6 ms·

The problem, in the USA for most people, is Comcast. Downspeed hardly matters. It's been plenty for decades. Upload speed has stagnated. I uploaded as fast in

The problem, in the USA for most people, is Comcast. Downspeed hardly matters. It's been plenty for decades. Upload speed has stagnated. I uploaded as fast in 2003 as I do now in 2022. And as others have said, it's not so much about 1 fast provider as many providers and choice. In my comcast monopoly my plan started at $60/mo in 2011 and without any changes on my end and no change in my upload speed that price has increased to it's current $105/mo. In addition to the price increases they've implemented a new system of total data transfer limits ((up/down)+internal overhead) meaning even if I could have a faster connection it'd mean nothing if I used it in the first week and then got hit with multiple $10 overage "fees". But I don't have a choice. It doesn't matter how good, or bad, Comcast is. They're the only game in town.

rascul 4y ago
> Downspeed hardly matters. It's been plenty for decades. Until the power company ran fiber earlier this year, the only wired option here was 3Mbps DSL from AT&T. AT&T buried fiber all over the area (including in front of my house) years ago, but it sits there unused.
- xahrepap 4y ago
  Same where I am. Most of the city has competition because it’s most new developments out here and a few fiber companies were able to get in the ground early. My neighborhood is older so we only have Comcast. But Comcast buried fiber here to “future proof” ages ago, they just haven’t lit it up. And they’re the only company who got their hardware in the ground. So I’m stuck on their cable. As it turns out the service here is good, so I shouldn’t complain. But it’s still frustrating that they are just sitting on fiber and not using it. And also that there’s no competition where I am. If I ever move, then I’ll know better and pick a house with fiber already. :/
  - lechatpito1 4y ago
    And no need to be in the countryside to experience this. I am living in Manhattan, Upper West Side, one of the most affluent neighborhood in the richest city of the country. It is Spectrum cable or nothing. There seem to be fiber around, but it did not make it to my street (lined with small buildings so maybe not interesting enough?). Meanwhile in France where we have spent some time this year, you get fiber in the most rural and isolated areas... Go figure.
    - rayiner 4y ago
      Being in an “affluent neighborhood” isn’t really the gating factor though. Many of those places aren’t development friendly at all. Meanwhile my red county has farms wired up with fiber.
- dubswithus 4y ago
  My parents live 4 miles from the nearest city in a rural area. Someone paid for a fiber line and my parents got a free install because it crossed the property. Before this they were using a microwave antenna and getting 10 megabit.
  - radicaldreamer 4y ago
    These days, fixed wireless mmwave antennas can do 300-1Gbps symmetrical for about $100 per antenna.
    - ed25519FUUU 4y ago
      What services are providing at those prices?
      - radicaldreamer 4y ago
        Monkeybrains in SF provides up to 1Gbps symmetrical at $35/month. The antenna cost is about $100 and labor/installation is $150 ($250/total).
      - kube-system 4y ago
        Nobody, they’re talking about the antenna(/radio) itself.
- walrus01 4y ago
  and people wonder why folks in not-very-far-out suburbs are buying and using starlink or other options, if all they have is ultra long loop length copper DSL and no DOCSIS3 available and no GPON or active ethernet fiber based service. i've seen starlink terminals in places they have absolutely no logical need to be if the local terrestrial incumbent phone company and cable companies with rights to the ROW (right-of-way) would get off their asses
  - ev1 4y ago
    lmao one of my mates has a starlink terminal in the outskirts of los angeles just to get work done because spectrum's gigabit plan is like 1.2MB/s upstream most of the time and in the subkilobytes during peak times it's comical how bad this is edit: how we found out about this was also amusing: he sent a group snapchat of the arrival and setup in backyard and we were all "did you move or go traveling?" "no, spectrum is godawful"
cyral 4y ago
I was curious about the upload issue recently and learned that it is because of limitations of the old cable infrastructure. You presumably receive your internet over coax (which can still provide really good download speeds, I was surprised when my gigabit internet package came and it only had a coax port instead of fiber). Cable TV is pretty much all downloads, with only a small portion of the bandwidth reserved for uploads, since uploading is only needed for authenticating your subscription, pay-per-view purchases, etc. Unfortunately there isn't an easy way to re-allocate the upload bandwidth, because this splitting is implemented with actual hardware frequency filters that are buried and on poles all over the US.
- harikb 4y ago
  As far as I have heard, they could choose to use N out of M channels for either upload or download and they are choosing to keep it the way it is. Probably they need to keep it that way for other reasons (their own cable-TV signal goes through it). But I know nothing about the electronics/signal-processing involved, so I could be totally wrong.
  - brianwawok 4y ago
    Mostly to slow torrent seeders. A fat up pipe and no data limit means TB after TB go to seed torrents. Otherwise for 90% of users, 90% of their traffic is download. Me legit pushing a 2GB docker image gets hit in the crossfire,
    - xibo9 4y ago
      One might say that the state of the art has been chained up with awful upload speeds. Where you can think of one possible application, I can think of more, and undoubtedly there are even more that don't occur to people because it doesn't enter their experience. Being able to do practical off-site backups from home, even snapshots on an hourly basis? That'd be the dream. Oh wait, I'm doing that now because I have 1 gigabit/sec upstream at home!
    - whoopdedo 4y ago
lallysingh 4y ago
Hopefully starlink will raise the bar with competition
- ganoushoreilly 4y ago
  Uploads are about the same 8-20 on the Starlink connection we have at our farm.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  Unfortunately Shannon's law makes that all but impossible.
godelski 4y ago
This is such an artificial/politically generated problem too. I used to live in Tennessee and there were several cities with gigabit internet that was created by public funding. Chattanooga did this but was blocked from providing access to those that were in unincorporated areas. Even though the city still provided these people other utilities (electricity, water, gas) and mail. Same thing happened in Tullahoma (city next to where Bonnaroo Music Festival is). Then I remember Google Fiber trying to come in but the state had a law where lines needed to be placed in certain areas (which were of course in use) and that one operator could not lay down lines unless there was a representative from those that already had lines in place (supposedly to protect property). But this obviously led to shenanigans. Similarly when I moved into an apartment I chose the faster city internet but the previous tenant had AT&T. When the utilities company came to turn on my fiber (as they had provided for the apt previously) they found that AT&T had slashed their line, which caused me to have to pay an instillation fee. For a state where the people were so proud and supportive of libertarianism and the free market there sure were a lot of laws that supported or enabled monopolies to run a muck. There are clearly available solutions and there's room for markets to exist and provide competition but it is very clear that we've set up a system that enables the unregulated monopolistic actions of ISPs.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
The problem is lack of competition. My father gets outstanding service at his house in RI because he can switch to about 3 providers. When he threatens to cancel they know he means it. I get fisted by Cuckcast up here in NH because they're the only choice.
- xibo9 4y ago
  Have you heard from Fidium yet in your community? I know they haven't got coverage everywhere yet, but its surprising how quickly they have been backfilling. Plus, fully symmetrical 1 gigabit/sec under $100/mo has been nice.
- philjohn 4y ago
  This is the key - capitalism only works when there is viable competition, otherwise it's just a monopoly. They got around this in the UK by splitting the monopoly (well, except for Kingston upon hull) into BT and OpenReach. OpenReach provides the infrastructure, and are bound by government regulation to provide open access to last mile infrastructure for a fixed fee per product - this allows a load of ISP's to offer their own value-add services. AAISP is pricey, but you get legendary support Zen is less pricey (and unlimited) and good support PlusNet is cheap as chips The one are this is different with is FTTP - because of the slow roll out on OpenReach's part, plenty of smaller providers have stepped up and built their own infrastructure and cover various parts of the country. Is it perfect? Of course not, but I'm paying 54 GBP a month for 900 down and 110 up FTTP.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    That's how DSL was supposed to work in the US. The telcos sabotaged it by not maintaining their copper lines and forced the independent ISPs out of business.
    - Kadin 4y ago
      Not really; they just lobbied the Bush II Administration into crippling the Clinton-era rules that required them to allow competitive DSL providers. The requirement was called "Local Loop Unbundling" and it required the RBOCs (legacy local telcos, from when the Bell System was broken up) to lease "dry pairs" to various competitive DSL providers at reasonable and nondiscriminatory rates. And for a few years it worked! The dialup ISPs started to move into DSL services and it looked like we would have real competition (admittedly DSL, but this looked decent enough at the time). But they lobbied the shit out of Congress and got LLU killed in the early 00s.
imoverclocked 4y ago
> But I don't have a choice. It doesn't matter how good, or bad, Comcast is. They're the only game in town. To extend that, Comcast is on my street but refuses to run a line up to my house because they consider it to be too cost prohibitive. At the same time, they block anyone else from making money in my region. I'm stuck with whatever cell signal I can acquire and that is as good as 5mbps during the day and might double that at night on a clear evening.
- jfoutz 4y ago
  somewhat cynical, but I think effective. Look into wireless internet service provider gear and mesh networks. It won't be faster than Comcast. 50Mbit maybe. Make flyers and talk to your neighbors. Call around and ask about pricing for fiber backhauls. Of course you don't want to run your own ISP. But, you could. It's not really that hard. Your neighbors could chip in for gear and be part owners. or a co-op or whatever. If you can create a plausible threat to the $5000 a month they're collecting around you, I suspect they'll greatly enhance performance in your area, and might even offer to connect you up.
  - justinjlynn 4y ago
    Either that or they'll send a C&D and then file multiple lawsuits to strategically prevent others from having the same idea, sure.
    - nine_k 4y ago
      I suppose their monopoly extends to offering service for money, not for having it for yourself (or a collective of neighbors who own the gear and share costs). Were it nit so, they could sue you for sharing the cellular internet around your house.
  - mawise 4y ago
    Related reading: https://startyourownisp.com/ https://startyourownisp.com/
  - mulmen 4y ago
thayne 4y ago
And in the new world of a lot more people working remotely, upload speeds are suddenly a lot more important. Mostly because of viseo conferences, but transferring other kinds of data too.
koala_man 4y ago
My internet in the Silicon Valley today is worse than I had in Europe 10 years ago. It's pretty disillusioning.
- _lqaf 4y ago
  Hah, my internet in San Francisco is worse that it was... in San Francisco in the 90s. My symmetric DSL then was faster than downstream-DOCSIS is now. I also have to keep a backup line, because Comcast here (SOMA) goes out about every other month, and I work from home. So I pay another $35 for MonkeyBrains, which is much slower, but more than nothing when Comcast is dead. To paraphrase Gandhi, I think American capitalism would be a very good idea.
  - dntrkv 4y ago
    Why not just tether to your phone? It would be way faster than monkey brains.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- rayiner 4y ago
  How’s your public transit compared to Europe? The number of homeless people/drug addicts? Personal safety?
walrus01 4y ago
The problem is not just Comcast but everything of its ilk, and by that I mean Charter (Spectrum/former Time Warner Cable), RCN/Grande/Astound and similar giant size coax based DOCSIS3 operators. In Canada, Shaw and Rogers. They are absolutely determined to squeeze every last dollar of ROI out of that existing coax cable plant by doing asymmetric RF channels for downstream/upstream. And not overbuilding themselves with GPON FTTH. There's a limited amount of RF spectrum in a given coax segment and they bond it together in such a way that 85% of it is used for downstream, and some paltry amount for upstream. On a heavily loaded DOCSIS3 segment it can also be 12-13ms latency to the gateway which is an eternity in metro area networking fiber terms. So you end up with something like a 200 Mbps down x 15.5 Mbps up cable connection. Obviously the abusive bait and switch customer acquisition and retention tactics are also a huge problem. Now they're doing additional bullshit like making special offers to bundle your cellphone service and cable together (Comcast is a MVNO on some nationwide cellular carriers), for a "discounted" price, so that it makes it more painful for you to switch your ISP service in the future if you're unhappy. Eventually they will need to spend a spectacular amount of money to overbuild themselves because in some places the local phone company (centurylink, ziply, verizon, others) is building 1 strand of dark fiber to each house, running it to some neighborhood level splitter, and going 1G or 10GPON on it for service that approaches real symmetric gigabit to the customer. To individual single family houses. Comcast is just the most obvious example of the problem in the incumbent cable operator industry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbHqUNl8YFk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbHqUNl8YFk
- jbman223 4y ago
  I got lucky, the subdevelopment I live in has been upgraded from classic Centurylink DSL to “Spectrum” fiber (1gbps fiber line to the house for $60/month, no contract and no equipment or setup fees. Growing up a few blocks away, it was a comcast subscription or a 1mbps DSL line(~10yrs ago). It’s awesome when a competitor can enter the market.
- tguvot 4y ago
  While there is plenty of things that can be blamed on cable providers, the allocation is asymmetric RF channels it's not something that they decide to do specifically to mess up with clients but actually part of DOCSIS standard that is made by CableLabs (yea.. with input from cable companies, yet...) . A lot of todays restriction are derived from dark ages when cable was tv and not internet. IIRC till DOCSIS 3.1 (or 3.0?) data downstream was actually framed inside mpeg segments (or something like this) . They did manage to incrementally squeeze much more out of their infra (coax) compared to what is achievable with twisted pair. Last house that I rented had 30+ years old coax drop that were handling 1000/30 just fine and at my current house i get 1200/30. Yea, it sucks that upstream is limited but sometimes legacy tech is legacy tech and decisions must be made in order to properly serve all the clients on plant with all the gazillion of different devices that they have Edit: nice old discussion about upstream channels allocation in DOCSIS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22572536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22572536
Sunspark 4y ago
If Starlink is in your area, this is an option worth looking into.
- dntrkv 4y ago
  Or 4g/5g. I bought a place way out in the boonies and I’m getting 70 down with a 4x4 MIMO antenna, no data cap. Without the antenna it would be <5 down.
  - superkuh 4y ago
    Neither starlink nor most terrestrial telco offer real internet service. I don't really care about speed. I care about participating in the internet and consistent latency. Some rare terrestrial telcos will offer ipv4 addresses and so use of ports for a much higher fee but it is the general rule that most don't. Consistent latency is impossible to achieve with wireless' random round trip time and tcp back-off. They're fine services for consuming media but they aren't very good ISPs.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  So far it appears that only early beta customers of Starlink are getting anywhere close to useable service and as soon as it opens up to more customers the links quickly saturate and you're back to whatever everyone else is offering - except with higher latencies. Something about Shannon's Law. It's better than nothing for folks who don't have any other options, but it's not a solution to this particular problem. The best solution I've seen to date is city-run fiber.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
And! When you lease a Comcast modem + wifi equipment, you then become an Xfinity wifi hotspot provider. Mind you, they don't tell you this. But to charge the customer money to expand their hotspot availability (and marketing bragging rights) is shite. But like you said, often there's no choice. But even when there is - in my area of NJ - aside from new customer deals both Verizon and Comcast are wildly expensive.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

rascul 4y ago

> Downspeed hardly matters. It's been plenty for decades. Until the power company ran fiber earlier this year, the only wired option here was 3Mbps DSL from AT&T. AT&T buried fiber all over the area (including in front of my house) years ago, but it sits there unused.

xahrepap 4y ago
Same where I am. Most of the city has competition because it’s most new developments out here and a few fiber companies were able to get in the ground early. My neighborhood is older so we only have Comcast. But Comcast buried fiber here to “future proof” ages ago, they just haven’t lit it up. And they’re the only company who got their hardware in the ground. So I’m stuck on their cable. As it turns out the service here is good, so I shouldn’t complain. But it’s still frustrating that they are just sitting on fiber and not using it. And also that there’s no competition where I am. If I ever move, then I’ll know better and pick a house with fiber already. :/
- lechatpito1 4y ago
  And no need to be in the countryside to experience this. I am living in Manhattan, Upper West Side, one of the most affluent neighborhood in the richest city of the country. It is Spectrum cable or nothing. There seem to be fiber around, but it did not make it to my street (lined with small buildings so maybe not interesting enough?). Meanwhile in France where we have spent some time this year, you get fiber in the most rural and isolated areas... Go figure.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    Being in an “affluent neighborhood” isn’t really the gating factor though. Many of those places aren’t development friendly at all. Meanwhile my red county has farms wired up with fiber.
dubswithus 4y ago
My parents live 4 miles from the nearest city in a rural area. Someone paid for a fiber line and my parents got a free install because it crossed the property. Before this they were using a microwave antenna and getting 10 megabit.
- radicaldreamer 4y ago
  These days, fixed wireless mmwave antennas can do 300-1Gbps symmetrical for about $100 per antenna.
  - ed25519FUUU 4y ago
    What services are providing at those prices?
    - radicaldreamer 4y ago
      Monkeybrains in SF provides up to 1Gbps symmetrical at $35/month. The antenna cost is about $100 and labor/installation is $150 ($250/total).
    - kube-system 4y ago
      Nobody, they’re talking about the antenna(/radio) itself.
walrus01 4y ago
and people wonder why folks in not-very-far-out suburbs are buying and using starlink or other options, if all they have is ultra long loop length copper DSL and no DOCSIS3 available and no GPON or active ethernet fiber based service. i've seen starlink terminals in places they have absolutely no logical need to be if the local terrestrial incumbent phone company and cable companies with rights to the ROW (right-of-way) would get off their asses
- ev1 4y ago
  lmao one of my mates has a starlink terminal in the outskirts of los angeles just to get work done because spectrum's gigabit plan is like 1.2MB/s upstream most of the time and in the subkilobytes during peak times it's comical how bad this is edit: how we found out about this was also amusing: he sent a group snapchat of the arrival and setup in backyard and we were all "did you move or go traveling?" "no, spectrum is godawful"

cyral 4y ago

I was curious about the upload issue recently and learned that it is because of limitations of the old cable infrastructure. You presumably receive your internet over coax (which can still provide really good download speeds, I was surprised when my gigabit internet package came and it only had a coax port instead of fiber). Cable TV is pretty much all downloads, with only a small portion of the bandwidth reserved for uploads, since uploading is only needed for authenticating your subscription, pay-per-view purchases, etc. Unfortunately there isn't an easy way to re-allocate the upload bandwidth, because this splitting is implemented with actual hardware frequency filters that are buried and on poles all over the US.

harikb 4y ago
As far as I have heard, they could choose to use N out of M channels for either upload or download and they are choosing to keep it the way it is. Probably they need to keep it that way for other reasons (their own cable-TV signal goes through it). But I know nothing about the electronics/signal-processing involved, so I could be totally wrong.
- brianwawok 4y ago
  Mostly to slow torrent seeders. A fat up pipe and no data limit means TB after TB go to seed torrents. Otherwise for 90% of users, 90% of their traffic is download. Me legit pushing a 2GB docker image gets hit in the crossfire,
  - xibo9 4y ago
    One might say that the state of the art has been chained up with awful upload speeds. Where you can think of one possible application, I can think of more, and undoubtedly there are even more that don't occur to people because it doesn't enter their experience. Being able to do practical off-site backups from home, even snapshots on an hourly basis? That'd be the dream. Oh wait, I'm doing that now because I have 1 gigabit/sec upstream at home!
  - whoopdedo 4y ago

lallysingh 4y ago

Hopefully starlink will raise the bar with competition

ganoushoreilly 4y ago
Uploads are about the same 8-20 on the Starlink connection we have at our farm.
arcticbull 4y ago
Unfortunately Shannon's law makes that all but impossible.

godelski 4y ago

This is such an artificial/politically generated problem too. I used to live in Tennessee and there were several cities with gigabit internet that was created by public funding. Chattanooga did this but was blocked from providing access to those that were in unincorporated areas. Even though the city still provided these people other utilities (electricity, water, gas) and mail. Same thing happened in Tullahoma (city next to where Bonnaroo Music Festival is). Then I remember Google Fiber trying to come in but the state had a law where lines needed to be placed in certain areas (which were of course in use) and that one operator could not lay down lines unless there was a representative from those that already had lines in place (supposedly to protect property). But this obviously led to shenanigans. Similarly when I moved into an apartment I chose the faster city internet but the previous tenant had AT&T. When the utilities company came to turn on my fiber (as they had provided for the apt previously) they found that AT&T had slashed their line, which caused me to have to pay an instillation fee. For a state where the people were so proud and supportive of libertarianism and the free market there sure were a lot of laws that supported or enabled monopolies to run a muck. There are clearly available solutions and there's room for markets to exist and provide competition but it is very clear that we've set up a system that enables the unregulated monopolistic actions of ISPs.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

The problem is lack of competition. My father gets outstanding service at his house in RI because he can switch to about 3 providers. When he threatens to cancel they know he means it. I get fisted by Cuckcast up here in NH because they're the only choice.

xibo9 4y ago
Have you heard from Fidium yet in your community? I know they haven't got coverage everywhere yet, but its surprising how quickly they have been backfilling. Plus, fully symmetrical 1 gigabit/sec under $100/mo has been nice.
philjohn 4y ago
This is the key - capitalism only works when there is viable competition, otherwise it's just a monopoly. They got around this in the UK by splitting the monopoly (well, except for Kingston upon hull) into BT and OpenReach. OpenReach provides the infrastructure, and are bound by government regulation to provide open access to last mile infrastructure for a fixed fee per product - this allows a load of ISP's to offer their own value-add services. AAISP is pricey, but you get legendary support Zen is less pricey (and unlimited) and good support PlusNet is cheap as chips The one are this is different with is FTTP - because of the slow roll out on OpenReach's part, plenty of smaller providers have stepped up and built their own infrastructure and cover various parts of the country. Is it perfect? Of course not, but I'm paying 54 GBP a month for 900 down and 110 up FTTP.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
  That's how DSL was supposed to work in the US. The telcos sabotaged it by not maintaining their copper lines and forced the independent ISPs out of business.
  - Kadin 4y ago
    Not really; they just lobbied the Bush II Administration into crippling the Clinton-era rules that required them to allow competitive DSL providers. The requirement was called "Local Loop Unbundling" and it required the RBOCs (legacy local telcos, from when the Bell System was broken up) to lease "dry pairs" to various competitive DSL providers at reasonable and nondiscriminatory rates. And for a few years it worked! The dialup ISPs started to move into DSL services and it looked like we would have real competition (admittedly DSL, but this looked decent enough at the time). But they lobbied the shit out of Congress and got LLU killed in the early 00s.

imoverclocked 4y ago

> But I don't have a choice. It doesn't matter how good, or bad, Comcast is. They're the only game in town. To extend that, Comcast is on my street but refuses to run a line up to my house because they consider it to be too cost prohibitive. At the same time, they block anyone else from making money in my region. I'm stuck with whatever cell signal I can acquire and that is as good as 5mbps during the day and might double that at night on a clear evening.

jfoutz 4y ago
somewhat cynical, but I think effective. Look into wireless internet service provider gear and mesh networks. It won't be faster than Comcast. 50Mbit maybe. Make flyers and talk to your neighbors. Call around and ask about pricing for fiber backhauls. Of course you don't want to run your own ISP. But, you could. It's not really that hard. Your neighbors could chip in for gear and be part owners. or a co-op or whatever. If you can create a plausible threat to the $5000 a month they're collecting around you, I suspect they'll greatly enhance performance in your area, and might even offer to connect you up.
- justinjlynn 4y ago
  Either that or they'll send a C&D and then file multiple lawsuits to strategically prevent others from having the same idea, sure.
  - nine_k 4y ago
    I suppose their monopoly extends to offering service for money, not for having it for yourself (or a collective of neighbors who own the gear and share costs). Were it nit so, they could sue you for sharing the cellular internet around your house.
- mawise 4y ago
  Related reading: https://startyourownisp.com/ https://startyourownisp.com/
- mulmen 4y ago

thayne 4y ago

And in the new world of a lot more people working remotely, upload speeds are suddenly a lot more important. Mostly because of viseo conferences, but transferring other kinds of data too.

koala_man 4y ago

My internet in the Silicon Valley today is worse than I had in Europe 10 years ago. It's pretty disillusioning.

_lqaf 4y ago
Hah, my internet in San Francisco is worse that it was... in San Francisco in the 90s. My symmetric DSL then was faster than downstream-DOCSIS is now. I also have to keep a backup line, because Comcast here (SOMA) goes out about every other month, and I work from home. So I pay another $35 for MonkeyBrains, which is much slower, but more than nothing when Comcast is dead. To paraphrase Gandhi, I think American capitalism would be a very good idea.
- dntrkv 4y ago
  Why not just tether to your phone? It would be way faster than monkey brains.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
rayiner 4y ago
How’s your public transit compared to Europe? The number of homeless people/drug addicts? Personal safety?

walrus01 4y ago

The problem is not just Comcast but everything of its ilk, and by that I mean Charter (Spectrum/former Time Warner Cable), RCN/Grande/Astound and similar giant size coax based DOCSIS3 operators. In Canada, Shaw and Rogers. They are absolutely determined to squeeze every last dollar of ROI out of that existing coax cable plant by doing asymmetric RF channels for downstream/upstream. And not overbuilding themselves with GPON FTTH. There's a limited amount of RF spectrum in a given coax segment and they bond it together in such a way that 85% of it is used for downstream, and some paltry amount for upstream. On a heavily loaded DOCSIS3 segment it can also be 12-13ms latency to the gateway which is an eternity in metro area networking fiber terms. So you end up with something like a 200 Mbps down x 15.5 Mbps up cable connection. Obviously the abusive bait and switch customer acquisition and retention tactics are also a huge problem. Now they're doing additional bullshit like making special offers to bundle your cellphone service and cable together (Comcast is a MVNO on some nationwide cellular carriers), for a "discounted" price, so that it makes it more painful for you to switch your ISP service in the future if you're unhappy. Eventually they will need to spend a spectacular amount of money to overbuild themselves because in some places the local phone company (centurylink, ziply, verizon, others) is building 1 strand of dark fiber to each house, running it to some neighborhood level splitter, and going 1G or 10GPON on it for service that approaches real symmetric gigabit to the customer. To individual single family houses. Comcast is just the most obvious example of the problem in the incumbent cable operator industry. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbHqUNl8YFk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbHqUNl8YFk

jbman223 4y ago
I got lucky, the subdevelopment I live in has been upgraded from classic Centurylink DSL to “Spectrum” fiber (1gbps fiber line to the house for $60/month, no contract and no equipment or setup fees. Growing up a few blocks away, it was a comcast subscription or a 1mbps DSL line(~10yrs ago). It’s awesome when a competitor can enter the market.
tguvot 4y ago
While there is plenty of things that can be blamed on cable providers, the allocation is asymmetric RF channels it's not something that they decide to do specifically to mess up with clients but actually part of DOCSIS standard that is made by CableLabs (yea.. with input from cable companies, yet...) . A lot of todays restriction are derived from dark ages when cable was tv and not internet. IIRC till DOCSIS 3.1 (or 3.0?) data downstream was actually framed inside mpeg segments (or something like this) . They did manage to incrementally squeeze much more out of their infra (coax) compared to what is achievable with twisted pair. Last house that I rented had 30+ years old coax drop that were handling 1000/30 just fine and at my current house i get 1200/30. Yea, it sucks that upstream is limited but sometimes legacy tech is legacy tech and decisions must be made in order to properly serve all the clients on plant with all the gazillion of different devices that they have Edit: nice old discussion about upstream channels allocation in DOCSIS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22572536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22572536

Sunspark 4y ago

If Starlink is in your area, this is an option worth looking into.

dntrkv 4y ago
Or 4g/5g. I bought a place way out in the boonies and I’m getting 70 down with a 4x4 MIMO antenna, no data cap. Without the antenna it would be <5 down.
- superkuh 4y ago
  Neither starlink nor most terrestrial telco offer real internet service. I don't really care about speed. I care about participating in the internet and consistent latency. Some rare terrestrial telcos will offer ipv4 addresses and so use of ports for a much higher fee but it is the general rule that most don't. Consistent latency is impossible to achieve with wireless' random round trip time and tcp back-off. They're fine services for consuming media but they aren't very good ISPs.
arcticbull 4y ago
So far it appears that only early beta customers of Starlink are getting anywhere close to useable service and as soon as it opens up to more customers the links quickly saturate and you're back to whatever everyone else is offering - except with higher latencies. Something about Shannon's Law. It's better than nothing for folks who don't have any other options, but it's not a solution to this particular problem. The best solution I've seen to date is city-run fiber.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

And! When you lease a Comcast modem + wifi equipment, you then become an Xfinity wifi hotspot provider. Mind you, they don't tell you this. But to charge the customer money to expand their hotspot availability (and marketing bragging rights) is shite. But like you said, often there's no choice. But even when there is - in my area of NJ - aside from new customer deals both Verizon and Comcast are wildly expensive.

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