"About half of Americans in rural areas don't have access to 25 Mbps down/3 Mbps up speeds, meaning that they can't take advantage of a lot of the internet's best goodies (read: streaming video)."
I agree with the sentiment. However, you don't need 25mbps to stream Netflix at high quality. My brother lives in a very rural part of the country, has 15mbps cable service, and streams Netflix, Hulu, and Prime perfectly well. In fact according to some threads on HN, people report being able to do that with ~5mbps just fine.
The only thing I'm aware of today that average consumers need, say, 50mbps for is numerous simultaneous streams (gaming in one room, hulu in the next, netflix in the next). This isn't to say the US shouldn't have drastically faster broadband mind you.
So while it's great to shove the telecom companies to higher speeds, there's no sense in gizmodo pretending 25mbps is some magic cutoff point, where below that you just can't "take advantage of a lot of the internet's best goodies." I consider it unfortunate that there are not more services that actually need 50mbps type speeds, to provide a lot more consumer-driven anger about being left out.
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"About half of Americans in rural areas don't have access to 25 Mbps down/3 Mbps up speeds, meaning that they can't take advantage of a lot of the internet's best goodies (read: streaming video)."
I agree with the sentiment. However, you don't need 25mbps to stream Netflix at high quality. My brother lives in a very rural part of the country, has 15mbps cable service, and streams Netflix, Hulu, and Prime perfectly well. In fact according to some threads on HN, people report being able to do that with ~5mbps just fine.
The only thing I'm aware of today that average consumers need, say, 50mbps for is numerous simultaneous streams (gaming in one room, hulu in the next, netflix in the next). This isn't to say the US shouldn't have drastically faster broadband mind you.
So while it's great to shove the telecom companies to higher speeds, there's no sense in gizmodo pretending 25mbps is some magic cutoff point, where below that you just can't "take advantage of a lot of the internet's best goodies." I consider it unfortunate that there are not more services that actually need 50mbps type speeds, to provide a lot more consumer-driven anger about being left out.