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The future is in symmetrical, high-speed internet speeds
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoThis sounds like a wired-centric approach, where people assume that everyone has a fiber connection. And I agree that it is ridiculous that cable companies have such bad upstream. Can starlink support synchronous up/down? I doubt it. The satellite swarm companies are going to bring the internet to rural/third world/oceania/etc in a way that hasn't been possible before. Even cellular won't solve deserts, ocean, tundra, and IIRC the tower density to support decent 4G/5G for true broadband just isn't economically feasible outside of suburbs, towns, highways, etc. But I'm shocked at the support range of LTE in wisconsin and upper peninsula michigan, although the bandwidth is pretty average, so what do I know.
- Spartan-S63 5y agoI think we need to approach internet connectivity from a wired-is-most-ideal standpoint and spend whatever capital needs to be spent to build it out. In the mean time, underserved communities can be serviced with cellular and satellite options. I don’t think wireless is the future due to limited spectrum and high latency. The future is still wired, it’s just that private companies can’t be the entities trusted to do the build-out — it has to be a public utilities project.
- williamaadams 5y agoDepends on the community of course. Sub-Saharan Africa leap-frogged copper and went to 4g/5G. Probably same for broader band. Not too long ago 10 mbits was ‘broadband’, so, maybe various forms of wireless will be just fine. Certainly more flexible in terms of long term options
- prophesi 5y agoNot too long ago, _4 mbits_ was considered broadband in the USA. And it's one of the reasons we have such terrible infrastructure; we poured a ton of money to improve internet access, and now we're left with coaxial in 2021 being sufficient in even downtown areas, since there was no motive to install fiber instead.
- contingencies 5y agoThe future is still wired, it’s just that private companies can’t be the entities trusted to do the build-out — it has to be a public utilities project. China did a great job at building out a fiber network. Unfortunately it's compromised by the GFW and other issues. Australia recently attempted to fund a national plan for fiber deployment, but managed to privatise the implementation to the point where it was never delivered and has become a joke. A couple of years ago, you still literally couldn't get a connection right in the middle of Sydney. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Broadband_Network Their take: There is no significant demand for wired connections above 25 Mbit/s and consideration of upgrading the network will not be undertaken until demand for high-bandwidth services is proven.
- pabs3 5y agoI hear New Zealand has significantly better Internet, perhaps Australians should all move there.
- sfblah 5y agoStarlink only makes sense in a world of unlimited capital for certain entrepreneurs IMO. I do not believe that service can be profitable without permanent government subsidies. Terrestrial fiber is just a better solution.
- rsynnott 5y agoAlso a world of unlimited microwave spectrum.
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoDo you have some breakdown of the costs? Because SpaceX can loft them easily enough, and they already have a functional network, and a client base from the former victims/users of viasat at a minimum. How would terrestrial fiber work in rural america, far north alaska and canada, the sahara, antarctica, siberia, etc? Once the satellites are aloft, and the customer base established, assuming they get special SpaceX launch rates, what makes the upkeep expensive that would require subsidy?
- naveen99 5y agoI am pessimistic about this coming upload utopia. Here in Houston suburb of Sienna, entouch (now grande) cut fiber upload speeds from gigabit to 30mb for reasons. Makes me suspect the cable modem asymmetry is also bs, (more about price discrimination and less about technology).
- war1025 5y agoI wonder how much of it revolves around the fact that fat upload pipes probably mainly matter when you are serving out content, and at that point probably the ISP would prefer you had a business account? I have 50/50 symmetrical, so I guess I can't complain. Nowhere close to gigabit, but always more than enough for my needs.
- naveen99 5y agoIt’s price discrimination turtles all the way down. At the edge, Business download speeds are even more expensive than consumer upload speeds.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- solarkraft 5y agoConventionally asymmetry has actually made technical sense to increase download speed. I must say I’m rather surprised ISP used to just give people symmetrical lines for free.
- icedchai 5y agoCable plants are generally weak on upstream bandwidth. Around here, there's only 4x 6mhz channels allocated for upstream, meaning about 100 megabits is shared across an entire node, which is 100's of homes. Downstream, on the other hand, is 32+ channels, plus a DOCSIS 3.1 OFDM channel, providing over a gigabit of bandwidth (shared.) DOCSIS 3.1 was supposed to also improve the upstream situation, but OFDM upstream is no where to be found yet, as supposedly they have to upgrade all the amplifiers to support more bandwidth in that direction. Most people don't care. They're not uploading tons of files. I'm hoping to get fiber someday.
- filoeleven 5y agoAnyone who reads science fiction that includes networked computing knows this. IoT is horrible in its current incarnation, leaking private info everywhere, but the ability to send about as much as I receive to whomever I want is integral to a connected future. The infrastructure must be present for the culture (or, optimistically, the Culture) to grow.
- dondanndy 5y agoThis article seems very US-centric, I'd like to know what the situation is in other countries. I will start with mine, Spain. Here, every ISP offers symmetrical speeds since they became a selling point some years ago. It seems like the minimum speed nowadays is 100Mbps with 600Mbps as the average and 1Gbps in the most expensive packages. Right now I am living in a little village in a very rural area where a local company offers 300Mbps (symmetrical, of course).
- justshowpost 5y agoIt is intentionally very US-centric because they are discussing sort of Obamanet to be provided for every household on taxpayers' money. Specifically, they are targeting an old CATV technology which is delivering the last mile service by coaxial cable (typically alredy existing) and asymmetrical by both design and low layer implementation. Still very popular in the US due the population density.
- User23 5y agoHuge swaths of the USA aren’t served by cable. While Starlink aims to serve the world, rural USA is where they’re going to make their money.
- KozmoNau7 5y agoHere in Denmark, most connections are asymmetrical, unless you specifically buy a business subscription, where you can get a symmetrical connection. The exception is fiber, where all connections are symmetrical, which has become a selling point. Speeds go up to 1000/100 on cable and 1000/1000 on fiber. I've got 100/100 on fiber, which is plenty fast for two people with our current usage.
- hypertele-Xii 5y agoIn Finland it is a citizen's right to receive 2 megabits down. So this is available nation-wide. I have 10/1 Mbit free of charge at home, the operator event sent me a modem free of charge. This might be a deal the housing cooperative (equivalent) has with the operator though, I'm only renting. In my experience connections are mostly asymmetrical, in the 10-100 Mbit range down and a tenth of it up. Costs are very low compared to the world, $5-20/mo or so. Usually ADSL, sometimes cable. Downtown in a bigger city I once got lucky and had like 1 Gbit symmetrical for $12/mo. It was kinda crazy, anything you could think of downloaded in less than a minute. It was faster to download from the Internet than to transfer files over USB.
- crazygringo 5y agoI'm not convinced. Take current 100/20 Mbps speeds. An average Zoom call uses 0.6 Mbps upstream, while a super-HD 1080p one uses 3.8 Mbps up. (And virtually nobody videoconferences from home in 1080p anyways, who wants coworkers to see your skin blemishes in maximum detail?!) So a connection or 20 Mbps upload supports 33 users in theory, or 5 at super-HD. Even allowing half that in practice... seems fine to me. The 100 Mbps download is necessary when you've got someone watching an 8K VR video on their headset, and a few 1080p movie streams going as well, which is more reasonable in a family setting. But most people just don't have any use for upload speeds anywhere near as fast as download. Or at least certainly not until we start doing 8K 3D video calls in front of massive 3D displays, which isn't anytime soon... [1] https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362023-System-requirements-for-Windows-macOS-and-Linux#h_d278c327-e03d-4896-b19a-96a8f3c0c69c https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362023-System-r...
- rsynnott 5y ago> which isn't anytime soon... I mean, it depends what you mean by ‘soon’. Infra subsidised today will largely still be there in 20 years. To be honest, I’m shocked that they’re considering subsidising anything other than fibre at this point.
- wyager 5y ago3.8Mbps 1080p is hardly 1080p. Decent quality starts at several 10s of Mbps, and high quality 1080p is in the 200-400Mbps range. Ideally in the future you would A) be broadcasting directly to other participants, not going through zoom’s servers, which might multiply upload bandwidth needs B) be broadcasting at several 10s of Mbps per stream. I definitely prefer higher bandwidth vconf. I’m not worried about blemishes, but I want to see people’s minute facial expressions better.
- zajio1am 5y agoI hoped that with the fiber, which is naturally full-duplex medium, symmetrical speed would be obvious choice. But with advent of GPON, which is essentially half-dupex shared fiber medium, asymmetrical speeds make sense again. Here, a provider i use offers variable tarrifs, that allow adjusting download/upload ratio dynamically in web interface (e.g. tarif '250' could be switched between 250/80 Mbps, 150/150 Mbps, or 80/250 Mbps).
- kornholi 5y agoAlthough GPON is shared, it is not half duplex! I'm not exactly sure why the asymmetrical version won out, perhaps due to cheaper optics back in the day? Latest iterations (NG-PON2 and XGS-PON) are 10G symmetrical, and XGS-PON is now cheap enough that GPON doesn't make much sense. AT&T Fiber in the US has been deploying it for the last few years.
- zajio1am 5y ago> Although GPON is shared, it is not half duplex! Seems like you are right! Although most are asymmetric (2488 / 1244 Mbps). I guess that even for ones with symmetric bitrates, effective upstream transfer rate would be lower than downstream transfer rate due to synchronization / higher inter-frame period needs.
- pabs3 5y agoI wish AON won over PON, since the latter isn't safe with an ONT/CPE controlled by the customer.
- MrRadar 5y agoI just signed up for fiber internet service at my new house and it's 940/940 symmetric. I'm 99% sure the service is some form of GPON so I don't think there's any inherent limitation that you can't have symmetric GPON.
- topranks 5y agoHeh that's interesting. I speculated about just such a possibility earlier in the thread - interesting to see someone doing it. What access technology is being used by that provider that you can change the up/down allocation?
- ilaksh 5y agoI feel this is really a moral issue and so one tailored for the EFF because high speed upload is key for home servers or widely distributed nodes in decentralized systems.
- ilaksh 5y agoI feel this is really a moral issue and so one tailored for the EFF because high speed upload is key for home servers or widely distributed nodes in decentralized systems. Especially if it comes with widescale IPV6 rollouts which will mean no more NAT traversal.
- gerdesj 5y agoThe argument is bollocks and I would like to see better from a technical evangelist organisation: "We want fibre" so we'll insist on 100Mb/100Mb symmetric throughput as a design requirement. That's the tail wagging the dog. Start with your requirements and then pontificate, eg "I want this": * Nominal download speed with no latency guarantees at up to 100Mbs-1 * Sustainable throughput for three concurrent 4HD streams * Latency suitable for speech without lag * 1500 byte frame transfer without me having to worry about MTU issues The second requirement is basically three lots of 25Mbs-1 with a reasonable ACK response time. I picked three: Parents and kids doing their own thing as two groups plus another one. The third requirement is a bit tricky but generally doable. If you do VoIP then >30ms latency is the start of the point where people need to manage their comms. Humans are actually really good at dealing with crap latency, provided the quality is good. I would suggest that say 10ms to your ISP PoP is a good start for latency. The EFF article waffles on at length. It is both crap technical and stolidly political in nature. I think it fails on all levels but I still applaud the basic premise: We all need reasonably decent, low latency connectivity. Oh, soz, I'm a Brit, but my last point still stands 8)
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoSymmetrical gigabit or more would fundamentally change the web forever. Self hosting becomes feasible for most things, it prys power away from the centralized structure we live with now.
- adolph 5y ago> Self hosting becomes feasible About 5-10 years too late.
- IshKebab 5y agoWhy? Also I'm not convinced self-hosting is really that feasible without ISPs offering static IPs and barely any do. Sure you can work around it with dynamic DNS but that's a hassle and hassles like that are what make it infeasible.
- rubatuga 5y agoWe've solved the static IP and port blocking problem at Hoppy Network, using WireGuard! https://hoppy.network https://hoppy.network
- adolph 5y agoBc the range of commercial offerings is so diverse and cost effective. Once upon a time, probably longer ago then 10, if you had a specific need that couldn’t be solved by cheap shared hosting, then self hosting at home might make sense if you planned to do all the patching, backups, hardware cycling, monitoring, etc yourself and didn’t care about network redundancy. Today it is nice for a certain variety of hobbyist for whom home data center is their thing. Otherwise host it somewhere competent.
- topranks 5y agoWe live in the world of terabit DDoS. Self-hosting is, unfortunately, not viable any longer. Even for mid-sized hosting providers.
- pabs3 5y agoWhich technologies offer symmetric Internet? Is symmetric Internet common anywhere outside of datacentres?
- justshowpost 5y agoGood point, there are actually very few due low demand.
- mastazi 5y agoYes, in some countries symmetrical connections are available to home connections, see the comments elsewhere on this page e.g. about Spain and Denmark. Often this is based on a fibre connection.
- topranks 5y agoFibre direct to the home, and not "shared segments" with other buildings (i.e. PON technology,) but direct full-duplex (two strand or WDM) fibre links from you to the ISP equipment. If and when that is widely available then we'll get equal up and download. If the up/down split is on copper with FDM then there will always be a question of how to allocate the spectrum to upload vs. download. And mostly, for consumer driven reasons, the standards will skew to give more of it to download.
- golemotron 5y agoNo mention of Starlink. This article won't age well.
- adolph 5y agoSearch 5G, no results
- MrRadar 5y agoI'm not sure what would lead you to that conclusion. Starlink is another asymmetric service. This page[1] shows an average of 100 Mbit down and 16 up on Starlink. If they can get the upload slightly faster they would qualify for subsidies under the 100/20 definition but not under the 100/100 definition, which actually reinforces the article's point that we should not be investing public money in technologies that will not scale for future needs as I doubt Starlink will ever be able to achieve the 100+ megabit upload speeds that future businesses (and some consumers) will need. Don't get me wrong, I think Starlink is going to be an important technology for getting the most rural and hard to serve 1% of people acceptable internet service, and it will provide important competitive pressures on other ISPs, but it will never be a true substitute for fiber for the other 99% of the population. [1] https://myspeedcheck.net/speedtest/starlink https://myspeedcheck.net/speedtest/starlink
- mwilcox 5y ago8gbit symmetrical available residential here in NZ
- denkmoon 5y agoIn Australia, with our "National Broadband Network" rollout, the highest speed plan a retail customer could get was 100mbit down and 40mbit up (100/40). In the last few years, this has now changes to 100/20 (and you need to buy a 250mbit down plan to get the old 40mbit up), because the national infrastructure co. charges for capacity each way, and uploads were just not being used enough for ISPs to justify paying for the upload capacity that was going unused. I'm not convinced symmetrical is the future. I would like it, but even in these days of remote work, nobody cares about their upload speed.
- solraph 5y ago> and uploads were just not being used enough for ISPs to justify paying for the upload capacity that was going unused I think it was pretty clear at the time that the "nobody uses it rhetoric" was to get around the lack of upload capacity on the HFC network (High Frequency Cable, otherwise known as cable TV coax for the international readers). The smoking gun is that you can get 250/50, but can't get 100/100 for any amount of money. Coming back to the article, Australia is a perfect warning of why broadband requirements should mandate 100/100, and therefore force new builds to build fibre. If congress allows 100/20, then the USA can join Australia in re-spending billions redoing infrastructure over and over again, instead of just getting it right the first time.
- Nevermark 5y agoAs high speeds become reliably available we will finally get nearly unlimited low-latency computing power, on demand. There will be a huge simplification and cost reduction, of the computing hardware experience as both consumers and businesses. You will only pay for the computing time you actually use, no idle hardware. And the only devices you will need will be (mostly wireless) I/O devices. And unlike heavy home desktop or gaming devices, our I/O devices (from touch screens, to keyboards to VR goggles) are very portable. The exception, large screens in hotels etc, will be configured as full computing conduits, not just Netflix streaming. We will all wonder at the clunky way we each currently manage our inflexible local/individual computing power now.
- jdblair 5y agoThe best internet service I ever had was symmetric gigabit fiber, terminated in my home in San Jose. Not only was it fast, the latency was 2ms. It wasn't cheap, about $120 / month. So it's definitely possible. The worst, not counting dial-up, was my ADSL service in Oakland. They said the wires were never upgraded. I finally switched to Comcast.
- yellow_lead 5y agoIn NC, I'm paying ~$75 for 200 / 10. Yours sounds like a steal.
- jcelerier 5y agoIn France I had gigabit fiber for, what, 6-7 years ? First for 49€ then 30€/month. I did a speed test recently and the fastest available speed in a small village near my parents was 8gb/s ! I was amazed, especially considering how hard it is to get 10G networking
- dkasper 5y agoI have a symmetric gigabit connection in the SF Bay Area from ATT fiber for $60/month. I never even have to think about internet speeds anymore.
- topranks 5y agoWhile I don’t really quibble with the overall argument, spectrum is a limited resource. If I had xMhz of bandwidth on a communications channel, and the applications I use mean my requirements are skewed in favour of either upload or download, why not allocate more of the available resources to that direction? It’s an interesting consideration actually, I wonder in future if some, say DOCSIS standard or something, would allow the end user to decide how many channels to allocate for up vs down.
- adriancr 5y agoIf you have separate upload and download channels, why would you want to limit either? If they are capable of 1/10/... gbps each direction, why not? here i'm thinking fiber optic and not old copper links