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Faster internet is coming, but only for a few

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Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few

#21

Post by cm2187 »

qwsxyh wrote: post #16
philjohn wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UK Has good coverage except in rural areas, and in some rural areas they've done their own FTTP (B4RN for example). There's a big "full fibre" push from various different providers (Hyperoptic (FTTB), GigaClear, CityFibre, BT OpenReach). Most densely populated areas have the choice of FTTC (the infrastructure is ALL BT OpenReach, however you have a choice of providers who piggy back on this), and in bigger cities/tow…

Hahahahahaha. Openreach is utter shit outside of very very lucky areas. I live in London (zone 6) and we get 30/8 (after fighting with BT support for two months to fix it from 22/1). If you're not covered by VM and win the postcode lottery as to not have it drop constantly, you're lucky to get "tolerable" speeds.

And even those lucky area are capped at 50mbit upload, which is better than nothing but that's not what I call a "gigabit" speed, and still make having all your data in the cloud a distant future.

Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few

#22

Post by gopalv »

ehsankia wrote: post #11

> Signals from space have to travel a long way, so the connection is slower than earth-bound internet options. But in unserved places, it's better than nothing. Is this true for LEO projects such as Starlink and OneWeb? I thought the latency characteristics were much more reasonable there. Or is this speaking about bandwidth? The wording is a bit vague.

> I thought the latency characteristics were much more reasonable there

London to NY via space should be faster than through the ocean fiber, though it won't have a steady RTT over minutes, as the satellites pass overhead.

Look at fig 7 on [1].

[1] = http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/starlink-draft.pdf

Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few

#23

Post by ollie87 »

njs12345 wrote: post #18
qwsxyh wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hahahahahaha. Openreach is utter shit outside of very very lucky areas. I live in London (zone 6) and we get 30/8 (after fighting with BT support for two months to fix it from 22/1). If you're not covered by VM and win the postcode lottery as to not have it drop constantly, you're lucky to get "tolerable" speeds.

Just count yourself lucky that you don't have an Exchange Only (EO) line, that doesn't have a cabinet and runs directly to the exchange.. I'm in Whitechapel (Zone 1) and get 8/1

I have a friend who lives in a small market town in the North on an exchange only line, he gets 2/0.5. Most of his neighbours can get vDSL too, poor bastard.

He uses a 4G router with a Three unlimited SIM.

He has both connected because we do a lot of FPS PC gaming and the latency on 4G is too poor to game so he switches to his ADSL connection to play games and then uses 4G to download/stream.

Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few

#24

Post by alexkiritz »

kgwxd wrote: post #10
alexkiritz wrote: post #3

Verizon sold most of its landline business to Frontier over the past decade. While the few remaining Verizon FiOS customers got upgraded to gigabit, the Frontier FiOS customers were left with the old technology. Our Frontier contract just expired and we’re upgrading from 150 mbps to 500 mbps for about $5 more tomorrow. But I’m not optimistic about the speed. I tried paying $150/mo for the Frontier 500 mbps package tw…

Don't most servers throttle how much bandwidth outbound traffic gets? I never expect to get full speed downloading a random file. Even a super popular torrent might not have enough peers to reach full potential before it's done downloading.

I remember never getting more than a fraction of the speed. Like maybe 200 mbps max on a 500 mbps connection when downloading a file. I assumed with the number of people with gigabit connections two years ago I’d have at least run into a few servers that didn’t throttle that low.

Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few

#25

Post by rsynnott »

ehsankia wrote: post #11

> Signals from space have to travel a long way, so the connection is slower than earth-bound internet options. But in unserved places, it's better than nothing. Is this true for LEO projects such as Starlink and OneWeb? I thought the latency characteristics were much more reasonable there. Or is this speaking about bandwidth? The wording is a bit vague.

I think they mean latency, which is less of a problem, though still not good, for hypothetical LEO solutions. Bandwidth, however, will remain a problem.

Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few

#26

Post by rsynnott »

pimterry wrote: post #6

Interesting, but purely US focused. Anybody have good data on progress in the rest of the world?

In Ireland, oddly, (typically 1Gbit, with artificial caps for cheaper plans) FTTP is becoming quite common in rural areas, but is almost non-existent in cities, where (100Mbit or worse) FTTC is dominant.

Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few

#27

Post by thebigspacefuck »

I’m still on 15 Mbps at my home, for $30/month. I haven’t found the need to upgrade even though according to the FCC, I don’t even have “broadband” (defined as 25 Mbps down and 3 Mbps up). I don’t often hear people complain that their internet is too slow, only that it’s too expensive. I hope that more bandwidth translates to cheaper internet, but it seems like the past 10 years my ISP has had the business model of raise the price and the speed at the same time and remove slower tiers of service, basically forcing people to pay for speeds that they never use.

Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few

#28

Post by mabbo »

ehsankia wrote: post #11

> Signals from space have to travel a long way, so the connection is slower than earth-bound internet options. But in unserved places, it's better than nothing. Is this true for LEO projects such as Starlink and OneWeb? I thought the latency characteristics were much more reasonable there. Or is this speaking about bandwidth? The wording is a bit vague.

I think the author is remembering 15 years ago when the first satellite internet companies existed. I remember trying to play Warcraft 3 at a friend's house in the country and having 2-3 second pings.

Those companies were using Geosynchronous satellites so that dishes could point at a single spot in the sky. Unfortunately, geosynchronous orbit is at a height of 35,786 km. That means almost 120ms just to reach the satellite, plus another 120ms to get the signal back down to earth, then your request hitting the real internet and another 240ms to get back to you over the same two satellite hops.

SpaceX's Starlink will be <1000 km up in low earth orbit, so somewhere under 5ms away at speed of light. For any transmission across an ocean, Starlink will be much faster (so you just know high speed trading companies will be big customers). How much bandwidth it offers remains to be seen.

Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few

#29

Post by alexkiritz »

duxup wrote: post #7
hugh4life wrote: post #5

I live very far from any major town(10 miles from post office, 15 miles from a high school, 20 miles from a major retail outlet). Our current internet is $35 for a 5Mb connection and the best I can currently get is $70 for a 10Mb connection. But sometime next year I will have fiber available to me. IIRC, it'll be something like $60 for a 250Mb connection and $110 for a 1Gb. It'll be interesting to see how fiber trans…

There is a weird dynamic in the US where many rural areas have garbage level internet access ... and some pockets have insanely high levels of service. Somehow some random telcos have found a way (presumably government subsidies (I don't think that is bad)) to provide some amazing service, while others wallow in absolute trashy telco service. I know folks with consistently low latency 1Gb service that is just amazing…

With the amount of money Americans have spent on internet everyone could have 100 gigabit by now.

The real question is how telcos have managed to spend all of their income. I know mine Frontier spends it all on interest payments for the service areas they’ve bought.

Re: Faster internet is coming, but only for a few

#30

Post by distantsounds »

pimterry wrote: post #6

Interesting, but purely US focused. Anybody have good data on progress in the rest of the world?

Germany's broadband situation isn't that good either, it seems: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/03/678803790/berlin-is-a-tech-hu... and https://www.wsj.com/articles/germans-grow-frustrated-with-th...
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