4 ms·

This! You have to admire the engineering that turned a coax cable that could barely handle a few kbps in the early 2000s into something as fast as my LAN today.

2bitencryption 6y ago
Speaking of this, my mind is in a constant battle between "ISPs like Comcast do nothing to improve the infrastructure they monopolize" and "ISPs like Comcast are doing amazing things like converting an old cable line into a 200mbps downlink and handling 'quarantine-level' network usage with ease". Somehow I think both are true, I'm just not sure how it's possible...
- proverbialbunny 6y ago
  It used to be my coax node was shared by over 200 people, and that was 1 TV channel equivalent of data. Then DOCSIS 2.0 came out and those 200 people were split between roughly 7 TV channels worth of data. This is how you'd get the standard 6-26 mbps home internet. Then Google Fiber came out and ISPs started running fiber to the streets of most houses, but not running fiber directly to each house. This was in defense of Google Fiber, so they could switch people to fiber gigabit easily with little transition. Now there is DOCSIS 3.0 which does channel bonding, so a single person can have up to the equivalent of 32 TV channels of data, getting up to 1.2 gbps if unshared. Today, the average home shares their bandwidth with between 0 and 3 other houses. The fiber is right outside. If you order gigabit cable internet they will run the fiber to your front yard but not let you connect to it directly. On comcast the lowest speed you can order where you get fiber internet is 2gbps, and because DOCSIS 3.1 now allows 10+ gbps cable internet, Comcast fiber may become a thing of the past. In a way, DOCSIS 3 has been a set back for consumers. Sure you can get multi 100mbps even gbps internet, but it allows cable companies to not have to run fiber that last 30 feet. With fiber your ping time is lower, so your internet feels quite a bit faster. Fast internet today isn't mbps, it's ping time.
  - bscphil 6y ago
    > With fiber your ping time is lower, so your internet feels quite a bit faster. Fast internet today isn't mbps, it's ping time. Two thoughts about this: 1. On 100/10 coax, ping times to 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, and 9.9.9.9 are all under 20 msec. What could a lower last mile latency possibly get me? Even cutting it to zero would seemingly not make a noticeable difference for page load times and the like. 2. I really wish this speed test measured your real latency, but it does not. It tests for latency pre-load, not during the load. Because of bufferbloat, most users will find that when they're downloading a file (whether that's someone on Netflix, or fetching a 2 MB image for a news article) their latency goes up dramatically, possibly hitting in the hundreds of msecs. It's really regrettable that this test doesn't try to measure this in any way. Fast.com does, but it's the only free test I can find that does. After a lot of tinkering, I managed to get my latency under load down to 50 msecs without a significant drop to my maximum speeds, but this required quite a lot of tinkering with queue management on a BSD based router, and I suspect most people will see worse results.
    - proverbialbunny 6y ago
      On Comcast my ping time is 16ms to a lot of websites. On AT&T fiber at the same speed (gigabit) it's 1.5ms. On fiber when I'm downloading at the full 126 MB/s my ping barely goes up, unlike on cable.
- novok 6y ago
  Comcast isn't building new last mile infrastructure, they're using new modems on both ends of the coax cable. They are running fiber lines although to be able to serve the the increased bandwidth demands.
  - toast0 6y ago
    > Comcast isn't building new last mile infrastructure, they're using new modems on both ends of the coax cable. In a lot of places, they're also adding lots of equipment in the last mile to shrink the "node" sizes so that the number of households within any particular shared medium on Comcast is much smaller today than it was 10 years ago. It's not the same level of build out as bringing fiber drops to every home, but it's also not nothing.
fletchowns 6y ago
100Mbps symmetrical cable internet was available some residential areas in the Bay Area in the early 2000s. Better upload than I have now in 2020!
- lumost 6y ago
  Multi Tbps internet is available to certain academic institutions, how much did it cost in the early 2000s? And was it really meant for a single home use? My computer in 2000 could not handle a 100 Mbps connection, and only had 32 MB of ram as I recall. The 100 Mbps may have been targeted towards businesses operating servers in a home address that were and are relatively common in the bay.
  - fletchowns 6y ago
    The cable provider was literally called @Home so they were definitely geared towards residential customers :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/@Home_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/@Home_Network
Nextgrid 6y ago
It isn't as fast as your LAN. It's shared between dozens (hundreds?) of flats, the upload bandwidth is very low, latency is relatively high and security can be questionable if encryption is not enabled due to the shared nature of it.

2bitencryption 6y ago

Speaking of this, my mind is in a constant battle between "ISPs like Comcast do nothing to improve the infrastructure they monopolize" and "ISPs like Comcast are doing amazing things like converting an old cable line into a 200mbps downlink and handling 'quarantine-level' network usage with ease". Somehow I think both are true, I'm just not sure how it's possible...

proverbialbunny 6y ago
It used to be my coax node was shared by over 200 people, and that was 1 TV channel equivalent of data. Then DOCSIS 2.0 came out and those 200 people were split between roughly 7 TV channels worth of data. This is how you'd get the standard 6-26 mbps home internet. Then Google Fiber came out and ISPs started running fiber to the streets of most houses, but not running fiber directly to each house. This was in defense of Google Fiber, so they could switch people to fiber gigabit easily with little transition. Now there is DOCSIS 3.0 which does channel bonding, so a single person can have up to the equivalent of 32 TV channels of data, getting up to 1.2 gbps if unshared. Today, the average home shares their bandwidth with between 0 and 3 other houses. The fiber is right outside. If you order gigabit cable internet they will run the fiber to your front yard but not let you connect to it directly. On comcast the lowest speed you can order where you get fiber internet is 2gbps, and because DOCSIS 3.1 now allows 10+ gbps cable internet, Comcast fiber may become a thing of the past. In a way, DOCSIS 3 has been a set back for consumers. Sure you can get multi 100mbps even gbps internet, but it allows cable companies to not have to run fiber that last 30 feet. With fiber your ping time is lower, so your internet feels quite a bit faster. Fast internet today isn't mbps, it's ping time.
- bscphil 6y ago
  > With fiber your ping time is lower, so your internet feels quite a bit faster. Fast internet today isn't mbps, it's ping time. Two thoughts about this: 1. On 100/10 coax, ping times to 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, and 9.9.9.9 are all under 20 msec. What could a lower last mile latency possibly get me? Even cutting it to zero would seemingly not make a noticeable difference for page load times and the like. 2. I really wish this speed test measured your real latency, but it does not. It tests for latency pre-load, not during the load. Because of bufferbloat, most users will find that when they're downloading a file (whether that's someone on Netflix, or fetching a 2 MB image for a news article) their latency goes up dramatically, possibly hitting in the hundreds of msecs. It's really regrettable that this test doesn't try to measure this in any way. Fast.com does, but it's the only free test I can find that does. After a lot of tinkering, I managed to get my latency under load down to 50 msecs without a significant drop to my maximum speeds, but this required quite a lot of tinkering with queue management on a BSD based router, and I suspect most people will see worse results.
  - proverbialbunny 6y ago
    On Comcast my ping time is 16ms to a lot of websites. On AT&T fiber at the same speed (gigabit) it's 1.5ms. On fiber when I'm downloading at the full 126 MB/s my ping barely goes up, unlike on cable.
novok 6y ago
Comcast isn't building new last mile infrastructure, they're using new modems on both ends of the coax cable. They are running fiber lines although to be able to serve the the increased bandwidth demands.
- toast0 6y ago
  > Comcast isn't building new last mile infrastructure, they're using new modems on both ends of the coax cable. In a lot of places, they're also adding lots of equipment in the last mile to shrink the "node" sizes so that the number of households within any particular shared medium on Comcast is much smaller today than it was 10 years ago. It's not the same level of build out as bringing fiber drops to every home, but it's also not nothing.

fletchowns 6y ago

100Mbps symmetrical cable internet was available some residential areas in the Bay Area in the early 2000s. Better upload than I have now in 2020!

lumost 6y ago
Multi Tbps internet is available to certain academic institutions, how much did it cost in the early 2000s? And was it really meant for a single home use? My computer in 2000 could not handle a 100 Mbps connection, and only had 32 MB of ram as I recall. The 100 Mbps may have been targeted towards businesses operating servers in a home address that were and are relatively common in the bay.
- fletchowns 6y ago
  The cable provider was literally called @Home so they were definitely geared towards residential customers :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/@Home_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/@Home_Network

Nextgrid 6y ago

It isn't as fast as your LAN. It's shared between dozens (hundreds?) of flats, the upload bandwidth is very low, latency is relatively high and security can be questionable if encryption is not enabled due to the shared nature of it.