I had 10gb internet on what was essentially a shared connection when I lived in Zürich.

That, along with a surplus server I literally housed in my shoe closet, gave me the firepower I needed to prototype out something that led to two research grants which now employ myself and a new PhD student.

We discount technological investments like this as being “too much” and “unpractical”, but we forget that, even if it only one person in a hundred or a thousand take advantage of them, the impact can be enough to launch careers or start businesses with sizeable positive externalities.

Being from a third world country, I completely agree with you on how technological investment can change lives. Even a low speed connection in a rural zone can achieve wonderful things.

But I really wonder what was your prototype that needed that speed connection and that wouldn't work with something slower. Can you share, at least vaguely, what was your work?

> Can you share, at least vaguely, what was your work?

We work with gis/satellite data. Nothing groundbreaking technically, but we aggregate it into products that are useful for social science researchers who aren’t comfortable with or don’t have the computing resources to use this data by themselves.

What exactly about gis/satellite data required such an insane uplink?

What exactly is insane about it?

I was surprised when my parents had 1Gbit in 2009. I was delighted when I could get 500Mbit in 2013. I'm slightly miffed that I don't even get 1Gbit in 2022. I literally laugh at providers attempting to convince me to get whatever with 10 or 20Mbit uplink speeds, in 2022l Yes, they exist.

Anyhow. What's insane about a 10Gbit uplink? I wired up my apartment for 1Gbit in 2001. I've been frustrated about home network speeds for 21 years. I do not understand why you consider 10Gbit insane.

At home you are free to make everything 10G-capable, have a NAS that can saturate such a link, etc.

On the wider internet, few resources are happy to dedicate such bandwidth to you, even if you can consume it. Not even every popular torrent can muster so much incoming bandwidth.

I can see how it may make sense if you run a popular public server from your home; maybe more convenient than colocation, but still is not a typical use case.

I feel the same. I am an übergeek, but I see no reason to pay for more than 100Mbit/sec, but 1Gbit and (soon'ish) 10Gbit will be available. Where I live, 100Mbit/sec is laughably cheap. I get a sales call once per month: "100Mit/sec is so slow! Would you like a upgrade?" I have no use for it. That said, I view myself as the exception to the rule. Please don't read this post as "1Gbit+ is useless" -- only that I don't have a use.

Real question: If you are an Internet gamer, I assume that latency per packet is lower for 1Gbit+ connections, so it is useful for many customers.

More: I feel the same about monitor resolutions above 4K. Anything above 4K on a 27inch monitor makes no sense for my body size / sitting height. I cannot use a vertical monitor taller than 27inch, and above 4K is too small for my aging eyesight! Again: I am sure there are many interesting applications for 4K+ and 27inch+. I hereby wish good luck to all the whippersnappers who will prove me wrong with interesting applications of 4K+ and 27inch+!

Also, even at colocation providers, 10 Gigabits committed rate is going to be a bit pricy.

You can look at it as too much for anyone's needs, or you can see it as enabling tomorrow's applications. Looking back, or looking forward.

Back in the dialup days, nobody in their right mind would run a torrent, or play online shooters, or watch streaming HD video -- such things were utterly impractical over ultra slow links with very high latency. Once people started getting broadband, these applications started appearing.

Of course we need faster links into people's homes. Of course under-1Gbit links into homes in 2022 are ridiculous.

> Not even every popular torrent can muster so much incoming bandwidth.

So? The process of wringing out the bottlenecks is to eliminate the ones you can, and be mad about the ones you can't.

I have 1Gbit Virgin in the U.K. and that speed us still very rare here. Any faster and I’m going to have to be searching for a better USB NIC in order to actually utilise anything. Most consumer hardware seems to still be 1000baseT so how would you utilise anything more than a gigabit connection unless you have 10+devices all working at maximum capacity? Also I rarely max it downloading anything at all, is there some sort of special internet somewhere that you can download stuff at 10Gbps?

Finally, can your SSD even keep up with speeds like this?

**Oh and I thought I’d note, it is the positive use of “insane” like “mad good”.

> Finally, can your SSD even keep up with speeds like this?

COTS nvme SSD can easily do 1GB/s which easily maxes out non-optimized 10Gbit due to overhead alone. Burst that is for write, but you get the idea.

> I literally laugh at providers attempting to convince me to get whatever with 10 or 20Mbit uplink speeds, in 2022l Yes, they exist.

Meanwhile here in Silicon Valley, the fastest connection I can get at home (sonic.net) is 22Mbps/1.7Mbps. In the office I have Comcast Business which is a bit faster (don't recall exactly) but certainly well below 100Mbps.

So yes 1Gbps sounds quite insane. 10Gbps is out of this universe.

I have 100up/50down (mbps, not giga) at home, and its the fastest I can afford. If money is not a concern then it can go up to 1gb, but not in my area yet. I can barely saturate my line unless I'm donwloading something big.

10gig is insane.

I can think of two things. Large time series data for large areas with a lot of attributes like temperature or other atmospheric data or a huge amount of point clouds or comparable 3D Data.

SAR and multispectral imagery. It’s not difficult to work with when you’re only dealing a small and well defined regions, but the bandwidth and storage requirement definitely increase once you start doing daily global composites.

We’ve actually moved everything into a data center with a 1gb connection. The trade of being that we have several orders of magnitude more storage and computing capacity.

It’s crazy because among friends I’m the only one working with geodata (remote sensing, too) and the last few days I keep stumbling upon people who already do some work in the same area and are probably much more advanced than I am. Good luck with your endeavour!

25Gbps is not insane if you are using commodity hardware. If you are buying any sort of datacenter switch, most likely it will be 25G/100G already. 10G/40G is dead tech.

Now, 400G uplinks are still pretty reserved, but 100G (and its' breakout, 4 x 25G) is common as dirt now.

Are there any small (affordable, energy-efficient) switches with those speeds? Say, around 8-24 of the 25G lanes? You can buy a dual-port SFP28 card for 250 EUR by using the QNAP "accessory"[0] which is just a ConnectX-6 Lx EN with a fan to work in the NAS systems they market it for.

This is quite efficient due to the PCIe4 support not hogging many lanes (half of the 8 lanes can be enough depending on usage), but to use the speed one needs a 25G switch. Is the cheapest way just an Ryzen with 5 of these directly attached to the CPU, and running routing on the CPU via DPDK?

[0]: https://geizhals.eu/qnap-lan-adapter-qxg-25g2sf-cx6-a2609459...

MikroTik is a market leader in barebones 10Gbit/sec routers. However, multi-port 25Gbit/sec is very expensive! This model is 2800 USD and has 12x 25Gbit/sec and 2x 100Gbit/sec ports: https://mikrotik.com/product/ccr2216_1g_12xs_2xq

I struggle to find a 10Gbps USB NIC for my laptop.

Go with surplus commercial hardware and be judicious about when you turn your equipment on.

I'm sure there's >10Gbits of 'gis/satellite data' available every second if you want it?

Or what if you want a bunch of historical data for some sort of analysis, and you'd like to start that now, not next week when it finishes downloading? If it's historical (i.e. sitting there available to download) then faster is always better right? If your connection is the bottleneck then all else equal why wouldn't you want it?

(I imagine 10Gbps is about the point currently where it's not necessarily going to help going faster on your end, unless you you have multiple (concurrent) sources, or know that even at that you're still still the bottleneck.)

GIS and remote sensing has you working with gargantuan TIFF files and massive amounts of other kinds of data. It's a whole thing. If you're doing data aggregation, it's possible that without an absolute unit of a pipe just to do a download of imagery, the prototype wouldn't have been feasible.

https://www.esri.com/arcgis-blog/products/product/imagery/ma...

Technically Switzerland is a third world country according to the original definition.

You could also say what you meant.

>>The term "Third World" arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO or the Warsaw Pact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World

And Finland may soon be moving from third world to first world.

I’ve never heard someone call their own country a “third world country”. Out of curiosity, which country are you referring to?

This is term is commonly misused as it originally referred to countries beyond the Cold War's NATO/USSR denominations. Today the parent likely refers to a country in the global south or a "developing" nation.

I'm from what used to be a third-world country in the strict sense of term, I'd now refer to my country as a country in the global south.

I think you have successfully illustrated the failure of "global south" as a replacement term.

I'm not against replacing "third world", but something with the word "south" is ambiguous and counterintuitive.

It isn't as much as a replacement term, but you make a fair point that is doesn't translate well. It is both jargon and a loaded concept, which can be confusing when taken literally and without understanding what it aims to represent.

Funnily enough until they said their country was such, I assumed they were American saying 'global' South to distinguish from meaning a South American country.

'Southern hemisphere' is fine though I think? And I assume that's what was meant.

If they meant it as a replacement for "third world" (in the contemporary sense, not explicitly about the cold war), then they didn't mean anything to do with south as a direction.

Your conclusion is my point.

>I'd now refer to my country as a country in the global south

Meaning what, in the southern hemisphere and not Australia or new Zealand?

It isn't a geographical denomination, but rather socioeconomic and political. Most of the countries in the global south denomination are actually in the northern hemisphere.

That seems like bad jargon.

Most people's mental map has basically all of Africa in the southern hemisphere, but geographically that is far from the case.

We have 195 countries in the world and only 33 of those are entirely on the southern hemisphere.

Here is one example of an illustrative map:

https://i.redd.it/w2tv9dda1xzy.png

Whoever came up with the term must think that the “south” starts at the tip of Italy

Yeah, basically. That puts almost all countries in Africa, and the Middle East, Mexico, India etc., in the "south".

Or not necessarily that the inventor of the phrase thinks like that themselves, but rather that they think most people think that way.

idk, the "West" seems pretty bad too

Well, most of earth’s landmass lies in the northern hemisphere.

What’s the “global south?”

It's basically a way to say 'third world' without the baggage of cold war politics embedded in it.

Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. HTH.

Is it south of some reference point (here in Maryland it looks like I’m south of Turkey and around the same as Beijing). Is Australia excluded? Or is it just a euphemism for developing nation.

There is not as it does not refer to a geographical designation. I wouldn't say it is a euphemism, but closer to what people actually refer to when they misuse the term "third-world".

The closest geographical designation was the Brandt line drawn in the 80s showing a north and south divide in terms of global wealth distribution [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_North_and_Global_South#...

Third world is inaccurate, but what’s wrong with “developing world.” Also: did I call it about China and Australia or did I call it?

Like I mentioned in my top-most comment, "developing nation" is what people typically refer to. As to your comment, I was pointing out that "global south" is not a euphemism for "developing nation". I'd say it is the other way around and in a misguided way. This is because the global south/north designation intentionally distances itself from terminology such as "developing nation".

I understand if this comes across as pedantry but the global north and south terminology does a better job at leveling the playing field when talking about wealth and progress disparities.

As per your other question, Australia is part of the global north, China is part of the global south in the global north and south groupings.

>I understand if this comes across as pedantry but the global north and south terminology does a better job at leveling the playing field when talking about wealth and progress disparities.

I mean... but how? It's just the exact same concepts with less intuitively obvious words. Arguably it frames the disparity as a more immutable part of a nation; it doesn't fit normal language patterns to talk about a country moving north/south.

> I understand if this comes across as pedantry but the global north and south terminology does a better job at leveling the playing field when talking about wealth and progress disparities.

How? South Korea, Japan, and Singapore are richer than France or Spain now. As nations develop the geographic terminology makes less and less sense. Developing nation is much more accurate.

Developing vs. developed country is always relative, and the term and the implied benchmark is set by developed countries.

In other words, effectively developed = what we are, developing = trying to be what we are.

It also places unnecessary upper bound on progress (if you call yourself developed, I guess you can stop developing then?).

Ultimately it is forcing a finite game onto the world.

Global south sounds like a better term.

> In other words, effectively developed = what we are, developing = trying to be what we are.

That’s the plan, yes.

> Ultimately it is forcing a finite game onto the world. Global south sounds like a better term.

Except that it’s geographically inaccurate as well as kind of racist. Japan, Singapore, and Korea can get richer than France or Spain, but they still get lumped in with the other non-white people in “the global south.”

> That’s the plan, yes.

Just to clarify, the plan is to stop developing?

> Japan, Singapore, and Korea can get richer than France or Spain, but they still get lumped in with the other non-white people in “the global south.”

Global south/north divide lumps SK, SG and JP into the north. I have a bigger problem with it putting Russia there, but not e.g. Argentina.

Besides, note how the term "developed" sounds like it has an objective, final and fixed definition, but always invites moving goalposts. Now you use some financial metric. Tomorrow someone uses education levels or democracy.

**

The truth is that everybody should keep developing, and development can entail different things to different people. If you say "I'm developed, and that other person is developing", "we are good, but they are not good yet", all you get is resentment when in fact you want global cooperation.

"Developedness" is a vague, subjective measure that indicates duck all except hubris on the part of whoever coined the term (not coincidentally, that was developed countries).

A vague measure warrants a vague term. "Global South" is far from perfect, but it is less bad. It is obviously geographically inaccurate, which on a meta level is quite fitting.

I don't think I could ever use either term without air quotes, but at least with global south they are more or less implied.

> Global south/north divide lumps SK, SG and JP into the north.

Only if you arbitrarily make exceptions for what’s “south”—ignoring the fact that Singapore and Taiwan and Korea are south of China. The phrase itself implies a permanent association between “south” (I.e. non-white, since skin color is a function of latitude) and “under-undeveloped.” That seems far worse to me than acknowledging that developing countries are indeed trying to become like developed countries.

Korea is hardly south of China. Regardless, the term is not supposed to be geographically correct, and to me it is a feature. It's a vague subjective term, as if it's been designed for people to think twice before using it and make their point using a more precise metric instead. That's why I think it's better than "developing nation", which is just as arbitrary but tries to hide that.

What is the measure of richer? By median income, Japan and South Korea are slightly richer than Spain but poorer than France. They are higher by GDP per Capita, but I don't think that is a very good measure as it completely ignores extreme income inequality and would list several oil rich nations very high even though only a few very wealthy at the top benefit.

I don't know, I just Googled it. I've definitely heard the term before, though.

Poor countries

Not the person you are asking, but in Eastern Europe we also call our countries "third world"; I learned in the middle school about economic development and classification by that, it was nothing to be ashamed of. Even today being in EU we are considered second class citizens, not a problem with me.

Uhm, whut?

Doesn't make sense. The second world countries wouldn't drop the third world when realigning to first world.

First world: NATO aligned. Second world: Warsawa pact aligned. Third world: Non-aligned.

Sweden and Swtizerland are traditional third world countries.

Grew up in a third world country (middle east)

That is the official terminology used in school books required by the official curriculum.

It's an outdated term. I recommend reading Hans Rosling's book Factfulness where he addresses a lot of common misconceptions. If anything, it's fun to take the tests and compare where you are against the rest of the world.

It’s colloquially used to mean economically underdeveloped/developing countries. However recently economists have begun using the term “emerging markets”.

Anything working with (downloading) massive datasets would 'work' slower, but as fast as possible (provided the supplier can keep up too) is better?

Add in a requirement/desire for it being real-time (or equivalently (you'd get further and further behind) continual) and it could be necessary if large (per second) enough.

This. In a developing country, zero internet/mobile to email/mobile SMS has a huge economic impact for farmers who want to check prices in local market. Scale up to 1Mbit via 3/4G, the economic impact is equally enormous for a variety of reasons.

> Being from a third world country, I completely agree with you on how technological investment can change lives.

Being from a soon north korea 2.0 to be (russia,) I can say it was my surprise to see Internet being so bad across the developed countries when I was travelling in the previous decade. Canada - ridiculously expensive traffic, Germany - no comments, UK - sometimes good, sometimes 128kbps DSL, USA - 20mbps DocSis everywhere

India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, China, much of Africa had FTTH as the dominant way of home Internet connection for a while.

A lot of it is down to those countries being early adopters of telecom infrastructure. It meant when a lot of other countries were wiring up internet for the first time, they weren’t faced with the prospect of having to piggyback existing and aged infrastructure. eg in some cases they could leapfrog copper almost entirely and jump straight to fibre.

>in some cases they could leapfrog copper almost entirely and jump straight to fibre.

I visited Nepal several years back. They were going straight to wireless. All of the villages in the mountains had a solar panel on their roof that they used to charge their cellphones and there was a cell tower on the ridges.

It was surreal to see villagers use Facebook but have no road access to the main city.

"Moving bits, not atoms" :-). Have you had a look at India's progress in FinTech / Telecom ?

Politicians in "old world" countries explicitly decided to stick to existing copper infrastructure instead of rolling out something better. These countries like to pretend corruption isn't an issue for them, but then you have asinine decisions like this.

In Canada it is down to our telecom oligopoly, which our government protects by (a) refusing foreign competition and (b) installing industry heads to run the consumer protection regulator, i.e. allowing the oligopoly to capture the regulatory body.

In actual fact, our telcos were heavily subsidized during their formative years, granting them a monopoly, rights of way, and helping to pay for their infrastructure. In return for a guaranteed profit margin, we had extreme control over their pricing structure and guarantees of service quality and coverage.

Then we allowed them to be privatized and deregulated, in exchange for which we get fucked. Which is, as far as I’ve ever been able to tell, the inevitable outcome of converting public services to private.

Govt created monopolies are bad whether they are public or private. Private is worse because money is removed as profit, not just reinvested.

Privatisation is good if competition is fostered at the same time. For example by opening existing physical infrastructure to multiple service providers.

Where I live we had (historically) one fixed lined govt provider. When mobile arrived we got 3 private providers. With fibre we got multiple hardware installers (ie multiple companies digging fibre) and then dozens of ISPs running on that.

So far, so good.

This one and the plain difference in the size.

It is easier to upgrade everything in some Blatic states than in some US cities.

Yeam, but there is also masive difference in wealth. And then you can't use size as enxcuse in a comparison with India

As a German I weep and cry. 25Gbit/s seems so so far off. And I live in a major city. I only get 150Mbit VDSL at the moment. I have no cable connection so one of these to get the theoretical 1Gbit/s download is out of the question.

The maximum speed available at my London address is 35 mbps download and 5.5 mbps upload. It hasn't changed in the seven years I've been living here. The best mobile connection I get is two bars of 3G unless it rains.

My previous address was stuck at 8 mbps dowload and 0.25 mbps upload and it will not be upgraded anytime soon because every corner of that street is listed / protected. I literally moved just because of that. Not I won't rent anything without fiber.

We are still creating newbuilds in cities without fiber. In other news, someone fucked up construction and left an entire complex of brand new apartment blocks with 7 mbps internet

https://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2017/03/mistake-leaves...

Oh boy I feel for you. Is it because of the house/street or a general issue in London?

I have 1gbps fibre in central London and generally see >750mbps in real link speed, 900 on a good day.

At my previous flat 150mbps was the fastest available. So it varies a lot in London on where exactly you are.

Are you with hyperoptic or community fibre? I’m with the former and see speeds around what you’re saying. I think CF are rolling out 3gbps connections in my area though.

It's not typical for London. Not that extreme anyway. I think our postcode is among 2% or 3% left without a fiber connection. Many others have 100 mbps or so (I try not to look what they really get :)

wow. that's ridiculous

Gigabit internet is quite widely available through different cable providers in Germany nowadays. Also the country side seems to be moving up, the very rural place where I grew up (and where my mom still lives) had a max of 2Mbps DSL for the last 20(!) years and now the whole area is being upgraded to fibre and will enjoy 10/1Gbps by the end of the year!

I moved into a newly build house in 2014 and was shocked to learn that all the houses only had basic copper telephone lines and Sat-TV. The whole field was empty and they had to do the groundwork for the copper cables anyway. I was shocked when the Telekom person, who connected my then 16MBit/s ADSL contract I had to move with, told me that the next TAL (connection point; Teilnehmer Anschluss Leitung, I don’t know the correct English term) was 5km out and that I will only able to receive 10MBit/s max. Netflix HD was blurry and browsing while streaming impossible. I hear news that it gets better and that rural places finally get faster speeds but as long as I live where I live now I’m bound to VDSL or find enough neighbors who would be willing to ship in to get a Fibre connection.

What a pain in the arse!

Just fyi as I know you aren’t a native speaker, it’s ‘chip in’, if you were native I’d assume a typo, probably is for you too, but it’s a phrase easy to mishear and when I was learning a second language I appreciated these corrections.

Argh yes I’m not a native speaker but in this case it was a typo ;) Thanks

The drawback is that cable it is a shared medium, so it can be quite bad when demand is high (in the evening) and the upload bandwidth usually is very low.

Lived in Germany for 5 years and cable internet was generally terrible. We had 200/20MBit. But the actual upstream would often be 1MBit. Downstream was better but at many times not great. There would also be regular outages, that would take hours to solve. The only alternative was VDSL with a maximum downstream of 50MBit.

We moved back to NL and have 1GBit fiber, and there has been a short outage once in three years. I know that there are a still a lot of addresses without fiber, but when I last checked the stats, about 50% of the addresses has the possibility to get a fiber subscription. Heck, even my parents who live in a small rural town have fiber.

The whole thing is quite a bit easier in a small country like NL though.

Yeah the classic argument, but at some point every internet connection becomes a shared medium. It really depends on how the network is setup and where the fibre backhauls start. If the building has older wiring which can only support 1Gbps and you have a bunch of high bandwidth users, then yes it can affect your bandwidth more than using other technologies.

Interesting. In populous areas of the US they use HFC so the cable to your house only services a few buildings, with the neighborhood having a fiber optic back-haul that is shared, but much faster

We have similar situation in Poland. I live in rural area, but quite close to bigger city and enjoy 1Gbps for the last 4 or 5 years.

I wonder how the upgrade might look considering that 10Gbps hardware is quite expensive (and house cabling might need upgrading) and 2.5Gbps/5Gbps is quite new and hard to find router or laptop dock/hub supporting it.

Still quite expensive though, especially compared to almost every other country out there. It's insanity.

Same as banking. Inventors and early adopters get stuck with "works well enough" old systems and all their deficiencies and limitations. Late newcomers roll out newest and greatest solutions.

Please do tell us about your work!

I'm guessing the work involves a web-crawler.

Many interesting things happen at the limit of what’s currently possible. That’s why extreme efficiency of computer hardware and software will always be important.

What exactly did you do on 10gb that couldn’t be accomplished on 1gb?

Also the fact that it would be cheaper for the people who need this tech to just rent out a VPS in a datacenter than to roll out 10gbps to every single person on the extremely rare chance someone needs it.

What did you do with 10Gb that you could not have done with 1Gb or 300Mbit?

These are the comments which should reach politicians.

Firstly … 25Gbit symmetrical … WOW.

Secondly - as a person living my whole life in IT - both passion and professionally - I have no idea what would 25Gbit be good for. I’m currently paying about $80 for symmetrical 1Gbit fiber and have the option to upgrade to 5Gbit for about $180 but it seems so pointless.

Here is the reasoning behind my grumpy opinion:

1. Living in a home with Cat5 throughout so the best I can do is to route 1Gbit. Running cables in multilevel (American) homes is a major PITA.

2. My Wi-Fi (802.11ax) is heavily affected by homes around me so only one AP can run with 80MHz channel width and the rest is 20-40MHz. Throughput ends up being somewhere between 150Mbit-500Mbit, depending on where you are.

3. I have a few smaller servers running ..stuff. The trouble is not about server performance or bandwidth.. it’s about reliability. Running any business on consumer line (in the USA) is just signing up for trouble. (Eg. “Is your line down because your modem received a fault firmware? No worries, the tech is going to be there within next 4 days to check your cables…”).

4. Things like game downloads on PS5 .. yes, they are amazingly fast (even on 1Gbit. They install faster from internet than from the built-in BD-ROM). But many games need to also “install” (whatever that means on PS5) and that takes 2x the time of download anyway. I can live with that once a month.

5. Big fan of streaming services, however many providers limit bitrate on their side so I am still watching the sometimes blurry 4k …

Back to original question and with genuine curiosity - what is 25Gbit for???

> Living in a home with Cat5 throughout so the best I can do is to route 1Gbit.

Having your uplink faster than all your individual ports in a network helps prevent any one port from being able to saturate your network.

I work at an ISP that within the last year started selling 10Gbit symmetric, and we all sorta know there's not a huge use for it - yet. It's not really an issue for use to justify though, we don't charge any extra for it, it's all $40/mo and if you're in a new area we're building you get 10Gbit instead of the old 1Gbit at that price.

Slightly off topic, but have you heard of Utopia? They’re a municipality in Utah. They run the fiber for a flat fee to customers and let any ISPs sell on it. Currently ~10-15 ISPs. Your guys pricing would absolutely stomp these ISPs. Have y’all considered jumping on these kinds of opportunities? No need to run cable and can just start accessing 100k+ Utah customers. Ripe for disruption.

I know nothing about your story, but based on what you said it sounds like it’s optimized already and the line-use fees+admin overhead pretty much explains why no one can offer better pricing. Again I know only what you wrote here, but that’s my uninformed opinion.

I’m not sure. The ISPs are charging $150+ for 10G plus you pay Utopia network $30/mo for the fiber line. So $180/mo total for the cheapest ISP.

Sure, but the ISP has to pay for transit, too. You aren’t going to be able to get settlement free peering as an ISP like that.

I don’t have a ton of knowledge in this area and am probably missing some things. But, I figured if they’re already able to offer 10G for $40/mo when they have to run their own physical infra on top of the peering and data center costs then they should be able to do it at a higher margin without. That higher margin could be a boon for them towards building their own infra in their current service area as well.

If they kept the same price then the total cost to the end user would be ~$70 for 10G. Which is less than half of the cheapest option available.

Transit costs aren't always the same in all locations

That’s nice!! $40/mo? That does not sound like US price.

It is. Sonic in northern California. More places soon, but scaling out physical infrastructure build has its own learning curve and often larger lead times. :)

Just got hooked up in Oakland and loving it! Paying $70 less per month vs Comcast

I was in Dogtown a year ago, but Sonic was just reselling AT&T to our address :(

Still very worthwhile to not have to talk to a Telco, but I had to rent + use AT&Ts garbage router because it did some proprietary negotiation step (With the ONT? There was a blog post where someone reverse engineered what was happening).

Now I'm in a smaller city and Sonic claims they have plans for us some day. For the time being, it's the Comcast nightmare.

Edit: and AT&T fiber was asymmetrical. Disappoint.

I'm in the same boat. I work there and can only get the resold AT&T service because my neighborhood was built pre-wired for only Comcast and AT&T, making it hard to service.

Still, like you noted, not having to deal with AT&T is a great selling point to a lot of people, and we're known for good support, so I'd like to think we're providing as good a service as those people can get until we build out our network in their area.

We have aggressive plans for the future, so I hope we're in your area sooner than later. :)

Same. About six months ago I started see Sonic trucks all over the neighborhood, five or six at a time covering multiple blocks. I asked if they were installing Fiber and was told no. Not much later, a sales rep knocked on my door. I said yes to the service before he could even greet me. It's been great.

Please come to the Peninsula (with fiber, Millbrae). Tired of my only options being Comcast or VDSL at max 20mbps :/

I'm not sure the exact areas we're building and planning, but it's possible we're coming soon. As I understand it we hit most of the low hanging fruit in the bay area already (above ground infra, aka poles), so we're trying to use advancements in trenching and hitting some slightly less dense areas than we previously targeted to be able to serve new areas at the price point we've set.

Dang! Good for you guys!! I’m in TX and ATT+Frontier have a firm grab on the infrastructure here. Charter is trying but still cannot compete with symmetric fiber.

I'm not sure, but I get the feeling that independent ISPs are having a bit of a resurgence, so maybe you'll be lucky and someone will look to serve your area. Or you can try it yourself. :)

I imagine it's easier now than it used to be to find some areas with good beauty and above ground infra (poles) that have space, and make a business plan and point at others that are doing it successfully as justification.

Or maybe we'll be there in a few years. At the rate we want to expand it's not impossible. :)

There's a 10 Gbit cable going in on my street for $60/month in Florida. Some interesting things happening in internet infrastructure these days.

I would love for this to happen on my street in Florida...

I think it's way too rural at this point however, given that I am technically in unincorporated area.

What street? Are schools any good?

What isp are you referencing?

I can get 6 Mbps for $40 here. Good stuff.

Lol and I’m sorry. I’d almost rather go with starlink at that point.

That's what I pay for 10Gb in the US. I think I'm a customer of the ISP the GP is referring to.

Getting 10G symmetrical May 1. I won't be able to use it all, though. Using a router that has a 10G port, but the stuff it does with packets means there's a limit I've heard of around 3G, but we'll see. Speed test is the first thing I'll be done once it's installed.

EDIT: USA, CA here. sonic.net. $40/mo with 3 free months. They'll pay up to $200 termination charges. Not affiliated with them.

My understanding is that cat-5e, for short runs (45m) you'd find in a house, can do 10gig. I'm still running 6a for all my new runs, but probably didn't need to.

And there’s a good chance that 404mm’s cat5 would pass as cat5e.

On point #1, you can probably do 10Gbps (assuming it's actually Cat5e), as long as it's under 50m or so. If it's just a run inside your house, it's likely well within range.

Yep, you beat me to this comment. I ran cat 5e through my house in 2009 and didn't bother with cat 6 because no cable runs would be that long. I assumed there would be 10Gb consumer switches by now, but I haven't seen any yet.

There are consumer 10gbit switches now, though they are on the pricy side at around $400. I bought 3 of them for our datacenter and 2 of them broke within 2 years, so I definitely regret buying consumer grade for our operations but professional gear was ridiculously expensive then. Upgraded to ubiquity now, hopefully it's more reliable, though I guess it's on the prosumer side if you ask your average net admin.

Well, when I say consumer, I mean unmanaged and less than $100 for 4-8 ports. I assumed that when gigabit over UTP was formalized in 1999, I wouldn't have to wait a quarter century to upgrade, but here we are. And to be fair, gigabit still basically does what I need.

The power usage on 10GB copper is nuts so most of the cheapest switches come with SPF cages.

I'm guessing it's less than the one or two dozen 60 watt bulbs I used to use to light my house. But yes, I've heard this for a long time - at my work we used twinax or fiber often for top of rack switching and that's one of the reasons I was told. Not sure if twinax is much less power intensive, but I do have a buddy who's using regular old coax in his house (moca or something like that) as a multi-gig backbone (still less than 10G) now and he likes it. Nowadays that I have more money, I would have run fiber alongside the cat 5/6 cable to future proof things, but I'm told terminating fiber is a technical challenge. I guess there's no free or even cheap lunch for 10G yet.

What I've heard is that 10Gb over copper struggles with heat and power consumption, though it is technically possible.

Yes, it’s 5E. I thought that cat5e maxes out at 2.5GBit. Honestly, none of my devices would benefit from 2.5Gbit in a significantly way. I run some cloud backups in the night and it’s ok if it takes extra 5 minutes.

You can try, depending on length 10Gbit are achievable.

I've been able to get 10G over a shoddy 100ft cat5e run. Give it a shot! It's fun!

Nope, it does not work at 10 Gbps; just 5Gbps for short runs (30m) and 2.5Gbps for 100m. I never tried for very short runs (1-5m), but it does not work for 50m at 10 Gbps.

> Back to original question and with genuine curiosity - what is 25Gbit for???

From a switch perspective, it makes more sense to carve out 4x 25G ports vs 4x 10G ports if you have 100G switches. In a single rack unit you can fit ~32 100G ports, which can then be broken out to 128x 25G ports. That’s more port density than a 1U 48 port 25 switch/line card.

I live in New Zealand, 1Gb uncapped fibre is available in most urban areas at reasonable cost (sub $100/month) - I keep getting feelers from the fibre company to upgrade (to 2/4Gb) and I honestly can't imagine why I'd bother - I work at home (have for 20 years) but I seldom find myself waiting for the net, we don't have a problem when everyone's streaming .... and I'd have to upgrade ALL the household infrastructure - routers/wiring .... and we'd still be limited by wifi speeds (which is what everyone outside my office uses).

I used to design 2D graphics accelerators, one thing we learned was that perceived performance is not linear, in reality there was a performance region where people would always crave more, and another where things were fast enough and people were happy but wouldn't open their wallets for massive increases .... at that point 10x seemed more like 1.5x) - I suspect that something similar applies to home net performance too

The only purpose of 25 Gbit/s at home that I can genuinely see is "because I can".

Going above 1 Gbit/s can have (very limited) practical sense because you can hit that with e.g. Steam downloads, changing a 5 minute wait into a 3 minute wait. You can also basically stop caring about QoS on your uplink once you're at 1 Gbit/s with one human user, or anywhere past 1 Gbps with more than one human user.

For running cables, seriously consider fiber. The hardware isn't as expensive as it used to be, and it solves a lot of problems: You can (based on common sense, not sure of your building code) stick fiber in power conduits since its non conductive, you don't have to worry about potential differences etc., it's thinner (easier to hide/more wife-compatible) and once in place, you will be able to use the same fiber for higher speeds just by swapping the SFP's at the ends.

Yeah, Steam takes much longer "preallocating space" than actually downloading everything for me, so a faster line does not help much there.

>$80 for symmetrical 1Gbit fiber and have

Init7:

1/1 Gbit/sec CHF 64.75

25/25 Gbit/sec CHF 64.75

It's the same price if available.

Have you tried >1GbE Over your cat5? I’ve done 10GbE over short runs (100-150ft), and 5GbE or 2.5 should work over longer runs…

Wifi6E is around the corner for >1GbE wifi.

I have a feeling that infrastructural upgrades like these will be instrumental in taking spatial computing and entertainment to the cloud. Currently VR applications live in your headset / computer, but no reason why they have to. Of course, that's not its immediate use, rather a use case that might be triggered / enabled due to this move.

In my opinion, 5gbit would be an useful upgrade (probably not worth that amount of money). In practice 1gbit is normally the limit of downloading in my experience. However, with multiple devices doing updates, downloads, streams actually having 5gbit and limiting each device to 1gbit ensures a high speed all time. Especially with roommates/family.

I recently put some fiber (AOC, to be precise) in a multilevel European building - brick and concrete. It was not trivial, but not a PITA.

25Gbps is for multiple transfers from multiple sites to multiple computers. For example I transfer large files for work (up to 100 GB) from multiple sources and it takes a long time and consumes all the bandwidth in the building. If I download at lower priority (implement some QoS) then it takes even longer. I can see 25 Gbps eliminate the bottleneck and allow everyone in the building to have their regular use (video conferences, movie streaming, gaming, whatever) without me impacting. I would never use more than 1% of that bandwidth on average, but I would peak more than 1 Gbps quite often. Yes, 10 Gbps would be more than enough, but if the cost is the same then 25 Gbps seems more future-proof, at a cost (SFP28 equipment is much more expensive than SFP+).

25 users of 1Gbps service? Obviously, a simplification, but something along those lines is how they tend to be advertised

My initial grumpy reaction was the same. Then again a quarter century ago I probably would have thought: “Would I ever really need more than 56k? Takes only a few minutes to download all of Les Misérables during which I could read maybe 4 or 5 pages.”

Answering for myself, backups. My SO and I both WFH. We generate a lot of data, personally and professionally. Most of that backs up to a local server, which then backs up to two off-sites. That server also backs itself up (plex, etc.).

I have to schedule it all to run at night because it will saturate the network during the day otherwise.

I have 1Gb/40Mb @ $100 internet for reference.

Cat5 can be capable of multi-gigabit over runs less than a couple hundred feet. Don’t count yourself out yet.

> Back to original question and with genuine curiosity - what is 25Gbit for???

What a pointless question. I wish people would stop worrying about this instead of simply making it possible, so we can figure out what to do with it.

… but that’s what I’m asking. What can I do with it? As I mentioned above, I have 1Gig and can go up to 5Gig. What can I do with it??

Maybe you can't, but somebody will find a use for it. Everybody should have access to it and I'm tired of the excuses made for not improving this infrastructure "but nobody needs it!!!!".

I have friends who do video editing, work from home. They're throwing around 300 GiB files regularly and for them 5Gbit would be a godsend.

You can start a company, as a private person, and expect everything to work when you run it from home. Just as if you were to run it from anywhere else.

I suspect the metaverse will be a bandwith hog. This matters where you centralize or distribute the world model; ditto for the rendering.

What about 8K, 16K, etc video streaming? Not much content today but I expect them to become mainstream eventually.

On behalf of all tech-minded Americans, I would like to say... I hate you.

I just got a notice in the mail that my ISP is "upgrading" their network so now I can pay $200 USD/month to get a whopping 2gbps, which I actually thought was pretty amazing until I read your post. So, thanks.

In all seriousness, congrats! You made a good case for why one would need that much bandwidth. Also, we need to catch up here. :)

I'm in a rural city in Thailand, fiber 2Gbps is $50 / mo. And this is just for normie. Like unimpressive.

I'm in a top 10 most expensive city in the world (Canada) and the best I can get for $50 is 80 Mbps (and even that is only available as a promotion that you can't get by simply going to the ISP's website and buying a plan).

I'm in Vancouver and paying about 55 CAD plus taxes for 300Mbps. So it's possible to get a bit more for similar money. The downside of that is however those are not available as regular offers, and you constantly have to deal with ISPs and rention programs to keep the price down. Even had various events where the ISP randomly increased the price inside one month, until I gave them a call and ask to fix it again.

This price randomness never occured to me in germany, and just booking a fixed low price on a website was so much more convenient.

I live in Germany. Enjoying 10 Mbit/s downstrean and 1 Mbit/s upstream. For 30 Euros per month. 80 would be like heaven for me.

Well, elsewhere in Germany you can get 2.5GBit/s fiber...

Berlin?

Not yet i think.

I'm in Vancouver, BC and paying 80$/mo for 1Gbps symmetric. I could get 2.5Gbps but it would be about twice the cost - and I would have to get something that can do 2.5G link speed on an SFP+, not many devices can.

I'm in the suburbs of the most expensive city in the world and I get 1gbps for $70 CAD

$50 gets me 2Mb ADSL here in the city centre of Glasgow. Your lucky.

I’m within 2km of Parliament and can’t get fibre. It’s disgusting.

In Winnipeg, Canada, I get 500Mbps up/down for 75$.

I've looked at the smaller ISPs in my area and they're terrible as far as pricing goes. Both the "major" options are still using Rogers' last-mile infrastructure, they offer poorer customer service (because of the previous point), charge the same or more money for the same level of service and offer no real incentive to switch. Having talked to some techs at TekSavvy, none of the smaller ISPs can offer anything interesting like synchronous speeds over coax/DOCSIS because they have little/no control over how the last-mile infrastructure is run. For that same reason they can't offer anything faster than 1G down either. It all feels like smoke and mirrors, and the CRTC seems to have a vested interest in keeping internet prices sky-high.

Yeah the last mile stuff is still owned by the majors, but at least the choice exists.

As much as Canadian telecom seems to own the CRTC it isn’t nearly as consumer unfriendly as when I lived in the US.

I had an apartment in downtown Seattle which had 2 choices for internet. Many of my friends were quite impressed since most addresses are only served by one ISP.

How is your internet provisioned? Is the no-name ISP building their own infrastructure or are they using the network of a larger one?

In Canada the infrastructure owners are required to give access to small providers at a regulated price.

So my internet is provided by Lightspeed on Shaw cable.

I use a local provider in NYC, and I used one in Seattle. I think both of them had some kind of point to point connection on the roof.

i signed up with one of the small ISPs in rural Canada. month after, they were bought by Rogers... :-(

Is this Toronto?

I'm Swiss and had Init7.

Moved to Thailand (BKK) in 2016 and was so disappointed by a very new condominium in the center, which didn't even allowed for FTTH lines.

Real Estate Developers usually make contracts within their Condos, to force the whole building to use only one provider.

How affordable is $50 in rural Thailand compared to the USA?

The US has around ~10-12 times the disposable median income of Thailand (2019 figures), and ~10 times the GDP per capita of Thailand (2022 IMF estimates).

It's like a typical consumer in the US spending $500+ per month for broadband. Even worse if you consider the rural income factor. Absolutely insane.

For a fraction of that you can get 1gbps from Comcast and you'll never utilize most of it in 99% of consumer situations.

I'm in a small quasi rural 'city' in the US, hours away from any consequential city, and I can get 1.2gbps from Comcast for 15-20% of the income adjusted rate in question referenced for Thailand.

It seems common to forget how astoundingly high US median income, disposable income, and GDP per capita figures are compared to the rest of the world. The latest 2022 estimates are pegging US GDP per capita at nearly double that of France and Japan. To match up on median disposable income figures, you have to use hyper affluent countries like Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland and Norway as references. Then people come on HN and proclaim how they're paying only $20 per month for Internet access, in a country with 1/10-1/5 the median disposable income of the US. The US is more expensive than it should be for Internet access (better telecom competition would go a long ways toward fixing that), however the reality is US income figures are also a lot higher than most of the developed world.

That’s not a reasonable comparison for Thailand food prices as food isn’t disposable income. World bank says GDP per capita PPP was 18,232$ in 2020 down from 19,233$ in 2019. Of course that’s not evenly distributed, but rural vs urban incomes mean costs are higher in cities than median income suggests. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...

Where your number comes into play is for people pricing Netflix subscriptions.

GDP PPP per capita is an extraordinarily low quality metric.

You end up with absurd examples where Botswana is comparable to China; Russia is comparable to Greece; Puerto Rico is comparable to Spain, ahead of Portugal, and just a bit lower than Japan; Kazakhstan is just a bit behind Latvia and Slovakia; Taiwan is far ahead of Finland, France, UK, New Zealand.

It’s just a question of what you’re trying to use these numbers for.

Imputed rent for example is one of those things that’s kind of silly on the face of it but makes various comparisons more reasonable. On the other hand it can also imply a great deal of economic activity that isn’t actually happening.

PPP is the same sort of calculation. If rents crash because a great deal of housing was built it can make GDP comparisons kind of meaningless. The country has more tangible wealth, people are better off, yet GDP falls. That’s not what you want the number to represent.

Both Nominal and PPP are out of whack if you are looking to learn about conditions on the ground. GDP measures the production of a certain country (and it's a very bad metric at that). Some countries are wealthy because its people make money from foreign sources. This is usually displayed by a high and chronic trade deficit.

That means you can have two countries with comparable GDP per-capita, where one of them have a more affluent population and able to pay higher prices.

I’m just wondering how good of a measure it is comparing the median incomes of different countries. If a there is a country A with 10x median income of some other country B , then the people of country A are really 10x more affluent than that of country B? especially if they pay 10x for everything?

In my home in downtown Chicago I have two wired options. 1.5Mbps for $60/month from AT&T, or $71,000 install plus $800 a month for 2Gbps from Comcast.

I went with 5G from T-Mobile for $50 a month.

$50 is about 1 week of 3 meals consumption per day (lower middle class)

So a bit under $2.50/meal. That’s very comparable to lower/lower-middle in the USA.

In capital city, I'd say it's about $4-5/meal (including drink) in daily basis. For those who eat lots of things, $7/meal makes them full.

---

footnote here: official income record of thai people/businesses does not really reflect reality. Lots of entities are kind of off-system.

Where do you spend 120 baht a meal? That's a restaurant meal, not the average meal. I don't spend more than 60 baht in Bangkok. At $7 (250 baht) you're talking about a night out (maybe except alcohol), way off of the "average meal".

I worked in BKK since 2016 and office staff usually goes to the cheapo restaurants (which I frequented too), so 40-80 baht is completely common also for white collar workers. But meat, vegetable and oil quality is really shady in that price range.

I prefer to order grab of around 120-200 baht from a "healthy" place or going for restaurants within Central 200-400 baht per meal.

(including drink) .. if you eat rice something with water everyday, it's quite a tight lifestyle.

I love the tightest lifestyle eating rice and 1-2 side dishes from street vendors who deserve the money rather than foreign investors to extract money from the economy like leeches.

$2.50/meal prepared outside, not from ingredients like in the US. You can easily get a meal for 40 baht across Thailand ($1.20)

The funny thing about rice with something, most of the time you want to add an fried egg too (more likely like + 10 bath charge). Crispy Pork is about 10 bath more expensive than the other. I think 40 bath is like 5 years ago pricing. You can still get it somewhere. 50-60 bath is more standard now.

Where did you get that number?

A decade of data set from my experience and network. Not from govt.

But is that within the city / country, or to outside the country, too? International bandwidth can be completely mediocre compared to local bandwidth. What I do is change the Server in speedtest.net to one in New York / wherever I have business in and test it out (from Hong Kong).

I work remotely with american friends for years, video meeting has always been smooth (I never test traceroute though)

I live in a metro area in the US and thousands of homes in my community do not have land-based broadband options. The US incumbents have totally failed and it isn't because there's a lot of desert in the West and Alaska. I'm sick of this argument which doesn't explain why city dwellers in most places in America have the worst internet in the developed world.

I live in the middle of nowhere USA. I'm about 1,000 feet off the road (that only random farms are on, about 20 miles from the small city we're near).

My local ISP trenched fiber to my house for free and provides gig internet for $80/month.

The funny thing is my previous house was in town and I had to settle for 100Mbit for the same price. ISPs are all sorts of messed up.

It’s all about what it costs to upgrade - if a rural ISP has to upgrade copper infrastructure for whatever reason they’ll fiber it.

In the city it’s often just as easy to let what is working continue “working” - a major rollout takes a lot of money.

Yep engineering the new network, pulling permits, hiring the contractor, buying new equipment/lines all cost $$$$$$

Yup, I live in San Francisco proper, and my only choice is Comcast cable. Looks like the current promo pricing for 1200Mbps is around $70/mo, but I can't quickly find what the normal price is. And I assume the uplink is something abysmal like 25Mbps.

(I'm on Comcast's Business service, $250/mo for 1000/35 [long dumb story why]. Most of the time I see under 600 down when checking on speed test sites, and real-world speeds downloading large files rarely exceeds 250. I expect real-world speeds on the non-business service are even worse.)

It's pretty embarrassing that this is the state of things.

Most of San Francisco can be served by Wave (cable). Sonic also has a large presence in San Francisco as well.

Over in Oakland I am paying $40/mo to Sonic for 10Gbps (though I only have equipment to route at 1Gbps at the moment)

I'm also in SF Bay Area and I just had 3 Gbps symmetric fiber installed by Comcast. This is their $299/mo "Gigabit Pro" option. I posted about it on Reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Comcast_Xfinity/comments/tkmv9y/upd...

There's a benchmark posted there showing that the speed is really as advertised.

I live in a not-very-metro area in the usa and get gigabit fiber for $65/mo.

I'm in Jersey City and have fios, 1gbit for $70 a month

Let's consider Gross National Product of each county adjusted for population size:

gnpUSD = {'USA': 21,650,000,000,000, 'THA': 491,910,000,000} #4th quarter 2021

pop = {'USA': 329,000,000, 'THA': 70,000,000} #as of 2021

gnp['USA'] // pop['USA'] 65805

gnp['THA'] // pop['THA'] 7027

Seems more like a distribution of resources issue... so why not jack up taxes on the wealthiest 1% and use it to pay for things like high-speed fiber in all the rural areas? Doubtless this would lead to economic growth?

It isn’t a ‘tax the 1%’ issue, it’s a corruption and market capture issue in the US that we refuse to acknowledge.

Throwing more money at it usually makes that kind of problem WORSE not better.

FDR's Rural Electricity Cooperatives did a lot to electrify much of the midwest and rural south, along with the creation of the TVA. I doubt anyone would want to rely on the current major providers, Comcast etc., who have such a bad track record, to accomplish this. Municipal broadband sounds like a better option:

> "The Rural Electrification Act of 1936, enacted on May 20, 1936, provided federal loans for the installation of electrical distribution systems to serve isolated rural areas of the United States. The funding was channeled through cooperative electric power companies, hundreds of which still exist today. (wiki)"

There are fair few places in the US where the local power company also owns a fiber network and provides (relatively speaking) super cheap gigabit or multi-gigabit internet service

However there are just as many places where the state's government was bought off to ban such networks because the majors are afraid of actual competition.

Don’t forget the existing providers have already received massive funds to ‘improve rural broadband’ in the same vein as that act. Hundred of billions of dollars if I remember correctly.

It’s mostly been ineffective.

I know. It's several factors, density, history of infra of telecom companies etc.

Sheer size isn't what you should compare. Population density is much more relevant. Granted, Thailand still comes out ahead, but by far less than your size comparison (33.6/km^2 vs 132/km^2)

Reading this thread, I am reminded of how cheap telco prices are in France: e.g. in 2020, fibre internet plans averaged between €26 and €28.35 (USD 28-30 at current rates) per month.[0]

Mobile plans are also on the cheap side, to the point of being competitive with many third world countries (for example, I wasn't that impressed with prices in Thailand in 2020 for comparable plans, only a 1-2€ difference with what I had at home).

This is getting to the point that I find myself often suggesting fellows from border countries open a line in France, just so that they can enjoy the "European roaming data envelope" that comes with most plans (i.e. several gigabytes are free to use from anywhere in Europe, and you can make calls and texts to other EU countries when abroad...) after realizing how expensive and suckish mobile plans are in their country (Belgium in this instance).

[0] https://www.connexionfrance.com/article/French-news/Best-and...

> enjoy the "European roaming data envelope"

Which provider would you recommend? I remember taking a look a while back and the most viable option was Free, but 15.99 EUR a month for when I need roaming 3–4 times a year seemed a bit excessive at 180.- per year.

For your specific use case, I'd say give Lebara mobile a shot.[0]

SIM card is free, you can top it up with a prepaid amount or do a one-month plan without renewing it, and I just checked their T&Cs relating to roaming and they are actually quite generous[1][2].

Besides, their website is (for the most part) translated in English due to their target demographic, so no need for full French fluency here!

Some good info in English on the French telco landscape can be found at [3].

[0] https://mobile.lebara.com/fr/en/

[1] https://mobile.lebara.com/fr/en/international-call-rates

[2] https://mobile.lebara.com/fr/en/terms-and-conditions#section...: See section 2.4.2 (in French unfortunately)

[3] https://en.selectra.info/broadband-phone-france/guides/mobil...

Edit: missing word

I'll nention it for completeness sake: another possible solution, albeit a bit cumbersome, would be to get a regular contract-free plan but suspend it for the period you don't need it.

A cursory search indicates that both Orange and Bouygues (as well as their contract-free offshoots, Sosh and B&YOU respectively) still offer this as a paid option at 5€ and 7€ per month respectively.

This means you could get the plan appropriate for your needs, then suspend it (for at most 6 month per year it seems) and only reactivate it when you need it.

However since this procedure requires getting in touch with customer service, it should be reserved for people well versed in French :-)

Edit: adding links (all in French)

https://www.echosdunet.net/dossiers/suspendre-ligne#suspensi...

https://assistance.sosh.fr/faq/308268

https://www.assistance.bouyguestelecom.fr/s/article/suspensi...

Thanks. France really does have insanely good mobile plans!

You need a French address though.

I was under the impression that they only requested an ID and a mean of payment, but after verification you are right, a proof of residency is also required for postpaid plans.

If you know someone in France, you may ask them to make a "solemn declaration" that you live at their address; then you only need provide their own proof of residency (people living with their parents routinely do so).

Tourist and prepaid SIM cards are still exempted and, depending on your case, can prove quite interesting.

In a large French city with 10gb/s fibre connection at 50 euros à month (internet, TV, fixed line phone). More than enough for two people working from home + family.

There are other ISPs in the states that are much more competitive (I work at one). Unfortunately, if you're not in a fairly dense area, the chances they can deliver to you is minimal, since building your own network is expensive.

For example, we offer $40 service, and if you're in our historical areas that's 1Gbit symmetrical, and if you're in newer areas we've turned up in the last year that's 10Gbit symmetrical.

We're expanding (as I expect most ISPs that can undercut the major players that much are), but it requires actually stringing fiber through neighborhoods on poles, so it takes a while (but that can be scaled...).

If you don't have telephone poles, it's much harder/more expensive to build out an area, so often those are skipped (at least initially) as areas cheaper to deliver to are prioritized. The is unfortunately a lot of new development, as they'll build neighborhood with underground utilities and pre-wire AT&T and Comcast, making it hard for others to deliver to the area without a lot of cost and work (trenching).

I have a sometimes 12mbit connection, but there's a Fiber POP about 1 mile down the road. There are phone poles (with fiber on them) between here and there. What does it cost to string fiber on poles, and what are the hopes of getting right of way? Alternatively, is there some way to pay / force the telco to build out FTTH?

Some people a few miles away have a fiber POP at the end of their shared driveway, and are trying to decide if they should pay the extra couple hundred per house to go from 1GBit to 25GBit symmetric to the houses.

In the US I believe anyone can use the pole space as long as it's not taken, but I'm not an expert. I do know you have to fill out engineering documents per-pole to explain the load and propose (pay for?) fixing the load bearing attached cables.

At the ISP I work for, I believe we spec out the cabling we need to a neighborhood and then order a special bundle with breakouts at specific locations along the length to serve locations, and then string that along the poles. I'm not sure why we wouldn't serve a house with one of those, but those go back to a central point in a neighborhood, and it's possible the backhaul from the central office to that central point in the neighborhood passes houses that aren't served. Where to build is all about ease of wiring an area and housi g density. It's all about cost per houses passed. The good news is that maybe your area is slated to get fiber since it goes by there, and it's just a matter of the lower hanging fruit being picked first.

Thanks. The polls are ancient (1980's; most bow 10-20 degress under the tension of the existing tensioning cables.)

This street got sold off to a bankrupt telco (from what I can tell, their business model is to buy up unprofitable lines, then periodically file for bankruptcy).

There are a few local fiber providers. Maybe I could call and see what it would take to convince them to build out. (There is definitely demand here.)

Alternatively AT&T (who is not our local telco) keeps spamming us to get a business fiber to the home connection. They make it clear they'll ban customers that appear to be using it for residential traffic, but I think that sort of traffic discrimination falls afoul of California's network neutrality laws. Has anyone tried calling their bluff on that?

It's a lot of work, but if you survey the area and get people to sign something saying they would buy pay up to $X for gigabit fiber or better, you might be able to approach some of those independent ISPs and lay the case out, you might get them to reprioritize your area (but it may or may not cover the same area you surveyed).

Be careful approaching incumbent major ISPs or letting them know if you got the signatures though. You might find they went out and offered sweetheart deals to the same people on two year contracts, but at existing service levels...

Regarding business fiber, I think they're more trying to keep people from reselling it as a micro ISP. If you're willing to pay business costs for personal use, I don't think they'll care. If you split the cost between 10 neighbors, they might. There may be other concerns they are dealing with that I'm not thinking of though.

One thing most people ignore: the prices these days for many thing don't have a direct correlation with the cost, but with how much people are willing to pay. This is happen especially in quasi-monopoly situations, like housing and internet services.

For example I have 3 Internet connections at home that I pay ~ $30 in total, from 150 Mbps to 1 Gbps. I think the 1 Gbps is ~ $12/month, it is so cheap because there are so many options and I can afford to keep all 3 for redundancy (1 is a 4G mobile data capped at 200GB/month, it works even when there is a power failure in the entire neighborhood).

But if there is no variety of options and no competition, then price is high. From what I read, most ISP in USA are squeezing as much as they can from their clients, sometimes to ridiculous levels.

I get upgrade offers all the time.

But it doesn’t matter because it isn’t actually offered in my area / the local telco can’t even notify the right people…

I don't think they do any longer but Verizon used to send me FIOS flyers on a fairly regular basis and when I went to their site it looked as if it wasn't actually available at my address (where I get Comcast).

Also amusingly, both Comcast and Verizon have the very old (as in multiple decades) name for the street I live on as my address. It's only somewhat wrong (the name used to have a North on it)--but it is still wrong.

AT&T called me. They said their technical guys think they might be able to upgrade the connection to my building from 1.5Mbps to 3Mbps if I want to sign-up with them. I'm in downtown Chicago.

I really, really hope you told them to fuck the hell off.

The guy on the phone was so cool. He was totally "in" on how hilariously awful it was that they could only get 1.5Mbps into my building. He had access to the system that let him see all the contracts of my neighbors and what connections they had and was floored that every building next me had gigabit.

I’m a tech-minded American that pays $65 per month for a 1 Gbps up and down line that I am completely satisfied with.

Until recently I paid $35 per month for a 300 Mbps line because I couldn’t justify the jump to 1 Gbps.

Then I had to upload some local Hyper-V servers to AWS to convert them to AMIs and figured what the heck I’d upgrade the line.

I would have no interest in upgrading beyond 1 Gbps right now though. There are too many infrastructure components that need to be upgraded to attain that and I don’t have a use case for it.

On the other hand, try making 10-15k/month in europe in a regular tech job, esp. with little experience (0-3yr).

It's orders of magnitude more uncommon than doing so in the USA.

So bring all the hate :)

That’s all very well if you have a tech job. If you have a low paid job you’re utterly screwed in the US. I’d rather make less so my fellow citizens can live a decent life too.

It's hard to do, but at least I can get fired and not worry about health insurance.

I feel you.

Here in Australia: $90/month nets you “100/40mb”, which is really more like “~85mb down, 25 up but only a quiet night, if you’re next to the router, and it hasn’t rained within the last week”.

It’s much, much better than it used to be at least (depending on where you live + NBN technology choice of course). And yet still completely hamstrung by the mess the current government made of the original NBN plan.

If you live in an area that can get HFC, FTTP, FTTN etc. it’s possible these days to get a pretty consistent 1000/50 for $150/month. Those fibre services are pretty stable in my experience, definitely a million times better than the old broadband which as you put got destroyed by bad weather and distance from the exchange.

Did you mean FTTC instead of FTTN? FTTN can rarely get close to the max of 100/40 in best case scenarios.

I did indeed, thanks. Too many acronyms!

The area of Sydney I live in has HFC-based NBN offered only, and it still falls over if it rains too much.

Apparently you can pay money to have fibre routed to your house from the nearest node/etc, but I rent, so I’m not going to do that.

You can but it's EXPENSIVE. Something like $5k-20k depending on residence and technology choice you have.

If you have to be "next to the router" than it's a problem with your infrastructure, not then NBN

The point is, that even if I were to plug my computer directly into the router, I'm not getting _good_ speeds, I simply wanted to head off comments like "have you tried 5Ghz networks? Have you tried a quieter band? Have you tried x/y/z other thing?".

Brooklyn here, my building still doesn’t have fiber — I’ve complained to the city for years! I get to pay $75/month for 200Mbps down, 10 Mbps up. I’ve been told fiber is coming for almost 15 years.