Please do. Had to go up to full gigabit down with xfinity to get 35 up. Next highest was 15 I think? Not that you can figure that out easily - their website doesn't list upload speeds. Or maybe it does - the website is terrible to navigate, slow and I got 404s off their main internet landing page.
Anyhow at the risk of this turning into a multi page rant about comcast I'll cut back to upload speed. I see it as upload is for creation and download is for consumption. What do the cable companies want people to be doing?
If you look at the popularity of twitch/youtube/(things I'm too old and unhip to know about) it is a direct threat to cable/traditional content creation. I'd wager the current state of affairs holds a lot of people back from getting into content creation, especially poorer/larger families who have to share a limited connection.
Most cable carriers, prominently Comcast, have issues with legacy channel allocations (e.g. for the On Demand feature for legacy Motorola STBs) that conflict with the channel allocations required for the higher upstream speeds supported by DOCSIS 3.0 and 3.1. This results in a de facto situation of upstream speeds being constrained to only a very small portion of the up to 2gbps upstream capability of 3.1, due to only having typically 3 QAM channels for upstream.
Unfortunately, eliminating these issues requires large-scale replacement of not just equipment in the field (nodes and amplifiers which are broadly all being replaced anyway to support Node+Zero architecture) but equipment in customer homes: the legacy STBs. Cable carriers have found in the past that getting people to turn these in to swap out for newer models is excessively expensive in customer goodwill, and less so cost, so there's a major technical disincentive to such a change.
if this issue came from a cable provider it sounds like malarkey.
Vector Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing can be used with traditional OFDM receivers even if the channel arrives as much as 180 degrees out of phase for a traditional allocation. it permits vector subchannelling for modern receivers to get to "new" broadband regulated speeds. when the vector size M=1, VOFDM returns to OFDM and in other conditions it just turns back into SC-FDE Single-carrier (frequency-domain-equalization.)
>Cable carriers have found in the past that getting people to turn these in to swap out for newer models is excessively expensive in customer goodwill
cable companies are hardly a station of the cross. AT&T and Comcast are renown for forcing customers to pay for modem upgrades to support digital boxes. XFinity X1 boxes are basically outlining how cable TV intends to remain set-top relevant in the 21st century by transitioning the box to 802.11 and ethernet. its also hardly difficult to see a scenario where not only your cable provider forces you to change, but the FCC strong-arms you as well. in 2008 the FCC basically "rechannelled" the VHF and UHF fast-scan TV spectrums to make way for digital TV.
IMO nows the time if they want to do it. cable TV is basicaly a dead animal and needs something, anything to keep it alive. full digital gigabit transition FTW.
The quality of the channel often does not permit the use of OFDM until distribution amplifiers are replaced. Unfortunately this is a totally different issue for the upstream and downstream directions as well, which is why several carriers, including Comcast in many markets, currently do OFDM downstream and only QAM upstream. The downstream issue has, on the whole, always been easier to fix due to the design of the outside plant, which is why 1gbps down has become a standard cable offering in DOCSIS 3.1 markets. In the case of upstream channels they are constrained by a variety of different equipment, some of which predates the use of QAM for all metadata.
Comcast is beginning a (presumably long) process of transitioning away from conventional cable television and to completely OTTd television service, which is essentially IPTV over DOCSIS, branded as Flex. This seems to be their long-term strategy and will allow a radically higher degree of flexibility in how they run their infrastructure. I would expect this to become the norm over the next ten years or so as DOCSIS is increasingly viewed as the primary purpose of the cable infrastructure.
Fascinating! I had no idea there was a delineation between upstream and downstream encoding albeit its a fairly obvious condition in retrospect thinking of the upload caps.
It’s a fairly obvious distinction considering that you’re dealing with a system that was initially designed for one way communication. The cable system is not an Ethernet network with multiple pairs of conductors for each direction, all hooked up to a switch. It’s effectively a single shared bus, which back in the day was shared between hundreds of houses. Remember, it was initially designed to just get OTA signals into TVs over cable.
It's also important to remember that fiber internet, in the sense people are usually talking about, is fundamentally the same. PON (passive optical networks) are passive in that a single fiber is shared between multiple houses using passive splitters. This means that the fiber is a shared medium and upstream and downstream, and multiple users, must all be managed based on TDM. In the widely used GPON, Gigabit PON, that shared medium operates at a gross rate of 1gbps as the name implies. The exact same issues of coordinating the shared medium between users exists for fiber last-mile technologies but is generally better managed because fiber carriers don't have nearly as much legacy to contend with and so universally use more modern scheduling and allocation methods.
From a practical perspective, any method of last-mile internet delivery will probably rely on a shared medium. The cost of "home run" cable routing is just too high, the telephone network which was originally structured this way has invested a great deal to move away from it wherever possible. There is no widely-used last mile internet technology today which does not have bandwidth contention between users. Fortunately, in practice, a 1gbps gross shared medium is usually sufficient to offer "gigabit symmetric" service to a neighborhood of subscribers without complaints, although there is some debate about whether or not popular 4K video streaming will change this.
Sounds like an operational risk on an RCM somewhere in the ivory tower. Instead it's cheaper to stay competitive through regulatory capture. I wish bribing politicians was more expensive than providing a better product </r>
People don't become "independently wealthy" by saying no to money, they do it by grasping at every bit they can. Wealth is positively, not inversely, correlated to greed. We literally just saw what happens when you put an "independently wealthy" in the oval office, he took a 10 million dollar bribe to greenlight an oil pipeline.
Cap political donations per person and ban corporate donations. Money is not, and should not be legally considered, speech.
> Cable carriers have found in the past that getting people to turn these in to swap out for newer models is excessively expensive in customer goodwill, and less so cost, so there's a major technical disincentive to such a change.
I wish carriers would have a different brand for "enthusiasts". The type of customer who won't mind going to his back-panel and swapping equipment if the rest of the network supports it.
They sort of support "pro" users, but at a premium. Comcast's 1GB package is somewhere between $80 and $100 depending on contract duration and payment options. 2GB internet is $299/mo plus $1k in installation fees! But at least in the review I read it's symmetrical.
I have it and it’s glorious. Spendy, but you’ve got your own 10g port on a switch at Comcast’s headend. And it’s actually 3 gbps total (between the 1g and 10g ports on the switch).
It sounds so much better than dealing with Comcast's cable plant. I keep a set of filters next to my modem so I can fiddle with the signal strength as large temperature changes affect it which in turn causes wild swings in my upload and download speeds. A truck roll might fix it once and for all but in the age of Covid that can't happen. Having fiber to the premises sounds heavenly next to that.
I have ftth from Fastweb in Italy and I get 1 Gbps down/200 mobs up for 24,95 €/month (with unlimited phone service included).
Apparently they're also going to bump download speed to 2.5 Gbps. You still have only 1gpbs ethernet ports on the provided modem/router, but the core idea is to give at least 500mbps to each client.
The broadband situation varies greatly across the US because we're such a big, sprawling country. Much of my city has access to symmetric 1G/1G connections, for example. Google has even been offering free fiber internet to public housing and select affordable housing buildings ( https://support.google.com/fiber/answer/6349491?hl=en ). Meanwhile, my friend who doesn't live very far from me is limited to DSL because he lives in a sparse location where houses are few and far between, making it prohibitively expensive to run new broadband infrastructure to everyone.
Mandating high speed internet access for everyone sounds great until you look at the costs for running new infrastructure to some of our more remote, rural cities.
>Mandating high speed internet access for everyone sounds great until you look at the costs for running new infrastructure to some of our more remote, rural cities.
Yes but broadband companies have already been given tax breaks and subsides to do that very work. They just haven't because (as an example) AT & T argues DSL still qualifies as sufficient for internet access. The original article was about upping the speed required to meet the definition of broadband from 25 down 3 up to 100 symmetrical. I'm not sure that'll actually make a difference unless broadband providers are required to install that new infrastructure.
When you’re talking about subsidies, cable companies are in a totally different boat than phone companies, because they’re regulated under an entirely different section of the communications act. It wasn’t until the Obama administration that broadband even came within the ambit of federal subsidies. Until then, the money was just for phone.
>Mandating high speed internet access for everyone sounds great until you look at the costs for running new infrastructure to some of our more remote, rural cities.
The same could have been said for water, gas, sewage, electric, and mail.
That's why Starlink will make sense mainly in the US, as there's only an antenna for the user to plug, there's no landline to extend.
I estimate AT LEAST 25 million potential American customers that are in the same situation as your friend
One thing that really can bog down these infra things in the US (ya know, besides the general "got mine. screw you!" attitude of the oligarchs who rule this place) is the urban sprawl. On the same plot of land, you can have 8-16 housing units in a low-rise apartment building paying that 24.95 a month, whereas in the US that would be a single-occupancy detached home most likely.
Can you get good fiber (or internet in general) outside major urban centers in Italy?
> I wish carriers would have a different brand for "enthusiasts". The type of customer who won't mind going to his back-panel and swapping equipment if the rest of the network supports it.
Problem with cable TV: it's a shared medium. Which means that for upgrading one pro customer, they'll have to either lay a new cable or get all of the normies on his cable branch to new STBs.
> I wish carriers would have a different brand for "enthusiasts"
Enthusiast customers aren't a good money maker for large-scale companies. The challenge is that they demand more performance, but aren't willing to pay much more for it. Also, for every 1 homeowner who can actually handle equipment swaps without an installer, there are probably 2 to 5 more who think they can do it but will blame the company, leave bad reviews, and complain online the second that they get stuck.
As a result, companies tend to stick to a generic consumer option and a separate, higher-priced business option. If enthusiasts were really willing to pay higher prices, they'd just grab the business package and accept the higher price.
I see it as upload is for creation and download is for consumption.
Nowadays, I see it as upload is for Zoom, download is for everything. It used to be basically okay to have slow upload speeds, but in an era when everything from kindergarten to the workplace requires video conferencing, good upload speeds are more important.
Even at gigabit Xfinity service, when both my kids were on remote school video chats, and I was trying to do a work meeting, my work meeting was definitely struggling. Thankfully, 3-4 months ago I was able to get symmetric gigabit provided by the city, and that problem has been entirely resolved.
I wouldn’t think kindergarten will still be on zoom when this legal change starts to have a measurable impact. Nor do I think many poor households even in the midst of the pandemic have someone working over zoom. So is the point of this legal change to ensure well paid employees can reap all the benefits of remote living but not have to bear all the costs?
Your forgetting medical virtual visits, which can allow people in rural areas (and people without reliable transportation) the ability to have conversations with their doctors. No more driving to the city, just to go over the lab results for the bloodwork you did 2 days ago.
Not to mention, virtual visits with other groups that help the poor, such as apply for assistance.
You’re overthinking it. I’ve worked at enough big companies to be 100% sure it’s not elaborate, long term evil plan to keep people from competing with them.
They do that because it’s cheaper that way for them, and majority of users don’t complain.
>They do that because it’s cheaper that way for them, and majority of users don’t complain.
How is it in any way cheaper for them? You can't buy a network switch or router that's anything but symmetrical up/down.
Comcast itself doesn't pay transit bandwidth, they strangled all the backbone providers out of existence and acquired them, they're all straight peering agreements, with some smaller players paying them.
This is 100% a scheme to prevent consumers from hosting servers and video feeds.
The entirety of the equipment used by Comcast for cable internet delivery (modems and CMTS) are built for non-symmetric service because it is designed into the standard. Further, most cable carriers face technical constraints that prevent them rolling out service much faster than DOCSIS2.0 to customers (20mbps up) while downstream upgrades are much easier. The design of the cable system is fundamentally asymmetric, cable having formerly been a broadcast medium, and so upstream improvements generally require complete replacement of equipment in the field.
None of that is applicable to OP. He has gig down, that's DOCSIS 3.1 with a 200Mbit upload limit. Comcast is artificially limited upload speeds, it would cost them absolutely nothing to raise his upload to 200Mbit - the Modem and CMTS HAVE to support it in order to be DOCSIS 3.1 compliant.
Ignoring the fact I don't think ANY of comcast's network is DOCSIS 2.0 and hasn't been for nearly a decade.
As I have discussed elsewhere, Comcast faces significant constraints on improving upstream speed, not the least of which is the distribution amplifiers in many markets which only permit 2 or 3 channels upstream and without sufficient link quality for OFDM. The technical system is complex and the constraints are typically distribution amplifiers and other outside plant, not modem or CMTS, which are indeed typically capable of 1gbps upstream. Doing so requires up to eight OFDM channels, however.
It's shocking to me how many people come up with elaborate theories about regulatory capture that don't even know the basics of how cable systems work.
I mean, the regulatory capture is absolutely real. I don't mean to absolve cable carriers of their many sins, chief amongst them a decade or more of chronic underinvestment in their infrastructure which is part of why the battleship is so hard to turn today.
I just want to make it clear that there is no magic button that legacy cable carriers could press to suddenly have infrastructure that is fully capable of the latest DOCSIS standard. It is an expensive and time-consuming process that, from what I have seen, is indeed underway at many major providers.
At the same time, they are absolutely lobbying to minimize any regulatory pressure to improve. My personal belief is that increasing competition from LTE has been more of a factor in companies like Comcast suddenly investing in Node+0 than any regulatory activity. Pressure from the government to provide 100mbps upstream could be a huge boost in getting these companies to invest more in the project and get it done more quickly.
It's just, you know, there's no silver bullet here. And most emphatically, "fiber" is not that silver bullet. In most cases the only real advantage of fiber internet is that it puts the infrastructure under control of someone other than an incumbent telco or cable provider, who is more willing to play ball with the community. I can't help but feel, though, that this is a waste of resources when the same goals could be achieved, with less monetary investment, if the cable carriers were deprived of their lobbying operations and forced through franchise agreements or telecom regulation to provide a certain service level.
Put in the most extreme way, I think "roll out fiber" is in many ways a worse solution than "nationalize Comcast." It tries to force a technical solution to what is fundamentally a business problem - a business problem that does have some technical limitations as accomplices, but the way to overcome these is largely well understood.
Are you really shocked? I feel like many people regularly come up with elaborate theories about things they don't really understand.
I'm sure I do it. Though it's something I'd like to minimize. It's definitely not always clear to me which of my opinions are really based on as complete a set of facts as I'd like them to be.
It's a post-hoc rationalization. You can't exactly point at a standard you yourself designed to explain why you are unable to do something. It's the old "it was a software problem", 30 years running now.
What's shocking to me is how many tech people acquiesce to this "sorry, it's just the software/hardware" of what was very obviously a deliberate design choice.
The standard, and what set of options you can use from the standard, reflects physical equipment that was put in the ground and incrementally upgraded over decades.
Sure in a sense the asymmetry is a “deliberate design choice.” But it’s a design choice that was made when cable broadband was first developed starting with cable TV networks that had little and sometimes no uplink capability. Hackers of all people should be able to understand the challenges posed by the old design decisions in big complex systems.
Maybe it's because Comcast sues cities trying to provide municipal fiber, preventing people from being able to purchase the kind of internet they want:
I believe that the up thread comments were about broadband upload speeds.
I'm quite satisfied with my 100 mbps download speed. I used to have 600 mpbs, but when I canceled my cable TV and phone service, I also switched to 100 mbps internet with the intent of raising that later if it turned out to be too slow. It's been nearly a year, and I've felt no need to raise it.
But that also dropped upload from around 30 mbps down to around 6 mbps. That's a lot more noticeable. I can't say I'm happy with that.
I agree! I'm an uber-networking geek and I've been happy with the slowest offered cable modem speeds. Sometimes as cheap as $20-$25/month. I've had 5mb download speeds (1mb up) for a house with two people, watching netflix while we both browsed/youtubed/etc (pfsense with qos rate limiting the chromecast to the resolution and bandwidth that I chose). Being happy with 480/720p helps.
I'd rather be able to buy guaranteed minimums from the cable company than have higher "up to" speeds. Like frame relay used to be. Let me buy a 100mb access port with a guaranteed minimum rate for my zoom/voice/whatever traffic, even if that's just a few mb/s.
I assume that the cable companies would rather overcharge us for faster higher advertised speeds than commit to guaranteed service levels.
Unless your workplace makes use of virtual meetings, or your family likes to video call. I have heard a lot of complaints about upload speeds recently.
That really illustrates the point. Video conferencing was a joke that nobody used until literally 12 months ago. Even now, most people don’t work jobs that allow remote work. Unless they have school-age kids, they still don’t care about upload.
> Anyhow at the risk of this turning into a multi page rant about comcast I'll cut back to upload speed. I see it as upload is for creation and download is for consumption. What do the cable companies want people to be doing?
Fun fact: Comcast does not even show you the upload speed by default on their speed test page. You have to click an extra "details" section for it to run the upload part of the test. Otherwise you just see the single download number.
To be fair, you also have to click on "details" on https://fast.com/ to see your upload. Other than aesthetics I can't think of why they would want to hide it.
After being forced to live with cable most my life since shifting away from dialup, fiber has been an absolute joy. I pay for 400mbps through Fios but get something like 500d/300u. It's stable, no capping non-sense I've experienced and only slightly more per month (I think I pay 20% more than cable) yet service is significantly better (I think I have 2.5-5x download before and 10-20x upload rate).
I have no desire to go back unless Verizon or one of its competitors decide to change drastically. What they're doing right now is fine, I don't even think about network service, it autopays and just works how I need it when I need it. First time I've been able to enjoy the pleasure of having fiber at home and not just work.
My understanding is that it is going to take a lot of capital investment from Comcast to fix that because their entire (copper) infrastructure is optimized around downloads. That is because the entire network was designed around cable TV, which is primarily downloading data. Newer fiber installations are better designed to handle uploads.
I love how this myth has morphed over time. Not only did nobody get "paid billions to upgrade their infrastructure from the government." But even insofar as you assert that lifting rate regulations (where the government tell you what prices you can charge) is the same as "getting paid billions" that was for telephone companies, not cable companies like Comcast. But don't get facts get in the way of Political Truth (TM).
Leaving billions aside, they were granted local monopolies in many places due to their investment.
One might argue they have not been good stewards of that responsibility.
Yes, DOCSIS does have a download/upload ratio. But DOCSIS 3.1 (required for gigabit down) has a 200Mbit upload limit, they are artificially capping it far lower and should have no issues supporting 100mbit up on a gig down plan.
Choices were between xfinity and sonic dsl (25 down) for my building. Nob Hill SF. Tried to get monkeybrains or webpass to install in building but didn't hear back from either.
I believe they're required to publish something called a "rate card". If you search "[name] internet rate card", you should be able to find a PDF type document listing service and rates.
Interesting - unfortunately less useful than the website. [0] Doesn't even list download speeds. Just has the ever so helpful names like "Blast! Pro+" and "Extreme Pro+". Admittedly there is one called "Gigabit".
I think the upload limit has something to do with the Docsis protocol that most of their equipment operates (cable TV) under. I believe that the newer version protocol (Docsics 4) should allow for much greater speeds, up and down. I have no idea how long it will take these companies to update to this version.
The current widely deployed version, DOCSIS 3 supports up to 1Gbps down, 200Mbps up. 3.1 which isn't fully deployed but is available in most major markets is up to 10/1.
I think the main issue is in how Comcast allocates the different channels. They prioritize download because it also serves TV customers, while upload is only used for Internet.
>I think the main issue is in how Comcast allocates the different channels. They prioritize download because it also serves TV customers, while upload is only used for Internet.
Comcast has an inherent conflict of interest, in that they are a middleman for high margin TV subscriptions. Better internet obviates the need to purchase TV subscriptions from Comcast, so I would conclude they're dragging their heels on purpose.
My local broadband provider admitted to me that they could offer symmetric 1 gig service, but are choosing not to. The current max a residential customer can purchase is 1 gig down, 25Mbs up. The monthly non-discount rate is $180, with $110/month possible with certain promotions. It is an extra 10$/month to go from 20Mbs up to 25Mbs. Starlink is doing well here.
It is frustrating that people in an area with 1Gbps down are able to sign up for Starlink while I'm still waiting. I would pay $500/mo for Starlink right now.
Currently paying $45/mo for "20Mbps/2Mbps" VDSL, $70/mo for "25Mbps/5Mbps" fixed wireless, and $110/mo for 100GB of 45Mbps/10Mbps LTE with $10/10GB overage, to barely stay online in semi-rural America, and I'm technically even in a greater metro area. The only way I can have a reliable video call is by using LTE data.
The fact that my household meets the current FCC definition of broadband, such that companies feel like they don't have to invest further because they've met their goal, would be laughable if it weren't so infuriating. I would be over the moon excited for 25Mbps reliable upload, and 100+Mbps download.
$180 is crazy, even for the US - for less than $100 I'm getting 1GB symmetric (which in practice has been a true 1Gb down, ~300mb up). Then again, I am currently lucky enough to be able to choose between a hone company and a cable company. At my last house, the cable company was my only option and service was not nearly as good (1gb/50).
Jesus, I pay that much for Spectrum's "up to" 100mbps. Right now speed test is showing me anywhere from .04 to around 40 down and about 10 up, but admittedly, my Wifi setup is less than optimal. There's only a single upgrade package "up to" 400 down.
> 1GB symmetric (which in practice has been a true 1Gb down, ~300mb up)
> service was not nearly as good (1gb/50)
Units gore. From context you almost certainly mean Gb/s and Mb/s. mb and gb are weird units that although technically possible don't apply here. GB is possible in this context but probably not what you meant. From context this is mostly understandable, but it makes it harder to follow.
It's one of those situations where most customers call at the end of their 1 year promotional period and pretend to threaten to cancel, gets transferred to customer retention, and resign for another year at the discount rate.
You're comparing London to Middle of Nowhere USA. Gigabit symmetric for $80/month is available all over D.C. (More expensive than London, but incomes here are higher too.)
Yep, live in Middle of Nowhere (ish) UK...I pay £30 for 70mbps, and am very happy. I moved recently from a larger town nearby, there I paid the same price for 20mbps (and it was horrendous service, up/down all day).
I live 20 miles from a fairly large city, there is a gigabit loop there...only high rises, average speeds in the city are 70bmps (which is why I feel lucky, I am right next to an exchange).
The fibre rollout was completely botched in the UK. BT (the former monopoly) was investing in TV and mobile, the govt has caught up with them now (and agreed to CPI+5% rate increases) but all through the 2010s, the only fibre investment was a startup that did a lot but was obviously limited by capital (CityFibre, just acquired by Goldman Sachs...so that should go well). The sector was also gunshy after the fallout from the late 90s: a big company invested heavily in fast internet and tried to overlay BT's network, it got taken to the woodshed.
The only place with consistently fast speeds over 100mbps is a small town/city on the East coast called Hull, due to a quirk of history they are the only place that is outside the BT monopoly (the monopoly there was run by KCom) so they got investment, and pretty much nowhere else did.
I am aware of the issues in the US but the UK is not a good example. As said above, telecoms policy through the whole of the 2010s was seriously mismanaged. We will catch up but we aren't a good example (most of the UK population is densely packed into England, which is the size of Alabama but with over 10x the population...even Scotland, which is roughly the size and population density of Alabama, has 75% of the population in 5% of the land...it shouldn't be hard).
Some of my London friends are using this. Crazy good value and the CS is excellent.
We've just moved from 20/2 Talktalk to 200/20 with Virgin for the same price (£30/month). Pretty sure you can get Hyperoptic a couple of streets away, but openreach hasn't got to us yet (hence Virgin).
With all the home Zoom calls, TalkTalk was killing me. In 2021 it was frustratingly slow.
Toronto Bell: I pay $112.99 including taxes for symmetric 1 gig and static IP. I got it on 3 years promotion with the promise to extend on the same terms.
I live in South Africa. Myself and all my friends are sitting on around 100 Mbps up/down uncapped unshaped, no fair use policy each at around $100 USD monthly. A few of my friends are on Gigabit down, 200 up.
How is America behind on this? Everything is hosted there and cached there. Is it big business lobbying politicians to prevent them from having to compete? In South Africa we have dozens on ISPs and as an economy we're probably not far off from one US state. The competition has been great for consumers.
USA built out its internet infrastructure earlier than most of the developing nations, who now, almost universally, have better connectivity.
That caused two things:
1. Coming later to the game, you don’t need to deal with legacy infra, that’s there, costed huge amount of money, and replacing it will cost even more (like cable connections to the houses)
2. USA has a general approach of building out infra in sprints, and then neglecting it until next sprint. Few examples - credit cards and their security, roads, space program, internet infra. And while it’s more complicated, politics are large reason for it. It’s much less catchy to say “I’ll spend $500B to maintain X”, then “I’ll spend $1000B to build Y”.
While the sentiment is generally understood, you should really mention that the type B didn't fix the main issue of Type A, in that it didn't recess the face and/or extend the prongs with a protective sleeve.
There is no single situation in "America" with respect to broadband. We're a federation of 50 different states that's almost the size of the entire EU. Broadband is mainly a state level issue and it varies by state. Here in Maryland, over 60% of people have access to fiber. I have two different fiber providers to my house, more than an hour outside a major city. Symmetrical gigabit here is under $80.
It doesn’t matter how shitty the deal is because exclusivity arrangements are illegal. But that doesn’t mean anyone actually wants to serve an area.
Baltimore has a non-exclusive arrangement with Comcast. But, as of 2016 when they were trying to get Google Fiber, literally no company had ever asked to come in and compete. It’s not worth it. Baltimore requires wiring up the whole city. A third of the city lives at or under the poverty line—it simply makes no business sense to build a fiber network that covers all of Baltimore.
That’s the basic constraint. Municipal politics makes it impossible to build a network just in the neighborhoods where people would sign up. There is a reason Google Fiber took its “fiber hoods” approach to cities in red states like Missouri and Kansas. At the same time, it makes no business sense for providers to foot the bill to wire up those poor areas, and the municipality doesn’t want to spend the money to do it.
> At the same time, it makes no business sense for providers to foot the bill to wire up those poor areas, and the municipality doesn’t want to spend the money to do it.
On the other hand, college neighborhoods are largely not wealthy and was one of the first places in my city to get fiber. I think it's because they tend to have a much higher density (e.g. a 2 story house likely houses 2 households) and I would guess are more likely to pay for faster and/or more stable internet.
Based on how telcos have been acting, I think they just wish everyone would pay $100 for 512k down and 64k up forever, while they get and keep government subsidies for broadband initiatives that never get rolled out.
I'm not even in a big city, just a solidly middle class red exurban county that makes it cheap to build infrastructure. We didn't even have public sewer and water in my neighborhood until 2015.
Living in a downtown area is pretty much guaranteed 1gbps fiber, outside of that is almost certainly garbage (cable/dsl/satellite) unless your neighborhood was built recently.
My congressional district has a Comcast call center located in it. So my representative bends over backwards to support Comcast because they 'provide so many jobs' in the area. It's pitiful.
No, it really means "they provide jobs." I encountered this dealing with environmental issues (on the public interest side). Exelon (the power company) doesn't need to donate money to candidates (which is illegal anyway). Having a big source of jobs in a particular district is plenty of leverage.
> doesn't need to donate money to candidates (which is illegal anyway)
While it is true that the direct donation of money is illegal, the running of political ads for or against a candidate is legal in the US, no matter how much is spent. I don't see any moral difference between "I will give you $100k to stop this regulation." and "If you stop this regulation, I will donate $100k to a PAC that supports your reelection." Both are, in my opinion, complete bribery and abuse of an office, but the latter is completely legal.
Yup. A bit offtopic, but these kinds of legislative plays are why something like the military-industrial complex is so hard to break.
Yeah, it'd be great to shut down that UTC plant that subsists entirely on defense contracts, but it's been in the community for 50 years and provides thousands of jobs. Good luck running for that district on a platform of wanting to kill local jobs.
They are political monopolies, not geographic. Congress created a telephony and cable video regulatory regime based on monopolies to subsidize the buildout of those technologies. Congress has only halfheartedly moved away from this system because cable and telecom are the largest political donor groups. Some states have made progress moving to more competitive models but for the most part the system is a rats nest of federal, state, and local regulations designed to block competition.
This is an area where the cynical conventional wisdom just doesn't hold up to actual facts. Congress made it illegal for localities to grant monopolies back in 1992. Many municipalities are trying to get more competition, not block it. But they insist on imposing public interest obligations that make it unfeasible to build competing systems.
> “We’ve, in fact, asked other cable operators if they’re interested in coming into the city and, so far, nobody else is,” says Minda Goldberg, a chief solicitor in the city’s Law Department.
> She was explaining things to Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke during a hearing on Sept. 22 on the renewal of Comcast’s 12-year-old franchise agreement. Clarke had asked if the agreement was an exclusive one with Comcast.
> Franchise agreements between a local government and cable operator are non-exclusive. That means anyone with the money can operate in Baltimore. And under federal regulations, the agreements apply only to cable television service.
The reason Comcast is a monopoly in Baltimore isn't "political donations." It's because the city insists that any competitor must build out to the whole city--which means running fiber to vast swaths of the city where people are too poor to pay what it would cost to recoup the investment. That, in turn, would force the company to recoup that investment from paying customers, which would drive up prices compared to the cable that's already in the ground.
> which means running fiber to vast swaths of the city where people are too poor
Imagine the sad state of affairs if they didn't have government programs for these same problems with electricity and phone lines in the 30's through the 60's. Not just in relatively dense city areas, but even rural areas.
There were plenty of things wrong with Ma Bell, but having short-term profit rule all else is just one more systemic issue that keeps poor areas poor.
Sadly, I doubt this will ever get better; the system is too entrenched, and can protect it's interests better than any other human system in the past, making it nigh-impossible to topple.
Reminiscing back to electrification in the 1930s overlooks a larger problem: cost disease. The US couldn’t afford to build any of the infrastructure we built back then. NYC can barely afford maintain its subway. Just extending the existing 120-mile long network by less than 10% will take longer than it took to build the whole to work in the first place.
People perceive it as a political problem, and in a sense it is, but they’re viewing it too narrowly. The US has enormous trouble building all sorts of infrastructure that other developed countries build relatively cheaply.
I would argue that in itself is also a political problem. Either you play with monopolies that drag things out and milk you for all your worth, or you play with local municipalities that have a byzantine rule set and politicians who love lobster dinners, or deal with a federal government that is influenced by the individuals and companies who want their pound of flesh, or...
And even without corruption, in a fair world: you have to not damage property, have safe practices, and pay your workers well. While I'm in favor, doing any of that balloons costs.
The solution - to have an efficient, fair, non-corrupt system - is simply not possible today, and likely never will be. Unless you are already a monopoly that can do whatever you please and abuse whoever you want, building infrastructure will forever be very expensive.
>This is an area where the cynical conventional wisdom just doesn't hold up to actual facts. Congress made it illegal for localities to grant monopolies back in 1992.
Apparently, it did not stop states from granting monopolies:
> Congress has only halfheartedly moved away from this system because cable and telecom are the largest political donor groups
The benefit telcos provide Congress are in letting them target employment and benefits. There are few other industries where a Congressperson can reliably create X jobs and headline benefits for their district, specifically and tangibly. That, much more than campaign contributions, explains their clout.
(People tend to vastly over-estimate the value of campaign contributions. They're lifeblood to challengers. But for incumbents, they largely have value in not going to challengers than as a direct benefit.)
What employment? It takes the same number of people to operate wired infrastructure regardless of who owns it. No cable company or telco company has moved jobs or retained jobs in an area as a bargaining chip.
Building out new capacity as well as upgrading and maintaining existing capacity involves hiring and buying locally. By practical requirement. Often, too, by contractual obligation.
The incumbents are not building out new capacity or upgrading, which is why the whole conversation is happening. They're going to maintain regardless of what the politician does.
> The incumbents are not building out new capacity or upgrading, which is why the whole conversation is happening.
Your assertion is false. https://www.vox.com/2018/12/12/18134899/internet-broafband-f... ("Finally some good news: The internet is getting faster, especially fixed broadband internet. Broadband download speeds in the U.S. rose 35.8 percent and upload speeds are up 22 percent from last year, according to internet speed-test company Ookla in its latest U.S. broadband report... As of October, the U.S. ranked seventh in the world in broadband.").
> incumbents are not building out new capacity or upgrading, which is why the whole conversation is happening
Look up your local telco monopoly and look at the number of field offices, warehouses, et cetera they have. It's substantial. That's because telecom is tough. It's also because it wins contracts.
Electrical, telephone, and cable tv wiring actually have a huge first mover advantage.
Whoever wired the thing first gets most of the customers and can pay for the build out. If you overbuild a roughly equivalent network, you're unlikely to get a lot of customers and you're unlikely to be able to pay for your buildout.
It doesn't matter if you have an exclusive franchise agreement once your network is built; the business realities provide exclusivity.
> Is it big business lobbying politicians to prevent them from having to compete?
Correct. The politicians that US citizens habitually elect are in the pocket of telecom companies. These politicians have not elevated Internet service in the US to the level of, for example, telephone service which, as a result of government policy established by now long dead politicians, is available almost anywhere someone would care to live in the US. This allows telecom companies to cherry pick lucrative areas for Internet service and ignore everything else. The result is that both rural and poor urban areas have poor or no Internet service while suburbs and dense metropolitan areas have high performance network services.
One might assume that US citizens are fabulously stupid for continuing to elect such politicians. That's the easy answer, frequently offered, and like most easy answers it misses a great deal. There are political undercurrents in the US that create the alignments of power that explain our outcomes. Unfortunately it isn't possible to candidly discuss these currents in forums such as this without igniting flame wars, so I'll end here.
We don't invest in the future, only immediate profits. Look at any other infrastructure....subways, roads, water, electrical, government systems, education, recycling, etc. They're all crumbling.
Subways, roads, water, electrical, government systems, education, and recycling are generally government run. "Immediate profits" isn't the excuse, because that isn't part of the equation. It's the fundamental inefficiency of government.
If your description was accurate, Ford would still be trying to sell their Model T rather than continuously investing in the future at a cost of today's profit. Obviously, this hasn't happened.
They're "government run" in the sense that the government hires out contractors and there's horrible oversight and incentive to create conditions where you receive more work.
For example, with education we keep expanding funding for private schools (for profit) over public schools. With subways in NYC we give out absurd amounts of cash to MTA to run it and just hope they're being honest, but costs keep increasing and there's very little to be shown for it. With government systems we could invest in great infrastructure, but why invest in a long term solution that decreases maintenance when you can be charged ridiculous amounts by the only contractor that knows the frankenstein codebase that they purposely developed to be unmanageable.
I am an American with symmetric gigabit service (actually ~900mbps down, ~880 mbps up) with no caps and I pay less than $100/month. Of course, that is because I live in a huge urban area where ISPs actually compete with each other and do not have any local monopolies on service. The problem in America is that there are vast geographic areas where millions of people have no real choice in broadband service, and ISPs let their networks languish in those areas.
Funny that the rich only ever have rich friends. Who can really afford $1200/a for ..., well, what exactly? One can make the case today, that access to the Internet is essential (although I'm not quite convinced that this needs to be from home. An account at school or a public library would suffice methinks), but broadband? with bitrates even exceeding those needed for high definition video streams? C'mon.
I am also in the US and my connection is 10x faster than yours and 30% cheaper.
Half of the senators listed in this article represent states with population densities lower than any South African province other than Northern Cape. Colorado's density is 19.9/km2. Maine is 16.9/km2
Many of the servers which you connect to in the US are in the Northeast megalopolis, which is an area with a density of 359.6/km2
Unless I'm missing something about existing coax cable deployments, this would practically force large-scale fiber buildout. Cable isn't built to service symmetrical speeds, and more than that I don't think that most residential workloads benefit significantly from it.
I do think that in the era of Zoom, a household could use ~20mbps upload, and I guess if we're trying to be forward looking, 100mbps is a target that's achievable right now (with fiber buildout).
"this would practically force large-scale fiber buildout"
Sounds good, I think it is pretty obvious that fiber is the future of wired connections. Comcast is already beginning to offer fiber service to achieve symmetric speeds and Verizon is planning a large-scale upgrade of its fiber optic endpoints to offer higher speeds (above gigabit service). If the industry needs a small regulatory nudge to move forward with this, great, let's do it.
DOCSIS 3.1 is capable of 10gbps down, 1gbps up, and the currently less common 4.0 is capable of 10gbps down and 6gbps up. This is equivalent to and often better than a typical FttH PON media (which in the most common form are capable of 1gbps symmetric per string only). The major constraint preventing high upstream speeds is legacy equipment in cable carrier networks; there is progress on changing this but not especially fast. Regulatory action to require high upstream speeds for broadband incentives could significantly speed things up.
The protocol may support it, but remember that the bandwidth shared across and entire neighborhood or market is still only as good as the CMTS is capable of supporting, which is nowhere near that.
PON faces the exact same constraint, and because the core of most cable carrier networks is carrier fiber my experience is that new-installation CMTS typically have better transit (multi-gbps fiber) than PON (1gbps fiber common). This is for smaller municipal PON carriers, I know less about major operations like AT&T's and Verizon's.
You can actually run DOCSIS over fiber too. I used to work for a mid-sized regional ISP that had everything from GPON, to DOCSIS cable, to every flavor of DSL. The backhaul throughput is the constraint everywhere, but so is signal loss over distance. The limiting factor for urban areas is usually oversubscribed and aging equipment (and building out new lines is very hard to do in an already developed area because legal/bureaucratic reasons), and the limiting factor for rural areas is the sheer distance needed to cover to get to maybe a couple dozen potential paying customers. The vast majority of the US is empty/undeveloped space with dozens to hundreds of miles in-between.
The interesting part is that fiber rollout would result in less bandwidth pooling on coax, which would make coax competitive again. I'm projecting it may never entirely go away for this reason- the cables are already buried, and the service will get better as demand decreases.
With DOCSIS 3.0 you can get up to 200 Mbit/s upstream, and DOCSIS 3.1 and 4.0 push that even further. There's even DOCSIS FDX (full duplex) that's fully symmetrical. It'll require some investment from the cable companies for sure, but I don't think this will be the end of cable service.
It was last year maybe, just before the pandemic hit, Comcast doubled my download speed but also cut my upload in half. They spun the change as a 'free' upgrade, but in reality my download speed was fine before; My gaming, outbound streaming, and work use cases all suffered massively due to the change.
we should increase the upload speed, but 100Mbs is overkill. I had gigabit fiber for 3 years before I realized I never went anywhere near that. I switched to 100/100 now and no one even noticed, that's with the whole family working/schooling from home. I'm pretty sure 50/50 would be fine.
The biggest issues are data caps and upload speeds.
From prior experience in this industry: Customers are generally quite bad at determining where the bottleneck is in their system.
It was surprising to see how often people upgraded their broadband plan or WiFi router after struggling to FaceTime with friends and family (who were likely on cellular), for example.
TBH if we want to see more services like stadia/geforce now or highier res streaming 50Mbps is not enough. Single stream in GFN can reach 50Mbps right now and that's only on 1080p60hz.
Rising bar won't hurt anyone and should force ISPs to create better infrastructure.
I have a family of 4 who will all be streaming, gaming, surfing at once on 25mbps and it's fine. You need about 5mbps per stream at 1080p and 30fps. Streaming in 4K is much more demanding but I think that's still a luxury.
I think the big variable between now and the last time these were set is the great remote working migration of 2020. Zoom doesn't require 1080 quality, but you'll be sending as much up as down, so the 3mbps upload speed would suddenly feel pretty tight.
I used to have 25/5 and from time to time it was tight for me alone (but I never fiddled much with QoS settings).
Under "normal" usage it did work, but then there were from time to time complications (e.g. OS update, Android update/installations, send/receive funny videos, etc...) and then when 1.5 years ago it became from time to time as well difficult to work from home (bigger SW-updates on the company notebook, more communication by antivirus/antispyware/antiwhatever) I gave up and changed to 1gb/1gb fibre => with what started happening last year I've been veeery lucky to get it just a few months before that the whole Covid situation made working from home a permanent situation :)
Maybe you are just capped by bad wifi? I had the same issue and switching around wifi protocols did a 10x on my speed. Like from 20-30mbs to 300-350mbs.
If all you do is basic Netflix / Facebook / etc. you really don't need all that fat of a pipe.
I did upgrade my router in the fall and was surprised how big of a difference it made for my speeds around the house, but we are still nowhere near saturating the bandwidth we have available with 50 / 50.
Granted, we are a family of 5 with 3 preschoolers that don't do anything besides watch shows a couple hours every evening.
See, this I do not understand... With 50/50Mbps I can't game and watch 1080p60 videos on YouTube whilst family stream, there will be a very noticeable lag in game and stream will start to buffer.
We now get 140/140 for just under $25 (Europe, Denmark)
Speed is often decoupled from latency - but many home routers don't do QoS correctly and can flood the DOWNSTREAM by flooding the UPSTREAM (ACKs don't get through).
Speed is confused for latency - many connections aren't well handled and so if you get close to saturating the connection latency goes to hell - because the ACKs can't get through fast enough.
In a letter to government leaders Thursday, a bipartisan group of senators called for a quadrupling of base high-speed broadband delivery speeds making 100Mbps down and 100Mbps up the new base for high-speed broadband.
Why are Senators writing letters to the Executive branch? The Executive branch enforces the laws that the Legislative branch writes. If Senators want a different definition they should do their damn jobs for once and write some laws.
That is simplistic. The legislative branch allows the executive branch to define things like this because the executive branch can move faster, unconstrained by the politics of the legislative process. If the legislature had voted on a specific definition of broadband, it would always be out of date, because in the time needed to update the definition the technology would have already advanced. Instead the legislature performs oversight of the executive branch agencies that exercise the power they have been granted; this letter is part of the oversight process, basically the senators saying, "Hey, we intended for you to keep this definition up to date and feel you are not doing so."
It doesn’t take years to pass a bill. In fact a bill can be passed more quickly than a regulation because it just takes a few votes whereas with a regulation there are unavoidable notice and comment periods.
I’d say that your “this is necessary for efficiency reasons” model is, if not simplistic, than at least naive.
We’ve moved to a system where Congress has abdicated the legislative role almost entirely not because it is impossible for legislatures to legislate (after all some countries combine the legislature and executive) but because feckless Members of Congress have found that doing nothing except carping from the sidelines is a pretty good gig.
A bill can be passed quickly, but most bills are not. I once met with the staff of some senators (bipartisan) to explain something I had worked on to inform a bill they were pushing -- it was years ago, the bill has languished despite being pushed the entire time. One reason the bill has gone nowhere was lobbying pressure by some other companies who did not want to be forced to use the technology the bill would mandate, and that lobbying came with tons of misinformation.
Congress almost never moves quickly. Parties have grand strategies that sometimes involve stalling good legislation. Deals have to made. Ideological disagreements can spill over or supersede rational analysis. That is the nature of politics, it has been the case since the first days of the Republic and it was the case in the governments that preceded the USA.
And yet from the 1930s to the 1970s every decade had several major pieces of legislation. Laws with detailed provisions—-not just outlines to be filled in by the President. The last three major pieces of legislation were PPACA (2010), Dodd-Frank (2010, an outline not a law), and the Patriot Act (2001). Something has clearly changed from the era of the Social Security Act, the Civil Rights Act, and Clean Water Act.
In the 1930s and early 40s Congress sat around arguing, refusing to allow the US to enter the war, despite the fact that our allies were being defeated and our economic interests were being threatened (to say nothing of the moral obligation we had to save Jewish lives, particularly after turning away ships full of Jewish refugees). In all likelihood our late entry resulted in a longer, costlier war -- we had to fight for more territory and against more fortified defenses, and our allies were less able to fight alongside us after so many defeats.
Look, there is a good argument that Congress has delegated too much authority to the executive branch and some of that authority should be withdrawn. That is not the same as saying that the executive branch should not make any determinations whatsoever and should only be given exact instructions by Congress. We should always be wary of going to the extremes in either direction -- the Romans gave the executive far too much power and we would not want to repeat their mistake, but an executive with too little power would be equally disastrous for the country.
You’re not wrong but it’s a strange argument to make right now. It’s as if we had the thermostat set to 50, I make an argument we need to crank it up, and you made a long detailed argument about how it can also be set too high. Sure, let’s worry about that when the temperature hits 68.
It's more like we have several thermostats, some set too low, but you pointed to one that was set just right and said we should turn it up.
OK the analogy is a bit strained. Maybe I should just say that I do not think the authority given to the FCC to make determinations about broadband speeds is an example of Congress delegating too much authority.
Even if I were to agree, if you are going to delegate—-delegate. Delegating and then writing ineffectual letters seems like the least respectable standard operating procedure for Congress-people to adopt. It strikes me as somewhere between pathetic and contemptible.
Legislation tends to be more about adding guard-rails and authority to do things, like giving the federal government the authority to even set this definition and the authority to levy fines and punish people that violate their regulations.
The specifics of the definition are left up to the executive branch, as the sibling post has said.
This was not how the system was designed to work and it doesn’t seem to be working. Correlation is not causation but it is pretty suggestive that government worked better before Congress stoped legislating in the 1980s.
I'll start off by saying I don't like caps, I don't think they accurately solve the problem they're trying to solve. This is not to be construed in defense of caps, but only to acknowledge they do currently exist for many.
Lets say a provider sells all plans with a 1TB cap. I have an options of 1Mbit, 10Mbit, 100Mbit, and gigabit, I'll take the gigabit plan nearly every time assuming the price is fine. Because while I still only have a 1TB cap actually getting the data I want will be faster. Most consumers have extremely bursty throughput needs, having a faster plan still benefits them even if there's the same cap.
Why would you want a car capable of going 60 miles an hour when a car that only goes 10 miles an hour will still get you there? Because it saves you time.
> Why would you want a car capable of going 60 miles an hour when a car that only goes 10 miles an hour will still get you there? Because it saves you time.
The analogy isn't perfect but let's play... What if your Ferrari just stopped working each month once it went 100 miles? Sure it saved you time when it was working, but now you can't use your Ferrari AT ALL for 2/3 of the month. What about if you need to get milk later in the month? Doctors appointment? etc.
To expand on this, what if your kids drove the Ferrari, full throttle. They might reach that 100 mile limit in one day! That's how data works now. Netflix, YouTube and others detect my fast connection, and throttle the quality up, thereby exhausting my cap quicker.
Exhausting my cap at high speed in 2 days doesn't benefit me for the remaining 28 days of the month.
This would be solved if I had better controls over this behavior from either my ISP, device, service or local network.
The car going faster didn't make me drive more miles. I still put in the same number of miles as I would have gone. I just finished my errands much faster than if I had a car that only went 10mph. So yeah, if my theoretical car had a 100mi range I'd still take the Ferrari over a cart that maxes out at 10mph. This exact scenario of capped miles exists for many people, it's called leasing a car. I imagine people still lease fancy cars because the experience driving one is better than driving a slower, crappier one.
Are you honestly suggesting in the above scenario you'd take the 1Mbit connection over any of the higher speeds?
> Are you honestly suggesting in the above scenario you'd take the 1Mbit connection over any of the higher speeds?
No, my point was that we now drive 50MPH sedans that stop working after 1000 miles. Instead of a sedan that drives 100MPH I'd rather have it keep working after 1000 miles, or at least not price gouge me when I do.
Or, in your analogy, if this was an actual open competitive market (it's not in the US) I could decide whether I want to buy or lease a Ferrari or Honda.
One of the benefits of home fiber that people rarely talk about is the low latency. On my fiber connection, I get around ~2ms ping to the nearest data center. On my parents' cable internet, it's around ~25ms ping. (I am not up-to-date on the latest DOCSIS versions, etc., and it's possible some cable companies might do better than this.)
This ~20ms makes a small but noticeable difference in how quickly web pages load, how smooth video conferencing and VoIP are, and how fluid online gaming is.
>25 down, 3 up is plenty for 99.9% of internet users.
Is it? What data makes you so confident about this?
If I buy a 25 max down, 3 max up connection, what speed will you actually be able to use - it is unlikely in my experience to be regularly hit those max speeds.
This does the opposite actually, it forced the federal government to de-prioritize areas with worse service in favor of areas with good but not as good as 100/100 service.
There are parts of the US that don't even have access to 15/3. This reclassification would put them in the same group as people with 75 up and down.
Yeah SLA is more important at that point. I've lived in apartments/had-service that would only slowdown/drop like once a month and I've had service that's dropped nearly every day. The later is incredibly frustrating.
Let's not be fooled by the messaging. This is the wired broadband telcos/cablecos not wanting low orbit satellite providers to be eligible for federal money. Starlink is scaring them. Perhaps the prospects of CBRS as well.
This is anti-competition in an area in which we desperately need competition, and therefore should be fought against, no matter how good it sounds.
“Going forward, we should make every effort to spend limited federal dollars on broadband networks capable of providing sufficient download and upload speeds and quality,”
Does this definition held by the FCC actually map to any legal qualifications for federal subsidies to ISP's, or is this just a nice gesture?
I believe the definition of broadband is mostly relevant when future grants and contracts are handed out by gov. So could help for new business, but I don't think it will be used in existing connections.
But to me it is not entirely clear in the article.
I live in a semi-rural area and work from home in tech. I am within range of LTE towers, but only T-Mo will serve my area and the connection remains spotty even with a $1000 signal booster.
It is frustrating to see initiatives like this that do not address the actual problems that make work difficult. My throughput is about 25 down / 3 up when it works, and this feels fine to me.
What I do need is a ping that stays under 100ms reliably, even when downloading or streaming. I can usually get 60ms or so, but it jumps up to 1000ms for short periods of time regularly for no reason. This interferes with any sort of voip calling severely.
Just as importantly, data caps should be at least 500GB, and clearly unlimited would be better yet. Plans that offer under 100GB of data are used up very quickly if doing anything more than the bare minimum.
Very in favor of modernizing the definition, very not in favor of subsidizing any network buildout -- if a provider is not offering broadband under the new definition that is not (in my eyes) a problem the government needs to step in to fix, it's simply being honest about our nation's network infra capabilities.
Sure, we can incentivize providers for reaching certain percentage rollouts under the new definition, but history shows us we should not consider schemes to help finance those buildouts.
Internet is not currently a utility, so unless we make it a proper utility with proper regulation before handing over money, the federal government is historically not capable of resisting lobbying pressure aimed at remove the teeth from similar subsidized buildout agreements. In almost all cases the money has disappeared without significant real world improvements.
For example, using the money intended for buildout to instead pay lobbyers to re-change the definition of broadband, thereby actualizing some stated goal of "75% of service area covered by broadband", and then pocketing the difference between the actual buildout costs and the lobbying costs.
If we offer a financing without regulation, we may as well move the money straight into the exec bonus category and totally ignore improving infra
Symmetric home bandwidth is a nice idea, but it's not how almost any residential infrastructure is built out. Even "symmetric" gigabit fiber usually isn't (yes I know there are a few FTTH networks using Metro Ethernet etc, but that's rare) since GPON is still asymmetric at the neighborhood level. Everyone on a single OLT port, very similar to how DOCSIS capacity is shared among a coaxial local segment in hybrid fiber/coax cable networks.
The reality is that residential customers use more download than upload on their last mile connection, bandwidth is always a limited resource that must be allocated, and engineering tradeoffs will always be made.
Is 3mbit up insufficient? It's workable right now, but barely. I do think that has good reason, and the capacity exists, to rise in the near future. But moving to symmetric is just going to result in more oversubscription on the upload side, and banking on how real-world most users don't actually fill their upload.
I'd also be concerned about the impacts on rural internet access innovation under this. Yes, "innovation" has too often been an excuse for refusing to build out physical plant; but the market has responded with new options which can provide over 25/3 to deep rural customers at a price point which can be profitable. The biggest threat to customers here is overly restrictive data caps - 20 gigs/month is not a usable quantity even if it's delivered at 100mbit! It's likely that some degree of data cap, at least a soft/deprioritization cap, will always be a fixture of most RF based last-mile access. That's unfortunate but that will always be constrained to the frequencies available. There are some hard decisions there, and points to the need to have a definition of what a sufficient data cap is.
Realistically, if you want broadband with no data caps (or only "top 1% of all users" type caps such as most "no cap" urban/suburban residential ISPs use) then there would need to be actual fiber to the premises run everywhere. That's a rural electrification level project.. which we already mandated and paid for big chunks of with the incumbent telcos, then let them pocket the money and not build out the network. Sigh. It's probably too late to claw any of that back or enforce those old mandates, so we're stuck with finding other ways to do it. (And even those broken promises only covered part of the country to begin with..)
"[Old] Usage patterns don't make sense to allocate bandwidth equally for up/down."
In the past 5 years the amount of video and streaming (pre-recorded and live) has exploded. And remote/WFH culture is advancing. It's time for US internet providers to catch up.
my fiancee, her family. lives in Mecca, Ca, not too far from indio, ca, which is where the Cochella festival is, and they can only get ATT ADSL2, they get 6mbit/1.5mbit and it's a joke. using even tmobile 4g only gets you 10mbit for a few seconds via bursting speeds.
As it is, ISPs provide barely enough bandwidth to get ACK packets up. Given that we are now expected to work (and study) from home, it doesn't take much to saturate a connection.
Years ago I read many complaints about how the U.S. government handed out hundreds of millions of dollars to telcos (in what form I don't know or remember) to build out their fiber networks, but they just never did it... and kept the money.
Now I can't find any reference to that at all. Does that scenario sound familiar to anyone?
Yes, something from the 90s. I'm sure HN user rayiner has posted an argument for why that isn't true, so maybe search comment history for fiber or broadband or subsidy to find arguments and the surrounding counterarguments?
They laid the fiber, they just didn't use it (for consumers). Google Fiber started out by just buying up a bunch of unused fiber lines that had been sitting there for years.
Utilities like water, electricity, and broadband should be nationalized and run by the public, for the public. They all require extensive physical infrastructure and "competition" doesn't work because the barriers to entry are so high.
The 3mbps upload speed for 25/3 does seem too slow with the rise of Zoom and other tools that can actually use the upload. Defining broadband as 25/10 or above would make more sense. 25/10 is plenty for work applications.
100Mbps upload seems pretty unnecessary for the vast majority of uses unless the FCC had a goal of promoting BitTorrent and other p2p sharing.
I have gigabit 1000/1000 from fios now and it does let me download games from steam faster though.
I don’t trust non symmetric connections advertised speeds in the first place, but 100Mbps is the minimum a family would need for multiple video calls and offsite backups.
I'm on a 7-person Zoom call with 15 fps video and 1 fps 4K screen-sharing right now. The quality is excellent. The real time stats are 300-314 kb/s upstream and 1350-1411 kb/s downstream.
Even if zoom is incorrectly using kb to mean bytes (instead of bits), that's ~3 Mbps of upstream required per video call.
Yes, and when a US cable company advertises 25Mbps, they mean they will give you 25Mbps for 5 minutes which they take from the whole neighborhoods' 50Mbps, and then throttle you down after that to god knows what.
If it's not fiber, I assume there's tons of overhead/lying with the numbers.
I pay for 200/10 Mbps and out of hundreds of tests, I have never gotten less than 235/11 and usually get 260/12 on hybrid cable (fiber backbone, DOCSIS 3.0 32x8 local loop) from Comcast.
Speedtest.net isn't a great a measurement because cable is notoriously bursty. Cable ISPs will give you the full (neighborhood) pipe for a minute, and then throttle you back to some set speed. This is helpful to speed up web browsing, but not when measuring bandwidth.
I'd recommend timing any big upload that takes at least an hour. Ideally encrypted and somewhat unique, so that it's not likely to be prioritized or served by an edge box.
I wasn't willing to go for an hour, but I planned an upload of one that would take about 15 minutes (to get well past any initial burst rate). The upload rate started at 1.3 MiB/s, quickly climbed to 1.4 MiB/s and stayed there the entire upload.
This is a shot on my personal iPhone family video, so there's zero chance that it is cached anywhere.
If you compute using a file byte as being 8 network bits (the reality is slightly higher, of course), you get:
jsokoloff@Jim-Macbook Downloads % time aws s3 cp iPhone_opening.MOV s3://XXX-XXX/photos/
upload: ./iPhone_opening.MOV to s3://XXX-XXX/photos/iPhone_opening.MOV
aws s3 cp iPhone_opening.MOV s3://XXX-XXX/photos/ 12.84s user 7.66s system 2% cpu 14:38.47 total
jsokoloff@Jim-Macbook Downloads % ls -la iPhone_opening.MOV
-rw-r--r--@ 1 jsokoloff access_bpf 1265329653 Aug 22 2020 iPhone_opening.MOV
jsokoloff@Jim-Macbook Downloads % echo -ne "bps: " && echo "1265329653 * 8 / (14 * 60 + 38.47)" | bc
bps: 11523031
jsokoloff@Jim-Macbook Downloads % echo -ne "Mibps/100: " && echo "1265329653 * 8 / (14 * 60 + 38.47) * 100 / 2 ^ 20" | bc
Mibps/100: 1098
So, 10.98 Mibps (11.52 Mbps) for an almost 15 minute period, which matches the above extremely closely.
That's a much better test and thanks for doing it. I usually use a factor of ~10 (9.5) to go from advertised Mb/s to actual MB/s, so I agree 1.4MB/s is decently better than the 10Mbps quoted.
Of course the ultimate test is hopping on a popular torrent ;)
Anyhow at the risk of this turning into a multi page rant about comcast I'll cut back to upload speed. I see it as upload is for creation and download is for consumption. What do the cable companies want people to be doing?
If you look at the popularity of twitch/youtube/(things I'm too old and unhip to know about) it is a direct threat to cable/traditional content creation. I'd wager the current state of affairs holds a lot of people back from getting into content creation, especially poorer/larger families who have to share a limited connection.