[HN Gopher] High-Speed Internet at a Crossroads
___________________________________________________________________
High-Speed Internet at a Crossroads
Author : fortran77
Score : 46 points
Date : 2021-05-21 13:43 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.harvard.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.harvard.edu)
| TripleH wrote:
| "And quite frankly, I hope I don't have to give another live
| lecture ever again. I'll tape it; I'll have them watch it -- I
| know most of them are going to watch it at 1.5 or 2x speed. I'll
| sound like Alvin and the Chipmunks, but that's OK. Then we can
| spend the time in class actually working on problems or
| discussing some of the issues that I brought up."
|
| Beside the joke, I find the concept of ingesting content at your
| pace and then talking about it in class very interesting. No idea
| if the knowledge will stick in mind as well as classic lectures,
| but I would definitely have been seduced by this proposition when
| I was a student.
| volta83 wrote:
| ", I find the concept of ingesting content at your pace and
| then talking about it in class very interesting."
|
| It's called a "flipped-classroom".
|
| The teacher gives you material to read or watch at home before
| the class, and then in the class it just asks if anyone had any
| questions, and they can go over these together.
|
| As a teacher it is super useful because you get to learn first
| hand which concepts the student didn't understand.
|
| And as a student you can read or watch something whenever you
| want at the speed that you want, and if you don't understand
| something you can ask about it in class.
|
| With some experience, teachers can also use the flipped-
| classroom model to focus only on the hardest part of a
| particular lecture. You can rely that some student is going to
| have trouble with it at home, so you can prepare before hand to
| the lecture to how to address that particular question (and
| once you have done the class a couple of times, you get pretty
| good at it).
|
| There is no need to waste teacher and student time during 1:1
| interactions on "easy" stuff that everyone can just read at
| home.
| fuzzer37 wrote:
| How do you deal with shy students, or ones who don't like to
| participate? This model sounds interesting, but I can't
| imagine exclusively using this method.
| yeigfepuih wrote:
| The best class I ever had was one where the teacher explained
| things for half the time and then we worked on homework for the
| other half.
|
| I think that is probably the best model. Letting students watch
| lectures on their own time is hardly better than expecting them
| to read on their own time.
| corysama wrote:
| Years ago I heard of experimental elementary/high school
| classrooms where students were expected to watch lecture
| videos at home and what would be "homework" would instead be
| the focus of the whole time in the classroom.
|
| Students were expected to help each other with the material
| and only go to the teacher if they were collectively stumped.
|
| I can imaging all kinds of bad scenarios were someone tried
| to switch a disruptive class to this routine overnight. But,
| with good onboarding and ramp up, that plan sounded like a
| dream to me!
| jon_richards wrote:
| College classes are often split into lectures and
| precepts/discussions/office hours. I think the thing holding
| back your idea is the expectation of being taught in-person by
| a professor. For large classes, that's only really possible in
| a lecture format.
|
| My personal favorite method of learning was a TA that went
| through the material, meticulously calling on each person in
| order. You could skip, but it was still obvious if you were
| playing a game or browsing Reddit. Eventually you learned that
| you really didn't have all the answers and that paying
| attention was probably a good idea. It also got people
| comfortable giving a wrong answer and that really helped
| everyone with the learning process.
| ghaff wrote:
| There is a forcing function to in-person lectures; I can't tell
| you how many events I've basically skipped in the past year
| because I can catch up on the videos anytime--and, of course, I
| mostly don't. But, in principle, depending upon the size of the
| class there's a lot to be said for watching the lecture on
| video and using class time for discussion, project work, etc.
| curriculum wrote:
| There's also something ritualistic about in-person lectures
| -- in a good way, like having a morning cup of coffee. We
| know that humans are not good at multi-tasking, so there is
| tremendous value in a dedicated time and place to think about
| one thing only in the presence of other people who are also
| thinking about that one thing.
|
| Of course, it's easy to squander that opportunity by
| delivering a rote, feelingless lecture. And if you're just
| going to lay out the facts, why not record them? In that
| case, videos have many advantages. But a live lecture is also
| an opportunity to get people excited about what you're
| teaching.
|
| Post-pandemic, my plan is to take a hybrid approach.
| Technical details, like proofs, belong in pre-recorded videos
| watched out-of-class. But the main conceptual thread should
| be delivered in live lecture, where I can give it the energy
| and life it deserves.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Pre covid, we had one professor who did lectures with videos
| (of him presenting) combined with in-person tasks and
| discussions. Each week you had to take a 10-minute test on
| the content of that weeks videos. It worked quite well.
|
| The biggest disadvantage was that with a live audience the
| professor got cues from the audience if we understood him or
| if he had to slow down. In his videos he constantly assumed
| he had to repeat everything slightly differently, so you had
| to watch at 1.5x speed to get to something bearable.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, particularly with a smaller audience that can
| definitely be a problem. I'm better at it than I was a year
| ago but I still find doing a video without an audience can
| be a bit challenging. And I definitely can't course correct
| the way I can if I see a bunch of puzzled expressions in
| the front row of a room.
|
| On the flip side, you can redo sections and easily insert
| multimedia and just mix up the talking head format.
| Grakel wrote:
| Anyone speaking improvisationallly (not from a script) can be
| listened to at 1.5x at least. I get through a lot of tutorials
| at 2x.
| ghaff wrote:
| I may be in the minority but I really don't care for
| listening to things sped up. If it's really just about
| maximizing data transfer, I'd probably rather read a good
| transcript at that point.
| Syonyk wrote:
| Unfortunately, as I'm sure you've discovered, "good
| transcripts" don't exist unless someone puts in the effort.
| :(
|
| I don't mind audio, but I definitely don't understand the
| value of "talking head" style videos. They're, if not the
| worst possible information density possible, pretty darn
| close. A couple hundred megabytes to see someone speaking a
| few dozen kilobytes of text, and I still can't search it or
| skim it to see if it covers what I want.
| ghaff wrote:
| A good transcript isn't really that hard. You just need
| to pay someone--the ML ones just aren't good enough to
| publish--and do some light editing. I usually do them for
| my podcasts. (Though the ML transcripts are good enough
| for skimming content and I use them if I'm just going to
| be using some excerpts from the audio.)
|
| I actually find that, for talks with slides, I do like
| having the inset speaker video. What I tend to do is to
| start off with a full screen talking head intro with
| mostly the slides/multimedia and a small speaker video.
| toss1 wrote:
| Totally agree that a _good_ transcript is way better in
| almost all cases (except where actual moving visual demo
| actually helps).
|
| However, are there any good automated transcription tools
| that can make a good transcript from an imperfect YouTube
| video? Most of what I've seen is good for humor, and I've
| even seen some used in a legal deposition context that are
| downright dangerous (inserting most likely word or phrase
| in place of what was actually said, so actively decreasing
| and corrupting info content). This might not be as
| disastrous for a lecture where there are also office hours,
| but... anything good out there?
| ghaff wrote:
| >are there any good automated transcription tools that
| can make a good transcript
|
| Automated? No. But if you're willing to pay $1/minute and
| the audio is good/accents aren't too heavy/etc. there are
| a bunch of options.
| williesleg wrote:
| Get off the internet and go outside.
|
| Sunshine is proven to fight off Covid. Harvard study.
| padobson wrote:
| _One of the interesting things about the infrastructure bill that
| has been proposed in Congress is it talks a lot about universal
| high-speed broadband access in the same way that, back in the
| '30s, the recovery bills from the Great Depression talked about
| telephone access for everybody._
|
| Does anyone know about how this legislation worked out? Did it
| really get more people telephone access?
|
| I'm skeptical of any praise toward the New Deal, because it's
| almost universally praised by just about everyone, but then you
| dig into it and you find out that agencies like the NRA[0] were
| so bad that even their proponents had to admit they were a
| failure, and the "successful" programs that lasted, like Social
| Security, pale in comparison to more modern programs like
| Australia's Super.
|
| I don't hate the idea of the government delivering internet, but
| more like they deliver water or electricity, at the municipal
| level, rather than some set of national, overarching subsidies
| and regulations that will probably create perverse incentives all
| over this very large country.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Recovery_Administrati....
| extra88 wrote:
| Yes, I think the Communications Act of 1934 (and the Rural
| Electrification Act of 1936) was successful. The Communications
| Act established a Universal Service Fund that used long-
| distance charges to subsidize phone service for low-income
| households and expanding service to households that would not
| be profitable to serve.
|
| The Telecommunications Act of 1996, meant to be sort of a
| digital update, has clearly not been successful.
| Syonyk wrote:
| It would be really nice if those designing technology systems for
| the web would spend some time _using the stuff they design_ on
| lower speed connections. There 's no excuse these days - the
| Chrome web inspector lets you simulate network profiles if you
| want (though I wish they'd add "Rural WISP" options by default -
| say, 5/1 with some random latency spikes and a few dropped
| packets every now and then).
|
| I've been on a 25/3 (that mostly delivers 20/2 during the day,
| and "a connection" during the evening that... varies wildly) for
| about six years now, and I've been working 100% remotely that
| entire time. It means I have to think about some of my transfers
| and let them run for longer periods, but I've had no trouble
| doing video conferences and other things on this connection. I
| just have to pay attention to what I'm doing, and I might need to
| cancel or pause a transfer if I'm jumping on a video call. If it
| works for the meeting, I tend to use a cell phone for audio -
| most video conference bridges support this method.
|
| But we've also generally designed our life around the fact that
| we're not on super fast connections. We cache content locally (I
| tend to rip DVDs to the server so I don't have to deal with the
| physical disks), and while streaming works if we let it, I'm
| certainly not streaming high bitrate 4k content... but we also
| don't have a large enough TV that it really matters at our
| viewing distances. Also tend to cache other stuff - I'm running a
| local Ubuntu repo, because I have a lot of VMs that do various
| things, and sucking down updates over the LAN is far faster than
| running over the WISP.
|
| None of us play extensive computer games, and while I do game a
| bit, it's things like Minecraft or Kerbal Space Program that are
| offline/local, or at least not latency sensitive. I hear lots of
| complaints about how bad consoles with online-only games are on
| slow connections (especially the update game), so we just don't
| have one. We game quite a bit, but it's board games, tabletop
| games, etc.
|
| If stuff were designed for "something slower than gigabit," it
| would certainly improve the experience on slower connections, but
| literally making a living on something a lot of people barely
| even consider broadband, I've not found it to be an actual issue
| if you just work within the limits.
|
| Now, the usual answer for this is "But Starlink!" - and I have
| it. It's a secondary connection, because it's not actually usable
| as a primary connection for much beyond casual web browsing and
| file downloads these days. I know it's a beta, and I'm certainly
| putting traffic through it to help with their testing, but it's
| just not a good primary connection if you have alternatives yet.
| The bandwidth is fine, the latency is good, and the rest of it is
| just annoying. It's really prone to breaking long running
| connections (CGNAT and it seems like my public IP changes halfway
| often), so SSH tunnels and VPNs get broken constantly. They
| tolerate some packet loss just fine (just pause for a moment and
| then resume when the packets start again), but over Starlink,
| they get reliably broken. I've not poked around enough to figure
| out why. The bandwidth is also hugely variable (both upload and
| download). Sure, you see 300-400Mbit at peaks, and I often see
| north of 200Mbit... briefly. Then it slows down, drops to less
| than 10Mbit, pauses, goes back up, etc. It doesn't show in random
| speed tests as much, but if you scp or rsync a big set of files
| over, you can watch the speed rise and fall. I can't imagine
| bandwidth estimation algorithms are able to make much sense of
| this for things like video calls, and the quality of video calls
| on Starlink isn't great yet. It's also prone to plenty of "micro-
| drops" where it simply stops passing traffic for 5-10 seconds.
| Not normally a huge deal, but very, very disruptive for video
| calls. I still use my 25/3 for any sort of video conferencing,
| because it's slower, but more consistent.
|
| (One may safely assume I'm pretty rural)
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Very interesting to hear your experience.
|
| Hopefully increasing satellite density fixes the speed
| reliability.
|
| And I guess I understand why your IP would shift and break
| connections but they really need at least an _option_ to not do
| that even if it adds a few more milliseconds of latency.
| linsomniac wrote:
| I can only imagine how much the Pandemic stretched the average
| home Internet. We had pretty good Internet, ~300Mbps in, maybe
| 15Mbps out, $100/mo, and when my wife and I and both the kids
| were on video meetings, it just couldn't keep up. I'd have to
| turn off video on my meeting to keep from losing audio. Upgraded
| to gigabit (30Mbps upstream?) and that helped, but it still
| struggled. Might have been at Xfinity...
|
| About 6 months into it, we got hooked up for the municipal fiber
| network, we were not in the first batch deployed but were fairly
| early. Symmetric gigabit for $60/mo, and it's been working
| amazingly!
|
| But, as the article says, "haves and have-nots". Our entire city
| should have the municipal network in a year or two. So the whole
| city will have it, and I think they'll be offering some
| incentives for people who can't afford the $60/mo. But
| nationally, and even in the rest of Colorado, there are still a
| lot of "have-nots".
| ghaff wrote:
| I have 200/5 with Xfinity which is _mostly_ OK. But it 's
| hardly POTS levels of reliability. Went out completely on me
| during a call yesterday and I had to fall back on my (marginal)
| cell phone service. I sometimes regret dropping my landline. I
| had more reliable phone service in the 1970s.
| linsomniac wrote:
| You should call Xfinity about that. Up until my recent switch
| to fiber, I've had Xfinity/AT&T BI/@Home for ~20 years, and
| 7+ years at work, and it's been pretty reliable. The times
| I've had reliability issues have all been due to signal
| issues. Some have been damaged cable that got water into it,
| and would come and go based on rain or humidity. Some were
| bad splitters, or marginal cable that removed/replaced
| splitters had resolved.
| ghaff wrote:
| It seems like the sort of thing where they'll be "Looks
| fine to us." It does get up to rated speeds. It's just that
| it sometimes is quite slow and now and then drops entirely.
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _I had more reliable phone service in the 1970s._
|
| I've considered getting a landline again, but it would be
| nothing but spam calls and surveys and scammers.
|
| I grew up with landlines, and it was possible to have long,
| nuanced conversations on them without stepping on each other
| like happens with modern cell phones, and someone pointed out
| a year or two back that the issue is the latency. Cell phones
| are high latency, often with some variances in the latency -
| for everything. Landlines, across town, were both lower
| latency and _far_ more consistent. Even across the country
| didn 't seem so bad as a modern cell phone to your neighbor.
|
| Talking on the phone didn't used to be painful - but it is
| now.
| ghaff wrote:
| I dropped mine last year (along with my cable TV) because
| it was nothing but junk. I'd have turned off the ringer and
| just kept it for backup but I don't use the phone a lot and
| $40/month or so was too much to pay for something I
| wouldn't really use.
| linsomniac wrote:
| I realized a few weeks ago that the house I've lived in for
| 5 years, I don't even know where a single phone jack is in
| the house. Except for the one that I tucked up in the attic
| when I remodeled the kitchen.
| Syonyk wrote:
| Our house literally doesn't have any. It was built new
| (manufactured home) in 2016, and I'm not even sure if it
| was an option in the build - I'd have to look over the
| list of options again.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| In 2012 when our house was built, the builder tried to
| convince me to drop the RJ11 jacks. I guess I'm old
| fashioned, I told them to put them in anyway. Haven't
| used them for anything, oh well. They're not useful for
| anything more than actual POTS.
| Rychard wrote:
| I'd recommend pulling the face-plate and checking the
| wiring. In my experience, builders use CAT5e for phone
| jacks (and for other low-voltage systems, like alarms.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Oh I'm sure it's at least cat5, but phone jacks are
| usually wired in series (in my experience, at least),
| which puts a damper on what you can do with them for
| data.
| toast0 wrote:
| It's worth double checking, home running POTS to a
| central point or at least the demarc got pretty common by
| 2000 or so. Makes it easier to add lines and what not,
| for your fax machine or computer modem.
| Animats wrote:
| _Talking on the phone didn 't used to be painful - but it
| is now._
|
| Indeed. I have a "land line", but it's just VoIP.
|
| I miss ISDN voice. Rigidly time-synchronized, no stutter,
| no transmission noise.
| blincolnmercury wrote:
| Syonyk >"Talking on the phone didn't used to be painful -
| but it is now."
|
| This.
|
| I ceased using a cellphone when I retired. Three days ago
| was conscripted into a cellphone conversation that had
| terrible audio and communications drops. If anything,
| cellphones have grown worse IMO.
|
| My landline has ISDN to the local office but the audio
| quality drops b/c of the other party's cellphone. Good
| news: it worked through the recent Texas cold weather
| power blackout.
|
| Wishing for the old days, when not only could speech be
| understood but also the emotions and inflections of the
| speaker were transmitted. All those nuances are lost
| "like tears in the rain":
|
| "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack
| ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched
| C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate. All
| those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
|
| Blade Runner - Final scene, "Tears in Rain" Monologue
| (HD):
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoAzpa1x7jU
| binkHN wrote:
| I wish municipal Internet was an option by me, but much of the
| US is purposely broken:
|
| https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...
| renewiltord wrote:
| I have symmetric fiber through Sonic here in SF for $50/mo and
| I think life would have been hard without it. I'm casually
| uploading things (Classic `docker push` a non-slim image) over
| while on video calls without a stutter. Amazing.
| cratermoon wrote:
| I noticed what you describe at work, too: families with kids in
| school and both parents working had the most difficulties. In
| places where home internet speeds are marginal for pre-pandemic
| usage, it was absolutely garbage.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Non fiber upload is a farce. I assume when they sell you more
| upload, they're just placing you in a higher priority in the
| 30Mbps they have allocated for the whole neighborhood.
|
| It is a hardware limitation as far as I know, so unless you see
| utility workers running new fiber, I would not expect much.
| katbyte wrote:
| I have 1000/100 cable and my upload is consistently 110-120
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I have never seen a cable internet provider even advertise
| upload bandwidth, much less actually deliver it. They don't
| even bother promising 2Mbps. Check Comcast/Spectrum/Cox/etc
| websites.
|
| I assume the only reason they do not is because that is how
| little upload capacity they have.
| adventured wrote:
| Recently signed up with Comcast, they did promise an
| associated upload speed with the no frills Internet
| package I selected (200/5, $35/month) and listed it in
| the description when I chose it. I typically get 5-6 mbps
| up (although I rarely use it).
| cptskippy wrote:
| I haven't had Comcast in a couple years but they did
| advertise upload speeds at one time and for the majority
| of the time (over 15 years) that I had them the speed was
| at or better than advertised.
|
| The last speed teir I had with them was 150/75 in 2019.
| zbrozek wrote:
| Most cable providers allocate spectrum to prioritize
| download. Even the DOCSIS standard is built around that
| asymmetry. Much depends on the level of over-subscription in
| a neighborhood.
|
| In my old neighborhood, Comcast appeared to have a relatively
| low over-subscription ratio. My promised 1000/40 service
| pretty much always hit exactly that and I was a pretty happy
| camper.
|
| In my new neighborhood, the Comcast over-subscription ratio
| is far, far worse. My neighbors complain that realized speeds
| never approach promised speeds. And I was unable to get
| service at all (despite all of my neighbors on the same
| street having service). After a year of tooth-pulling, I got
| an F-U quote from Comcast at $210,000 to connect my house.
|
| So I banded together with neighbors in the community on a
| couple of adjacent un-served streets and we trenched and laid
| fiber. Now I have 10000/10000 service and it's awesome.
|
| Edit: I actually can't measure how close my service is to
| meeting the promise. I run out of CPU first. That's OK.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > So I banded together with neighbors in the community on a
| couple of adjacent un-served streets and we trenched and
| laid fiber. Now I have 10000/10000 service and it's
| awesome.
|
| That's fantastic! One might even scale this community up to
| a few more blocks and call it a government. Too bad it's
| such a bad word for many.
| nybble41 wrote:
| It's not a government until you get the guns out and
| force people to join up and pay dues whether they want to
| or not.
|
| What zbrozek described is just a co-op, or something less
| formal along the same lines: an organization designed to
| provide benefits other than financial profit for its
| (voluntary) members, who are also its shareholders. Co-
| ops are great. I wish people would use them more often
| rather than clamoring for unnecessary government
| involvement.
| briffle wrote:
| You literally cannot find the upload for Comcast/XFinity
| until after you have gone through the sign up, and even
| given your credit card. There is one more confirmation
| before your card gets charged, and that is where it is.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/03/comcast-hides-
| up...
|
| I have tried to see if upgrading from 200Mb down to 400Mb
| down would change my upstream, and havent found a thing.
| One site suggests i might get 5Mb/s more upload. Sucks for
| pushing docker images.
| Aa9C4xPz43Gg7k6 wrote:
| I got 1gb from them just to rise my upload speed.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| I switched to fiber in 2019, and 2020 would have been a mess
| without it.
| Loughla wrote:
| _cries in satellite broadband_
|
| Seriously, we had to get a cell booster and root our phones
| to be able to use them as wireless hotspots just to survive
| and stay employed last year. It was an absolute trainwreck,
| the entire time.
| oriolid wrote:
| How much bandwidth did you actually have? I have symmetric
| gigabit shared with ~50 people and everything works great, but
| my router shows that video calls on all platforms take less
| than 10Mbps and somehow Zoom manages to have the best quality
| with around 3Mbps.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| One big complaint I have about Zoom is that the user has
| little control over bandwidth usage. For upload, all you
| control is SD vs HD. For audio, no control. And seemingly no
| control over download, but it will use less if you run it in
| thumbnail mode.
|
| I wish I could suppress download to thumbnail mode except
| screensharing.
|
| As a Canadian, I'm used to having to deal with software
| developed in an environment with unlimited bandwidth and
| without caps...
| Animats wrote:
| Welcome to botched network upload congestion handling. 15Mbps
| should be plenty if there's fair queuing at the choke point for
| the transition from LAN to WAN. See "bufferbloat".
|
| Without that, you need huge amounts of bandwidth so that the
| FIFO queues never fill.
| eikenberry wrote:
| Back when I had crappy internet I used wondershaper to
| mitigate this sort of issue. It worked great and was very
| simple, it just throttled all connections a bit to eliminate
| the throttling.
|
| https://lartc.org/wondershaper/
| Animats wrote:
| I suspect that some major ISPs want bad queuing in routers
| to force people to upgrade and buy more bandwidth. Then
| they want to charge more if you _use_ the bandwidth.
| vlan0 wrote:
| Most folks don't realize this, but many issues are actually due
| to bufferbloat. Get a powerful router that runs CAKE and you'll
| be amazed at how little jitter will be seen while maximizing
| available bandwidth.
|
| Also, if you live in a dense urban area, you'll also likely
| suffer from issues with available wireless spectrum and have to
| compete with everyone's router blasting as loud as possible.
|
| https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/
| Bayart wrote:
| >Get a powerful router that runs CAKE
|
| It doesn't even need to be powerful if you're on a normal
| copper line for home use. I'm saying that running a 20EUR
| Xioami router and having machines torrenting, an Android box
| watching stuff, phones watching YT etc. without hiccups.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > Get a powerful router
|
| Any guide on how to do this properly? My ISP's hardware is
| garbage but I'm not sure how to replace it. Feels like it was
| easier in the DSL days.
| gruez wrote:
| But isn't the problem at every level, including the modem?
| Having a powerful router wouldn't help if the modem it's
| connected has bufferbloat as well.
| Syonyk wrote:
| If you've profiled the system and rate limit bandwidth to
| what's below the "steady state flow" of your network
| (including modem), then you never have buffers. It's usually
| only one or two layers you have to worry about before you get
| into some higher bandwidth backbones and the problem largely
| goes away. If L3's main links are buffering, the internet has
| some larger problems.
|
| As a concrete example here, I run networking for our church,
| and we've had to make a facility that really wasn't designed
| for livestreaming into something that can toss out a
| tolerable stream.
|
| We've got... no idea what we pay for, actually, but it
| reliably measures about 70/15 on Sunday mornings with nothing
| restricted. However, due to some various quirks of network
| naming, there are a lot of other devices on the network, some
| of which only get woken up for Sundays, and they like
| installing updates. Plus cell phones that recognize "Oooh,
| wireless!" I need to split the network up, but I also hate
| rejoining "things" to networks, and we have a few more of
| those than I really care to deal with.
|
| Experimentally, while our max upstream is about 15Mbit,
| things start to get erratic beyond about 10 - latency starts
| getting inconsistent and we start having stream issues. I've
| capped the livestream bandwidth at 8Mbit (we hardware
| transcode on site from the Main profile h.264 coming out of
| the switcher to High profile, at a lower bitrate), and that
| gets first priority - I'm using Mikrotik queues, so any
| packet coming out of the server on Sunday goes first. I
| played around with what everyone else gets, and eventually
| settled on around 2Mbit - that can mix in with our livestream
| and still not impact anything outbound.
|
| But I also had to cap our download. While the connection can
| do 70Mbit, I reliably saw upload dropping (even from 10Mbit)
| if something had pegged out download in the morning. So
| that's capped to a conservative 20Mbit, which is enough for
| most things, and is low enough to not interfere with the
| higher priority upload.
|
| This is all on timers, and the limits kick in Sunday before
| the services, and drop off afterwards.
|
| You can also find a lot of gains if your router prioritizes
| acks outbound. DSL modems were often so badly asymmetrical
| (think 25Mbit down, 768kbit up) that your upstream acks would
| end up in queues and not get through for a while (buffer
| bloat, though I didn't know that term at the time). You could
| radically improve a DSL modem's connection by putting some
| queues in to manage upload. Prioritize acks, and then limit
| your total upload to about 750kbit (on that example 768k
| modem) so that you weren't buffering in the modem.
|
| And all of this is entirely in the scope of the router, even
| if it's working around issues further upstream.
| gruez wrote:
| So you capped your connection from a theoretical 75/15 to
| 20/8? I guess it makes sense if you value latency above all
| else, but for situations where throughput matters (eg.
| streaming or downloading game patches), it's unacceptable.
| Dynamically setting your speed cap would get rid of this
| problem, but would be huge timesink to get it just right.
| Syonyk wrote:
| I leave 2Mbit for other uploads, so it's 20/10, but, yes.
| During times when we care about latency and upload packet
| loss with a "realtime" set of requirements (there's no
| mechanism to retransmit lost packets for livestreaming
| with what we're using, so lost packets are just lost and
| glitch), the connection is heavily restricted.
|
| However, if you're trying to reduce buffer bloat and
| random latency, the general concept of restricting to
| what your connection can actually tolerate works quite
| well. I've done it plenty on various connections over the
| years.
| vlan0 wrote:
| I said powerful router because running CAKE/fq_codel means
| your router's CPU will be processing each packet. Which is
| not normally the case for a router processing unicast traffic
| without an AQM algorithm.
|
| For instance, much of Ubiquiti's lineup will choke on
| anything over 500mbps w/ fq_codel (aka Smart Queue) enabled.
| hyko wrote:
| _We decided almost a century ago that universal telephone service
| was something that we wanted to have. We need to make that
| decision about the internet now._
|
| YES!
| lstodd wrote:
| Yeah, sure.
|
| Then Bell System had to be broken down, and even that wasn't
| enough.
|
| The whole mess with internet access in US is due to local
| monopolies held up by idiotic regulations. More regulations
| won't ever solve the problem.
| extra88 wrote:
| Regulation is what connected every home to electricity and
| telephone service, it could do the same for quality broadband
| service.
| cratermoon wrote:
| Key takeaways
|
| - asymmetric broadband (high download speeds, low upload speeds)
| won't work in a world where people are doing real work "in a
| world of Zoom conferences, we need something that is more
| symmetric in download and upload -- or at least upload speeds
| need to be a lot faster than they were when it was mostly Netflix
| and HBO Max"
|
| - rural/urban divide is real and a severe problem "for the most
| part, cities have done reasonably well, and rural areas have done
| reasonably badly. So this divide is really economic and
| population density"
|
| - the free market has few, if any, incentives, to build out to
| rural and low-density areas "If you are running a wire, whether
| it be cable or fiber, it costs the same amount per mile pretty
| much no matter where you put it. So if you can put it someplace
| where you can service 100,000 people, it's a lot more
| economically advantageous than if you're going to be serving 20"
|
| - there isn't any real free market anyway, since most locales
| have a single provider, maybe two "while there may be multiple
| internet providers, there are very few internet providers at any
| single place. So we essentially have, at least in regions, de
| facto monopolies that have very little reason to increase their
| offerings, at least from the sense of competition.
|
| - jobs will not be completely unconnected to location "It's still
| going to matter that you are in the same area so that on
| occasion, you can come into the office and meet physically
| together. But I think there's going to be much less of the five
| days a week on campus sort of work. People will be able to work
| two to three days a week at home, without any loss of
| productivity or loss of culture within their group."
| Dah00n wrote:
| I'm constantly baffled at how the US can be stuck in this
| situation, being a country known for high tech businesses like
| Google etc. Especially when well-tested and proven solutions
| are readily available if politicians were interested. For
| example the problem with only one ISP is easy to fix (in
| theory, I know it isn't politically): Force infrastructure
| providers to open up for competitors. All electricity companies
| can be picked as a provider on the local infrastructure where I
| live and the same with internet. Even very rural areas have
| fibre (though there's nothing as rual as rual America of
| course). In my opinion all these problems stem from the two
| party system where nothing really changes so everything becomes
| inefficient in the long run.
| toast0 wrote:
| > For example the problem with only one ISP is easy to fix
| (in theory, I know it isn't politically): Force
| infrastructure providers to open up for competitors.
|
| The problem with this is that the US already did this, but
| with bad rules in the telecom act of 1996. After a few years
| of litigation, the FCC decided the line sharing requirements
| didn't actually apply to anyone, because there was 'enough'
| competition between cable, dsl, satellite (hah!), and
| powerline (double hah!). I don't know how we would get the 96
| telecom act back, but this time with rules that make sense
| when the issues are difficult to explain to people.
| cratermoon wrote:
| As the article points out, there are (or were) many ISPs,
| and the FCC managed to finagle that fact into "there is
| actual competition" even though most markets were only
| served by one, or perhaps two. The country ended up such
| that actually trying to enter a market where one of the big
| telecoms is dominant essentially can't happen, but the FCC
| continues to pretend that competition is possible and the
| markets are free.
| dudul wrote:
| I'm probably kind of ignorant here, but isn't there a
| difference between ISP and electricity providers though? When
| it comes to electricity, the infrastructure is used to bring
| the product (electricity) to the customer. When it comes to
| Internet, the infrastructure is the product.
|
| Say the infrastructure is now open for all companies. What is
| now the differentiator between Comcast and Fios? The
| infrastructure and the bandwidth it can handle is what they
| are selling.
| cratermoon wrote:
| How is the infrastructure the product? If I buy a cable
| modem and plug it into the wall but don't cough up money to
| Comcast/XFinity, I get nothing, same as if I plug my coffee
| pot into an electrical outlet but don't pay the electric
| company for service.
| dudul wrote:
| Electric cables can be shared by different companies
| because they still have the differentiator of how they
| get the electricity they sell you. Either they make it,
| or buy it and negotiate prices, etc. The electricity is
| the product, not how they get it to your house.
|
| What would be a differentiator for ISPs if the
| infrastructure was completely shared? The internet would
| be the same.
| JTbane wrote:
| It's ridiculous that this is still an issue- cheap fiber optics
| have been around since the 80s. The blame rests on the ISPs for
| their monopolistic behavior.
| Bayart wrote:
| The problem isn't the ISPs, it's the regulation and the arcane
| onion of overlapping jurisdictions. Places where infrastructure
| owners are legally bound to share with third party network
| operators don't have that problem.
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