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Home broadband has not improved much in the past 10 years. Home users simply couldn't stream a 720p video back then and most still can't as of today. So there

Home broadband has not improved much in the past 10 years. Home users simply couldn't stream a 720p video back then and most still can't as of today. So there is no point in making higher resolution cameras, that won't run 5 frames per second. Besides, high-end phones have very good cameras nowadays but they sell for a $1000 and upward. The typical webcam budget is rather in the $20-30 range. If you're willing to put hundred(s) in a webcam, like businesses and streamers, there are good options.

ceejayoz 7y ago
This doesn't appear to be accurate. https://www.statista.com/statistics/616210/average-internet-connection-speed-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/616210/average-internet-... Anecdotally, my local ISP has gone from everyone getting 10/1 to 100/5 in the base package in the last few years.
- lotsofpulp 7y ago
  Upload bandwidth for 95% of homes in the US is the same as it was almost 20 years ago. It’s so bad it’s not even advertised. If you have access to fiber, then you’re very lucky in the US. I would also say 5mbps upload is hardly an upgrade. A single FaceTime call uses a couple mbps, so it’s probably just enough for that, assuming everyone in the neighborhood isn’t uploading too, which they are nowadays.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    Again, anecdotally, mine's gone from 1 Mbps upload to 30 in the last ~10 years or so. I don't have fiber, I've got Spectrum over the cable lines, in a small market with not much competition. (It's either Spectrum, or the local phone company's shitty DSL offering. There's one local fiber company, but only in a couple percent of households... including literally my neighbor, but not me.) Specific data on upload speeds is harder to come by, but https://www.tomsguide.com/us/internet-speed-what-you-need,news-24289.html https://www.tomsguide.com/us/internet-speed-what-you-need,ne... says "According to Ookla, the average U.S. broadband download speed is 96 Mbps and average upload speeds are now at 33Mbps."
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      I can easily tell which of one of my family has fiber internet versus not fiber internet just by the consistency and quality of our FaceTime calls. Even between the US and England, the fiber to fiber connections are far more high quality and stable than cable and other types. The ISPs can claim whatever numbers they want, but the real test is what it feels like when you use it.
  - sloaken 7y ago
    They say 95% of statistics people quote are made up (including mine here). So to quote a source, that is not my brain: from 2017 to 2018 upload speeds went up 22% https://www.vox.com/2018/12/12/18134899/internet-broafband-faster-ookla https://www.vox.com/2018/12/12/18134899/internet-broafband-f...
    - lotsofpulp 7y ago
      Non fiber upload speed is a farce. I assume it’s just something like 20mbps shared in a neighborhood of 50 or 100 homes, and the ISP lets it burst to 10mbps or something for a couple minutes and then throttles you down again. There’s a reason it’s never advertised by cable ISPs.
      - user5994461 7y ago
        The weak link is the copper cable going to the home. It's only possible to transport about 20 Mbps usable within a mile. It's split about 90% up 10% down because download is more useful for homes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.992.5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.992.5 Anything on the ISP network is most likely fiber (or Ethernet within one building), so symmetric both ways.
        lotsofpulp 7y ago
        Yes, and the existing cable monopolies in the US would like it to stay that way, so they can continue to collect rent on their coaxial cable wires from decades ago. That’s why they fight municipal fiber installation in court. If they didn’t do this, they wouldn’t be so evil, and also why fiber internet needs to be a utility, like electricity, water, gas, and sewage. Also, since the media companies are also the owners of the wire in the case or Comcast, they can prioritize their traffic and de prioritize competitor’s traffic.
  - tibbon 7y ago
    I'm lucky here. Nearly 1000mbps each way on my FIOS; and it's very consistent. I realize this is the 1% of internet in the US. But I would enjoy being able to send 4k video over Zoom.
  - devonkim 7y ago
    There's another bandwidth limitation at play - public wi-fi in airports, hotels, and even conference centers is atrocious by default. The best bet for improving video calling resolution in the US appears to be hardware h.265 encoders because we're making such slow progress aggregately in Internet upload bandwidth.
  - distant_hat 7y ago
    Really is it that bad? I'm in third world India and get 200Mbps up and down at about $20/month.
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      Yes. The US is weirdly behind in a variety of things it got into early, but let stagnate. Until fairly recently, text messaging cost $0.10/message, for inbound and outbound. We only just got chips on our credit cards in the last few years. Broadband over 10-15 megabits is in a similar boat - only recently has it started to catch up with the rest of the world, and there's a lot left to go, especially in rural areas .
      - vonmoltke 7y ago
        > Until fairly recently, text messaging cost $0.10/message Define "fairly recently". I haven't paid per-text in over a decade.
- user5994461 7y ago
  Average is meaningless. Either you have broadband and you're physically capped at 1 Mbps upload, or you have fiber and it's -roughly- unlimited. The average of 9 households having broadband and 1 having gigabit fiber may be 100 Mbps theoretically, but practically that's 9 people who can't use a HD webcam.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    > Either you have broadband and you're physically capped at 1 Mbps upload, or you have fiber and it's -roughly- unlimited. This is... not the case?
    - user5994461 7y ago
      Which part do you need more explanations about? I find modulation a fascinating topic. Broadband ADSL has a total usable bandwidth around 20/1 Mbps due to how it works, that goes down significantly as a home is further from the phone center. Many homes won't get any better than 5/0.5 as they're kilometers away. A single fiber can do a Tbps both ways. The difference is night and day.
      - ceejayoz 7y ago
        > Which part do you not understand? The part that ignores the existence of cable internet? Or the fact that plenty of people are on cell phones for their broadband usage? The available options are more than "DSL, fiber, or nothing".
- jsight 7y ago
  Also anecdotal, but I had less than 3 up and down about 11 years ago. 10 years ago it was 3 symmetric. Now its 100 symmetric, and was (briefly) 1gb symmetric with another provider last year. Its definitely improving on average.
Milner08 7y ago
Not sure where you're living but that's not true. Home broadband has gotten a lot better over the last 10 years here in the UK. I don't know anyone (admittedly I don't know many in the countryside) who can't stream at 1080p. Even 4K Netflix is often fine.
- apetresc 7y ago
  He's referring to upload, not download, since that is the relevant metric when talking about using a webcam.
  - user5994461 7y ago
    Yes about upload, but I want to say as well that Netflix is a special subject anyway. A 1080p video on Netflix today has lower quality (bitrate) than a 720p video on Youtube 5 years ago. The only reason Netflix HD works for so many people is because Netflix has lowered the standard of what was considered HD.
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      The video on YouTube five years ago was encoded with a far less effective codec. H265 uses half the bandwidth of H264 for the same quality of video, for example; raw bitrate isn't a useful indicator of quality if the codecs differ.
      - user5994461 7y ago
        Bitrate is a useful indicator. It's the amount of information that is directly linked to maximum quality, there are bounds on what can be compressed by how much. Fact is, x265 can do 25-33% smaller size than x264 for equivalent visual quality. The higher gain at higher resolutions (2k, 4k) that were not well supported by older codecs anyway. You can refer to Netflix own papers on that. Services doing half the bandwidth have reduced quality. The improvement in codec can only explain half the reduction, the other half is grossly lowering quality (to reduce costs and work with mediocre home connections). That's not necessarily bad for customers, better have a pseudo HD stream than no stream.
naoru 7y ago
Really? I've got 500/500 MBit/s at home. 10 years ago I had about 30, but even that is more than sufficient to stream high quality video. And this is not a "first-world" country even.

ceejayoz 7y ago

This doesn't appear to be accurate. https://www.statista.com/statistics/616210/average-internet-connection-speed-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/616210/average-internet-... Anecdotally, my local ISP has gone from everyone getting 10/1 to 100/5 in the base package in the last few years.

lotsofpulp 7y ago
Upload bandwidth for 95% of homes in the US is the same as it was almost 20 years ago. It’s so bad it’s not even advertised. If you have access to fiber, then you’re very lucky in the US. I would also say 5mbps upload is hardly an upgrade. A single FaceTime call uses a couple mbps, so it’s probably just enough for that, assuming everyone in the neighborhood isn’t uploading too, which they are nowadays.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  Again, anecdotally, mine's gone from 1 Mbps upload to 30 in the last ~10 years or so. I don't have fiber, I've got Spectrum over the cable lines, in a small market with not much competition. (It's either Spectrum, or the local phone company's shitty DSL offering. There's one local fiber company, but only in a couple percent of households... including literally my neighbor, but not me.) Specific data on upload speeds is harder to come by, but https://www.tomsguide.com/us/internet-speed-what-you-need,news-24289.html https://www.tomsguide.com/us/internet-speed-what-you-need,ne... says "According to Ookla, the average U.S. broadband download speed is 96 Mbps and average upload speeds are now at 33Mbps."
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    I can easily tell which of one of my family has fiber internet versus not fiber internet just by the consistency and quality of our FaceTime calls. Even between the US and England, the fiber to fiber connections are far more high quality and stable than cable and other types. The ISPs can claim whatever numbers they want, but the real test is what it feels like when you use it.
- sloaken 7y ago
  They say 95% of statistics people quote are made up (including mine here). So to quote a source, that is not my brain: from 2017 to 2018 upload speeds went up 22% https://www.vox.com/2018/12/12/18134899/internet-broafband-faster-ookla https://www.vox.com/2018/12/12/18134899/internet-broafband-f...
  - lotsofpulp 7y ago
    Non fiber upload speed is a farce. I assume it’s just something like 20mbps shared in a neighborhood of 50 or 100 homes, and the ISP lets it burst to 10mbps or something for a couple minutes and then throttles you down again. There’s a reason it’s never advertised by cable ISPs.
    - user5994461 7y ago
      The weak link is the copper cable going to the home. It's only possible to transport about 20 Mbps usable within a mile. It's split about 90% up 10% down because download is more useful for homes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.992.5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.992.5 Anything on the ISP network is most likely fiber (or Ethernet within one building), so symmetric both ways.
      - lotsofpulp 7y ago
        Yes, and the existing cable monopolies in the US would like it to stay that way, so they can continue to collect rent on their coaxial cable wires from decades ago. That’s why they fight municipal fiber installation in court. If they didn’t do this, they wouldn’t be so evil, and also why fiber internet needs to be a utility, like electricity, water, gas, and sewage. Also, since the media companies are also the owners of the wire in the case or Comcast, they can prioritize their traffic and de prioritize competitor’s traffic.
- tibbon 7y ago
  I'm lucky here. Nearly 1000mbps each way on my FIOS; and it's very consistent. I realize this is the 1% of internet in the US. But I would enjoy being able to send 4k video over Zoom.
- devonkim 7y ago
  There's another bandwidth limitation at play - public wi-fi in airports, hotels, and even conference centers is atrocious by default. The best bet for improving video calling resolution in the US appears to be hardware h.265 encoders because we're making such slow progress aggregately in Internet upload bandwidth.
- distant_hat 7y ago
  Really is it that bad? I'm in third world India and get 200Mbps up and down at about $20/month.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    Yes. The US is weirdly behind in a variety of things it got into early, but let stagnate. Until fairly recently, text messaging cost $0.10/message, for inbound and outbound. We only just got chips on our credit cards in the last few years. Broadband over 10-15 megabits is in a similar boat - only recently has it started to catch up with the rest of the world, and there's a lot left to go, especially in rural areas .
    - vonmoltke 7y ago
      > Until fairly recently, text messaging cost $0.10/message Define "fairly recently". I haven't paid per-text in over a decade.
user5994461 7y ago
Average is meaningless. Either you have broadband and you're physically capped at 1 Mbps upload, or you have fiber and it's -roughly- unlimited. The average of 9 households having broadband and 1 having gigabit fiber may be 100 Mbps theoretically, but practically that's 9 people who can't use a HD webcam.
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  > Either you have broadband and you're physically capped at 1 Mbps upload, or you have fiber and it's -roughly- unlimited. This is... not the case?
  - user5994461 7y ago
    Which part do you need more explanations about? I find modulation a fascinating topic. Broadband ADSL has a total usable bandwidth around 20/1 Mbps due to how it works, that goes down significantly as a home is further from the phone center. Many homes won't get any better than 5/0.5 as they're kilometers away. A single fiber can do a Tbps both ways. The difference is night and day.
    - ceejayoz 7y ago
      > Which part do you not understand? The part that ignores the existence of cable internet? Or the fact that plenty of people are on cell phones for their broadband usage? The available options are more than "DSL, fiber, or nothing".
jsight 7y ago
Also anecdotal, but I had less than 3 up and down about 11 years ago. 10 years ago it was 3 symmetric. Now its 100 symmetric, and was (briefly) 1gb symmetric with another provider last year. Its definitely improving on average.

Milner08 7y ago

Not sure where you're living but that's not true. Home broadband has gotten a lot better over the last 10 years here in the UK. I don't know anyone (admittedly I don't know many in the countryside) who can't stream at 1080p. Even 4K Netflix is often fine.

apetresc 7y ago
He's referring to upload, not download, since that is the relevant metric when talking about using a webcam.
- user5994461 7y ago
  Yes about upload, but I want to say as well that Netflix is a special subject anyway. A 1080p video on Netflix today has lower quality (bitrate) than a 720p video on Youtube 5 years ago. The only reason Netflix HD works for so many people is because Netflix has lowered the standard of what was considered HD.
  - ceejayoz 7y ago
    The video on YouTube five years ago was encoded with a far less effective codec. H265 uses half the bandwidth of H264 for the same quality of video, for example; raw bitrate isn't a useful indicator of quality if the codecs differ.
    - user5994461 7y ago
      Bitrate is a useful indicator. It's the amount of information that is directly linked to maximum quality, there are bounds on what can be compressed by how much. Fact is, x265 can do 25-33% smaller size than x264 for equivalent visual quality. The higher gain at higher resolutions (2k, 4k) that were not well supported by older codecs anyway. You can refer to Netflix own papers on that. Services doing half the bandwidth have reduced quality. The improvement in codec can only explain half the reduction, the other half is grossly lowering quality (to reduce costs and work with mediocre home connections). That's not necessarily bad for customers, better have a pseudo HD stream than no stream.

naoru 7y ago

Really? I've got 500/500 MBit/s at home. 10 years ago I had about 30, but even that is more than sufficient to stream high quality video. And this is not a "first-world" country even.