13 ms·

Some color about buying home internet in London vs San Francisco (in my experience). I recently moved back from London to San Francisco. In my 3 years in centr

by habosa 4y ago

Some color about buying home internet in London vs San Francisco (in my experience). I recently moved back from London to San Francisco. In my 3 years in central London (N1) I had to use a 5g hotspot (thank you, Vodafone unlimited) to get anything close to fast internet in my flat. If I went with a wired "broadband" connection I could not get more than 10Mbps down. The street next to mine had gigabit fiber though. The reason? Almost all utility cables in London are underground. So replacing internet infrastructure requires ripping up the street. I lived on the high street near a tube station so I guess they hadn't laid a new line near me in 10+ years. I was really shocked after calling 15+ internet companies and finding out that nobody could offer me higher speeds. Only different prices. Now I moved back to San Francisco and I was excited to get some fast internet in my home. Quickly it became obvious that Comcast was my only real option at my address. They had plans up to 1200MBps down, but nothing over 20Mbps up! And 50%+ of the plans had data caps. I find a 1Gbps plan with a 500GB data cap hilarious ... theoretically you could use the entire data cap in ~75 minutes if you could saturate it. That's a lot less than a month! So basically internet is a disaster in both countries but it sounds like this is a step in the right direction.

dmitryminkovsky 4y ago
How was the 5G hotspot though?
- secondcoming 4y ago
  If you are in the right location it's a viable alternative to fibre. Here's mine, elsewhere in the UK (not in Newcastle): https://www.speedtest.net/result/14185051949 https://www.speedtest.net/result/14185051949 Cheaper than fibre and 30-day rolling contract. Unlimited data.
  - dmitryminkovsky 4y ago
    Thanks for sharing. This seems totally fine, if not more than acceptable? How much does this cost?
    - secondcoming 4y ago
      £28pm. It's great, I originally intended to use it temporarily while potentially waiting for fibre to be connected, but it was so good I didn't bother with fibre in the end.
  - wdb 4y ago
    Which provider is that?
    - secondcoming 4y ago
      3
- habosa 4y ago
  It was great. £50/month and I used 1TB of data with no throttling. Two people working from home full time. Only occasionally slow. Not great latency though.
simonebrunozzi 4y ago
Try Monkeybrains.
- everdrive 4y ago
  That seems more likely to give me a prion disease, so no thank you.
- mikeyouse 4y ago
  If you live in the Avenues in SF or in certain parts of the East Bay (Oakland, Richmond, some parts of Berkeley) - Sonic has started rolling out 10gbps Fiber as well. All of those places have 1gbps on offer, but people are playing with the 10gbps too; https://dongknows.com/10gbps-internet-unlocking-super-broadbands-secret/ https://dongknows.com/10gbps-internet-unlocking-super-broadb...
- paxys 4y ago
  Monkeybrains is great for the price, but if you want a more premium and reliable service then there are much better options. Google Fiber (Webpass) does symmetric gigabit. AT&T has 5 gigabit. Sonic 10 gigabit. Of course the real problem is that your building likely won't have any of them.
  - simonebrunozzi 4y ago
    Not all places in that area can subscribe to Google Fiber or others.
- dylan604 4y ago
  Are they chilled? Also, does it come after the eyeball soup course?
jnathsf 4y ago
try Sonic - I live in SF and have a dedicated fiber connection
acchow 4y ago
Comcast has a 500GB data cap in SF? Isn't it 1.2TB?
whitepoplar 4y ago
Comcast now offers vastly higher upload speeds (10mbps -> 100mbps) so long as you rent their modem, which is an additional $25/month, but also comes with unlimited data. Paying for unlimited data separately costs $30/month if you own your own modem, but doesn't yet support higher upload speeds. It's unfortunate that this is the case, but for those who need higher upload speeds, it's at least possible with Comcast now. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/want-faster-comcast-uploads-you-have-to-pay-25-month-extra-for-xfi-complete/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/want-faster-comc...
- dylan604 4y ago
  >Comcast now offers vastly higher upload speeds (10mbps -> 100mbps) I mean, yeah, I guess normally a 10x increase is deemed a good thing and could be considered "vastly higher". Who wouldn't be impressed with a 10x bump in pay? However, 100mbps is still tragically low. Having anything less than full bandwidth up/down on a fiber line is just cheating the user artificially. Being fiber, I could see offering a cheaper modem because it has a cheaper SFP in it, but even those are dirt cheap now for lowly 1Gbps
  - vel0city 4y ago
    Comcast often isn't FTTP, its is usually coax to the home. There are some services they do with FTTP, such as their 2Gbit service, but most installs are coax.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      >but most installs are coax. Good gawd! It's like cable is in their DNA and they invested heavily in a cable manufacturing company and are trying to keep it alive /s also, is it pushing the limits of marketing to say you have a fiber connection if the cable coming into your home is actually coax? edit: just to clarify, is it really fiber if the demarc isn't in/on your house? I get running fiber to the home to a device that then turns that into coax to run to the modem of choice for the vendor. i have fiber to fiber so the demarc is sitting right being my desk with a 6' cat6 cable from it to the modem. if your advertised fiber service brings fiber over long haul to the neighborhood but then breaks that out into standard coax for last mile delivery, is that still a fiber connection?
gpderetta 4y ago
My previous home in London was a purpose built flat. I could chose between two different fibre-to-the-home providers that had each run their own wire to each apartment in the block. They were both quite cheap. Recently I moved to a terraced house about 300m from my previous flat. The only internet option is expensive and slow fibre-to-the-cabinet-down-the-street. Yes, coverage in London is uneven!
dheera 4y ago
They need to reword the law to keep up with Moore's Law, so that if you built a home in 2023 you'd be required to have 1 gigabit, in 2024 you'd be required to have 1.2 gigabit, in 2025 you'd be required to have 1.44 gigabit, etc. The moment internet connections don't keep up with Moore's Law, the real estate typhoons would then have no choice but to fund bandwidth-related R&D to get internet connections back on track with the requirement before they could sell more homes.
- skybrian 4y ago
  But why? How many videos are you going to watch at the same time?
  - barnabee 4y ago
    Not sure about the answer to that exact question but I’d like to turn my PC on and be able to update any game I feel like playing in less than 5 minutes. Sometimes there are many 10s of gigabytes of updates.
  - gernb 4y ago
    Everyone always thinks the current bandwidth is enough.... it never is. I have no idea what the future hold but a typical VR movie is ~20gig I'm not saying VR is going to take off but maybe streamed AR virtual presence might and it will require more bandwidth than today's video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7raHNfPc6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7raHNfPc6A And even if that doesn't, something always comes up that needs more bandwidth.
    - dheera 4y ago
      This is also what worries me about fusion energy. They say we'll have "unlimited" energy but it's really not unlimited, it can be petawatts but it's still finite, and people will invent new devices that will drain all of the fusion fuel as well instead of powering our current lifestyle. People won't own cars, they'll fly themselves everywhere because it's "okay" to consume megawatts per person, and we'll end up draining all the oceans of their deuterium. It's exactly what happened when oil was discovered, it was thought of as an "unlimited" energy source in the days of horses. On the plus side fusion energy is carbon-clean, but its fuel is most certainly finite.
kccqzy 4y ago
The underground utility is a big reason why, where I live, an older house from the baby boom period (1950s) might have fiber and gigabit internet but a newer home from the 1980s might not.
- dylan604 4y ago
  yet another example of how they just built things better/to last in the 50s! /s
thomseddon 4y ago
For clarity - whilst most connectivity infrastructure in London is underground, it's almost always within a primary duct, so running new infrastructure is usually a case of pulling in a new cable as opposed to "ripping up the street". In fact, anyone approved can use BTs own ducts and poles via their PIA product[1], which has created a resurgent and incredibly active market of "alternative" network providers ("alt nets"). London for example is now well served for broadband by Community Fibre, g.network, Hyperoptic and others alongside the incumbents. [1] https://www.openreach.co.uk/cpportal/products/passive-products/physical-infrastructure-access(PIA) https://www.openreach.co.uk/cpportal/products/passive-produc...
- cameronh90 4y ago
  It may be in a duct, but occasionally the manholes are in really awkward locations - like in the middle of an extremely busy road. I've been waiting for symmetric fibre for a year, and they're trying to install it, but getting the permission to close the road to lift up the manhole is proving to be a challenge.
  - thomseddon 4y ago
    Yeah it's certainly not without issue, the network is full of blockages, collapsed ducts etc. Traffic management and road closures can be hard work, we've had to wait over a year before for a road closure as it would affect multiple bus routes. (And as an aside, lockdown was extremely productive for network build like this!)
  - djhn 4y ago
    But my impression of London (from living there for a few years in the 2010s) was that it is very much a 6am-11pm city and everything is shut at night. Surely infrastructure work can take place during night shifts? I found the experience of working in the city and living in Westminster frustrating, because shops, public transport and even pubs(!) would effectively have closed by the time you finished work.
    - cameronh90 4y ago
alias_neo 4y ago
I moved from a village in Cheshire where I had 500Mb/500Mb to London Zone 3 where the best I could get was 3Mb/0.2Mb, then I bought a new build in Zone 6 where I could get 1.2Gb/1.2Gb, now I moved to Liverpool into a 1930s house where I can get 1.2Gb/100Mb (FttP) which isn't great uoload (I work remote), but is because it's GPON. I got a letter through the door a week or two ago saying they're building out 10Gb/10Gb on my road over the next few years, so I've got a bit of time to start upgrading my kit to handle 10Gb symmetric, which I'm hoping will push the price down of the sub-10Gb speeds, because let's he honest, I don't need 10/10.
Xcelerate 4y ago
I moved from the Bay Area to a rural place in the southeast. It is a mystery how I am able to get 10Gbps fiber here from not only AT&T but also the local utility company, whereas in Redwood City my option was basically only Comcast with a slow upload cap.
- rayiner 4y ago
  It’s not a “mystery.” California makes it expensive and difficult to build infrastructure. That’s why Google Fiber started out in places like Kansas City. I live in a historically red county in the Verizon footprint. I have two fiber lines into my house, one from Verizon and one from Comcast. I get 6 gbps service from Comcast. It’s expensive ($300/month, compared to 10 gig for $300 in Chattanooga). But it’s not even an option in most of Silicon Valley.
  - lern_too_spel 4y ago
    Is that all over your state? There are places in California, including parts of Silicon Valley, where you can get 10 Gbps fiber Internet service for $40/month.
    - rayiner 4y ago
      FiOS is almost everywhere in the state. Comcast 6 gig fiber is anywhere within 1,760 feet of a fiber node that has overhead (rather than buried) utilities.
      - lern_too_spel 4y ago
        Similarly, AT&T and Comcast are almost everywhere in California with at least 1 Gbps service for $70. Places with fiber laid by Sonic have 10 Gbps at $40/month. I checked a random address in Redwood City, where Xcelerate was from, and found that Comcast offers 6 Gbps service there too for the same price you get it, as well as AT&T fiber.
donatj 4y ago
> I find a 1Gbps plan with a 500GB data cap hilarious This is how I ended up paying the extra $20 a month for unlimited data. I had 1TB cap on a 1Gbps connection. My wifes friend who was unemployed and staying us would put Netflix shows on for ambiance all day as she wandered about the house (not even watching it!) - streaming 4k Netflix ate up serious data pretty quickly and I got quite a few overage charges. It's just bizarre to me that we live in an age where "turn off the TV, it's costing me actual measurable amounts of money" is a real thing.
- uxcolumbo 4y ago
  What a waste. Did you mention it to her? Why not just put the radio on or at least don’t stream in 4k. I wonder how many are like her, just leaving it on all day for ambience and what the carbon footprint is.
  - donatj 4y ago
    Honestly, she was on really hard times already and I didn’t want to make it worse. I looked for options within the app to disable 4K but couldn’t find anything, I ended up lowering my Netflix subscription to not include 4K but that didn’t kick in until the following month.
    - uxcolumbo 4y ago
      Ah ok so it was mental health related. Hope your friend gets better.
spacedcowboy 4y ago
My brother has Gig ethernet in London, 1G in both directions. Lives south of the river, even... :) I've got AT&T GigE here in San Jose, but he's had it for longer than I have.
- kergonath 4y ago
  > Lives south of the river, even... So, the legends are true, and there are actually people south of the river? ;) Seriously though, in my flat in SE15, I had some decent DSL (as good as it can be, with pitiful bandwidth but it was really stable). I planned to get Hyperoptic to lay some fibre, but then I moved to a different place with 10/10 FTTH. My pet peeve in London is the patchiness of 4G and 5G coverage. It’s a bloody big city, and yet I regularly get no bars at all in zones 1 and 2. It’s the same for broadband: some streets are great, other very much less so.
  - mikelward 4y ago
    EE doesn't work at my house and they don't care. Vodafone and O2 are better in my area, but I'm lucky if I get HSPA around my tube station. Really looking forward to getting mobile data on the tube.
itslennysfault 4y ago
I know this probably doesn't help you currently, but if you move look for places that have Wave-G (apparently it's now called astound). It's available in SF and Seattle and offers symmetric gig up/down with no cap for $80/mo. I had it in Seattle, and I have a good friend with it in SF and we both had nothing but great experiences with them.
- mattl 4y ago
  Astound is also what RCN in the North East rebranded to. I’m paying $65 for 900mbps/20ish but with HBO Max included.
  - Denatonium 4y ago
    Enjoy that price while it lasts and get ready to haggle; the non-promotional rate (found on the "Rate Cards" page linked at the bottom of Astound's website) for your speed tier is $161.99 per month in addition to the Network Access and Maintenance Fee. At least in former RCN areas, there's usually at least a semi-viable competitor, and after being away for 2 months, you generally become eligible for the new customer promotions again.
    - mattl 4y ago
      Yeah there’s Comcast and I keep seeing a Verizon truck and hoping FIOS will come.
alanh 4y ago
Bay Area residents should really consider Sonic as their internet provider. I have gigabit speed, fiber direct to my unit, and a bill lower than Comcast's, with no data cap
- likpok 4y ago
  Sonic only works some places, specifically where there are overhead power lines they can use to route the cables. There used to be some discussion about "microtrenching" so they could cost-effectively bury fiber throughout the city but the Board of Supervisors shut that down pretty definitively (or rather: made requirements that made it too expensive for sonic). So Sonic is really good where you can get it, but you can't get it in much of the city. You also have to be careful, because Sonic has two types of offering: fiber (good) and reselling at&t dsl (pretty bad). Only get them if you get the actual fiber!
lowbloodsugar 4y ago
I don’t know why techies move into residences without first checking the communications options.
- bravetraveler 4y ago
  I would love for better options for this -- the place I live now took nearly two months to find! Comparing address listings against the various provider websites is a ridiculous chore It's frustrating - depending on the street you may have 2/1 gigabit fiber... or DSL.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  I bought a house in rural new mexico and forgot entirely to check this until I moved in. Thankfully, I could get 40Mbps down / 5Mbps up which is enough for me. It is scary to think about what I would have done if the service had been substantially worse (or not available at all).
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> So basically internet is a disaster in both countries Country-level generalizations about internet speeds are basically useless in 2023. A lot of us have easy access to 1G up and down and multiple providers to choose from. I have friends who live less than 15 minutes away who only have DSL or Starlink as options. Extrapolating city-level anecdotes to entire countries doesn't make any sense. We don't upgrade the whole country's infrastructure in lock step.
- TheHappyOddish 4y ago
  > Country-level generalizations about internet speeds are basically useless in 2023. I'm not sure that's true. Nobody in Australia on a residential grade NBN connection (which most people are on, and those are aren't are being forced onto) has > 1gbps, and none of them have syncronous up. This is absolutely run in lock step on a country level. I'd imagine multiple countries are like this.
irrational 4y ago
Maybe it's a problem with living in a city? I live in a suburb and have had fiber optic internet for nearly 2 decades. Currently I pay for a 1 Gig plan (up and down - unlimited data - I use my own router/modem), but 2 and 5 Gig speeds are also offered.
dasil003 4y ago
More SF/London anecdata: I got reliable low-latency 100Mbps via BT FTTC in 2011 (in SW12), which was better than anything I had ever gotten in the US across 3 states I lived in until 2018 at which point I got 1 Gbps AT&T Fiber in the East Bay which has been fantastic.
likpok 4y ago
There's a pretty big difference between "can't get above 10 Mbps down", which is pretty bad and "can't get above 10 Mbps up), which is not nearly as bad. Most people's internet usage is highly download-heavy! Pre-video conferencing there wasn't a whole lot that would use upload at all (outside of niche use cases like torrenting). Hard to blame the cable companies for prioritizing download bandwidth. I lived through covid on a normal cable plan of 200/10 and never ran into major issues.
TaylorAlexander 4y ago
Yes the options in the Bay Area are rough! I just moved to Oakland and I have Sonic with symmetric 1gbps for $40 per month, the first time I’ve ever been able to get fiber after 20 years in the Bay. Anyway seems like there might be more fiber in the East Bay for some reason.
ricardobayes 4y ago
Just circling back on the topic of "good enough work" from a few days ago. Spain rolled out 93% of fiber coverage in a relatively short period of time, but that meant tearing up sides of streets in most cases, and/or air cables. Yeah, the air cables are unsightly, and the roads have a different-colored "strip" on one side. But we have good internet. If they wanted to do it "perfect, and polished" then we would still have ISDN/satellite internet for many years to come.
stuaxo 4y ago
For a long time in the UK almost all internet providers used BT Openreach's[1] infrastructure, except for Virgin. [1] BT Openreach - which all the internet providers except Virgin use. - This goes back to BT and before it was privatized, the post office. [2] Virgin, took over Nynex infrastructure and put in fibre optic cables. Unfortunately, Virgin has some pretty bad caps. I had pretty bad down speed in London on copper cables, but my provider, Zen Internet uses the FritzBox router - it had good enough diagnostics to tell me there was a problem between the router and the box on the street, eventually got an engineer to come out and I got 70Mbit down and about 20mbit up. Since I moved to a different road in London, everything is fibre, I could get 1gbit, but I got the 100mbit plan which works out about not so different from my previous plan in practice.
ksec 4y ago
>The reason? Almost all utility cables in London are underground. I am assuming that is the same in most part of the world? So it is a feature, not a bug.
pleb_nz 4y ago
How long ago are you talking?

by habosa 4y ago

dmitryminkovsky 4y ago

How was the 5G hotspot though?

secondcoming 4y ago
If you are in the right location it's a viable alternative to fibre. Here's mine, elsewhere in the UK (not in Newcastle): https://www.speedtest.net/result/14185051949 https://www.speedtest.net/result/14185051949 Cheaper than fibre and 30-day rolling contract. Unlimited data.
- dmitryminkovsky 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing. This seems totally fine, if not more than acceptable? How much does this cost?
  - secondcoming 4y ago
    £28pm. It's great, I originally intended to use it temporarily while potentially waiting for fibre to be connected, but it was so good I didn't bother with fibre in the end.
- wdb 4y ago
  Which provider is that?
  - secondcoming 4y ago
    3
habosa 4y ago
It was great. £50/month and I used 1TB of data with no throttling. Two people working from home full time. Only occasionally slow. Not great latency though.

simonebrunozzi 4y ago

Try Monkeybrains.

everdrive 4y ago
That seems more likely to give me a prion disease, so no thank you.
mikeyouse 4y ago
If you live in the Avenues in SF or in certain parts of the East Bay (Oakland, Richmond, some parts of Berkeley) - Sonic has started rolling out 10gbps Fiber as well. All of those places have 1gbps on offer, but people are playing with the 10gbps too; https://dongknows.com/10gbps-internet-unlocking-super-broadbands-secret/ https://dongknows.com/10gbps-internet-unlocking-super-broadb...
paxys 4y ago
Monkeybrains is great for the price, but if you want a more premium and reliable service then there are much better options. Google Fiber (Webpass) does symmetric gigabit. AT&T has 5 gigabit. Sonic 10 gigabit. Of course the real problem is that your building likely won't have any of them.
- simonebrunozzi 4y ago
  Not all places in that area can subscribe to Google Fiber or others.
dylan604 4y ago
Are they chilled? Also, does it come after the eyeball soup course?

jnathsf 4y ago

try Sonic - I live in SF and have a dedicated fiber connection

acchow 4y ago

Comcast has a 500GB data cap in SF? Isn't it 1.2TB?

whitepoplar 4y ago

Comcast now offers vastly higher upload speeds (10mbps -> 100mbps) so long as you rent their modem, which is an additional $25/month, but also comes with unlimited data. Paying for unlimited data separately costs $30/month if you own your own modem, but doesn't yet support higher upload speeds. It's unfortunate that this is the case, but for those who need higher upload speeds, it's at least possible with Comcast now. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/want-faster-comcast-uploads-you-have-to-pay-25-month-extra-for-xfi-complete/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/want-faster-comc...

dylan604 4y ago
>Comcast now offers vastly higher upload speeds (10mbps -> 100mbps) I mean, yeah, I guess normally a 10x increase is deemed a good thing and could be considered "vastly higher". Who wouldn't be impressed with a 10x bump in pay? However, 100mbps is still tragically low. Having anything less than full bandwidth up/down on a fiber line is just cheating the user artificially. Being fiber, I could see offering a cheaper modem because it has a cheaper SFP in it, but even those are dirt cheap now for lowly 1Gbps
- vel0city 4y ago
  Comcast often isn't FTTP, its is usually coax to the home. There are some services they do with FTTP, such as their 2Gbit service, but most installs are coax.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    >but most installs are coax. Good gawd! It's like cable is in their DNA and they invested heavily in a cable manufacturing company and are trying to keep it alive /s also, is it pushing the limits of marketing to say you have a fiber connection if the cable coming into your home is actually coax? edit: just to clarify, is it really fiber if the demarc isn't in/on your house? I get running fiber to the home to a device that then turns that into coax to run to the modem of choice for the vendor. i have fiber to fiber so the demarc is sitting right being my desk with a 6' cat6 cable from it to the modem. if your advertised fiber service brings fiber over long haul to the neighborhood but then breaks that out into standard coax for last mile delivery, is that still a fiber connection?

gpderetta 4y ago

My previous home in London was a purpose built flat. I could chose between two different fibre-to-the-home providers that had each run their own wire to each apartment in the block. They were both quite cheap. Recently I moved to a terraced house about 300m from my previous flat. The only internet option is expensive and slow fibre-to-the-cabinet-down-the-street. Yes, coverage in London is uneven!

dheera 4y ago

They need to reword the law to keep up with Moore's Law, so that if you built a home in 2023 you'd be required to have 1 gigabit, in 2024 you'd be required to have 1.2 gigabit, in 2025 you'd be required to have 1.44 gigabit, etc. The moment internet connections don't keep up with Moore's Law, the real estate typhoons would then have no choice but to fund bandwidth-related R&D to get internet connections back on track with the requirement before they could sell more homes.

skybrian 4y ago
But why? How many videos are you going to watch at the same time?
- barnabee 4y ago
  Not sure about the answer to that exact question but I’d like to turn my PC on and be able to update any game I feel like playing in less than 5 minutes. Sometimes there are many 10s of gigabytes of updates.
- gernb 4y ago
  Everyone always thinks the current bandwidth is enough.... it never is. I have no idea what the future hold but a typical VR movie is ~20gig I'm not saying VR is going to take off but maybe streamed AR virtual presence might and it will require more bandwidth than today's video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7raHNfPc6A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7raHNfPc6A And even if that doesn't, something always comes up that needs more bandwidth.
  - dheera 4y ago
    This is also what worries me about fusion energy. They say we'll have "unlimited" energy but it's really not unlimited, it can be petawatts but it's still finite, and people will invent new devices that will drain all of the fusion fuel as well instead of powering our current lifestyle. People won't own cars, they'll fly themselves everywhere because it's "okay" to consume megawatts per person, and we'll end up draining all the oceans of their deuterium. It's exactly what happened when oil was discovered, it was thought of as an "unlimited" energy source in the days of horses. On the plus side fusion energy is carbon-clean, but its fuel is most certainly finite.

kccqzy 4y ago

The underground utility is a big reason why, where I live, an older house from the baby boom period (1950s) might have fiber and gigabit internet but a newer home from the 1980s might not.

dylan604 4y ago
yet another example of how they just built things better/to last in the 50s! /s

thomseddon 4y ago

For clarity - whilst most connectivity infrastructure in London is underground, it's almost always within a primary duct, so running new infrastructure is usually a case of pulling in a new cable as opposed to "ripping up the street". In fact, anyone approved can use BTs own ducts and poles via their PIA product[1], which has created a resurgent and incredibly active market of "alternative" network providers ("alt nets"). London for example is now well served for broadband by Community Fibre, g.network, Hyperoptic and others alongside the incumbents. [1] https://www.openreach.co.uk/cpportal/products/passive-products/physical-infrastructure-access(PIA) https://www.openreach.co.uk/cpportal/products/passive-produc...

cameronh90 4y ago
It may be in a duct, but occasionally the manholes are in really awkward locations - like in the middle of an extremely busy road. I've been waiting for symmetric fibre for a year, and they're trying to install it, but getting the permission to close the road to lift up the manhole is proving to be a challenge.
- thomseddon 4y ago
  Yeah it's certainly not without issue, the network is full of blockages, collapsed ducts etc. Traffic management and road closures can be hard work, we've had to wait over a year before for a road closure as it would affect multiple bus routes. (And as an aside, lockdown was extremely productive for network build like this!)
- djhn 4y ago
  But my impression of London (from living there for a few years in the 2010s) was that it is very much a 6am-11pm city and everything is shut at night. Surely infrastructure work can take place during night shifts? I found the experience of working in the city and living in Westminster frustrating, because shops, public transport and even pubs(!) would effectively have closed by the time you finished work.
  - cameronh90 4y ago

alias_neo 4y ago

I moved from a village in Cheshire where I had 500Mb/500Mb to London Zone 3 where the best I could get was 3Mb/0.2Mb, then I bought a new build in Zone 6 where I could get 1.2Gb/1.2Gb, now I moved to Liverpool into a 1930s house where I can get 1.2Gb/100Mb (FttP) which isn't great uoload (I work remote), but is because it's GPON. I got a letter through the door a week or two ago saying they're building out 10Gb/10Gb on my road over the next few years, so I've got a bit of time to start upgrading my kit to handle 10Gb symmetric, which I'm hoping will push the price down of the sub-10Gb speeds, because let's he honest, I don't need 10/10.

Xcelerate 4y ago

I moved from the Bay Area to a rural place in the southeast. It is a mystery how I am able to get 10Gbps fiber here from not only AT&T but also the local utility company, whereas in Redwood City my option was basically only Comcast with a slow upload cap.

rayiner 4y ago
It’s not a “mystery.” California makes it expensive and difficult to build infrastructure. That’s why Google Fiber started out in places like Kansas City. I live in a historically red county in the Verizon footprint. I have two fiber lines into my house, one from Verizon and one from Comcast. I get 6 gbps service from Comcast. It’s expensive ($300/month, compared to 10 gig for $300 in Chattanooga). But it’s not even an option in most of Silicon Valley.
- lern_too_spel 4y ago
  Is that all over your state? There are places in California, including parts of Silicon Valley, where you can get 10 Gbps fiber Internet service for $40/month.
  - rayiner 4y ago
    FiOS is almost everywhere in the state. Comcast 6 gig fiber is anywhere within 1,760 feet of a fiber node that has overhead (rather than buried) utilities.
    - lern_too_spel 4y ago
      Similarly, AT&T and Comcast are almost everywhere in California with at least 1 Gbps service for $70. Places with fiber laid by Sonic have 10 Gbps at $40/month. I checked a random address in Redwood City, where Xcelerate was from, and found that Comcast offers 6 Gbps service there too for the same price you get it, as well as AT&T fiber.

donatj 4y ago

> I find a 1Gbps plan with a 500GB data cap hilarious This is how I ended up paying the extra $20 a month for unlimited data. I had 1TB cap on a 1Gbps connection. My wifes friend who was unemployed and staying us would put Netflix shows on for ambiance all day as she wandered about the house (not even watching it!) - streaming 4k Netflix ate up serious data pretty quickly and I got quite a few overage charges. It's just bizarre to me that we live in an age where "turn off the TV, it's costing me actual measurable amounts of money" is a real thing.

uxcolumbo 4y ago
What a waste. Did you mention it to her? Why not just put the radio on or at least don’t stream in 4k. I wonder how many are like her, just leaving it on all day for ambience and what the carbon footprint is.
- donatj 4y ago
  Honestly, she was on really hard times already and I didn’t want to make it worse. I looked for options within the app to disable 4K but couldn’t find anything, I ended up lowering my Netflix subscription to not include 4K but that didn’t kick in until the following month.
  - uxcolumbo 4y ago
    Ah ok so it was mental health related. Hope your friend gets better.

spacedcowboy 4y ago

My brother has Gig ethernet in London, 1G in both directions. Lives south of the river, even... :) I've got AT&T GigE here in San Jose, but he's had it for longer than I have.

kergonath 4y ago
> Lives south of the river, even... So, the legends are true, and there are actually people south of the river? ;) Seriously though, in my flat in SE15, I had some decent DSL (as good as it can be, with pitiful bandwidth but it was really stable). I planned to get Hyperoptic to lay some fibre, but then I moved to a different place with 10/10 FTTH. My pet peeve in London is the patchiness of 4G and 5G coverage. It’s a bloody big city, and yet I regularly get no bars at all in zones 1 and 2. It’s the same for broadband: some streets are great, other very much less so.
- mikelward 4y ago
  EE doesn't work at my house and they don't care. Vodafone and O2 are better in my area, but I'm lucky if I get HSPA around my tube station. Really looking forward to getting mobile data on the tube.

itslennysfault 4y ago

I know this probably doesn't help you currently, but if you move look for places that have Wave-G (apparently it's now called astound). It's available in SF and Seattle and offers symmetric gig up/down with no cap for $80/mo. I had it in Seattle, and I have a good friend with it in SF and we both had nothing but great experiences with them.

mattl 4y ago
Astound is also what RCN in the North East rebranded to. I’m paying $65 for 900mbps/20ish but with HBO Max included.
- Denatonium 4y ago
  Enjoy that price while it lasts and get ready to haggle; the non-promotional rate (found on the "Rate Cards" page linked at the bottom of Astound's website) for your speed tier is $161.99 per month in addition to the Network Access and Maintenance Fee. At least in former RCN areas, there's usually at least a semi-viable competitor, and after being away for 2 months, you generally become eligible for the new customer promotions again.
  - mattl 4y ago
    Yeah there’s Comcast and I keep seeing a Verizon truck and hoping FIOS will come.

alanh 4y ago

Bay Area residents should really consider Sonic as their internet provider. I have gigabit speed, fiber direct to my unit, and a bill lower than Comcast's, with no data cap

likpok 4y ago
Sonic only works some places, specifically where there are overhead power lines they can use to route the cables. There used to be some discussion about "microtrenching" so they could cost-effectively bury fiber throughout the city but the Board of Supervisors shut that down pretty definitively (or rather: made requirements that made it too expensive for sonic). So Sonic is really good where you can get it, but you can't get it in much of the city. You also have to be careful, because Sonic has two types of offering: fiber (good) and reselling at&t dsl (pretty bad). Only get them if you get the actual fiber!

lowbloodsugar 4y ago

I don’t know why techies move into residences without first checking the communications options.

bravetraveler 4y ago
I would love for better options for this -- the place I live now took nearly two months to find! Comparing address listings against the various provider websites is a ridiculous chore It's frustrating - depending on the street you may have 2/1 gigabit fiber... or DSL.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
I bought a house in rural new mexico and forgot entirely to check this until I moved in. Thankfully, I could get 40Mbps down / 5Mbps up which is enough for me. It is scary to think about what I would have done if the service had been substantially worse (or not available at all).

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> So basically internet is a disaster in both countries Country-level generalizations about internet speeds are basically useless in 2023. A lot of us have easy access to 1G up and down and multiple providers to choose from. I have friends who live less than 15 minutes away who only have DSL or Starlink as options. Extrapolating city-level anecdotes to entire countries doesn't make any sense. We don't upgrade the whole country's infrastructure in lock step.

TheHappyOddish 4y ago
> Country-level generalizations about internet speeds are basically useless in 2023. I'm not sure that's true. Nobody in Australia on a residential grade NBN connection (which most people are on, and those are aren't are being forced onto) has > 1gbps, and none of them have syncronous up. This is absolutely run in lock step on a country level. I'd imagine multiple countries are like this.

irrational 4y ago

Maybe it's a problem with living in a city? I live in a suburb and have had fiber optic internet for nearly 2 decades. Currently I pay for a 1 Gig plan (up and down - unlimited data - I use my own router/modem), but 2 and 5 Gig speeds are also offered.

dasil003 4y ago

More SF/London anecdata: I got reliable low-latency 100Mbps via BT FTTC in 2011 (in SW12), which was better than anything I had ever gotten in the US across 3 states I lived in until 2018 at which point I got 1 Gbps AT&T Fiber in the East Bay which has been fantastic.

likpok 4y ago

There's a pretty big difference between "can't get above 10 Mbps down", which is pretty bad and "can't get above 10 Mbps up), which is not nearly as bad. Most people's internet usage is highly download-heavy! Pre-video conferencing there wasn't a whole lot that would use upload at all (outside of niche use cases like torrenting). Hard to blame the cable companies for prioritizing download bandwidth. I lived through covid on a normal cable plan of 200/10 and never ran into major issues.

TaylorAlexander 4y ago

Yes the options in the Bay Area are rough! I just moved to Oakland and I have Sonic with symmetric 1gbps for $40 per month, the first time I’ve ever been able to get fiber after 20 years in the Bay. Anyway seems like there might be more fiber in the East Bay for some reason.

ricardobayes 4y ago

Just circling back on the topic of "good enough work" from a few days ago. Spain rolled out 93% of fiber coverage in a relatively short period of time, but that meant tearing up sides of streets in most cases, and/or air cables. Yeah, the air cables are unsightly, and the roads have a different-colored "strip" on one side. But we have good internet. If they wanted to do it "perfect, and polished" then we would still have ISDN/satellite internet for many years to come.

stuaxo 4y ago

For a long time in the UK almost all internet providers used BT Openreach's[1] infrastructure, except for Virgin. [1] BT Openreach - which all the internet providers except Virgin use. - This goes back to BT and before it was privatized, the post office. [2] Virgin, took over Nynex infrastructure and put in fibre optic cables. Unfortunately, Virgin has some pretty bad caps. I had pretty bad down speed in London on copper cables, but my provider, Zen Internet uses the FritzBox router - it had good enough diagnostics to tell me there was a problem between the router and the box on the street, eventually got an engineer to come out and I got 70Mbit down and about 20mbit up. Since I moved to a different road in London, everything is fibre, I could get 1gbit, but I got the 100mbit plan which works out about not so different from my previous plan in practice.

ksec 4y ago

>The reason? Almost all utility cables in London are underground. I am assuming that is the same in most part of the world? So it is a feature, not a bug.

pleb_nz 4y ago

How long ago are you talking?