FCC launches inquiry to increase minimum broadband speed [pdf]

https://docs.fcc.gov/public/attachments/DOC-398168A1.pdf

by KoftaBob • 3 years ago

409 423 3 years ago

docs.fcc.gov

Download only, yes? And what about the busy-Sunday night problem? This seems so besides the point.

Cable at an apartment building I visit is often 300mbps, but Sunday evening it can have horrible jitter and lag and much slower speeds. It's incredibly frustrating; common sites can be basically unusable.

This also feels like it's setting a bar where most DSL systems wont have any chance of competing. In cities I can be more sympathetic (put in more pops) but in rural areas, this feels like a barrier that is extremely cost prohibitive to make happen, for not great reasons.

shortcake27• 3 years ago

I usually pay for 50mbps, but I can live comfortably on 25mbps if need be (sometimes I drop my connection speed to save money). However, I have a fibre connection, where QoS is 100% 100% of the time. 25mbps is totally fine for web browsing, gaming, and streaming. The only issue is downloads, which simply take more time. I'd still rather have a rock solid 25mbps than 300mbps with jitter. Cable is garbage. Always has been, always will be.

wongarsu2• 3 years ago

With VDSL and supervectoring you can get 250MBit/s, provided you aren't more than a quarter of a mile or so from the multiplexer. Which is probably not cost-effective in most of America due to the low density of suburbia, never mind rural places.

andrewmunsell• 3 years ago

This is nice, but with increased speed, they should also require ISPs do not impose a data cap to be considered broadband.

endisneigh12• 3 years ago

Why shouldn’t there be a cap? Bandwidth isn’t free.

It’s sad seeing people on a forum called hacker news having no idea how networking infrastructure works.

entropicdrifter• 3 years ago

Because it's next to free (no additional cost to run the infrastructure we're already running) and we're nowhere near the limits of our existing infrastructure's overall bandwidth limits right now, as evidenced by the lack of caps not affecting quality of internet service for the entirety of 2020, when more people were online per hour than at any previous point in history.

ehPReth4• 3 years ago

once the infrastructure is there does each byte/gigabyte really have an intrinsic cost? isn't more about the bytes per second and not the bytes total?

kvakvs• 3 years ago

Cost of the traffic is: hardware (staggered cost covered over many months), and running costs (subscription to higher tier internet carriers, electricity, rent of the premises, salaries etc). Most of this is covered by the monthly fees, to have a profitable business one must have those costs covered as a minimum. None of the above affects how much internet data goes through, zero or maxed out capacity, cost is the same.

guhidalg2• 3 years ago

Let me throw that question back at you: why should there be a cap? You are paying ISPs for a certain bandwidth speed per month and they sure as hell are not prorating your service based on data that you did not consume. If the ISP is in capable of delivering the agreed-upon band with every minute of the whole month, then they are not meeting the SLA that you’re paying them for.

Zigurd3• 3 years ago

Bits that go unused have no value. Caps on numbers of bits in a billing cycle don't make sense. While it isn't exactly pure artificial scarcity, it's darn close. A retail ISP already has to have some fair share mechanisms for peak use times. That leaves very very little usefulness in monthly caps.

musha68k5• 3 years ago

Peering agreements at internet exchanges make additional bandwidth very cheap to provide and infra costs are spread over years and many users, further reducing ongoing costs..

Bandwidth caps not only have a weak fiscal basis but also clash with net neutrality tenets, go against what made the internet successful in the first place.

paxys11• 3 years ago

They already charge for bandwidth. People pay more for 500mpbs than 50mbps. We are talking about total monthly data caps, which have nothing to do with bandwidth.

kstrauser2• 3 years ago

"It's weird that none of the so-called experts agree with me. The problem is clearly with their understanding of the space, not mine."

staringback• 3 years ago

So that someone's grandma who hardly uses her connection can subsidize your extreme over-consumption of digital media?

voakbasda3• 3 years ago

Yes, for the same reason that roads used by daily drivers are subsidized by remote workers.

paxys11• 3 years ago

Data packets aren't a limited resource. The costs for your ISP are fixed whether they serve you 1MB or 1TB. Data caps and overage charges are purely a money grab, not some fundamental economic requirement. So no, infrequent users aren't "subsidizing" anyone else.

phkahler4• 3 years ago

> So that someone's grandma who hardly uses her connection can subsidize your extreme over-consumption of digital media?

While I agree that grandma doesn't need 1Gbps, neither do I and neither do most people. So why mandate such a high speed for the label anyway? It seems like a way to disqualify things like Starlink that will have difficulty providing extreme speeds to large numbers of users at once.

The only time I'll use such a speed is when downloading some data - an ISO file or something similar. Streaming video does not require such (gbps) speeds even for multiple streams in the same house.

rasz• 3 years ago

No, so that ISPs are incentivized to actually invest in bigger pipes.

antisthenes2• 3 years ago

This is how consumption of any resource works, in any group where the number of people using it is more than 1.

If I drink less water than you, am I subsidizing your water usage. I'd say so!

Not the hill you want to die on, trust me.

phantom784• 3 years ago

Or at least require that uncapped tiers be available.

notyourwork2• 3 years ago

And that speed should be symmetrical. We are continuing to push the boundaries are content going out.

AussieWog93• 3 years ago

That's what gets me. Is there a technical reason why symmetrical connections would be more expensive than asymm?

yadaeno• 3 years ago

And throw in an availability requirement so my gigabit connection doesn't drop to 10kbps every Friday night when everyone is using the internet.

kulahan4• 3 years ago

A huge portion of people don't need a massive upstream. This sounds more expensive for basically no benefit (for most)

RajT882• 3 years ago

Asymmetric speeds let ISP's oversell their network (more).

LoganDark• 3 years ago

My upload speed is a mere 35th of my download. Affordable symmetrical needs to be a thing. Especially with a certain ISP monopoly.

sokoloff• 3 years ago

I don't care if it's symmetrical. I care that I have enough upstream.

I'd obviously rather have a useful 500/200 than a 100/100 or 50/50, even though the latter is symmetrical. (I think my service now is around 400/20. I'm way happier with that than I would be with 50/50.)

jjcm• 3 years ago

I'm actually on the opposite side of this. I wish there were more metered options available for data, especially for wireless options. I'd love to see an offering that has a low monthly connection fee (i.e. $1-5), along with a sensible price per GB option (i.e. double the cost of transit so there are decent margins on this, but isn't something crazy like $10/gb).

Assuming that for most consumers the end price averages to be the same, the benefit of metered is it puts an incentive on the data provider to make their speeds as high as possible. Higher speeds will result in more bandwidth usage (i.e. Youtube/Netflix will default to a higher data rate), which will result in more profit for the company. The desires of the customer and the desires of the provider are the same - faster and more stable internet leads to better customer experience and more profit.

One of the issues I see with fixed-speed-unlimited-data options is that providers are incentivized to oversell the fixed speed bandwidth, leading to "up to 100mbps" type connections where it's a theoretical max, not the average. Under this model the desires of the customer are misaligned with the desires of the provider. The provider wants the customer to use as little data as possible - the less they use the more they can sell plans on the same infrastructure. This can be addressed with rules and regulations, but I prefer a situation where I know both the customer and provider have aligned desires.

elzbardico• 3 years ago

Yes, metering is the rational thing to do.

But caps are different and don't work the same.

stefan_• 3 years ago

Well twice the price of transit is .. NaN? Data isn't generally charged in bits.

ftth_finland• 3 years ago

It makes no sense to price wireless data based on IP transit costs.

IP transit costs per GB are a fraction of a hundredth of a penny.

It barely makes any sense to bill consumers per GB on any terrestrial network.

In Northern Europe a typical 4G SIM with a monthly data quota is $9 per month. An unlimited 4G SIM with all you can eat data is $18. How many price points do you need in between?

Heck, international 4G/5G data roaming fees are capped at $2/GB and by 2027 the cap will be $1/GB.

musha68k5• 3 years ago

The metered pricing model doesn’t align with reality of data costs for ISPs which are often negligible (thanks to technological advances and peering agreements especially). This makes the metered model more of a revenue strategy than a necessity. It’s also conflicting with basic tenets of net neutrality.

hn_acker6• 3 years ago

At least for wired connections, data caps are utterly artificial [1].

Network congestion arguments in this debate operate on an unsubstantiated and uncontextualized assumption of scarcity — there is only so much bandwidth, and a few people are going to use it all. Yes, some network congestion arguments have prevailed with wireless broadband because of the atmospherical and technical limitations of the medium. However, congestion is not as consequential for fixed broadband. Broadband providers reason that instead of limiting these internet “super-users” (which would be discriminatory and litigated accordingly), they need to implement data caps for all consumers, which they claim is fair and unbiased. However, scarcity is not a reality for broadband providers, even with super-users. Internet functions by “statistical multiplexing” meaning that bandwidth is dynamically allocated and reused without a limit “[u]nlike other utilities such as water, electricity, gas or oil.”
This means that no super-user is consuming bandwidth at the expense of other users; you’re not going to receive less internet because your neighbor runs a Twitch channel, for example. Rather, super-users are simply using more internet more often, and the “super-user discount” (the fact that broadband providers aren’t able to charge them, specifically, for this “above normal” usage) angers providers more than anything else. This brings us to the real reason broadband providers apply data caps to consumers: money. Applying data caps to all of us, therefore, enables broadband providers to pat themselves on the back for devising clever “overage” fees.

As time goes on the same will become true for the majority of wireless usage, if it isn't true already.

Sending twice the data at a time doesn't cost the ISP twice the money. But large ISPs with regional monopolies continue overcharging you [2] while committing subsidy fraud [3] and subsidy obstruction [4] at every opportunity (sometimes with help from corrupt legislators [5]).

[1] https://publicknowledge.org/no-cap-the-truth-about-data-caps...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38105873

[3] Pick any one of these links. https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/06/mississippi-says-att-too... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/15/report-shows-comcast-con... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/16/verizon-t-mobile-oversta...

[4] Pick any one of these links. https://communitynets.org/content/monopoly-providers-mire-nt... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/15/report-shows-comcast-con... https://www.techdirt.com/2015/04/16/alec-threatens-to-sue-cr...

[5] Ditto. https://www.techdirt.com/2021/02/19/new-bill-tries-to-ban-co... https://www.techdirt.com/2022/04/11/illinois-missouri-and-ne...

IdiranVibe2• 3 years ago

It blows my mind that you guys in the US still have to deal with data caps ... It's been years in the UK since that's been a thing for broadband, and we're close to the point where mobile data will be the same

criddell• 3 years ago

It depends on your ISP. My phone has a data cap of 100 GB/month. Once I go over that I am throttled when the network is congested.

My home internet has no data caps.

ls612• 3 years ago

For residential internet most people have no data cap and those who do have a very large cap (over 1TB/month). Even I as a pretty active user only use like 500GB/month on my desktop according to Windows.

adrr• 3 years ago

Only data caps if you only have one choice in broad band. Once you have two or more, data caps go away and price is cut in half. If there are no competitors, the provider will milk the customers of cash.

FredPret• 3 years ago

Western Europe is covered in little hamlets and the odd big city, but it is amazingly densely populated as a region.

So cell service, internet, trains, and cheap flights are all easier to provide there.

Whereas here in the much more sparsely-populated North America, those things are all pricier, and it’s easier to accommodate big trucks, big highways, giant Costco’s, etc.

callalex5• 3 years ago

They should also require the ISP to use a reasonable method to count the amount of data if there is a data cap. No matter how I count the data in and out of my gateway running OpenWRT, Comcast/Xfinity consistently counts and charges me for at least 20% more data with no discernible reason why.

I think somewhere in fine print they claim they get to round up to the nearest KB or MB every minute or some asinine made-up scale that only benefits them.

kstrauser2• 3 years ago

I wish ISPs were required to advertise the number of seconds you're allowed to use their service at full speed. Ooh, a gigabit pipe with a terabyte cap? You're allowed to use it for 3 hours per month before throttling or extra charges kick in.

I believe it's false advertising when ISPs claim their price is $X per month if it's only for 1/240th of a month. I understand and support the idea of overprovisioning, but a 240x ratio is insanity.

ehPReth4• 3 years ago

happy to see upload get the attention it deserves. nothing is more annoying than uploading a video to $messagingapp or $socialmediaplatform and it just taking forever due to slow upload. a nice quality of life improvement to shove that quicker to someone.

even stuff like backing up computers, or running security cameras that you can view remotely or that record to the cloud (encrypted) are really hampered by upload speed. there's a lot of cool stuff one can do if only one had the speed to do it with.

voakbasda3• 3 years ago

Oh, it's worse than that. With my 20-1 DSL connection, saturating the uplink effectively causes a DoS for the downlink.

koito17• 3 years ago

You gave me flashbacks to 2010 when I had used ADSL and thought 128 KB/s download was the best thing ever for downloading MP3s. And as you mentioned, using up all upload bandwidth effectively DoSed everyone else on the network, though in my case, any single person downloading also slowed down everything else to a crawl. I must have had less "downstream channels" (or whatever the DSL equivalent is) than your setup.

My current internet connection uses DOCSIS 3.1, but I can't recall any resource contention even if I have several computers trying to upload simultaneously. Not a big fan of asymmetric speeds, though, but apparently DOCSIS 4.0 (which is being finalized this year) gets us closer to symmetrical speeds.

inemesitaffia2• 3 years ago

Cake or fq-codel on Openwrt

idiot900• 3 years ago

Honest question: at what point, with real life usage, is 1 Gbps actually necessary for home users?

I find that latency rather than throughput is what determines my perceived quality of an Internet connection. But am curious how others think.

lapphi• 3 years ago

Probably when VR starts popping off

dawnerd• 3 years ago

When games are 100+ gigs it starts being something that can make an impact especially when updates are also massive. But this is the same thing people say over every incremental in tech. “Isn’t x enough”

Zigurd3• 3 years ago

First, you are not buying a sustained 1Gb. Not at consumer pricing. Secondly, having burst capacity is very helpful. Moving big images, videos, etc., which you do only occasionally, benefits a lot from a 1Gb consumer-grade link.

cortesoft7• 3 years ago

I recently went from 300mbps to 2gbps, and one big difference is game update time. In the past, I would sometimes go to play a game with my friends and it would require a 10 gig update, and we would have to play a different game because it would take too long to update. Now I can update in under a minute and we can play.

phkahler4• 3 years ago

To me that's more about the company making too many large updates. And when they do have a large updated it should be up to the user to decide when to get it. Downloading it over night should be an option, and not required to play. I've seem games that demanded the update in order to play, which is really annoying and I don't think it should be that way.

alerighi• 3 years ago

They upgraded my line from VDSL (~80Mbit/s down and 20 up) to 1Gbit/s FTTH (~800Mbit/s down and 300 up) and didn't see that big difference, on normal navigation.

Sure, if I download a torrent, it is much faster. But is not the kind of upgrade that I experienced from ADSL (7Mbit) to VDSL. Since most of the time I use the PC under Wi-Fi anyway, that doesn't go over 600Mbit/s near the AP, but really not over 100 in the location where I usually have my PC.

What I've seen instead is a much more stable connection. Giving that the network is entirely fiber and passive there weren't (so far) any interruption of service in roughly one year, while with VDSL there where time to time that the connection did not work, in one occasion for nearly a week. Also since it was copper lines in case of bad weather, or crosstalk with other users, the performance did vary a lot.

_ea1k• 3 years ago

That matches my experience as well. I'll take a little slower, if its symmetric and fiber. The stability is worth it. I could stream multiple videos at 4k pretty easily with 100Mbps. They've upgraded to 300 since then, but the difference was unnoticeable.

Most complaints that I've seen in various neighborhoods are from people that were not getting anywhere near their full speed. Usually the cause is their wifi router.

nathanfig2• 3 years ago

Most households with 4+ people are going to have dozens of connected devices, including multiple doing HD to 4K entertainment streams, outgoing video feeds, and (at least on PS5) the occasional unexpected 80GB updates to a video game you were just about to play. This in addition to the apps/webapps that are often in the 10s of Mb of content served per click.

jeffbee• 3 years ago

Multiple simultaneous 4K streams does not describe any household I know. How much TV are you people watching? It seems like an exceptionally high level of media consumption, in my experience.

Furthermore, 4K video is < 25mbps each per stream, usually.

ipython• 3 years ago

Those households also have one poorly configured Wi-Fi access point, which is jockeying for airtime with dozens of competing access points in the same frequency range, meaning the customer is realistically going to see maybe 200Mbps aggregated across those devices (due to interference, channel congestion, that one streaming device with a -90dBm signal sucking up all the airtime at the lowest supported data rate...)

IMHO we need to address the "last meter" experience before mandated gigabit internet speeds mean anything.

CSMastermind• 3 years ago

Plenty of people work from home and that connection speed can be important when you're uploading a bunch of files while on a video call for example.

Or there's three people in your house all on video calls.

carstenhag• 3 years ago

With Teams using 0.3 Mbit/s (3fps) while I am sharing my screen, this is not really a concern.

Szpadel2• 3 years ago

I have 1gb connection and I agree that 99% of the time this isn't utilized, but it's very helpful when you want to download anything, from new steam game, through system updated to for me work related usage. this isn't that much about you can download per month, but how fast you can do it when you need something

gustavus2• 3 years ago

Honestly everytime I've tried downloading a large file the bottleneck is on the serving end, where they aren't able to send that much data that fast.

gustavus2• 3 years ago

As long as front-end developers keep shoving more and more layers of JavaScript "libraries" and corporations shovel more and more adware into every request it's likely we'll continue to need more and more bandwidth; because most developers figure if it is working great in thier office with a dedicated fiber line on the latest MBP it obviously must be fine for everyone.

Night_Thastus• 3 years ago

The world moves ever onward. Services like 4K high-bitrate playbacks have become more common. Games with sizes of 200GB aren't unheard of now.

Most people could get away with less, but sooner or later 1Gbps will go from "excessive" to "good" to "acceptable" to "slow".

wing-_-nuts3• 3 years ago

Latency usually explodes as connection utilization goes up. If you have a router with good QOS and limit to 80% of your max available connection you're probably going to have pretty good latency.

Then again I'm not a networking guy. Someone who knows more about this stuff than I do can give you more comprehensive advice and talk about stuff like buffer bloat, etc.

kcb2• 3 years ago

Download a PS5 game or Steam game.that you want to play shortly.

kaylynb• 3 years ago

1 Gbps is nice when downloading games and updates. Since everything is digital it can be the difference between waiting 30 minutes or 3 hours. IE: You play a game the night it's released/updated or wait until after work the next day.

Upload speed probably makes more sense for more use cases though. I used to have symmetric 1Gbps fiber and never bothered to setup QOS as my upload was never saturated.

I moved and am stuck with "1Gbps" Comcast. Which really means 25Mbps upload. I had to setup qdiscs on my gateway and split my network into tiers to get acceptable upload speeds and latency for the workstations in my home. I maybe have more uploads than 'normal' people, as I have automated backups that store data off-site, but normal people have "backups" in the form of cloud storage I think.

Uploading videos (to YouTube, for example) is painfully slow. I'm simulating living in Australia when I upload a video.

superkuh• 3 years ago

I'm much more excited about the "...and 20 megabits per second for upload". My comcast account for $107/mo with 1.2 TB data transfer cap per month still only has a 5 megabit upload throttle (80/5). I literally had the same upload speed in 2003.

jmyeet2• 3 years ago

Waht the government needs to do (but never will) is make the last mile a municipal utility such as in Chattanooga [1].

Instead we have monopolies that do what all monopolies do in a capitalist organization of the economy: they rent-seek, spend their time and money on lobbying to legislatively exclude competition (eg [2]), do the bare minimum and take public money to roll out broadband but then just not do it (eg [3].

The Internet is the US is objectively awful for most people by the standard of other developed economies [4].

It's ridiculous that people still defend this system.

[1] https://qz.com/1996234/the-best-broadband-in-the-us-is-in-ch...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-al...

[3] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/veriz...

[4] https://broadbandnow.com/report/2018-fcc-international-data-...

Zigurd3• 3 years ago

Municipal ISPs are a good start, and they illustrate how much of your ISP bill goes to debt service from when the commercial ISP bought out competitors.

But you don't have to run a municipal ISP like a commercial ISP. If pricing goes low enough, just make it an amenity, like parks and sidewalks, and fund it that way.

And then you can choose a totally different architecture than a commercial ISP could operate: no network admission barriers, mesh networks, etc.

elromulous• 3 years ago

I think I speak for many when I say "'bout damn time".

0cf8612b2e1e• 3 years ago

Will they also change how they define a region? At one point, I thought so long as an ISP service a single customer in a zip code(?), census tract(?), some region definition, the ISP could make claims to offering that tier of service everywhere.

I_Am_Nous6• 3 years ago

The service regions are kind of a government mandated monopoly for who can offer service where. However, the FCC is now requiring automated speed testing so if you say you can offer 100/100 symmetrical you have to prove it. The FCC can pick any customer and say "prove this customer can get the service they are paying for" -- for us, that means installing a cloud connected router that automatically connects and tests. Apparently the fines are pretty gnarly...

bscphil5• 3 years ago

It's 100 Mbps down / 20 Mbps up as the proposal, and 1000 Mbps / 500 Mbps as an eventual goal.

I imagine the 20 Mbps upload target is useless for most of us, even those on asymmetric cable, but there's a good chance that if the ISPs were forced to provide 20 Mbps up at their lowest broadband tiers, it would raise the ladder quite a bit. For example, on Comcast I get 800 / 20, but there's also a 400 / 10 tier (and maybe a low-cost tier below that?). If everyone was getting 20 up, maybe I'll get upgraded to 40 Mbps.

jwells89• 3 years ago

Upload being low is frustrating. In my area Comcast sells “gigabit” service that’s 1000Mbps/20Mbps which seems like it’s explicitly designed to hook less technically aware customers who know “gigabit” is good but not exactly how.

Thankfully there are alternative ISPs here that sell symmetrical gigabit, but that’s definitely not the case everywhere.

bscphil5• 3 years ago

In my case Comcast is 800/20 or 1000/35, but they refuse to even advertise the upload rate so you don't know when you're signing up. There's a somewhat outdated, very hard to find page that lists these [1] but many tiers (including mine) don't seem to be shown.

[1] https://www.xfinity.com/networkmanagement

m4635• 3 years ago

I wonder what at upload speed will the acks be congested and prevent full download speeds from occurring.

Analemma_2• 3 years ago

I imagine the 20 Mbps upload target is useless for most of us, even those on asymmetric cable

I wish this were true. I'm in Seattle and Xfinity will only sell me 5 Mbps up, even at 480 down, unless I pay out the ass for a symmetric gigabit connection I don't need. Very much looking forward to the FCC forcing at least 20.

danielhep• 3 years ago

Where do you live? It's possible to get gigabit service from a handful of different non Comcast ISPs in most of the city.

duffyjp3• 3 years ago

I'd recommend looking into the 5G home internet services all the major cell carriers offer. They're all cheaper than I was paying Spectrum for their minimum tier. None are offered at my address unfortunately but being in Seattle I'd bet you could get one.

I had fiber installed this summer and until they finally sent a staff engineer out it was going down 2-5 times a day. I work from home so I had to tether to my phone for Teams meetings to make sure I'd stay connected. It was actually completely fine and I only get 2 bars of LTE at home.

jupp0r2• 3 years ago

Agreed. ISPs can allocate bandwidth on DSL/Coax trunks as they please so it should just be a configuration change to increase the upload percentage.

toast03• 3 years ago

That's not really true. There's certainly knobs to turn, and almost certainly some available capacity to increase uploads, but coax and dsl are fundamentally asynchronous.

Coax has to manage the single (or few) headend transmitter vs many CPE transmitters, you get better multiplexing to the CPE than from the CPE; and while the newest equipment may be able to handle CPE uploads across most of the spectrum, older equipment had a narrower range of frequencies available to upload with. If there's spare frequencies and downstream capacity isn't using it, then yeah... if not, there's trade offs.

For DSL, everybody has a dedicated pair to the DSLAM/remote terminal whatever, but crosstalk between pairs impacts the signals and again, the DSLAM has more ability to mitigate that towards the CPE than the CPE can when sending upstream. Anyway, VDSL/VDSL2 are specified with asymetric up and down bandwidth, as was ADSL. Of course, DSL ISPs tend to cap sync rates based on profiles, rather than running the lines to their maximum capacity, so a lot of lines do have more upload capacity than is allowed to be used, and to the extent that's the case, it would just take a profile update to get more upload for many users.

cavisne• 3 years ago

DOCSIS (the Coax protocol) is asymmetric. 10:1 for docsis 3.1 and 10:6 for 4.0

So cable at least will always be a bit asymmetric. A lot of fiber deployments (GPON) are also but the bandwidth limits are much higher so it does not really matter.

SketchySeaBeast2• 3 years ago

I guess I'm the outlier. I have 300 down / 15 up and never really notice an issue.

freedomben6• 3 years ago

How often do you upload? I notice especially when trying to rsync or upload files to the cloud.

lotsofpulp2• 3 years ago

You don’t notice because you have never had the capability to host content. With symmetric upload, it would be possible to backup our phones/data to our own NAS at home as opposed to relying on Apple/Microsoft/Alphabet/Amazon. You could stream video from your own device, you could share it, etc.

The lack of high quality, high bandwidth symmetric connections to the home (and ipv6) is a huge boon to the entrenched big tech companies.

organsnyder2• 3 years ago

According to someone I know that works at Comcast, they're working on rolling out symmetrical (or at least closer to symmetrical) speeds—even over coax—within the next few years. I'm able to get 2000/200, which is decent. Metronet just buried fiber in my front yard, though, so I'm looking forward to symmetrical fiber soonish (though Metronet has been building so fast I'm worried about growing pains).

JoshGlazebrook• 3 years ago

They announced this a few weeks ago (https://www.fiercetelecom.com/broadband/comcast-first-deploy...).

Already starting the rollout in Colorado.

bscphil5• 3 years ago

Yes, there's actually a significant ongoing scandal over this because they're only rolling it out (in most cases) to people renting their expensive hardware, even if the modem you bought already has the necessary DOCSIS 3.1 support. It's so scummy.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/want-faster-comc...

c2h5oh2• 3 years ago

Starlink will not qualify - even in area with no congestion where you have to problem maintaining >200Mbps down your upload speed averages around 15Mbps

freedomben6• 3 years ago

yep, my average is about 88 Mbps down and 7.4 Mbps up on Starlink. The frustrating thing is it fluctuates a lot. At one point I could get about 160/10.

d3w4s92• 3 years ago

I have 10mbps upload from Comcast. My GoPro footage takes ages to upload. This is just infuriating.

gnicholas11• 3 years ago

There have been times where I considered tethering to my phone for large uploads. If it's at the end of my billing cycle, and I have enough room under my cap, I actually do it.

ShakataGaNai• 3 years ago

If you're in the bracket of "100 mbps down is fine for me" then you most likely do not care about the upload speed at all. About the only advantage for the average person would be "Your iCloud backup goes faster".

1gig/500meg would be a huge step forward. I'm currently on the highest most bestest plan that my ISP (Astound) offers. And it's 1.2gig down, 50 mbps up. That's not a typo, FIFTY up. I'm a techy and even I know I don't need 1.2gig down. My house is wired with CAT6 because I dragged it around, but my main switch is still gig. So... I can't even enjoy the increased download. The only reason I stepped to that highest plan was to get more upload than the 20mbps they previously offered.

bscphil5• 3 years ago

If you're in the bracket of "100 mbps down is fine for me" then you most likely do not care about the upload speed at all.

Personally I'd trade my current speeds (800 / 20) for 100 / 100 in a heartbeat. There's just ... not that much I can do with more than 100 down. That's fast enough to stream a Blu-ray disc directly off of a web server. It's fast enough that package updates on Linux take longer to install than they do to download.

Can I theoretically use more? Sure, it's nice to be able to download files or update Steam games a little faster. But 20 Mbps up is killing me. Backing up a drive to cloud server can take hours or days.

happytiger3• 3 years ago

1000 Mbps down / 100 Mbps up should be the minimum for any first world country.

Without mandated illegality of data caps and other Comcast data and modem games this does nothing to change the reality of boots on the ground unfortunately. These speeds only really allow you to close your data cap sooner in the month for the vast majority of customers who use Internet for modern things. A fixed data cap locks in an “era” of technology so that when the era ends (HD > 4k, 4k > 8k for example) every one of the customers ends up being a heavy user. It is a scam that should be illegal.

We’ve already paid for this with multiple rural broadband bills. It’s time for change.

This is woefully (and shamefully) inadequate action by the FCC but at least we don’t have to deal with Ajit’s basically sellout behavior anymore and can at least talk about solutions beyond the current regulatory captured standards.

I commend them for moving, but I can’t condone their proposal as it’s truly and utterly inadequate and far behind global standards as well.

If you want your country to slip into uncompetitive mess, go ahead and hamper the backbone of the new Industrial Revolution by giving away all the value to your corporate friends and leaving the innovation a generation of true broadband performance could generate laying on the shop floor.

Did I mention we have already paid for broadband (ready, was supposed to be fiber rollout)? Twice? Low standards might as well be low standards FCC.

Culonavirus2• 3 years ago

Many (most?) people do not even have devices that could utilize 1Gbit/s. My (relatively new) Galaxy Tab S7+ (11ac wifi) has a hard time going over 500Mbit/s (not sure if it's wifi or the slow internal memory, can't be arsed to find out), and it's similar with my (not that old) LG Velvet phone... All of that on a connection that can do a rock solid 1Gbps on my PC through UTP (cat 6)...

What I'm trying to say is that many of these devices regular people have don't even have the capability to receive 1Gbit/s streams. It's great for us nerds or people who (also) work from home and need blazing fast connections to work servers etc, but as of 2023, it's overkill for many regular people.

Datacaps should be illegal though.

d3w4s92• 3 years ago

Anyone with a PlayStation/Xbox/gaming PC -- that's a lot of people -- can tell you how much they dislike waiting for a game download. I have 300Mbps download and I still find it too slow. I don't want to start a download, wait for half an hour before I can play the game.

I_Am_Nous6• 3 years ago

This is a relevant issue for people who call our ISP and complain they aren't getting their 250/250 and we find out they speed tested with a 6 year old cheap Android phone that only supports 2.4 GHz wireless.

Wireless is a convenience feature but it gets treated like it should act exactly like a direct wire does.

nikitoci• 3 years ago

Many households have a few people sharing single connection, so it’s not that hard to saturate 1Gbit/s even from weaker devices.

gnicholas11• 3 years ago

I have no need for speeds like this. I have kids, we have many devices, and still we have no need for this. I understand that some people want speeds like this, but it shouldn't be accomplished by eliminating choice for people who would be perfectly happy with much lower speeds. And of course, if the mandated minimum speed is set to 1000/100, then these customers would be subsidizing those who use/want the higher speeds.

bmicraft2• 3 years ago

And of course, if the mandated minimum speed is set to 1000/100, then these customers would be subsidizing those who use/want the higher speeds.

Barely. Most costs to telcos are fixed costs, and upgrading the speeds of their lower speed plans shouldn't lead to a big increase in traffic.

happytiger3• 3 years ago

It’s not just throughout speed it’s latency that’s important about connection speed.

somat2• 3 years ago

Oh boy! pedant time. note that ethernet and gpon(single line fiberoptic) are not broad band, they are base band.

Broad band does not mean speed. it means it uses a lot of frequencies at the same time.

OK getting dizzy here from too much excitement, pedant time is over for this week. We are all allowed to go back to using the non-technical meaning of broadband where it means speed.

s1gnp0st• 3 years ago

*Pedant

somat2• 3 years ago

Totally fair call, fixed.

aidenn04• 3 years ago

If we are being pedants, I object to fiber-optic being labeled as base-band.

It is modulating a ~100THz carrier wave, so is clearly not base-band.

I_Am_Nous6• 3 years ago

Maybe old fashioned "blink on means 1, no light means 0" is base-band, but these days they have virtual data channels and bidirectional fiber transmits on a different frequency than it receives on...so definitely broad-band.

xyst2• 3 years ago

FCC should fix the collusion that happens under the table between ISPs. ISPs tend to avoid entering an area where there is already established service.

So for a majority of people, the ISPs have a de facto monopoly. No need to improve service or customer support.

Also need to overturn legislation at state level which forbids municipal ISPs from being created. This would help break the mini monopolies that ISPs.

Defining standards is fine. But the real issue needs to be fixed.

apex3stoker• 3 years ago

There is a ISP which provides fibre internet with great upload speed and low price a few miles away. I once called their signup phone number and asked if they could extend their service to my place. They said no because they had an agreement with Comcast not to encroach on each other territories.

xyst2• 3 years ago

how is this not a blatant violation of anti-trust laws?

The Sherman Act broadly prohibits 1) anticompetitive agreements and 2) unilateral conduct that monopolizes or attempts to monopolize the relevant market.

userinanother3• 3 years ago

Does everyone really need that much bandwidth though? Usally 20mbps is enough for most things. 50 is plenty and after that it’s mostly bragging rights.

aidenn04• 3 years ago

You clearly don't play video games. Waiting on downloads in the mid 10s of GB is common.

KerrAvon2• 3 years ago

- Multiple people videoconferencing at once, as was very common in a lot of households during COVID lockdown.

- Gaming.

- Other large downloads/uploads for WFH purposes.

- High-bitrate 4k UHD streaming.

userinanother3• 3 years ago

I buy physical media for the most part because it retains resale value. But also the inconvenience of someone downloading for an extra hour or two shouldn’t drive us to build billions in infrastructure

wmf3• 3 years ago

25 Mbps is enough for one person so 100 Mbps is reasonable for a household.

kcb2• 3 years ago

It's the difference between playing the game you just bought in 20 mins or having to leave your PC on until the next day.

theideaofcoffee• 3 years ago

2023: “Does everyone really need 100Mbps?”

2003: “Does everyone really need 5Mbps?”

1994: “Does everyone really need 28.8Kbps?”

1967: “Does ARPAnet really need 2.4Kbps?”

issafram• 3 years ago

I had Comcast forever with a maximum upload of 25mbps. They abandoned advertising the upload speed a long time ago. Finally made the switch to AT&T Fiber last weekend. I'll never go back to cable again!

erwincoumans• 3 years ago

Similar here, moved to Sonic fiber, 10G download and upload speed.

danielfoster4• 3 years ago

I recently won a credit card dispute over a hotel resort fee. The hotel claimed they had high-speed Internet. The speed was only 2-3 mbps. I was able to use the current FCC definition of high-speed to claim a refund.

avarun• 3 years ago

Was the wifi access part of the resort fee? Curious how you went about explaining the monetary value of the wifi portion of your stay to the credit card company.

danielfoster4• 3 years ago

Yes, it was advertised as part of the fee.

xnx• 3 years ago

That is awesome. Can you say more about your process?

google234123• 3 years ago

I feel like you almost always win credit card disputes - could have just said it felt slow and won.

joecool1029• 3 years ago

probably just called the card issuer. It's a valid chargeback reason, here's Visa's guidance (probably under section 13.3): https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/VCOM/global/support-legal/d...

"You inaccurately described the merchandise or services at the time of purchase." (billed as high-speed, it wasn't)

danielfoster4• 3 years ago

I took screenshots of text from the hotel’s website claiming what was included, then sent them to Amex when I filed my dispute online. Of course I tried to work with the hotel before going this route, but they refused to refund anything.

hipadev232• 3 years ago

Credit cards almost always side with the consumer if you have meaningful spend and very few issues/chargebacks/claims. If you never use the card, and then chargeback, they'll just deny your claim and drop your ass. It's not about the money of the individual charge (for small stuff like this anyway), it's about keeping you happy and spending on the card.

I highly doubt the argument itself was relevant whatsoever.

freedomben6• 3 years ago

Hasn't worked for me. Chargebacks are pretty much non-existent. The bank will just contact the vendor, ask them if they delivered "the product" and if they just say "yes" (no proof needed, and they always say yes) they deny my claim. I barely even got it back when my kid stole my credit card and gave it to a scammer selling "minecraft accounts."

Maybe I need to find a different bank?

danielfoster4• 3 years ago

The claim was $700.

sschueller• 3 years ago

More effective would be to require all connections to be opened to any other provider (for a fee of course also defined by the FCC).

Additionally there should be a over subscriber limit defined based on used capacity based on something like a 95th percentile calculation.

It doesn't help if you have a gigabit internet connection when it's unusable because of the lack of backend capacity.

Although if you had an open infrastructure the free market every one loves so much would kill bad service.

KerrAvon2• 3 years ago

It actually used to work like something like that in the early 2000's (?), and then the rules were changed to give the power back to the big telcos again.

Eumenes• 3 years ago

Wouldn't this just give the greenlight to crappy internet companies to shove more tracking BS and bloatware into their web/mobile apps? Can the average residential internet user even tell the difference from whats available now and 100mbps vs 1gbps?

adrianmonk• 3 years ago

My ̶b̶o̶d̶y̶ data terminal is ready.

gnicholas11• 3 years ago

I started with Comcast with 12Mbps service. Over time, they increased the base speed they offer to 20, 25, 50, and now 75. They have done this because they want to have x% of their customers on "broadband", per the federal definition.

This is all well and good, but they keep increasing the price, and refuse to offer lower-tier service. I probably wouldn't want 12Mbps anymore, but 20 or 25 would suffice. I wish I could pay a fraction of what I'm paying for 75Mbps and get a lower tier of service. It should suffice that x% of customers are offered "broadband" for a reasonable price, even if some choose a lower speed.

Ultimately, this comes down to competition. There are no other wired options where I live (in the heart of Silicon Valley). I have considered using a cellular hotspot, but it's not competitive in terms of pricing.

I'm all for prodding companies to move to faster speeds, but there should still be room for consumer choice.

sidewndr462• 3 years ago

I got hit by this as well. Speed was doubled 'for free' one month with no notice. A few months later the price was doubled.

whateverman232• 3 years ago

Would it actually be that much less costly to give you 20-25 vs 75, though? My uninformed assumption was that it was largely artificial once you get to a low enough speed.

gnicholas11• 3 years ago

Well, if there's not a cost difference, why do they keep trying to double my pricing when the base tier goes up?

My sense is there is some cost savings at these lower tiers, but more importantly it would prevent ISPs from jacking prices up while using higher speeds as the rationale ("Look, we just tripled your speed, and it only costs double!"). ISPs would be less likely to double prices without any service improvement. But since many people don't care about the service improvement, it's an illusory benefit for them.

cmiles74• 3 years ago

Agreed, I suspect the cost is in providing the larger amount of bandwidth to the block or neighborhood (better cabling, cable modems, etc.) Once in place, the individual subscriber usage probably all costs the same for Comcast.

Workaccount23• 3 years ago

In an extreme ironic twist, me, the techie nerd guy, has the slowest internet of the regular-folk friend group of mine. Everyone has got 1Gbps and here I am with 300Mbps.

vladslav2• 3 years ago

My friends in third-world countries get faster and less expensive service than me in Silicon Valley. On top of that, there is no fiber connection in my neighborhood, and they've been on fiber for over 5 years. And there is a data cap also. It's just crazy and sad.

warner257• 3 years ago

Me too. I tell everyone who will listen that they should look at their actual bandwidth usage. I've looked at the detailed statistics on my Google Nest WiFi router, and my family's peak usage never exceeded about 30 Mbps. That's with me working from home as a CS PhD student and my wife homeschooling our kids during the day. I have 300 Mbps (down) because that's the lowest, cheapest tier that my ISP offers.

Maybe people are actually using their 1 Gbps bandwidth if they have multiple 4K TVs and do serious gaming? I don't know, I doubt it.

I tell everyone to look at their actual cellular data usage too. I think all middle class Americans just buy unlimited plans now, but I do just fine with 500 MB per month for $5.

isilofi• 3 years ago

Non-techie notices "internet is slow" because their youtube video is blocky or pages load slowly. Non-techie goes to ISP to complain. ISP upsells to a more expensive plan.

The actual reason in almost all cases: non-techies are clueless about their slow and shitty WIFI. Picking empty or less busy channels, using 5GHz, using gasp cables, all black magic and never done.

Sometimes the upselling actually helps because the better plan comes with a maybe-better AP...

Terr_• 3 years ago

As someone who plays games a lot more than watches movies, I don't need much bandwidth, what I really want is low latency.

xattt• 3 years ago

It might be that you’re informed enough to consider that 300 Mbps is more than enough.

teaearlgraycold2• 3 years ago

I'm in an area with competition and I think I'm paying like $60/month for 10Gbps.

huytersd2• 3 years ago

What? I wasn’t even aware consumer speeds got that high. No caps I hope?

gnicholas11• 3 years ago

Yeah that's Comcast's regular price for their lowest tier (75Mbps) where I am.

duffyjp3• 3 years ago

AT&T finally started offering fiber in my neighborhood this summer while Spectrum raised their minimum tier another $5. Needless to said I've seen a lot of AT&T vans around.

Unlike most folks my experience with fiber has been dreadful but at least I'm not paying out the nose for a connection with less upload speed than phone.

gknoy• 3 years ago

I have considered using a cellular hotspot, but it's not competitive in terms of pricing.

I had the opposite experience. I was a very happy Comcast customer for a year or two (their curfew-for-kids-computers feature on their router was great, and the mobile app integration was very handy), but the 5G Verizon offering was cheaper and faster (where I live). I have never felt so bad canceling my account, as everything about the experience was great, but VZ had double (or more) the upload speed.

Galacta7• 3 years ago

I would love to get Verizon 5G Home Internet for my mom, who is currently getting gouged by Verizon with DSL (and slow barely better than dial-up DSL). Unfortunately, she's not eligible, as Verizon apparently limits the number of 5G customers they offer in a given area -- due to bandwidth limitations. So it's great for folks who can get it, but pretty limited in terms of how many people can actually sign-up for service.

mixdup2• 3 years ago

This is all well and good, but they keep increasing the price, and refuse to offer lower-tier service. I probably wouldn't want 12Mbps anymore, but 20 or 25 would suffice. I wish I could pay a fraction of what I'm paying for 75Mbps and get a lower tier of service. It should suffice that x% of customers are offered "broadband" for a reasonable price, even if some choose a lower speed.

The problem is that most of the costs of providing broadband are fixed costs. To run a coaxial cable from their headend to your house, and to provide employees and crews to repair it and install it all costs the same whether you buy 10 megabits or 2 gigabits

The variable costs--things like backbone bandwidth, paying for transit, doing node splits, etc are a smaller part of the overall cost than you might expect

This lower end of the market, though, is being taken up by Fixed Wireless (T-Mobile and Verizon primarily) for example you can get Verizon home wireless internet for as low as $25. My mom has it, and it's decent 50 megabit service for a low price

gnicholas11• 3 years ago

you can get Verizon home wireless internet for as low as $25.

I hope this leads to wired ISP price reductions, or at least slower price growth. I happen to live in a VZW dead zone, so unfortunately it won't work for me...

PaulHoule2• 3 years ago

There also is a step between DSL and cable and fiber. I have a fiber to the node situation that gives consistent and reliable 20 Mbps down and I have two of those with load balancer. With VDSL they could sell 100Mbps service to a few houses close to the node.

A real upgrade for me would involve running a cable through a beaver meadow. There is an electric line and crews do go in there to limb up trees and they are planning to replace a pole, if there was some rational coordination of services and a commitment to universal service they’d get the fiber in when they do a maintenance cycle on the power line.

lyu07282• 3 years ago

The actual problem is that this is infrastructure owned by a private, international for-profit corporation. Of course it's a fixed cost and a limited number of profitable customers (get fucked if you live anywhere that isn't profitable), yet your profits need to go up forever. I'm always curious because most people intuitively understand why for example it makes no sense to privatize streets and roads, there is only one going to your home. Even most people who have faith in capitalism, understand how monopolies are bad for society, privatized infrastructure is one of the more obvious contradictions of liberalism.

bonyt• 3 years ago

The problem is that most of the costs of providing broadband are fixed costs. To run a coaxial cable from their headend to your house, and to provide employees and crews to repair it and install it all costs the same whether you buy 10 megabits or 2 gigabits

Not sure if this is completely the case when it comes to older networks that might need upgrades because lots of folk are sharing the same coax line. In an HFC[1] network, bandwidth is shared on the coax branches, and a variable number of units can be sharing the same fiber link, which can serve a neighborhood, block, or even unit. And, so upgrades can make a network more "fiber-rich."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_fiber-coaxial

ZoomerCretin3• 3 years ago

The UK fixes this by forcing the companies who own the lines to rent and share them with other providers. ISPs in the US vehemently oppose this, of course.

prirun• 3 years ago

you can get Verizon home wireless internet for as low as $25

I just checked the Verizon wireless page:

https://www.verizon.com/home/internet/5g/

It says $35/mo "with AutoPay and 5G Mobile plans". So to get this price, you have to have Verizon 5G Mobile.

My current cell phone plan is $22/mo. Verizon's cheapest plan is the "Unlimited Welcome" plan, which is $40/mo. Adding Home Wireless Internet to that plan is $40; to get the $25 price you have to have a more expensive mobile plan.

And of course, all of these are introductory prices. They are much higher after the 2-year introductory period.

adamsvystun• 3 years ago

I agree that there should be more consumer choice. But is there anything FCC can do to increase it? Is it in their jurisdiction?

gnicholas11• 3 years ago

Well, they seem to be able to offer incentives based on how many customers are on "broadband", so presumably they could offer incentives related to offering lower tiers/pricing, or to ISPs entering a market that only has one provider.

toast03• 3 years ago

But is there anything FCC can do to increase it? Is it in their jurisdiction?

Sure. They could apply the line sharing rules from the 1996 Telecom Act. Afaik, that's still law, but when courts said the FCC couldn't apply it to telephone companies and not cable companies, the FCC opted to declare the market was competitive and end mandatory line sharing.

Help from congress would be great, though. There was a lot of shenanigans under the line sharing regime, like ILECs pricing retail internet lower than wholesale prices. After a transition period, the line owners shouldn't offer retail service at all, make them restructure it into actually separate companies providing the internet service vs the lines.

ClumsyPilot2• 3 years ago

There are no other wired options where I live (in the heart of Silicon Valley)

This reads like a joke.

josh_carterPDX• 3 years ago

I'm a Comcast customer and bundle my services. Every two years, once the introductory rate expires, I call to get a new "promo" rate or just say they can cancel me right then and there. They've never taken me up on the cancellation. As a result I have a full 1GIG service at my house and feel like I pay a reasonable amount.

I'm just not a big fan of their "security" features. Other than that, I haven't had many issues here in Oregon.

tzs2• 3 years ago

When I had Comcast bundles I did similar, except instead of calling I went to their nearest office. I liked doing this in person because I sometimes have trouble understanding call center accents.

jmyeet2• 3 years ago

We don't need competition. We need to provide Internet access as a heavily-regulated utility, ideally as a municipal service. Competition for last-mile Internet actually makes very little sense because it's an overbuild.

Imagine it costs $2000 per household to connect a fiber network. With 70% of households signing up, that produces a certain cost. Now imagine there was a second fiber network that also cost $2000 per household that splits the customer base. By definition, this is going to be more expensive.

Capitalism created this problem. It won't solve it. This is capitalism working as intended: doing the absolute least possible for the highest possible price while lobbying to exclude competition (eg by making municipal broadband illegal).

Expecting markets to solve this problem is neoliberal brain rot. Let's imagine that you do get 2 or even 3 ISPs in an area similar to Comcat, Spectrum, AT&T or Verizon. Now what? They just collude to keep speeds low and prices high [1].

Build municipal broadband. Failing that, regulate ISPs like utilities. And this would include unbundling TV services.

[1] https://www.legitreviews.com/american-isps-collude-to-keep-b...

m4635• 3 years ago

I started comcast with 100Mbps service and they have increased my bill every year too. sigh

hn_acker6• 3 years ago

I'm all for prodding companies to move to faster speeds, but there should still be room for consumer choice.

There certainly should be consumer choice, but in your case another problem is that the amount you pay Comcast for 75 Mbps download now should be no more than what you paid for 12 Mbps before. As I wrote in a different comment [1]:

It's not reasonable for big ISPs like Comcast to offer me 300 megabits download 15 megabits upload for $70 a month (might've been $90, but assume $70) while EPB of Chattanooga [1] offers 1 gigabit symmetrical for $67.99 a month. What speed any individual actually needs doesn't have to come into the picture. In matters of consumer protection, the principle of the thing matters just as much as actual consumer needs.

(Ignore the [1] inside the quoted paragraph above. I'm leaving it in for Ctrl-F purposes.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38105873

jedbrown• 3 years ago

They tripled the price of my grandmother's service over a five year period despite no speed increases so I figure they were going to charge you more regardless.

elicksaur• 3 years ago

When will a SLA be enforced by regulation? Who actually sees 90%+ of the billed speed 90%+ of the time?

I paid for 200mbps for a long time and only typically saw 20-30mbps. When I moved, Comcast gave me a deal for 400mbps, I’m now seeing 50-60mbps typically. Never bothered looking at 1g plans because why pay the price to get just 100mbps in reality.

ghostly_s• 3 years ago

Great, I hope they codify what can be called "Fiber" next. My friend was excited to share Centurylink fiber was available at their new address, but while it is indeed delivered by fiber, it's capped out at 200Mbps.

jdlyga• 3 years ago

Verizon Fios still advertises in my building at an amazing 50 mbps. They have an old hookup from a decade+ ago when the building was first constructed. Meanwhile, our minimum cable speed available for purchase is 300 mbps. I still get contacted by Fios people every so often. They want 70 per month for 50 mbps!

zbrozek• 3 years ago

AT&T is offering 18/1 DSL in my neighborhood in 94022. Comcast offers nothing. Pretty sure this goalpost movement isn't going to convince either of them to offer service.

throw0101a• 3 years ago

How about a future/stretch goal of open access networks so that we can get some competition at OSI Layer 3:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_network

Ideally OSI Layer 1/2 would be a neutral third-party that doesn't do an IP but rather only makes sure physical plant is ubiquitous in good working order:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband

It was possible to wire up countries and continents with electricity and telephone in the early 1900s, so I don't see why is not technically possible to do the same with fibre in the early 2000s.

layoric• 3 years ago

Australia broadband is not great, but a few years ago I got fibre installed (at my own expense), and since have benefitted from actual competition among ISPs. The little ISP I’m with bills a daily rate which you can change at any point without penalty. Most days I just stay on a 1000/50 for about $3 USD a day, but can change to a range of plans from 50/20 to 1000/400, and it take only a few minutes to apply and kick in.

The monopoly situation I read about in the various areas of the US really sounds like the FCC or another regulator needs to break up region exclusive deals, or something. It feels like Australia, of all places might actually leap frog the US once fibre is more widely available, and that is pretty bad since we have had some of the worst average internet speeds in the developed world at very high prices. Regulatory capture is a plague , and this FCC “proposal” feels like a crumb to delay what sounds like much needed broader disruption of monopolies.

dottjt• 3 years ago

Which company are you with? Also in Australia, although I don't think fibre is available yet to my address.

Did you also have to pay for fibre to be installed?

mcoliver• 3 years ago

Should update the title to 100/20. I still find it amazing that companies can list services without the upload speed (eg Comcast). Of course latency and jitter matter too but that's probably above the heads of a lot of consumers.

Upload and latency increasingly matter more and more and is essential to many work from home endeavors. Whether you are uploading content for work or play, or have a family video conferencing, or a host of other things.

Perhaps the more interesting part of the doc is the future proposal for 1gb/500mb. I understand the engineering tradeoffs and reasoning for the asymmetrical bandwidth on coax/docsis but perhaps it's time to rethink some of that. That would be a good thing.

vel0city9• 3 years ago

The FCC requires ISPs to publish information about their network management practices. That's how you get sites like this:

https://www.xfinity.com/networkmanagement

I do wish this was required to be easily accessible from the marketing pages. Usually it takes some digging to find it. But at least they do have to make these numbers public.

portpecos• 3 years ago

The FCC determined that Comcast’s Xfinity Internet broadband Internet access services deliver, on average, over 100 percent of their advertised downstream and upstream speeds during the busiest periods of the day, known as "peak" times, during sustained testing. Peak times are Monday through Friday from 7:00pm to 11:00pm local time.
Latency is typically measured in milliseconds, and generally has no significant impact on typical everyday Internet usage.

I took that from their networkmanagement page. Their statements seem to conflict with the consensus of the HN crowd, but I could be wrong.

m4635• 3 years ago

Upload speed is just a cash grab. It is a way to segregate price-sensitive residential vs price-insensitive business customers who can then be charged enormous amounts.

SV_BubbleTime3• 3 years ago

Upload speed is just a cash grab.

No.

This lacks all historical and practical understanding of why upload speeds are limited.

Back in the 70s/80s when coax was being planned and rolled out for cable, they needed to figure out what frequencies they would use. Cable providers knew they needs a ton in one direction and only a tiny bit for things like buying pay per view in the other.

This has been fine traditionally because even up to Netflix and streaming we haven’t needed the upload at residential. No one complained. That may start to change a little.

As far as I am aware, all DOCSIS (cable) providers in the USA that are using cable-tv coax are limited to a max of 35Mbps upto DOCSIS3.1.

I am writing this on 1250/35 right now. The local tiers for me are 100/15, 400/25, 1000/35, 1250/35.

It isn’t a “cash grab” at all. If you need more upload you need a new line that isn’t divided so asymmetrically, which means fiber. And once you fiber, there is zero reason to go go symmetric, as you have two lines with the same equipment on either side, to a point where the ISP will charge differently if you cut into their bandwidth too much.

packetlost• 3 years ago

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. That is not at all how ISPs distinguish between residential/consumer and commercial customers at all. It's almost always entirely dependent on the transport being used (DOCSIS, twisted pair, fiber, etc.)

z_zetetic_z• 3 years ago

I have had an uncapped symmetric 10Gbps connection for ~50 USD / month for more than 10 years.

manchmalscott• 3 years ago

The issue with that is even though I have gigabit internet, and we pay over $200 a month for it, my internet speed is still usually measured in kilobytes and sometimes just bytes per second. Speed tests show anywhere between 4-9 hundred MiB/s down and yet it takes YouTube like ten seconds just to load the titles of videos, and I’m in a big city not even a rural area. Just because they “””provide””” a speed doesn’t mean anyone will ever see it in practice.

gnarlouse• 3 years ago

In Iowa, you can still find fiber speeds as low as 5mbps in an upscale residential neighborhood. They'll sell it to you marked as 100mbps without batting an eye. Customer service will say "oh you've probably got a gamer in the neigborhood" as if that excuses them from their unapologetically horrible service.

Gotta love the late stage greed in this world

photonios• 3 years ago

Everyone here arguing that most people have no practical use for higher speeds at home have never experienced 1 GBit up+down. Once you have it, you'll never settle for less.

I have 1 GBit up+down at home, I cabled the whole house with CAT7 cables and set up the best access points money can buy for mobile devices. Everything else is wired. It's an amazing experience and internet everywhere sucks compared to home.

When I lived in Romania this costed me €10, now that I am back in the Netherlands it's a bit more pricey at €52, but it's 100% worth it.

pottertheotter• 3 years ago

I think that people also say that they have no practical use for it because they don't have access to it, so they don't realize all the practical uses. For instance, I've worked with a lot of engineering companies that collect a lot of lidar data. Having reasonable speeds (1Gbps up/down) would have a huge impact on how and where we can transmit and process the data.

smilekzs• 3 years ago

I did the same, hoping that someday I will finally get FTTH. Currently still on the only real option here which is Comcast 1G/20M. Sometimes LTE has better upload speed (but not latency, obviously).

runjake2• 3 years ago

What's really hurting me isn't my 400Mbps download.

What's hurting me is the advertised 12Mbps upload, or in reality, 9-10Mbps upload.

Customers are so focused on synthetic download speeds, but meanwhile the upload rug is being pulled from them. Get a few devices on your network with iCloud Photos enabled and you're hosed, because traffic can't ACK/get out.

bmicraft2• 3 years ago

Wow, the worst ratio i've ever seen was 20:1 and that's way below

runjake2• 3 years ago

This is on Spectrum Cable Internet, for anyone wondering.

dathinab• 3 years ago

as far as I can tell given the IT usage in the country I'm from:

- 10mbps is the bare minimum to not have frequent major problems with all kinds of things but it still just a minimum (symmetric, if with reasonable latency and reliable and always actually 10mbps, i.e. not a contract which says 10mbps but is often much less or supper low latency)

- 100(down)/~50(up)mbps is "good enough" for quite many (but then bluray dvds are still make some profite here, soo...; also again actual speeds not "marketed speeds")

- 500+mbps down are what you really want if you play a lot of AAA games or similar, else download times for updates and similar become quite in-convenient and can infer with you playing with other people (e.g. due to you waiting for a unexped download). Some jobs need speeds like that, too.

- there is little point in more then 1gbps down or 250mbps up (where I live; outside some niche cases). It's partially a chicken and egg problem: Without good internet you can't sell services which need/want such speeds but without such services why should anyone spend (larger amounts of) money to buy such internet and if very few buy it where available why should a teleco make it available in other areas

Through that's private usage, not b2b, e.g. remote controlled agriculture machines.

speby• 3 years ago

Remember when a T-1 line was considered to be like the god-level status of internet connections? Whoa.... 1.5Mbps!? Later, more affordable DSL speeds would reach single-digit Mbps and it felt like being on another planet.

Now all of those speeds feel like they're dial-up modems.

pokstad2• 3 years ago

T1 was a dedicated circuit though, even with DSL there was still a need for T1 lines.

pokstad2• 3 years ago

Isn’t the term “broadband” supposed to reference using the full capacity of the wire medium? Like DSL was broadband because voice lines only used a narrow band of the frequency range of the wire?

medellin• 3 years ago

This would have been great 10 years ago. In 2023 20 mbps for upload is a joke.

hollander• 3 years ago

Naming should be megaband, gigaband, teraband etc.

Arubis• 3 years ago

If I’m Comcast, I’m getting behind this. What a great way to kill off competition from small urban fixed wireless ISPs!

hansvm• 3 years ago

It's a good start, but networks can have all sorts of pathologies rendering them less useful (or nearly useless), and the current oligopoly is financially incentivized to minimally meet these definitions regardless of how usable the network is:

(1) We provide speeds "up to 100mbps" (actual max throughput in any 24h period being 10-60mbps)

(2) We provide mean speeds of 200mbps, easily beating the definition (mean is measured over time, not from the customer's perspective, so if most people get on at the same time then most browsing sessions see throughput of 10mbps or less due to poorly handled congestion)

(3) We provide mean speeds of 100mbps (upload is 0.01mbps)

(4) We provide mean speeds of 100mbps, over 99% of the time (every 3 months an 8h maintenance block drops speeds to 10kbps, rendering the network totally unusable that workday)

(5) Mean throughput is 100mbps, mean latency is 2000ms (totally unusuable for real-time _anything_)

(6) Mean throughput is 200mbps, mean latency is 20ms, every 5min a few packets will have up to 10s of latency (still totally unusable for most real-time purposes, but naive metrics make it sound good)

(7) You're allowed "unlimited" "100mbps" (but if you use that for more than a contiguous day, or a few long evenings in a row, then 100mbps is redefined to mean 100kbps)

And on and on and on. More useful metrics might measure actual consumer impact:

(a) Can you rely on this every workday to shuffle documents back and forth?

(b) Can you rely on this every workday to have low-resolution video calls?

(d) During peak hours, can you reasonably expect to be able to stream buffered 720p video?

A raw 100mbps floor doesn't guarantee your network suffices for any of those use cases.

nunez2• 3 years ago

This is a very welcome change. 25/3 is fine but maxes out once you have one Netflix 4K stream going and won't work at all once AR/VR becomes more mainstream

imagetic• 3 years ago

We just moved from 12 years on Bay Area fiber to PNW Comcast Coax, 1Gb down, but 4mb up and averaging 4 brief outages a day. Yay, me!

FCC launches inquiry to increase minimum broadband speed [pdf]

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