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Top U.S. cities have seen internet speeds decline this past week
- ganoushoreilly 7y agoIf anything it shows how over subscribed the lines are by the providers. I'm sure they'll use it as an argument for gov. investment. :/
- willis936 7y agoThey already burned money given for them to do that. The next logical step is to simply take the infrastructure for the public.
- op00to 7y agoIf it was overloaded handoffs or connections, the problem would be cheap and easy to fix. Unfortunately the problem is overloaded last-mile. Way more expensive to fix, because it costs money and cuts into profit margins.
- topkai22 7y agoSo thoughts on rural areas- my experience is that they generally have more workers that will be considered essential than in urbanized areas- agricultural workers, truck drivers, people in the supply chain, etc. That might provide some moderating forces on the lower bandwidth options they are often stuck with. That being said, schools doing distance learning over low bandwidth dsl or fixed wireless is going to be interesting...
- dredmorbius 7y agoTime for the rural broadband administration to shine: https://www.ntca.org/ruraliscool/who-we-are https://www.ntca.org/ruraliscool/who-we-are See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Utilities_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_Utilities_Service
- Accujack 7y agoIf by "shine" you mean "be as ineffective and underfunded as they have been for decades", then yes.
- dredmorbius 7y agoRural phone and electric service exist largely by government based efforts. Market solutions don't work for disadvantaged communities, we've learnt that lesson repeatedly. Answering your presumption: no, that's not what I mean at all.
- HarryHirsch 7y agoTry office hours (i.e. video calls) over satellite internet! It's the only thing that's on offer in the boonies.
- stickfigure 7y agoI'm on rural wireless broadband about an hour outside of SF. While the service has never been amazing (3Mbit on a good day, 10Mbit at best), it's been sub-1Mbit (and sometimes sub-0.1Mbit) for quite some number of days now. The rural wireless ISPs are swamped.
- sudosteph 7y agoI had to do a temporary move, and ended up in the only rural county in NC with county-wide municipal fiber. It's working great, FWIW. I'm hopeful this situation will finally prove to the rest of the state that rural fiber is a worthwhile thing to do at scale. I've seen people argue it's not worth it b/c it doesn't attract enough jobs to pay for itself, but the additional network resiliency and quality of living improvements alone are worth it. Especially in times like this. If Wilkes County can do it, so can others.
- Accujack 7y agoFYI, "lower bandwidth" can effectively mean dial up connections only, depending on how far someone lives from a major population center. My uncle lives about 50 miles west of Minneapolis/St. Paul, and unless he wants to pay more than his entire (fixed) monthly income, his only option is dial-up. Cell data isn't even very good out there. Lots of people in the US in rural areas are going to be entirely shut out of schools and businesses for the duration.
- topkai22 7y agoAgreed, I don't want to minimize the impact on them. I was responding to the article's DSL population. For your uncle- I know that both suburban and rural providers in my area are providing various "COVID19 lifeline" deals, including fixed wireless operators serving some super rural locations. Might be worth looking into.
- gok 7y agoThe actual report: https://broadbandnow.com/report/internet-speed-analysis-march-15th-21st/ https://broadbandnow.com/report/internet-speed-analysis-marc... "But New York City, now considered the epicenter of the virus in the U.S., saw download speeds drop by 24% last week, compared to the previous 10-week range. That said, NYC home network connections, which have a median speed of nearly 52 Mbps, are managing." It took me a few times reading it to understand what this is trying to say. What they mean is that many of these cities that are showing slowdowns already had higher-than-average median speeds. Many of the cities that aren't seeing slowdowns were already pretty slow to begin with. E.g. Chicago has only slowed down 10% but its median speed is only 26.79 mbps.
- wtvanhest 7y agoIt seems more like a mix shift issue, than a real issue. If most of the fastest internet speeds are in offices, and people start working from home where slower speeds are located than average speed will decline.
- irrational 7y agoIs that true? My home connection has always been far faster than my office connection. Sometimes I go home just to download a particularly large file.
- phinnaeus 7y agoWhat kind of office is it and where is it located?
- 411111111111111 7y agonot the parent but that kind of situation is pretty normal in germany with consumer gigabit costs of about 50€/month. enterprise connections pay a premium, and smallish employers often don't want to spend money on monthly expenditures, so mostly ~50-200mbit shared between all people at the office
- seibelj 7y agoEveryone is trapped inside trying to stream HD video and all physical medium has limits. Especially coax. Why does supply and demand surprise anyone? This isn’t a conspiracy.
- memco 7y agoI used to read about how ISPs were overselling and would be in trouble if everyone was using their connection to the fullest. It was always talked of as a hypothetical because it used to be pretty unlikely that every person would be home and needing to use the internet so much at the same time. Now that so many people are home and needing to use the internet, it’s not hypothetical and we get to see how ISPs are actually able to handle the load: and as many predicted it would not be able to keep up. I think this isn’t news in the sense that everyone thought it would be fine; I think this is news because this was a known but not addressed situation. It will be interesting if this leads to capacity upgrades or if we’ll see more pleas for major content producers and consumers to constrain their resources to keep the infrastructure running. I think people would like to see upgrades so that we can get the previous speeds and quality but we’ll see.
- Laforet 7y agoThe hypothetical already exists, it's called the evening peak hours. I'm not familiar with every part of the US however in Europe most ISPs saw no need to throttle video as the current situation merely makes the usual peak last longer.
- zeckalpha 7y ago> 112/200 top U.S. cities have seen internet speeds increase this past week And no matter how hard we try, half are below the median!
- dogsgobork 7y agoNetwork speeds in other cities didn't increase, they just didn't decrease.
- Ninjak8051 7y agoChecking the actual report (broadbandnow.com, not the linked article, which is blogspam) they looked at the weekly median download speeds for the previous ~10 weeks. Last week, 88/200 cities had a median download speed lower than any of the previous 10 weeks.
- mstibbard 7y agoStatistics are unforgiving!
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- tartoran 7y agoYeah, I wouldn’t be pissed if 4k doesn’t work. If the content is good even less than HD works for me. Everybody’s on, the network is congested, lets not be too picky for now. Stay safe everyone
- tibbydudeza 7y agoMy fiber ISP is doubling my speed for free during the 21 day nationwide lockdown ... currently on 50/50 Mbps.
- jsjddbbwj 7y ago25/25 fibre? That's... Cheap
- tibbydudeza 7y agoIt will be upgraded to 100/100 in the next few days ... pay about 75 USD but it is really a luxury for most where I live.
- sjg007 7y agoAnyone use bevcomm? I have fiber to the house at 300Mbps but rarely get it. I wanted 1Gps but apparently my ONT can’t handle it. I’d get it replaced but trying to avoid covid_19 at this time.
- threwer234234 7y agoSeems to be a worldwide thing. I have a 50Mbps symmetric optical fiber line in Bengaluru, and servers hosted outside India have come to crawl these days, even while latency/bandwidth within the city are as high as before. I wonder if the undersea cables have become overwhelmed in the past few days.
- gcatalfamo 7y agoIt's peculiar how everything that has happened in Italy is slowly also happening over there. And weird in a sense that the US actually has/had a chance to use other country's hindsight and is not doing it.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoItaly is 60 millions of people in a country 116,000sq miles. The US is 328 millions of people in a country 3.8 million square miles. For different reasons, its playing out similarly?
- rooam-dev 7y agoIt's just a reality check on how much your current ISP has oversold their capacity (similar to overbooking of airplane tickets).
- A4ET8a8uTh0 7y agoAnecdata. Chicago suburb on WOW.D 78 mbps U 10 ( I pay for much lower speeds ). I was able to get Doom Eternal in 30 mins or something. Decent stress relief. I am not sure what is happening. It is obvious WOW lifted caps on me and I am actually benefiting, but I am not sure how that is possible since everyone near me ia streaming something.
- sebow 7y agoNot surprising,not news. Internet connections are just like ordinary pipes. More overall usage means less bandwidth for everybody
- fonix 7y agoi understand wireless is tied to the internet backbone, but i'd imagine with so many people at home, wireless data congestion must be at an all time low, with everyone (probably) on their home wireless networks rather than using cellular data.
- mcny 7y agoI think by default some Android-based devices and iPhone in recent years (since about 2014 I believe but don't quite me on that) can use cellular data even when we are on WiFi if the WiFi signal is weak like when you've wandered too far from the access point.
- dumbfounder 7y agoSo am I the only one that's happy and amazed it's working at all? Unprecedented demand and it's still running, just a bit slower than normal. Imagine if it all fell apart.
- Ajedi32 7y agoI'm having trouble imagining a failure mode that would cause total collapse under load rather than just reduced per-user speeds. Networks have to deal with spikes in demand pretty frequently anyway, usually during the evenings when lots of people are streaming video. A sudden increase in overall demand throughout the day doesn't seem like it should be that big of a deal; and so far it seems like it isn't.
- kevstev 7y agoIt seems almost funny now, but in the late 90s there was a lot of talk about how the internet could fail under its own load. The arguments never made that much sense to me, but they attracted attention...
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoHow about the mode where, video streaming makes normal browsing impossible for some users? Their packets just don't survive the public net in the blizzard of video packets? That would cause apparent collapse for some at least. Not sure how 'net neutrality' would factor into that - a free-for-all would mean it might happen more, but a pay-as-you-go would eliminate a whole class of users. A hard problem.
- freehunter 7y agoNetworking isn’t magic, it’s pretty well understood. And ISPs are pretty good at QoS to make sure that doesn’t happen.
- JoeAltmaier 7y agoWhen it gets full (like it is some places), then the only strategy is to drop packets. If they are dropped systematically (by some rule) then some demographic loses some part of their internet entirely. That's also well understood. Its a product of non-neutral nets, where by definition they do something by a rule (instead of randomly for instance). And even randomly dropping (neutrality?) stresses certain subsets of network traffic more than other e.g. video can recover from dropped packets; TCP traffic not so much. Again stymying certain classes of activity more than others.
- hokumguru 7y agoAnecdotally, here in Nebraska my residential fiber connection remains 1gbps symmetric. Haven't seen any fluctuations at all over the last few weeks. Living in less densely populated areas does have its advantages at times.
- kawfey 7y agoLikewise, in St Louis on AT&T Gigabit fiber. There have been many outages with Spectrum cable though.
- bin0 7y agoI'd guess this is less of a concern than the services people are accessing being slow. E.g. even though I've got FTTH, youtube is still sometimes slow to load the front page.
- tibbydudeza 7y agoFortunately youtube and netflix has a good CDN at our major ISP interchange node as we are about 12,000 km from New York so all our traffic goes via undersea cables.