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The home upgrade that most folks need is a symmetrical fibre optic of some kind, with open-access [1] and either municipal [2] or non-profit at OSI Layer 1/2, w

The home upgrade that most folks need is a symmetrical fibre optic of some kind, with open-access [1] and either municipal [2] or non-profit at OSI Layer 1/2, with competition at OSI Layer 3. I think at this point 100Mbps would be the minimum, with diminishing returns once you start getting above 1Gbps (but available with XG(S)-PON(G.98(0)7)/NG-PON2(G.989)/HSP(G.9804) and 802.3ca). It was technically possible to wire up entire countries and continents for electricity and phone service, so I doubt there are any technical hurdles in doing the same with fibre. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_network [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago
The internet is designed for average people to suck down content, rather than create content. It's why I get 1gbps down but 35mbps up.
- thefz 3y ago
  With 2.5Gbps I receive 600Mbit up, which is more than comfy for a home lab and for self hosting... even media. But yeah, I would get 1Gbps symmetric if I could.
- thfuran 3y ago
  The Internet really wasn't designed that way, though the modern Internet certainly shaped up that way for the most part. Most likely you get that highly asymmetric bandwidth because you're using an ISP piggybacking on cable TV service infrastructure, which unequivocally was originally designed for much more bandwidth in one direction than the other.
- throw0101c 3y ago
  The Internet is designed for whatever we decide to design it for. The fact that most use cases are currently download-heavy does not mean other types of application could not be created if more bandwidth was available for upload. If you told people about streaming >1080p video folks with 9600bps modems back in the day would have thought you were nuts. Certainly there's probably a point of diminishing returns, but why not give as many people 'too much' bandwidth and see if folks think of creative ways to use it?
  - js8 3y ago
    > The fact that most use cases are currently download-heavy Is it still true? I am happy with whatever I got but I thought a big consumer use case is multiplayer gaming, which requires low latency bidirectionally.
    - throw0101c 3y ago
      I think ten minutes of 4K video probably uses more bandwidth than a multi-hour gaming session: game coders are probably very efficient about what they send over the wire.
      - gunapologist99 3y ago
        and, even if the coders were incredibly inefficient, it probably wouldn't make much difference at all, because 4k is literally multiple orders of magnitude more data than just sending coordinates of players and bullets, which even Doom was doing back in the day with reasonable (playable) latency over dial-up. As you point out, for most types of online games, most limitations are due to latency, not bandwidth.
- ilyt 3y ago
  That's not "the internet", that's last hop of the internet and mostly due to technical limitations (if you got X bandwidth giving most of it to upload makes sense). FTH makes it easier to give symmetrical access
- dspillett 3y ago
  Only the "last mile" of residential connections (and often business, if they can't justify the cost of a full fibre connection in their current location). Up to 33k6 modems home internet was generally symmetrical: the same speed up and down. 56k6 standards introduced asymmetry: it wasn't easy (i.e. inexpensively with that era's tech) to reliably transmit at the faster rates over copper in both directions (in fact it was rare in one direction - it wasn't often I saw faster than 48k, IIRC 45k was what I'd usually get) so the upstream was half of down. If I was uploading anything like photos of force the connection down to 33k6 at the upstream rate would be 33k6 rather than 24k or less. This continued with ADSL and then FTTC: the signalling frequencies used are allocated in a way that gives preference to downstream speed. This is a good compromise for most home users who download far more than they send back, but inconvenient when setting up (to pick one example from many) large videos recorded on modern phones, which is something many home users might want to do regularly. I currently get ~55mbit/13mbit and I'd much rather have it more balanced (something like 24mbit/24mbit?). I'll be upgrading to FTTP as soon as the cables they install a month or so ago are enabled, not for better downstream (it isn't often that ~55mbit is a significant inconvenience) but for better upstream. Full fibre doesn't have the limits of copper connections that force the choice of how to portion limited frequencies, not just because full fibre has cleaner signalling (so far reliable throughout) anyway, but also because it is synchronous: unlike with copper the signals from each side don't interfere with each other. (Copper needn't have this limitation but to work around it you'd need to double up the number of wires and even then at the speeds offered many would prefer such a bonded arrangement to give faster downstream at the expense of upstream)
rjsw 3y ago
I got 500Mb/s symmetrical fibre installed last month. Not seeing much faster transfer rates from individual servers, I'm guessing most do some traffic shaping. Edit: mistyped G instead of M.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tw04 3y ago
  I'm assuming you mean 500Mb/s or are being facetious? 500Gb/s is internet backbone speeds.
- ta1243 3y ago
  500gbit? That's about 5% of the entire capacity of the London Internet Exchange. I assume you're using some WDM to split the carrier into multiple 100G nics at each end? Doesn't sound cheap. What's the onward capacity, I assume your link is directly into a major peering centre.
TacticalCoder 3y ago
> It was technically possible to wire up entire countries and continents for electricity and phone service, so I doubt there are any technical hurdles in doing the same with fibre. France is aiming at 100% fiber coverage. I spent some time in a very remote, very rural part of France, far from the closest village... And I had fiber to the home (2 Gbps down // 600 Mbps up).
- throw0101c 3y ago
  > […] far from the closest village... And I had fiber to the home (2 Gbps down // 600 Mbps up). You were probably not surprised that the dwelling you were in had electricity. I think at some point having fibre should also be as unsurprising.
  - smeej 3y ago
    Interestingly, there are a lot of places near me in northern New England where I genuinely am surprised to find electricity (or plumbing, for that matter) in a house. Some places are just that hard to get to.
    - throw0101a 3y ago
      IMHO, if you can string a copper wire for power (and POTS) you can string a fibre. It's just a matter of us deciding to wire things up like was done in the 20th century.
      - smeej 3y ago
        Sure. These really remote places generally have some way they're generating their own power, which is why I'm surprised to find it.
      - zbrozek 3y ago
        We need to figure out how to get costs and permit times down if we want to build stuff again.
  - 3y ago
hnreport 3y ago
[flagged]
cesarb 3y ago
> It was technically possible to wire up entire countries and continents for electricity and phone service, so I doubt there are any technical hurdles in doing the same with fibre. Wiring up some places for electricity is really hard. I live in a huge country (Brazil) with a sprawling integrated electricity network, but there are still over a hundred small localities (source: https://www.ons.org.br/AcervoDigitalDocumentosEPublicacoes/RT-ONS%20DPL%200528-2022%20-%20PEN%20SISOL%202023.pdf https://www.ons.org.br/AcervoDigitalDocumentosEPublicacoes/R...) which are not yet connected to that network. Most of them are deep within the Amazon forest, a few are in a state (Roraima) which is separated from the rest by the Amazon forest (though that state used to have a connection to Venezuela's electricity network), and one is on an island (Fernando de Noronha) which is far enough from the continent that a submarine cable would not be easy.
- redox99 3y ago
  Nowadays shouldn't it be easy to install solar panels and megapacks, and operate independently from the grid?
  - cesarb 3y ago
    Yes, but in the context of this thread ("[...] so I doubt there are any technical hurdles in doing the same with fibre"), that would be like installing a wired phone or network service which reaches only as far as the same city. That is, you can operate an independent network, but what you want is to network with the rest of the world; and even if doing it with optical fiber is as easy as connecting to the country's main electric network, there are places where connecting to that electric network is already hard.
    - throw0101c 3y ago
      > Yes, but in the context of this thread ("[...] so I doubt there are any technical hurdles in doing the same with fibre"), that would be like installing a wired phone or network service which reaches only as far as the same city. The context of this thread is: if you could technically string power and POTS lines, why can't you string fibre? Note what you, yourself quote: the same with fibre. It pre-supposes the other infrastructure was setup.
ksec 3y ago
There were never any technical difficulties with it. It was / is always about cost. And anything government lead will comes with politics. We also have 5G Home Station in many places and those are fast becoming part of the broadband solution especially in rural area. ( So much about 5G being useless on HN )
randomdata 3y ago
Meanwhile, out here in rural Canada, farms here now have two fibre lines running to them. About a decade ago the local (co-op) telco dropped fibre lines to all the farms. Then, the government decided that rural areas didn’t have internet access so they put up funding and now another ISP has used that to built another fibre network.

2OEH8eoCRo0 3y ago

The internet is designed for average people to suck down content, rather than create content. It's why I get 1gbps down but 35mbps up.

thefz 3y ago
With 2.5Gbps I receive 600Mbit up, which is more than comfy for a home lab and for self hosting... even media. But yeah, I would get 1Gbps symmetric if I could.
thfuran 3y ago
The Internet really wasn't designed that way, though the modern Internet certainly shaped up that way for the most part. Most likely you get that highly asymmetric bandwidth because you're using an ISP piggybacking on cable TV service infrastructure, which unequivocally was originally designed for much more bandwidth in one direction than the other.
throw0101c 3y ago
The Internet is designed for whatever we decide to design it for. The fact that most use cases are currently download-heavy does not mean other types of application could not be created if more bandwidth was available for upload. If you told people about streaming >1080p video folks with 9600bps modems back in the day would have thought you were nuts. Certainly there's probably a point of diminishing returns, but why not give as many people 'too much' bandwidth and see if folks think of creative ways to use it?
- js8 3y ago
  > The fact that most use cases are currently download-heavy Is it still true? I am happy with whatever I got but I thought a big consumer use case is multiplayer gaming, which requires low latency bidirectionally.
  - throw0101c 3y ago
    I think ten minutes of 4K video probably uses more bandwidth than a multi-hour gaming session: game coders are probably very efficient about what they send over the wire.
    - gunapologist99 3y ago
      and, even if the coders were incredibly inefficient, it probably wouldn't make much difference at all, because 4k is literally multiple orders of magnitude more data than just sending coordinates of players and bullets, which even Doom was doing back in the day with reasonable (playable) latency over dial-up. As you point out, for most types of online games, most limitations are due to latency, not bandwidth.
ilyt 3y ago
That's not "the internet", that's last hop of the internet and mostly due to technical limitations (if you got X bandwidth giving most of it to upload makes sense). FTH makes it easier to give symmetrical access
dspillett 3y ago
Only the "last mile" of residential connections (and often business, if they can't justify the cost of a full fibre connection in their current location). Up to 33k6 modems home internet was generally symmetrical: the same speed up and down. 56k6 standards introduced asymmetry: it wasn't easy (i.e. inexpensively with that era's tech) to reliably transmit at the faster rates over copper in both directions (in fact it was rare in one direction - it wasn't often I saw faster than 48k, IIRC 45k was what I'd usually get) so the upstream was half of down. If I was uploading anything like photos of force the connection down to 33k6 at the upstream rate would be 33k6 rather than 24k or less. This continued with ADSL and then FTTC: the signalling frequencies used are allocated in a way that gives preference to downstream speed. This is a good compromise for most home users who download far more than they send back, but inconvenient when setting up (to pick one example from many) large videos recorded on modern phones, which is something many home users might want to do regularly. I currently get ~55mbit/13mbit and I'd much rather have it more balanced (something like 24mbit/24mbit?). I'll be upgrading to FTTP as soon as the cables they install a month or so ago are enabled, not for better downstream (it isn't often that ~55mbit is a significant inconvenience) but for better upstream. Full fibre doesn't have the limits of copper connections that force the choice of how to portion limited frequencies, not just because full fibre has cleaner signalling (so far reliable throughout) anyway, but also because it is synchronous: unlike with copper the signals from each side don't interfere with each other. (Copper needn't have this limitation but to work around it you'd need to double up the number of wires and even then at the speeds offered many would prefer such a bonded arrangement to give faster downstream at the expense of upstream)

rjsw 3y ago

I got 500Mb/s symmetrical fibre installed last month. Not seeing much faster transfer rates from individual servers, I'm guessing most do some traffic shaping. Edit: mistyped G instead of M.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tw04 3y ago
I'm assuming you mean 500Mb/s or are being facetious? 500Gb/s is internet backbone speeds.
ta1243 3y ago
500gbit? That's about 5% of the entire capacity of the London Internet Exchange. I assume you're using some WDM to split the carrier into multiple 100G nics at each end? Doesn't sound cheap. What's the onward capacity, I assume your link is directly into a major peering centre.

TacticalCoder 3y ago

> It was technically possible to wire up entire countries and continents for electricity and phone service, so I doubt there are any technical hurdles in doing the same with fibre. France is aiming at 100% fiber coverage. I spent some time in a very remote, very rural part of France, far from the closest village... And I had fiber to the home (2 Gbps down // 600 Mbps up).

throw0101c 3y ago
> […] far from the closest village... And I had fiber to the home (2 Gbps down // 600 Mbps up). You were probably not surprised that the dwelling you were in had electricity. I think at some point having fibre should also be as unsurprising.
- smeej 3y ago
  Interestingly, there are a lot of places near me in northern New England where I genuinely am surprised to find electricity (or plumbing, for that matter) in a house. Some places are just that hard to get to.
  - throw0101a 3y ago
    IMHO, if you can string a copper wire for power (and POTS) you can string a fibre. It's just a matter of us deciding to wire things up like was done in the 20th century.
    - smeej 3y ago
      Sure. These really remote places generally have some way they're generating their own power, which is why I'm surprised to find it.
    - zbrozek 3y ago
      We need to figure out how to get costs and permit times down if we want to build stuff again.
- 3y ago

hnreport 3y ago

[flagged]

cesarb 3y ago

> It was technically possible to wire up entire countries and continents for electricity and phone service, so I doubt there are any technical hurdles in doing the same with fibre. Wiring up some places for electricity is really hard. I live in a huge country (Brazil) with a sprawling integrated electricity network, but there are still over a hundred small localities (source: https://www.ons.org.br/AcervoDigitalDocumentosEPublicacoes/RT-ONS%20DPL%200528-2022%20-%20PEN%20SISOL%202023.pdf https://www.ons.org.br/AcervoDigitalDocumentosEPublicacoes/R...) which are not yet connected to that network. Most of them are deep within the Amazon forest, a few are in a state (Roraima) which is separated from the rest by the Amazon forest (though that state used to have a connection to Venezuela's electricity network), and one is on an island (Fernando de Noronha) which is far enough from the continent that a submarine cable would not be easy.

redox99 3y ago
Nowadays shouldn't it be easy to install solar panels and megapacks, and operate independently from the grid?
- cesarb 3y ago
  Yes, but in the context of this thread ("[...] so I doubt there are any technical hurdles in doing the same with fibre"), that would be like installing a wired phone or network service which reaches only as far as the same city. That is, you can operate an independent network, but what you want is to network with the rest of the world; and even if doing it with optical fiber is as easy as connecting to the country's main electric network, there are places where connecting to that electric network is already hard.
  - throw0101c 3y ago
    > Yes, but in the context of this thread ("[...] so I doubt there are any technical hurdles in doing the same with fibre"), that would be like installing a wired phone or network service which reaches only as far as the same city. The context of this thread is: if you could technically string power and POTS lines, why can't you string fibre? Note what you, yourself quote: the same with fibre. It pre-supposes the other infrastructure was setup.

ksec 3y ago

There were never any technical difficulties with it. It was / is always about cost. And anything government lead will comes with politics. We also have 5G Home Station in many places and those are fast becoming part of the broadband solution especially in rural area. ( So much about 5G being useless on HN )

randomdata 3y ago

Meanwhile, out here in rural Canada, farms here now have two fibre lines running to them. About a decade ago the local (co-op) telco dropped fibre lines to all the farms. Then, the government decided that rural areas didn’t have internet access so they put up funding and now another ISP has used that to built another fibre network.