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England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

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Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#181
post #89
post #52

I wish that countries would mandate symmetrical connections as well. This would open up so much more opportunity for self hosting web apps and allow for decentralized sites, such as peertube, to function better.

Almost all gigabit is already symmetric so this is a concern of the past.

This is a choice, by the ISPs, unrelated to the physical layer. It would be nice if it were a requirement.

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#182
post #90

Some color about buying home internet in London vs San Francisco (in my experience). I recently moved back from London to San Francisco. In my 3 years in central London (N1) I had to use a 5g hotspot (thank you, Vodafone unlimited) to get anything close to fast internet in my flat. If I went with a wired "broadband" connection I could not get more than 10Mbps down. The street next to mine had gigabit fiber though. Th…

My brother has Gig ethernet in London, 1G in both directions. Lives south of the river, even... :)

I've got AT&T GigE here in San Jose, but he's had it for longer than I have.

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#183
post #90

Some color about buying home internet in London vs San Francisco (in my experience). I recently moved back from London to San Francisco. In my 3 years in central London (N1) I had to use a 5g hotspot (thank you, Vodafone unlimited) to get anything close to fast internet in my flat. If I went with a wired "broadband" connection I could not get more than 10Mbps down. The street next to mine had gigabit fiber though. Th…

I know this probably doesn't help you currently, but if you move look for places that have Wave-G (apparently it's now called astound). It's available in SF and Seattle and offers symmetric gig up/down with no cap for $80/mo. I had it in Seattle, and I have a good friend with it in SF and we both had nothing but great experiences with them.

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are in the right location it's a viable alternative to fibre. Here's mine, elsewhere in the UK (not in Newcastle): https://www.speedtest.net/result/14185051949 Cheaper than fibre and 30-day rolling contract. Unlimited data.

Thanks for sharing. This seems totally fine, if not more than acceptable? How much does this cost?

£28pm. It's great, I originally intended to use it temporarily while potentially waiting for fibre to be connected, but it was so good I didn't bother with fibre in the end.

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#185
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still haven't figure out how to get IPv6 with hyperoptic with my own router. Other than that, I second, good service.

Don’t bother. Their IPv6 setup is notoriously broken. They have a number of IPv6 misconfiguration in their core switches which makes using IPv6 with your own hardware almost impossible. Unfortunately it seems they’ve also let go of all their good network admin. It used to be possible to find someone at Hyperoptic capable of investigating and fixing these issues, but no more.

Something definitely changed around COVID time, they stopped providing the info to set up your own kit freely, they wouldn't put you in touch with L3+ tech anymore and you couldn't connect your own kit without cloning IDs.

I had an issue one time, around 2020 and I couldn't fit the life of me get past a zero-knowledge L1.

Back in 2017-18 when I joined they put me in touch with one of their network engineers who helped me configure my EdgeRouter.

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#186

laughs in australian

And before someone comes in with the old excuse about population density, keep in mind they could mandate it for our dense metropolitan areas and service the great majority of citizens and businesses. If they'd actually built the right NBN in the first place.

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the bulk of FTTP connections in the UK, to which this article refers, which run over Openreach’s common last-mile or Virgin Media’s DOCSIS cables. They’re the only National operators offering gigabit, or near-gigabit speeds. There are plenty of smaller ISPs that run their own fibre and do offer symmetric connections, but the bigger players all off asymmetric connections.

Do you know what makes them asymmetric? Is it just traffic shaping at the ISP, or is it some hardware limitation?

It's not necessarily a hardware limitation (depending on hardware), but the at the physical layer the frequency plan for a DSL or PON connection typically allocates a narrower band for upstream traffic than downstream traffic. GPON is usually 2.4 Gbit down and 1.2 Gbit up across everyone attached to the same optical splitter.

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#188
post #90

Some color about buying home internet in London vs San Francisco (in my experience). I recently moved back from London to San Francisco. In my 3 years in central London (N1) I had to use a 5g hotspot (thank you, Vodafone unlimited) to get anything close to fast internet in my flat. If I went with a wired "broadband" connection I could not get more than 10Mbps down. The street next to mine had gigabit fiber though. Th…

Comcast now offers vastly higher upload speeds (10mbps -> 100mbps) so long as you rent their modem, which is an additional $25/month, but also comes with unlimited data. Paying for unlimited data separately costs $30/month if you own your own modem, but doesn't yet support higher upload speeds. It's unfortunate that this is the case, but for those who need higher upload speeds, it's at least possible with Comcast now…

Comcast offers higher upload speeds in the markets where there is competition. In the markets where they have bribed their way to a monopoly they have limited uploads and data caps. Fortunately I don't live in one of those so I can avoid them and wish the unholy demise of them as a company.

Re: England just made gigabit internet a legal requirement for new homes

#189
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. The vast majority of people are never going to need or care about hosting a decentralized hoozywhatsit. Mandating technical decisions that cause waste is suboptimal. You get symmetrical speeds with fiber, but if ISPs could use the existing fiber infrastructure and allocate 75% of the bandwidth as download instead of 50%, that would be a win.

Maybe John Q Public doesn’t want to host his own hoozywhatsit, but what if he starts making VR calls that require uploading massive amounts of data? Or some mesh technology takes off? Or he takes up vlogging? I don’t like the command-and-control mentality behind traditional one-way media (not saying that’s your mentality). The further we get from that, the better

I can easily envision a future where live 'lidar' scans of your body and face need to be streamed as part of a VR chatroom
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