11 ms·

FCC report finds almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds

161 points by cmurf 9y ago

marpstar 9y ago
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. Forget competition, there's practically no service at all.
- rayiner 9y ago
  Much of my county doesn’t even have water and sewer pipes. People just spend the thousands to tens of thousands of dollars needed to build septic systems and wells and accept that is the trade off for living in the country.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    You say that like it's a bad thing. Wells and septic systems are so common that I would struggle to believe they're a "trade off". Where I grew up (on well water and a septic tank), people couldn't believe that city folk pay for their water, and what's more, that they pay to have it go down the drain! A septic tank costs ~$5k and will last for 40 years. Over the lifetime of a septic tank, my city water bill will have cost me $24,000.
    - randallsquared 9y ago
      A septic tank also costs acreage that city homes do not typically have available for less than $24,000.
      - freehunter 9y ago
        Which is why cities have city water systems, yeah, but anywhere outside of the city, septic and wells just makes more sense.
        ghaff 9y ago
        >anywhere outside of the city It's not quite that stark. I live in a population ~7K ex-urban town. I have town water. I do have a septic tank although I believe a portion of the town near the center has sewer hookups.
        gnim 9y ago
        There is an environmental downside to septics too. Where I grew up there was a sandy aquifer that caused nitrogen loading from septic run off in ponds and marshes. This attributed to algea growth, oxygen depletion and marine species die-off. There is now an extensive effort to sewer the region.
    - wiredfool 9y ago
      Yes, and occasionally, you might have to get a guy with a backhoe to come out and do some work. That's $1000. That's assuming that you don't need a new line, which would take a perc test and a new permit. All the while the guy with the backhoe is looking at your system and wondering how it ever worked or got signed off in the first place. It's several hundred to get it pumped every couple of years, I think I'm remembering in the range of $600 and just shy of 3 years between pumpings. Then the well needs power, and someone needs to do the generator in a power outage, or you get to chip in for a spiffy one with an autostart, and the only time the well head ever acts up is on national holidays when if you can get someone out, it's 3x overtime. You know, I kind of like city water now.
      - freehunter 9y ago
        You say that like city water never needs maintenance. My neighbor had roots growing into his pipes from a tree on city property, but since the pipes were on private property he had to have them replaced on his own dime, and also fix the flooding in the house from the backed-up sewer line. I'm not arguing that septic tanks are better, and I apologize that many people reading my comment seem to think I am. What I'm arguing is that septic tanks are not uncommon. On the contrary, basically everyone outside of city limits is using one.
        Broken_Hippo 9y ago
        Most cities I lived in serviced the lines up to the point they entered the house, though. Not as much to worry about.
        vonmoltke 9y ago
        All the cities I have lived in would only serice lines up to and including the meter. Everything downstream of the meter was the property owner's responsibility.
      - LyndsySimon 9y ago
        > Yes, and occasionally, you might have to get a guy with a backhoe to come out and do some work. That's $1000. I can rent a mini excavator for a weekend for <$200. > That's assuming that you don't need a new line, which would take a perc test and a new permit. What permit? > It's several hundred to get it pumped every couple of years, I think I'm remembering in the range of $600 and just shy of 3 years between pumpings. I had my tank pumped last month, it was $160. > Then the well needs power, and someone needs to do the generator in a power outage, or you get to chip in for a spiffy one with an autostart, and the only time the well head ever acts up is on national holidays when if you can get someone out, it's 3x overtime. When I was on well water, our pump could (and did) run off a car battery and an inverter when necessary. > You know, I kind of like city water now. I just bought a home that's on city water, but has a septic tank. I'm prevented by ordinance from replacing the tank, but I'll do everything in my power to keep it as long as possible. It's far easier and cheaper than paying for city sewer even without including the costs of hooking up to it.
    - justin66 9y ago
      > Where I grew up (on well water and a septic tank), people couldn't believe that city folk pay for their water, and what's more, that they pay to have it go down the drain! Where I grew up, people with the choice invariably chose "city water" when it was available, and the network of its availability is continuing to expand outward, as quickly as substantial pressure and money from the suburbs and exurbs can make that happen. I don't know whether the same is true of sewer service.
    - Broken_Hippo 9y ago
      Actually, some years ago a septic system could cost anywhere from $5k to $15k in the area I was in. Most companies won't take payments, and if you've had some financial difficulty, many places won't help you fix it. You can, however, get different programs to help with your sewage and water bill. And then you have the upkeep. Folks have already mentioned power issues (generator or stored water), pumping, and other things that can go wrong (including backflow into your house and testing water occasionally to make sure it hasn't been contaminated). Most folks where I lived (indiana) also needed a water softener just to keep their water from stinking of eggs. Clothes didn't last as long, and few white clothes stayed white for long without special caustic cleaners. Blonde hair turned orange and it took a beauty treatment to get it back and/or special shampoo. Some homes have a section of yard that stays pretty soggy, and folks need to know where the system is so they don't accidentally dig there or plant trees to closely. If you don't know this stuff, you gotta pay someone to come out and tell you. Not to mention that at least with city water, the expenses are constant instead of sudden: city water is more like regular oil changes whereas a septic is more like a sudden flat tire or two that happens to stink up your car somehow.
  - dboreham 9y ago
    And some of us spend tens of thousands building themselves a network. Experience has shown me however that I'm in the minority. Almost nobody values their Internet sufficiently to want to spend that much on a connection.
  - Shivetya 9y ago
    throw in many would be surprised at how many areas cell coverage drops out. traveling a lot has shown me that cell is not guaranteed and having a satellite dish at least gets us tv/music. then again traveling also reveals that free internet is just a McD away.
  - oneplane 9y ago
    In my country there are no houses with septic tanks or wells. I guess it really depends on your location and government on how infrastructure is handled.
    - perl4ever 9y ago
      What is your country, where they have no wells?
- ndespres 9y ago
  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.
  - freehunter 9y ago
    In my experience modern DSL (like AT&T Uverse) is fiber-to-the-curb and DSL from there. Meaning the amount of DSL line you have is incredibly short and then it hits a fiber line.
    - ndespres 9y ago
      That's an interesting approach, and really seems like it would cut down on the amount of work required in the home to provide such a significant speed upgrade over traditional ADSL. Thanks for enlightening me! Verizon rips out the copper network interface from your home and replaces it with Fios gear all the way through, which always felt like overkill though I know they do it partly to suck you in to their TV offerings too. I wonder how much the extra expense of this last 100 feet of the deployment (from telephone pole to house) holds back more broadband penetration.
  - dwyerm 9y ago
    vDSL is what changed to make the speeds higher, but although it got a little better, it seems like the distances are still pretty limited. I suspect that the DSLAMs have become smaller and cheaper, so that you can push those out of the central office and into smaller cabinets inside neighborhoods, which had the effect of making the distance problem appear to go away. That still seems to leave truly rural areas out of luck, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL
  - rsynnott 9y ago
    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.
thekingshorses 9y ago
I pay $75 for 7/0.768Mbps and $220 for 50/10Mbps for 2 business lines. My only option is Spectrum cable. They are offering 100Mbps fiber for $770/month if sign up for 5 years contract.
- inetknght 9y ago
  $770/mo for 5 years contract? I assume that's on your business lines and has a service level agreement with it?
  - dboreham 9y ago
    Not the parent, but yes (we used to have fiber service from Charter). It's also symmetrical so 100Mbits up, which is an order of magnitude faster than their residential copper service. The 5 year commit is to cover their cost stringing fiber from the closest splice point to your facility (could be several blocks). If you can peer with them in a building that is already fiber-fed on their network, the cost should be lower.
LogicX 9y ago
Surprisingly, in Myrtle Beach, SC we have multiple high speed providers choices: HTC (as in htcinc.net, a local telco cooperative offering gigabit fiber), or Spectrum, who just minutes ago I heard for the first time that their new default tier in our area is 100mbps. Not sure if they go much hiher though, because a few years ago TWC was going to offer 300mbps cable service, and then the Spectrum merger cancelled that expansion. Either way, I'm happy with my high speed fiber service. And I likely have competition to thank.
- juliangoldsmith 9y ago
  >a few years ago TWC was going to offer 300mbps cable service, and then the Spectrum merger cancelled that expansion. Are you sure they don't offer that? I live in Charlotte, and that's what I have.
  - scottwernervt 9y ago
    They are also bringing gigabit by end of 2018: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/charter-promises-gigabit-internet-to-virtually-all-customers-this-year/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/chart...
    - ehPReth 9y ago
      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 :/)
      - FireBeyond 9y ago
        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?
        9y ago
rhino369 9y ago
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.
- dsr_ 9y ago
  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.)
  - cortesoft 9y ago
    Well, latency is never going to change, no matter what plan you use. You can't really sell a faster speed of light....
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - undersuit 9y ago
      Latency can definitely improve from where we are at. The speed of light is different through different materials, that's why some people are using hollow fiber optic cables to have lower latency connections. Laying a more direct line would also improve latency, my connections to Seattle backtrack about a hundred miles east before heading out west again according to traces. Faster routing hardware would shave off a few milliseconds. Economic factors hold back latency improvements for the majority of internet users, not hard physical limits.
    - SteveNuts 9y ago
      Speed of light isn't the only factor in latency. Quality of the equipment, routing protocols, etc are far more important since those are the things we can actually change.
      - 9y ago
mnm1 9y ago
This reminds me of the former Romanian dictator's comment that his people simply just did not need color tv. I didn't think I'd ever see that kind of stupidity from the US Congress and regulators. Busting up monopolies is clearly no longer in fashion.
- utellme 9y ago
  Сhaushesku considered that people doesn't need a TV at all, so blackouts became usual thing. By the way, I don't think it's all about monopolies. It's just expenses, companies should invest huge amounts of cash just to reach last mile. Who will take such risks after some company already built infrastructure which you can just double and hope for underbidding your opponents?
  - mkhalil 9y ago
    Well for starters, municipalities could compete. Unfortunately for us consumers, Comcast has lobbied pretty well and made it against the law for municipalities to start their own ISP.
mikeytown2 9y ago
Comcast recently upped my speed from 75/5 to 150/5. My downloads still top out around 40 on non speed testing sites. I’m looking for something else that has better upload speed; I started with 20/5 on Comcast and over the last 5 years the speed has been going up on paper. I have a 32/8 channel modem attached to a ubiquiti gateway on gigabit Ethernet, so the bottleneck is on the Comcast side. Advertised speeds only match reality for a select few sites that are used for speed testing from my experience.
JohnTHaller 9y ago
I live in NYC and only have a single option over 15Mbps.
godzillabrennus 9y ago
I'm a short term renter who tends to move somewhere new about once a year inside of the USA for work. I have been choosing where to live primarily around the speed of the ISP available in the building. I have had 1Gbit for the last two years and would never want to downgrade. It's a national embarrassment that we don't have this kind of access in more places.
microcolonel 9y ago
While it's healthy to understand these stats, consider that some people knowingly move to places which are not thoroughly served by broadband providers, and some of them don't really care. I know and talk to enough people who knew, in advance of making a choice to move, that they were moving somewhere with absolutely no home terrestrial broadband, and did so anyway. Often mobile (or even satellite, which is generally quite limited in terms of upstream bandwidth and latency) internet is enough for them, or the pros of living there outweigh that con; many could arrange to bridge to a neighbour fairly cheaply through directional radio but neglect to because, again, it doesn't bother them all that much. Home terrestrial broadband is a commodity, not a right, nor even a necessity (though some may like to frame it as such). It is more important to be employed, out of prison, fed, and housed, than it is to binge watch the last remaining bottom-of-the-barrel content on Netflix. As improvements to codecs roll out, even more people on the same slower connections will have access to high quality video (and the ability to share it), which is the major strain on those connections in the first place, and it won't take people forcing others to give a damn about broadband.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  But did they move because of the lack of broadband, or in spite of it? And by the standards of your last paragraph, anything beyond a nutrient slurry would be considered a luxury. Not a compelling argument.
pascalxus 9y ago
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/ 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/ https://common.net/ unfortunately, alot of these aren't ready yet in my area
- rpearl 9y ago
  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.
  - glup 9y ago
    IIRC LMI resells Sonic (at least for DSL, not sure about fiber).
toomanybeersies 9y ago
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 governments on all levels, from town halls up to parliament/congress/whoever is at the top, to improve internet infrastructure to at least 100 Mbps. This is especially important for less populated areas if they don't want to wither and die out in the information economy. What the USA needs is a grassroots movement to improve internet infrastructure. 120 years ago, telecommunications pioneers used barbed wire fences to build their own telephone infrastructure [1], this needs to happen again for the internet, but telecom companies apparently block this from happening. [1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-telephone-lines-homesteaders-prairie-america-history https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-telephone-...
- adventured 9y ago
  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?
  - roganartu 9y ago
    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 maintenance costs) resulting in things like contractors wrapping tangled messes of cables in plastic shopping bags to keep them "dry"[1]. Anecdotally, several ADSL2+ connections I had over multiple years and residences in Australia would noticeably degrade for a week or two after heavy rains. I know others who experienced similar behaviour. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=telstra+australia+plastic+bag+copper&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=telstra+australia+plastic+ba...
MrVitaliy 9y ago
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.
- oneplane 9y ago
  Where in the world do you live that you still have data caps?
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    IIRC, most US broadband providers have published data caps (and had secret unpublished ones before the FCC’s transparency rules, the one bit of the earliest Net Neutrality regulation that wasn't struck down, forced them to be disclosed.)
  - ihattendorf 9y ago
    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.
  - ethebubbeth 9y ago
    Cox Communications added a 1TB cap on all service tiers, including gigabit, four months ago here in Arizona. It's $10 per 50 gb beyond that, or $50 for supposedly unlimited that I used to get in the base price.
  - chad_c 9y ago
    Atlanta, GA. Comcast cable. I’m in the neighborhood for Google Fiber but I highly doubt they will finish the roll out. In the meantime, ATT has deployed lots of fiber in the area but they are slow to activate each street.
nodesocket 9y ago
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.net POP's probably can't push that much bandwidth to max out my 1Gbps connection.
- ktsmith 9y ago
  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.
  - nodesocket 9y ago
    @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.
- bigjimmyk3 9y ago
  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.
8bitsrule 9y ago
Free market. ;-{
shdwban 9y ago
What is happening to hacker news? It's no longer about js frameworks and most comments are well informed and well reasoned and not just I know more than you do from the past Is this because smart people have migrated from reddit due to the political propaganda? Are their any public visitor stats ?
segmondy 9y ago
Last year, I was talking to friends in Africa with Internet faster than mine and cheaper to boot! WTF!
kimmel 9y ago
I am currently out in the sticks in the U.S. near a major interstate highway. I have one option for wired internet which is DSL. The max speed is 5Mbps down and 0.5Mbps up. I have a choice between 2 wireless companies that will gladly lock me into a 2 year contract at ~$100 a month with a bandwidth cap of 200-300 GB a month. I have asked around and it has been this way for ~10 years and the local ISP has no intention of an infrastructure upgrade. I check the broadbandnow website every month and there are no new options. This is the free market most of the people living in rural America deal with. I previously lived in a major city and had 100Mbps down and 30Mbps up with no data caps. Now think about how slow that is. I have to wait for Youtube to buffer up and Netflix/Hulu were so unusable I canceled my service. Watching anything live only works at the lowest possible resolution. VOIP is completely unreliable and gaming is spotty at best. The last time I had internet options this slow was the end of the 90s. Using census data there are 10,000+s of people out here dealing with this garbage level service. The U.S. government defines broadband as 25Mbps down and 3Mbps upload at a minimum. I currently do not have broadband internet.
- trevyn 9y ago
  What speed is your LTE?
  - kimmel 9y ago
    According to a chart of the local LTE mobile internet options the max speed is 10Mbps. The fast test on my phone just reported the max speed as 1.9Mbps.
  - BenjiWiebe 9y ago
    Plus you can rarely use LTE as general purpose internet. Data cap, limited speed, sky high bill, or something...

161 points by cmurf 9y ago

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. Forget competition, there's practically no service at all.

rayiner 9y ago
Much of my county doesn’t even have water and sewer pipes. People just spend the thousands to tens of thousands of dollars needed to build septic systems and wells and accept that is the trade off for living in the country.
- freehunter 9y ago
  You say that like it's a bad thing. Wells and septic systems are so common that I would struggle to believe they're a "trade off". Where I grew up (on well water and a septic tank), people couldn't believe that city folk pay for their water, and what's more, that they pay to have it go down the drain! A septic tank costs ~$5k and will last for 40 years. Over the lifetime of a septic tank, my city water bill will have cost me $24,000.
  - randallsquared 9y ago
    A septic tank also costs acreage that city homes do not typically have available for less than $24,000.
    - freehunter 9y ago
      Which is why cities have city water systems, yeah, but anywhere outside of the city, septic and wells just makes more sense.
      - ghaff 9y ago
        >anywhere outside of the city It's not quite that stark. I live in a population ~7K ex-urban town. I have town water. I do have a septic tank although I believe a portion of the town near the center has sewer hookups.
      - gnim 9y ago
        There is an environmental downside to septics too. Where I grew up there was a sandy aquifer that caused nitrogen loading from septic run off in ponds and marshes. This attributed to algea growth, oxygen depletion and marine species die-off. There is now an extensive effort to sewer the region.
  - wiredfool 9y ago
    Yes, and occasionally, you might have to get a guy with a backhoe to come out and do some work. That's $1000. That's assuming that you don't need a new line, which would take a perc test and a new permit. All the while the guy with the backhoe is looking at your system and wondering how it ever worked or got signed off in the first place. It's several hundred to get it pumped every couple of years, I think I'm remembering in the range of $600 and just shy of 3 years between pumpings. Then the well needs power, and someone needs to do the generator in a power outage, or you get to chip in for a spiffy one with an autostart, and the only time the well head ever acts up is on national holidays when if you can get someone out, it's 3x overtime. You know, I kind of like city water now.
    - freehunter 9y ago
      You say that like city water never needs maintenance. My neighbor had roots growing into his pipes from a tree on city property, but since the pipes were on private property he had to have them replaced on his own dime, and also fix the flooding in the house from the backed-up sewer line. I'm not arguing that septic tanks are better, and I apologize that many people reading my comment seem to think I am. What I'm arguing is that septic tanks are not uncommon. On the contrary, basically everyone outside of city limits is using one.
      - Broken_Hippo 9y ago
        Most cities I lived in serviced the lines up to the point they entered the house, though. Not as much to worry about.
        vonmoltke 9y ago
        All the cities I have lived in would only serice lines up to and including the meter. Everything downstream of the meter was the property owner's responsibility.
    - LyndsySimon 9y ago
      > Yes, and occasionally, you might have to get a guy with a backhoe to come out and do some work. That's $1000. I can rent a mini excavator for a weekend for <$200. > That's assuming that you don't need a new line, which would take a perc test and a new permit. What permit? > It's several hundred to get it pumped every couple of years, I think I'm remembering in the range of $600 and just shy of 3 years between pumpings. I had my tank pumped last month, it was $160. > Then the well needs power, and someone needs to do the generator in a power outage, or you get to chip in for a spiffy one with an autostart, and the only time the well head ever acts up is on national holidays when if you can get someone out, it's 3x overtime. When I was on well water, our pump could (and did) run off a car battery and an inverter when necessary. > You know, I kind of like city water now. I just bought a home that's on city water, but has a septic tank. I'm prevented by ordinance from replacing the tank, but I'll do everything in my power to keep it as long as possible. It's far easier and cheaper than paying for city sewer even without including the costs of hooking up to it.
  - justin66 9y ago
    > Where I grew up (on well water and a septic tank), people couldn't believe that city folk pay for their water, and what's more, that they pay to have it go down the drain! Where I grew up, people with the choice invariably chose "city water" when it was available, and the network of its availability is continuing to expand outward, as quickly as substantial pressure and money from the suburbs and exurbs can make that happen. I don't know whether the same is true of sewer service.
  - Broken_Hippo 9y ago
    Actually, some years ago a septic system could cost anywhere from $5k to $15k in the area I was in. Most companies won't take payments, and if you've had some financial difficulty, many places won't help you fix it. You can, however, get different programs to help with your sewage and water bill. And then you have the upkeep. Folks have already mentioned power issues (generator or stored water), pumping, and other things that can go wrong (including backflow into your house and testing water occasionally to make sure it hasn't been contaminated). Most folks where I lived (indiana) also needed a water softener just to keep their water from stinking of eggs. Clothes didn't last as long, and few white clothes stayed white for long without special caustic cleaners. Blonde hair turned orange and it took a beauty treatment to get it back and/or special shampoo. Some homes have a section of yard that stays pretty soggy, and folks need to know where the system is so they don't accidentally dig there or plant trees to closely. If you don't know this stuff, you gotta pay someone to come out and tell you. Not to mention that at least with city water, the expenses are constant instead of sudden: city water is more like regular oil changes whereas a septic is more like a sudden flat tire or two that happens to stink up your car somehow.
- dboreham 9y ago
  And some of us spend tens of thousands building themselves a network. Experience has shown me however that I'm in the minority. Almost nobody values their Internet sufficiently to want to spend that much on a connection.
- Shivetya 9y ago
  throw in many would be surprised at how many areas cell coverage drops out. traveling a lot has shown me that cell is not guaranteed and having a satellite dish at least gets us tv/music. then again traveling also reveals that free internet is just a McD away.
- oneplane 9y ago
  In my country there are no houses with septic tanks or wells. I guess it really depends on your location and government on how infrastructure is handled.
  - perl4ever 9y ago
    What is your country, where they have no wells?
ndespres 9y ago
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.
- freehunter 9y ago
  In my experience modern DSL (like AT&T Uverse) is fiber-to-the-curb and DSL from there. Meaning the amount of DSL line you have is incredibly short and then it hits a fiber line.
  - ndespres 9y ago
    That's an interesting approach, and really seems like it would cut down on the amount of work required in the home to provide such a significant speed upgrade over traditional ADSL. Thanks for enlightening me! Verizon rips out the copper network interface from your home and replaces it with Fios gear all the way through, which always felt like overkill though I know they do it partly to suck you in to their TV offerings too. I wonder how much the extra expense of this last 100 feet of the deployment (from telephone pole to house) holds back more broadband penetration.
- dwyerm 9y ago
  vDSL is what changed to make the speeds higher, but although it got a little better, it seems like the distances are still pretty limited. I suspect that the DSLAMs have become smaller and cheaper, so that you can push those out of the central office and into smaller cabinets inside neighborhoods, which had the effect of making the distance problem appear to go away. That still seems to leave truly rural areas out of luck, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL
- rsynnott 9y ago
  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.

thekingshorses 9y ago

I pay $75 for 7/0.768Mbps and $220 for 50/10Mbps for 2 business lines. My only option is Spectrum cable. They are offering 100Mbps fiber for $770/month if sign up for 5 years contract.

inetknght 9y ago
$770/mo for 5 years contract? I assume that's on your business lines and has a service level agreement with it?
- dboreham 9y ago
  Not the parent, but yes (we used to have fiber service from Charter). It's also symmetrical so 100Mbits up, which is an order of magnitude faster than their residential copper service. The 5 year commit is to cover their cost stringing fiber from the closest splice point to your facility (could be several blocks). If you can peer with them in a building that is already fiber-fed on their network, the cost should be lower.

LogicX 9y ago

Surprisingly, in Myrtle Beach, SC we have multiple high speed providers choices: HTC (as in htcinc.net, a local telco cooperative offering gigabit fiber), or Spectrum, who just minutes ago I heard for the first time that their new default tier in our area is 100mbps. Not sure if they go much hiher though, because a few years ago TWC was going to offer 300mbps cable service, and then the Spectrum merger cancelled that expansion. Either way, I'm happy with my high speed fiber service. And I likely have competition to thank.

juliangoldsmith 9y ago
>a few years ago TWC was going to offer 300mbps cable service, and then the Spectrum merger cancelled that expansion. Are you sure they don't offer that? I live in Charlotte, and that's what I have.
- scottwernervt 9y ago
  They are also bringing gigabit by end of 2018: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/charter-promises-gigabit-internet-to-virtually-all-customers-this-year/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/chart...
  - ehPReth 9y ago
    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 :/)
    - FireBeyond 9y ago
      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?
      - 9y ago

rhino369 9y ago

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.

dsr_ 9y ago
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.)
- cortesoft 9y ago
  Well, latency is never going to change, no matter what plan you use. You can't really sell a faster speed of light....
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - undersuit 9y ago
    Latency can definitely improve from where we are at. The speed of light is different through different materials, that's why some people are using hollow fiber optic cables to have lower latency connections. Laying a more direct line would also improve latency, my connections to Seattle backtrack about a hundred miles east before heading out west again according to traces. Faster routing hardware would shave off a few milliseconds. Economic factors hold back latency improvements for the majority of internet users, not hard physical limits.
  - SteveNuts 9y ago
    Speed of light isn't the only factor in latency. Quality of the equipment, routing protocols, etc are far more important since those are the things we can actually change.
    - 9y ago

mnm1 9y ago

This reminds me of the former Romanian dictator's comment that his people simply just did not need color tv. I didn't think I'd ever see that kind of stupidity from the US Congress and regulators. Busting up monopolies is clearly no longer in fashion.

utellme 9y ago
Сhaushesku considered that people doesn't need a TV at all, so blackouts became usual thing. By the way, I don't think it's all about monopolies. It's just expenses, companies should invest huge amounts of cash just to reach last mile. Who will take such risks after some company already built infrastructure which you can just double and hope for underbidding your opponents?
- mkhalil 9y ago
  Well for starters, municipalities could compete. Unfortunately for us consumers, Comcast has lobbied pretty well and made it against the law for municipalities to start their own ISP.

mikeytown2 9y ago

Comcast recently upped my speed from 75/5 to 150/5. My downloads still top out around 40 on non speed testing sites. I’m looking for something else that has better upload speed; I started with 20/5 on Comcast and over the last 5 years the speed has been going up on paper. I have a 32/8 channel modem attached to a ubiquiti gateway on gigabit Ethernet, so the bottleneck is on the Comcast side. Advertised speeds only match reality for a select few sites that are used for speed testing from my experience.

JohnTHaller 9y ago

I live in NYC and only have a single option over 15Mbps.

godzillabrennus 9y ago

I'm a short term renter who tends to move somewhere new about once a year inside of the USA for work. I have been choosing where to live primarily around the speed of the ISP available in the building. I have had 1Gbit for the last two years and would never want to downgrade. It's a national embarrassment that we don't have this kind of access in more places.

microcolonel 9y ago

While it's healthy to understand these stats, consider that some people knowingly move to places which are not thoroughly served by broadband providers, and some of them don't really care. I know and talk to enough people who knew, in advance of making a choice to move, that they were moving somewhere with absolutely no home terrestrial broadband, and did so anyway. Often mobile (or even satellite, which is generally quite limited in terms of upstream bandwidth and latency) internet is enough for them, or the pros of living there outweigh that con; many could arrange to bridge to a neighbour fairly cheaply through directional radio but neglect to because, again, it doesn't bother them all that much. Home terrestrial broadband is a commodity, not a right, nor even a necessity (though some may like to frame it as such). It is more important to be employed, out of prison, fed, and housed, than it is to binge watch the last remaining bottom-of-the-barrel content on Netflix. As improvements to codecs roll out, even more people on the same slower connections will have access to high quality video (and the ability to share it), which is the major strain on those connections in the first place, and it won't take people forcing others to give a damn about broadband.

s73v3r_ 9y ago
But did they move because of the lack of broadband, or in spite of it? And by the standards of your last paragraph, anything beyond a nutrient slurry would be considered a luxury. Not a compelling argument.

pascalxus 9y ago

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/ 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/ https://common.net/ unfortunately, alot of these aren't ready yet in my area

rpearl 9y ago
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.
- glup 9y ago
  IIRC LMI resells Sonic (at least for DSL, not sure about fiber).

toomanybeersies 9y ago

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 governments on all levels, from town halls up to parliament/congress/whoever is at the top, to improve internet infrastructure to at least 100 Mbps. This is especially important for less populated areas if they don't want to wither and die out in the information economy. What the USA needs is a grassroots movement to improve internet infrastructure. 120 years ago, telecommunications pioneers used barbed wire fences to build their own telephone infrastructure [1], this needs to happen again for the internet, but telecom companies apparently block this from happening. [1] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-telephone-lines-homesteaders-prairie-america-history https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/barbed-wire-telephone-...

adventured 9y ago
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?
- roganartu 9y ago
  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 maintenance costs) resulting in things like contractors wrapping tangled messes of cables in plastic shopping bags to keep them "dry"[1]. Anecdotally, several ADSL2+ connections I had over multiple years and residences in Australia would noticeably degrade for a week or two after heavy rains. I know others who experienced similar behaviour. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=telstra+australia+plastic+bag+copper&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=telstra+australia+plastic+ba...

MrVitaliy 9y ago

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.

oneplane 9y ago
Where in the world do you live that you still have data caps?
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  IIRC, most US broadband providers have published data caps (and had secret unpublished ones before the FCC’s transparency rules, the one bit of the earliest Net Neutrality regulation that wasn't struck down, forced them to be disclosed.)
- ihattendorf 9y ago
  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.
- ethebubbeth 9y ago
  Cox Communications added a 1TB cap on all service tiers, including gigabit, four months ago here in Arizona. It's $10 per 50 gb beyond that, or $50 for supposedly unlimited that I used to get in the base price.
- chad_c 9y ago
  Atlanta, GA. Comcast cable. I’m in the neighborhood for Google Fiber but I highly doubt they will finish the roll out. In the meantime, ATT has deployed lots of fiber in the area but they are slow to activate each street.

nodesocket 9y ago

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.net POP's probably can't push that much bandwidth to max out my 1Gbps connection.

ktsmith 9y ago
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.
- nodesocket 9y ago
  @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.
bigjimmyk3 9y ago
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.

8bitsrule 9y ago

Free market. ;-{

shdwban 9y ago

What is happening to hacker news? It's no longer about js frameworks and most comments are well informed and well reasoned and not just I know more than you do from the past Is this because smart people have migrated from reddit due to the political propaganda? Are their any public visitor stats ?

segmondy 9y ago

Last year, I was talking to friends in Africa with Internet faster than mine and cheaper to boot! WTF!

kimmel 9y ago

I am currently out in the sticks in the U.S. near a major interstate highway. I have one option for wired internet which is DSL. The max speed is 5Mbps down and 0.5Mbps up. I have a choice between 2 wireless companies that will gladly lock me into a 2 year contract at ~$100 a month with a bandwidth cap of 200-300 GB a month. I have asked around and it has been this way for ~10 years and the local ISP has no intention of an infrastructure upgrade. I check the broadbandnow website every month and there are no new options. This is the free market most of the people living in rural America deal with. I previously lived in a major city and had 100Mbps down and 30Mbps up with no data caps. Now think about how slow that is. I have to wait for Youtube to buffer up and Netflix/Hulu were so unusable I canceled my service. Watching anything live only works at the lowest possible resolution. VOIP is completely unreliable and gaming is spotty at best. The last time I had internet options this slow was the end of the 90s. Using census data there are 10,000+s of people out here dealing with this garbage level service. The U.S. government defines broadband as 25Mbps down and 3Mbps upload at a minimum. I currently do not have broadband internet.

trevyn 9y ago
What speed is your LTE?
- kimmel 9y ago
  According to a chart of the local LTE mobile internet options the max speed is 10Mbps. The fast test on my phone just reported the max speed as 1.9Mbps.
- BenjiWiebe 9y ago
  Plus you can rarely use LTE as general purpose internet. Data cap, limited speed, sky high bill, or something...