Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 105 posts

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#71

Post by rpearl »

pascalxus wrote: post #46

For those in the east bay, Bay area, looking for another provider, keep an eye on this one: https://www.lmi.net/services/internet/phiber/ They claim 50$/mo (60 after first year) for speeds up to 1 GB/sec. But, its not available yet, but will be sometime in 2018, they say. Here's another one, I'm looking into: https://common.net/ unfortunately, alot of these aren't ready yet in my area

sonic.net is also doing gigabit in the bay area, including expanding to the east bay.

We have it at my home in San Francisco and it's been rock solid so far. It was slated for December 2017 but we got it even earlier, in October.

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#72

Post by FireBeyond »

ehPReth wrote: post #66
scottwernervt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are also bringing gigabit by end of 2018: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/chart...

Not sure I’d call 940/35Mbps gigabit (better providers use that to refer to 1/1Gbps — Charter’s marketing wank doesn’t sit too well :/)

Comcast is at 1gbps/35mbps.

What's the overhead of ACKs? It feels to me that you probably couldn't saturate the connection without getting buffer bloated by ACK traffic, at which point can it really be called 'gigabit' if it's not theoretically attainable?

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#73

Post by akira2501 »

roganartu wrote: post #60
adventured wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The slow part of Australia's Internet I get, that's a very common issue people talk about. What is the nature of the flakiness? If you don't mind elaborating. How frequently is it like that?

The flakiness is a byproduct of constantly degrading last-mile infrastructure that is prohibitively expensive to maintain. With the exception of FTTP installations that were completed before the NBN[0] became a political football, the majority of consumer internet connections in Australia have a copper last-mile serving ADSL2+. Flakiness with this copper is caused by general network neglect (due to unsustainable main…

> the majority of consumer internet connections in Australia have a copper last-mile serving ADSL2+.

Half the point of laying fiber was _because_ of all the old copper and how unusable it has become. Exceptionally short-sighted.

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#74

Post by ihattendorf »

oneplane wrote: post #59
MrVitaliy wrote: post #54

It's not broadband for me, it's monthly data caps. I can stream 4 different netflix shows, on 50Mbps, and blow through 1TB monthly cap in 3 weeks. No point of getting even faster connection.

Where in the world do you live that you still have data caps?

Cox added 1TB caps in the Phoenix area in 2017. Only other competition is CenturyLink, which is DSL and in most places only provides 20-40 down/1 up. I think they're starting to up it to 60/80/100 down and up to 40 up in some places, though.

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#75

Post by philliphaydon »

rhino369 wrote: post #44
dsr_ wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit more than that, but not much more. I changed from 50Mb/s to 1000Mb/s service a few months ago; latency is much the same, which means that when the pipe is not crowded, I really can't tell the difference. (But it's wonderful headroom for large file transfers.)

I can't tell the difference between 75mbit and 900mbit. Most servers don't get anywhere near 900mbit. And my hardware is almost always a limiting facture (wifi, hdd speed, etc).

Oh I can tell the difference between 75mbit and my current 800mbit.

But only when I’m downloading new games off Xbox one. Finishes in minutes rather than 10s of minutes.

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#76

Post by rsynnott »

ndespres wrote: post #6
marpstar wrote: post #2

In my area (Midwest USA), you can only get 100Mbps or more from either A) Cable company. In my case Mediacom. B) Fiber, which is also offered by Mediacom as well as some rural providers to select locations. DSL is barely 20Mbps around here, and you can't even get 10Mbps service in some spots two miles off US 20. As someone who'd like to buy a home in the country, I find this lack of coverage a much bigger issue. Forg…

I didn't realize DSL speeds were even possible above 7.1 Mbps, have things changed? ADSL is (or was) very much dependent on total wire distance and overall copper line quality from the nearest telco switching station. Top speeds were simply not possible above the 2-mile mark and that was pushing it. Rural areas, forget about it.

That’d be ADSL1. ADSL2+ showed up here (in Ireland) in 2006 or so, and it wasn’t new then. It went up to 24Mbit/sec. Same range as ADSL1, more or less. VDSL showed up here in 2010 or so (again, not sure when it was actually introduced), and does up to 100Mbit/sec. It’s much lower range, and is usually used from roadside cabinets. G.fast is extremely low range but can go up to 1Gbit or so. In some markets it’s used for multi-hundred-Mbit links for premises within 500m or so of a cabinet.

None of these are especially useful for rural areas.

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#77

Post by yorby »

rhino369 wrote: post #7

43% with less than two choices for 25mbit is more concerning. 25mbit is around what you'd need for a family of four without being bandwidth crunched all the time.

if your kids play Roblox, 25mbit is the bare minimum... this game appear to be very inefficient

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#78

Post by shados »

bhauer wrote: post #68
toomanybeersies wrote: post #47

I used to ask why anyone would ever need 100 Mbps, until I got 100 Mbps. Then I said the same about gigabit, until I got gigabit. Now I've moved from New Zealand, with its amazing internet infrastructure, to Australia, where I'm lucky to get 10 Mbps, and it keeps dropping out. I couldn't even download a folder from Dropbox last night because my connection was too slow and flaky. It should be the priority for governme…

> I used to ask why anyone would ever need 100 Mbps, until I got 100 Mbps. Then I said the same about gigabit, until I got gigabit. I wish more technologists who have become tolerant of stagnation in technology would remember that. A great deal of modern computing feels "good enough" when given only superficial thought. But replaced by something truly improved, the old rightfully feels outdated and decidedly inadequa…

People forget that when you get a tool (like an internet connection) that is orders of magnitude more powerful (10mb vs 100 or 100 vs 1000), you don't get to do the same things you used to 10 times better/faster. You get to do completely different things. 56k connections used to be fine when web pages were static text. 1mb connections were fine when the pinnacle of multimedia was MP3s.

Netflix in 4k HDR was not even something you imagined back then though. If we had connections orders of magnitude faster with matching latency, we could, I dunno, ditch local drives altogether! Make my machine a dumb terminal again, even if it's a gaming rig! My imagination is rather limited, but I'm sure people will figure something out.

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#79

Post by bigjimmyk3 »

nodesocket wrote: post #64

I recently moved to Nashville and signed up for the AT&T gigabit offering which is 1Gbps up and down with unlimited data for $80 a month (what a deal). Wireless devices cap out at around 400Mbps on Speedtest.net because they hit wireless throughput maximums. My iMac which is attached to my AirPort Time Capsule via CAT6 pushes around 700Mbps up and down. I'm fairly certain I am not being capped, just that Speedtest.ne…

I have a similar service (1gbps up/down) and I was able to get 944mbps by cabling my laptop directly to the ONT. According to my research, that's the practical maximum since there is some protocol overhead taking up part of the pipe. Once I reintroduced the router, I also dropped to ~750mbps.

All testing was to an iperf node at my ISP.

Re: FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

#80

Post by nodesocket »

ktsmith wrote: post #69
nodesocket wrote: post #64

I recently moved to Nashville and signed up for the AT&T gigabit offering which is 1Gbps up and down with unlimited data for $80 a month (what a deal). Wireless devices cap out at around 400Mbps on Speedtest.net because they hit wireless throughput maximums. My iMac which is attached to my AirPort Time Capsule via CAT6 pushes around 700Mbps up and down. I'm fairly certain I am not being capped, just that Speedtest.ne…

Your contract with AT&T probably only guarantees you 70% of the advertised speed. I've never had an issue with speedtest.net POPs being able to handle gigabit tests. I have lots of experience with underperforming AT&T connections of all kinds. I would try another speed test site if you think that is the bottleneck.

@bigjimmyk3 brought up a great point. Most consumer routers can't push 1Gbps fully. Also, I am actually routing through two routers. The first being the AT&T supplied router/modem combo, then that flows into an Apple AirPort Time Capsule in bridge mode. All CAT6 cabling.
Post reply on HN