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Download-only being a serious disadvantage seemed like the point of this post. US internet service from the pseudo-monopolist cablecos and telcos generally bein

Download-only being a serious disadvantage seemed like the point of this post. US internet service from the pseudo-monopolist cablecos and telcos generally being overpriced and subpar seems like the theme of the comments, and they're correct. The counterarguments you typically hear about it being hard/expensive to provide such services in the US due to geography and population distribution are, in my strong opinion, nothing more than industry propaganda and a poor excuse.

rayiner 5y ago
I’ve got symmetric 2 gbps at home, and frankly I struggle to find a purpose for it. I think for the vast majority of people, download speeds are the important thing. It’s also worth noting that, while cable has various limitations, it was an earlier-deployed technology. So while Spain has closed the gap recently, the US enjoyed a healthy lead over the last decade. (For example in Akamai’s 2015 study, Spain was #30 and the US was #20.) As to the difficulty and expense of serving the US—what’s your opinion based on? It’s easy to blame the “industry.” But it’s not like the US public sector is great at building infrastructure. Here in Maryland we are building 16 miles of light rail in the middle of existing suburban streets for the same price as Copenhagen spent to build 16 miles of fully automated subway. Building any kind of infrastructure in the US is very difficult and expensive for various legal reasons.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Running some fiber is in no way comparable to building light rail. It is simply not done because Comcast and their ilk want to sit there and collect money without investing in upgrades, and even lobbied to prevent voters from getting it installed themselves on a city level. Also, 1Gbps+ symmetric fiber connections can allow for lots of things, like hosting videos yourself, or running your own backup service for your devices. A family of four can easily use it by streaming high definition media and data up and down. It opens the door to not having to rely on FAANG to host and serve personal content, maybe even allowing for federated services again.
- comex 5y ago
  > I’ve got symmetric 2 gbps at home, and frankly I struggle to find a purpose for it. I think for the vast majority of people, download speeds are the important thing. The majority of Internet traffic today is video, where there's no real reason for bandwidth usage to be asymmetric. You might be streaming webcam video up to a Zoom call or streaming a movie down from Netflix. Today, the former has far lower video quality than the latter. But why should it? Why can't we stream equally high-quality 4K (and better) video in both directions? …Well, bandwidth is only one reason, with other reasons including the low quality of most webcams and processing power limitations. And video doesn't require that much bandwidth. The 20Mbit the EFF is complaining about is already good enough for one 4K video stream. Still, only one, and only if that 20Mbit is an actually achievable transfer rate rather than a theoretical cap. 100Mbit would be much more comfortable, especially for multi-user households. On the other hand, 2Gbps is beyond what video streaming will have any use for in the foreseeable future. But I'd argue most people have no need for 2Gbps down either, with some exceptions.
  - oarsinsync 5y ago
    > The 20Mbit the EFF is complaining about is already good enough for one 4K video stream. Still, only one, and only if that 20Mbit is an actually achievable transfer rate rather than a theoretical cap. 100Mbit would be much more comfortable, especially for multi-user households. Focusing explicitly on "20Mbit ... is already good enough for oen 4K video stream", this is only true if the peak rate is 20Mbit, or if it's not a real time application, where buffering can be applied to smooth out that stream. Try streaming a 4K RDP session on 20Mbit, and watch that experience degrade rapidly during any periods of high motion on the remote machine. Averages only work for workloads that can be smoothed. For any real time applications, what matters most is the peak rate. For example, a single 4K RDP session can peak at over 80Mbit. Even at 50Mbit, the session will become unusable during peak motion periods, in the worst possible way: you lose the content, and there's a delay before you're able to interact with the session in real time again. So yes, 20Mbit is good enough for lowest common denominator stuff, but there's a lot of value being ignored outside of watching TV.
- oarsinsync 5y ago
  > It’s also worth noting that, while cable has various limitations, it was an earlier-deployed technology. So while Spain has closed the gap recently, the US enjoyed a healthy lead over the last decade. (For example in Akamai’s 2015 study, Spain was #30 and the US was #20.) Spain deployed ADSL back in the late 90s, and had it available in relatively rural areas before major cities (e.g. London) had availability. Spain started deploying FTTP a few years ago, everywhere, to replace the ageing copper infrastructure. Spain never really had a large scale cable rollout outside of fortunate areas of a few major cities. For the vast majority, it was copper line services only. Now ~everyone can get FTTP, and anyone who has that has symmetric services. There aren't many major applications that benefit from symmetric connectivity as a rule, because the vast majority of the world (including those in Silicon Valley) dont have that capability. The userbase for such applications is relatively tiny. This is part of why we depend on 'the cloud'. The idea that anyone can host anything depends on decent upload rates. Why couldn't an on-prem equivalent of Dropbox be mainstream if everyone had symmetric connectivity 20 years ago already?
- smolder 5y ago
  The utility you personally get out of symmetric 2gbps is pretty much irrelevant here. I am seriously hobbled by not having symmetric internet available in my area, and so are many other people; the articles point stands. As for where I got my opinion that the "they're doing the best they can, it's expensive to do in the US" line is a poor excuse for the high prices and poor quality of services... I have some personal experience in dealing with their business side, which shows none of the qualities of a business working hard to compete. That shouldn't convince anyone else, but the obvious anti-consumer behaviors like forcing bundles on people, absurdly low upload speeds (far under what docsis will allow for on well laid out networks), arbitrary data caps, and so on shouldn't give the impression they're working hard to support US technical innovation. There are massive price drops in the rare competitive area (clearly they're working with a lot of margin), and comcast (e.g.) makes $40B yearly profit while failing at basic customer service. Last, are the success stories of municipal ISPs and foreign ISPs, which, despite the objections, often are very comparable expense-wise and still make the US ISPs look as awful as they are.

rayiner 5y ago

I’ve got symmetric 2 gbps at home, and frankly I struggle to find a purpose for it. I think for the vast majority of people, download speeds are the important thing. It’s also worth noting that, while cable has various limitations, it was an earlier-deployed technology. So while Spain has closed the gap recently, the US enjoyed a healthy lead over the last decade. (For example in Akamai’s 2015 study, Spain was #30 and the US was #20.) As to the difficulty and expense of serving the US—what’s your opinion based on? It’s easy to blame the “industry.” But it’s not like the US public sector is great at building infrastructure. Here in Maryland we are building 16 miles of light rail in the middle of existing suburban streets for the same price as Copenhagen spent to build 16 miles of fully automated subway. Building any kind of infrastructure in the US is very difficult and expensive for various legal reasons.

lotsofpulp 5y ago
Running some fiber is in no way comparable to building light rail. It is simply not done because Comcast and their ilk want to sit there and collect money without investing in upgrades, and even lobbied to prevent voters from getting it installed themselves on a city level. Also, 1Gbps+ symmetric fiber connections can allow for lots of things, like hosting videos yourself, or running your own backup service for your devices. A family of four can easily use it by streaming high definition media and data up and down. It opens the door to not having to rely on FAANG to host and serve personal content, maybe even allowing for federated services again.
comex 5y ago
> I’ve got symmetric 2 gbps at home, and frankly I struggle to find a purpose for it. I think for the vast majority of people, download speeds are the important thing. The majority of Internet traffic today is video, where there's no real reason for bandwidth usage to be asymmetric. You might be streaming webcam video up to a Zoom call or streaming a movie down from Netflix. Today, the former has far lower video quality than the latter. But why should it? Why can't we stream equally high-quality 4K (and better) video in both directions? …Well, bandwidth is only one reason, with other reasons including the low quality of most webcams and processing power limitations. And video doesn't require that much bandwidth. The 20Mbit the EFF is complaining about is already good enough for one 4K video stream. Still, only one, and only if that 20Mbit is an actually achievable transfer rate rather than a theoretical cap. 100Mbit would be much more comfortable, especially for multi-user households. On the other hand, 2Gbps is beyond what video streaming will have any use for in the foreseeable future. But I'd argue most people have no need for 2Gbps down either, with some exceptions.
- oarsinsync 5y ago
  > The 20Mbit the EFF is complaining about is already good enough for one 4K video stream. Still, only one, and only if that 20Mbit is an actually achievable transfer rate rather than a theoretical cap. 100Mbit would be much more comfortable, especially for multi-user households. Focusing explicitly on "20Mbit ... is already good enough for oen 4K video stream", this is only true if the peak rate is 20Mbit, or if it's not a real time application, where buffering can be applied to smooth out that stream. Try streaming a 4K RDP session on 20Mbit, and watch that experience degrade rapidly during any periods of high motion on the remote machine. Averages only work for workloads that can be smoothed. For any real time applications, what matters most is the peak rate. For example, a single 4K RDP session can peak at over 80Mbit. Even at 50Mbit, the session will become unusable during peak motion periods, in the worst possible way: you lose the content, and there's a delay before you're able to interact with the session in real time again. So yes, 20Mbit is good enough for lowest common denominator stuff, but there's a lot of value being ignored outside of watching TV.
oarsinsync 5y ago
> It’s also worth noting that, while cable has various limitations, it was an earlier-deployed technology. So while Spain has closed the gap recently, the US enjoyed a healthy lead over the last decade. (For example in Akamai’s 2015 study, Spain was #30 and the US was #20.) Spain deployed ADSL back in the late 90s, and had it available in relatively rural areas before major cities (e.g. London) had availability. Spain started deploying FTTP a few years ago, everywhere, to replace the ageing copper infrastructure. Spain never really had a large scale cable rollout outside of fortunate areas of a few major cities. For the vast majority, it was copper line services only. Now ~everyone can get FTTP, and anyone who has that has symmetric services. There aren't many major applications that benefit from symmetric connectivity as a rule, because the vast majority of the world (including those in Silicon Valley) dont have that capability. The userbase for such applications is relatively tiny. This is part of why we depend on 'the cloud'. The idea that anyone can host anything depends on decent upload rates. Why couldn't an on-prem equivalent of Dropbox be mainstream if everyone had symmetric connectivity 20 years ago already?
smolder 5y ago
The utility you personally get out of symmetric 2gbps is pretty much irrelevant here. I am seriously hobbled by not having symmetric internet available in my area, and so are many other people; the articles point stands. As for where I got my opinion that the "they're doing the best they can, it's expensive to do in the US" line is a poor excuse for the high prices and poor quality of services... I have some personal experience in dealing with their business side, which shows none of the qualities of a business working hard to compete. That shouldn't convince anyone else, but the obvious anti-consumer behaviors like forcing bundles on people, absurdly low upload speeds (far under what docsis will allow for on well laid out networks), arbitrary data caps, and so on shouldn't give the impression they're working hard to support US technical innovation. There are massive price drops in the rare competitive area (clearly they're working with a lot of margin), and comcast (e.g.) makes $40B yearly profit while failing at basic customer service. Last, are the success stories of municipal ISPs and foreign ISPs, which, despite the objections, often are very comparable expense-wise and still make the US ISPs look as awful as they are.