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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

#231

Post by dahfizz »

FredPret wrote: post #113
dahfizz wrote: 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

It's not like I have a problem with symmetrical connections. I have a symmetrical fiber setup. People who need to upload will choose a plan with it.

I just think _legally mandating that every connection be symmetrical_ is a mistake. Most people don't want or need it.

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

#232

Post by chowells »

dylan604 wrote: post #209
rayiner wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not “cheating the user artificially.” Comcast delivers service over shared-medium coaxial cable that was originally designed for one-way service. The available frequencies are split into upload and download portions, and increasing the upload speed decreases the download speed.

which just goes to show that they are not truly using fiber. which is my point. if you're using fiber, it is designed to be bi-directional full duplex or whatever to call it technically. if you are offering a true fiber connection with asymmetric speeds, then you are doing something artificial to it. if you are actually using coax cable, then it's 100% artificial since it's supposed to be fiber. so what are you imply…

Why do you think it's supposed to be fiber? I've never once seen comcast or any other cable internet provider claim they're fiber.

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

#233

Post by dasil003 »

habosa wrote: 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…

More SF/London anecdata: I got reliable low-latency 100Mbps via BT FTTC in 2011 (in SW12), which was better than anything I had ever gotten in the US across 3 states I lived in until 2018 at which point I got 1 Gbps AT&T Fiber in the East Bay which has been fantastic.

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

#234

Post by [deleted] »

xbmcuser wrote: post #10

I think this comes across as shocking to Americans but the thing is the rest of the world treats internet as a utility so most governments try to get cheap and fast internet for as large a portion of the population as possible. Where as US cities and towns are stuck under its isp corporate monopolies.

[deleted]

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

#235

Post by cat_plus_plus »

toast0 wrote: post #105
cat_plus_plus wrote: post #44

Just in time for wired internet to be obsolete. Especially for apartment buildings, makes much more sense to provide WiFi throughout private and common area than running cables to each unit. Even for individual homes, neighborhood 5g cells can do the trick for most people's needs. Also locking in current technology when constructing a building that could last a century is really dumb. Better to have access panels in…

High density living is even more reason to run wired connections. The more fixed stations you can get off the air, the better everything else runs. Your TV probably stays in one spot, so streaming player(s) should be wired. If you do anything real time, having lower base latency and nearly zero jitter is pretty nice too. If you want to save costs, it's really not too expensive to add one or two runs of twisted pair p…

How does the builder know where I am going to put my one or multiple TVs? Or if I even have a TV - plenty of people went mobile-only for video. Old coax cable came out in the middle of the wall in the room I decided to use for home office, what was I going to do with it there? Finally I just cut it out and drilled a whole through a floor in another room to run Sonic fiber cable and connect a modem and WiFi router inside a cabinet shelf. If I was renting, I would rather just have good WiFi signal int the apartment like I do at work or in the hotel and organize my limited space for my convenience rather than based on where cables run.

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

#236

Post by mikelward »

kergonath wrote: post #219
spacedcowboy wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Lives south of the river, even... So, the legends are true, and there are actually people south of the river? ;) Seriously though, in my flat in SE15, I had some decent DSL (as good as it can be, with pitiful bandwidth but it was really stable). I planned to get Hyperoptic to lay some fibre, but then I moved to a different place with 10/10 FTTH. My pet peeve in London is the patchiness of 4G and 5G coverage. It’s a…

EE doesn't work at my house and they don't care. Vodafone and O2 are better in my area, but I'm lucky if I get HSPA around my tube station.

Really looking forward to getting mobile data on the tube.

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

#237

Post by johnwalkr »

userbinator wrote: post #195

Unintentional side-effect of faster internet speeds: even more bloated app-sites. One wonders if average page sizes are going to start reaching hundreds of MB or even exceed 1GB more quickly.

I had 10Gbps (real-world numbers were about 6Gbps down and 2Gbps up) internet, on so-called unsaturated "dark fibre" for several years in Tokyo and while it was incredibly fast for downloading games from steam, streaming movies and synching to/from cloud services, it really wasn't noticeably faster than 100Mbps services for general web browsing. There was also no noticeable difference for general web browsing when I connected to my 10Gbps modem with 10Gbps wired, 1Gbps wired or wifi.

The bottleneck is definitely on having a million connections open to serve a typical commercial app-site including ads, and the latency of each, than just datarate.

So although it's for a bad reason, I don't expect that higher average datarates will automatically lead to more bloat, at least not right away. Hopefully it highlights where internet browsing bloat actually comes from (although I doubt it).

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

#238

Post by dahfizz »

moralestapia wrote: post #217
dahfizz wrote: 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.

>Mandating technical decisions that cause waste ... What you mean waste ? The same infra that lets you download, lets you upload. Also, if only you knew the cost of wholesale bandwidth ...

> The same infra that lets you download, lets you upload.

Not really. The DOCSIS protocol that runs the cable internet and GPON TDMA which runs fiber both dedicate more channels / bandwidth to download than upload.

We could come up with new communication protocols that are symmetrical, but this would lower download speed in order to increase upload speed. It's a physical limitation of the universe we inhabit. That tradeoff is not worth it for most people.

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

#239

Post by Dylan16807 »

dahfizz wrote: post #230
Dylan16807 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

75% download would be fine too. Right now many connections are 90% or 95% or worse, and that is not okay.

They are that they way for a reason. Legacy copper infrastructure only offers so much bandwidth, and customers would rather have most of that bandwidth be for download.

"Most" is fine. I'm not talking about "most" as the issue.

And I'm not talking about copper either. Legacy coax is the main problem. Because it has components on the wire enforcing upload/download splits that weren't designed for modern internet service. If it was installed today (and both upload and download were openly advertised, if necessary), then it wouldn't have such an asymmetric layout. It's not customer demand limiting upload to 10-20mbps. In theory this will get fixed over time, but I want more pressure on implementing the fixes.

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

#240

Post by tialaramex »

Most of England has last mile connectivity from BT, the historical monopoly telco. BT is required by the regulator to sell access over their "last mile" of copper, fibre, or whatever, at a fixed tariff, plus to sell routing over their long distance networks for a fair price, so that ISPs, even relatively small ones, can serve anybody with those last mile lines, from anywhere in the country. So maybe you pay Jim's Tiny ISP £29 pcm, Jim's pays BT say £8.26 pcm to reach your home, and they've got £20.74 to buy upstream bandwidth, pay staff, taxes etc. The box in your house either belongs to you or was sent out by Jim's, the fibre or copper between your house and some big building belongs to BT, fibre between the building and Jim's Tiny ISP is either owned by BT or a rival huge corporation.

Anyway for a good many years now, BT offered to basically do fibre rather than copper for the same install price on new homes so long as the builders actually had their people come in early and put the trenches where they need to be etc. on a multi-home site during construction. If you wait until the house is finished, BT wants $$$ to dig everything up and lay fibre.

This meant if the house builders understand why owners would want Internet, or if they at least understand market forces, they would pull their finger out and arrange this, because it's basically free money. Some fraction of buyers will actually remember to ask if the new house has decent broadband, and at some point vague non-committal answers either become specific (and actionable if you were lying) or the buyer walks away.

But if the house market is booming, and you don't get into the habit of having BT do their work early in development, you're going to keep building houses which don't have fibre, they'll sell anyway. This government rule tells builders nope, either show why that it'd be crazy expensive to run fibre up a mountain or whatever - or else pay up and get it done, whereupon of course that's pressure on builders to do it properly.

I expect the net price will be almost zero, because of scale.

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