4 ms·

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)

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)