Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 105 posts

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#41

Post by mhays »

rhino369 wrote: post #7

43% with less than two choices for 25mbit is more concerning. 25mbit is around what you'd need for a family of four without being bandwidth crunched all the time.

I'm curious why you think 25 mbps is what you'd need for a family of four? Is there some sort of data out there for this?

Netflix states you need 3.5 mbps for SD, 5.0 mbps for HD.[0] With a family of four, does this means everyone could be watching HD Netflix, and do various other browsing simultaneously, and still be under 25mbps? If so, wouldn't 25mbps be far above what a family of four would need "without being bandwidth crunched all the time"? (Assuming that HD video would be the most data-intensive thing) Especially since, likely more often than not, everyone in the house will not be streaming HD video simultaneously.

The reason why I state this is because, while I get more speed is always better, we seem to often state X mbps is the bare minimum that should be achieved, but never say why. It makes it seem we are letting the perfect, or great, be the enemy of the good in some scenarios. For instance, if 10, 15, or 20 mbps is perfectly fine for most households, then shouldn't we use those numbers instead?

[0]: https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#42

Post by gnim »

freehunter wrote: post #15
randallsquared wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A septic tank also costs acreage that city homes do not typically have available for less than $24,000.

Which is why cities have city water systems, yeah, but anywhere outside of the city, septic and wells just makes more sense.

There is an environmental downside to septics too. Where I grew up there was a sandy aquifer that caused nitrogen loading from septic run off in ponds and marshes. This attributed to algea growth, oxygen depletion and marine species die-off. There is now an extensive effort to sewer the region.

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#43

Post by microcolonel »

bri3d wrote: post #26
microcolonel wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And sometimes more important than either of those, the choice between directional radio and cable of any kind (fiber or copper).

I strongly suspect that for an average consumer, latency is driven by the TCP stack on every piece of hardware close to the edge (local machine, router, modem, ISP point of presence) to a much higher degree than the transmission medium or backhaul. Consumer internet has a long way to go before it becomes HFT backhaul-grade.

Well, for a considerable number of consumer deployments, it appears that internal reflection is the main source of latency.

https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2018/01/20/network-latencies-a...

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#44

Post by rhino369 »

dsr_ wrote: post #9
rhino369 wrote: post #7

43% with less than two choices for 25mbit is more concerning. 25mbit is around what you'd need for a family of four without being bandwidth crunched all the time.

A bit more than that, but not much more. I changed from 50Mb/s to 1000Mb/s service a few months ago; latency is much the same, which means that when the pipe is not crowded, I really can't tell the difference. (But it's wonderful headroom for large file transfers.)

I can't tell the difference between 75mbit and 900mbit. Most servers don't get anywhere near 900mbit. And my hardware is almost always a limiting facture (wifi, hdd speed, etc).

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#45

Post by Shivetya »

rayiner wrote: post #3
marpstar wrote: post #2

In my area (Midwest USA), you can only get 100Mbps or more from either A) Cable company. In my case Mediacom. B) Fiber, which is also offered by Mediacom as well as some rural providers to select locations. DSL is barely 20Mbps around here, and you can't even get 10Mbps service in some spots two miles off US 20. As someone who'd like to buy a home in the country, I find this lack of coverage a much bigger issue. Forg…

Much of my county doesn’t even have water and sewer pipes. People just spend the thousands to tens of thousands of dollars needed to build septic systems and wells and accept that is the trade off for living in the country.

throw in many would be surprised at how many areas cell coverage drops out. traveling a lot has shown me that cell is not guaranteed and having a satellite dish at least gets us tv/music. then again traveling also reveals that free internet is just a McD away.

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#46

Post by pascalxus »

For those in the east bay, Bay area, looking for another provider, keep an eye on this one: https://www.lmi.net/services/internet/phiber/

They claim 50$/mo (60 after first year) for speeds up to 1 GB/sec. But, its not available yet, but will be sometime in 2018, they say.

Here's another one, I'm looking into: https://common.net/

unfortunately, alot of these aren't ready yet in my area

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#47

Post by toomanybeersies »

I used to ask why anyone would ever need 100 Mbps, until I got 100 Mbps. Then I said the same about gigabit, until I got gigabit.

Now I've moved from New Zealand, with its amazing internet infrastructure, to Australia, where I'm lucky to get 10 Mbps, and it keeps dropping out. I couldn't even download a folder from Dropbox last night because my connection was too slow and flaky.

It should be the priority for governments on all levels, from town halls up to parliament/congress/whoever is at the top, to improve internet infrastructure to at least 100 Mbps. This is especially important for less populated areas if they don't want to wither and die out in the information economy.

What the USA needs is a grassroots movement to improve internet infrastructure. 120 years ago, telecommunications pioneers used barbed wire fences to build their own telephone infrastructure [1], this needs to happen again for the internet, but telecom companies apparently block this from happening.

[1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-telephone-...

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#48

Post by bb88 »

mjevans wrote: post #23
cortesoft wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, latency is never going to change, no matter what plan you use. You can't really sell a faster speed of light....

It might actually, mostly due to buffer bloat on some modem stacks. The anti-buffer bloat stuff from the recent DOCSIS (I forget if it was 3.0 or the one after) are supposed to help a LOT with latency issues. Not as good as fiber but close enough that global distance issues become dominant again.

edited: DOCSIS 3.1 adds the Active Queue Management.

There's a lot of reason to believe this is true.

I noticed that in some ping tests when I had a cable modem, RTT went to over 3 seconds for a ping to google when the uplink was saturated.

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#49

Post by woodruffw »

mhays wrote: post #41
rhino369 wrote: post #7

43% with less than two choices for 25mbit is more concerning. 25mbit is around what you'd need for a family of four without being bandwidth crunched all the time.

I'm curious why you think 25 mbps is what you'd need for a family of four? Is there some sort of data out there for this? Netflix states you need 3.5 mbps for SD, 5.0 mbps for HD.[0] With a family of four, does this means everyone could be watching HD Netflix, and do various other browsing simultaneously, and still be under 25mbps? If so, wouldn't 25mbps be far above what a family of four would need "without being ba…

> Assuming that HD video would be the most data-intensive thing

I think this is the wrong assumption to make. I have a 30mbps-ish plan right now, and I can slow my apartment's connection down to a crawl by initiating a large download.

25mbps might be enough for a family of four whose connections are consistent, but I'd wager that the average home's traffic is more on the bursty side.

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#50

Post by rhino369 »

mhays wrote: post #41
rhino369 wrote: post #7

43% with less than two choices for 25mbit is more concerning. 25mbit is around what you'd need for a family of four without being bandwidth crunched all the time.

I'm curious why you think 25 mbps is what you'd need for a family of four? Is there some sort of data out there for this? Netflix states you need 3.5 mbps for SD, 5.0 mbps for HD.[0] With a family of four, does this means everyone could be watching HD Netflix, and do various other browsing simultaneously, and still be under 25mbps? If so, wouldn't 25mbps be far above what a family of four would need "without being ba…

I ball parked it conservatively. I thought netflix streams took more like 7.5mbps. So I bet they could probably get away with less.

I bet a 4 person household will have less than 3 streams almost always. So that's 10mpbs. You'd need some room for surfing, updates, downloads, etc. I bet 15mpbs is fairly usable for a family of 4.

Not to be an old man, but back in my day, we had one PC that everyone shared. And it had a 33.6kbit modem that was UPGRADEABLE to 56k. But the upgrade was a lie. And you had to disconnect when your mom wanted to call her friend. And we liked it.

Post reply on HN