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Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

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Re: Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US it’s also not uncommon for connections to be not only asymmetrical, but downright lopsided. Comcast sells “gigabit” in my area that’s 1.2Gbps down but only like 20Mbps up which is just silly. Thankfully a competitor offers true gigabit for about the same price, and so that’s what I subscribe to.

Can you even achieve 1200 down with only 20 up? Is it enough bandwidth to send all the ACKs back and get full speed down?

It depends on the window size. A pure TCP ACK packet is going to be 64 bytes (the minimum ethernet frame size). If you were to ACK every incoming packet, that would then mean the incoming packets have to be at least 3804 bytes, which puts them in jumbo frames territory, which are unlikely to work over the Internet.

However, you only need to send an ACK when the TCP window is full, not for every incoming packet. If the TCP window is set at 64k, for example, and assuming an MSS of 1460, then you can receive a total of ~66K bytes for each ACK you send ((64k/1460)*1500, assuming the provider counts every byte in every packet, not just the TCP payload). The window size can actually scale much higher though, up to 1GB. So, in principle, yes, you can comfortably get this much download speed with only this much upload speed.

Of course, this would only apply for downloading huge files with a very efficient implementation. If you are using HTTP to download lots of small resources, your uplink would be saturated with GETs far before you saturate your downlink.

Re: Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People really need to cool it with the 2024 buzzphrase "regulatory capture". I don't know which podcast, and I'm almost certain it is some dumbass podcast somewhere, is promulgating the phrase which has been popping up with ludicrous regularity in 2024 to describe every situation where someone is pissed off about something, but the primary reason people don't have 10gbps internet isn't regulatory capture, it is that…

> "20 minutes from Google's Headquarters" is San Jose. It's also Burlingame, San Mateo, Fremont, Union City... Or, if the traffic is bad, it's Redwood City, Menlo Park, Stanford, Cupertino... Or, if you're taking public transit (or walking), it's pretty much just Mountain View.

It doesn’t matter in which cardinal direction you travel for 20 minutes— regulatory capture ain’t stopping anyone from starting their own ISP.

Re: Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

#144
post #130

Comcast lobbied so hard to get our local mileage for fiber expansion voted down. When it passed, they suddenly decided they’re going to spend 6 figures worth of money to expand their own fiber backdown (they’re not even to the house). Its amazing when corporations will spend more money fighting something than actually implementing said thing.

6 figures? For a single house or?

He explained himself in the last sentence

>"Its amazing when corporations will spend more money fighting something than actually implementing said thing."

Re: Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

#145
post #39

I recently bought a house in Utah. Utopia is the best internet provider experience I've had so far (I've had Xfinity and Verizon previously). Speeds are typically 10-25 Mbps _faster_ than the advertised rate I'm paying for. Being able to have multiple (~5 or more) provider options to choose between is a welcome change from past monopolies I've been trapped in. Granted this all could change down the road (I hope not),…

Utopia provides an active ethernet connection to each subscriber with the specified bandwidth. This is superior to most fiber deployments, which are passive optical networks (GPON) where groups of 16-32 homes share a connection (usually 2.4 Gb down and 1.2 Gb up). I live in Utah and actively worked to get fiber in my small city. Utopia requires cities to guarantee a take rate (40% if I recall correctly) and taxpayers…

With active its just the last mile that is not shared, everything after that is shared. So it can suffer from the same oversubscription problem, just depends on how good the ISP is. But adding more capacity on those shared links is easier than fixing capacity issues on a PON deployment.

Re: Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's more to a connection than speed, there might be data limits, there might be latency differences and it might just be unavailable or expensive. I'm not from the US, but if it's somewhat economically viable, go for the underdog.

In the US it’s also not uncommon for connections to be not only asymmetrical, but downright lopsided. Comcast sells “gigabit” in my area that’s 1.2Gbps down but only like 20Mbps up which is just silly. Thankfully a competitor offers true gigabit for about the same price, and so that’s what I subscribe to.

Its not just the US as most last mile standards are not symmetric because they only use one line for both directions and use different frequencies for each side (most DSL, cable, PON). So the spectrum available is limited and since most users will benefit from more download rather than upload the split is not even by choice. But like in your example the ISP can sometimes tweak how much is available in each direction and you end up with those insane differences.

Where I live we mostly have symmetrical ethernet fiber, and some cable. We started using fiber long before PON came out and it never became popular here so pretty much all fiber here is 100/100, 1000/1000 or even 10000/10000.

Re: Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

#147
This reminds me of Longmont, Colorado's city-managed ISP (NextLight).

They fought the Comcast / Verizon duopoly for a while before founding it. Turns out when good people who live next door are the ones responsible for your basic utilities, you get better, faster, more reliable service with better customer support.

Who knew.

Re: Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

#148
post #140
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Australia has Abbott and friends to thank for fucking the whole NBN plan up royally. We would have had fiber to the premises everywhere and affordable gigabit by now, but Abbott decided Australia shouldn't spend money on what he saw as merely a "video entertainment system" and binned it in favour of the current Mixed Technology mess. Which then actually cost more to implement.

Pretty sure they intentionally screw it up. It means that the populous will generally think that the government can't provide effective utility at cost and so private equity can move in and provide equally bad utility at monopoly rent prices.

There’s a bunch of stuff there but I think they were also trying to protect Foxtel so Murdoch could avoid having to compete with Netflix etc.

Assholes all round

Re: Utah Locals Are Getting Cheap 10 Gbps Fiber Thanks to Local Governments

#149
I'm in NYC and I have a local ISP called Honest Internet that gives me gigabit for $50/mo. Comcast/Xfinity, Verizon, Spectrum all wanted $90/mo for this. I also have a direct email address to get support rather than some useless "chatbot" and endless phone queue. Support local ISPs.
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