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A comment on The Decline of Net Neutrality Activism. Parent comment

Re:The Decline of Net Neutrality Activism by Retric on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @09:25PM (#35064421)
Median internet speeds is a terrible metric when comparing infrastructure because it effectively only measures the cheapest to deploy urban populations internet speeds which is basically meaningless now days. 50 Mbps or 500 Mbps all are basically running on the same back haul which is why things fell apart during the pandemic when people tried to actually use their hypothetical home bandwidth.

Meanwhile millions of Americans are stuck with 1.5 Mbps DSL or really expensive Satellite internet.

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Re:The Decline of Net Neutrality Activism by mardifoufs on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @09:35PM (#35064484)
I don't disagree with your point! But it seems like the same pattern is true for average speeds too (sort by average):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_In...

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Re:The Decline of Net Neutrality Activism by Retric on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @09:43PM (#35064534)
It’s a valid point, on the other hand average is much worse. 1 person at 1GBps makes up for huge numbers of people at 1.5Mbps vs 20 Mbps.

Not that all speeds above 20 Mbps are equal, but there are heavy diminishing returns. IMO, I would rank countries by percentage of 50+Mbps internet connections.

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Re:The Decline of Net Neutrality Activism by p1necone on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @11:34PM (#35065284)
Median, mean and mode are all going to be pretty misleading if you're trying to work out if people outside of densely populated areas can get decent speeds.

You probably need to measure lower percentiles to get an idea of how bad it can get.

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Re:The Decline of Net Neutrality Activism by unmole on Tuesday March 07, 2023 @11:58PM (#35065443)
Why is it meaningless to look at the most common deployment?
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Re:The Decline of Net Neutrality Activism by Retric on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @05:32AM (#35067352)
The numbers got high enough the differences don’t really matter much.

Suppose you were looking at countries median car top speed. Fining one countries median is 150 MPH vs 156 just don’t tell you much when you can’t drive that speed on public roads. Or in internet terms Netflix etc isn’t sending 8k stream let alone multiple 8k streams.

On the other hand many internet connections can’t handle a single 4k or even 1080p so percentage of connections over X threshold is more impactful.

Now if people where measuring say the median miles per gallon or in internet terms say latency or bandwidth caps then the median actually matters more.

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Re:The Decline of Net Neutrality Activism by goodpoint on Wednesday March 08, 2023 @09:34AM (#35069401)
Netflix often uses local caches hosted by large ISPs, making it even more difficult to talk about Internet "speed".
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