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With how slowly these proposals roll out, 100/20 won't be enough. As others said, there is a lack of both competition and pricing to worry about too. In a majo
by pdx6 4y ago
With how slowly these proposals roll out, 100/20 won't be enough. As others said, there is a lack of both competition and pricing to worry about too.
In a major tech hub like San Francisco, where I live, it's possible to get 1gb/1gb in some areas for under $90, but which those are isn't consistent nor wide spread. Home cell coverage at 100/20 is spotty at best, and there is only one flat rate vendor (T-Mobile Home, no Verizon Home yet). For those outside of the Bay Area exurbs, I can only imagine the horrors of Comcast/Xfinity or only DSL people must deal with.
Looking forward, the FCC is assuming that people are just watching Netflix, Tiktok, and making angry Karen posts on Nextdoor. We're not sure where web3 will lead, and how much bandwidth will that take: Distributed file systems/data privacy? Fast crypto transactions? Metaverse/VR/AR glasses/contacts? And what about latency?
1000/500 should be the FCC goal.
- eertami 4y ago> In a major tech hub like San Francisco, where I live, it's possible to get 1gb/1gb in some areas for under $90 As a point of comparison, I live in a small city in Europe (80k population) and we have 10gb/10gb for $60/month. My internal network is only capable of 2.5gbit, but I can upload at that speed indefinitely. I could honestly not imagine going back to ADSL speeds.
- xboxnolifes 4y agoYou have access to residential internet with 10Gbps up and down? I didn't even know that was a thing.
- Youden 4y agoI've got 25/25Gbps here in Switzerland. I pay ~$65/month.
- pooper 4y agoCan you please elaborate on your experience with it? Previously, on HN I remember seeing this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31134534 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31134534
- Youden 4y agoHonestly it's mostly a novelty for me, I did it for bragging rights and out of curiosity. 1Gbps to 10Gbps has some tangible benefits like downloading large games in a fraction of the time, or doing super fast backups. However when you have 25Gbps, you have a pipe twice as large as is common in standard hardware. You usually see yourself limited by 10Gbps peering links or by endpoints with only 10Gbps NICs. And of course 25Gbps is faster than most conventional storage, you need very high-end NVMe or RAID to keep up. If I'd have had to pay a bit extra every month, I probably wouldn't have done it. But since it was just the price of the hardware plus installation, I thought it was worth trying.
- geerlingguy 4y agoNot in the US :'(
- backspace_ 4y agoActually it is a thing in the us.
- cbozeman 4y agoI don't know why you're being downvoted... Utah has multiple 10 Gbps up / down providers ranging from $170 - $249.99. Chattanooga, Tennessee has EPB that does 10 Gbps up / down for $299.99. Lafayette, Louisiana has LUSFiber that does 10 Gbps up / down for $295.95.
- zbrozek 4y agoAt my house, thanks to Los Altos Hills Community Fiber. It's in the US. https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/b6f39b75-d71a-4d89-b0f5-9a9496b3bd56 https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/b6f39b75-d71a-4d89-b0f5-9...
- _huayra_ 4y agoDamn you've got 2 orders of magnitude on me with my bare-bones Comcast plan! What's this run you per month?
- mikeyouse 4y agoLos Altos Hills is one of the wealthiest zip codes in the country, filled with tech millionaires and billionaires.. whatever the price may be, it’s heavily subsidized by extremely rich people who became wealthy due to tech companies wanting it in the first place. On Zillow, the cheapest house there is $4M and will likely be purchased to be torn down, the most expensive property is $40M and looks like a boutique hotel. Not really fair to compare them to the normal town.
- 4y ago
- pottertheotter 4y agoA lot of Utah (areas that have UTOPIA Fiber) has had it since 2018. It’s still $200+ a month though.
- cbozeman 4y agoI would gladly pay $200 a month for that.
- bigyikes 4y agoSerious question: what do you want that much bandwidth for? I could upgrade from 100Mb/s to 1Gb/s but I haven’t because honestly can’t think of a use case for myself.
- orangepanda 4y agoI upgraded to 1Gbps a while back, mostly because the price was the same. Also though I don’t really need it. Then I realised I can now download AAA steam games in the time it takes to make a cup of tea. No need for a separate storage drive anymore.
- icedchai 4y agoI rarely need that much bandwidth, but it's convenient when available. Example: when I do an OS update. The lower latency and reliability of fiber is actually more important. DOCSIS / Cable networks are very flaky, subject to interference. There will be small periods of packet loss that literally come and go with the weather (or perhaps a neighbor messing around with their wiring.) 95% of consumers won't notice, but if I'm in the middle of uploading a docker image and my upstream bandwidth drops from 30 megabits to 3 megabits due to increased packet loss and TCP re-transmissions, I definitely will. I've had this happen before. Massive packet loss in the neighborhood. It took months to get it fixed.
- fomine3 4y agoI wonder is bufferbloat become more problem on extremely fast residential connection.
- lostmsu 4y agoWhat's the city?
- teaearlgraycold 4y agoTBF I'm in a SF suburb and I get 10Gb/s down and 2Gb/s up for $40/month.
- pottertheotter 4y agoWhat? Where can you get that?
- retypepassword 4y agoSounds like Sonic. They're building out fiber in various zip codes around the SF Bay Area.
- inferiorhuman 4y agoIt sounds like Sonic, but Sonic's 10 Gbps offering is AFAIK symmetric. Of course Sonic's gotten a lot more cagey about specifics and I don't have any 10G equipment so it's hard for me to tell.
- teaearlgraycold 4y agoIt’s actually just “up to” 10 Gb/s. And my 10Gb hardware is pretty janky so my speeds might not be representative of the full capabilities.
- inferiorhuman 4y agoPretty much any consumer internet service (including Sonic) will be "up to".
- teaearlgraycold 4y agoRedwood City
- inferiorhuman 4y agoSan Francisco is an interesting case (and I say this as an SF native). The city government is so unfathomably dysfunctional in large part due to London Breed (the current mayor) bringing cronyism back as fast as she can. Parts of the city are covered by MonkeyBrainz (microwave p2p), parts by Webpass (fiber), and most of the city is covered by Comcast (cable) or PacBell/SBC/AT&T (DSL and adjacent). Up until Sonic started rolling out 1 Gbps fiber a few years ago all I could get at my last place in the city was 3/1 Mbps ADSL or Comcast. PacBell was always reluctant to build out RTs compared to GTE/Verizon (who has a significantly smaller presence in the Bay Area) so DSL speeds in large chunks of SF were always shit. Even when they did build out RTs the ILECs were never required to resell RT access so speeds remained shit. I'm not entirely sure why AT&T's U-Verse (FTTN, VDSL last mile) was rolled out so slowly but I expect the need for intrusive sidewalk boxes was part of the problem. Sonic got boned because SF's supervisors were/are reluctant to allow micro trenching. For a while there was some buzz about muni fiber but that never got off the ground (and Sonic certainly helped put a few nails in that coffin).
- nanidin 4y ago> Fast crypto transactions? Is client bandwidth a limiting factor in crypto transactions?
- bogota 4y agoI can’t actually think of any where the client is the limit. However for some having faster server nodes that are hosted at peoples homes would help speed up some currencies such as nano.
- rayiner 4y agoWhy is broadband so shitty in the heart of Silicon Valley? Why doesn’t Google just wire the whole place up as a tech demo? Comcast just upgraded my fiber to 7 gbps. It’s spendy ($300/mo) but I also have gigabit Fios available for $80/mo.
- bad416f1f5a2 4y agoGoogle wired my city up as a tech demo. Their microtrenching approach was atrocious and resulted in frequent service interruptions and significant traffic disruption as they patched the same spots multiple times. Eventually they decided the network was so damaged that they’d have to do a total rebuild, and that wasn’t interesting. They threw up their hands up and left, giving the city a few million to clean up the mess. So, careful what you wish for.
- google234123 4y agoIt worked in SLC. Maybe they dug deeper trenches?
- bad416f1f5a2 4y ago3x deeper - Louisville got 2” trenches. This went as well as you’d expect.
- rayiner 4y agoWhy do you have to trench? Have you ever seen Tokyo? Outside some very high density areas, all the fiber is on poles.
- inferiorhuman 4y agoDepends on the city I'm sure. If a city's already invested in undergrounding utilities there may not be any other option.
- tadfisher 4y agoPole ownership isn't a clear cut thing, and cities are cagey around erecting new poles. So using existing poles requires paying someone money, or is impossible due to local telecom monopolies. Either way, microtrenching is very cheap and attractive, though it has maintenance issues in areas with large climate swings.
- josh2600 4y agoThis. I am insanely embarrassed by the third world telecom infrastructure many Americans have to live with. 100Mbps symmetrical is just on the edge of what telcos can jam into dsl over their existing install base. The goal of the telco is to keep the FCC speed goal at copper limits for as long as possible to avoid paying the fiber they were paid to build in the 90’s. Om Malik wrote a fantastic book entitled: “Broadbandits” which covers the $750B telecom heist (way back 30 years ago when a single billion was a lot of money for a business). https://www.amazon.com/Broadbandits-Inside-Billion-Telecom-Heist/dp/0471660612 https://www.amazon.com/Broadbandits-Inside-Billion-Telecom-H...
- SamReidHughes 4y agoWho paid them to build fiber and under what contract?
- josh2600 4y agoTelecom act of 1996 paid them to build fiber but they set the speed limits low enough that they could satisfy it with DSL. There’s new DSL tech that’s ~100mbps, so this is that technique again. The fatal flaw in 1996, like today, is not pushing for gigabit, and is one of the major reasons the US is a declining global power. Faster internet access is core infrastructure for participation in the 21st century.
- politician 4y agoThe US is not a declining global power.
- jdhendrickson 4y agoCompletely based on the lens through which you are viewing it. I myself am American and have seen the quality of life for the average citizen declining in my life time. If I wasn't a part of the new middle class provided by technology, my children would have a worse life than me, combine that with the recidivism displayed by our judiciary recently and some could definitely argue we are declining. But with a user name like that, you already know all that. You might say our gdp and other metrics still show us as a giant on the world stage, I'm sure there are other metrics we can crow about, Yet it feels like little of that is trickling down to our citizens.
- evandijk70 4y agoFiber was installed here, and they provide three tiers - 50Mb/s, 100 Mb/s and 1000 Mb/s, for 45, 50, and 55 euro each. We took the 100Mb/s. I have no idea what I would use 1 Gb/s for, using it as definition for broadband would be premature. Than again, Bill Gates said that: '640 kB RAM ought to be enough for anybody'.
- Youden 4y agoAt 1Gbps the internet becomes close to indistinguishable from a local network, opening up interesting possibilities like a "NAS" that's actually just the cloud. That extra bandwidth, combined with the low latency of fibre, can make it possible to easily interact with a remote PC as if it's sitting in front of you, so you could do away with a home PC or workstation and use a thin client to access a beefy machine on-demand in some datacenter.
- BenjiWiebe 4y agoFor those use cases, latency is IMO a bigger deal than bandwidth. For remote PC, 20mbps 5ms latency would beat 10Gbps 50ms latency. And due to the speed of light, you can't get latency arbitrarily low.
- cbozeman 4y agoBut you can dial it down pretty damn well. When I had Frontier in Texas, I rarely saw latency over 19 ms to any location in the United States. 35+ ms and I was fussy... amazing how quickly fiber can spoil a man.