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.
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.