[HN Gopher] ISP announces 86% slowdown "in line with others"
___________________________________________________________________
ISP announces 86% slowdown "in line with others"
Author : smackay
Score : 177 points
Date : 2021-06-27 09:28 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (doctorow.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (doctorow.medium.com)
| j-krieger wrote:
| > The surging anti-monopoly movement has been greeted with
| skepticism from the left, some of whom suspect the whole thing is
| merely fetishizing competition for its own sake
|
| I wish it would become less common place on HN to share articles
| that a) are hidden behind paywall and b) start with a loaded
| sentence antagonising some abstract unknown political entity (who
| even is "the left"?). The entire article is about lacking
| broadband in the US. Why even include some random rambling about
| US politics when the subject matter is not even political to
| begin with?
| phtrivier wrote:
| I think CD claims that the lack of broadband in the US is
| political.
| itsibitzi wrote:
| Lack of access to public services, in this case broadband, is
| absolutely a political issue.
| [deleted]
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| Honestly the title tells you everything you need to know here
| and the article doesn't really provide any additional
| information anyway.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| The carpenter analogy was creative! Market-only economists
| are like carpenters with a religious fixation on screw
| fasteners and abhorence of nails.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| There was not a paywall in my case. The issue may be a
| _selective_ restriction, which also explains why it was upvoted
| on HN.
| freshdonut wrote:
| This is poor writing for sure.
| atoav wrote:
| I'd argue this is because:
|
| 1. A big part of the political spectrum believes a free market
| will lead to the best resulting infrastructure
|
| 2. Internet infrastructure is one of these things where the
| "shape" of the incentive structure can make or break how things
| develope
|
| Therefore if your goal is getting fast broadband for as many
| people as possible as soon as possible, political or
| organisational interventions will get you there quicker than
| just waiting and hoping. And getting their could be key for the
| future economic development of whole nations.
|
| Gladly we have many regions and a few decades of network
| infrastructure building, so seeing which approaches worked and
| which didn't is just a matter of looking carefully and trying
| not to lie to oneself about this.
|
| That being said: so far the "free market" approach didn't
| really keep its promises if we are honest.
| least wrote:
| There hasn't been a free market approach with regards to
| internet in the United States in any sense of the word. From
| municipal to federal government the market has been captured
| by regulations that results in many places in the United
| States only having one available ISP that provides broadband
| internet. This was pretty evident when you see Google's
| efforts to roll out fiber internet all around the United
| States being stonewalled left and right.
|
| I will concede that even if the market were free, there'd be
| plenty of edge cases (a lot of last-mile infrastructure)
| that'd reduce access, and I think those cases are where the
| government can excel. But realistically it seems more likely
| that Starlink is going to be available sooner than any
| movement from local governments.
| tobr wrote:
| > To keep reading this story, get the free app or log in.
|
| How can someone write this sentence and not even try to address
| the obvious follow-up question: _Why?_
|
| I can imagine a few reasons, and none of them makes me want to do
| what Medium is asking me to do, "free" or not.
| imron wrote:
| > Why?
|
| Because you're not using an add blocker.
| ruuda wrote:
| There was also no such popup with Javascript disabled
| mrtksn wrote:
| I wonder how would your position change if they put another
| option that says "read in browser for 1$" and what it does, is
| to immediately pop up the 1 step payment confirmation and
| unlocks the article once you complete the payment(which itself
| could be 1 step with faceID or touchID on Apple devices).
|
| This rant is the default reaction on for any article that is
| not presented frictionlessly and for free. There must be a
| metric in the analytics for it :)
|
| Let's call it bounce/rant ratio. Over 1.0 it means that people
| don't care enough about your article, if it's under 1.0 it
| means that people can take even more in order to read it.
| tobr wrote:
| I would like that. It's easy to understand: Medium is a
| business, they need money to keep going, so they ask people
| to pay for the service. Instead I'm left guessing why they so
| desperately want me to sign up, even though they probably
| can't pay their employees with user accounts.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Fair enough.
|
| I think you have a point there. Why would you be required
| to create an account, all you want to do is to read an
| article right? The connection is not obvious, as you said
| it. Putting a price tag for instant anonymous reading could
| clarify things.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| An account doesn't net them $1 though, and $1 is also a lot
| of money to risk considering Medium hosts a lot of garbage.
| If the button represented the true income they earn from
| someone creating a throwaway account then I'd be happy as it
| would be in the range of a few cents.
| mrtksn wrote:
| It's free market. I also don't see how we are entitled to
| get it for free or get it in our own terms(I want it for
| free and I want it without creating an account and I want
| it it he browser).
|
| If the offer is not good, just bounce. The entitlement for
| for free stuff on the internet is amusing, what I actually
| wonder is if it is a millennial thing to believe that we
| deserve it for free or at the perceived inartistic value of
| our own. My observations are that the older generations and
| the newer generations have no problem with understanding
| the concept of paying for content(with money, data or
| access to you for an upsell later).
|
| The early internet has spoiled us when everything was made
| for the glory and later in 2000s free again but paid by VCs
| during the gold rush and land grab.
| turminal wrote:
| > It's free market.
|
| That's a very ironic thing to say given what the post was
| about.
| mrtksn wrote:
| I don't see the irony. The article is about the ISP
| situation in the USA, which is arguably monopolistic in
| nature. It's hardly the case with blogging platforms, in
| fact, lately most of the blogposts here on HN tend to be
| hosted on SubStack.
|
| I also remember the days when Medium was supposed to
| change publishing. Back then, Medium were the "good
| guys". Then they monetised.
| vinay_ys wrote:
| I closed that window within 5 seconds.
| johndunne wrote:
| Spot on... I was just about to write about the very same point,
| and delighted to see it's the top response here... Paywalls,
| paywall, paywalls, please. Line up, line up.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| https://archive.is/AQ32r
|
| It's my go-to for Medium, almost always already archived and
| ready to read.
|
| I haven't found a way to effectively get around it with either
| uBlock Origin or Bypass Paywalls extensions installed.
| AlfeG wrote:
| I always open links to Medium in incognito mode. This helps.
| brnt wrote:
| Here in the Netherlands this is now the standard for
| everything. What started as a cheaper than supplying a fob 2
| factor, ended up naturally with locking up all info in apps.
| That, and Whatsapp being the only method of communication
| offered.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| I encountered "whatsapp is the only option" exactly once; and
| stopped doing business with that company. (Whatsapp is not
| any sort of standard,and I definitely don't support it :-P )
|
| Do you have any examples of other companies?
| Freak_NL wrote:
| I think I've seen it once or twice now. One is a small
| local burger side-gig here in Leeuwarden (limited in the
| sense that they only work/deliver on Friday's) which seems
| to exclusively work through Instagram and WhatsApp. I can't
| order from them because of this, but they are unique in
| this regard. But then again, their target demographic seem
| to be younger people who wish to buy not just burgers but
| also a photographable experience (at least, that is what I
| make of the pink hamburger buns and general vibe).
|
| Tangentially related: one of those nasty new grocery
| delivery apps -- this one is called 'Crisp' -- only works
| with an Android or IOS app (which is weird, because it is
| just an online shop for groceries, and it is usually much
| easier to just set up a website for an online shop, so they
| are definitely in the game of manipulating their customers
| to the extreme based on purchase patterns and other
| trackable behaviour).
|
| All in all, nothing major yet. But yes, very annoying.
| zihotki wrote:
| That could also be explained by pure economy. It's too
| costly to support many communication channels so they
| just focus on the ones that brings more money. And
| Whatsup is one of major chat platforms in Netherlands due
| to historical reasons.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| Absolutely true. But if there is something we have
| (failed to) learn time and time again: that way lies
| madness.
|
| I'll vote with my wallet and hope to counterbalance
| things slightly. That's one way to ensure that there will
| still be alternatives when ie6/flash/whatsapp are
| inevitably End-of-Lifed .
| brnt wrote:
| Many. Sometimes after digging through the website you can
| find a forgotten phone number or even email adres, but
| that's clearly not where they're nudging you. WhatsApp,
| Facebook or Twitter, or their own app.
| eloisius wrote:
| Also annoyed. Turning a freaking blog platform into a walled
| garden is an absolute farce. What value exactly does Medium add
| over WordPress? It's trendy and newer? Has a more "minimal"
| design? The gimmicky inline comments? I've added Archive.is'
| Firefox addon and my default is to read Medium (and many other
| sites) as archives.
|
| I really wish that search engines would start indexing these
| sites as humans see them. Maybe Brave can take a stance like
| that.
| zo1 wrote:
| I avoid medium by default these days. Problem is more and
| more of these pay walled sites are "oddly" starting to appear
| near the top of search results. Even though that same data or
| news exists on non pay walled sites/blogs. TowardsDataScience
| is another one.
|
| I know it's not the same but the rise of "Axios" feels just
| as artificial or pushed. Like all of a sudden it popped up
| and everyone is "what do you mean you've never heard of them,
| they're a top news organization." Yet the first time I heard
| of them was watching an interview they did where the
| journalist was interviewing a major politician whilst holding
| a look of absolute disgust on their face.
| commoner wrote:
| Bypass Paywalls Clean lets you read Medium articles without
| installing the app or logging in:
|
| https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean
|
| Also works on mobile, if you use Android.
| fallingknife wrote:
| They cut the article by 86% to be in line with others!
| bencollier49 wrote:
| As emphasised by Freak_NL, it seems particularly ironic that
| this is Cory Doctorow behind the paywall.
|
| What I don't understand is why when I'm searching for technical
| articles, Google ranks Medium at the top of results. Doesn't
| this fall into the whole "one result for the spider and another
| for the user" trap to get marked down? It's a blight on the
| web.
| turminal wrote:
| Medium is in direct conflict with some of the things Doctorow
| fought for over the years. It's sad to see him using it.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| You can only use your new Boulangism toaster with approved,
| compatible groceries. Please hold your Boulangism approved food
| item in front of the Boulangism toaster to let it scan it. Your
| Boulangism toaster will open when it recognizes compatible food
| from producers from its partner program.
|
| Paraphrased from Doctorow's excellent novella Unauthorized
| Bread.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| His story isn't that crazy; something similar happened in
| real life with Juicero. DRM on chopped fruit!
| Freak_NL wrote:
| No it is indeed an excellent and very believable story
| (although taken to the extreme). The general moral of that
| story doesn't jive the notion of having to get a free app
| to continue reading a blog article, even if a web browser
| suffices from a technical standpoint; so I cheekily
| referenced it in that context.
|
| Juicero definitely sounds like the inspiration for
| Doctorow's novella.
| hytdstd wrote:
| It's nice to have a symmetric connection, but for most people
| outside of tech, upstream is only stressed when uploading photos.
| It's rarely advertised outside of fine print. I personally love
| symmetric connections, but in some way the average consumer is
| subsidizing the costs for me.
| ev1 wrote:
| > but for most people outside of tech, upstream is only
| stressed when uploading photos
|
| Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, all of these make this untrue. Even
| GDrive/Dropbox of projects, videos is extremely common these
| days.
|
| It is important that users be allowed to produce in addition to
| being spoon fed ads at maximum download rate.
| iptrans wrote:
| This isn't about symmetric connections. It's about Altice
| lowering the upstream from 35 Mbps to 5 Mbps.
|
| Going from 35 Mbps to 5 Mbps is ridiculous. It effectively
| lowers the quality of the broadband by bottlenecking
| connection.
|
| You need upstream bandwidth to use your downstream. Having only
| 5% upstream of your downstream means the connection is at risk
| of congestion merely from return packets when downloading.
|
| Once you saturate your upstream your downstream will become
| laggy and slow down.
|
| Even ignoring headline downstream speeds, 5 Mbps of upstream
| bandwidth is a piddling amount of bandwidth. It is trivial to
| exhaust that amount of bandwidth just by normal Internet usage
| and a video call.
|
| The whole thing is just a money grab from Altice by forcing
| customers to upgrade to more expensive packages just to get
| working broadband equivalent to what they had before.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Surely video calls must be the most common upstream killer
| these days? I am often in calls where coworkers turn off their
| cameras to avoid dropping off.
| Proven wrote:
| Yet another anti-free market rant by CD.
|
| They say they made their service plans less generous to be in
| line with others. If there's no "others", they might be a
| monopoly. CD doesnt' challenge the claim there are others, but
| also calls these guys a monopoly. Which is it?
|
| I've also seen no explanation what makes this 86% slowdown so
| terrible. You may need 10 minutes rather than 75 seconds to
| upload your YouTube tutorial, but so what?
|
| If you upload 1 video a day, who cares? If you upload a lot more,
| it's a for-profit activity. Surely you can afford to pay for a
| better package than the basic "Web & email" type of residential
| service?
|
| Nothing entitles you to these services. If you don't like the
| service, cancel your subscription.
|
| Most laughable is his idea that government can somehow improve
| competition. He could write for another 30 years and still not
| write anything useful or insightful.
| cashsterling wrote:
| I live in Longmont, CO which has municipal fiber optic broadband.
| 50 USD per month for 1 Gbit symmetric internet... it's great.
| ta988 wrote:
| Is that your final cost or do you have taxes, ONT rental and so
| on?
| apeace wrote:
| If you want more ISP competition where you live, I suggest
| getting active in your town government.
|
| A while ago, I called up the town hall of the suburb where I grew
| up, and asked for a copy of their contract with Comcast. It
| technically doesn't grant them a monopoly -- that would be
| illegal -- but in effect it does. The contract says Comcast must
| serve any resident within two business days of the request. It
| also says the town can't give a better contract to another ISP (I
| forget the exact legal terms, this was years ago).
|
| That means a startup ISP can't launch neighborhood by
| neighborhood. In order to provide service in the town, you need
| to build out connectivity _everywhere_ , upfront. That is a multi
| million-dollar construction project which stands no chance of
| being paid back within a time period any investor would be
| comfortable with.
|
| Even another large ISP wouldn't want to take this risk, which is
| why they still haven't done so in my home town. Best case is that
| you get around 5-10% of residents within a couple years. Even if
| your service is much better than the incumbent's, it can be hard
| to educate consumers. Most people won't know what they're
| missing, they'll be too lazy to switch, etc.
|
| So, if you want to attempt to solve this problem in your town,
| there are a few things you can try to do:
|
| - Make it so that startup ISPs can build out neighborhood by
| neighborhood. Yes, this means the hardest-to-reach/least
| profitable areas will be served last, but it's better than
| nothing.
|
| - Get your town to fund construction. There are plenty of ISPs
| who would jump at the opportunity to serve your town if they
| didn't have to pay the capex. Have your town reach out to every
| startup ISP you can find and work on a deal.
|
| - Build a municipal ISP. It's not that hard, more and more towns
| are doing it.
| Dah00n wrote:
| It's cheaper per capita to roll out fibre to 50 million people
| than to 5 million; no-one can seriously argue otherwise. This
| alone shows how broken the system is. Not only broadband but also
| healthcare and other services _should_ be extremely cheap and
| well tested in the US in locations with a high density of people.
| That it is often as broken in high density areas as in rural
| areas baffles the mind. As a Scandinavian I 'm often chocked how
| the US _isn 't_ number one. It _really should_ be.
| iptrans wrote:
| > It's cheaper per capita to roll out fibre to 50 million
| people than to 5 million;
|
| This assumes an awful lot of things.
|
| If the average number of linear feet constructed grows when
| going from 5 million to 50 million then the cost per capita
| isn't going to decrease.
|
| What going from 5 million to 50 million enables is averaging
| high cost builds over a larger subscriber base resulting in
| affordable prices for more people. Note that this will not
| however decrease costs overall.
| [deleted]
| Ekaros wrote:
| Living in sparsely populated fenno-scandinavian country I
| really never understood how badly others can do things... Like
| Germany and USA? Germany has no excuses, and USA does have some
| large areas, but outside those?
| vijaybritto wrote:
| Whenever Google's web performance engineers talk about slow
| internet speeds we should realize that they are talking about
| themselves too.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| It's a bit disingenuous to think they're just aligning their
| offering to competitors. This is the usual trick to impede p2p
| protocols like torrent on their network, without outright saying
| so.
|
| A friend of mine runs an internet provider (in Europe though) and
| he's flooded by all the takedown requests of warez content on his
| network. Luckily he's not in Germany, so people don't get fined
| or sent threatening lawyers letters so he just notifies
| customers. Other providers just swallow them.
|
| TL;DR Most providers do limit uploads for various reasons,
| reading it as a monopolistic measure is far fetched.
|
| The problem with internet in the USA is the same as most problems
| in the USA: a huge population scattered across a huge country.
| Good luck with serving fast internet to everyone, it's not
| Europe.
|
| As a proof of this, metropolitan hubs in the USA are fine
| internet wise.
|
| Looking at how well public services are run in general, I doubt a
| public monopoly would be better than this "private" monopoly:
| last mile providers in the USA have a hard job.
| Supermancho wrote:
| > It's a bit disingenuous to think they're just aligning their
| offering to competitors.
|
| https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/altice-plans-to-cut-uploa...
|
| An Altice spokesperson said that the new upload speeds "are in-
| line with other ISPs and aligned with the industry."
| doikor wrote:
| > The problem with internet in the USA is the same as most
| problems in the USA: a huge population scattered across a huge
| country. Good luck with serving fast internet to everyone, it's
| not Europe.
|
| The population density here in Finland is half of USA and we
| still got 1gbit fiber available in pretty much any city.
|
| Nobody is expecting to have fiber into every farm but any
| city/town with more than 10k people can have fiber installed in
| a profitable way just fine.
|
| This is possible due to rules/laws that encourage competition
| not stifle it. (Mainly centered around forcing renting out the
| last mile infrastructure to your competition at reasonable
| rates)
| _-david-_ wrote:
| >The population density here in Finland is half of USA and we
| still got 1gbit fiber available in pretty much any city.
|
| In the US any new development has 1gbit fiber as well. Older
| developments are starting to get it rolled out as well but it
| is a bit slow.
|
| >Nobody is expecting to have fiber into every farm but any
| city/town with more than 10k people can have fiber installed
| in a profitable way just fine.
|
| This is a major problem in the US. A lot of towns are very
| small. In fact the vast majority are under 10k people (16,410
| out of 19,502)
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/241695/number-of-us-
| citi...
| doikor wrote:
| But in reality those 16k hold a very small part of the
| population. Them existing is not a reason you could not
| have fiber available for the majority of the population
| (and for cheap like 100mbit unlimited for $20 per month)
|
| Here in Finland only 97 towns have over 10k population (out
| of 310). And this number has gotten "better" over the last
| couple decades as we joined a bunch of small/dying places
| together.
|
| Basically for any argument about population density Finland
| just has a really low density. From western countries only
| Canada, Iceland and Australia beat us in that.
|
| (Finland is 216 out of 250 worldwide with our 16 per km^2)
| shadilay wrote:
| I'm saddened that there is no 'best practices' toolkit for the
| enterprising folks in rural America who have the skills to
| install their own fiber. The real pervasive monopoly is
| interconnection.
| iptrans wrote:
| There are a lot of (high level) resources online, but on a
| practical level you will have to deal with local permitting and
| right of way issues, so there really can't be an ultimate mater
| plan.
|
| Interestingly interconnection, or more precisely Internet
| capacity, isn't really an issue. If you have enough
| subscribers, it is fairly straightforward to purchase wholesale
| bandwidth from one of the many commercial providers.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Meanwhile, in Switzerland, 25 Gb/s fiber (symmetric) is rolled
| out around Zurich.
|
| Is this slow broadband in US a country wide thing or only certain
| areas?
| nwallin wrote:
| Varies widely. I could be fantastic in one town, but terrible
| in the next town over, even if the towns are similar in terms
| of size, density, demographics, and wealth. But in general,
| more places than not have pretty poor broadband.
|
| From what I understand, most European countries have some sort
| of system in place where one company owns the copper/fiber line
| to your house, and another company connects that line to the
| backbone. (I'm oversimplifying because I don't understand it)
| The US doesn't have that- the same company that maintains the
| copper maintains the connection to the backbone. And if there's
| only one line to your house, that company has a monopoly on
| you, and they have no financial reason to better their service.
|
| Thankfully, my house/neighborhood is serviced by at least three
| broadband providers. I pay $60 a month for 150Mb/s up, 150Mb/s
| down. Customer service is pretty good. I'm very happy with it.
|
| 25Gb/s though, that's wild. I have difficulty imagining it just
| from a technical perspective.
| gaudat wrote:
| Woah. Is it like available to everyone in the city area? How's
| the price?
| vinay427 wrote:
| Not the OP but as a resident, it's available at my address
| near the edge of the city, albeit in a larger building rather
| than an older individual home, so I imagine it's accessible
| to most people in the city limits. The city has municipal
| connections into homes that ISPs can then lease, allowing
| them to compete for customers without competing over
| infrastructure rights, so it seems to have the benefits of
| both ends of a public-private partnership.
|
| One of the most well-known providers of the fastest speeds,
| Init7, charges 64.75 CHF/mo (~70 USD) with a 333 CHF (~365
| USD) setup fee.
|
| It's fairly easy nowadays to find 10 Gbps symmetric plans for
| 50 CHF/mo, although they used to cost more a few years ago.
| kube-system wrote:
| It's mostly a population density thing.
|
| Most mid or large US cities have gigabit options, sometimes
| multiple options (in which case prices will be affordable)
|
| Small cities and towns probably won't have fiber. If you're
| lucky and the cable infrastructure is new, you might be able to
| get gigabit cable, but it's more likely that the affordable
| options are 25-300mbps.
|
| If you are in a rural village, you may or may not have cable
| availability. (Likely depending on your proximity to other
| populated areas) Without cable, you may be relying on LTE or
| DSL.
|
| And finally, if you're in an area more rural than this, the
| only utilities that come to your house are likely electricity
| and copper phone. You're either choosing between satellite or a
| (likely weak) cell signal.
| ta988 wrote:
| The problem in US with cable isnt download speeds, it is that
| the major providers limit uploads rather drasticaly (they
| never talk about how much upload they can give and talk about
| "gig" internet). I've had a 300/12 Mbps connections, that's
| pretty insane...
| [deleted]
| floatingatoll wrote:
| It's country-wide, except in the very few areas where municipal
| broadband or community-local ISPs have stepped in and run their
| own fiber.
|
| There's a fiber loop a hundred feet away that's restricted to
| businesses, but it still scares Comcast (because it's a fiber
| run by one of those local ISPs) enough that my price for a
| symmetric is half what it would be on the other side of town.
| gizdan wrote:
| Not a US citizen so take this with a grain of salt, but it
| seems to be _mostly_ country wide. A US colleague of mine lives
| less than 10 mins from our office (which is close to many other
| offices), and he is struggling to get anything beyond 20mbps.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Median download speeds in the US are generally 50-70mbps with
| a few outliers. Here's a state map.
|
| https://www.pcmag.com/news/state-by-state-the-fastest-and-
| sl...
|
| Cities will of course be higher, typically ranging from
| 100-900 for non-gigabit. Rural is more frustrating, and will
| hopefully be alleviated by the new satellite ISPs coming
| online.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| you must not live in a city -- older homes and older
| sections of a city are very late to get physical upgrades.
| 0x0nyandesu wrote:
| Used to live in Philly. Had fiber gigabit in old
| building. Please stop making assumptions.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| S/older/poorer/g
|
| Here is the fiber map for a Minneapolis ISP laying their
| own fiber: https://usinternet.com/fiber/coverage-map/
|
| The unwired parts of the city are where poor people live,
| the wired parts are where not poor people live.
| asia92 wrote:
| it makes sense though, can poorer people afford faster
| speeds?
| 1123581321 wrote:
| I've lived in many kinds of places. But please focus on
| the data I provided. There are of course exceptions to
| the general trend of speeds being higher in more densely
| connected areas.
| kube-system wrote:
| That map is pretty close to being a population map:
| https://xkcd.com/1138/
|
| I think that speed by state is a pretty bad measure for
| conveying anything useful. Speeds vary _within_ each state
| by orders of magnitude, depending on whether you can get a
| connection to a particular medium or not.
|
| I bet the full data set of speeds is not a bell curve.
| There are probably huge peaks for each medium, and I
| wouldn't be surprised if the mode and mean are
| significantly different.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Yes, it's not great, but I hoped it would serve to
| correct the misperception that such slow speeds are
| typical in the US. I hope I can find better data next
| time.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| How does that work when even 10Gbps ethernet is still cost-
| prohibitive for SOHO applications and "real" 1Gbps+ Wi-Fi just
| doesn't happen in thick-walled european houses...
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| "10Gbps ethernet is still cost-prohibitive"
|
| That is old news in 2021.
|
| Do you know about <<MikroTik 5-Port Desktop Switch, 1 Gigabit
| Ethernet Port, 4 SFP+ 10Gbps Ports (CRS305-1G-4S+IN)>>?
|
| Amazon sells it for 140 USD.
|
| It is legendary on home networking discussion boards. (They
| have a nice 8 port version also.)
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| For the past, literally 15 years, I've balked at a
| workgroup switch that cost more than $50.
|
| (Granted, since last year I've been a convert to Ubiquiti
| gear, but that wasn't a valid option when I was a teenager
| living with my parents, trying to convince my dad on good
| tech to buy within a reasonable budget)
| Aardwolf wrote:
| It requires getting some relatively expensive hardware, and
| you wouldn't use this wirelessly
|
| https://www.englishforum.ch/tv-internet-
| telephone/304268-ini...
| Dah00n wrote:
| It should be obvious but it isn't meant for WiFi. I use fibre
| and cat6 in my house for everything except smartphones.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > I use fibre and cat6 in my house for everything except
| smartphones.
|
| I assure you that your customer profile is not
| representative of the vast majority of your ISP's
| customers.
| tolien wrote:
| > I assure you that your customer profile is not
| representative of the vast majority of your ISP's
| customers.
|
| The top tier is almost always a tiny minority [1] of any
| ISP's customers but it's convenient marketing and usually
| has by far the highest margins. It's like arguing Bugatti
| buyers aren't the majority of Volkswagen Auto Group's
| customers: it's true but what difference does that make?
|
| 1: Virgin Media offers tiers from 100Mbps to 1Gbps but
| "The average speed across our U.K. broadband base
| continues to increase and was 186 Mbps at the end of Q1",
| https://www.libertyglobal.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2021/05/Fix...
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > It's like arguing Bugatti buyers aren't the majority of
| Volkswagen Auto Group's customers: it's true but what
| difference does that make?
|
| Actually, you raise a good point of discussion: But I'll
| argue that UK residential ISPs touting their highest-
| tiers as "proof" they're being competitive, even though
| only a tiny minority of punters shell out for it, as
| being self-serving and ultimately against the national
| interest.
|
| With Bugatti: people are buying an asset. You're paying
| for the quality of the engineering workmanship that goes
| into the final product - but once you've given your $1-3m
| over to Herbert Diess you're no-longer an ongoing concern
| to them, beyond the dealer's servicing fees - and your
| investment in a single vehicle means little to the road
| and highways infrastructure where you live - even if your
| jurisdiction implements vehicle-value-based property tax
| and road-usage-tax it won't mean much at the end-of-the-
| day - but with residential broadband it's something
| else...
| Bayart wrote:
| I have a bunch of WiFi ac and ax devices in the house and
| they collectively can easily saturate my 1G WAN link. While I
| don't have a workflow they would warrant 10G, the overhead is
| getting desirable.
| gallexme wrote:
| 10gbit is just on the border of affordable for IT hobbyist
| people
|
| Lots of data center hardware getting sold in masses on eBay.
|
| And copper cables these days also can do 10gbit, but even
| fiber at home you can get the Transceivers for about 15EUR
| each, and a switch for another 200EURused, some old PC as
| Router with cheap 10gbit card also works wonders
| bserge wrote:
| The problem here is most people want new. Why? I have no
| idea. Maybe they're thinking of everyone buying one.
|
| I've been looking at making a NAS box and it would cost
| less than 200 Euros for decent hardware (better than some
| QNAP, including a 10Gbps fiber adapter and Wifi) and a
| completely custom aluminum case.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| I hope I'm not taken the wrong way - but in certain
| geographies technologist salaries/total-comp are such
| that it costs us more money to search for bargains than
| it does to plonk down $hundreds for brand-name SMB
| hardware for our SOHO gear.
|
| That is is why we buy new kit instead of used. I could
| spend 2-3 hours of my time scanning eBay and Craigslist
| and comparing spreadsheets of compatible equipement and
| then waiting for USPS mail deliveries (at my $200/hr
| consulting rate) or I could spent 5-10 minutes on
| Ubiquiti's online store and be done with it.
|
| It's ugly and I dislike it (the thrill of the chase...).
| But that's capitalism. Frankly I won't be able to "enjoy"
| this again until I'm after retirement...
| bserge wrote:
| That makes sense (and explains a lot, actually).
|
| But in that case you're not complaining about the cost of
| hardware, I think.
|
| I was commenting more on people who think it's too
| expensive but still want new.
|
| Since we're on topic, having been born in the land of no
| opportunities, I've learned to save on everything.
|
| And I've learned to build/make anything, quite literally.
| It's not that hard and it's really satisfying, but sadly
| time consuming.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| What part is cost prohibitive? It really doesn't have to be
| too expensive to have a modem like device that attaches fiber
| and a number of (10) gigabit lan ports and fast WiFi.
|
| Its an amount of bandwidth that's difficult to fill but
| that'll change.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Prices for 10Gbps switches are in the hundeds of Euros,
| compared to the prices for 1Gbps switches - or the type of
| 4 or 5-port switches embedded in ISP-provided CPE.
| iptrans wrote:
| Nah. You can get a 4 port 10G switch for about $100 from
| a known vendor.
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| Who is doing 25gbit to the home?
| detaro wrote:
| Init7 offers it since a few weeks ago.
| raptor99 wrote:
| Just to add another anecdote, I live 30 to 45 minutes (miles)
| outside of a major US city, just at the cusp of the metropolitan
| area. I live in a county, not in any city limits, etc.
|
| We have access to at least two different providers offering
| gigabit service, along with many different speed services below
| that. We also have various satellite and cellular data options as
| well.
|
| As stated many times before in various comments, articles etc:
| Sure, ISPs can definitely do better, but considering the landmass
| of the US and the different population densities, I think things
| are going pretty well. If you want to move rural enough, then a
| lot of things are going to become an issue utility wise,
| including electric, gas, water, internet, etc. The saying goes
| that you can't have your cake and eat it too. From prevailing
| comments and articles online it seems people want to be able to
| blindly pick literally anywhere on a map to live and also expect
| 100 Mb to gigabit service, not considering any sort of
| infrastructure that is around the area they have picked to live.
| jedimind wrote:
| ISPs get away with too much BS nowadays and lobbying[0] is one of
| the main reasons why. The US is not even in the top 10 of
| countries ranked[1] by internet speed. I honestly think that if
| we changed a few rules around lobbying many problems would be
| solved pretty quickly and not only regarding the internet.
|
| [0]https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/verizon-
| communications/summ...
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_..
| .
| Scoundreller wrote:
| It's strange as Altice is a French company (or partly owned by a
| French company by the same name) which owns/operates SFR in
| France.
|
| I guess their French services are inline with French competition,
| except that means increasing speeds at lower prices, because
| competition.
|
| The 1yr 'teaser rate' is ~US$19/month for 500/500, 160 TV
| channels and a home phone with unlimited calls. After a year it
| goes up to ~US$45, but because competition, you can threaten to
| leave or actually leave and get promo prices again. And it's
| europe, these prices include a 20% sales tax.
|
| And that's kinda expensive, you should probably go with free.fr
| instead.
|
| https://www.sfr.fr/offre-internet
|
| It wasn't always like this is in France. Telecom used to be quite
| terrible actually, so the government opened up everything. That's
| why you rarely see a case study on French telecom policy
| elsewhere in the world, nobody in industry wants to talk about
| it.
| xondono wrote:
| Claiming that America has slow connections compared to Europe
| without acknowledging the obvious differences in infrastructure
| cost is ridiculous.
|
| Europe is way more dense than America, just look at any light
| pollution map and compare. Europe has also a LOT of previously
| built roads that make deployments way cheaper.
|
| Once you take that into account, the ISP market in the US is not
| _that_ dysfunctional, it's just that economies of scale matter
| too much.
| adventured wrote:
| It's also worth pointing out that the US has faster Internet
| speeds than France, Germany, Spain or Italy. That has been true
| for at least 20 years running at this point.
|
| The two largest economies in Europe have always had inferior
| Internet speeds to the US. France in particular has spent
| decades as a badly lagging second class Internet citizen on
| speeds. As recently as four years ago France was one of the
| absolute worst places in the affluent world for Internet
| speeds, while the US has routinely ranked near the top dozen
| affluent nations (competing mostly with far smaller nations,
| with far greater population density concentrated in a few major
| cities, such as Switzerland or Norway in the case of Europe).
| undfg wrote:
| It's really funny to read "I live in the middle of no fucking
| where and I all I have is a shitty DSL. Why won't the ISP pay
| $100k to deploy a cable just for me?"
|
| They think it's any better in Europe? In the places where it is
| better it's because the government has given the isps a lot of
| money. Money that would be much better spent elsewhere, as I
| believe if you want good services you have to move to the
| cities - you shouldn't ask the rest of the country to subsidise
| your lifestyle.
| Bayart wrote:
| The reverse argument makes as much, if not more, sense :
| rents in cities are far too high, the economy is too
| concentrated and it has negative side effects on quality of
| life, health, political stability, wealth disparity and
| growth. Deploying more infrastructure to cheaper areas and
| insentivizing decentralization helps solving that.
| anonymoushn wrote:
| Lots of people live in cities in the US and only have a
| shitty DSL.
| rhino369 wrote:
| Every single AirBnB I've stayed at in Europe has shitty DSL
| too.
| bserge wrote:
| Look at Romania. It is pretty similar to the US in density
| and number of small towns per capita I believe, and ISPs
| deliver fiber to shitty little towns with 5000 people for the
| same price as in the city. Somehow the United States can't do
| that?
|
| Then look at Germany, they're squeezing up to 300 Mbps out of
| copper (really impressive tbh, but it's no fiber) and 4G is
| atrocious. The UK fairs much better in both. Spain seems to
| be quietly ahead of both in fiber.
|
| It's all about people and politics, not technology or
| distance when it comes to good Internet.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| ISPs and carriers in the US have no problem deploying 5G
| nationwide. If only the first strand is expensive in a fiber
| deployment, why duplicate work by not installing residential
| fiber at the same time?
|
| Also in the US, the availability of high speed, low cost fiber
| options versus slow, expensive copper can be accurately guessed
| based on nothing but the median home price in a neighborhood.
| When fully occupied apartment buildings lack fiber but not the
| townhomes across the street, "population density" is not a
| satisfactory explanation.
| iptrans wrote:
| > If only the first strand is expensive in a fiber
| deployment, why duplicate work by not installing residential
| fiber at the same time?
|
| Because 5G is expected to be more profitable than fiber and
| deploying fiber would require more CAPEX.
| bserge wrote:
| This argument every single time. If you take into account
| people, high pop density is a downside. Laying fiber from one
| town to another you have to go through hundreds of private
| properties.
| rhino369 wrote:
| The cost of fiber from town to town is a small part of the
| cost. And it's already done for the most part.
|
| That isn't what is holding up fiber deployments to
| residential houses.
| rhino369 wrote:
| Canada and Australia have the same issues as the us. It's
| mostly a geography issue.
|
| I've also never seen convincing evidence that US is really
| worse on average than other large countries-- Germany, France,
| Italy, Spain. All the speed test rankings place us around the
| same.
|
| When you consider pricing--you need to consider average income.
| ISP costs are mostly tied to local wages. So you can't compare
| US prices to Romania.
| iptrans wrote:
| This appeal to American exceptionalism does not stand up to
| scrutiny.
|
| A lot of European countries have far lower population densities
| that the US, but still better infrastructure and broadband.
|
| The US just is _that_ dysfunctional.
| xondono wrote:
| Some places in europe have lower population densities
| _because of low population_ , not because of massive
| distances.
|
| The problem in the US is that distances are _way_ longer.
| iptrans wrote:
| The US has a well developed and competitive national
| backbone market.
|
| When building networks the geographical extremities of the
| nation do not matter, only the distance to the closest
| point of presence.
|
| Europe and the US are not that dissimilar in geographical
| extent or population density, so neither of these can be
| used as convincing arguments for American exceptionalism.
|
| The fact remains that the US is just _that_ dysfunctional
| compared to Europe.
| 1ncorrect wrote:
| Normalising the dimensioning data links by arbitrary fractional
| throughput rates is an anachronism which needs to be challenged
| and eradicated from the entire industry.
| maltalex wrote:
| How is this not investigated as an antitrust violation?
|
| North America has some of the highest telecom prices in the world
| with some of the slowest speeds and worst service. There's
| clearly something very wrong with the market.
| Dah00n wrote:
| It would create huge shockwaves in the US if these problems
| were fixed, like fixed for real. It's an ingrained part of the
| North American market. You would, IMO, have to go all the way
| to removing all money, except state funds, from politics to
| start to fix this. Top to bottom fixed are needed. Turtles all
| the way down.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| At least in the areas so rural that the power companies
| didn't want to build out infrastructure either, where
| electricity only became available after FDR's Rural
| Electrification Act formed non-profit local electrical coops,
| the problem can be solved by allowing those still existing
| coops to get into the broadband business.
|
| Mississippi changed the law to allow this, and gave out
| matching block grants to get the ball rolling, and has seen
| great results.
|
| https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/how-coronavirus-
| stimulus-...
| hytdstd wrote:
| can you elaborate on this? in particular, why are state funds
| excluded?
| sokoloff wrote:
| The comment makes sense to me if I read "state" as
| "government entity" rather than "individual state in the
| union".
|
| Elections cost money to run, someone has to pay for that,
| so allowing funding but forcing all the money coming into
| the system to come from the government makes it harder for
| private individual or group X to subvert it in a "I scratch
| your back here and you remember this later" way.
|
| I suspect that first amendment will bar bans on advertising
| that would be necessary for this to be fully effective
| (without another amendment, of course), but a lot of
| progress is still possible without running afoul of 1A.
| api wrote:
| Corruption is basically legal in the US. You will go to jail
| for trying to bribe a judge but there are dozens of totally
| legal ways to bribe politicians. This is one of the most
| significant problems with American politics and is why quite a
| few things are perverse and broken.
| andromeduck wrote:
| The market failed because of how difficulty it is to establish
| last mine given municipal regulation, permitting and other
| bullshit.
|
| If we want to fix broadband and cellular, decouple utility pole
| ownership/permitting from retail providers.
| iptrans wrote:
| The above is, in conciliatory terms, hyperbole.
|
| In reductionist terms the real underlying reason for market
| failure is regulatory capture.
|
| As to utility poles, a large number of poles are owned by
| power companies who by and large do not offer retail
| broadband services, so even here you are barking up the wrong
| tree.
|
| That being said, there are issues with utility poles which
| need to be addressed. Efforts such as one touch make ready
| and the like are needed on a national level.
| unishark wrote:
| Seems to me you're making the same point as the parent
| poster.
|
| I think by "ownership" they mean monopolization of the
| poles due to agreements with the local govt to provide
| service in return for monopoly rights.
| iptrans wrote:
| Not really.
|
| The parent to my original post identified a problem, but
| misdiagnosed the root cause and prescribed an incorrect
| solution.
|
| As noted above a lot of poles are owned by power
| companies that do not offer broadband service.
| Furthermore exclusive franchises have not been permitted
| for a good while anymore.
|
| Anybody with the correct permits can secure space on
| poles. This isn't the issue. Part of the problems is how
| costs are assigned and how timely work progresses.
|
| Who owns the pole isn't the big issue.
| tialaramex wrote:
| I'm guessing by "decouple utility pole ownership/permitting"
| you're thinking about the Last Mile.
|
| This is almost exactly what happened in Britain.
|
| The last mile _telephone system_ is owned by Openreach, which
| is owned by British Telecom, but they 're required to sell
| the things you'd actually want that system _for_ at regulated
| wholesale prices to any outfit that wants to retail it.
|
| So for example they'll sell you LLU (Local-loop Unbundled)
| service which means you can put data onto a copper cable
| between a home or business property and one of the thousands
| of physical telephone exchanges that used to house Strowger
| electro-mechanical switches when that's how telephones
| worked. You also get some footprint inside the exchange. How
| you make that into an ISP is your business, but unlike
| running cables to millions of houses, running fibre to a few
| thousand telephone exchanges is something a business might
| actually compete at and sure enough BT have competition for
| that part of the problem, at least outside the very rural
| areas.
|
| Or if you're a small outfit and you don't want contracts to
| shove data over fibres around the country you can buy
| Wholesale Line Rental for a higher price and Openreach will
| deliver the bits from that copper cable to a single point
| elsewhere on the telephone network, then you just build your
| ISP at that location.
|
| Since Openreach isn't allowed to sell retail products, the
| regulator mostly needs to make sure that it doesn't
| deliberately tweak these prices to benefit its owner, BT,
| which does sell retail products to consumers. For example
| maybe BT doesn't need Wholesale Line Rental, the regulator
| needs to make sure the price for it makes sense anyway as
| smaller ISPs would otherwise be run out of business.
|
| Overall I'm very satisfied with the results. Britain's cable
| Internet is a monopoly instead (Virgin) but of course almost
| everywhere that can get cable has a telephone line, so at
| least they are competing with somebody. More than 95% of
| households could actually get Superfast broadband (ie 30Mbps
| or better if the WiFi wasn't in an upstairs bedroom connected
| via a 1970s bell wire phone extension)
| rektide wrote:
| the US had this local loop unbundling. anyone could build,
| and anyone else could access those incumbent carrier's
| lines to provide service at regulated wholesale rates. this
| was created by the 1996 Telecommunications Act.
|
| but then fiber came along, and Verizon vs FCC (2002) slowly
| made it's way through courts, got to the supreme court, and
| the supreme court sided with Verizon, who said fiber was so
| fancy, so costly, so new, that they required a monopoly.
| the Supreme Court overruled Congress & upturned the
| Tecommimications Act & have fiber a local monopoly, and
| things in the US have been getting slowly worse ever since.
| tolien wrote:
| In the UK the wholesale access part applies even to
| FTTC/P, so you can get fibre all the way to your door
| operated by Openreach and connected to BT Wholesale but
| with packets being passed to your choice of ISP for
| internet access.
|
| There are some additional requirements - I think in the
| early days you had to take a modem from BT and there's a
| minimum commitment (used to be 18 months).
| toast0 wrote:
| In the US, the 1996 telecoms act setup similar, but weaker,
| requirements for incumbent local (telephone) exchange
| carriers. But a series of regulatory and court decisions
| ended up with almost all of that being vacated. Basically
| cable worked to get excluded because they were 'new', and
| then telco worked to get excluded because it wasn't fair to
| make them do it when cable didn't have to, and the
| regulator said between cable, telco, power line (hah!) and
| radio (hah, but slightly less hah) users had choices and
| everything was fine.
|
| And the key weakneses were that the companies weren't
| restrucured, so retail could charge less than wholesale
| rates and corporate accounting would sort it out, that
| makes it really hard to compete; and even bigger was that
| access was only on a space avaialable basis, and new
| facilities (namely DSL remote terminals) were purpose built
| to provide desirable products to end users while minimizing
| space such that there was no requirement to provide
| competitive access since there was no space.
|
| From accross the pond, OpenReach seems like a big success,
| and what we could have had, but didn't end up with.
| johndunne wrote:
| My limited understanding of US politics (UK resident, Irish
| citizen here) is that lobby groups, once considered criminal
| organisations to the US senate, have gained 'acceptence' via
| decades of regulation creep i.e. the backdoor. This is why such
| loud responses have appeared from the 'Net neutraility'
| movement. The consequence is; more for the haves, less for the
| have-nots. Participation in democracy is a requirement, not an
| option... it can get exhausting though...
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Why do people think there's something inherently wrong with
| lobbying. Lobbying the government with your opinions is an
| essential right and a key part of how a government needs to
| work.
| johndunne wrote:
| I think the problem is when you're not particularly
| familiar with the US senate lingo or a non US native. In
| this case, the term 'lobbying' might most often be heard
| abroad when discussions are around the problem of the 'big
| money' behind lobbying. And it's this practise that was
| unlawful a few decades ago, not the lobbying itself. My
| bad, educated a little more and thankful.
| rhino369 wrote:
| Lobbying is protracted by the first amendment---"petition the
| Government for a redress of grievances."
|
| They money is the big issue.
| johndunne wrote:
| I am actually referring to the 'Big Money' lobbying when I
| say 'lobbying'. My confusion, thanks for the highlight.
| _wldu wrote:
| I live in a rural college town on the East Coast USA. I paid
| Verizon 90 USD per month for 1.5Mbit DSL and a home phone
| number.
|
| I had this phone service for about 12 years. It was horrible.
| When the phone rang, the DSL would stop working. When I ended
| calls, the DSL would stop working. There was so much static on
| the line I could barely talk/hear others. But it grew worse and
| started impacting my ability to work from home after COVID.
|
| Verizon said they could "roll a truck" to my house in about two
| months if I agreed to pay several hundred dollars upfront. I
| told them no. I had had enough. I ported my phone number to
| Consumer Cellular and use 4G for Internet access now. It's
| faster, $30 cheaper each month and much more reliable although
| I do limit my use as it has a 35 GB per month cap and "may"
| slow down if I go over that. I wonder, would it slow down more
| than Verizon's 1.5Mbit?
|
| I'm still Waiting on Elon and Starlink to save us.
| umvi wrote:
| I feel like geo internet such as HughesNet would be both
| cheaper and better than what you describe. Geo is high
| latency but at least better bandwidth than 1.5Mbps
| mgamache wrote:
| the latency would make real-time audio/video impossible.
| That's not a solution in the world of Zoom/discord.
| raptor99 wrote:
| Is Verizon the only option there for the last 12 years?
| fossuser wrote:
| We got Starlink in Placerville California and it's great.
|
| Just make sure you place the dish in a location with zero
| obstructions.
|
| 50-180mbps down and 24-40ms latency. ~25mbps up.
| ncmncm wrote:
| We just _didn 't_ get Starlink in Placerville, because we
| are surrounded by 100-ft tall trees. So we are still stuck
| on microwave links. (ATT ran fiber to within yards of the
| house more than a decade ago, and never lit it because the
| FCC allowed them not to. They pocketed the $half-trillion
| the FCC let them tax landlines for to build it, though.)
|
| But it is good news that Pville is in a served area now.
| Where did you find a prairie in Pville?
| missedthecue wrote:
| The fcc never gave them half a trillion. The fcc never
| had half a trillion to give. Can you show me where in
| ATTs financial statements they gained $500 billion or
| anywhere near that?
| ncmncm wrote:
| It was a $half billion. And obviously the FCC never gave
| it to anybody; as I wrote _right there in the very
| posting_ you replied to, landline subscribers were taxed
| for it.
|
| A $half billion seemed like a lot of money back then.
| mmmBacon wrote:
| Are you familiar with the concept of hyperbole?
|
| A hyperbole is an exaggerated statement or claim not
| meant to be taken literally.
| iso1210 wrote:
| https://towerdirect.net/product/used-120ft-sabre-self-
| suppor...
| fossuser wrote:
| We're lucky - it's at the top of a hill overlooking a
| giant valley up mosquito road I think on the west side of
| town? It took a few tries and there is still a minor
| obstruction which causes occasional 10s drops. It's my
| in-laws house (I just bought the starlink set up for them
| so there would be better connectivity when I'm there).
|
| If I had control over placement and such I think I could
| get a view without obstruction.
|
| They still have calnet as a fallback network, but it's
| slow and has similar latency.
| f6v wrote:
| > 90 USD per month for 1.5Mbit DSL
|
| I can't believe it. I paid an equivalent of couple dollars
| per month for that 15 years ago in Eastern Europe.
| joshspankit wrote:
| There's both a legitimate challenge (the land masses are
| huge in countries like Canada and the US) and functional
| monopolies that are leveraged by the companies who own the
| infrastructure that stretches out over those land masses.
|
| Canada is an easier example because it's essentially
| serviced by 3 companies who then lease out to the smaller
| "competitors": for rural areas some people have the choice
| of either DSL over oxidized above-ground lines or tower-to-
| dish internet where the tower is daisy-chained from another
| tower or from it's own oxidized lines. There is no cell
| coverage at all, and poor phone service. If someone in an
| area like that wants internet the company says that ~"the
| cost of the service must cover all the infrastructure and
| maintenance" and then they base that cost on only a few
| percent of people actually using it. In that way it's hard
| to argue against "well, it costs us $1500/mo to provide
| service to 10 users, so we're losing money when we charge a
| 'reasonable' $120". But what's really happening is that
| people in those areas are bandwidth starved, signing up for
| anyone who can provide decent service, and signing up in
| bulk while the company oversubscribes. It's easy for them
| to still show losses publicly, but on the back end they are
| collecting government subsidies and using free capital to
| extend the network as far as they can.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Rural?
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Yes
| iso1210 wrote:
| OP said he was in a town
| itsoktocry wrote:
| > _I 'm still Waiting on Elon and Starlink to save us._
|
| What leads you to believe Elon's internet will, in any way,
| be pro consumer? Tesla certainly isn't, and their customer
| service is not good.
| api wrote:
| Starlink is already faster and will provide some
| competition too.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Competition is always good and will force other providers
| to up their game.
| TurkTurkleton wrote:
| Starlink, unfortunately, will not present meaningful
| competition. It will really only be viable in sparsely
| populated areas--even once the full constellation is
| deployed, there simply won't be the bandwidth for large
| numbers of users in densely populated areas like major
| cities--and both Starlink spokespeople and Musk himself
| have not been particularly coy about that fact...though I
| suppose neither have they tried particularly hard to push
| back against the prevailing tech-media narrative that
| once Starlink is fully armed and operational it will have
| Comcast, Spectrum, Cox, et al. quaking in their boots.
| toast0 wrote:
| I think Starlink has a chance to raise the floor in rural
| areas.
|
| Telcos (usually) do an OK job when there's a competing
| cable company, and vice versa, but when it's just one
| offering, there's often low reliability, low speed or
| both. This is most often in rural areas, where Starlink
| should be viable.
|
| Some urban areas do fall into the same single provider,
| low quality offering, and Starlink won't be viable there.
| kube-system wrote:
| Starlink will be good for people in rural areas, but it
| won't positively change the existing economics of
| terrestrial internet service.
|
| Frontier doesn't offer slow DSL to rural areas because
| they're rolling in cash from having no competitors. And
| when they lose customers to Starlink, it's going to make
| their subscriber revenue to infrastructure expenditure
| ratio even worse.
| tw04 wrote:
| > Frontier doesn't offer slow DSL to rural areas because
| they're rolling in cash from having no competitors.
|
| They actually do. The reason they're going bankrupt is
| because competitors have started showing up due to the
| Connect America Fund causing them to lose customers in
| droves.
|
| Simultaneously they took funds themselves and didn't
| bother using them to upgrade infrastructure.
|
| Source: previous frontier customer who couldn't leave
| fast enough. Also convinced every single neighbor to do
| the same, even the ones who thought it was "fine" and
| wanted to be "loyal".
| kube-system wrote:
| Rural broadband (non-satellite) has always required more
| infrastructure per subscriber. More revenue, like through
| the subsidies you mention, are the only way to fix the
| problem. The lack of competition in rural areas is more
| of a symptom of the inherent infrastructure problem,
| rather than the cause.
|
| The Connect America Fund is also known as the "universal
| service high-cost program"
| toast0 wrote:
| If I'm Frontier, why spend on infra to provide a better
| product to people in areas with no competitors? That's
| just money spent with no change in revenue.
|
| Now if there's a viable competitor, it's a choice between
| spending the money to keep customers or not spending the
| money and losing the customers over time. Terrestrial
| networking _can_ easily beat Starlink on bandwidth,
| availability, latency, jitter, etc, all the quality
| metrics (except portability), but only if the terrestrial
| network makes the effort.
|
| Telcos have the ability to quickly roll out new networks
| when they're inspired. AT&T ran fiber to the home (GPON)
| in several markets within about 18 months when Google
| Fiber announced they were entering those markets (which
| they then decided not to). Telcos have an army of people
| (many consultants) who can run outdoor wiring and do home
| installation, they have easy access to poles, and
| (mostly) a decent database of addresses and line lengths
| to get multifiber lines factory manufactured to roll out
| with minimal field splicing.
|
| And that's the hard way; things like better remote
| terminal equipment and/or backhaul don't require a lot of
| capital or labor individually (but may in aggregate), or
| just more adaptive DSL speed profiles just developer
| labor and configuration pushes. I could probably get 50%
| more downstream speed and 2-3x my upstream speed, but my
| ISP has inflexible speed profiles; that's probably not
| the issue for people on 1.5 M dsl, but it's got to be an
| issue for some.
| kube-system wrote:
| If you're not familiar with Frontier -- they _currently_
| aren 't profitable and recently filed bankruptcy. Their
| network consists mainly of the old rural systems that the
| big telecoms didn't want due to a lack of profitability.
| The big and profitable telecoms have concentrated their
| service to denser areas, and pulled out of lesser
| profitable rural areas entirely, even though they had a
| monopoly in those areas.
|
| Their bad service is not the result of a lack of
| competition, it's a lack of a profitable business model.
| It is simply more expensive to connect 1 customer with a
| mile of wire than it is to connect 100 or 1000 customers
| with a mile of wire. I don't think there's any way to
| solve this problem without subsidization of rural
| internet.
| 29083011397778 wrote:
| We went from .4Mb download, with a 7 _second_ ping, to
| ~100Mb and ~20ms ping when we changed from Telus (Alberta,
| Canada) to Starlink.
|
| Maybe Starlink won't be perfect, but the bar is lower than
| you can even imagine.
| SXX wrote:
| > When the phone rang, the DSL would stop working. When I
| ended calls, the DSL would stop working.
|
| In Russia such issues were just solved by adding some passive
| "splitter" device that supposedly filtered some of voice call
| from DSL data transfer. Every DSL ISP did it.
| ncmncm wrote:
| All DSL subscribers _everywhere_ get those.
| brewdad wrote:
| Same. I still have a couple of DSL splitters Verizon gave
| me when I had DSL ~20 years ago. They should have been
| included with the installation. One can probably find the
| splitters online for a few bucks if they need them.
| tyfytyf wrote:
| You can also try https://startyourownisp.com/
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| People say the same about Germany, frequently on HN. Terrible
| broadband speeds and lack of competition.
| fuzzy2 wrote:
| It's not true though. Due to unique circumstances and
| regulation you usually have lots of "virtual ISPs" to choose
| from.
|
| There is no real incentive to upgrade the network outside
| urban areas though, that's true.
| pydry wrote:
| IIRC anti-trust is only violated when you use an existing
| monopoly to muscle in on new markets.
|
| Also because political donations.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| Antitrust laws are incredibly vague. Here's the relevant part
| of the Sherman Act as an example.
|
| >Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize,
| or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to
| monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the
| several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed
| guilty of a felony,
| giobox wrote:
| You can't begin to understand anti-trust law in US without
| looking at the extensive body of case law too - like any
| common law system, just reading the statute doesn't tell
| you the whole story.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| The same is true for environmental law.
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| > That's why America, the birthplace of the internet, has some of
| the slowest, most expensive broadband in the rich world,
|
| You see this repeated everywhere, but is it actually true? At
| least for speed, the data I've seen recently indicates the answer
| is "no". The Wikipedia page with charts from speedtest.net and
| speedtestnet.io has the US actually doing very well, not at the
| very top, but close to it:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Interne...
|
| The US is in the #11 spot in both charts, with speeds of 192 Mbps
| and 171 Mbps, respectively.
| Dah00n wrote:
| I don't know what the reality is but I doubt something just a
| bit technical (as running a speedtest) shows the average speed
| for everyone. My guess is it is worse than it appears but that
| the people with some technical expertise is better off in the
| US than in many other countries _but_ that the average user is
| worse off. I can 't prove that either way though.
| ev1 wrote:
| The average user will not be visiting speedtest.net, they
| will be visiting "whatever internal site their ISP tells them
| to"
| adreamingsoul wrote:
| Birthplace of the Internet?
| Reason077 wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
| adreamingsoul wrote:
| It was a collective effort by many people (of varying
| nationalities) across many countries (US, UK, France,
| etc../).
|
| But I digress, Arpanet was the first WAN and so I guess I
| see your point.
| adventured wrote:
| Funny, I've now lived long enough to see people
| attempting to openly deny the US its central credit for
| creating the Internet.
|
| It was a collective human effort! Comedy gold.
| zepto wrote:
| > It was a collective effort by many people (of varying
| nationalities) across many countries (US, UK, France,
| etc../).
|
| What are you talking about? The internet started with
| Arpanet. Later, other countries built their own TCP/IP
| networks and connected the.
|
| There is no ambiguity and no collective effort across
| many countries except for the fact that many countries
| later built their own parts of the network. The internet
| began in the US.
| adreamingsoul wrote:
| TCP/IP is just one part of that system.
|
| Arpanet as a project built upon existing ideas to create
| a wide-area network. Yes, this project began in the US
| and it built upon the work of others.
|
| I wasn't there and I'm not a historian, but when I try to
| understand the facts I see many nationalities and
| countries having contributed to what we ultimately call
| the Internet.
| zepto wrote:
| > ideas to create a wide-area network
|
| Having ideas to create something is very different from
| actually building it.
|
| _Everything_ is built on existing ideas. It is
| meaningless to reference this.
|
| > I see many nationalities and countries having
| contributed to what we ultimately call the Internet.
|
| We aren't talking about 'what we ultimately call the
| internet'. This discussion is about the birthplace of the
| internet which is unequivocally the US, and which you
| denied.
|
| The birthplace of the internet was the US. The birthplace
| of the web was Switzerland. It's complete bullshit to
| pretend otherwise.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Access is what matters.
|
| Consider two groups of ten people. Group A consists of ten
| people, who each have a Ferrari. In this group, the average car
| is a Ferrari. But in Group B there are also ten people, one of
| them has ten Ferraris, nine others own a 2CV. In this group the
| average car is also a Ferrari.
|
| But Group B's cars _suck_. 90% of people in Group B do not have
| access to the "average" of a Ferrari.
|
| There are two elements to access and the US doesn't do great at
| either of them. One element is: Can you actually get a decent
| service? If the best service you could actually buy is a 2Mbps
| ADSL connection then, "No", you can't, even if your best friend
| has 1Gbps symmetric. The US is almost inevitably going to suck
| in this respect for some of its most rural residents, but
| nobody in a suburb let alone inside a city ought to be
| suffering this under a rational approach. Second element is:
| Can you _afford_ decent service? Maybe 1Gbps is technically on
| offer in your neighbourhood, for the same price as your rent.
| Obviously you won 't buy that. In some cases this is going to
| be impacted by other economic decisions. If your country's idea
| of a "living wage" doesn't include paying for Internet service
| then that's maybe a problem in 2021.
| Zarel wrote:
| The best way to handle all these issues is to use the median
| rather than the mean. If most people have no Ferraris, then
| the median person has no Ferrari. If most people can't afford
| gigabit, then the median person has no gigabit internet.
|
| And yes, the US has much lower median speed (Speedtest.net
| reports an "average" of 191 Mbps in 11th place, and
| FairInternetReport reports a "median" of 30 Mbps in 23rd
| place)
|
| https://fairinternetreport.com/research/internet-speed-by-
| co...
|
| The US's median speed doubled during the pandemic, though -
| it was apparently much lower before that.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Interesting about the pandemic. So that suggests the access
| problem was less bad than I had thought, since presumably
| lots of people were able to _buy_ better Internet service,
| once it was important to them.
|
| 30Mbps seems fine to me. I only have slightly more than
| that here, and I have never felt the need to buy more even
| though I could afford it. Of course that's for one person,
| the median US household size is considerably more.
| 29083011397778 wrote:
| I've only given the following a cursory glance, but it
| doesn't look like consumers had much to do with the speed
| increase. Instead, Comcast was concerned with being
| called out on price gouging in Baltimore [0]. Or they
| increased their minimum speed without increasing the
| price [1,2] - which I'd think implies Baltimore had a
| point about the price gouging.
|
| So while some people may have been able to buy better
| internet before, the data doesn't support that it was
| affordable, if it was even available at all.
|
| [0] https://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2021/02/02/comcast-
| internet-s...
|
| [1]
| https://corporate.comcast.com/press/releases/internet-
| essent...
|
| [2] https://philadelphia.chalkbeat.org/2021/2/4/22266246/
| after-p...
| tushar-r wrote:
| >speedtest.net and speedtestnet.io
|
| From what I've heard, many ISP's either host their own
| Speedtest servers or prioritize this traffic to make numbers
| seem better.
| RKearney wrote:
| No ISP on the planet can guarantee speeds across the
| internet. They can only guarantee speeds on their own
| network. I suspect most people that use speedtest.net
| understand this as it quite literally shows that your ISP is
| hosting the test (assuming your ISP has one).
| wholinator2 wrote:
| Really? I've never seen my ISP listed on that site or seen
| in any obvious way that my ISP is hosting the test. Maybe
| it's there but if it is, it's either hidden, or done in a
| way such that it's non obvious your getting "fake" speeds
| compared to the rest of the internet. There's no disclaimer
| that because it runs on their servers you'll get higher
| than normal speeds in the test. And in my experience where
| I live the average consumer has no idea those tests are
| bullshit.
|
| If it's actually a test of internet speed, why are they
| choosing to run it in a way that does not reflect the true
| speed you will see when using the internet. I remember
| reading a reddit post where a person said he noticed that
| the speed tests were ridiculously faster and thus decided
| to proxy all his internet through that address. Anecdata
| but it was stated it _vastly_ increased his internet speeds
| until the ISP caught on and stopped it somehow. The
| question was how they might continue to get around it.
|
| It's obvious the ISP are not providing even a fraction of
| the advertised speeds to an advanced user but average
| people tend to really believe they will see those speedtest
| speeds throughout the rest of the internet.
| pydry wrote:
| If you're interested in other markets where this dynamic occurs,
| there are quite a few:
|
| https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/02/private-equity-crapi...
|
| https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/01/the-crapification-of...
|
| https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/02/james-surowiecki-pro...
|
| It's a mirror image of "shrinkflation" - the process whereby
| hiking of the price of chips gets partially disguised by reducing
| the number of chips in a bag rather than increasing the sticker
| price.
| luke2m wrote:
| Great article. But can't he find some other place to blog?
| deadalus wrote:
| https://outline.com/mUNVS7
| rbut wrote:
| > So why is Altice slashing upload speeds? To be "in line with
| other ISPs." In other words, "The rest of the industry is fucking
| awful, so why should we be any better?"
|
| Wouldn't the real reason with DOCSIS be so they have more
| downstream channels and less upstream? Giving them more
| downstream bandwidth to sell. Why didn't the article mention
| this?
| zekica wrote:
| This is only an issue when providers use a configuration called
| low-split, which majority of providers do use.
|
| The main issue is that changing the network to support higher
| upload speeds is that they need to replace most of the
| splitters in their network, but it is doable and there are
| providers that already did that.
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