[HN Gopher] FCC launches inquiry to increase minimum broadband s...
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FCC launches inquiry to increase minimum broadband speed [pdf]
Author : KoftaBob
Score : 379 points
Date : 2023-11-01 19:37 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (docs.fcc.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (docs.fcc.gov)
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| Download only, yes? And what about the busy-Sunday night problem?
| This seems so besides the point.
|
| Cable at an apartment building I visit is often 300mbps, but
| Sunday evening it can have horrible jitter and lag and much
| slower speeds. It's incredibly frustrating; common sites can be
| basically unusable.
|
| This also feels like it's setting a bar where most DSL systems
| wont have any chance of competing. In cities I can be more
| sympathetic (put in more pops) but in rural areas, this feels
| like a barrier that is extremely cost prohibitive to make happen,
| for not great reasons.
| shortcake27 wrote:
| I usually pay for 50mbps, but I can live comfortably on 25mbps
| if need be (sometimes I drop my connection speed to save
| money). However, I have a fibre connection, where QoS is 100%
| 100% of the time. 25mbps is totally fine for web browsing,
| gaming, and streaming. The only issue is downloads, which
| simply take more time. I'd still rather have a rock solid
| 25mbps than 300mbps with jitter. Cable is garbage. Always has
| been, always will be.
| wongarsu wrote:
| With VDSL and supervectoring you can get 250MBit/s, provided
| you aren't more than a quarter of a mile or so from the
| multiplexer. Which is probably not cost-effective in most of
| America due to the low density of suburbia, never mind rural
| places.
| andrewmunsell wrote:
| This is nice, but with increased speed, they should also require
| ISPs do not impose a data cap to be considered broadband.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Why shouldn't there be a cap? Bandwidth isn't free.
|
| It's sad seeing people on a forum called hacker news having no
| idea how networking infrastructure works.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Because it's _next to free_ (no additional cost to run the
| infrastructure we 're already running) and we're nowhere near
| the limits of our existing infrastructure's overall bandwidth
| limits right now, as evidenced by the lack of caps not
| affecting quality of internet service for the entirety of
| 2020, when more people were online per hour than at any
| previous point in history.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Source? Running things requires labor, labor is getting
| expensive. Pricing isn't set on simply the marginal cost of
| materials...
| vorpalhex wrote:
| Running a fully utilized fiber line is.. exactly the same
| amount of labor as running a 10% utilized one.
|
| The cost to track and bill people for caps and let them
| pay overages though..
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Chokepoints are peering exchanges, transit handoffs, and
| core network gear, which is sized for a percentile of
| utilization below constant 100%. Having implemented a
| billing system and utilization monitoring for managed
| hosting datacenter environment, it is trivial to collect
| metrics from equipment and bill accordingly. You don't
| want to nickle and dime or gouge customers, but you do
| want to ensure proportionality across the customer
| population.
|
| Some combination of caps, overage charges, traffic
| shaping, and edge CDN appliances is needed (Netflix,
| Akamai, etc). Off peak unlimited is also a potential
| strategy to drive low priority transfer to low
| utilization periods. Pick your poison. There is a reason
| most of Netflix global infra is monster CDN boxes closest
| to customers.
|
| https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
| throitallaway wrote:
| > There is a reason most of Netflix global infra is
| monster CDN boxes closest to customers.
|
| Because it would be ridiculously expensive to egress
| video streams directly from AWS. They've determined that
| it's cheaper to pay ISPs for rack space.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| You misunderstand the model. They don't pay ISPs, they
| offer the appliance for free to the ISP for colocation,
| reducing the upstream networking costs. AWS egress being
| extortionate is a distinct issue. The cost to the ISP in
| the rack (cooling, power, space) is immaterial
| considering the transfer savings (not only opex, but
| reduced capex from needing to oversize network gear or
| specific ports for peak streaming consumption) over the
| life of the relationship.
|
| If you want to learn more, lurk on the NANOG (North
| American Network Operators' Group) mailing list. It is
| common to monitor AS traffic flows to understand whether
| you can offload with CDN appliance relationships or how
| to improve your network architecture (which networks to
| peer to directly or which internet exchanges [IXs] to
| meetup at). These agreements sometimes happen at a bar
| over beers during NANOG events. Call Verizon and ask them
| how much a 1Gbps circuit is. Consider why Comcast built
| their own national backbone.
|
| Also, some important history to remember. Fast.com
| measures your speeds to Netflix servers because some ISPs
| wanted to charge their customers _and_ Netflix for that
| transfer (or to upgrade peering points) because of the
| revenue destruction from cable customers fleeing for
| streaming (net neutrality debate).
|
| https://archive.nanog.org/meetings/nanog45/presentations/
| Nor... (Peering 101, Bill Norton [Equinix cofounder],
| NANOG 45)
|
| https://drpeering.net/white-papers/Video-Internet-The-
| Next-W... (Video Internet: The Next Wave of Massive
| Disruption to the U.S. Peering Ecosystem (v1.7))
|
| https://drpeering.net/HTML_IPP/ipptoc.html ("The Internet
| Peering Playbook")
|
| https://arstechnica.com/features/2008/09/peering-and-
| transit... ("How the 'Net works: an introduction to
| peering and transit")
|
| https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2014/07/how-c... ("How Comcast became a
| powerful--and controversial--part of the Internet
| backbone")
|
| https://openconnect.zendesk.com/hc/en-
| us/articles/3600361636...
|
| > How much does the appliance cost my organization?
|
| > Appliances, including replacement appliances, are
| provided to qualifying ISPs at no charge when used within
| the terms of the license agreements.
| atomicnumber3 wrote:
| Also, when caps are implemented, they're ridiculously
| expensive and limited, especially in an age of streaming
| video. Expensive comically beyond any reasonable conception
| of the actual marginal cost of transiting the traffic.
|
| Also - just look at LTE operators. They're also no-cap at
| this point (though subject to QoS at certain breakpoints,
| but they're typically reasonable breakpoints ime?). And
| that's in a SIGNIFICANTLY more capital intensive market -
| you have most of the concerns with terrestrial fiber, plus
| the joy of having to own RF spectrum and maintain towers
| etc.
|
| So I think no-caps-and-required-speed requirements would
| just make sense and be required to keep ISPs from trying to
| backtrack on being forcibly dragged into the modern area
| like balky calves.
| Szpadel wrote:
| I think that the issue is lack of competition. on mobile
| market it's easy to switch operator to any from multiple
| nation wide ones. for cable ISP AFAIK in US there is
| usually one. (in my central european country there is at
| least 3 ISP available ans AFAIK fibers to building are in
| some way rented to internet providers (?))
| wongarsu wrote:
| In principle caps help with oversubscribing. If you want to
| use a 10GBit/s uplink to serve 5000 people with 100MBit/s
| each, you won't saturate your uplink nearly as often if you
| add a data cap.
|
| Of course that's not all that different from restricting
| bandwidth, just that you are restricting average bandwidth
| while allowing for some burst. Still violates the spirit of
| having fast bandwidth, unless the caps are quite generous.
| NotSammyHagar wrote:
| They do help push people to use less, but for places like
| Comcast I see data caps as just a revenue stream
| increaser. The entire company strategy seems to follow
| this approach.
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| Yes and no, depending on your plant build out you might
| have great interplant connectivity - 10G between each
| switch, 10G to the router, but the extraplant connections
| still cost and have bandwidth limits. So if you only use 2
| gbps total during peak, you may not need to upgrade your
| plant to support higher speeds but you will have to pay
| more to your upstream provider to support it.
|
| This is actually relevant to my ISP day job, we have a pipe
| to a well known backbone provider, and dual pipes to a
| statewide provider. We ran on the dual pipes for a long
| time before pushing our ISP traffic over the single
| backbone provider. These days, if that main ISP pipe goes
| down, it fails over to the dual pipes to keep everything
| running. But now that we are offering packages higher than
| 25/3 for DSL, terrestrial wireless, and cable, the dual
| pipes don't have enough bandwidth to keep up.
|
| If we offer gigabit service over fiber (and we do) just a
| couple of customers actively using their whole pipe is an
| enormous chunk of the network compared to the 40 or so
| customers that same gigabit of bandwidth would serve on
| previous 25/3 packages. We don't have data caps or even
| contracts (small town benefits :P ) but there is a lot more
| to it for smaller ISPs than adjusting the rate limiting and
| packages we allow people to use.
| musha68k wrote:
| It's true that smaller ISPs have their challenges, but
| the cost for both interplant and extraplant connections
| has been generally decreasing. Economies of scale and
| peering agreements can mitigate many of these costs.
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| True, we connect our main ISP pipe to an internet
| exchange for that reason. It's also interesting to see
| how the industry is adopting pluggables for a lot of
| newer deployments because depending on what you need,
| there's a lot of flexibility now compared to even 5 years
| ago.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Because it's next to free (no additional cost to run the
| infrastructure we're already running)
|
| Aren't we effectively arguing CapEx versus OpEx?
|
| Sure, an ISP's OpEx is tiny. But CapEx is _huge_ ,
| especially when you've got an old neighborhood that's all
| wired up with copper and you gotta replace it all with
| fiber going into the house.
| ehPReth wrote:
| once the infrastructure is there does each byte/gigabyte
| _really_ have an intrinsic cost? isn 't more about the bytes
| per second and not the bytes _total_?
| endisneigh wrote:
| There's more to running an isp than simply plumbing
| electricity.
| ehPReth wrote:
| sure, but is your 'profit' to be made in.. charging per
| byte consumed/sent? it just feels... gougey?
|
| I had to live under an ISP that charged something on the
| order of $10+/GB after a certain amount and after they
| were forced to offer unlimited internet it was an actual
| breath of fresh air just to be able to _use the internet_
| and not worry about literally everything in the house, or
| if I could update my OS, or play this game, or watch this
| Netflix show, etc.
|
| i'm honestly curious. why not a standard margin on your
| 'per second' allowances (100/100Mbps, etc) or other
| 'addon' services?
|
| why should someone with a ring doorbell (or a homekit
| secure video whatever) be punished over someone who
| doesn't?
| cortesoft wrote:
| Sure, but the argument for caps is that it reduces overall
| demand and therefore peak consumption, and peak consumption
| is what the ISPs actually have to pay for.
| kvakvs wrote:
| Cost of the traffic is: hardware (staggered cost covered over
| many months), and running costs (subscription to higher tier
| internet carriers, electricity, rent of the premises,
| salaries etc). Most of this is covered by the monthly fees,
| to have a profitable business one must have those costs
| covered as a minimum. None of the above affects how much
| internet data goes through, zero or maxed out capacity, cost
| is the same.
| endisneigh wrote:
| This is patently false. Given optics can only support so
| many people at a given latency and bandwidth.
| guhidalg wrote:
| Let me throw that question back at you: why should there be a
| cap? You are paying ISPs for a certain bandwidth speed per
| month and they sure as hell are not prorating your service
| based on data that you did not consume. If the ISP is in
| capable of delivering the agreed-upon band with every minute
| of the whole month, then they are not meeting the SLA that
| you're paying them for.
| spiznnx wrote:
| If ISPs were like an electric utility, we'd see something
| like a cost per GB transferred in cents, with a minimum
| charge reflecting the cost of maintaining a connection of a
| certain speed to the network.
|
| Which is algebraically identical to a monthly charge and
| data cap with overage charge. The main issue is the overage
| charge is too high, it should be like 1 cent per GB
| (Comcast is charging 20x that).
| guhidalg wrote:
| 1c/GB would be a decent rate for home data transfer in
| 2023, but where would you set the free limit? For
| reference, at my house I have a 1Gbps line and it looks
| like in 48 hours I have downloaded 1TB of data (looking
| at the number of received bytes my AT&T device is
| reporting). Am I normal? I don't know, but AT&T does...
| spiznnx wrote:
| I think that's rather high compared to average,
| considering the standard cap for Comcast Xfinity
| residential is 1.2TiB per month, and they claim only "a
| very small percentage" of their customers use more.
|
| I don't think the actual cap really matters if the per-GB
| and base pricing reflects the true costs. If it's low it
| means heavy users pay more, if it's high, light users pay
| more.
| vel0city wrote:
| 1TB in 48 hours is absolutely not a normal residential
| connection usage.
|
| The average US residential customer uses a bit over
| 500GB/mo in data. You're doing 2x that in 1/15th the
| time.
|
| https://www.allconnect.com/blog/report-internet-use-over-
| hal...
| Zigurd wrote:
| Bits that go unused have no value. Caps on numbers of bits in
| a billing cycle don't make sense. While it isn't exactly pure
| artificial scarcity, it's darn close. A retail ISP already
| has to have some fair share mechanisms for peak use times.
| That leaves very very little usefulness in monthly caps.
| musha68k wrote:
| Peering agreements at internet exchanges make additional
| bandwidth very cheap to provide and infra costs are spread
| over years and many users, further reducing ongoing costs..
|
| Bandwidth caps not only have a weak fiscal basis but also
| clash with net neutrality tenets, go against what made the
| internet successful in the first place.
| paxys wrote:
| They already charge for bandwidth. People pay more for
| 500mpbs than 50mbps. We are talking about total monthly data
| caps, which have nothing to do with bandwidth.
| endisneigh wrote:
| False. A month is a discrete amount of time that yields a
| potential maximum amount of data downloaded, this amount is
| clearly related to the bandwidth provided, hence caps.
|
| To think otherwise is to falsely believe they support
| unlimited throughput. Furthermore the bandwidth itself
| literally is a function of the transmission material and
| infrastructure, which also isn't free...
| paxys wrote:
| I have a 500 Mbps connection with a 1TB data cap, both
| pretty standard numbers in the US. If I used the
| connection at its advertised speeds, I would exhaust my
| monthly limit in about 4 hours. So no, that relationship
| is non-existent. The data cap math instead is "99% of our
| users use < 1TB, so we will charge the rest more because
| we can".
| endisneigh wrote:
| Or more accurately, to disincentive excessive use. They
| don't need a cap to simply charge you more money, they've
| been doing that just fine with or without caps.
| paxys wrote:
| That would be a valid argument if they defined
| "excessive" based on infrastructure limits rather than a
| demand curve and market research.
| endisneigh wrote:
| All prices are based on "demand curve and market
| research" so I'm not sure what your point is.
| paxys wrote:
| My point from the start has been that ISPs put data caps
| and overage charges in place to make extra money, not to
| protect their infrastructure.
| mjrpes wrote:
| If that was a big issue, why are smaller ISPs (like
| sonic.com) able to offer 10Gb ethernet at a flat rate
| with no caps?
| kstrauser wrote:
| "It's weird that none of the so-called experts agree with me.
| The problem is clearly with their understanding of the space,
| not mine."
| staringback wrote:
| So that someone's grandma who hardly uses her connection can
| subsidize your extreme over-consumption of digital media?
| voakbasda wrote:
| Yes, for the same reason that roads used by daily drivers are
| subsidized by remote workers.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Ironically roads should also have caps and/or tolls, so
| this take is strange. This is partly why gas and excise tax
| is a thing...
| superb_dev wrote:
| Do you seriously want every road you drive on to charge
| you? Roads should be a public good that we all benefit
| from
| endisneigh wrote:
| You already are charged by every road you drive on, just
| not explicitly or proportionally.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| I would happily pay for congestion pricing because it
| would allow me to go where I'm going faster.
|
| Right now we have this weird sunk cost and lack of
| obvious incremental charges to driving, that encourages
| driving when there are other better options for some
| trips.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| Personally, that sounds pretty wonderful. Better yet,
| charge by vehicle weight. I'd like to be able to ride a
| bike on the road and have everyone think the guy in the
| car is imposing inconvenience rather than the other way
| around.
| notyourwork wrote:
| What is ironic about you're opinion disagreeing with the
| status quo in some countries?
| endisneigh wrote:
| It's ironic because they're arguing against caps but talk
| about roads, but roads in the United States are in
| terrible shape due to certain groups, such as
| construction vehicles not paying their fair share to
| begin with.
|
| This partly why gas tax is even a thing.
| eganist wrote:
| > Ironically roads should also have caps and/or tolls, so
| this take is strange.
|
| We'll set up electronic tolls on your cul-de-sac and
| every light and stop sign, or toll you by mile driven
| using an odometer beaconing out to the tax authorities
| per drive and registered to your tax ID number (US) or
| equivalent. And then cap you on the number of miles
| you're allowed to drive per year on all cars unless you
| pay an additional fee.
|
| Older cars must be retrofit at the driver's expense.
|
| Also the auditing and anti-fraud infrastructure must be
| instituted for all of this.
|
| ---
|
| Or we can just do flat taxes and chill.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Flat taxes are regressive and inefficient, but I suppose
| we can still chill.
| vel0city wrote:
| I'm absolutely down for vehicle registration fees to
| relate to miles driven and weight classifications, and
| major highways being funded by extra tolling.
|
| The streets in my neighborhood cost way less per mile for
| maintenance than giant highways with massive bridges and
| interchanges. It makes sense they'd cost more to use.
|
| Showing the real cost of these things to consumers might
| make them change their minds about riding the train.
| These days a lot of people don't even think about the
| cost of driving their car across town, but gosh that
| metro day pass is $5? How expensive!
| eganist wrote:
| > gosh that metro day pass is $5? How expensive!
|
| Nah, metro day pass should cost as much as howevermany
| miles the buyer traveled. Otherwise people who buy the
| passes for just one stop would be subsidizing the costs
| for people who travel from one end of a line to the
| other.
|
| It'd be pretty shit to meter one and not the other.
| c54 wrote:
| The economy wide productivity gains from having tax
| funded roads mean it doesn't make sense to have roads be
| profitable or break even as an individual entity.
|
| Similar thing probably goes for internet access.
| endisneigh wrote:
| Taxes are not flat, just like caps, so there's no
| contradiction.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Gotta be careful what you measure though. If I spend a
| bunch of money owning and maintaining my car, it's
| possible that that could've been spent on other things
| that would be overall better for the economy.
| paxys wrote:
| Bad analogy, because it actually costs more to maintain
| roads that are used more. ISPs don't have to pay extra if I
| consume more data packets than my neighbor. Overage charges
| are just a money grab on their part, nothing more.
| kulahan wrote:
| Also a bad analogy because the roads are paid for with
| gas taxes, which WFH workers typically purchase less of
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| A minority of US road costs are paid for with gas taxes,
| and it depends tremendously on the location.
| https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/states-road-
| funding...
|
| WFH workers likely pay more per mile travelled in taxes
| than someone who super-commutes.
| Willamin wrote:
| In the US, we tax roads by usage via fuel (gasoline and
| diesel) tax [^1]. It's a simple solution: the more miles
| you drive, the more fuel you use; the more fuel you use,
| the more tax you pay. Vehicles that use more fuel per mile
| driven tend to be larger and thus cause more wear on the
| roads.
|
| It's not without its faults though. Fuel usage isn't
| directly related to cost of road maintenance, it's just a
| very rough approximation. Fuel usage has mattered less and
| less over the past couple of decades with hybrids and EVs -
| though this is addressed in some places by imposing an
| extra EV tax (since EV drivers would pay no fuel tax but
| would still cause wear on the roads).
|
| [^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_Unite
| d_State...
| arcticbull wrote:
| A lot more wear on the roads in a lot of cases, as it's
| exponential (~fourth power) with respect to weight and
| EVs weigh a lot (~30% more than a comparable ICE car).
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| A minority of roadbuilding funds come from fuel taxes in
| the US. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/states-
| road-funding...
|
| The additional problem with this is that road wear scales
| a lot faster than fuel usage.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
| paxys wrote:
| Data packets aren't a limited resource. The costs for your
| ISP are fixed whether they serve you 1MB or 1TB. Data caps
| and overage charges are purely a money grab, not some
| fundamental economic requirement. So no, infrequent users
| aren't "subsidizing" anyone else.
| 542458 wrote:
| > The costs for your ISP are fixed whether they serve you
| 1MB or 1TB.
|
| That's only true in a _very_ abstract sense. If everybody
| went from using 1MB /day to 1TB/day there would be massive
| congestion issues and costs would increase as ISPs rush to
| install higher-bandwidth equipment. Put a different way: It
| is cheaper to construct a network where all subscribers
| consume only 1MB/day than a network where all subscribers
| consume 1TB/day, because the former can be done with much
| lower end equipment.
| paxys wrote:
| Well it should be true in the concrete sense. If they
| can't consistently serve you at 100mpbs or whatever else
| then they shouldn't advertise it. "But everyone else is
| using it at the same time so too bad" wouldn't work as an
| excuse in any other industry.
| 542458 wrote:
| > If they can't consistently serve you at 100mpbs or
| whatever else then they shouldn't advertise it.
|
| But that's true of almost every industry. Your bank
| advertises that you can withdraw your money at any time,
| but if everybody withdrew their money simultaneously
| there would be issues. A store advertises next-day
| shipping, but if everybody ordered simultaneously there
| would be issues. A house might have 100A power service,
| but if every house started burning 100A simultaneously
| there would be issues.
|
| Put another way, what you're proposing is _dramatically_
| slower speeds for most users. ISPs are profitable, but
| they 're not that profitable. Actual average usage on
| most lines is probably low single digit percentages, if
| not sub-1%. I just checked my line - my average use is
| about 200kB/s (for a total of about 500GB per month), or
| about 1% of my speed cap.
| vasachi wrote:
| Yes it would work in any other industry. Users can
| overload a power grid. Users can overload a telephone
| network. Users can overload a grocery store. NO industry
| can deal with critical overload without problems.
| cortesoft wrote:
| If you want every ISP to provision the full bandwidth for
| every customer, so that their network can handle all
| their customers using their full bandwidth at the same
| time, it is going to cost each subscriber a LOT more
| money or get a lot lower peak bandwidth. I think MOST
| people would prefer to pay less and be able to use the
| full speed for a fraction of the time.
|
| If you want to know how much more expensive the
| connection would be if you expect to use the full
| bandwidth 24/7, just look at the cost you pay for transit
| in a datacenter. It is multiples of the cost home
| consumers pay at a per-bit level.
|
| Most users are best served by being told the speeds they
| will usually get if they stay within average usage
| patterns, because that is what most people do.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > "But everyone else is using it at the same time so too
| bad" wouldn't work as an excuse in any other industry.
|
| Go to a grocery store in Florida before a hurricane and
| try to buy bread.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> Data packets aren't a limited resource.
|
| No, but bandwidth is. Particularly wireless where you can't
| just lay down another cable or fiber.
| bisby wrote:
| Bandwidth and data caps aren't hand in hand. If I
| download a COD update that is 100gb right now at 1gbps.
| or I watch 3gb of netflix a day at 10mbps, i'm still
| using 100gb. But the bandwidth requirements are very
| different.
|
| They either have infrastructure that can handle 1gbps per
| user, and then they have bandwidth available, and data
| caps are nonsense... or they don't have the
| infrastructure, and are banking on their service being
| idle 90% of the time for most users, and this is why
| after 5 oclock, my internet goes to crap when everyone is
| getting home and starting to use the internet. And now
| suddenly Im drastically overpaying for non-broadband
| internet because my ISP underprovisioned way too much.
|
| This goes back to the point that everyone is making that
| ISPs shouldn't be able to underprovision to the point
| that it degrades performance during high usage times.
|
| My ISP saw $800 million in profits on $2 billion in
| revenue in 2019. That's an AMAZING profit margin. They
| can afford to not underprovision, and when they don't
| under provision, then no, bandwidth isn't a limited
| resource.
| paxys wrote:
| > No, but bandwidth is
|
| Which is why they already charge for bandwidth
| cortesoft wrote:
| This just isn't true, though. The limit for a network
| provider is peak bandwidth usage. When they sell a 2gbps
| connection to a customer, that 2gbps connection is not
| reserved entirely for that customer. It isn't like the
| total bandwidth an ISP has is 2gbps * N number of
| customers.
|
| They over-subscribe because they know not every customer is
| going to be using up that full 2gbps 24/7.
|
| Now, you can argue that an ISP SHOULD provision that way,
| with the expectation that their customers are going to be
| using the full connection 24/7, but that would raise the
| cost per customer a LOT, and I don't think people want to
| be paying for an ISP that provisions like that. It would be
| a lot more expensive per customer, and it would end up with
| a lot of the bandwidth going unused most of the time.
|
| If the average bandwidth used by customers goes up, it will
| require the ISP to pay for and maintain more circuits and
| cost more money. We can argue there are better, fairer,
| ways to limit usage, but it is simply not true that every
| customer downloading a lot more doesn't cost the ISP more
| money in the long run.
| BigFnTelly wrote:
| would it be fair to say that bandwidth is just another
| product sold like plane tickets?
| johncolanduoni wrote:
| With the crucial difference that the equivalent of 7/8ths
| of a a seat is still useful when it comes to bandwidth,
| especially for home internet.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Yes? But with orders of magnitude more difference. Let's
| do a back of the napkin calculation:
|
| Say your ISP gives you 100mbit/s = 1.08TB/day [?]
| 30TB/mo. On gigabit that'd be 300TB. While you do have
| some heavy torrenters they are outliers.
|
| Now I assume everything but TV/movie streaming is a
| rounding error for average Joe. Netflix says 1-7GB/h
| depending on quality. Average user watches ~3.2h/day (wtf
| is wrong with people!) but that's ~100-700 GB/mo. Now
| that's between 0.033%-2.3% of downstream bandwidth.
|
| Of course, people generally watch TV at the same time of
| day, so it gets more complicated to provision resources.
| But there's also no question that pooling bandwidth
| (over-provisioning) makes sense to reduce costs. The
| question is more about how much congestion is acceptable,
| and I wouldn't trust shitty monopolistic companies to
| behave. But if you can handle eg Super Bowl or a World
| Cup final without degradation you're probably good the
| rest of the year?
| musha68k wrote:
| ISPs face costs for peak usage / level of "playing with
| the numbers" yes, but economies of scale and exchange
| agreements reduce these costs significantly. Bandwidth
| caps not only have a weak financial justification but
| also run counter to net neutrality.
| arp242 wrote:
| > The costs for your ISP are fixed whether they serve you
| 1MB or 1TB.
|
| I cannot believe how anyone with a straight face can claim
| that the infrastructure and maintenance required to serve
| "n times 1MB" is _exactly_ the same as the costs for "n
| times 1TB". This is _so obviously_ not the case that I
| genuinely don 't even know how to explain it.
|
| You can serve your thousand subscribers on a dingy Pentium
| 1 if they're using 1MB, because it adds up to just 1,000MB.
| You wouldn't be able to serve just a single customer with
| the same hardware. Never mind the cabling etc.
| callalex wrote:
| There is some truth to what you say but Comcast charges
| me around $1 per gigabyte over my cap. It absolutely does
| not cost them that much more money to serve me.
| arp242 wrote:
| Almost certainly not, no. That it's overpriced is of
| course a different thing. I suspect part of the reason
| these costs are so high is that they really don't _want_
| you to use more data, so they won 't have to upgrade the
| network.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> So that someone's grandma who hardly uses her connection
| can subsidize your extreme over-consumption of digital media?
|
| While I agree that grandma doesn't need 1Gbps, neither do I
| and neither do most people. So why mandate such a high speed
| for the label anyway? It seems like a way to disqualify
| things like Starlink that will have difficulty providing
| extreme speeds to large numbers of users at once.
|
| The only time I'll use such a speed is when downloading some
| data - an ISO file or something similar. Streaming video does
| not require such (gbps) speeds even for multiple streams in
| the same house.
| rasz wrote:
| No, so that ISPs are incentivized to actually invest in
| bigger pipes.
| antisthenes wrote:
| So it was a series of tubes after all...
| antisthenes wrote:
| This is how consumption of any resource works, in any group
| where the number of people using it is more than 1.
|
| If I drink less water than you, am I subsidizing your water
| usage. I'd say so!
|
| Not the hill you want to die on, trust me.
| arp242 wrote:
| Except in many places you pay water by amount used (Islamic
| and some other countries excepted). This is the case for
| loads of resources.
| phantom784 wrote:
| Or at least require that uncapped tiers be available.
| notyourwork wrote:
| And that speed should be symmetrical. We are continuing to push
| the boundaries are content going out.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| That's what gets me. Is there a technical reason why
| symmetrical connections would be more expensive than asymm?
| paxys wrote:
| The technical reason is that by restricting upload speed
| they can offer a higher download speed, and that is what
| most users care about.
| andersa wrote:
| This is nonsense. Fiber cables are always capable of the
| same speed in both directions at once. The actual reason
| is so they can sell you an overpriced "business" plan if
| you need upload speeds from the current decade.
| paxys wrote:
| A _very_ small part of the country is connected by fiber,
| and fiber connections are always symmetrical. The vast
| majority of consumers still get internet via coax cables,
| and bandwidth is very much an issue on those.
| derefr wrote:
| No, a very small part of the _last mile_ is connected by
| fiber. Trunking is always fiber these days. As are local
| neighbourhood branch points, if your provider evolved
| from a telephone company. (If you live in an apartment
| building served by an ex-telephone ISP, you likely have
| fiber run all the way to the network closet of your
| building, with only the per-subscriber in-wall wiring
| switching over to copper.)
|
| ISPs that evolved from cable companies might still be
| using cable hubs with a common collision domain, but only
| a relatively small number of subscribers will be riding
| the same copper -- it's just _cheaper_ these days to
| convert the signal to fiber as early in the signal path
| as possible. Plastic wires are cheaper than metal wires,
| _and_ you need fewer of them (and so fewer switches.)
| 0x0000000 wrote:
| Fiber is not ubiquitous. Many of us are still on DOCSIS
| over copper, in which case the person you are replying to
| is exactly correct: upload speed can be reduced for
| additional download speed.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| True FTTH is naturally symmetric; PON is not nor is
| Cable.
| dylan604 wrote:
| No, I think you might be confused. We all know that the
| fiber for the download link is at least 10x wider than
| the fiber for the upload channel. There's just no way to
| squeeze the same number of bits through the smaller
| "tube" /s
| IntelMiner wrote:
| Yes, * _fiber*_ can. But the majority of Americans use
| Cable /HFC (DOCSIS) technologies. These were designed as
| a one-to-many closed loop TV broadcast on a coax line.
| Except with the incoming DOCSIS 4.0 deployments it's
| always been asymmetric as a limitation of the technology
| aaronax wrote:
| Though the fiber system as a whole may not be capable of
| symmetry. For example GPON with 2.5gbps/1.25gbps up/down
| and 10G-PON at 10/2.5 up/down.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| I find that reasoning suspicious. Ever notice how most of
| the muni and coop internet providers offer a symmetrical
| speed while att and comcast don't? My bet is that there's
| no real technical limitation, it's simply price
| segmentation.
| paxys wrote:
| Fiber is symmetric, coax is not. This isn't some grand
| conspiracy, just how the underlying engineering works.
| orra wrote:
| In the UK, Openreach FTTP is heavily asymmetric. Network
| operators aren't entirely at the whims of asymmetric
| standards: network operators _want_ asymmetric services.
| wmf wrote:
| There is a technical limitation _on cable and DSL
| networks_ but not on other techs like fiber or wireless.
| vel0city wrote:
| AT&T does offer symmetrical speeds. Most PON-based FTTH
| ISPs I've encountered do.
|
| There are technical reasons for offering asymmetrical
| speeds when it comes to coax connections. There's only so
| many channels on the wire, a lot are still dedicated to
| television, people mostly only care about download, so
| they prioritize it. PONs don't carry television and are
| just fundamentally different in design, so its easier for
| them to support symmetrical bandwidth.
| godzillabrennus wrote:
| My assumption is torrents are a threat to streaming
| services already and potentially a death blow if uplink
| speeds are too fast.
| RajT88 wrote:
| When I worked at a small ISP, this was indeed a threat.
| We offered symmetric speeds though and dealt with it via
| traffic shaping.
|
| It really was just the odd teenager torrenting here and
| there.
| hhh wrote:
| why would uplink speeds being fast contribute to torrents
| outside of the first few seeders?... you would just have
| more peers contributing smaller amounts
| callalex wrote:
| Also new media (streamers and tubers) rely on uploads and
| are eating cable's lunch. It's just extortion through
| monopoly.
| epx wrote:
| AFAIK, PON (Passive Optical Network) has inherent reasons
| to be asymetric
| wmf wrote:
| Not really. I'm sure asymmetric PON is cheaper but there
| are plenty of symmetric EPON modes.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Assuming we are talking about Cable internet: If they were
| starting from scratch all possibilities are equally
| expensive, but they have installed equipment in your
| neighborhood which assumes a specific channel allocation.
|
| They have increased the channel allocation for upstream in
| recent years and DOCSIS 4.0 allows symmetric connections,
| but the demand is for downstream, and the fewer channels
| they allocate to upstream the bigger number they can
| advertise.
| yadaeno wrote:
| And throw in an availability requirement so my gigabit
| connection doesn't drop to 10kbps every Friday night when
| everyone is using the internet.
| Astronaut3315 wrote:
| Add in some moderate packet loss and you've got CenturyLink
| fiber.
| kulahan wrote:
| A huge portion of people don't need a massive upstream. This
| sounds more expensive for basically no benefit (for most)
| ceejayoz wrote:
| A lot of people need enough for at least a steady
| Zoom/FaceTime call, and that's only going to increase over
| time.
| dylan604 wrote:
| potentially multiple simultaneously if mom&dad have
| separate jobs with kids attending classes.
|
| asymmetrical is as antiquated as dial-up. there's no
| reason for it in 2023.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| You don't need more than 10 mb for that though. How often
| are people uploading 1+ GB? For me at least the answer is
| never.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Not many are using gigabit upstream, but Spectrum's 300
| megabit _down_ plans in my area come with like 20 megabit
| up. I'd get noticeable stutter in calls if I browsed the
| web during one.
|
| Thankfully synchronous gigabit fiber came this year.
| dpkirchner wrote:
| Let's pitch symmetrical, let them counter with 20Mbit up
| per 100Mbit down, and call it a victory.
| dylan604 wrote:
| i think you're about 1/5 the minimum speeds we should be
| countering. 100mbps up, 1000mbps down
| dpkirchner wrote:
| I just noticed the document does prescribe 100 down, 20
| up. Mb.
|
| And yeah, I could go for a gigabit minimum.
| asstrotrash wrote:
| The majority of people is not the qualifier here for this
| argument. It's what is actually a good definition for the
| term "broadband" in this time and age.
| kulahan wrote:
| A good definition shouldn't apply to the majority of
| people?
| hn_acker wrote:
| > A good definition shouldn't apply to the majority of
| people?
|
| If "good definition of minimum broadband speed", then
| "applies to the majority of people". The converse is not
| true. It is not the case that if "applies to the majority
| of people", then "good definition of minimum broadband
| speed."
|
| 1. Whether a speed applies to a majority of people is
| necessary but not sufficient.
|
| 2. You are unknowingly accepting being ripped off. It's
| not reasonable for big ISPs like Comcast to offer me 300
| megabits download 15 megabits upload for $70 a month
| (might've been $90, but assume $70) while EPB of
| Chattanooga [1] offers 1 gigabit symmetrical for $67.99 a
| month. What speed any individual actually needs doesn't
| have to come into the picture. In matters of consumer
| protection, the principle of the thing matters just as
| much as actual consumer needs.
|
| Today's internet technology (particularly optical fiber
| [2], paired with hardware implementing DOCSIS 3.1 or 4
| [3]) is fully capable of providing 1 gigabit symmetrical
| for "the majority of people", even in rural areas.
| Moreover, in the long term, transitioning to fiber would
| be less expensive to the big ISPs like Comcast [4], but
| Comcast keeps raising prices on broadband over decades-
| old copper wires and committing subsidy fraud [5]. Don't
| let big ISPs define "good enough" to be much lower than
| technology and the price of the technology allow.
|
| Going by the Chattanooga metric, 100 mbps symmetrical
| should cost no more than $10, and anything lower is not a
| good definition of minimum broadband speed for the
| present (never mind the future).
|
| [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/why-fiber-
| vastly-super...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Versions
|
| [3] https://epb.com/fi-speed-internet/gig/
|
| [4] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/why-slow-
| networks-real...
|
| [5] Pick any one of these links.
| https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/06/mississippi-says-att-
| too... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/15/report-shows-
| comcast-con...
| https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/16/verizon-t-mobile-
| oversta...
|
| _--------Everything below this line is bonus.--------_
|
| The following excerpt is from an article about data caps
| [6] but applies equally well to the state of broadband
| pricing in general.
|
| > Network congestion arguments in this debate operate on
| an unsubstantiated and uncontextualized assumption of
| scarcity -- there is only so much bandwidth, and a few
| people are going to use it all. Yes, some network
| congestion arguments have prevailed with wireless
| broadband because of the atmospherical and technical
| limitations of the medium. However, congestion is not as
| consequential for fixed broadband. Broadband providers
| reason that instead of limiting these internet "super-
| users" (which would be discriminatory and litigated
| accordingly), they need to implement data caps for all
| consumers, which they claim is fair and unbiased.
| However, scarcity is not a reality for broadband
| providers, even with super-users. Internet functions by
| "statistical multiplexing" meaning that bandwidth is
| dynamically allocated and reused without a limit
| "[u]nlike other utilities such as water, electricity, gas
| or oil."
|
| [6] https://publicknowledge.org/no-cap-the-truth-about-
| data-caps...
| gtvwill wrote:
| Bs. Not sure why you think it but every system has cloud
| backup these days, folks regularly broadcast multiple video
| streams at once from home and a plethora of other
| activities that require upload.
|
| Please stop spreading such misinformation as its an
| unnecessary expense. It costs zero dollars for upload stop
| cucking it because you don't understand its use.
| RajT88 wrote:
| Asymmetric speeds let ISP's oversell their network (more).
| LoganDark wrote:
| My upload speed is a mere 35th of my download. Affordable
| symmetrical needs to be a thing. Especially with a certain
| ISP monopoly.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I don't care if it's symmetrical. I care that I have _enough_
| upstream.
|
| I'd obviously rather have a useful 500/200 than a 100/100 or
| 50/50, even though the latter is symmetrical. (I think my
| service now is around 400/20. I'm way happier with that than
| I would be with 50/50.)
| jjcm wrote:
| I'm actually on the opposite side of this. I wish there were
| more metered options available for data, especially for
| wireless options. I'd love to see an offering that has a low
| monthly connection fee (i.e. $1-5), along with a sensible price
| per GB option (i.e. double the cost of transit so there are
| decent margins on this, but isn't something crazy like $10/gb).
|
| Assuming that for most consumers the end price averages to be
| the same, the benefit of metered is it puts an incentive on the
| data provider to make their speeds as high as possible. Higher
| speeds will result in more bandwidth usage (i.e.
| Youtube/Netflix will default to a higher data rate), which will
| result in more profit for the company. The desires of the
| customer and the desires of the provider are the same - faster
| and more stable internet leads to better customer experience
| and more profit.
|
| One of the issues I see with fixed-speed-unlimited-data options
| is that providers are incentivized to oversell the fixed speed
| bandwidth, leading to " _up to_ 100mbps " type connections
| where it's a theoretical max, not the average. Under this model
| the desires of the customer are misaligned with the desires of
| the provider. The provider wants the customer to use as little
| data as possible - the less they use the more they can sell
| plans on the same infrastructure. This can be addressed with
| rules and regulations, but I prefer a situation where I know
| both the customer and provider have aligned desires.
| elzbardico wrote:
| Yes, metering is the rational thing to do.
|
| But caps are different and don't work the same.
| stefan_ wrote:
| Well twice the price of transit is .. NaN? Data isn't
| generally charged in bits.
| ftth_finland wrote:
| It makes no sense to price wireless data based on IP transit
| costs.
|
| IP transit costs per GB are a fraction of a hundredth of a
| penny.
|
| It barely makes any sense to bill consumers per GB on any
| terrestrial network.
|
| In Northern Europe a typical 4G SIM with a monthly data quota
| is $9 per month. An unlimited 4G SIM with all you can eat
| data is $18. How many price points do you need in between?
|
| Heck, _international_ 4G /5G data roaming fees are capped at
| $2/GB and by 2027 the cap will be $1/GB.
| musha68k wrote:
| The metered pricing model doesn't align with reality of data
| costs for ISPs which are often negligible (thanks to
| technological advances and peering agreements especially).
| This makes the metered model more of a revenue strategy than
| a necessity. It's also conflicting with basic tenets of net
| neutrality.
| hn_acker wrote:
| At least for wired connections, data caps are utterly
| artificial [1].
|
| > Network congestion arguments in this debate operate on an
| unsubstantiated and uncontextualized assumption of scarcity
| -- there is only so much bandwidth, and a few people are
| going to use it all. Yes, some network congestion arguments
| have prevailed with wireless broadband because of the
| atmospherical and technical limitations of the medium.
| However, congestion is not as consequential for fixed
| broadband. Broadband providers reason that instead of
| limiting these internet "super-users" (which would be
| discriminatory and litigated accordingly), they need to
| implement data caps for all consumers, which they claim is
| fair and unbiased. However, scarcity is not a reality for
| broadband providers, even with super-users. Internet
| functions by "statistical multiplexing" meaning that
| bandwidth is dynamically allocated and reused without a limit
| "[u]nlike other utilities such as water, electricity, gas or
| oil."
|
| > This means that no super-user is consuming bandwidth at the
| expense of other users; you're not going to receive less
| internet because your neighbor runs a Twitch channel, for
| example. Rather, super-users are simply using more internet
| more often, and the "super-user discount" (the fact that
| broadband providers aren't able to charge them, specifically,
| for this "above normal" usage) angers providers more than
| anything else. This brings us to the real reason broadband
| providers apply data caps to consumers: money. Applying data
| caps to all of us, therefore, enables broadband providers to
| pat themselves on the back for devising clever "overage"
| fees.
|
| As time goes on the same will become true for wireless
| connections.
|
| [1] https://publicknowledge.org/no-cap-the-truth-about-data-
| caps...
| IdiranVibe wrote:
| It blows my mind that you guys in the US still have to deal
| with data caps ... It's been years in the UK since that's been
| a thing for broadband, and we're close to the point where
| mobile data will be the same
| criddell wrote:
| It depends on your ISP. My phone has a data cap of 100
| GB/month. Once I go over that I am throttled when the network
| is congested.
|
| My home internet has no data caps.
| thayne wrote:
| I don't know about other ISPs, but Xfinity/Comcast
| residential internet has a data cap of 1TB/month,
| regardless of the bandwidth tier you pay for. Although you
| can pay a (substantial) fee to remove that data cap.
| SoylentYellow wrote:
| Removing the Xfinity data cap would increase my bill by
| 60%. It is outrageous.
| mjrpes wrote:
| Comcast Business has no data cap and so might be an
| option
| ls612 wrote:
| For residential internet most people have no data cap and
| those who do have a very large cap (over 1TB/month). Even I
| as a pretty active user only use like 500GB/month on my
| desktop according to Windows.
| callalex wrote:
| 1TB/mo is not "very large" since you can get that kind of
| data allocation on a $2-4/mo server.
| vel0city wrote:
| Residential internet connections aren't designed for the
| same kind of usage as some VPS.
| callalex wrote:
| Ok but we're talking about a whole computer with
| redundant power and connectivity and memory and disk
| storage compared to throughput on already-installed non-
| redundant wires. One of those certainly costs way less
| than the other, but Comcast still charges multiple orders
| of magnitude more for.
| vel0city wrote:
| Its not a whole computer, its a tiny fraction of a whole
| computer. And that whole computer is in a giant
| datacenter hundreds of feet from massive ISP
| interconnections and only a few hops of hardware away
| from it. Meanwhile the residential customer is probably
| many miles from the nearest interchange, often even
| hundreds or more miles.
|
| Location, location, location.
|
| I do agree the over the cap costs imposed by residential
| ISPs are many, many multiples of their true cost, but
| they're mostly there to discourage use not be a
| reasonable price. If you want business level usage hop on
| their business networking where pricing models are more
| designed for more average load.
| adrr wrote:
| Only data caps if you only have one choice in broad band.
| Once you have two or more, data caps go away and price is cut
| in half. If there are no competitors, the provider will milk
| the customers of cash.
| IdiranVibe wrote:
| I suppose at that point it's a geography issue which is
| less of a problem here due to the size of the country
| callalex wrote:
| They should also require the ISP to use a reasonable method to
| count the amount of data if there is a data cap. No matter how
| I count the data in and out of my gateway running OpenWRT,
| Comcast/Xfinity consistently counts and charges me for at least
| 20% more data with no discernible reason why.
|
| I think somewhere in fine print they claim they get to round up
| to the nearest KB or MB every minute or some asinine made-up
| scale that only benefits them.
| kstrauser wrote:
| I wish ISPs were required to advertise the number of seconds
| you're allowed to use their service at full speed. Ooh, a
| gigabit pipe with a terabyte cap? You're allowed to use it for
| 3 hours per month before throttling or extra charges kick in.
|
| I believe it's false advertising when ISPs claim their price is
| $X per month if it's only for 1/240th of a month. I understand
| and support the idea of overprovisioning, but a 240x ratio is
| insanity.
| ehPReth wrote:
| happy to see upload get the attention it deserves. nothing is
| more annoying than uploading a video to $messagingapp or
| $socialmediaplatform and it just taking forever due to slow
| upload. a nice quality of life improvement to shove that quicker
| to someone.
|
| even stuff like backing up computers, or running security cameras
| that you can view remotely or that record to the cloud
| (encrypted) are really hampered by upload speed. there's a lot of
| cool stuff one can do if only one had the speed to do it with.
| voakbasda wrote:
| Oh, it's worse than that. With my 20-1 DSL connection,
| saturating the uplink effectively causes a DoS for the
| downlink.
| koito17 wrote:
| You gave me flashbacks to 2010 when I had used ADSL and
| thought 128 KB/s download was the best thing ever for
| downloading MP3s. And as you mentioned, using up all upload
| bandwidth effectively DoSed everyone else on the network,
| though in my case, any single person downloading also slowed
| down everything else to a crawl. I must have had less
| "downstream channels" (or whatever the DSL equivalent is)
| than your setup.
|
| My current internet connection uses DOCSIS 3.1, but I can't
| recall any resource contention even if I have several
| computers trying to upload simultaneously. Not a big fan of
| asymmetric speeds, though, but apparently DOCSIS 4.0 (which
| is being finalized this year) gets us closer to symmetrical
| speeds.
| inemesitaffia wrote:
| Cake or fq-codel on Openwrt
| voakbasda wrote:
| That's not viable for me, as my subnet router is on the far
| side of my DSL connection. There's absolutely no way for me
| to filter incoming packets before they traverse my
| downlink. And as far as I know, there's no easy way to get
| all of my machines on my static subnet to coordinate
| traffic shaping.
| idiot900 wrote:
| Honest question: at what point, with real life usage, is 1 Gbps
| actually necessary for home users?
|
| I find that latency rather than throughput is what determines my
| perceived quality of an Internet connection. But am curious how
| others think.
| lapphi wrote:
| Probably when VR starts popping off
| dawnerd wrote:
| When games are 100+ gigs it starts being something that can
| make an impact especially when updates are also massive. But
| this is the same thing people say over every incremental in
| tech. "Isn't x enough"
| Zigurd wrote:
| First, you are not buying a sustained 1Gb. Not at consumer
| pricing. Secondly, having burst capacity is very helpful.
| Moving big images, videos, etc., which you do only
| occasionally, benefits a lot from a 1Gb consumer-grade link.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I recently went from 300mbps to 2gbps, and one big difference
| is game update time. In the past, I would sometimes go to play
| a game with my friends and it would require a 10 gig update,
| and we would have to play a different game because it would
| take too long to update. Now I can update in under a minute and
| we can play.
| phkahler wrote:
| To me that's more about the company making too many large
| updates. And when they do have a large updated it should be
| up to the user to decide when to get it. Downloading it over
| night should be an option, and not required to play. I've
| seem games that demanded the update in order to play, which
| is really annoying and I don't think it should be that way.
| cortesoft wrote:
| The whole point is that I am trying to play multiplayer
| games with my friends. All being on the same version seems
| like a reasonable requirement.
| alerighi wrote:
| They upgraded my line from VDSL (~80Mbit/s down and 20 up) to
| 1Gbit/s FTTH (~800Mbit/s down and 300 up) and didn't see that
| big difference, on normal navigation.
|
| Sure, if I download a torrent, it is much faster. But is not
| the kind of upgrade that I experienced from ADSL (7Mbit) to
| VDSL. Since most of the time I use the PC under Wi-Fi anyway,
| that doesn't go over 600Mbit/s near the AP, but really not over
| 100 in the location where I usually have my PC.
|
| What I've seen instead is a much more stable connection. Giving
| that the network is entirely fiber and passive there weren't
| (so far) any interruption of service in roughly one year, while
| with VDSL there where time to time that the connection did not
| work, in one occasion for nearly a week. Also since it was
| copper lines in case of bad weather, or crosstalk with other
| users, the performance did vary a lot.
| jsight wrote:
| That matches my experience as well. I'll take a little
| slower, if its symmetric and fiber. The stability is worth
| it. I could stream multiple videos at 4k pretty easily with
| 100Mbps. They've upgraded to 300 since then, but the
| difference was unnoticeable.
|
| Most complaints that I've seen in various neighborhoods are
| from people that were not getting anywhere near their full
| speed. Usually the cause is their wifi router.
| nathanfig wrote:
| Most households with 4+ people are going to have dozens of
| connected devices, including multiple doing HD to 4K
| entertainment streams, outgoing video feeds, and (at least on
| PS5) the occasional unexpected 80GB updates to a video game you
| were just about to play. This in addition to the apps/webapps
| that are often in the 10s of Mb of content served per click.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Multiple simultaneous 4K streams does not describe any
| household I know. How much TV are you people watching? It
| seems like an exceptionally high level of media consumption,
| in my experience.
|
| Furthermore, 4K video is < 25mbps each per stream, usually.
| ipython wrote:
| Those households also have one poorly configured Wi-Fi access
| point, which is jockeying for airtime with dozens of
| competing access points in the same frequency range, meaning
| the customer is realistically going to see maybe 200Mbps
| aggregated across those devices (due to interference, channel
| congestion, that one streaming device with a -90dBm signal
| sucking up all the airtime at the lowest supported data
| rate...)
|
| IMHO we need to address the "last meter" experience before
| mandated gigabit internet speeds mean anything.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Plenty of people work from home and that connection speed can
| be important when you're uploading a bunch of files while on a
| video call for example.
|
| Or there's three people in your house all on video calls.
| carstenhag wrote:
| With Teams using 0.3 Mbit/s (3fps) while I am sharing my
| screen, this is not really a concern.
| Avamander wrote:
| That's a ridiculously low and bad target to aim for though.
| vel0city wrote:
| Teams will usually use ~4Mbit of upload when I do screen
| sharing, and screen shares are usually significantly above
| 3fps (normally closer to 15-30fps).
| Szpadel wrote:
| I have 1gb connection and I agree that 99% of the time this
| isn't utilized, but it's very helpful when you want to download
| anything, from new steam game, through system updated to for me
| work related usage. this isn't that much about you can download
| per month, but how fast you can do it when you need something
| gustavus wrote:
| Honestly everytime I've tried downloading a large file the
| bottleneck is on the serving end, where they aren't able to
| send that much data that fast.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| You _can_ use something called lftp to transfer single
| files using multiple connections at once, I 'm sure there's
| similar switches for wget or curl
| mksybr wrote:
| If there's a torrent available you can get better speed.
| Helpful for Linux installation ISOs
| gustavus wrote:
| As long as front-end developers keep shoving more and more
| layers of JavaScript "libraries" and corporations shovel more
| and more adware into every request it's likely we'll continue
| to need more and more bandwidth; because most developers figure
| if it is working great in thier office with a dedicated fiber
| line on the latest MBP it obviously must be fine for everyone.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| The world moves ever onward. Services like 4K high-bitrate
| playbacks have become more common. Games with sizes of 200GB
| aren't unheard of now.
|
| Most people could get away with less, but sooner or later 1Gbps
| will go from "excessive" to "good" to "acceptable" to "slow".
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Latency usually explodes as connection utilization goes up. If
| you have a router with good QOS and limit to 80% of your max
| available connection you're probably going to have pretty good
| latency.
|
| Then again I'm not a networking guy. Someone who knows more
| about this stuff than I do can give you more comprehensive
| advice and talk about stuff like buffer bloat, etc.
| kcb wrote:
| Download a PS5 game or Steam game.that you want to play
| shortly.
| kaylynb wrote:
| 1 Gbps is nice when downloading games and updates. Since
| everything is digital it can be the difference between waiting
| 30 minutes or 3 hours. IE: You play a game the night it's
| released/updated or wait until after work the next day.
|
| Upload speed probably makes more sense for more use cases
| though. I used to have symmetric 1Gbps fiber and never bothered
| to setup QOS as my upload was never saturated.
|
| I moved and am stuck with "1Gbps" Comcast. Which really means
| 25Mbps upload. I had to setup qdiscs on my gateway and split my
| network into tiers to get acceptable upload speeds and latency
| for the workstations in my home. I maybe have more uploads than
| 'normal' people, as I have automated backups that store data
| off-site, but normal people have "backups" in the form of cloud
| storage I think.
|
| Uploading videos (to YouTube, for example) is painfully slow.
| I'm simulating living in Australia when I upload a video.
| superkuh wrote:
| I'm much more excited about the "...and 20 megabits per second
| for upload". My comcast account for $107/mo with 1.2 TB data
| transfer cap per month still only has a 5 megabit upload throttle
| (80/5). I literally had the same upload speed in 2003.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Waht the government needs to do (but never will) is make the last
| mile a municipal utility such as in Chattanooga [1].
|
| Instead we have monopolies that do what all monopolies do in a
| capitalist organization of the economy: they rent-seek, spend
| their time and money on lobbying to legislatively exclude
| competition (eg [2]), do the bare minimum and take public money
| to roll out broadband but then just not do it (eg [3].
|
| The Internet is the US is objectively awful for most people by
| the standard of other developed economies [4].
|
| It's ridiculous that people still defend this system.
|
| [1]: https://qz.com/1996234/the-best-broadband-in-the-us-is-in-
| ch...
|
| [2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-
| al...
|
| [3]: https://arstechnica.com/information-
| technology/2015/06/veriz...
|
| [4]: https://broadbandnow.com/report/2018-fcc-international-
| data-...
| Zigurd wrote:
| Municipal ISPs are a good start, and they illustrate how much
| of your ISP bill goes to debt service from when the commercial
| ISP bought out competitors.
|
| But you don't have to run a municipal ISP like a commercial
| ISP. If pricing goes low enough, just make it an amenity, like
| parks and sidewalks, and fund it that way.
|
| And then you can choose a totally different architecture than a
| commercial ISP could operate: no network admission barriers,
| mesh networks, etc.
| elromulous wrote:
| I think I speak for many when I say "'bout damn time".
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| Will they also change how they define a region? At one point, I
| thought so long as an ISP service a single customer in a zip
| code(?), census tract(?), some region definition, the ISP could
| make claims to offering that tier of service everywhere.
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| The service regions are kind of a government mandated monopoly
| for who can offer service where. However, the FCC is now
| requiring automated speed testing so if you say you can offer
| 100/100 symmetrical you have to prove it. The FCC can pick any
| customer and say "prove this customer can get the service they
| are paying for" -- for us, that means installing a cloud
| connected router that automatically connects and tests.
| Apparently the fines are pretty gnarly...
| bscphil wrote:
| It's 100 Mbps down / 20 Mbps up as the proposal, and 1000 Mbps /
| 500 Mbps as an eventual goal.
|
| I imagine the 20 Mbps upload target is useless for most of us,
| even those on asymmetric cable, but there's a good chance that if
| the ISPs were forced to provide 20 Mbps up at their lowest
| broadband tiers, it would raise the ladder quite a bit. For
| example, on Comcast I get 800 / 20, but there's also a 400 / 10
| tier (and maybe a low-cost tier below that?). If everyone was
| getting 20 up, maybe I'll get upgraded to 40 Mbps.
| jwells89 wrote:
| Upload being low is frustrating. In my area Comcast sells
| "gigabit" service that's 1000Mbps/20Mbps which seems like it's
| explicitly designed to hook less technically aware customers
| who know "gigabit" is good but not exactly how.
|
| Thankfully there are alternative ISPs here that sell
| symmetrical gigabit, but that's definitely not the case
| everywhere.
| bscphil wrote:
| In my case Comcast is 800/20 or 1000/35, but they refuse to
| even advertise the upload rate so you don't know when you're
| signing up. There's a somewhat outdated, very hard to find
| page that lists these [1] but many tiers (including mine)
| don't seem to be shown.
|
| [1] https://www.xfinity.com/networkmanagement
| linsomniac wrote:
| ISTR, and this was ~3+ years ago now, that Xfinity/Comcast
| is quite hard to even find out what the upload speed of the
| different offerings is. I even was chatting with their
| support and asking and they were cagey, like "why do you
| want to know?"
| bscphil wrote:
| Currently, at least in my area, _after_ you 've purchased
| a plan (potentially with a term agreement), you can log
| onto the Xfinity website and see what your expected
| upload speed is. Mine says 800 / 20, although I think
| it's possible that the 800 is really 900 and they
| undersell download speeds to avoid customer complaints. I
| regularly max out a Gbit line in iperf tests to nearby
| servers.
| m463 wrote:
| I wonder what at upload speed will the acks be congested and
| prevent full download speeds from occurring.
| tga_d wrote:
| Is that even possible with SACK?
| Analemma_ wrote:
| > I imagine the 20 Mbps upload target is useless for most of
| us, even those on asymmetric cable
|
| I wish this were true. I'm in Seattle and Xfinity will _only_
| sell me 5 Mbps up, even at 480 down, unless I pay out the ass
| for a symmetric gigabit connection I don 't need. Very much
| looking forward to the FCC forcing at least 20.
| danielhep wrote:
| Where do you live? It's possible to get gigabit service from
| a handful of different non Comcast ISPs in most of the city.
| ska wrote:
| Comments said they don't want to pay more for gigabit (that
| they don't need) just to get reasonable upload speed.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| I'm also in Seattle and get symmetric gigabit for $49.99
| all in, I'd be surprised if they're getting 480 from
| comcast for cheaper. I think my provider is only
| available for apartment buildings but there's likely
| competition from other providers that at least offer
| symmetric speeds.
| Analemma_ wrote:
| Unfortunately Comcast is the only option in my 14-unit
| condo, which AIUI is not unusual for this size of
| building in this area.
|
| The worst part is that the much larger condo right next
| to us has Google Fiber :(
| ska wrote:
| That's the worst, and usual require board approval to
| change, which you can't get.
| duffyjp wrote:
| I'd recommend looking into the 5G home internet services all
| the major cell carriers offer. They're all cheaper than I was
| paying Spectrum for their minimum tier. None are offered at
| my address unfortunately but being in Seattle I'd bet you
| could get one.
|
| I had fiber installed this summer and until they finally sent
| a staff engineer out it was going down 2-5 times a day. I
| work from home so I had to tether to my phone for Teams
| meetings to make sure I'd stay connected. It was actually
| completely fine and I only get 2 bars of LTE at home.
| jupp0r wrote:
| Agreed. ISPs can allocate bandwidth on DSL/Coax trunks as they
| please so it should just be a configuration change to increase
| the upload percentage.
| toast0 wrote:
| That's not really true. There's certainly knobs to turn, and
| almost certainly some available capacity to increase uploads,
| but coax and dsl are fundamentally asynchronous.
|
| Coax has to manage the single (or few) headend transmitter vs
| many CPE transmitters, you get better multiplexing to the CPE
| than from the CPE; and while the newest equipment may be able
| to handle CPE uploads across most of the spectrum, older
| equipment had a narrower range of frequencies available to
| upload with. If there's spare frequencies and downstream
| capacity isn't using it, then yeah... if not, there's trade
| offs.
|
| For DSL, everybody has a dedicated pair to the DSLAM/remote
| terminal whatever, but crosstalk between pairs impacts the
| signals and again, the DSLAM has more ability to mitigate
| that towards the CPE than the CPE can when sending upstream.
| Anyway, VDSL/VDSL2 are specified with asymetric up and down
| bandwidth, as was ADSL. Of course, DSL ISPs tend to cap sync
| rates based on profiles, rather than running the lines to
| their maximum capacity, so a lot of lines do have more upload
| capacity than is allowed to be used, and to the extent that's
| the case, it would just take a profile update to get more
| upload for many users.
| cavisne wrote:
| DOCSIS (the Coax protocol) is asymmetric. 10:1 for docsis 3.1
| and 10:6 for 4.0
|
| So cable at least will always be a bit asymmetric. A lot of
| fiber deployments (GPON) are also but the bandwidth limits
| are much higher so it does not really matter.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I guess I'm the outlier. I have 300 down / 15 up and never
| really notice an issue.
| freedomben wrote:
| How often do you upload? I notice especially when trying to
| rsync or upload files to the cloud.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Not often and never in large doses - mostly just recorded
| images or videos to the cloud. I don't know the use cases
| people have for that outside of streaming large media.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| You don't notice because you have never had the capability to
| host content. With symmetric upload, it would be possible to
| backup our phones/data to our own NAS at home as opposed to
| relying on Apple/Microsoft/Alphabet/Amazon. You could stream
| video from your own device, you could share it, etc.
|
| The lack of high quality, high bandwidth symmetric
| connections to the home (and ipv6) is a huge boon to the
| entrenched big tech companies.
| chrononaut wrote:
| > With symmetric upload, it would be possible to backup our
| phones/data to our own NAS at home as opposed to relying on
| Apple/Microsoft/Alphabet/Amazon.
|
| I am not following this one. Why would upload bandwidth at
| home inhibit backing up your phone/data to a NAS at home?
| Or are you referring to remote restoration / access?
|
| Wouldn't the NAS be using its download bandwidth to receive
| backups when your phone is remote? and your phone would be
| on the local network when you're at home?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Sorry, I meant sync services too. As in right now, people
| use Google or Apple to synchronize their photos/files/etc
| across devices and locations.
|
| But it could be possible to do this with your own device
| at home with sufficient upload.
|
| It might be too late though, since if sufficient people
| are used to the big tech companies doing it, it might not
| leave enough of a market to develop sell a device to do
| it (although I feel like it should be doable with
| software and existing NAS vendors like Synology).
| organsnyder wrote:
| According to someone I know that works at Comcast, they're
| working on rolling out symmetrical (or at least closer to
| symmetrical) speeds--even over coax--within the next few years.
| I'm able to get 2000/200, which is decent. Metronet just buried
| fiber in my front yard, though, so I'm looking forward to
| symmetrical fiber soonish (though Metronet has been building so
| fast I'm worried about growing pains).
| JoshGlazebrook wrote:
| They announced this a few weeks ago
| (https://www.fiercetelecom.com/broadband/comcast-first-
| deploy...).
|
| Already starting the rollout in Colorado.
| bscphil wrote:
| Yes, there's actually a significant ongoing scandal over this
| because they're only rolling it out (in most cases) to people
| renting their expensive hardware, even if the modem you
| bought already has the necessary DOCSIS 3.1 support. It's so
| scummy.
|
| https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/want-faster-
| comc...
| organsnyder wrote:
| I can understand it to an extent--easier to do an initial
| roll-out when you're able to more easily control the
| parameters--but it certainly isn't a good look.
|
| What's more scummy (IMHO) is that it's actually cheaper for
| me to rent their modem--which includes unlimited data--than
| it is for me to pay the fee to remove the data cap.
| c2h5oh wrote:
| Starlink will not qualify - even in area with no congestion
| where you have to problem maintaining >200Mbps down your upload
| speed averages around 15Mbps
| freedomben wrote:
| yep, my average is about 88 Mbps down and 7.4 Mbps up on
| Starlink. The frustrating thing is it fluctuates a lot. At
| one point I could get about 160/10.
| c2h5oh wrote:
| As far as I can tell you can't meet the 20Mbps upload
| requirement anywhere.
|
| I'm in rural middle of nowhere in central Europe, at a
| latitude with very dense Starlink coverage and I'm almost
| certainly the only Starlink user in my hex - the speeds I'm
| getting are pretty much unaffected by network congestion.
|
| Even in those ideal conditions upload is 10-15Mbps 95% of
| the time, even when download is closer to 300 than 200Mbps
| olyjohn wrote:
| It's a bummer, but considering that all I had before
| Starlink was 768down/128kup, this is a godsend. It will
| never be as good as an actual good wire-line connection,
| but whatever, that's not really it's point. Anybody who has
| cable or fiber, or even a fast tier of DSL should not
| really bother with Starlink.
| freedomben wrote:
| Yep, agreed. I am extremely glad that starlink exists,
| and I'm willing to pay double for starlink that I would
| pay for a connection limited to 12 Mbps down
| d3w4s9 wrote:
| I have 10mbps upload from Comcast. My GoPro footage takes ages
| to upload. This is just infuriating.
| gnicholas wrote:
| There have been times where I considered tethering to my
| phone for large uploads. If it's at the end of my billing
| cycle, and I have enough room under my cap, I actually do it.
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| If you're in the bracket of "100 mbps down is fine for me" then
| you most likely do not care about the upload speed at all.
| About the only advantage for the average person would be "Your
| iCloud backup goes faster".
|
| 1gig/500meg would be a huge step forward. I'm currently on the
| highest most bestest plan that my ISP (Astound) offers. And
| it's 1.2gig down, 50 mbps up. That's not a typo, FIFTY up. I'm
| a techy and even I know I don't need 1.2gig down. My house is
| wired with CAT6 because I dragged it around, but my main switch
| is still gig. So... I can't even enjoy the increased download.
| The only reason I stepped to that highest plan was to get more
| upload than the 20mbps they previously offered.
| bscphil wrote:
| > If you're in the bracket of "100 mbps down is fine for me"
| then you most likely do not care about the upload speed at
| all.
|
| Personally I'd trade my current speeds (800 / 20) for 100 /
| 100 in a heartbeat. There's just ... not that much I can do
| with more than 100 down. That's fast enough to stream a Blu-
| ray disc directly off of a web server. It's fast enough that
| package updates on Linux take longer to install than they do
| to download.
|
| Can I theoretically use more? Sure, it's nice to be able to
| download files or update Steam games a little faster. But 20
| Mbps up is killing me. Backing up a drive to cloud server can
| take hours or days.
| happytiger wrote:
| 1000 Mbps down / 100 Mbps up should be the minimum for any first
| world country.
|
| Without mandated illegality of data caps and other Comcast data
| and modem games this does nothing to change the reality of boots
| on the ground unfortunately. These speeds only really allow you
| to close your data cap sooner in the month for the vast majority
| of customers who use Internet for modern things. A fixed data cap
| locks in an "era" of technology so that when the era ends (HD >
| 4k, 4k > 8k for example) every one of the customers ends up being
| a heavy user. It is a scam that should be illegal.
|
| We've already paid for this with multiple rural broadband bills.
| It's time for change.
|
| This is woefully (and shamefully) inadequate action by the FCC
| but at least we don't have to deal with Ajit's basically sellout
| behavior anymore and can at least talk about solutions beyond the
| current regulatory captured standards.
|
| I commend them for moving, but I can't condone their proposal as
| it's truly and utterly inadequate and far behind global standards
| as well.
|
| If you want your country to slip into uncompetitive mess, go
| ahead and hamper the backbone of the new Industrial Revolution by
| giving away all the value to your corporate friends and leaving
| the innovation a generation of _true_ broadband performance could
| generate laying on the shop floor.
|
| Did I mention we have already paid for broadband (ready, was
| supposed to be fiber rollout)? Twice? Low standards might as well
| be low standards FCC.
| Culonavirus wrote:
| Many (most?) people do not even have devices that could utilize
| 1Gbit/s. My (relatively new) Galaxy Tab S7+ (11ac wifi) has a
| hard time going over 500Mbit/s (not sure if it's wifi or the
| slow internal memory, can't be arsed to find out), and it's
| similar with my (not that old) LG Velvet phone... All of that
| on a connection that can do a rock solid 1Gbps on my PC through
| UTP (cat 6)...
|
| What I'm trying to say is that many of these devices regular
| people have don't even have the capability to receive 1Gbit/s
| streams. It's great for us nerds or people who (also) work from
| home and need blazing fast connections to work servers etc, but
| as of 2023, it's overkill for many regular people.
|
| Datacaps should be illegal though.
| d3w4s9 wrote:
| Anyone with a PlayStation/Xbox/gaming PC -- that's a lot of
| people -- can tell you how much they dislike waiting for a
| game download. I have 300Mbps download and I still find it
| too slow. I don't want to start a download, wait for half an
| hour before I can play the game.
| happytiger wrote:
| It's funny how people who don't use gaming or need to
| manage large remote files for work will actively advocate
| for slower speeds and the lack of need for speed.
|
| It's also about latency.
|
| But the thing people miss is that this is mandating
| projects for _future infrastructure_ projects. Whatever we
| set at a baseline is what we will standardize on for the
| next generation. People donut understand these are leading
| values for project acceptability not minimum standards of
| throughout as they are being presented. Massive difference.
|
| It's not about whether you can make it work today, it's
| about what kind of projects are acceptable speed for
| tomorrow and whether we can call it broadband when it's
| not.
|
| Just look at gaming. When it came on a CD people complained
| that gaming would never work on a t1 line, and 1.5 mbit was
| supposed to support at 25 person office (1999). Then 10
| mbit was mind blowing with bonded DSL and you could support
| everything. Now we are having an argument about 100 and
| 300, but the same logic applies. What works for today
| _isn't_ the standard we should be applying to qualify
| infrastructure minimums for buildout (which is what this
| is).
|
| I mean imagine when games at 2-3TB each (it's coming) and
| drives are 50GB. It's not a question of throughput, as you
| said it becomes a question of time to complete -- aka
| productivity -- and that means waiting around for stuff to
| finish while you download. That's what broadband standards
| are working against -- what we think is acceptable to be
| installing today -- not whether you can max the link with
| your current mix of devices and two 4k TVs.
|
| Good point.
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| This is a relevant issue for people who call our ISP and
| complain they aren't getting their 250/250 and we find out
| they speed tested with a 6 year old cheap Android phone that
| only supports 2.4 GHz wireless.
|
| Wireless is a convenience feature but it gets treated like it
| should act exactly like a direct wire does.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I have no need for speeds like this. I have kids, we have many
| devices, and still we have no need for this. I understand that
| some people want speeds like this, but it shouldn't be
| accomplished by eliminating choice for people who would be
| perfectly happy with much lower speeds. And of course, if the
| mandated minimum speed is set to 1000/100, then these customers
| would be subsidizing those who use/want the higher speeds.
| bmicraft wrote:
| > And of course, if the mandated minimum speed is set to
| 1000/100, then these customers would be subsidizing those who
| use/want the higher speeds.
|
| Barely. Most costs to telcos are fixed costs, and upgrading
| the speeds of their lower speed plans shouldn't lead to a big
| increase in traffic.
| happytiger wrote:
| It's not just throughout speed it's latency that's important
| about connection speed.
| somat wrote:
| Oh boy! pedant time. note that ethernet and gpon(single line
| fiberoptic) are not broad band, they are base band.
|
| Broad band does not mean speed. it means it uses a lot of
| frequencies at the same time.
|
| OK getting dizzy here from too much excitement, pedant time is
| over for this week. We are all allowed to go back to using the
| non-technical meaning of broadband where it means speed.
| s1gnp0st wrote:
| *Pedant
| somat wrote:
| Totally fair call, fixed.
| inemesitaffia wrote:
| Try again
| aidenn0 wrote:
| If we are being pedants, I object to fiber-optic being labeled
| as base-band.
|
| It is modulating a ~100THz carrier wave, so is clearly not
| base-band.
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| Maybe old fashioned "blink on means 1, no light means 0" is
| base-band, but these days they have virtual data channels and
| bidirectional fiber transmits on a different frequency than
| it receives on...so definitely broad-band.
| xyst wrote:
| FCC should fix the collusion that happens under the table between
| ISPs. ISPs tend to avoid entering an area where there is already
| established service.
|
| So for a majority of people, the ISPs have a de facto monopoly.
| No need to improve service or customer support.
|
| Also need to overturn legislation at state level which forbids
| municipal ISPs from being created. This would help break the mini
| monopolies that ISPs.
|
| Defining standards is fine. But the real issue needs to be fixed.
| apex3stoker wrote:
| There is a ISP which provides fibre internet with great upload
| speed and low price a few miles away. I once called their
| signup phone number and asked if they could extend their
| service to my place. They said no because they had an agreement
| with Comcast not to encroach on each other territories.
| xyst wrote:
| how is this not a blatant violation of anti-trust laws?
|
| > The Sherman Act broadly prohibits 1) anticompetitive
| agreements and 2) unilateral conduct that monopolizes or
| attempts to monopolize the relevant market.
| userinanother wrote:
| Does everyone really need that much bandwidth though? Usally
| 20mbps is enough for most things. 50 is plenty and after that
| it's mostly bragging rights.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| You clearly don't play video games. Waiting on downloads in the
| mid 10s of GB is common.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| - Multiple people videoconferencing at once, as was very
| common in a lot of households during COVID lockdown.
|
| - Gaming.
|
| - Other large downloads/uploads for WFH purposes.
|
| - High-bitrate 4k UHD streaming.
| userinanother wrote:
| All nice to haves but do we really need to build out all
| the infrastructure for that if most people don't need that
| speed and definitely can't convert that convenience into
| economic value. This is especially now that most companies
| are forcing everyone back and the government is pretending
| covid is no longer a thing
| userinanother wrote:
| I buy physical media for the most part because it retains
| resale value. But also the inconvenience of someone
| downloading for an extra hour or two shouldn't drive us to
| build billions in infrastructure
| wmf wrote:
| 25 Mbps is enough _for one person_ so 100 Mbps is reasonable
| for a household.
| kcb wrote:
| It's the difference between playing the game you just bought in
| 20 mins or having to leave your PC on until the next day.
| theideaofcoffee wrote:
| 2023: "Does everyone really need 100Mbps?"
|
| 2003: "Does everyone really need 5Mbps?"
|
| 1994: "Does everyone really need 28.8Kbps?"
|
| 1967: "Does ARPAnet really need 2.4Kbps?"
| issafram wrote:
| I had Comcast forever with a maximum upload of 25mbps. They
| abandoned advertising the upload speed a long time ago. Finally
| made the switch to AT&T Fiber last weekend. I'll never go back to
| cable again!
| erwincoumans wrote:
| Similar here, moved to Sonic fiber, 10G download and upload
| speed.
| danielfoster wrote:
| I recently won a credit card dispute over a hotel resort fee. The
| hotel claimed they had high-speed Internet. The speed was only
| 2-3 mbps. I was able to use the current FCC definition of high-
| speed to claim a refund.
| avarun wrote:
| Was the wifi access part of the resort fee? Curious how you
| went about explaining the monetary value of the wifi portion of
| your stay to the credit card company.
| danielfoster wrote:
| Yes, it was advertised as part of the fee.
| xnx wrote:
| That is awesome. Can you say more about your process?
| google234123 wrote:
| I feel like you almost always win credit card disputes -
| could have just said it felt slow and won.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| probably just called the card issuer. It's a valid chargeback
| reason, here's Visa's guidance (probably under section 13.3):
| https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/VCOM/global/support-
| legal/d...
|
| "You inaccurately described the merchandise or services at
| the time of purchase." (billed as high-speed, it wasn't)
| danielfoster wrote:
| I took screenshots of text from the hotel's website claiming
| what was included, then sent them to Amex when I filed my
| dispute online. Of course I tried to work with the hotel
| before going this route, but they refused to refund anything.
| hipadev23 wrote:
| Credit cards almost always side with the consumer if you have
| meaningful spend and very few issues/chargebacks/claims. If you
| never use the card, and then chargeback, they'll just deny your
| claim and drop your ass. It's not about the money of the
| individual charge (for small stuff like this anyway), it's
| about keeping you happy and spending on the card.
|
| I highly doubt the argument itself was relevant whatsoever.
| freedomben wrote:
| Hasn't worked for me. Chargebacks are pretty much non-
| existent. The bank will just contact the vendor, ask them if
| they delivered "the product" and if they just say "yes" (no
| proof needed, and they always say yes) they deny my claim. I
| barely even got it back when my kid stole my credit card and
| gave it to a scammer selling "minecraft accounts."
|
| Maybe I need to find a different bank?
| bawolff wrote:
| > I barely even got it back when my kid stole my credit
| card and gave it to a scammer selling "minecraft accounts."
|
| Nor should you quite frankly. Kids buying stupid things is
| not the same as fraud.
| Yiin wrote:
| I'd assume in this case the fraud is not getting the
| minecraft account for advertised price and/or abusing the
| credit card info afterwards.
| freedomben wrote:
| Exactly. If I had run the card myself in this case, it
| would not have changed. The dude took the money and ran,
| never delivered anything
| freedomben wrote:
| Perhaps you missed the word "scammer" in my comment? I'm
| glad you weren't the person deciding on my case. It has
| nothing to do with the fact that my kid stole my card.
| The scammer who made the charge was committing text book
| fraud[1]
|
| [1] http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fraud
| itslennysfault wrote:
| I've done several chargebacks and never had an issue (with
| Chase).
|
| $500 for items stolen off my porch. So they WERE delivered,
| but I didn't receive the item.
|
| Over $1,000 for a hotel I booked and they wouldn't let me
| reduce my 5 day reservation by 1 day (the first day because
| I realized I couldn't get there on the expected day). I
| went back and forth between the booking website and the
| hotel 3 times each with them both telling me only the other
| could change the dates. So, I charged back the whole stay
| and found a different hotel for my updated timeline.
| joemi wrote:
| That's not how chargebacks work at all in my experience,
| from the point of view of the company getting charged-back.
| I worked for a indie small retail store that also sells
| online, and I was the guy the owner would give the
| chargeback notices to and was told to "figure it out". No
| matter whether a chargeback for an in-store charge or an
| online order, the credit card company never once granted it
| the store's favor in all the times I tried. Further they
| require a lot of proof, more proof than we could actually
| provide. For weborders, simply showing them the weborder
| and the tracking info was not enough. They needed _proof_
| that what was ordered was what was sent, which we couldn't
| provide because we weren't taking photos/video of us
| packing the products. For chargebacks on in-store
| purchases, it was just as burdensome to present proof. I
| even had one time when the customer emailed saying she did
| a chargeback by accident, and I provided that email and
| what records of the sale I had from the POS system, and the
| chargeback still went through.
|
| (Also, a bit of a side-point: The chargeback notices always
| had a VERY short window during which you were allowed to
| contest them. In most cases we had about 5 days to respond,
| but sometimes the notice wasn't delivered until after the
| respond-by date.)
| doh wrote:
| This is why I pay almost exclusively with Amex. They do
| contact a vendor and sometimes the vendor tries to fight
| it, but if I reopen the dispute, I always get my money back
| (and I dispute a lot of transactions).
|
| I have the opposite experience with Mastercard. Of the
| dozen or so disputes across 5 cards I had over the years I
| essentially lost them all. Visa is somewhere in the middle.
| They tend to side with customer but also will investigate
| thoroughly.
| danielfoster wrote:
| The claim was $700.
| nathanfig wrote:
| Whoa, was this for multiple parties or a month long stay or
| something?
| hipadev23 wrote:
| how did you pay $700 for internet at any speed? was this a
| cruse ship?
| sschueller wrote:
| More effective would be to require all connections to be opened
| to any other provider (for a fee of course also defined by the
| FCC).
|
| Additionally there should be a over subscriber limit defined
| based on used capacity based on something like a 95th percentile
| calculation.
|
| It doesn't help if you have a gigabit internet connection when
| it's unusable because of the lack of backend capacity.
|
| Although if you had an open infrastructure the free market every
| one loves so much would kill bad service.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| It actually used to work like something like that in the early
| 2000's (?), and then the rules were changed to give the power
| back to the big telcos again.
| Eumenes wrote:
| Wouldn't this just give the greenlight to crappy internet
| companies to shove more tracking BS and bloatware into their
| web/mobile apps? Can the average residential internet user even
| tell the difference from whats available now and 100mbps vs
| 1gbps?
| adrianmonk wrote:
| My body data terminal is ready.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I started with Comcast with 12Mbps service. Over time, they
| increased the base speed they offer to 20, 25, 50, and now 75.
| They have done this because they want to have x% of their
| customers on "broadband", per the federal definition.
|
| This is all well and good, but they keep increasing the price,
| and refuse to offer lower-tier service. I probably wouldn't want
| 12Mbps anymore, but 20 or 25 would suffice. I wish I could pay a
| fraction of what I'm paying for 75Mbps and get a lower tier of
| service. It should suffice that x% of customers are offered
| "broadband" for a reasonable price, even if some choose a lower
| speed.
|
| Ultimately, this comes down to competition. There are no other
| wired options where I live (in the heart of Silicon Valley). I
| have considered using a cellular hotspot, but it's not
| competitive in terms of pricing.
|
| I'm all for prodding companies to move to faster speeds, but
| there should still be room for consumer choice.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I got hit by this as well. Speed was doubled 'for free' one
| month with no notice. A few months later the price was doubled.
| whateverman23 wrote:
| Would it actually be that much less costly to give you 20-25 vs
| 75, though? My uninformed assumption was that it was largely
| artificial once you get to a low enough speed.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Well, if there's not a cost difference, why do they keep
| trying to double my pricing when the base tier goes up?
|
| My sense is there is some cost savings at these lower tiers,
| but more importantly it would prevent ISPs from jacking
| prices up while using higher speeds as the rationale ("Look,
| we just tripled your speed, and it only costs double!"). ISPs
| would be less likely to double prices without any service
| improvement. But since many people don't care about the
| service improvement, it's an illusory benefit for them.
| jacksnipe wrote:
| They've already trained consumers that higher speeds cost
| more. They would need a compelling reason to keep costs the
| _same_ after increasing speeds.
| vel0city wrote:
| I've had many instances where ISPs increased my speeds
| without increasing prices.
|
| If pricing stayed even close to fixed my gigabit internet
| would cost well over $10,000mo, considering back in the
| day I was paying SBC for less than a meg for more than
| I'm paying for a gigabit today. And that's before
| adjusting for inflation, those 90s dollars are worth way
| more than 2023 dollars.
| jakogut wrote:
| In my area, a competitor just finished installing fiber
| to my neighborhood, and is offering symmetrical gigabit
| speeds for less (nearly half the price) than I was paying
| for 500/20 Mbps to the incumbent cable company before.
|
| The cable company now needs to both increase speeds _and_
| lower prices to even keep their existing customers. This
| is a good place to be, as a customer.
| tzs wrote:
| In the almost 20 years I've had Comcast they've increased
| speeds numerous times without increasing prices.
| whateverman23 wrote:
| > Well, if there's not a cost difference, why do they keep
| trying to double my pricing when the base tier goes up?
|
| Because you keep paying for it. It's not like you're going
| to not pay for internet, and you probably don't have many
| alternative options.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Yeah, like I said in my original post, it all comes down
| to competition.
| mixdup wrote:
| >Well, if there's not a cost difference, why do they keep
| trying to double my pricing when the base tier goes up?
|
| At least they're giving more speed instead of just doubling
| the cost with no increase in service
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Because they can? Their goal is to maximize profit, if
| raising prices does that they'll raise prices.
| Arainach wrote:
| What makes you think the price wouldn't double if the speed
| stayed the same? That's what cable prices have done.
| gopher2000 wrote:
| Because they are for-profit organizations and thus greedy.
| Pretty easy.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| Agreed, I suspect the cost is in providing the larger amount
| of bandwidth to the block or neighborhood (better cabling,
| cable modems, etc.) Once in place, the individual subscriber
| usage probably all costs the same for Comcast.
| chx wrote:
| Nope, the big ongoing cost is in support. Humans.
|
| The big upfront cost is trenching. The rest is potatoes. If
| you think the "big heroes" of an ISP are the router
| wizards, oh boy. It's the permit people. A ransomware gang
| has nothing on the uppity council of a town of 4000 people.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| In an extreme ironic twist, me, the techie nerd guy, has the
| slowest internet of the regular-folk friend group of mine.
| Everyone has got 1Gbps and here I am with 300Mbps.
| vladslav wrote:
| My friends in third-world countries get faster and less
| expensive service than me in Silicon Valley. On top of that,
| there is no fiber connection in my neighborhood, and they've
| been on fiber for over 5 years. And there is a data cap also.
| It's just crazy and sad.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Are they in geographic region that is more densely
| populated? Or an area that was built out more recently? In
| my last house (also in SV) the choices were between Comcast
| and AT&T copper. The latter went up to 6/1, so was
| effectively useless. I'm sure it was laid down decades ago.
| thumbsup-_- wrote:
| Yes. Providers in India offer far more speed at far
| cheaper prices than US. The key to this is competition.
| There are many providers available in each major city
| which helps consumer. It's sad that in many US' major
| cities there is usually one or two providers only for a
| building or neighborhood. My building in SF only has
| comcast, so they have a monopoly and can charge whatever
| they want.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| You can find fiber connection in some remote vilage in
| slovakia.
|
| Consolidation is the cause - US had 2-se as many listed
| companies 30 yeats ago.
|
| Now US capital is buying up independant businesses across
| easterm Europe and developing countries, killing
| competition and the local economy.
| vladslav wrote:
| They are in a densely populated area. The city had issues
| with internet service for quite a while. The government
| started to invest heavily in fiber tech around the 2010s,
| and fast forward to now, almost everyone in the city can
| get a fiber connection to their home or apartment
| building. The cost is around ~28$ for 300Mbs and $80 for
| 1Gbs.
| Fatnino wrote:
| Much of residential silicon valley was built very quickly
| in the 50s
| Fnoord wrote:
| Check this out:
|
| > Broadband penetration as of June 2017: 23.5 broadband
| connections for every 100 people. > Distribution of
| broadband connections by type, as reported by Ancom, is as
| follows 94% FTTx (FTTH/FTTB/FTTC/FTTN) internet access
| connections, 4.8% Coaxial cable, 0.2% other.
|
| Now guess the country. Answer in ROT13 at [1]. Hint: it
| ain't a first world country. Another hint: Latine loquitur.
| Oh and it ain't a recent development either. They've been
| at it like forever.
|
| [1] uggcf://ra.jvxvcrqvn.bet/jvxv/Vagrearg_va_Ebznavn
| robertlagrant wrote:
| If you develop later you can leapfrog countries that ground
| through all the necessary phases for the development to
| happen for everyone globally. But that doesn't mean you can
| keep pace. Hopefully your area gets an upgrade, or a
| Starlink, soon.
| arllk wrote:
| I live in Peru, and I have 400Mbps internet FTTH with no
| data cap, and the price is 37 USD [1], the competition of
| the internet providers is incredibly good for the
| consumers.
|
| The lowest plan that mi ISP offers is 100Mbps and is at 21
| USD.
|
| [1] https://www.movistar.com.pe/hogar/internet/solo-
| internet (Link in Spanish)
| vondur wrote:
| According to wikipedia the average monthly salary in Peru
| is $502 US. $37 per month doesn't seem that cheap to me.
| nicoburns wrote:
| As another point of comparison, a new ISP in my area of
| London is offering symmetric gigabit fiber for PS25/month
| or around $30/month (USD).
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| Your country requires ISPs to share and rent lines. That
| does a great deal for competition and lowering prices
| vondur wrote:
| $30/month USD compared to the average salary in London is
| pretty good. We unfortunately don't have much competition
| among ISP's here in the US.
| Fatnino wrote:
| Palo Alto just unveiled another fiber to the home plan to
| be ready by Jan 2025 in one select neighborhood (that I
| live just outside of, dammit).
|
| This plan will definitely come to fruition just like all
| the other ones since the 90s
| msmith wrote:
| It boggles my mind that Google Fiber has been available
| in Austin, TX for 10 years but is still not available in
| the communities next door to Google HQ.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| Probably due to the extreme level of veto-ism in the Bay
| Area. Everyone wants internet, but if 5 people
| complaining about yards or roads being dug up can get
| work to stop indefinitely, costs are going through the
| roof. There's far more uncertainty in that political
| environment than anywhere else.
|
| For reference, I live in a small town of ~6,000 people,
| and we're getting fiber laid. For the longest time we
| only had 25mbps, and then a new provider came in with
| coaxial and offered 200mbps (with a data cap), and now a
| third is laying fiber.
|
| Our average income is $34k/year, so it's not because we
| have more money than the opulent Bay Area.
| 867-5309 wrote:
| "faster" here is relative. unless you live in eastern USA
| or western Europe, you'd be lucky to see half the quoted
| "speed", since that is where the majority of the internet
| resides
| warner25 wrote:
| Me too. I tell everyone who will listen that they should look
| at their actual bandwidth usage. I've looked at the detailed
| statistics on my Google Nest WiFi router, and my family's
| peak usage never exceeded about 30 Mbps. That's with me
| working from home as a CS PhD student and my wife
| homeschooling our kids during the day. I have 300 Mbps (down)
| because that's the lowest, cheapest tier that my ISP offers.
|
| Maybe people are actually using their 1 Gbps bandwidth if
| they have multiple 4K TVs and do serious gaming? I don't
| know, I doubt it.
|
| I tell everyone to look at their actual cellular data usage
| too. I think all middle class Americans just buy unlimited
| plans now, but I do just fine with 500 MB per month for $5.
| pests wrote:
| I have 3 days left in my billing cycle on phone and I've
| used 8.5GB of data. I have WiFi everywhere I go too.
|
| 500 for $5 would cost me about $50 - unlimited makes
| perfect sense.
| warner25 wrote:
| What do you do with all that, especially with WiFi
| everywhere? Are you continuously streaming video while
| on-the-go between WiFi networks? That's fine, it's just
| stunning.
|
| I'm admittedly a minimal user of my phone. I average
| about 10 unlocks per day. Especially when I'm on-the-go,
| it's just calls and text messages, some driving
| directions, and maybe looking up a phone number or
| business hours. If I use it to listen to an audiobook or
| podcast, I download those ahead of time on WiFi. Using
| only 200 MB per month is normal.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > I'm admittedly a minimal user of my phone. I average
| about 10 unlocks per day.
|
| That's about 5 - 10 times the amount of unlocks I do. Not
| what I'd consider minimal, at all. :D
| devindotcom wrote:
| not OP, but anyone who streams music regularly or watches
| videos on their commute, or does video calls on the go,
| will rack up pretty serious gigs. I'm with you on low
| bandwidth usage and certainly on the home bandwidth
| thing, but some people have a very mobile and streaming-
| centric lifestyle. It's a bit foreign to me but it's
| definitely common.
| joe5150 wrote:
| Netflix 4K streams seem to top out around 25Mbps and I'd
| guess other services are comparable, so 1Gbps is still a
| lot of bandwidth for even large multi-streamer households.
| I think a lot of families will reach the limits of cheap,
| basic wifi routers before they start actually pushing
| against their bandwidth caps in these situations.
|
| My issue in the past with cable gigabit service was the
| relatively tiny upstream bandwidth of 20-50Mbps. This made
| for some challenges a few years ago when suddenly everybody
| in the house was on Zoom all day long.
| bdavbdav wrote:
| Yep. We don't need the gigabit down, we need the 100 up
| that comes with it. Openreach seem to sell about 10% of
| the download as the upload.
| warner25 wrote:
| I strongly agree about upload bandwidth. In previous
| homes I've chosen higher tiers of service for exactly
| that reason. I think I could live happily with 20 or even
| 10 Mpbs down, but not 1 Mbps up when I'm using cloud
| storage for photos and need to be on some video calls. I
| shouldn't need to pay for an order-of-magnitude more
| download bandwidth to get reasonable upload bandwidth,
| but apparently I do.
| hn_acker wrote:
| > Me too. I tell everyone who will listen that they should
| look at their actual bandwidth usage.
|
| I shouldn't have to look at my actual bandwidth usage. As I
| wrote in a different comment [1]:
|
| > You are unknowingly accepting being ripped off. It's not
| reasonable for big ISPs like Comcast to offer me 300
| megabits download 15 megabits upload for $70 a month
| (might've been $90, but assume $70) while EPB of
| Chattanooga [1] offers 1 gigabit symmetrical for $67.99 a
| month. What speed any individual actually needs doesn't
| have to come into the picture. In matters of consumer
| protection, the principle of the thing matters just as much
| as actual consumer needs.
|
| > Today's internet technology (particularly optical fiber
| [2], paired with hardware implementing DOCSIS 3.1 or 4 [3])
| is fully capable of providing 1 gigabit symmetrical for
| "the majority of people", even in rural areas. Moreover, in
| the long term, transitioning to fiber would be less
| expensive to the big ISPs like Comcast [4], but Comcast
| keeps raising prices on broadband over decades-old copper
| wires and committing subsidy fraud [5]. Don't let big ISPs
| define "good enough" to be much lower than technology and
| the price of the technology allow.
|
| (The [] citations within my quotes refer to links in my
| other comment. I'm leaving them in for Ctrl-F purposes.)
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38105873
| warner25 wrote:
| Sure. I just mean, from a home economics perspective,
| that people should look at their actual bandwidth usage
| rather than blindly paying for 500 Mbps or 1 Gbps because
| they just want a fast connection and that's what the ISP
| marketing literature recommends for a family of four.
| isilofi wrote:
| Non-techie notices "internet is slow" because their youtube
| video is blocky or pages load slowly. Non-techie goes to ISP
| to complain. ISP upsells to a more expensive plan.
|
| The actual reason in almost all cases: non-techies are
| clueless about their slow and shitty WIFI. Picking empty or
| less busy channels, using 5GHz, using _gasp_ cables, all
| black magic and never done.
|
| Sometimes the upselling actually helps because the better
| plan comes with a maybe-better AP...
| gosub100 wrote:
| > their slow and shitty WIFI
|
| I'm still embarrassed about the time I called my ISP and
| complained that the new Xmbs package they just installed is
| capped at only Ymbps only to realize I had run the speed
| test over wifi (back in the wireless-g,maybe n days)...
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| I live with the shitty wifi because the yak-shaving that
| comes with "ok, I will set their router to be pass through,
| now I need to install openwrt on that 100$ recommended
| router, and run a cable behind my drywall upto the second
| floor, and install anothe openwrt and bang goes a weekend
| and really I am only do that once I order a second line
| because taking out my family's internet for the whole
| weekend because I will fuck it up at least once ..
|
| ok.
|
| Next month honest
| gnicholas wrote:
| Yeah, the Comcast sales reps spin ridiculous tales about
| how much speed you need. People who don't know better are
| fooled by this, and end up paying way too much for speeds
| they don't remotely need.
| doubled112 wrote:
| And some techies regret our choice to have both a Mikrotik
| AP and walls. You can have decent WiFi and one of those,
| but not all three.
|
| That'll teach me to stay consistent.
| Terr_ wrote:
| As someone who plays games a lot more than watches movies, I
| don't need much bandwidth, what I really want is low latency.
| xattt wrote:
| It might be that you're informed enough to consider that 300
| Mbps is more than enough.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I'm in an area with competition and I think I'm paying like
| $60/month for 10Gbps.
| huytersd wrote:
| What? I wasn't even aware consumer speeds got that high. No
| caps I hope?
| bitbckt wrote:
| Sonic in the Bay Area offers 10Gb symmetric at that price,
| no cap. I upgraded from their 1Gb plan to 10Gb with no
| change in price.
|
| Unfortunately, I've since moved to another part of the
| country, with much less enlightened ISP options.
| Jiocus wrote:
| Started seeing consumer 10Gbps back in 2018 (in Sweden).
| The problem was there wasn't many consumer router devices
| around back then to support that kind of link. It might
| have even been unheard of, so one ISP solved it by
| designing their own custom device to specification - just
| so they could offer 10Gbps asap.
| tracker1 wrote:
| That would be my problem... my router has 2.5gbps ports,
| and I've only got 2 devices on my network supporting 10gb
| (nas and my desktop)... everything else is 1gb or 2.5gb.
| I'm not sure what the hardware costs would be to support
| that.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| No caps, no cap :P
|
| I even made my own router because I didn't like the
| consumer options available:
| https://danangell.com/blog/posts/10gbps-router-for-fun/
| gnicholas wrote:
| Yeah that's Comcast's regular price for their lowest tier
| (75Mbps) where I am.
| duffyjp wrote:
| AT&T finally started offering fiber in my neighborhood this
| summer while Spectrum raised their minimum tier another $5.
| Needless to said I've seen a lot of AT&T vans around.
|
| Unlike most folks my experience with fiber has been dreadful
| but at least I'm not paying out the nose for a connection
| with less upload speed than phone.
| gknoy wrote:
| > I have considered using a cellular hotspot, but it's not
| competitive in terms of pricing.
|
| I had the opposite experience. I was a very happy Comcast
| customer for a year or two (their curfew-for-kids-computers
| feature on their router was great, and the mobile app
| integration was very handy), but the 5G Verizon offering was
| cheaper and faster (where I live). I have never felt so bad
| canceling my account, as everything about the experience was
| great, but VZ had double (or more) the upload speed.
| Galacta7 wrote:
| I would love to get Verizon 5G Home Internet for my mom, who
| is currently getting gouged by Verizon with DSL (and slow
| barely better than dial-up DSL). Unfortunately, she's not
| eligible, as Verizon apparently limits the number of 5G
| customers they offer in a given area -- due to bandwidth
| limitations. So it's great for folks who can get it, but
| pretty limited in terms of how many people can actually sign-
| up for service.
| mixdup wrote:
| >This is all well and good, but they keep increasing the price,
| and refuse to offer lower-tier service. I probably wouldn't
| want 12Mbps anymore, but 20 or 25 would suffice. I wish I could
| pay a fraction of what I'm paying for 75Mbps and get a lower
| tier of service. It should suffice that x% of customers are
| offered "broadband" for a reasonable price, even if some choose
| a lower speed.
|
| The problem is that most of the costs of providing broadband
| are fixed costs. To run a coaxial cable from their headend to
| your house, and to provide employees and crews to repair it and
| install it all costs the same whether you buy 10 megabits or 2
| gigabits
|
| The variable costs--things like backbone bandwidth, paying for
| transit, doing node splits, etc are a smaller part of the
| overall cost than you might expect
|
| This lower end of the market, though, is being taken up by
| Fixed Wireless (T-Mobile and Verizon primarily) for example you
| can get Verizon home wireless internet for as low as $25. My
| mom has it, and it's decent 50 megabit service for a low price
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _you can get Verizon home wireless internet for as low as
| $25._
|
| I hope this leads to wired ISP price reductions, or at least
| slower price growth. I happen to live in a VZW dead zone, so
| unfortunately it won't work for me...
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There also is a step between DSL and cable and fiber. I have
| a fiber to the node situation that gives consistent and
| reliable 20 Mbps down and I have two of those with load
| balancer. With VDSL they could sell 100Mbps service to a few
| houses close to the node.
|
| A real upgrade for me would involve running a cable through a
| beaver meadow. There is an electric line and crews do go in
| there to limb up trees and they are planning to replace a
| pole, if there was some rational coordination of services and
| a commitment to universal service they'd get the fiber in
| when they do a maintenance cycle on the power line.
| dekhn wrote:
| I mean, the beavers would probably also appreciate an
| upgrade.
| lyu07282 wrote:
| The actual problem is that this is infrastructure owned by a
| private, international for-profit corporation. Of course it's
| a fixed cost and a limited number of profitable customers
| (get fucked if you live anywhere that isn't profitable), yet
| your profits need to go up forever. I'm always curious
| because most people intuitively understand why for example it
| makes no sense to privatize streets and roads, there is only
| one going to your home. Even most people who have faith in
| capitalism, understand how monopolies are bad for society,
| privatized infrastructure is one of the more obvious
| contradictions of liberalism.
| bonyt wrote:
| > The problem is that most of the costs of providing
| broadband are fixed costs. To run a coaxial cable from their
| headend to your house, and to provide employees and crews to
| repair it and install it all costs the same whether you buy
| 10 megabits or 2 gigabits
|
| Not sure if this is completely the case when it comes to
| older networks that might need upgrades because lots of folk
| are sharing the same coax line. In an HFC[1] network,
| bandwidth is shared on the coax branches, and a variable
| number of units can be sharing the same fiber link, which can
| serve a neighborhood, block, or even unit. And, so upgrades
| can make a network more "fiber-rich."
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_fiber-coaxial
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| The UK fixes this by forcing the companies who own the lines
| to rent and share them with other providers. ISPs in the US
| vehemently oppose this, of course.
| adamsvystun wrote:
| I agree that there should be more consumer choice. But is there
| anything FCC can do to increase it? Is it in their
| jurisdiction?
| gnicholas wrote:
| Well, they seem to be able to offer incentives based on how
| many customers are on "broadband", so presumably they could
| offer incentives related to offering lower tiers/pricing, or
| to ISPs entering a market that only has one provider.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| > There are no other wired options where I live (in the heart
| of Silicon Valley)
|
| This reads like a joke.
| josh_carterPDX wrote:
| I'm a Comcast customer and bundle my services. Every two years,
| once the introductory rate expires, I call to get a new "promo"
| rate or just say they can cancel me right then and there.
| They've never taken me up on the cancellation. As a result I
| have a full 1GIG service at my house and feel like I pay a
| reasonable amount.
|
| I'm just not a big fan of their "security" features. Other than
| that, I haven't had many issues here in Oregon.
| tzs wrote:
| When I had Comcast bundles I did similar, except instead of
| calling I went to their nearest office. I liked doing this in
| person because I sometimes have trouble understanding call
| center accents.
| jmyeet wrote:
| We don't need competition. We need to provide Internet access
| as a heavily-regulated utility, ideally as a municipal service.
| Competition for last-mile Internet actually makes very little
| sense because it's an overbuild.
|
| Imagine it costs $2000 per household to connect a fiber
| network. With 70% of households signing up, that produces a
| certain cost. Now imagine there was a second fiber network that
| also cost $2000 per household that splits the customer base. By
| definition, this is going to be more expensive.
|
| Capitalism created this problem. It won't solve it. This is
| capitalism working as intended: doing the absolute least
| possible for the highest possible price while lobbying to
| exclude competition (eg by making municipal broadband illegal).
|
| Expecting markets to solve this problem is neoliberal brain
| rot. Let's imagine that you do get 2 or even 3 ISPs in an area
| similar to Comcat, Spectrum, AT&T or Verizon. Now what? They
| just collude to keep speeds low and prices high [1].
|
| Build municipal broadband. Failing that, regulate ISPs like
| utilities. And this would include unbundling TV services.
|
| [1]: https://www.legitreviews.com/american-isps-collude-to-
| keep-b...
| m463 wrote:
| I started comcast with 100Mbps service and they have increased
| my bill every year too. sigh
| hn_acker wrote:
| > I'm all for prodding companies to move to faster speeds, but
| there should still be room for consumer choice.
|
| There certainly should be consumer choice, but in your case
| another problem is that the amount you pay Comcast for 75 Mbps
| download now should be no more than what you paid for 12 Mbps
| before. As I wrote in a different comment [1]:
|
| > It's not reasonable for big ISPs like Comcast to offer me 300
| megabits download 15 megabits upload for $70 a month (might've
| been $90, but assume $70) while EPB of Chattanooga [1] offers 1
| gigabit symmetrical for $67.99 a month. What speed any
| individual actually needs doesn't have to come into the
| picture. In matters of consumer protection, the principle of
| the thing matters just as much as actual consumer needs.
|
| (Ignore the [1] inside the quoted paragraph above. I'm leaving
| it in for Ctrl-F purposes.)
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38105873
| elicksaur wrote:
| When will a SLA be enforced by regulation? Who actually sees 90%+
| of the billed speed 90%+ of the time?
|
| I paid for 200mbps for a long time and only typically saw
| 20-30mbps. When I moved, Comcast gave me a deal for 400mbps, I'm
| now seeing 50-60mbps typically. Never bothered looking at 1g
| plans because why pay the price to get just 100mbps in reality.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| Great, I hope they codify what can be called "Fiber" next. My
| friend was excited to share Centurylink fiber was available at
| their new address, but while it is indeed delivered by fiber,
| it's capped out at 200Mbps.
| jdlyga wrote:
| Verizon Fios still advertises in my building at an amazing 50
| mbps. They have an old hookup from a decade+ ago when the
| building was first constructed. Meanwhile, our minimum cable
| speed available for purchase is 300 mbps. I still get contacted
| by Fios people every so often. They want 70 per month for 50
| mbps!
| zbrozek wrote:
| AT&T is offering 18/1 DSL in my neighborhood in 94022. Comcast
| offers nothing. Pretty sure this goalpost movement isn't going to
| convince either of them to offer service.
| throw0101a wrote:
| How about a future/stretch goal of open access networks so that
| we can get some competition at OSI Layer 3:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_network
|
| Ideally OSI Layer 1/2 would be a neutral third-party that doesn't
| do an IP but rather only makes sure physical plant is ubiquitous
| in good working order:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband
|
| It was possible to wire up countries and continents with
| electricity and telephone in the early 1900s, so I don't see why
| is not _technically_ possible to do the same with fibre in the
| early 2000s.
| layoric wrote:
| Australia broadband is not great, but a few years ago I got fibre
| installed (at my own expense), and since have benefitted from
| actual competition among ISPs. The little ISP I'm with bills a
| daily rate which you can change at any point without penalty.
| Most days I just stay on a 1000/50 for about $3 USD a day, but
| can change to a range of plans from 50/20 to 1000/400, and it
| take only a few minutes to apply and kick in.
|
| The monopoly situation I read about in the various areas of the
| US really sounds like the FCC or another regulator needs to break
| up region exclusive deals, or something. It feels like Australia,
| of all places might actually leap frog the US once fibre is more
| widely available, and that is pretty bad since we have had some
| of the worst average internet speeds in the developed world at
| very high prices. Regulatory capture is a plague , and this FCC
| "proposal" feels like a crumb to delay what sounds like much
| needed broader disruption of monopolies.
| dottjt wrote:
| Which company are you with? Also in Australia, although I don't
| think fibre is available yet to my address.
|
| Did you also have to pay for fibre to be installed?
| mcoliver wrote:
| Should update the title to 100/20. I still find it amazing that
| companies can list services without the upload speed (eg
| Comcast). Of course latency and jitter matter too but that's
| probably above the heads of a lot of consumers.
|
| Upload and latency increasingly matter more and more and is
| essential to many work from home endeavors. Whether you are
| uploading content for work or play, or have a family video
| conferencing, or a host of other things.
|
| Perhaps the more interesting part of the doc is the future
| proposal for 1gb/500mb. I understand the engineering tradeoffs
| and reasoning for the asymmetrical bandwidth on coax/docsis but
| perhaps it's time to rethink some of that. That would be a good
| thing.
| vel0city wrote:
| The FCC requires ISPs to publish information about their
| network management practices. That's how you get sites like
| this:
|
| https://www.xfinity.com/networkmanagement
|
| I do wish this was required to be easily accessible from the
| marketing pages. Usually it takes some digging to find it. But
| at least they do have to make these numbers public.
| portpecos wrote:
| >The FCC determined that Comcast's Xfinity Internet broadband
| Internet access services deliver, on average, over 100
| percent of their advertised downstream and upstream speeds
| during the busiest periods of the day, known as "peak" times,
| during sustained testing. Peak times are Monday through
| Friday from 7:00pm to 11:00pm local time.
|
| >Latency is typically measured in milliseconds, and generally
| has no significant impact on typical everyday Internet usage.
|
| I took that from their networkmanagement page. Their
| statements seem to conflict with the consensus of the HN
| crowd, but I could be wrong.
| vel0city wrote:
| People getting their contracted speeds from a company they
| generally despise probably aren't going to come out of the
| woodwork to write supporting comments.
|
| Note they're not saying 100% of customers got their rated
| speeds, but the average customer got over 100% of their
| rated speeds. So, say the 50th percentile customer pays for
| 100M, they actually got 102M, boom, that metric is met.
| However easily 25%+ of customers didn't get their rated
| speeds during that peak period.
|
| Some people ranting on an internet forum isn't high quality
| data of overall network metrics.
|
| For a lot of residential customers, once latency is _good
| enough_ it doesn 't really matter. Once you get down below
| like 30 or so milliseconds, a lot of consumer applications
| just won't be any different. I could have 80ms latency to
| HN and my experience of the site would be roughly the same.
| Not saying all residential applications don't care about
| latency <30ms, but generally speaking the vast majority
| have very little difference at the moment. Watching a
| streaming movie, loading a web page, doom scrolling social
| media, etc are all going to be the exact same experience at
| 2ms or 10ms or 30ms. This is changing though, and I do
| prefer having such low latency with my residential fiber
| connection.
| NoPicklez wrote:
| <30ms latency is absolutely a good sweet spot.
|
| Most people that need any less are likely gaming, heck
| even I'd like less for gaming but 30ms is more then
| enough to be able to play FPS games well.
|
| I appreciate there is more to latency than just gaming,
| but I hear more people wanting less ping for those
| reasons than anything else.
| m463 wrote:
| Upload speed is just a cash grab. It is a way to segregate
| price-sensitive residential vs price-insensitive business
| customers who can then be charged enormous amounts.
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| > Upload speed is just a cash grab.
|
| No.
|
| This lacks all historical and practical understanding of why
| upload speeds are limited.
|
| Back in the 70s/80s when coax was being planned and rolled
| out for cable, they needed to figure out what frequencies
| they would use. Cable providers knew they needs a ton in one
| direction and only a tiny bit for things like buying pay per
| view in the other.
|
| This has been fine traditionally because even up to Netflix
| and streaming we haven't needed the upload at residential. No
| one complained. That may start to change a little.
|
| As far as I am aware, all DOCSIS (cable) providers in the USA
| that are using cable-tv coax are limited to a max of 35Mbps
| upto DOCSIS3.1.
|
| I am writing this on 1250/35 right now. The local tiers for
| me are 100/15, 400/25, 1000/35, 1250/35.
|
| It isn't a "cash grab" at all. If you need more upload you
| need a new line that isn't divided so asymmetrically, which
| means fiber. And once you fiber, there is zero reason to go
| go symmetric, as you have two lines with the same equipment
| on either side, to a point where the ISP will charge
| differently if you cut into their bandwidth too much.
| hn_acker wrote:
| > It isn't a "cash grab" at all. If you need more upload
| you need a new line that isn't divided so asymmetrically,
| which means fiber. And once you fiber, there is zero reason
| to go go symmetric, as you have two lines with the same
| equipment on either side, to a point where the ISP will
| charge differently if you cut into their bandwidth too
| much.
|
| Everything else you said could be true, yet not the part
| about a cash grab. _Anything worse than $10 for 100 Mbps
| down and 100 Mbps up from a large ISP is a cash grab_ now
| that fiber exists [1], DOCSIS 3.1 can offer up to 1 Gbps
| (to say nothing of DOCSIS 4) [2], and large ISPs like
| Comcast keep committing subsidy fraud [3].
|
| I wrote more about pricing in a different comment [4].
|
| [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/why-fiber-vastly-
| super...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Comparison
|
| [3] Pick any one of these links.
| https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/06/mississippi-says-att-
| too... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/15/report-shows-
| comcast-con... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/16/verizon-
| t-mobile-oversta...
|
| [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38105873
| packetlost wrote:
| You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. That
| is not at all how ISPs distinguish between
| residential/consumer and commercial customers at all. It's
| almost always entirely dependent on the transport being used
| (DOCSIS, twisted pair, fiber, etc.)
| z_zetetic_z wrote:
| I have had an uncapped symmetric 10Gbps connection for ~50 USD /
| month for more than 10 years.
| manchmalscott wrote:
| The issue with that is even though I have gigabit internet, and
| we pay over $200 a month for it, my internet speed is still
| usually measured in kilobytes and sometimes just bytes per
| second. Speed tests show anywhere between 4-9 hundred MiB/s down
| and yet it takes YouTube like ten seconds just to load the titles
| of videos, and I'm in a big city not even a rural area. Just
| because they """provide""" a speed doesn't mean anyone will ever
| see it in practice.
| gnarlouse wrote:
| In Iowa, you can still find _fiber_ speeds as low as 5mbps in an
| upscale residential neighborhood. They 'll sell it to you marked
| as 100mbps without batting an eye. Customer service will say "oh
| you've probably got a _gamer_ in the neigborhood " as if that
| excuses them from their unapologetically _horrible_ service.
|
| Gotta love the late stage greed in this world
| photonios wrote:
| Everyone here arguing that most people have no practical use for
| higher speeds at home have never experienced 1 GBit up+down. Once
| you have it, you'll never settle for less.
|
| I have 1 GBit up+down at home, I cabled the whole house with CAT7
| cables and set up the best access points money can buy for mobile
| devices. Everything else is wired. It's an amazing experience and
| internet everywhere sucks compared to home.
|
| When I lived in Romania this costed me EUR10, now that I am back
| in the Netherlands it's a bit more pricey at EUR52, but it's 100%
| worth it.
| pottertheotter wrote:
| I think that people also say that they have no practical use
| for it because they don't have access to it, so they don't
| realize all the practical uses. For instance, I've worked with
| a lot of engineering companies that collect a lot of lidar
| data. Having reasonable speeds (1Gbps up/down) would have a
| huge impact on how and where we can transmit and process the
| data.
| smilekzs wrote:
| I did the same, hoping that someday I will finally get FTTH.
| Currently still on the only real option here which is Comcast
| 1G/20M. Sometimes LTE has better upload speed (but not latency,
| obviously).
| runjake wrote:
| What's really hurting me isn't my 400Mbps download.
|
| What's hurting me is the advertised 12Mbps upload, or in reality,
| 9-10Mbps upload.
|
| Customers are so focused on synthetic download speeds, but
| meanwhile the upload rug is being pulled from them. Get a few
| devices on your network with iCloud Photos enabled and you're
| hosed, because traffic can't ACK/get out.
| bmicraft wrote:
| Wow, the worst ratio i've ever seen was 20:1 and that's way
| below
| dathinab wrote:
| as far as I can tell given the IT usage in the country I'm from:
|
| - 10mbps is the bare minimum to not have frequent major problems
| with all kinds of things but it still just a minimum (symmetric,
| if with reasonable latency and reliable and always actually
| 10mbps, i.e. not a contract which says 10mbps but is often much
| less or supper low latency)
|
| - 100(down)/~50(up)mbps is "good enough" for quite many (but then
| bluray dvds are still make some profite here, soo...; also again
| actual speeds not "marketed speeds")
|
| - 500+mbps down are what you really want if you play a lot of AAA
| games or similar, else download times for updates and similar
| become quite in-convenient and can infer with you playing with
| other people (e.g. due to you waiting for a unexped download).
| Some jobs need speeds like that, too.
|
| - there is little point in more then 1gbps down or 250mbps up
| (where I live; outside some niche cases). It's partially a
| chicken and egg problem: Without good internet you can't sell
| services which need/want such speeds but without such services
| why should anyone spend (larger amounts of) money to buy such
| internet and if very few buy it where available why should a
| teleco make it available in other areas
|
| Through that's private usage, not b2b, e.g. remote controlled
| agriculture machines.
| speby wrote:
| Remember when a T-1 line was considered to be like the god-level
| status of internet connections? Whoa.... 1.5Mbps!? Later, more
| affordable DSL speeds would reach single-digit Mbps and it felt
| like being on another planet.
|
| Now all of those speeds feel like they're dial-up modems.
| pokstad wrote:
| T1 was a dedicated circuit though, even with DSL there was
| still a need for T1 lines.
| pokstad wrote:
| Isn't the term "broadband" supposed to reference using the full
| capacity of the wire medium? Like DSL was broadband because voice
| lines only used a narrow band of the frequency range of the wire?
| medellin wrote:
| This would have been great 10 years ago. In 2023 20 mbps for
| upload is a joke.
| hollander wrote:
| Naming should be megaband, gigaband, teraband etc.
| Arubis wrote:
| If I'm Comcast, I'm getting behind this. What a great way to kill
| off competition from small urban fixed wireless ISPs!
| hansvm wrote:
| It's a good start, but networks can have all sorts of pathologies
| rendering them less useful (or nearly useless), and the current
| oligopoly is financially incentivized to minimally meet these
| definitions regardless of how usable the network is:
|
| (1) We provide speeds "up to 100mbps" (actual max throughput in
| any 24h period being 10-60mbps)
|
| (2) We provide mean speeds of 200mbps, easily beating the
| definition (mean is measured over time, not from the customer's
| perspective, so if most people get on at the same time then most
| browsing sessions see throughput of 10mbps or less due to poorly
| handled congestion)
|
| (3) We provide mean speeds of 100mbps (upload is 0.01mbps)
|
| (4) We provide mean speeds of 100mbps, over 99% of the time
| (every 3 months an 8h maintenance block drops speeds to 10kbps,
| rendering the network totally unusable that workday)
|
| (5) Mean throughput is 100mbps, mean latency is 2000ms (totally
| unusuable for real-time _anything_)
|
| (6) Mean throughput is 200mbps, mean latency is 20ms, every 5min
| a few packets will have up to 10s of latency (still totally
| unusable for most real-time purposes, but naive metrics make it
| sound good)
|
| (7) You're allowed "unlimited" "100mbps" (but if you use that for
| more than a contiguous day, or a few long evenings in a row, then
| 100mbps is redefined to mean 100kbps)
|
| And on and on and on. More useful metrics might measure actual
| consumer impact:
|
| (a) Can you rely on this every workday to shuffle documents back
| and forth?
|
| (b) Can you rely on this every workday to have low-resolution
| video calls?
|
| (c) Can you usually play a quasi-realtime game for 30min without
| lag killing your character?
|
| (d) During peak hours, can you reasonably expect to be able to
| stream buffered 720p video?
|
| A raw 100mbps floor doesn't guarantee your network suffices for
| any of those use cases.
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