a service has been deployed in a large country?
[+] [-] A1phab3t|8 years ago|reply
Sorry financially-challenged rural dweller, you only have a phone with a fixed data allowance. I guess you'll need to continue relying on old media for your information needs. Have fun with whatever the public library has to offer-- oh by the way we're cutting the library from our budget.
Oh and those of you who, despite our best efforts, discovered that you can learn a knowledge trade and work from home, staying near your family and friends, bringing money into the local economy rather than move to a city? Sorry, it's not in our political interest to allow you to broaden your horizons.
[+] [-] smsm42|8 years ago|reply
> This would also be the first time that the FCC has set a broadband speed standard for mobile; at 10Mbps/1Mbps, it would be less than half as fast as the FCC's home broadband speed standard of 25Mbps/3Mbps.
I mean, what that "standard" does? Is it prohibited to sell connection slower than this? Clearly not, since there tons of home internet offers slower than 25/3. So what is the meaning of this standard, what consequences does it have? Of course the press, who is supposed to inform me, is too busy trying to propagandize me and forgets to explain what that all actually means. Could fellow HNians fill the gap?
[+] [-] speedz|8 years ago|reply
The speed standard is used to funnel money to the incumbents. The incumbents are supposed to improve and/or upgrade their speeds or coverage to match these standards in return for these subsidies, but reality has a way to get in the way. In practice the incumbents pocket the money and deliver whatever they feel like.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stevefeinstein|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xoa|8 years ago|reply
No, it's total bullshit, except in the pedantic "well, humans don't NEED electricity/medicine/communications/synthetic shelter/[anything since we wandered the plains of Africa and had a life expectancy in the 40s]" sense. Fast, symmetrical end point Internet is of massive importance and in not just direct but emergent ways that a surprising number of people, even on HN, don't seem to consider. Think for example of many of the concerns that have been raised over the last few years here about how the net has become ever more centralized, or about the difficulties of efforts like Tor. A lot of the core driver for that comes down to lack of end point bandwidth vs demands. If symmetrical gigabit connections were the rule rather then the exception, it'd be possible once again for significantly sized services run directly. Obviously if a service grew large enough they'd eventually need to move towards the core, but for a lot of people it'd completely eliminate the need for many current colo and cloud offerings. Would you be happy going back to thinnet or 10BASE-T on your LAN? Everything that runs there could run over the net with more bandwidth, latency only becomes a significant issue over extremely long distances.
More bandwidth also means more can start to be devoted to meta-content issues like privacy. If we consider 25 Mbps to be a target for many services say, then onion routing networks are hard to make use of because they tend to impose significant overhead and be limited by slow nodes (particularly as even someone with a "enough" 25 Mbps connection themselves often would not be willing to allow all of that to be used by the larger network). But if everyone had 1000 Mbps (or more) to play with, then they could easily devote a bunch of that to sharing networks, take even a 90% overhead hit, and still have as much bandwidth as they needed. Just as more power in CPUs/GPUs has allowed us to not merely run things faster, but optimize towards the value of human time vs computer time, more bandwidth "then needed" represents leeway to optimize towards goals beyond the bare necessities.
Seriously, giving everyone (or close enough) fast, symmetrical connections should be one of the absolute highest priorities of anyone concerned about market competition, centralized control, privacy, and so on. It'd be one of the best investments America could make, just as national electrification, telephone, and roads were.