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I can only imagine how much the Pandemic stretched the average home Internet. We had pretty good Internet, ~300Mbps in, maybe 15Mbps out, $100/mo, and when my

I can only imagine how much the Pandemic stretched the average home Internet. We had pretty good Internet, ~300Mbps in, maybe 15Mbps out, $100/mo, and when my wife and I and both the kids were on video meetings, it just couldn't keep up. I'd have to turn off video on my meeting to keep from losing audio. Upgraded to gigabit (30Mbps upstream?) and that helped, but it still struggled. Might have been at Xfinity... About 6 months into it, we got hooked up for the municipal fiber network, we were not in the first batch deployed but were fairly early. Symmetric gigabit for $60/mo, and it's been working amazingly! But, as the article says, "haves and have-nots". Our entire city should have the municipal network in a year or two. So the whole city will have it, and I think they'll be offering some incentives for people who can't afford the $60/mo. But nationally, and even in the rest of Colorado, there are still a lot of "have-nots".

cratermoon 5y ago
I noticed what you describe at work, too: families with kids in school and both parents working had the most difficulties. In places where home internet speeds are marginal for pre-pandemic usage, it was absolutely garbage.
lotsofpulp 5y ago
Non fiber upload is a farce. I assume when they sell you more upload, they’re just placing you in a higher priority in the 30Mbps they have allocated for the whole neighborhood. It is a hardware limitation as far as I know, so unless you see utility workers running new fiber, I would not expect much.
- katbyte 5y ago
  I have 1000/100 cable and my upload is consistently 110-120
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I have never seen a cable internet provider even advertise upload bandwidth, much less actually deliver it. They don’t even bother promising 2Mbps. Check Comcast/Spectrum/Cox/etc websites. I assume the only reason they do not is because that is how little upload capacity they have.
    - cptskippy 5y ago
      I haven't had Comcast in a couple years but they did advertise upload speeds at one time and for the majority of the time (over 15 years) that I had them the speed was at or better than advertised. The last speed teir I had with them was 150/75 in 2019.
    - adventured 5y ago
      Recently signed up with Comcast, they did promise an associated upload speed with the no frills Internet package I selected (200/5, $35/month) and listed it in the description when I chose it. I typically get 5-6 mbps up (although I rarely use it).
    - katbyte 5y ago
      I don’t live in America? So maybe that’s why. I was advertised 1000/100 and I get that.
- zbrozek 5y ago
  Most cable providers allocate spectrum to prioritize download. Even the DOCSIS standard is built around that asymmetry. Much depends on the level of over-subscription in a neighborhood. In my old neighborhood, Comcast appeared to have a relatively low over-subscription ratio. My promised 1000/40 service pretty much always hit exactly that and I was a pretty happy camper. In my new neighborhood, the Comcast over-subscription ratio is far, far worse. My neighbors complain that realized speeds never approach promised speeds. And I was unable to get service at all (despite all of my neighbors on the same street having service). After a year of tooth-pulling, I got an F-U quote from Comcast at $210,000 to connect my house. So I banded together with neighbors in the community on a couple of adjacent un-served streets and we trenched and laid fiber. Now I have 10000/10000 service and it's awesome. Edit: I actually can't measure how close my service is to meeting the promise. I run out of CPU first. That's OK.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    > So I banded together with neighbors in the community on a couple of adjacent un-served streets and we trenched and laid fiber. Now I have 10000/10000 service and it's awesome. That’s fantastic! One might even scale this community up to a few more blocks and call it a government. Too bad it’s such a bad word for many.
    - nybble41 5y ago
      It's not a government until you get the guns out and force people to join up and pay dues whether they want to or not. What zbrozek described is just a co-op, or something less formal along the same lines: an organization designed to provide benefits other than financial profit for its (voluntary) members, who are also its shareholders. Co-ops are great. I wish people would use them more often rather than clamoring for unnecessary government involvement.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Co-ops are good for a farm. Or maybe in a rural area without lots of easements. Logistically, everyone will want fiber, and there’s no reason it cannot be dealt with like water/sewer/gas/electric. I do not see a volunteer based co op making progress in an urban area.
ghaff 5y ago
I have 200/5 with Xfinity which is mostly OK. But it's hardly POTS levels of reliability. Went out completely on me during a call yesterday and I had to fall back on my (marginal) cell phone service. I sometimes regret dropping my landline. I had more reliable phone service in the 1970s.
- Syonyk 5y ago
  > I had more reliable phone service in the 1970s. I've considered getting a landline again, but it would be nothing but spam calls and surveys and scammers. I grew up with landlines, and it was possible to have long, nuanced conversations on them without stepping on each other like happens with modern cell phones, and someone pointed out a year or two back that the issue is the latency. Cell phones are high latency, often with some variances in the latency - for everything. Landlines, across town, were both lower latency and far more consistent. Even across the country didn't seem so bad as a modern cell phone to your neighbor. Talking on the phone didn't used to be painful - but it is now.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    I dropped mine last year (along with my cable TV) because it was nothing but junk. I'd have turned off the ringer and just kept it for backup but I don't use the phone a lot and $40/month or so was too much to pay for something I wouldn't really use.
  - linsomniac 5y ago
    I realized a few weeks ago that the house I've lived in for 5 years, I don't even know where a single phone jack is in the house. Except for the one that I tucked up in the attic when I remodeled the kitchen.
    - Syonyk 5y ago
      Our house literally doesn't have any. It was built new (manufactured home) in 2016, and I'm not even sure if it was an option in the build - I'd have to look over the list of options again.
JJMcJ 5y ago
I switched to fiber in 2019, and 2020 would have been a mess without it.
- Loughla 5y ago
  cries in satellite broadband Seriously, we had to get a cell booster and root our phones to be able to use them as wireless hotspots just to survive and stay employed last year. It was an absolute trainwreck, the entire time.
  - JJMcJ 5y ago
    Once talked with someone who lived in the country. Satellite or drive to nearest town to use the public library during their hours.
renewiltord 5y ago
I have symmetric fiber through Sonic here in SF for $50/mo and I think life would have been hard without it. I'm casually uploading things (Classic `docker push` a non-slim image) over while on video calls without a stutter. Amazing.
oriolid 5y ago
How much bandwidth did you actually have? I have symmetric gigabit shared with ~50 people and everything works great, but my router shows that video calls on all platforms take less than 10Mbps and somehow Zoom manages to have the best quality with around 3Mbps.
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  One big complaint I have about Zoom is that the user has little control over bandwidth usage. For upload, all you control is SD vs HD. For audio, no control. And seemingly no control over download, but it will use less if you run it in thumbnail mode. I wish I could suppress download to thumbnail mode except screensharing. As a Canadian, I’m used to having to deal with software developed in an environment with unlimited bandwidth and without caps…
Animats 5y ago
Welcome to botched network upload congestion handling. 15Mbps should be plenty if there's fair queuing at the choke point for the transition from LAN to WAN. See "bufferbloat". Without that, you need huge amounts of bandwidth so that the FIFO queues never fill.
- eikenberry 5y ago
  Back when I had crappy internet I used wondershaper to mitigate this sort of issue. It worked great and was very simple, it just throttled all connections a bit to eliminate the throttling. https://lartc.org/wondershaper/ https://lartc.org/wondershaper/
  - Animats 5y ago
    I suspect that some major ISPs want bad queuing in routers to force people to upgrade and buy more bandwidth. Then they want to charge more if you use the bandwidth.
- linsomniac 5y ago
  Not in my case it seems. I had done the bufferbloat tests I ran last year. IIRC, it was found off this site: https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/Tests_for_Bufferbloat/ https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/Tests_for_Bu...
binkHN 5y ago
I wish municipal Internet was an option by me, but much of the US is purposely broken: https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/ https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...
skyde 5y ago
Get yourself a router that support good AQM such as fq_codel or cake. You will likely discover that 15MBps upstream was sufficient.

cratermoon 5y ago

I noticed what you describe at work, too: families with kids in school and both parents working had the most difficulties. In places where home internet speeds are marginal for pre-pandemic usage, it was absolutely garbage.

lotsofpulp 5y ago

Non fiber upload is a farce. I assume when they sell you more upload, they’re just placing you in a higher priority in the 30Mbps they have allocated for the whole neighborhood. It is a hardware limitation as far as I know, so unless you see utility workers running new fiber, I would not expect much.

katbyte 5y ago
I have 1000/100 cable and my upload is consistently 110-120
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  I have never seen a cable internet provider even advertise upload bandwidth, much less actually deliver it. They don’t even bother promising 2Mbps. Check Comcast/Spectrum/Cox/etc websites. I assume the only reason they do not is because that is how little upload capacity they have.
  - cptskippy 5y ago
    I haven't had Comcast in a couple years but they did advertise upload speeds at one time and for the majority of the time (over 15 years) that I had them the speed was at or better than advertised. The last speed teir I had with them was 150/75 in 2019.
  - adventured 5y ago
    Recently signed up with Comcast, they did promise an associated upload speed with the no frills Internet package I selected (200/5, $35/month) and listed it in the description when I chose it. I typically get 5-6 mbps up (although I rarely use it).
  - katbyte 5y ago
    I don’t live in America? So maybe that’s why. I was advertised 1000/100 and I get that.
zbrozek 5y ago
Most cable providers allocate spectrum to prioritize download. Even the DOCSIS standard is built around that asymmetry. Much depends on the level of over-subscription in a neighborhood. In my old neighborhood, Comcast appeared to have a relatively low over-subscription ratio. My promised 1000/40 service pretty much always hit exactly that and I was a pretty happy camper. In my new neighborhood, the Comcast over-subscription ratio is far, far worse. My neighbors complain that realized speeds never approach promised speeds. And I was unable to get service at all (despite all of my neighbors on the same street having service). After a year of tooth-pulling, I got an F-U quote from Comcast at $210,000 to connect my house. So I banded together with neighbors in the community on a couple of adjacent un-served streets and we trenched and laid fiber. Now I have 10000/10000 service and it's awesome. Edit: I actually can't measure how close my service is to meeting the promise. I run out of CPU first. That's OK.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > So I banded together with neighbors in the community on a couple of adjacent un-served streets and we trenched and laid fiber. Now I have 10000/10000 service and it's awesome. That’s fantastic! One might even scale this community up to a few more blocks and call it a government. Too bad it’s such a bad word for many.
  - nybble41 5y ago
    It's not a government until you get the guns out and force people to join up and pay dues whether they want to or not. What zbrozek described is just a co-op, or something less formal along the same lines: an organization designed to provide benefits other than financial profit for its (voluntary) members, who are also its shareholders. Co-ops are great. I wish people would use them more often rather than clamoring for unnecessary government involvement.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      Co-ops are good for a farm. Or maybe in a rural area without lots of easements. Logistically, everyone will want fiber, and there’s no reason it cannot be dealt with like water/sewer/gas/electric. I do not see a volunteer based co op making progress in an urban area.

ghaff 5y ago

I have 200/5 with Xfinity which is mostly OK. But it's hardly POTS levels of reliability. Went out completely on me during a call yesterday and I had to fall back on my (marginal) cell phone service. I sometimes regret dropping my landline. I had more reliable phone service in the 1970s.

Syonyk 5y ago
> I had more reliable phone service in the 1970s. I've considered getting a landline again, but it would be nothing but spam calls and surveys and scammers. I grew up with landlines, and it was possible to have long, nuanced conversations on them without stepping on each other like happens with modern cell phones, and someone pointed out a year or two back that the issue is the latency. Cell phones are high latency, often with some variances in the latency - for everything. Landlines, across town, were both lower latency and far more consistent. Even across the country didn't seem so bad as a modern cell phone to your neighbor. Talking on the phone didn't used to be painful - but it is now.
- ghaff 5y ago
  I dropped mine last year (along with my cable TV) because it was nothing but junk. I'd have turned off the ringer and just kept it for backup but I don't use the phone a lot and $40/month or so was too much to pay for something I wouldn't really use.
- linsomniac 5y ago
  I realized a few weeks ago that the house I've lived in for 5 years, I don't even know where a single phone jack is in the house. Except for the one that I tucked up in the attic when I remodeled the kitchen.
  - Syonyk 5y ago
    Our house literally doesn't have any. It was built new (manufactured home) in 2016, and I'm not even sure if it was an option in the build - I'd have to look over the list of options again.

JJMcJ 5y ago

I switched to fiber in 2019, and 2020 would have been a mess without it.

Loughla 5y ago
cries in satellite broadband Seriously, we had to get a cell booster and root our phones to be able to use them as wireless hotspots just to survive and stay employed last year. It was an absolute trainwreck, the entire time.
- JJMcJ 5y ago
  Once talked with someone who lived in the country. Satellite or drive to nearest town to use the public library during their hours.

renewiltord 5y ago

I have symmetric fiber through Sonic here in SF for $50/mo and I think life would have been hard without it. I'm casually uploading things (Classic `docker push` a non-slim image) over while on video calls without a stutter. Amazing.

oriolid 5y ago

How much bandwidth did you actually have? I have symmetric gigabit shared with ~50 people and everything works great, but my router shows that video calls on all platforms take less than 10Mbps and somehow Zoom manages to have the best quality with around 3Mbps.

Scoundreller 5y ago
One big complaint I have about Zoom is that the user has little control over bandwidth usage. For upload, all you control is SD vs HD. For audio, no control. And seemingly no control over download, but it will use less if you run it in thumbnail mode. I wish I could suppress download to thumbnail mode except screensharing. As a Canadian, I’m used to having to deal with software developed in an environment with unlimited bandwidth and without caps…

Animats 5y ago

Welcome to botched network upload congestion handling. 15Mbps should be plenty if there's fair queuing at the choke point for the transition from LAN to WAN. See "bufferbloat". Without that, you need huge amounts of bandwidth so that the FIFO queues never fill.

eikenberry 5y ago
Back when I had crappy internet I used wondershaper to mitigate this sort of issue. It worked great and was very simple, it just throttled all connections a bit to eliminate the throttling. https://lartc.org/wondershaper/ https://lartc.org/wondershaper/
- Animats 5y ago
  I suspect that some major ISPs want bad queuing in routers to force people to upgrade and buy more bandwidth. Then they want to charge more if you use the bandwidth.
linsomniac 5y ago
Not in my case it seems. I had done the bufferbloat tests I ran last year. IIRC, it was found off this site: https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/Tests_for_Bufferbloat/ https://www.bufferbloat.net/projects/bloat/wiki/Tests_for_Bu...

binkHN 5y ago

I wish municipal Internet was an option by me, but much of the US is purposely broken: https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/ https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc...

skyde 5y ago

Get yourself a router that support good AQM such as fq_codel or cake. You will likely discover that 15MBps upstream was sufficient.