71–80 of 432 posts
Oh boy! pedant time. note that ethernet and gpon(single line fiberoptic) are not broad band, they are base band. Broad band does not mean speed. it means it uses a lot of frequencies at the same time. OK getting dizzy here from too much excitement, pedant time is over for this week. We are all allowed to go back to using the non-technical meaning of broadband where it means speed.
Honest question: at what point, with real life usage, is 1 Gbps actually necessary for home users? I find that latency rather than throughput is what determines my perceived quality of an Internet connection. But am curious how others think.
I have 1gb connection and I agree that 99% of the time this isn't utilized, but it's very helpful when you want to download anything, from new steam game, through system updated to for me work related usage. this isn't that much about you can download per month, but how fast you can do it when you need something
This is nice, but with increased speed, they should also require ISPs do not impose a data cap to be considered broadband.
And that speed should be symmetrical. We are continuing to push the boundaries are content going out.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why shouldn’t there be a cap? Bandwidth isn’t free. It’s sad seeing people on a forum called hacker news having no idea how networking infrastructure works.
Because it's next to free (no additional cost to run the infrastructure we're already running) and we're nowhere near the limits of our existing infrastructure's overall bandwidth limits right now, as evidenced by the lack of caps not affecting quality of internet service for the entirety of 2020, when more people were online per hour than at any previous point in history.
This is actually relevant to my ISP day job, we have a pipe to a well known backbone provider, and dual pipes to a statewide provider. We ran on the dual pipes for a long time before pushing our ISP traffic over the single backbone provider. These days, if that main ISP pipe goes down, it fails over to the dual pipes to keep everything running. But now that we are offering packages higher than 25/3 for DSL, terrestrial wireless, and cable, the dual pipes don't have enough bandwidth to keep up.
If we offer gigabit service over fiber (and we do) just a couple of customers actively using their whole pipe is an enormous chunk of the network compared to the 40 or so customers that same gigabit of bandwidth would serve on previous 25/3 packages. We don't have data caps or even contracts (small town benefits :P ) but there is a lot more to it for smaller ISPs than adjusting the rate limiting and packages we allow people to use.
It's 100 Mbps down / 20 Mbps up as the proposal, and 1000 Mbps / 500 Mbps as an eventual goal. I imagine the 20 Mbps upload target is useless for most of us, even those on asymmetric cable, but there's a good chance that if the ISPs were forced to provide 20 Mbps up at their lowest broadband tiers, it would raise the ladder quite a bit. For example, on Comcast I get 800 / 20, but there's also a 400 / 10 tier (and may…
I wish this were true. I'm in Seattle and Xfinity will only sell me 5 Mbps up, even at 480 down, unless I pay out the ass for a symmetric gigabit connection I don't need. Very much looking forward to the FCC forcing at least 20.
It's 100 Mbps down / 20 Mbps up as the proposal, and 1000 Mbps / 500 Mbps as an eventual goal. I imagine the 20 Mbps upload target is useless for most of us, even those on asymmetric cable, but there's a good chance that if the ISPs were forced to provide 20 Mbps up at their lowest broadband tiers, it would raise the ladder quite a bit. For example, on Comcast I get 800 / 20, but there's also a 400 / 10 tier (and may…
Oh boy! pedant time. note that ethernet and gpon(single line fiberoptic) are not broad band, they are base band. Broad band does not mean speed. it means it uses a lot of frequencies at the same time. OK getting dizzy here from too much excitement, pedant time is over for this week. We are all allowed to go back to using the non-technical meaning of broadband where it means speed.
*Pedant
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So that someone's grandma who hardly uses her connection can subsidize your extreme over-consumption of digital media?
Data packets aren't a limited resource. The costs for your ISP are fixed whether they serve you 1MB or 1TB. Data caps and overage charges are purely a money grab, not some fundamental economic requirement. So no, infrequent users aren't "subsidizing" anyone else.
They over-subscribe because they know not every customer is going to be using up that full 2gbps 24/7.
Now, you can argue that an ISP SHOULD provision that way, with the expectation that their customers are going to be using the full connection 24/7, but that would raise the cost per customer a LOT, and I don't think people want to be paying for an ISP that provisions like that. It would be a lot more expensive per customer, and it would end up with a lot of the bandwidth going unused most of the time.
If the average bandwidth used by customers goes up, it will require the ISP to pay for and maintain more circuits and cost more money. We can argue there are better, fairer, ways to limit usage, but it is simply not true that every customer downloading a lot more doesn't cost the ISP more money in the long run.
Honest question: at what point, with real life usage, is 1 Gbps actually necessary for home users? I find that latency rather than throughput is what determines my perceived quality of an Internet connection. But am curious how others think.
Most people could get away with less, but sooner or later 1Gbps will go from "excessive" to "good" to "acceptable" to "slow".
Honest question: at what point, with real life usage, is 1 Gbps actually necessary for home users? I find that latency rather than throughput is what determines my perceived quality of an Internet connection. But am curious how others think.
I recently went from 300mbps to 2gbps, and one big difference is game update time. In the past, I would sometimes go to play a game with my friends and it would require a 10 gig update, and we would have to play a different game because it would take too long to update. Now I can update in under a minute and we can play.