341–350 of 432 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plenty of people work from home and that connection speed can be important when you're uploading a bunch of files while on a video call for example. Or there's three people in your house all on video calls.
With Teams using 0.3 Mbit/s (3fps) while I am sharing my screen, this is not really a concern.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many (most?) people do not even have devices that could utilize 1Gbit/s. My (relatively new) Galaxy Tab S7+ (11ac wifi) has a hard time going over 500Mbit/s (not sure if it's wifi or the slow internal memory, can't be arsed to find out), and it's similar with my (not that old) LG Velvet phone... All of that on a connection that can do a rock solid 1Gbps on my PC through UTP (cat 6)... What I'm trying to say is that m…
Anyone with a PlayStation/Xbox/gaming PC -- that's a lot of people -- can tell you how much they dislike waiting for a game download. I have 300Mbps download and I still find it too slow. I don't want to start a download, wait for half an hour before I can play the game.
It’s also about latency.
But the thing people miss is that this is mandating projects for future infrastructure projects. Whatever we set at a baseline is what we will standardize on for the next generation. People donut understand these are leading values for project acceptability not minimum standards of throughout as they are being presented. Massive difference.
It’s not about whether you can make it work today, it’s about what kind of projects are acceptable speed for tomorrow and whether we can call it broadband when it’s not.
Just look at gaming. When it came on a CD people complained that gaming would never work on a t1 line, and 1.5 mbit was supposed to support at 25 person office (1999). Then 10 mbit was mind blowing with bonded DSL and you could support everything. Now we are having an argument about 100 and 300, but the same logic applies. What works for today isn’t the standard we should be applying to qualify infrastructure minimums for buildout (which is what this is).
I mean imagine when games at 2-3TB each (it’s coming) and drives are 50GB. It’s not a question of throughput, as you said it becomes a question of time to complete — aka productivity — and that means waiting around for stuff to finish while you download. That’s what broadband standards are working against — what we think is acceptable to be installing today — not whether you can max the link with your current mix of devices and two 4k TVs.
Good point.
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…
Upload being low is frustrating. In my area Comcast sells “gigabit” service that’s 1000Mbps/20Mbps which seems like it’s explicitly designed to hook less technically aware customers who know “gigabit” is good but not exactly how. Thankfully there are alternative ISPs here that sell symmetrical gigabit, but that’s definitely not the case everywhere.
(1) We provide speeds "up to 100mbps" (actual max throughput in any 24h period being 10-60mbps)
(2) We provide mean speeds of 200mbps, easily beating the definition (mean is measured over time, not from the customer's perspective, so if most people get on at the same time then most browsing sessions see throughput of 10mbps or less due to poorly handled congestion)
(3) We provide mean speeds of 100mbps (upload is 0.01mbps)
(4) We provide mean speeds of 100mbps, over 99% of the time (every 3 months an 8h maintenance block drops speeds to 10kbps, rendering the network totally unusable that workday)
(5) Mean throughput is 100mbps, mean latency is 2000ms (totally unusuable for real-time _anything_)
(6) Mean throughput is 200mbps, mean latency is 20ms, every 5min a few packets will have up to 10s of latency (still totally unusable for most real-time purposes, but naive metrics make it sound good)
(7) You're allowed "unlimited" "100mbps" (but if you use that for more than a contiguous day, or a few long evenings in a row, then 100mbps is redefined to mean 100kbps)
And on and on and on. More useful metrics might measure actual consumer impact:
(a) Can you rely on this every workday to shuffle documents back and forth?
(b) Can you rely on this every workday to have low-resolution video calls?
(c) Can you usually play a quasi-realtime game for 30min without lag killing your character?
(d) During peak hours, can you reasonably expect to be able to stream buffered 720p video?
A raw 100mbps floor doesn't guarantee your network suffices for any of those use cases.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes and no, depending on your plant build out you might have great interplant connectivity - 10G between each switch, 10G to the router, but the extraplant connections still cost and have bandwidth limits. So if you only use 2 gbps total during peak, you may not need to upgrade your plant to support higher speeds but you will have to pay more to your upstream provider to support it. This is actually relevant to my IS…
It’s true that smaller ISPs have their challenges, but the cost for both interplant and extraplant connections has been generally decreasing. Economies of scale and peering agreements can mitigate many of these costs.
Should update the title to 100/20. I still find it amazing that companies can list services without the upload speed (eg Comcast). Of course latency and jitter matter too but that's probably above the heads of a lot of consumers. Upload and latency increasingly matter more and more and is essential to many work from home endeavors. Whether you are uploading content for work or play, or have a family video conferencin…
Upload speed is just a cash grab. It is a way to segregate price-sensitive residential vs price-insensitive business customers who can then be charged enormous amounts.
No.
This lacks all historical and practical understanding of why upload speeds are limited.
Back in the 70s/80s when coax was being planned and rolled out for cable, they needed to figure out what frequencies they would use. Cable providers knew they needs a ton in one direction and only a tiny bit for things like buying pay per view in the other.
This has been fine traditionally because even up to Netflix and streaming we haven’t needed the upload at residential. No one complained. That may start to change a little.
As far as I am aware, all DOCSIS (cable) providers in the USA that are using cable-tv coax are limited to a max of 35Mbps upto DOCSIS3.1.
I am writing this on 1250/35 right now. The local tiers for me are 100/15, 400/25, 1000/35, 1250/35.
It isn’t a “cash grab” at all. If you need more upload you need a new line that isn’t divided so asymmetrically, which means fiber. And once you fiber, there is zero reason to go go symmetric, as you have two lines with the same equipment on either side, to a point where the ISP will charge differently if you cut into their bandwidth too much.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The majority of people is not the qualifier here for this argument. It's what is actually a good definition for the term "broadband" in this time and age.
A good definition shouldn't apply to the majority of people?
If "good definition of minimum broadband speed", then "applies to the majority of people". The converse is not true. It is not the case that if "applies to the majority of people", then "good definition of minimum broadband speed."
1. Whether a speed applies to a majority of people is necessary but not sufficient.
2. You are unknowingly accepting being ripped off. It's not reasonable for big ISPs like Comcast to offer me 300 megabits download 15 megabits upload for $70 a month (might've been $90, but assume $70) while EPB of Chattanooga [1] offers 1 gigabit symmetrical for $67.99 a month. What speed any individual actually needs doesn't have to come into the picture. In matters of consumer protection, the principle of the thing matters just as much as actual consumer needs.
Today's internet technology (particularly optical fiber [2], paired with hardware implementing DOCSIS 3.1 or 4 [3]) is fully capable of providing 1 gigabit symmetrical for "the majority of people", even in rural areas. Moreover, in the long term, transitioning to fiber would be less expensive to the big ISPs like Comcast [4], but Comcast keeps raising prices on broadband over decades-old copper wires and committing subsidy fraud [5]. Don't let big ISPs define "good enough" to be much lower than technology and the price of the technology allow.
Going by the Chattanooga metric, 100 mbps symmetrical should cost no more than $10, and anything lower is not a good definition of minimum broadband speed for the present (never mind the future).
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/why-fiber-vastly-super...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Versions
[3] https://epb.com/fi-speed-internet/gig/
[4] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/why-slow-networks-real...
[5] Pick any one of these links. https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/06/mississippi-says-att-too... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/15/report-shows-comcast-con... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/16/verizon-t-mobile-oversta...
--------Everything below this line is bonus.--------
The following excerpt is from an article about data caps [6] but applies equally well to the state of broadband pricing in general.
> Network congestion arguments in this debate operate on an unsubstantiated and uncontextualized assumption of scarcity — there is only so much bandwidth, and a few people are going to use it all. Yes, some network congestion arguments have prevailed with wireless broadband because of the atmospherical and technical limitations of the medium. However, congestion is not as consequential for fixed broadband. Broadband providers reason that instead of limiting these internet “super-users” (which would be discriminatory and litigated accordingly), they need to implement data caps for all consumers, which they claim is fair and unbiased. However, scarcity is not a reality for broadband providers, even with super-users. Internet functions by “statistical multiplexing” meaning that bandwidth is dynamically allocated and reused without a limit “[u]nlike other utilities such as water, electricity, gas or oil.”
[6] https://publicknowledge.org/no-cap-the-truth-about-data-caps...
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 have 10mbps upload from Comcast. My GoPro footage takes ages to upload. This is just infuriating.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Me too. I tell everyone who will listen that they should look at their actual bandwidth usage. I've looked at the detailed statistics on my Google Nest WiFi router, and my family's peak usage never exceeded about 30 Mbps. That's with me working from home as a CS PhD student and my wife homeschooling our kids during the day. I have 300 Mbps (down) because that's the lowest, cheapest tier that my ISP offers. Maybe peop…
I have 3 days left in my billing cycle on phone and I've used 8.5GB of data. I have WiFi everywhere I go too. 500 for $5 would cost me about $50 - unlimited makes perfect sense.
I'm admittedly a minimal user of my phone. I average about 10 unlocks per day. Especially when I'm on-the-go, it's just calls and text messages, some driving directions, and maybe looking up a phone number or business hours. If I use it to listen to an audiobook or podcast, I download those ahead of time on WiFi. Using only 200 MB per month is normal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 could pay a fraction of what I'm paying for 75Mbps and get a lower tier of service. It should suffice that x% of customers are offered "broadband" for a reasonable price, even if some choose a lower speed. The problem is that most of the…
There also is a step between DSL and cable and fiber. I have a fiber to the node situation that gives consistent and reliable 20 Mbps down and I have two of those with load balancer. With VDSL they could sell 100Mbps service to a few houses close to the node. A real upgrade for me would involve running a cable through a beaver meadow. There is an electric line and crews do go in there to limb up trees and they are pl…