[HN Gopher] EPB Launches America's First Community-Wide 25 Gig I...
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EPB Launches America's First Community-Wide 25 Gig Internet Service
Author : Scottopherson
Score : 111 points
Date : 2022-08-24 20:47 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (epb.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (epb.com)
| btrautsc wrote:
| the most amazing part about EPB is they have absolutely
| phenomenal customer service. it really is surprising.
| Youden wrote:
| So weird hearing about how amazing this speed is for a
| _convention center_ when I have 25Gbps at home and mainly just
| use it to download movies and anime from Usenet.
| tannedNerd wrote:
| Good for you? The majority of the world is on a fraction of
| that, much less the US. It just became easy to get 2 Gbps in
| some parts of the USA while others you max out at 25 Mbps down
| and 2 Mbps up. This is very much good news to everyone else.
| [deleted]
| dmonitor wrote:
| Where on earth and why
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Literally this announcement is saying where. It's not just
| the convention center, it's the whole service region, the
| convention center is just _first_.
| jagrsw wrote:
| Probably Switzerland - init7 has it in its offer:
| https://www.init7.net/en/internet/fiber7/
|
| The price is the same as for 1Gbps and 10Gbps (~60USD/month)
| - though the initial setup price differs: ~300USD for 25Gb/s
| vs <100USD for 1Gbps
|
| The actual speed within network is indeed 25Gb/s to some
| fellow users running speedtest.net servers. Inside
| Switzerland it's maybe ~15Gb/s to some well connected servers
| in the area of Zurich, and ~10Gb/s across EU. Tested with
| speedtest.net and iperf.
| r00fus wrote:
| Wow this reads like an announcement from a different timeline
| (like the one that was promised when fiber was promoted in the
| early 2000s). 25Gb/s symmetric? In the middle of Tennessee?
|
| Meanwhile I have traffic-shaped Comcast and no fiber in sight in
| Silicon Valley.
| hhh wrote:
| I have WK&T and have symmetrical gigabit w/ 24/7 chat support
| in a town with a population of 300 in TN. Spectacular service,
| but I did sit on a waiting list and pay $1000 for installation.
| My bill has gone down over time (WK&T is a co-op.)
|
| I have only ever had issues for a period of 2 months during
| peak times when my traffic was being routed through another ISP
| that I would always get ~0.2% packet loss from. WK&T helped me
| identify some routes that were unaffected to set up a tunnel to
| work around it for the few times I was affected.
| ejb999 wrote:
| its weird, I live in a tiny little town with about 400
| households and I now have access to 1G symmetrical fiber for
| about $80/month - but we (the town) had to pay for the fiber
| build out with increases taxes and user fees...well worth it in
| my case. I would have been OK with only Comcast as previously
| it was just 3Mb Verizon DSL for almost my entire WFH career
| (20+ years).
| reillyse wrote:
| A cynical person might say that large telecoms company aren't
| interested in monopolizing your market and so you are free.
| I'm astounded by how bad/expensive my internet is in massive
| cities that should be easy to connect. I live in an apartment
| in LA and have very few options. I lived in a loft in
| downtown before (5 years ago) and the building only allowed
| DSL. I have a business connection in Portland and pay around
| 100/month for 15Mb.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| I'm in Brooklyn by prospect park and only have 1 ISP choice
| for my apartment. And it's coax based, so every plan caps
| at 20Mbs upload. It's that or satellite internet. I miss
| having fiber.
| atwebb wrote:
| This has been going on for a while, comments like this and the
| recent Tennessean article/debacle are a bit eye opening to the
| naivety of technology and accomplishments outside of major
| hubs.
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| Let me tell you the story of CA attempting to build high
| speed rail..
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Why would a story about building high speed rail be
| relevant to installing fiber adjacent to existing
| utilities?
| KerrAvon wrote:
| "real estate is expensive and NIMBYs don't want it"... the
| end.
|
| (Also the story of why Hyperloop is pointless. technology
| isn't the problem that needs solving! Fast rapid transit
| tech has existed since the 1980's and it's not the cost
| issue.)
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > Meanwhile I have traffic-shaped Comcast and no fiber in sight
| in Silicon Valley.
|
| Isn't the SF bay area more of a geography issue than an
| incumbent monopoly issue? I'm sure its a mixture of both, but
| also a geography issue.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| No, what would geography have to do with it? Fiber can be run
| on poles or underground throughout the Bay Area -- it's an
| incumbent monopoly issue.
| hedora wrote:
| It's a five minute bike ride on flat land from Google HQ
| (mostly along utility right of way) to housing with < 6mbit
| DSL.
|
| Drive 10-20 miles, and you'll be in areas where AT&T decided
| to sell the lines to a bankrupt telco. Looking at the lines
| in those areas is entertaining. The telephone poles were
| installed by some ancient secret society named "GTE", and now
| have 20 degree bows. When lines loosen up and block traffic,
| the usually just tie them up on to some nearby tree branch.
|
| If you look really carefully, you'll occasionally see fiber
| points of presence dangling precariously from this mess of
| caution tape and guy-wire.
|
| It's not all bad news: I know of communities outside of telco
| right of way that managed to tap into one of those.
|
| Last time I heard they were debating between 1 gig symmetric
| to each home or paying a couple hundred bucks (one time) per
| house to get something comparable to what you'd expect in
| Tennessee.
|
| It's definitely a problem with incumbent monopolies.
| a2tech wrote:
| My parents in (poor) rural Michigan will soon have county wide
| fiber internet provided by the local electrical co-op. I'm sure
| the support will be semi-local and so will the technicians. So
| you'll actually get people that at least pretend to give a shit
| about your problems all for a better price than whats available
| in the city from Comcast.
|
| And yes, they and ATT lobbied extensively to block communities
| from building out their own ISPs because they didn't want to
| compete. Michigan has a law in place where a municipality can't
| build out a service if at least 3 companies are willing to bid
| on running 'high speed' internet service in a town.
| xeromal wrote:
| Yeah, seems some rural communities are getting fiber faster. My
| house in northern GA far from Atlanta has symmetrical(?) fiber.
| It gets 1000 up and 1000 down.
| prophesi wrote:
| Meanwhile I'm in the heart of a city and stuck with unreliable,
| overpriced, and low speed cable/dsl from Spectrum because I'm
| pretty sure my landlord is taking part of their payola scheme. I
| used to live in Chattanooga which makes me extra bitter about it.
| efficax wrote:
| wild, i don't have any devices that can max that out even over
| ethernet
| robmccoll wrote:
| I don't think I have enough aggregate online disk bandwidth at
| home to store things are that speed, much less do I have it
| networked to do so. Wow.
| ajg36 wrote:
| Has anyone tried this service in real life and tested the actual
| bandwidth?
| mmaunder wrote:
| Cool, but try to get 25Gbps on your mac. It's tough. We have our
| own 10 gig symmetrical fiber backbone connection and wanted
| 25Gbps on a mac in our film production facility. Thunderbolt
| maxes out at 40Gbps so you're already close to the max data
| transfer rate for a peripheral. We had to use ATTO's hardware
| which is bulky, a pain to configure on a macbook (you need to
| bond two interfaces) and honestly most of the time it's just
| easier to stay on Wifi and deal with 400Mbps throughput.
|
| Not sure about windows, but USB-C maxes out at 10 Gbps IIRC, so
| I'd love to hear what folks in that realm are doing.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Please, Br'er Fiber, don't throw me in the 25 Gbps patch.
| Anything but that.
|
| Seriously, I would be happy to take up the challenge if someone
| is willing to provide such service.
|
| More seriously, that bandwidth probably doesn't go to a single
| computer -- those of us with multiple people in the household
| working or playing from home can do more & better things
| simultaneously.
| Havoc wrote:
| >USB-C maxes out at 10 Gbps
|
| Lower. I've got a 5gbps usb-c adapter...ends up being more like
| 3.5. And like 4x the price of a 2.5 dongle
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Yeah frankly I just hardline for 1Gbps and anything over
| like...I don't know, 1TB? I just ship a drive. Anything beyond
| 1 or 2 requires too much effort to make work for me.
|
| It helps that I'm an in-house video producer at a tech company
| and not working at a post house/on major sets anymore haha
| p1necone wrote:
| How big do you think the carrier pigeon needs to be for an
| HDD? Carrier Albatross? Can they even be trained?
| nippoo wrote:
| The main current use case for this isn't people syncing their
| Dropboxes very fast, it's businesses and groups of users who
| can now all reliably each get gigabit+ speeds rather rather
| than slowing down when multiple people share a connection...
| blakes wrote:
| In the Windows world one would just get a 25Gb NIC and be good
| to go.
|
| * and supporting network equipment/cabling of course
| ejb999 wrote:
| I don't really see the point - impressed that they offered it,
| but how many people truly need it?
|
| I have 1G symmetric FTTH internet, the bottleneck is still the
| services I want to access at the other end - really makes no
| difference how much faster the pipe is, if the service you are
| using can't keep up.
|
| Will some people benefit?? sure - a handful of power users doing
| massive uploads and downloads for commercial purposes... but the
| typical Netflix watcher or telecommuter really isn't going to
| benefit at all from from anything faster than about 100MBs
| up/down right now.
|
| Like I said, I have 1G fiber connection, you know how long it
| takes me to watch a two hour Netflix movie at 1G speed? Two
| hours. You know how long that would take me on a 50Mbs
| connection? 2 hours. You know how long that would take me on a
| 25Gb connection? 2 hours.
|
| That said, if I could buy a 25 Gb connection at a reasonable
| price I would.
| digitallyfree wrote:
| There are places like Switzerland where you actually can get a
| 25Gbps residental connection for a reasonable price. The actual
| cost lies in your backend infrastructure and the skills you
| need to use it (it's all enterprise equipment at that level).
| Everything from the routing to the switching to the servers
| that you're likely running on that connection can get real
| expensive.
| exq wrote:
| 20 years ago you'd have said the same thing about dsl to
| broadband, and if everyone had that same mentality, Netflix
| would still be mailing dvds and not offering 4k streaming.
| Innovation is good.
| laurencerowe wrote:
| I think the difference is that 20 years Gbit ethernet was
| becoming standard issue on desktops while even 10Gbit
| ethernet is still pretty rare outside of the data centre and
| switch uplinks today.
|
| 25Gbit internet will be great for schools, libraries, and
| offices with multiple users but it's going to be a while
| before it becomes relevant for individual homes.
| bitbckt wrote:
| 10/40Gb hasn't been the standard in data centers in a
| number of years. My house is entirely 10Gb (save for
| wireless), in part because older enterprise gear at those
| speeds is so cheap.
|
| 25/50 and 100/400 have supplanted 10/40 in the data center,
| and 800Gb is here now.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| That's the maximum, right? I would imagine they have plans from
| sub-gigabit up to 25G. I know I'd absolutely love the option of
| 10G for a reasonable price (thousand(s)?). Heck, I'd be
| overjoyed to get symmetrical 100 Mbps, and I'd gladly pay a few
| hundred for it.
|
| Meanwhile my Dad has 500/500 AT&T Fiber, and he pays half what
| I pay for 930/35 Charter Spectrum cable :(
| bitbckt wrote:
| I have 10Gb symmetrical to the home in the Bay Area for
| ~$40/mo. Thousands? Really?
| thfuran wrote:
| Thousands? Why not more like $40/mo, like several cities in
| Europe where 10G is already offered?
| alexdumitru wrote:
| Thousands? In Romania you can get 10G for just a bit over
| $10. 1G is $8 and 500M is $6.
| CyberDildonics wrote:
| This same ISP offered 10 gigabit for $400 seven years ago.
| moistoreos wrote:
| /remindme in 10 years
|
| In all seriousness, YES! File sizes are not getting smaller. If
| the bottleneck of data transference were my hardware, then we
| would live in a data utopia.
|
| Imagine the size of files for the last 20 years and you could
| probably do a relatively close comparison for the next 20. I
| would say they have future-proofed their system for a long
| while.
|
| I would also say that with the addition of IoT, there is going
| to be a LOT more casual traffic across the wire in people's
| homes/businesses.
| ejb999 wrote:
| I don't disagree - in 10 years this will be different and so
| will my opinion - things we don't even know about will become
| common everyday necessities and may require those kind of
| speeds...but right now, I don't see it.
| themacguffinman wrote:
| There's kind of a chicken & egg dynamic here. People won't
| experiment with futuristic high-bandwidth applications
| before they have high bandwidth.
| lloeki wrote:
| > Imagine the size of files for the last 20 years and you
| could probably do a relatively close comparison for the next
| 20.
|
| Is it? A some point usefulness plateaus.
|
| I mean taking the streaming example, we can easily stream
| several 4K HDR streams within a 1G pipe, and 4K is basically
| retina-class unless you plan to project in a cinema, so
| anything above is virtually useless (just like the move to
| 24bit/192kHz is for listening).
|
| The only way I can see this use case growing in size in any
| semi-useful way is by reducing compression ratio to eliminate
| artifacts.
|
| Similarly picture size increase but I don't see people start
| sharing gigapixel pictures.
|
| Maybe this could be an enabler of truly privacy respecting
| home self-hosting. Own your data, own your services. Maybe
| distributed storage like ipfs could benefit from that as
| well.
|
| But size, I can only see us using more of it because we
| basically now have the ability to be inefficient, not because
| it's useful.
|
| But hey, 20 years is basically impossible to project into
| with any reliability.
| netr0ute wrote:
| > how many people truly need it?
|
| 56kbps ought to be enough for anyone
| yakkityyak wrote:
| Internet is like ram. You can never have too much.
| [deleted]
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| > I don't really see the point - impressed that they offered
| it, but how many people truly need it?
|
| Can you imagine the types of applications this would enable if
| everyone had a 25gbps connection?
|
| An Xbox could have a 200GB hard drive. Want to play a different
| game? Just wait a few seconds, we'll download the latest 150GB
| Call of Duty.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| More important is high quality high upload bandwidth not
| hidden behind CGNAT. We could actually move away from having
| to depend on Microsoft/Apple/Google/Amazon servers to host
| and deliver personal content.
| Shank wrote:
| > I have 1G symmetric FTTH internet, the bottleneck is still
| the services I want to access at the other end - really makes
| no difference how much faster the pipe is, if the service you
| are using can't keep up.
|
| I can definitely hit this with one Steam download. If any more
| users want to download games, they can easily compete for 1G.
|
| Netflix and other services have relatively low bitrate streams
| too. If I could get higher quality / higher bitrate streams,
| I'd prefer that over what most streaming services offer too.
|
| I think it's easy to think things are good enough without
| looking too deep into the details. You're used to 1G. But a lot
| of people are used to a lot more and a lot less.
| ejb999 wrote:
| >>You're used to 1G. But a lot of people are used to a lot
| more and a lot less.
|
| Trust me, I am not used to it (at least not yet)- I have only
| had it for 5+ months - I have been WFH for more than 25 years
| and only had access to 3Mbs DSL before this.
| oyashirochama wrote:
| Ive hit 5gbps at my dorm room, I had upto 10gbps only issue
| it was shared with the entire base and at the time only had
| 2 10gbps trunks out of the ISP. They later upgraded to 2
| 40gbps from NTT.
| xxpor wrote:
| 60 mbit 4k (same as bluray) would be sick
| mciancia wrote:
| Well, if cost of hardware on ISP side is fairly similar for 1G,
| 10G and 25Gbps, then why not offer also the fastest option just
| because you can?
|
| > if the service you are using can't keep up.
|
| Thats standard chicken and egg problem, why provide faster
| servers when ISPs are offering 1Gbps at most
|
| IMO internet speed could be like electricity/power - like most
| people don't care how much power they can get from the grid, in
| the future we will have the same when it comes to the internet
| - it will almost always be fast enough for everything
| nothis wrote:
| The way I see it is that by raising the bar like this, you're
| making more realistic speeds for average users a) more
| stable/common and b) less expensive.
| digdugdirk wrote:
| Chattanooga Tennessee, for those curious but not curious enough
| to read the article.
|
| I'm intrigued by the city's push for this community co-op high
| speed internet - does anyone here have any experience with how
| the city has changed before/after the "gig-city" push? And did
| pandemic work from home change/accelerate things at all?
| vlan0 wrote:
| This is just getting stupid. It's more marketing than anything
| else. It feels like the megahertz wars of the 90s. Your
| connection is SO MUCH more than just your local PHY rate. Let's
| start raising the bar. Show me you've optimized to reduce
| bufferbloat. Show me you care about RTT and not simply the
| cheapest pipe.
|
| I'm also not sure they have the capacity to deliver true 25Gb to
| for many folks simultaneously.
|
| https://www.peeringdb.com/net/7007
| https://bgp.he.net/AS26827#_asinfo
| dweekly wrote:
| I think things like this are great because they will finally
| start to create pressure to commodify >1gbps networking in the
| home. The industry has some work to do here.
|
| I've been on Sonic 10G for almost a year now and LOVE it, but
| it's definitely been a sore spot to get things set up to expect
| those kinds of speeds - prosumer 10G switches are vastly more
| expensive per-port, wired consumer devices don't typically
| support 10GbaseT/SFP+, 2.5G/5G switches aren't broadly available
| and commodified (e.g. UniFi has limited offerings here) and
| WiFi6E is still mid-rollout (almost no client devices currently
| in market yet) meaning that clients can't reasonably expect
| >1gbps of goodput, even with a good link from a modern device to
| a modern AP. Then there's flakiness: when things get hot in my
| garage, my 10G switch just stops working. My Thunderbolt-
| to-10GbaseT adapter for my MacBook runs very hot. Lots of sharp
| edges here.
|
| The more consumers are buying 10G equipment for their 10G home
| links, the faster prices will come down and reliability will come
| up - not just for 10G but also for 2.5G/5G equipment. Hats off to
| EPB for paving the way for 25G and keeping vendors diligent in
| mapping out the next generation of their equipment.
| TylerE wrote:
| I wonder how much of a push this will really be?
|
| For the vast majority of people even vanilla gigabit is of
| limited benefit... that's on the edge of what a consumer SSD is
| writing at.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Right - the popular sentiment on my smallish town Facebook
| group is people dropping their 300mbps cable since Spectrum
| is an awful company to deal with in favor of cell-based
| (T-mobile or Verizon) home service. 90%+ of people in most
| areas don't need internet any faster than Netflix requires,
| and nobody is running ethernet so WiFi speeds are going to be
| the limiting factor in internet speed for most everyone else.
| TylerE wrote:
| I went from ~250Mbit to Gigabit recently. I don't notice it
| on my wireless clients at all, but it is really nice on my
| main PC, which is tied directly into the router via a good
| 'ole cable. I've seen actual downloads speeds flirting with
| 100MB/sec, which is really nice when downloading some of
| these massive 50GB+ games.
| icedchai wrote:
| You may be off a bit. A gigabit is only around 125 megabytes
| a second. A low end consumer SSD is closer to a 550 megabytes
| second, or ~4 gigabits. A high-end NVMe SSD will get you 3 or
| 4 gigabytes a second. 30 to 40x a gigabit!
| robocat wrote:
| > A high-end NVMe SSD will get you 3 or 4 gigabytes a
| second
|
| The Samsung PCIe 4.0 990 PRO just released: sequential read
| 7.45GB/s and write 6.9GB/s --
| https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/samsung-
| announces-99...
| TylerE wrote:
| Under ideal circumstances, yes. When say, torrenting, or
| anything else with non-ideal file access patterns real
| world speeds are not going to be nearly that high,
| especially on a consumer-grade drive.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| The way the site is reacting to this hug, I'd expect it'd be
| better off hosted from a beefy laptop on a 25 Gig residential
| connection.
| bandwidth wrote:
| Okay so all we need now is a few IoT toasters to send 25G of DDoS
| traffic right?
| elfatizer wrote:
| When we bought a house, the best one ended up being literally a
| couple miles outside of EPB's service area and I had to switch to
| Comcast. I see their billboard every time I drive home, just to
| rub salt in the wound.
| Xeoncross wrote:
| I love how so many companies offer work-from-home now as you
| can literally work from anywhere in the world as long as it's
| only in a major city with a high bandwidth connection.
| ghaff wrote:
| That is really not true. For most people modest speed
| connections are fine for working. Starlink certainly be
| sufficient in general.
| hedora wrote:
| Check out this map, which doesn't seem to include starlink.
| Click "min price" (to make the 25+ MBPS filter appear), then
| click "25+ MBPS". You'll see that rural houses are likely to
| have access to better Internet than ones in Silicon Valley.
|
| To really light the map up, click "fixed wireless". I've had
| mixed luck with such ISPs, but they generally offer
| affordable plans that have better uplink bandwidth and ping
| latency than comcast.
|
| https://broadbandnow.com/national-broadband-map
| mikestew wrote:
| You have different parameters than I, because "the best one"
| has 25Gbps to the home, and not Comcast for an internet
| provider. :-)
|
| I know what you're saying, though. I suppose it's _possible_ to
| have higher priorities than bandwidth. Personally, I 'd still
| have to give serious thought to how much I want $FEATURE if it
| means having to do business with Comcast (or Comcast aside,
| give up 25Gbps). Backyard for the kids? They can go play in the
| park. :-)
| kQq9oHeAz6wLLS wrote:
| And here I am looking at properties that even Starlink would
| have trouble providing service to...
| vlan0 wrote:
| Running away to the mountains to escape it all? Need
| company?
| runako wrote:
| No wonder Comcast has been very active in lobbying to prevent
| other utilities from providing Internet[1].
|
| 1 - https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/1/8530403/chattanooga-
| comcas...
| mindslight wrote:
| The problem with municipal Internet is the town will build it
| out once, and then never upgrade the technology while it slowly
| becomes obsolete </s>.
|
| Seriously though, municipal fiber is fantastic. I've been an
| observer to friends having conversations about Internet
| provider woes, while I just sit there shaking my head. I've
| only got 1Gb but I rarely care about the bandwidth, consistent
| <15ms ping to close data centers, there's no data quotas, no
| yearly fuckery where they dick around with the price and you
| have to wait on hold to threaten to cancel and commit to a
| longer term, and I haven't noticed any downtime in years. It
| just works.
| yborg wrote:
| The OP story is literally the municipal provider delivering
| 25x faster service over 12 years. The "never upgrade the
| technology" provider is usually going to be monopoly Comcast,
| because they know your other option is a can and string.
| mindslight wrote:
| Sarcasm. It's a useful skill that fosters self awareness
| and builds your memetic defenses. And I even included a tag
| to help train your detector.
| midnitewarrior wrote:
| Why? I work a tech job and I 50gb connection is more than I need,
| it's more than most need.
| yborg wrote:
| Cool, so you can downgrade to a 25gb connection like EPB and
| save some money.
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(page generated 2022-08-24 23:00 UTC)