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FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

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Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#261

Post by namecheapTA »

NavinF wrote: post #207
namecheapTA wrote: post #98

I got tired of my previous internet provider. I noticed Xfinity wifi was available at my house. I signed up. They asked me to either rent a router or bring my own and do self install. I have done neither. I use the Xfinity wifi. For over a year now. No complaints. Wiring every house in a dense area seems weird when you can just go wireless.

That just means you have very low standards. Wi-Fi is half duplex and the latency spikes are ridiculous.

I do I suppose. I just want my files to download, send, and my websites to load. I don't play games or operate some kind of server from my house, so for me it works as well as the wired internet at my work.

Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#262

Post by 5e92cb50239222b »

Strom wrote: post #254
5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Kazakhstan and am paying just a little over $10 a month for a 500 Mbit/s symmetrical FTTH link (no caps either). It's even faster and cheaper in Russia (at least it has been until now, I don't know how long it's going to be true since they're sanctioned to the moon). Both countries pretty much have (their own) monopolistic internet providers, and yet. Why do Americans tolerate this bullshit?

When comparing local production prices between different countries it is important to keep local wages in mind. The ISP employees in Kazakhstan are not getting paid US salaries. To do some quick math, let's take the median monthly salaries of both Kazakhstan and USA, 364,000 KZT ($755) and 3,500 USD per month respectively. That means that the $10/month 500Mbps symmetrical fiber is about 1.32% of median monthly wage i…

> are not getting paid US salaries

Sure, that was implied. All hardware and software used to build networks is imported though, and is bought for 'hard' currency (and a lot of it is needed to build networks in a country with an extreme climate and such low population density).

> Can you have a connection uptime of 6 months without interruptions

I've been using this provider since 2008 (and switched from ADSL to fiber-optics in 2013). It's been pretty great actually, I believe we had two service interruptions in all that time, roughly half-hour each. I don't remember the exact time since the last one happened some years ago.

No idea about 100% stability across many months of use since I don't host anything at home. This sounds like something you'd want if you were getting remotely operated on.

The router keeps the same IP for months, and I've never had the connection break from under me (besides two occasions mentioned above).

> Does the ISP have excellent global peering

Well, it's definitely not going to be as good as what you have in Europe. I mean, look at our geographical location, it's right in the middle of freaking nowhere. I guess it's pretty similar to what they have in NZ, only they are surrounded by water, and we by a thousand miles of steppe.

Last year, I looked at what they paid in Russia to get similar connection speeds. Prices were significantly lower in Moscow and SPb than in Siberia (roughly $5 for 1 Gbit/s versus $5 for 200 Mbit/s IIRC), which makes sense when you think of it. And we're way further down.

Both up and down speeds to US and EU datacenters are stable and close to 100% advertised.

Right now, ping to HN is at 220 ms. Going by the most direct route possible at the speed of light in vacuum, I get 100 ms to that same datacenter (us-west-2). So it's 2.2 times worse than the unreachable ideal. Don't know how much better it could be if we had direct cabling to the US since it's not going to happen for financial reasons.

We have a couple more providers (who seem to have been allowed to the market to make the main one look like less of a monopolist) that are not as popular. They definitely do oversell bandwidth. You'd be lucky to get 10% of what you had paid for, especially on weekends.

> Is the last mile cabling cost eaten by the ISP

You don't pay anything when signing up for the service.

So no, I think US customers are simply getting shafted for their money.

Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#263

Post by fomine3 »

Strom wrote: post #254
5e92cb50239222b wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Kazakhstan and am paying just a little over $10 a month for a 500 Mbit/s symmetrical FTTH link (no caps either). It's even faster and cheaper in Russia (at least it has been until now, I don't know how long it's going to be true since they're sanctioned to the moon). Both countries pretty much have (their own) monopolistic internet providers, and yet. Why do Americans tolerate this bullshit?

When comparing local production prices between different countries it is important to keep local wages in mind. The ISP employees in Kazakhstan are not getting paid US salaries. To do some quick math, let's take the median monthly salaries of both Kazakhstan and USA, 364,000 KZT ($755) and 3,500 USD per month respectively. That means that the $10/month 500Mbps symmetrical fiber is about 1.32% of median monthly wage i…

Mostly agree but add a point: Kazakhstan (or say all country except US) ISPs needs broad international connection to US because many services hosted in the US despite it's CDN era, so transit fee is added, while US ISPs just need national connection.

Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#264

Post by fomine3 »

icedchai wrote: post #253
bigyikes wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: what do you want that much bandwidth for? I could upgrade from 100Mb/s to 1Gb/s but I haven’t because honestly can’t think of a use case for myself.

I rarely need that much bandwidth, but it's convenient when available. Example: when I do an OS update. The lower latency and reliability of fiber is actually more important. DOCSIS / Cable networks are very flaky, subject to interference. There will be small periods of packet loss that literally come and go with the weather (or perhaps a neighbor messing around with their wiring.) 95% of consumers won't notice, but…

I wonder is bufferbloat become more problem on extremely fast residential connection.

Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#265

Post by fomine3 »

icedchai wrote: post #258
jl6 wrote: post #242

Higher minimum upload speeds will be more impactful than cranking download speed even higher. 100/100 is way, way better than 500/20. Upload speed is what enriches the two-way internet - servers, content uploads, high quality videoconferencing, cloud backups. Prioritising download speed is keeping us in the broadcast era.

For tech nerds like us, definitely. The average consumer doesn't need more upstream. A long as Netflix and Youtube work, it's fine!

Some average consumers now upload YouTube videos.

Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#266

Post by [deleted] »

dntrkv wrote: post #171
_lqaf wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah, my internet in San Francisco is worse that it was... in San Francisco in the 90s. My symmetric DSL then was faster than downstream-DOCSIS is now. I also have to keep a backup line, because Comcast here (SOMA) goes out about every other month, and I work from home. So I pay another $35 for MonkeyBrains, which is much slower, but more than nothing when Comcast is dead. To paraphrase Gandhi, I think American capita…

Why not just tether to your phone? It would be way faster than monkey brains.

[deleted]

Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#267

Post by icedchai »

fomine3 wrote: post #265
icedchai wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For tech nerds like us, definitely. The average consumer doesn't need more upstream. A long as Netflix and Youtube work, it's fine!

Some average consumers now upload YouTube videos.

True, though I'd guess a low single digit percentage. Those are the exception, not the rule. ISPs could upsell them on higher end plans. Though I doubt that will happen. A real problem with broadband is lack of choice, both in the plans themselves and the providers.

Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#268

Post by ehPReth »

PaulKeeble wrote: post #219
p1necone wrote: post #187

There's a lot of comments on this thread pointing out typical bandwidth usage of popular streaming services, games etc and claiming that there's no need for higher bandwidth connections. There's an important point that I think people are missing, which is that the bandwidth usage of internet services is going to be carefully tuned to balance quality and stability at typical internet speeds. When a large portion of co…

There is still a market for Blue rays for precisely this reason, compression does a lot of harm to the image and streaming services often run at 1/4 or less the bitrate. There is also the sound compression as well which is very heavily done on places like Netflix, presumably because their intended audience is watching on a tablet or a low end smart TV that has terrible in built speakers but if you have reasonable add…

Completely agree! I’d love to see a “new world” with higher bitrate video

Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#269

Post by ehPReth »

FireBeyond wrote: post #247
p1necone wrote: post #187

There's a lot of comments on this thread pointing out typical bandwidth usage of popular streaming services, games etc and claiming that there's no need for higher bandwidth connections. There's an important point that I think people are missing, which is that the bandwidth usage of internet services is going to be carefully tuned to balance quality and stability at typical internet speeds. When a large portion of co…

One of the things that frustrates me is that ISPs have successfully lobbied broadband surveys to exclude "inconvenient" plans. AT&T asked that their DSL plans were not counted towards their "average bandwidth" because they were "obsolete and no longer being marketed". To be clear - they were still _available_, and in many cases, your only option, but they were an anchor pulling down the average, so AT&T just "didn't…

Jesus! The power of ISPs seems unchecked and immense :/

Re: FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

#270

Post by BenjiWiebe »

Youden wrote: post #216
evandijk70 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fiber was installed here, and they provide three tiers - 50Mb/s, 100 Mb/s and 1000 Mb/s, for 45, 50, and 55 euro each. We took the 100Mb/s. I have no idea what I would use 1 Gb/s for, using it as definition for broadband would be premature. Than again, Bill Gates said that: '640 kB RAM ought to be enough for anybody'.

At 1Gbps the internet becomes close to indistinguishable from a local network, opening up interesting possibilities like a "NAS" that's actually just the cloud. That extra bandwidth, combined with the low latency of fibre, can make it possible to easily interact with a remote PC as if it's sitting in front of you, so you could do away with a home PC or workstation and use a thin client to access a beefy machine on-de…

For those use cases, latency is IMO a bigger deal than bandwidth. For remote PC, 20mbps 5ms latency would beat 10Gbps 50ms latency.

And due to the speed of light, you can't get latency arbitrarily low.

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