Unless I missed it, the article doesn't mention once that to get 10 Mbps, you need to pay for 100 Mbps because you NEVER get remotely close to the advertised speeds.
Pretending you get the advertised speeds reeks of industry shilling...
Should be within 10%? Where is that posted? I pay for xfinity 1gbps, and rarely get 50% of the "advertised maximum". I would switch to fiber in a heartbeat if I could, but my little street is the only street without enough customers to "make it worth it".
Interestingly, at least in my neighborhood fiber has similar problems to cable, according to the guy who installed fiber at my house. They are perfectly willing to oversell what the connection into the neighborhood is able to support. And the people who get limited first when it's too busy, according to him, are those with Gigabit connections.
You're never gonna get rated port rates in a speed test, there is overhead to contend with, and so thats reasonable considering overhead for the speed test. This is even more so when consider that on a 1gbps the fastest the interface you're handing off with is 1gbps
Common practice is to set the throttling limit for a cable modem at 10-20% above your advertised speed. On my half-gig service with my current carrier I clock between 550-640 Mbps. When I had a 150 Mbps Xfinity plan, I regularly clocked 180 Mbps.
If you're regularly getting less than your advertised speed, either the local distribution is over-extended and badly in need of an upgrade, or the line to your house is trash. Either way, you should be complaining.
Also, note that if you have 1 Gbps service from Xfinity, you have fiber out at the street, they just bring coax into your home.
I ran physical ethernet cable to my TVs when I built my house; just for this reason.
Otherwise, most placed I've lived, the cable modem was so close to the TV, that it's easier to just run a short wire instead of messing with WIFI passwords.
When I switched from DSL to cable internet several years ago, the concern I had was with upload capacity. To get to 10 Mbps upload speed, which I wanted in order to be able to do high-definition video conferencing along with other simultaneous internet usage, I had to order the 250 Mbps download speed. I recognize that I seldom use 250 Mbps download, but I can fill up 10 Mbps upload pretty easily.
Are backbones usually heavily asymmetric? Or do the ISP's just have say, 10gbit symmetric lines that barely get used on one side, with the odd content host saturating?
Without getting into super deep detail, on cable internet, there is a balance between spectrum allocated for Tv content, and internet bandwidth. The system will have a finite amount of spectrum available, which can be divided between TV content, downstream internet, and upstream internet.
Given that most peoples usage is mostly downloading, the CATV carriers allocate more spectrum/bandwidth to downloads vs uploads.
Any reason why can’t those be allocated dynamically and switched between upload/download? So your connection is still not symmetric, but at least your 350Mbps download speed can suddenly turn into 350Mbps upload, or be roughly evenly split in half if you’re both uploading and downloading?
I was pretty sure fiber was bi-directional so you can always saturate the same fiber with all upload or download based on demand. Copper wire can't do this so they use most of their last mile copper for download since that is what most people use the most of.
Yeah but my point is why can’t it do the same as Wi-Fi (since technically coax is just radio anyway) and dynamically allocate bandwidth for upload or download depending on usage?
technically possible, would require a ton of upgrades to the infrastructure to support such a thing, and probably just not worth the investment for these companies right now.
ADSL2+ uses frequency division duplexing (FDD), ~9:1 ratio (50/448 bins). DOCSIS up to 3.1 is also FDD. Typical EuroDOCSIS 3.0 modem deployments work in 8/4 (max 400/100 Mbit) or 16/8 (max 800/200 Mbit) channel configurations.
Finally 'full duplex' DOCSIS 3.1, renamed to 4.0, promises up to 10Gbps symmetric transfers thanks to echo cancellation (V.34 dialup modem says hi). Of course we barely switched to 3.1 and its unlikely cable networks will jump on the 4.0 bandwagon any time soon.
4:1 is a reasonable ratio for consumer connections, at least. I'm sitting here on a DOCSIS 3.0 modem but it's set up as 10:1. And going up a tier doesn't increase upload speed at all.
The transmission lines are half-duplex on a channel by channel basis. At any given time you can either use a channel for upload or download, but not both. And usage is very asymmetric. It's more efficient to thus allocate more channels for download. Otherwise, you'll have unused upload channels while the download channels are saturated.
It's mostly about the connection from the local node to your house, not the backbone.
You are a minority 1% user who doesn't really show up in the statistics. Most likely your upload is classified as file sharing and you are probably seen as abusing your connection. There is a reason why uploads are so limited for consumers. You should get a business connection if you really need it for conduction serious business.
If you do online backups you better get the backup plan that will be coming soon from a range of supported backup providers. /s
Video conferencing isn't the only use for upload bandwidth. There are lots of other use-cases which are much more mainstream, like streaming, YouTube uploads, backups (lots of phones these days do photo/video backups automatically), photo sharing, etc. Downloads are still more common of course, but these days I'd say upload bandwidth gets used far more than it ever has in the past.
Every use case you’ve given are minority use cases or power users. I’d say less than 5% of subscribers do the above and most do not use a lot of upstream bandwidth. Most phones do the backups at night when most people are sleeping.
Over copper it's easier to provide asymetric connections because the provider can better manage interference between different cables. When there's no interference problem it's only a question of allocating the bandwidth. Ideally the connection would auto-adjust and provide up to the full bandwidth in both directions instead of constant half/half or 0.9/0.1.
Ultimately I think this is an outcome of asymmetric price elasticity:
People who are downstream limited tend to be on the consumer side. Even if they might be willing to pay more for higher bandwidth it's more a convenience than something they really need. So in order to actually get them on a more expensive tier, the ISP has to offer an upgrade with a relatively high bandwidth per dollar difference in downstream.
People who are limited primarily by upstream however tend to be be more of the productive side and, if what they have is not enough, there is probably some form of urgency for more. They will jump on higher tiers for much smaller upstream deltas than their downstream-limited counterparts.
I don't know if there is an actual technological or logistical reason forcing ISPs to only offer one up/down ratio per price tier, but if they offered selectable asymmetry or symmetric, they would either get less money from downstream users (not attractive enough to upgrade) or from upstream users (problem solved at a lower tier).
We have a gigabit Bay Area Comcast connection for $89/month (gigabit down/35mbps up) and downloading an Xbox One game (50-90GB) while wired directly into the switch still takes 20min or so.
I can’t get behind the paywall, but faster internet is definitely worth it.
That upload speed is just ridiculous. With pretty much everyone pushing cloud storage & services, upload speeds are important too. I’d take a symmetric 100/100 connection over 1000/35 any day.
Exactly, having a 1000/400 Mb (roughly, can't complain for 49€) at home not only helps to download stuff as plenty others mentioned but it also created new opportunities.
I have roughly a half a gigabyte of pictures (digital and digitized from films). Before having fiber, it wasn't doable to do backup in the cloud. But now it's just a piece of cake and it doesn't take that long either.
Back when I had gigabit, it seemed like Xbox servers were by far the limiting factor in Xbox One downloads (either that or the peering between Verizon and MS servers). I'd rarely get over 100mbps, though I could saturate a usenet server connection pretty close to 1000mbps.
When I moved, I downgraded to 300mbps down, and I haven't notice any practical difference. Hell, for 3 months my download was artificially limited to 30mbps down (don't ask me why) and I really only noticed the issue when uptaking Xbox games. Everything else felt fine.
For a definition of "it" that corresponds to the prices American telecoms feel their monopoly/oligopoly position entitles them to charge, the title is right, the extra bandwidth isn't worth "it."
On a recent trip to Sweden, I saw multiples of the bandwidth I'm used to advertised for a fraction of the price. For that definition of "it," I'd pay "it" in a heartbeat.
If you live in an apartment in Sweden it's now often treated as a utility. I have the following things included in my rent: water, (central) heating and 1Gb/1Gb internet. I don't even know which provider it is.
In my case 500/500 fiber @ ~$40-45/month, somewhere around $20-25/month for 100/50 4G and something like $60-65 for 1000/1000 fiber. Semi-rural areas are usually not far behind.
With neighborhood deals you can push those prices a bit.
Most (major) train lines have fiber buried next to them that is leased by the various telecoms which helped the expansion.
[Edit]
Looked it up and a rural town in the southern parts where I used to live offers 1000/1000 from 5 different ISP's who are apparently fighting. They've all lowered prices recently, cheapest is at ~$30/month.
Most (major) train lines have fiber buried next to them that is leased by the various telecoms which helped the expansion.
Yes indeed. Most people don't know that. Here's a little piece of related trivia:
Long before wireless was a thing, people wanted to bypass the AT&T long distance voice telecom monopoly. Actually, long before voice communications were a thing, people wanted to send telegrams.
Hmmm ... as you note, there are train lines all over. Perfect for right of way to run telegraph wires, and eventually to run long distance fiber.
A relatively modern name arising from that: Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications
Why would Comcast do that? Wouldn't they want you to pay more for faster internet service (when you're almost never going to be maxing out your bandwidth)?
I guess they could be gaining by publishing this so it calms down those who are already on the maximum tier but are not happy and might switch to a different provider that can offer more?
I don't get it. Why would they, and what evidence do you have? I had a cable connection through Time Warner Cable and was paying $15/month for a 3Mbps connection. It worked fine. They were bought by Spectrum, who raised the price to $20/month and decreased the actual speed I was getting. When I finally caved and called to upgrade, the lowest speed I could order was 200Mbps.
As far as I can tell, it is the cable companies that are pushing the higher speeds, not saying they are not worth it.
I had the same deal. When spectrum took over my only option was to go from $15 to $70 if I wanted more speed. In addition I felt that they made the 3 mbps worse over time with more and more interruptions and reduced speed.
As far as spectrum goes they are pushing for higher speeds for a very high price. It feels like only being able to buy a Porsche as a car. Certainly a nice car but very expensive for most of us.
That seems unlikely. The ideal customer for Comcast, et al is one who pays for the top tier, world class speeds and then checks their email. The margins on that customer are fantastic and any outage is unlikely to be detected.
A paid placement from Comcast is more likely to talk about how much better Netflix is without the occasional freeze or how better movies movies are in HD.
Is it? You have another 5 dollar price increase but your service level is still "good enough" according to the article. Certainly not worth doing anything about it.
It's not just about speed but about time. I value my time. Yeah, I may not saturate my gigabit line, but when I only have to wait 1 minute for a 3GB MacOS update instead of 20, that's valuable to me. It's worth the expense of having a mostly idle gigabit line.
Also I definitely saturate my gigabit link on download all the time, and sometimes on upload too, but I realize I'm not the average person in that regard.
Latency makes a big difference too. Using the internet on a symmetric fiber connection with sub 5ms latency is way better than a coax connection split between 1,000 homes with a few hundred ms ping.
Maybe, but most US households don't even have the "bandwidth" that they say are advertised as getting. Just because Comcast says you are getting 200mbps doesn't mean you are, it's probably just boosting it temporarily and allocating it from other houses in the neighborhood. And the uploads are laughable, try having multiple FaceTime video calls going in the same house, they degrade quite quickly because they barely have a solid 2mbps upload.
Also, behind all these NATs and blocked ports, the whole system is designed to not be used. Update it so everyone has strong connections with consistent bandwidth and low latency with IPv6 and perhaps we would see more possibilities with home internet use.
Comcast's 150mbps down includes 10mbps up - it's not terrible for one or two people but as a power user I had to upgrade to 450down/20up.
The upload is so pathetic because cable doesn't have symmetric bandwidth, you have to choose if you want more download channels or more upload channels. Most households don't need much upload, thus the ratio.
10mbps up is a minimum requirement for me though IMO.
If it's not fiber to the home, I don't believe the advertised numbers. Most households don't need a garbage coax connection that can't provide a consistent bandwidth, but imagine if households had decent connections. Then you can create hardware and software that let people host their own media and backup their own devices, instead of handing it over to giant corporations with government backdoors.
> Then you can create hardware and software that let people host their own media and backup their own devices, instead of handing it over to giant corporations with government backdoors.
Actually low upload bandwidth makes it harder to give 3rd parties data :P
Question, does AT&T fiber do fiber all the way to the home? Because I know one of my family members has their fiber offering, but they have serious bandwidth issues around normally busy hours - suggesting even with fiber they're over provisioned.
They do have installations of Fiber all the way into the box in your home. I don't know if that is uniform although I assume it would be. And of course they are over provisioned.
FTTH != dedicated fiber. Most residential fiber is a shared service based around passive optical networks which will turn one fiber line into many endpoints for residential customers. Poorly managed PONs can give poor performance.
That said, AT&T has been selling their U-Verse FTTN (fiber to the node) service as "fiber home internet" for many years now. This is still based around DSL technologies but have fiber terminated much closer to the house than at a central office. If they're not on a Gigapower plan with a true optical network terminal inside their house, they probably don't actually have fiber.
> Then you can create hardware and software that let people host their own media and backup their own devices, instead of handing it over to giant corporations with government backdoors.
I have 3 gbps of upload bandwidth at my house. (1 Comcast fiber line with 2 gbps symmetric, and one Verizon fiber line with 1 gbps symmetric.) I still host everything on One Drive because what the heck is the point of hosting your own servers as a consumer?
Netflix? Instant iOS upgrades? Unless you’re transferring something bigger than about a gigabyte, the TCP slow start won’t even ramp the connection up to full speed before the download finishes. In this age of AWS there is little point in having that much upload capacity at home. Really, I was just tickled that Comcast would agree to build what’s basically a Metro-E line to my house so I ran with it.
I have gigabit up and down, and wired gigabit throughout out our house. The only time I come close to saturating it is when I’m “downloading Linux distros” via bit torrent. Netflix maxes out at I believe 10-15Mbps per stream, my son has both his XBox and PS4 on a wired connection in his room, we have a combination of Roku TVs and Apple TVs through out the house.
Even when I’m working from home and uploading large files to S3, it barely hits 100Mbps on a good day and the CLI automatically uses multiple streams to upload.
My VPN connection to our AWS network also rarely hits 100Mbps.
i had comcast 250mb down package for years. I could easily download 2TB a day for multiple days straight without a problem. In fact, there were times I did.
Not sure how it works in US, but in France when you get FTTH, you actually get GPON which means that you don't have your own fiber between your home and the central office.
The central office is connected by a single fiber to a spliter that services up to 64 homes.
So when you buy 1Gpbs internet, it actually goes through a 2.5GBps fiber shared with up to 63 other houses.
My regular 100/100 line downloads 3Gb in five minutes. The difference in my life is miniscule compared to a gigabit line. Also the gigabit line requires hardware all the way to achieve the promised speed.
When you're talking about 3GB, sure. If you look at video games, a lot of your AAA games are coming in at 12-70GB or even 100GB. Certain games (I'm looking at you PUBG) also don't optimize their updates, so some updates can be upwards of 10-15GB. Once you get into that realm time really does become a factor.
I'm on 400/25 and I always dread installing Battlefield 4 after a fresh install. I think it's around 60-70GB right now and takes around 45 minutes to get everything downloaded.
Too bad steam has trouble hitting even 100mbit/s on my gig fiber connection. In fact I find that many services seem to throttle at exactly 100mbit/s, e.g. Dropbox.
I had this exact issue then found out either my cable or port on my router was bad, and was only initiating a 100mbps link.
Steam can hit 40MBps (over 300mbps) regularly for me.
I find what you say to be true though, most services can't saturate my link - but I'd double check because exactly 100mbps is suspicious.
Also don't use speedtest.net, try fast.com (run by netflix) - ISPS are known to "cheat" on speedtest.net (they can host a speedtest server inside their network) but fast.com downloads actual movie fragments from netflix's cdn.
Might need to check something out. I saturate my 400mbit connection. Now PSN on the other hand... last time I used it Sony artificially limited it to something like 20mbit.
It's not just single downloads though. It's also not having to hear from the other room "are you breaking the internet again?!" every time I need to download something large while my wife is watching Netflix.
That's buffer bloat. Your router is putting your wife's Netflix data in a queue behind seconds or even minutes of data from your connection. Completely pointless but it made some microbenchmark 0.1% better so they shipped it. Buy devices that don't do that.
> Trust me, once you get a faster connection you definitely won’t want to go back to 100.
I had a 1G connection, but my most often used desktop would often switch to 100M, and it would take me weeks to notice. I would absolutely get a 1G connection again if it were reasonable, but a solid 100M is fine for everything other than really large up/downloads. Symmetric 10, with decent latency isn't that bad either.
> It’s kind of like high DPI displays.
Yeah, I've had those too, and I don't find them worth it. A slightly higher than 'normal' dpi, that I can run at 1:1 was pretty nice until my eyes got older.
Symetric 10 does not even allow for streaming in good quality.
100 is good most of the time but then happens the moment you need some big chunk of data (ex: a game of 150 GB) and then you need to wait quite a bit.
Also, if you have a larger household with everybody streaming and playing games, 100Mbits can saturate pretty quickly.
As I don't have kids, 100Mbits is mostly OK for me but occasionnaly I wish I had more. Like when I moved my photo backup, 500GB to upload was a pain at 100Mbit/s, but obviously this is not something I need to do everyday.
I had a high quality 6M for a long time, and streaming was fine; much nicer (less buffering) when I got a bigger pipe though, although the bigger pipe was less consistent
I also have a gig connection and a bad connection to a patch panel took out one of the twisted pairs and caused the link to downgrade to 100 base TX. Took me weeks to notice.
Have you amortized the value of that time over 24 hours?
I'm probably not going to apply that MacOS update until the weekend, so I can download it at 3AM. I don't care if it takes 2 minutes or 20 minutes (or, heck, 200 minutes!) to download season three of The Wire as long as I can start episode one "quickly enough" because the rest will follow.
The point is I don't want to wait. For example, Firefox broke in update 5, and I really need Firefox to work for some testing. So I can't put off that update until night.
That's just a small example, but not having to plan my life around large downloads is in and of itself a benefit of the fast connection.
I don't disagree with you, but I think most HN readers are power users.
In the context of this article, I feel like most readers don't fall into this category and probably aren't getting that amount of return on their higher speed investments.
Though, your comment brings up an interesting point - I wonder if internet speeds would play a factor in getting more users to run their updates? In general they're disruptive so there are other issues, but it could be part of the overall frustration. Personally, I have a fast connection so I rarely have this specific problem.
Anyone who plays video games on computer, ps4, or xbox one also regularly saturates their connection. Game updates are a daily occurrence on Steam for me (mostly because I have hundreds of games) and giant updates are normal on console
I'd beg to differ, especially if your console or PC is networked wirelessly. 802.11n can only do 600mbps in the best conditions. Residential gig pipes are not uncommon anymore.
I've seen some ridiculous download speeds from Steam, but never enough to saturate my gig pipe even during a full game installation. I just can't see Steam providing that kind of bandwidth to it's users when the filesizes can get upwards of 50gigs. They would DDOS themselves.
The Steam client starts to throttle its network throughput based on disk performance these days. I've got games installed on SSDs and on spinning rust, and I'll see download speeds back off on the spinning rust while it unpacks files despite there being plenty of resources to cache files otherwise. This is very different from the times where it would attempt to download everything first and then begin to unpack files.
I can’t get more than 430/430 wireless with either my laptop with 802.11ac or my iPhone. My old 802.11n 5ghz laptop gets around 100/100. I have the bundled modem from AT&T with gigabit internet.
Not that it’s a big deal all of our bedrooms, living room, and office are wired for gig-e.
I was thinking of updates before even getting to the third paragraph of your comment - to that question I would answer a definite 'yes'. I think slow Internet poses a massive security risk in this regard. It isn't even about users choosing to run or not to run updates - my parents had such slow Internet at one stage that a large Windows or OSX update would never get a chance to download before the next lot of updates arrived. They'd be several updates behind through no choice of their own.
Incidentally I think Windows Updates are getting better in regard to disruptiveness. What I wish they would do though is implement some kind of "reboot as many times as you need to apply the update and then just power down once it's done". I will hit 'Update and shutdown', then turn on my PC the next day and have to wait for the second stage of the update to run. Though again, it seems vastly improved as of late - that second stage takes very little time at all.
>I don't disagree with you, but I think most HN readers are power users.
A percentage of HN readers perhaps. Gigabit isn't even available here in Indy for the vast majority of people.
Fastest I can get is '100mbps' for 60$ a month plus fees with a 1TB cap and it's not even close to actually being 100mbps from AT&T. Netflix degrades itself probably once an hour on average while watching HD (not 4K) and if nothing is running I'm lucky if I can pull 500-750 kilobytes a second (a whopping 4-6% of my advertised speed) from my gigabit server I rent (but a friend in another city with gigabit can almost max out his advertised speed pulling from it).
Allegedly AT&T has up to gigabit for about 20% of the city if you happen to live in a fiber neighborhood. If I went witha business line, at a considerably higher cost (if they'd even allow it at a residential address) I could get up to '300mbps'.
I've been seeing people talk about gigabit at their homes for years no and I'm just like "whatev!".
It depends on how you define “power user”. Many power users don’t understand a lot of the issues surrendering this either.
I’ve known many people who perceive stuttering, slow page loads and game lag as a result of a slow connection. The ISP’s could solve this but I’d imagine it works in their favor. While I’m more than capable of tweaking SQM/Cake (OpenWrt) values and testing (keeping ping times below 40ms), I believe a simple consumer friendly (read: automatic) solution is sorely needed.
Not sure if this matters for your overall point, but mac os updates are downloaded asynchronously, it's their installation that locks up your computer for 20 minutes.
Sounds like an inconsequential detail, but I can't readily think of any recent experience where I actually did have to wait for a download to finish before I could continue doing anything. Most things are either streaming or background, nowadays.
This is why we should not be paying for speed/bandwidth, but be paying for data usage. Internet carriers should deliver traffic at the fastest speed possible all the time, and then just charge us for how much we use their network. What we've become accustomed to in home internet pricing goes by another name for mobile carriers: throttling.
Paying for bandwidth is simple and straightforward. You don't accidentally exceed your bandwidth and suddenly have to pay out the nose because some application wasn't behaving like you expected. I can imagine a lot more ways that ISPs can get tricky with pricing on data usage as opposed to bandwidth involving peek time pricing, zero rating some usage(as opposed to "fast lanes")etc. It just feels dystopian and bad for consumers.
>You don't accidentally exceed your bandwidth and suddenly have to pay out the nose because some application wasn't behaving like you expected.
Just think of all the crypto mining out there for example, imagine how many people could accidentally allow crypto mining software to be installed and all of that data being transferred for half a month and then BAM big bill.
Or someone makes malware that just transfers junk data purely to rack up data charges for kicks, or worse someone at an ISP does it to boost earnings or because they hate their employer and want them to eventually get 'caught doing it'.
> Just think of all the crypto mining out there for example, imagine how many people could accidentally allow crypto mining software to be installed and all of that data being transferred for half a month and then BAM big bill.
Not to deride your point, but crypto mining typically uses very little data since you only need the data contained in the block header, and don't need all of the transactions.
True, I suppose I was thinking of running full nodes, even then though it would just be a one time decent data hit for something like bitcoin. Still might be a practical thing for 51% attacks for currencies with smaller blockchains.
Fine, change my crypto malware thought to a distributed storage malware. Several years ago there were a handful of distributed peer-to-peer file storage and backup system programs where you'd select how much of your storage you wanted to donate to the pool and that would determine how much you would get to use in the collective cloud for storing stuff.
It wouldn't surprise me if someone had malware out there doing this for their own uses, if you had a botnet of 100k computers and took 1 gig from each, and had a 100x redundancy you've got 100 gigabytes of distributed storage for whatever which you might be using for your own backup or for file sharing...
Actually I bet you could do this for hosting stuff on the darknet, if you had a decent amount of machines on a botnet, say 10,000 machines, and needed just 100mb for your entire darknet site, you could have all 10,000 machines hosting it and serving it via 10,000 tor connections... interesting. This would be a hell of a plot device or potentially even a practical deployment for espionage use or general criminal activity. Have one machine somewhere under your full control randomly loading 1 or more of the sites at random to load the actual darknet site.
As mobile is eating the industry already anyways, this is already what's happening, and phones have adapted to show and restrict data usage, and it'd be nice if we had that much control at home too.
Ideally, the per usage rate you pay for Internet should both be much more granular than mobile ISPs use (by the MB would be nice), and so inconsequential that you don't need to worry about it as a daily aspect. (Nobody spends serious thought about the cost of turning on the light switch when they enter a room.)
I disagree. The vast majority of internet costs are setting up the internet lines, maintaining them, and customer support. "Correct" pricing would likely be "large monthly price" + "negligible price per gb".
So, the main thing people fail to recognize is that the cost you pay and the cost of providing you service aren't significantly correlated. Essentially you are paying into a budget sheet that your ISP has going, where their expenses of operating the network (plus profit, of course) is divvied up amongst all their customers.
It's just preferable, of course, if people who use the service more, effectively pay more for it. As someone who's in the top few percent of Internet users, I know this would mean I would pay more, but I'm okay with that. Seniors who check their email once a week shouldn't be spending $60 a month on Internet.
Yeah I have mixed experience with that. I get some surprisingly fast downloads on my 1 gbps line+wifi
But then redownloading a non-new game from playstation network goes only a few mbps, and my playstation 4 is the only wired connection I maintained
Some of the services that you would think have highly connected CDNs or could leverage multi participant torrent like downloads just... dont? Games are like 40gb+ these days but I still expected it to take 20 minutes
How much time do you think the average person actually spends waiting for a download?
Most of my software updates run in the background.
Xbox/Steam is the only thing I notice downloading and I usually just play a different game if it needs a big update.
Work is the only reason I pay for 300mbps. Otherwise, 100mbps would be more than enough for me.
Upload is where I really feel the lack of bandwith. I don't have fiber avaialable at my new apartment, and the cable companies only offer 20-25 mbps upload. Hard to run a plex server for my parents and inlaws with that little bandwidth.
Honestly, what's the point of these paywall articles? Might as well just setup groups on HN that only have access to certain paywalls and publish them there. At this point, this is only a topic of discussion. I have no idea why the article thinks it's not worth it.
Streaming video might not cause you to max out your connection, but downloading large files may well. And if so, the files will download substantially faster.
This title needs a [paywall] suffix. So not having read this, I suspect this was a paid article by US carriers to convince US customers that everything is fine and they should stop demanding service that is on par with the rest of the developed world because "what we offer you is fine, see?"
Only if you get the advertised speed. Sure you can buy 100mbps, but will you get? Unlikely even wired locally via gigabit.
The major service provides frequently lie out their teeth by abusing "up to". 1mbps is a speed that fits into "up to 100mbps".
Further, due to the corruption of the FCC through Ajit Pai, they are not required to give you any particular level of speed that you'd expect depending on where you talk to.
The ISP can willfully and intentionally degrade your service you bought and paid for to certain providers unless that provider also pays.
A fast internet connection is like many other resources: It might be good 95 % of the time and you won't pay any attention to it, but when you notice it's not enough, it totally pisses you off. This applies equally to computer RAM, floor space and station wagons.
I really appreciated my gigabit Ethernet connection when I had to reinstall DCS World, which takes over 100 gigabytes of disk space when you own a few extra modules.
If it is not worth it (presumably because most of the bandwidth will just be unused) then the ISPs should just bump everyone up to gigabit or whatever their end-user links support. Few people will actually use the extra bandwidth so there will not be much aggregate impact on the ISP.
(This holds true until the next leap in bandwidth-requiring applications comes along.)
Perhaps for a "regular" user, but for me it's absolutely worth it. I imagine the ycombinator crowd isn't who this article is targeting, and likely isn't applicable for many here
In my neighborhood Cox brought in Gigablast a few months ago and it is around $130/month. Google fiber is being put in now, and will be $70/month, so we will have two Gigabyte options. I like seeing the competition, and the resulting price drops. Surely Cox will need to lower their price to compete.
High quality 4K and 8K streaming isn't widely used because there are not many users. Therefore there is no evidence for demand. Therefore there isn't many providers and content. Therefore we don't really need the bandwidth to support something that doesn't exist yet. We need to wait until other markets prove that this demand exists. Then the companies who provide the solutions can take over our market. Win-Win.
Average is definitely the wrong metric to look at for this. It's like saying "the average speed of a car is only 25 MPH, but you're paying for one that can go 70", but everyone would probably agree that going over 70 is valuable even if it's only for short bursts.
Especially bad is that graph of speed vs average bandwidth used (%). Of course people don't max out a 1000 MB/s line constantly, that'd be nuts.
I've got 600/600 fiber here in Northern Spain and it's its just awesome for things like digital game downloads on the PS4 or PC. The cost is 39 eur a month. The funny thing is that most people with this kind of setup are using a wifi hotspot that can only deliver a small percentage of the available bandwidth.
I feel like this is a prime example of survivorship bias. We're in an era where things have to be transcoded to utilize a smaller amount of bandwidth, so the stuff delivered to us it pre-optimized for our connection. If YouTube or Netflix suddenly made their encodes not crap, we might actually saturate the network.
Having asymmetric connections in most homes I feel severely limits how we utilize the internet. I'm definitely a power user and would choose to run multiple game servers and web servers along with some video streaming if my connection was symmetric instead of the 400/25 that Spectrum offers in my area. However, I feel like there's a ton of missed potential for home-based consumer server appliances. Maybe companies like Apple would be more inclined to take platforms like Synology and create something that's even more user friendly.
They want you to buy the business product / enterprise product then. I know it sucks to be in the power user category, but part of the reason they have such limited upload channels is to prevent their networks for being used exactly how you want to use it. They don't want people running servers, they want your money to upgrade to an enterprise level service.
I agree that there's so much potential that could be tapped if only we consumers could host stuff at home. In fact, I don't get why ISPs don't push for this; I have to imagine there's a market out there for this.
Stuff like Syno is probably the easiest stuff out there, but it's still not like I could give it to my parents. It has huge potential just from a marketing standpoint. "Your data's secure because you know exactly where it is." and such.
> The Wall Street Journal studied the internet use of 53 of our journalists across the country, over a period of months, in coordination with researchers at Princeton University and the University of Chicago.
From the first paragraph, which says it all right there. If journalists aren't making use of all available resources, then more mustn't be worth it. Nor do I see the price comparisons of related internet service globally.
The internet is a form of free speech. The more bandwidth, the more free content available. For example, DOCSIS 4.0 can deliver symmetrical 10Gbps to the house.[1] YouTube would be obsolete if a P2P video platform was available with users pushing 10Gbps each.
Faster internet is worth it. Nobody uses what they have because they don't have much. Everything has been designated to the cloud.
It’s where electricity and bandwidth are cheapest due to economies of scale. Colo’ing at HE is fun/etc (and they have an amazing team!) but you pay a pretty penny for physical proximity.
That’s like quoting the max speed off a WiFi box at the store (AC5300 does 5.3gbps gais, Linksys PR said so!) or funnier yet 5G radio vendors.
TBH the backend upgrades to support DOCSIS 3/3.1 are way more expensive than its worth to ISPs. Add in the finite spectrum for cable providers and giving up 24 channels per modem to-fill-what-business-need isn’t high priority.
Apparently the WSJ has discovered the Law of Diminishing Returns.
I'd love to double my 20Mb/5Mb connection, and I would get real benefit from doing so. Doubling a 1Gb/1Gb connection doesn't have the same effect nor benefit.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadPretending you get the advertised speeds reeks of industry shilling...
If you're regularly getting less than your advertised speed, either the local distribution is over-extended and badly in need of an upgrade, or the line to your house is trash. Either way, you should be complaining.
Also, note that if you have 1 Gbps service from Xfinity, you have fiber out at the street, they just bring coax into your home.
I get a peak speed of slightly over my 35Mbs limit on my Vodaphone FTC - can sustain 30-31 Mbs for big downloads eg from steam.
And once you get to the multi-hundreds speeds, wifi might literally not be able to support the speeds.
My parents have an actual 1Gig link but you’d never be able to tell unless you removed the router because it just can’t keep up.
I measure from my actual elderly laptop running over the Fastest devolo POE kit.
I do need to investigate getting a better router than the standard one Voda provide.
Otherwise, most placed I've lived, the cable modem was so close to the TV, that it's easier to just run a short wire instead of messing with WIFI passwords.
Are backbones usually heavily asymmetric? Or do the ISP's just have say, 10gbit symmetric lines that barely get used on one side, with the odd content host saturating?
Without getting into super deep detail, on cable internet, there is a balance between spectrum allocated for Tv content, and internet bandwidth. The system will have a finite amount of spectrum available, which can be divided between TV content, downstream internet, and upstream internet.
Given that most peoples usage is mostly downloading, the CATV carriers allocate more spectrum/bandwidth to downloads vs uploads.
2) The cable is a shared medium (like wifi) so it’s not just a matter of what you’re doing, but what everyone else is doing.
Finally 'full duplex' DOCSIS 3.1, renamed to 4.0, promises up to 10Gbps symmetric transfers thanks to echo cancellation (V.34 dialup modem says hi). Of course we barely switched to 3.1 and its unlikely cable networks will jump on the 4.0 bandwagon any time soon.
It's mostly about the connection from the local node to your house, not the backbone.
If you do online backups you better get the backup plan that will be coming soon from a range of supported backup providers. /s
and that reason is that DOCSIS allocates more channels for down than up. and DOCSIS does that because that's what most consumers want.
People who are downstream limited tend to be on the consumer side. Even if they might be willing to pay more for higher bandwidth it's more a convenience than something they really need. So in order to actually get them on a more expensive tier, the ISP has to offer an upgrade with a relatively high bandwidth per dollar difference in downstream.
People who are limited primarily by upstream however tend to be be more of the productive side and, if what they have is not enough, there is probably some form of urgency for more. They will jump on higher tiers for much smaller upstream deltas than their downstream-limited counterparts.
I don't know if there is an actual technological or logistical reason forcing ISPs to only offer one up/down ratio per price tier, but if they offered selectable asymmetry or symmetric, they would either get less money from downstream users (not attractive enough to upgrade) or from upstream users (problem solved at a lower tier).
I can’t get behind the paywall, but faster internet is definitely worth it.
I have roughly a half a gigabyte of pictures (digital and digitized from films). Before having fiber, it wasn't doable to do backup in the cloud. But now it's just a piece of cake and it doesn't take that long either.
When I moved, I downgraded to 300mbps down, and I haven't notice any practical difference. Hell, for 3 months my download was artificially limited to 30mbps down (don't ask me why) and I really only noticed the issue when uptaking Xbox games. Everything else felt fine.
On a recent trip to Sweden, I saw multiples of the bandwidth I'm used to advertised for a fraction of the price. For that definition of "it," I'd pay "it" in a heartbeat.
With neighborhood deals you can push those prices a bit.
Most (major) train lines have fiber buried next to them that is leased by the various telecoms which helped the expansion.
[Edit] Looked it up and a rural town in the southern parts where I used to live offers 1000/1000 from 5 different ISP's who are apparently fighting. They've all lowered prices recently, cheapest is at ~$30/month.
Yes indeed. Most people don't know that. Here's a little piece of related trivia:
Long before wireless was a thing, people wanted to bypass the AT&T long distance voice telecom monopoly. Actually, long before voice communications were a thing, people wanted to send telegrams.
Hmmm ... as you note, there are train lines all over. Perfect for right of way to run telegraph wires, and eventually to run long distance fiber.
A relatively modern name arising from that: Southern Pacific Railroad Internal Network Telecommunications
Sprint for short.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_Corporation#Southern_Pa...
As far as I can tell, it is the cable companies that are pushing the higher speeds, not saying they are not worth it.
As far as spectrum goes they are pushing for higher speeds for a very high price. It feels like only being able to buy a Porsche as a car. Certainly a nice car but very expensive for most of us.
A paid placement from Comcast is more likely to talk about how much better Netflix is without the occasional freeze or how better movies movies are in HD.
Also I definitely saturate my gigabit link on download all the time, and sometimes on upload too, but I realize I'm not the average person in that regard.
Also, behind all these NATs and blocked ports, the whole system is designed to not be used. Update it so everyone has strong connections with consistent bandwidth and low latency with IPv6 and perhaps we would see more possibilities with home internet use.
The upload is so pathetic because cable doesn't have symmetric bandwidth, you have to choose if you want more download channels or more upload channels. Most households don't need much upload, thus the ratio.
10mbps up is a minimum requirement for me though IMO.
Actually low upload bandwidth makes it harder to give 3rd parties data :P
Question, does AT&T fiber do fiber all the way to the home? Because I know one of my family members has their fiber offering, but they have serious bandwidth issues around normally busy hours - suggesting even with fiber they're over provisioned.
That said, AT&T has been selling their U-Verse FTTN (fiber to the node) service as "fiber home internet" for many years now. This is still based around DSL technologies but have fiber terminated much closer to the house than at a central office. If they're not on a Gigapower plan with a true optical network terminal inside their house, they probably don't actually have fiber.
I have 3 gbps of upload bandwidth at my house. (1 Comcast fiber line with 2 gbps symmetric, and one Verizon fiber line with 1 gbps symmetric.) I still host everything on One Drive because what the heck is the point of hosting your own servers as a consumer?
Even when I’m working from home and uploading large files to S3, it barely hits 100Mbps on a good day and the CLI automatically uses multiple streams to upload.
My VPN connection to our AWS network also rarely hits 100Mbps.
The central office is connected by a single fiber to a spliter that services up to 64 homes.
So when you buy 1Gpbs internet, it actually goes through a 2.5GBps fiber shared with up to 63 other houses.
I'm on 400/25 and I always dread installing Battlefield 4 after a fresh install. I think it's around 60-70GB right now and takes around 45 minutes to get everything downloaded.
Steam can hit 40MBps (over 300mbps) regularly for me.
I find what you say to be true though, most services can't saturate my link - but I'd double check because exactly 100mbps is suspicious.
Also don't use speedtest.net, try fast.com (run by netflix) - ISPS are known to "cheat" on speedtest.net (they can host a speedtest server inside their network) but fast.com downloads actual movie fragments from netflix's cdn.
Dropbox does not throttle at 100mbit/s either.
Maybe it's a problem with your ISP or your router?
Trust me, once you get a faster connection you definitely won’t want to go back to 100.
It’s kind of like high DPI displays.
I had a 1G connection, but my most often used desktop would often switch to 100M, and it would take me weeks to notice. I would absolutely get a 1G connection again if it were reasonable, but a solid 100M is fine for everything other than really large up/downloads. Symmetric 10, with decent latency isn't that bad either.
> It’s kind of like high DPI displays.
Yeah, I've had those too, and I don't find them worth it. A slightly higher than 'normal' dpi, that I can run at 1:1 was pretty nice until my eyes got older.
100 is good most of the time but then happens the moment you need some big chunk of data (ex: a game of 150 GB) and then you need to wait quite a bit.
Also, if you have a larger household with everybody streaming and playing games, 100Mbits can saturate pretty quickly.
As I don't have kids, 100Mbits is mostly OK for me but occasionnaly I wish I had more. Like when I moved my photo backup, 500GB to upload was a pain at 100Mbit/s, but obviously this is not something I need to do everyday.
I'm probably not going to apply that MacOS update until the weekend, so I can download it at 3AM. I don't care if it takes 2 minutes or 20 minutes (or, heck, 200 minutes!) to download season three of The Wire as long as I can start episode one "quickly enough" because the rest will follow.
That's just a small example, but not having to plan my life around large downloads is in and of itself a benefit of the fast connection.
In the context of this article, I feel like most readers don't fall into this category and probably aren't getting that amount of return on their higher speed investments.
Though, your comment brings up an interesting point - I wonder if internet speeds would play a factor in getting more users to run their updates? In general they're disruptive so there are other issues, but it could be part of the overall frustration. Personally, I have a fast connection so I rarely have this specific problem.
I've seen some ridiculous download speeds from Steam, but never enough to saturate my gig pipe even during a full game installation. I just can't see Steam providing that kind of bandwidth to it's users when the filesizes can get upwards of 50gigs. They would DDOS themselves.
I'm not convinced here in the US, although maybe it is slightly more common in those who download lots of games or updates
Not that it’s a big deal all of our bedrooms, living room, and office are wired for gig-e.
Incidentally I think Windows Updates are getting better in regard to disruptiveness. What I wish they would do though is implement some kind of "reboot as many times as you need to apply the update and then just power down once it's done". I will hit 'Update and shutdown', then turn on my PC the next day and have to wait for the second stage of the update to run. Though again, it seems vastly improved as of late - that second stage takes very little time at all.
A percentage of HN readers perhaps. Gigabit isn't even available here in Indy for the vast majority of people.
Fastest I can get is '100mbps' for 60$ a month plus fees with a 1TB cap and it's not even close to actually being 100mbps from AT&T. Netflix degrades itself probably once an hour on average while watching HD (not 4K) and if nothing is running I'm lucky if I can pull 500-750 kilobytes a second (a whopping 4-6% of my advertised speed) from my gigabit server I rent (but a friend in another city with gigabit can almost max out his advertised speed pulling from it).
Allegedly AT&T has up to gigabit for about 20% of the city if you happen to live in a fiber neighborhood. If I went witha business line, at a considerably higher cost (if they'd even allow it at a residential address) I could get up to '300mbps'.
I've been seeing people talk about gigabit at their homes for years no and I'm just like "whatev!".
The real difference is streaming almost everything vs needing to wait until a download finishes.
I’ve known many people who perceive stuttering, slow page loads and game lag as a result of a slow connection. The ISP’s could solve this but I’d imagine it works in their favor. While I’m more than capable of tweaking SQM/Cake (OpenWrt) values and testing (keeping ping times below 40ms), I believe a simple consumer friendly (read: automatic) solution is sorely needed.
Sounds like an inconsequential detail, but I can't readily think of any recent experience where I actually did have to wait for a download to finish before I could continue doing anything. Most things are either streaming or background, nowadays.
Perhaps Steam?
Just think of all the crypto mining out there for example, imagine how many people could accidentally allow crypto mining software to be installed and all of that data being transferred for half a month and then BAM big bill.
Or someone makes malware that just transfers junk data purely to rack up data charges for kicks, or worse someone at an ISP does it to boost earnings or because they hate their employer and want them to eventually get 'caught doing it'.
Not to deride your point, but crypto mining typically uses very little data since you only need the data contained in the block header, and don't need all of the transactions.
Fine, change my crypto malware thought to a distributed storage malware. Several years ago there were a handful of distributed peer-to-peer file storage and backup system programs where you'd select how much of your storage you wanted to donate to the pool and that would determine how much you would get to use in the collective cloud for storing stuff.
It wouldn't surprise me if someone had malware out there doing this for their own uses, if you had a botnet of 100k computers and took 1 gig from each, and had a 100x redundancy you've got 100 gigabytes of distributed storage for whatever which you might be using for your own backup or for file sharing...
Actually I bet you could do this for hosting stuff on the darknet, if you had a decent amount of machines on a botnet, say 10,000 machines, and needed just 100mb for your entire darknet site, you could have all 10,000 machines hosting it and serving it via 10,000 tor connections... interesting. This would be a hell of a plot device or potentially even a practical deployment for espionage use or general criminal activity. Have one machine somewhere under your full control randomly loading 1 or more of the sites at random to load the actual darknet site.
Ideally, the per usage rate you pay for Internet should both be much more granular than mobile ISPs use (by the MB would be nice), and so inconsequential that you don't need to worry about it as a daily aspect. (Nobody spends serious thought about the cost of turning on the light switch when they enter a room.)
It's just preferable, of course, if people who use the service more, effectively pay more for it. As someone who's in the top few percent of Internet users, I know this would mean I would pay more, but I'm okay with that. Seniors who check their email once a week shouldn't be spending $60 a month on Internet.
But then redownloading a non-new game from playstation network goes only a few mbps, and my playstation 4 is the only wired connection I maintained
Some of the services that you would think have highly connected CDNs or could leverage multi participant torrent like downloads just... dont? Games are like 40gb+ these days but I still expected it to take 20 minutes
Any way thats what I’m paying a premium for
Spoil me
Most of my software updates run in the background.
Xbox/Steam is the only thing I notice downloading and I usually just play a different game if it needs a big update.
Work is the only reason I pay for 300mbps. Otherwise, 100mbps would be more than enough for me.
Upload is where I really feel the lack of bandwith. I don't have fiber avaialable at my new apartment, and the cable companies only offer 20-25 mbps upload. Hard to run a plex server for my parents and inlaws with that little bandwidth.
The major service provides frequently lie out their teeth by abusing "up to". 1mbps is a speed that fits into "up to 100mbps".
Further, due to the corruption of the FCC through Ajit Pai, they are not required to give you any particular level of speed that you'd expect depending on where you talk to.
The ISP can willfully and intentionally degrade your service you bought and paid for to certain providers unless that provider also pays.
I really appreciated my gigabit Ethernet connection when I had to reinstall DCS World, which takes over 100 gigabytes of disk space when you own a few extra modules.
(This holds true until the next leap in bandwidth-requiring applications comes along.)
I want responsiveness, I don't want my traffic to circumnavigate the globe, and inconsistent pings can signal other qos issues.
High quality 4K and 8K streaming isn't widely used because there are not many users. Therefore there is no evidence for demand. Therefore there isn't many providers and content. Therefore we don't really need the bandwidth to support something that doesn't exist yet. We need to wait until other markets prove that this demand exists. Then the companies who provide the solutions can take over our market. Win-Win.
Especially bad is that graph of speed vs average bandwidth used (%). Of course people don't max out a 1000 MB/s line constantly, that'd be nuts.
Having asymmetric connections in most homes I feel severely limits how we utilize the internet. I'm definitely a power user and would choose to run multiple game servers and web servers along with some video streaming if my connection was symmetric instead of the 400/25 that Spectrum offers in my area. However, I feel like there's a ton of missed potential for home-based consumer server appliances. Maybe companies like Apple would be more inclined to take platforms like Synology and create something that's even more user friendly.
From the first paragraph, which says it all right there. If journalists aren't making use of all available resources, then more mustn't be worth it. Nor do I see the price comparisons of related internet service globally.
Faster internet is worth it. Nobody uses what they have because they don't have much. Everything has been designated to the cloud.
[1] https://www.cablelabs.com/technologies/docsis-4-0-technology
Because that's where the money and power lies.
TBH the backend upgrades to support DOCSIS 3/3.1 are way more expensive than its worth to ISPs. Add in the finite spectrum for cable providers and giving up 24 channels per modem to-fill-what-business-need isn’t high priority.
I'd love to double my 20Mb/5Mb connection, and I would get real benefit from doing so. Doubling a 1Gb/1Gb connection doesn't have the same effect nor benefit.