171–180 of 432 posts
I paid for 200mbps for a long time and only typically saw 20-30mbps. When I moved, Comcast gave me a deal for 400mbps, I’m now seeing 50-60mbps typically. Never bothered looking at 1g plans because why pay the price to get just 100mbps in reality.
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I find that reasoning suspicious. Ever notice how most of the muni and coop internet providers offer a symmetrical speed while att and comcast don't? My bet is that there's no real technical limitation, it's simply price segmentation.
Fiber is symmetric, coax is not. This isn't some grand conspiracy, just how the underlying engineering works.
1000 Mbps down / 100 Mbps up should be the minimum for any first world country. Without mandated illegality of data caps and other Comcast data and modem games this does nothing to change the reality of boots on the ground unfortunately. These speeds only really allow you to close your data cap sooner in the month for the vast majority of customers who use Internet for modern things. A fixed data cap locks in an “era…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let me throw that question back at you: why should there be a cap? You are paying ISPs for a certain bandwidth speed per month and they sure as hell are not prorating your service based on data that you did not consume. If the ISP is in capable of delivering the agreed-upon band with every minute of the whole month, then they are not meeting the SLA that you’re paying them for.
If ISPs were like an electric utility, we'd see something like a cost per GB transferred in cents, with a minimum charge reflecting the cost of maintaining a connection of a certain speed to the network. Which is algebraically identical to a monthly charge and data cap with overage charge. The main issue is the overage charge is too high, it should be like 1 cent per GB (Comcast is charging 20x that).
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…
Agreed. ISPs can allocate bandwidth on DSL/Coax trunks as they please so it should just be a configuration change to increase the upload percentage.
Coax has to manage the single (or few) headend transmitter vs many CPE transmitters, you get better multiplexing to the CPE than from the CPE; and while the newest equipment may be able to handle CPE uploads across most of the spectrum, older equipment had a narrower range of frequencies available to upload with. If there's spare frequencies and downstream capacity isn't using it, then yeah... if not, there's trade offs.
For DSL, everybody has a dedicated pair to the DSLAM/remote terminal whatever, but crosstalk between pairs impacts the signals and again, the DSLAM has more ability to mitigate that towards the CPE than the CPE can when sending upstream. Anyway, VDSL/VDSL2 are specified with asymetric up and down bandwidth, as was ADSL. Of course, DSL ISPs tend to cap sync rates based on profiles, rather than running the lines to their maximum capacity, so a lot of lines do have more upload capacity than is allowed to be used, and to the extent that's the case, it would just take a profile update to get more upload for many users.
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…
Agreed. ISPs can allocate bandwidth on DSL/Coax trunks as they please so it should just be a configuration change to increase the upload percentage.
So cable at least will always be a bit asymmetric. A lot of fiber deployments (GPON) are also but the bandwidth limits are much higher so it does not really matter.
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It blows my mind that you guys in the US still have to deal with data caps ... It's been years in the UK since that's been a thing for broadband, and we're close to the point where mobile data will be the same
It depends on your ISP. My phone has a data cap of 100 GB/month. Once I go over that I am throttled when the network is congested. My home internet has no data caps.
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Ironically roads should also have caps and/or tolls, so this take is strange. This is partly why gas and excise tax is a thing…
The economy wide productivity gains from having tax funded roads mean it doesn’t make sense to have roads be profitable or break even as an individual entity. Similar thing probably goes for internet access.
I started with Comcast with 12Mbps service. Over time, they increased the base speed they offer to 20, 25, 50, and now 75. They have done this because they want to have x% of their customers on "broadband", per the federal definition. This is all well and good, but they keep increasing the price, and refuse to offer lower-tier service. I probably wouldn't want 12Mbps anymore, but 20 or 25 would suffice. I wish I coul…
I started with Comcast with 12Mbps service. Over time, they increased the base speed they offer to 20, 25, 50, and now 75. They have done this because they want to have x% of their customers on "broadband", per the federal definition. This is all well and good, but they keep increasing the price, and refuse to offer lower-tier service. I probably wouldn't want 12Mbps anymore, but 20 or 25 would suffice. I wish I coul…