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FCC launches inquiry to increase minimum broadband speed [pdf]

409 points by KoftaBob 3y ago

jauntywundrkind 3y ago
Download only, yes? And what about the busy-Sunday night problem? This seems so besides the point. Cable at an apartment building I visit is often 300mbps, but Sunday evening it can have horrible jitter and lag and much slower speeds. It's incredibly frustrating; common sites can be basically unusable. This also feels like it's setting a bar where most DSL systems wont have any chance of competing. In cities I can be more sympathetic (put in more pops) but in rural areas, this feels like a barrier that is extremely cost prohibitive to make happen, for not great reasons.
- Bud 3y ago
  [dead]
- shortcake27 3y ago
  I usually pay for 50mbps, but I can live comfortably on 25mbps if need be (sometimes I drop my connection speed to save money). However, I have a fibre connection, where QoS is 100% 100% of the time. 25mbps is totally fine for web browsing, gaming, and streaming. The only issue is downloads, which simply take more time. I'd still rather have a rock solid 25mbps than 300mbps with jitter. Cable is garbage. Always has been, always will be.
- wongarsu 3y ago
  With VDSL and supervectoring you can get 250MBit/s, provided you aren't more than a quarter of a mile or so from the multiplexer. Which is probably not cost-effective in most of America due to the low density of suburbia, never mind rural places.
andrewmunsell 3y ago
This is nice, but with increased speed, they should also require ISPs do not impose a data cap to be considered broadband.
- endisneigh 3y ago
  Why shouldn’t there be a cap? Bandwidth isn’t free. It’s sad seeing people on a forum called hacker news having no idea how networking infrastructure works.
  - entropicdrifter 3y ago
    Because it's next to free (no additional cost to run the infrastructure we're already running) and we're nowhere near the limits of our existing infrastructure's overall bandwidth limits right now, as evidenced by the lack of caps not affecting quality of internet service for the entirety of 2020, when more people were online per hour than at any previous point in history.
    - endisneigh 3y ago
      Source? Running things requires labor, labor is getting expensive. Pricing isn’t set on simply the marginal cost of materials…
      - vorpalhex 3y ago
        Running a fully utilized fiber line is.. exactly the same amount of labor as running a 10% utilized one. The cost to track and bill people for caps and let them pay overages though..
        toomuchtodo 3y ago
        Chokepoints are peering exchanges, transit handoffs, and core network gear, which is sized for a percentile of utilization below constant 100%. Having implemented a billing system and utilization monitoring for managed hosting datacenter environment, it is trivial to collect metrics from equipment and bill accordingly. You don't want to nickle and dime or gouge customers, but you do want to ensure proportionality across the customer population. Some combination of caps, overage charges, traffic shaping, and edge CDN appliances is needed (Netflix, Akamai, etc). Off peak unlimited is also a potential strategy to drive low priority transfer to low utilization periods. Pick your poison. There is a reason most of Netflix global infra is monster CDN boxes closest to customers. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
ehPReth 3y ago
happy to see upload get the attention it deserves. nothing is more annoying than uploading a video to $messagingapp or $socialmediaplatform and it just taking forever due to slow upload. a nice quality of life improvement to shove that quicker to someone. even stuff like backing up computers, or running security cameras that you can view remotely or that record to the cloud (encrypted) are really hampered by upload speed. there's a lot of cool stuff one can do if only one had the speed to do it with.
- voakbasda 3y ago
  Oh, it's worse than that. With my 20-1 DSL connection, saturating the uplink effectively causes a DoS for the downlink.
  - koito17 3y ago
    You gave me flashbacks to 2010 when I had used ADSL and thought 128 KB/s download was the best thing ever for downloading MP3s. And as you mentioned, using up all upload bandwidth effectively DoSed everyone else on the network, though in my case, any single person downloading also slowed down everything else to a crawl. I must have had less "downstream channels" (or whatever the DSL equivalent is) than your setup. My current internet connection uses DOCSIS 3.1, but I can't recall any resource contention even if I have several computers trying to upload simultaneously. Not a big fan of asymmetric speeds, though, but apparently DOCSIS 4.0 (which is being finalized this year) gets us closer to symmetrical speeds.
  - inemesitaffia 3y ago
    Cake or fq-codel on Openwrt
    - voakbasda 3y ago
      That's not viable for me, as my subnet router is on the far side of my DSL connection. There's absolutely no way for me to filter incoming packets before they traverse my downlink. And as far as I know, there's no easy way to get all of my machines on my static subnet to coordinate traffic shaping.
idiot900 3y ago
Honest question: at what point, with real life usage, is 1 Gbps actually necessary for home users? I find that latency rather than throughput is what determines my perceived quality of an Internet connection. But am curious how others think.
- lapphi 3y ago
  Probably when VR starts popping off
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dawnerd 3y ago
  When games are 100+ gigs it starts being something that can make an impact especially when updates are also massive. But this is the same thing people say over every incremental in tech. “Isn’t x enough”
- Zigurd 3y ago
  First, you are not buying a sustained 1Gb. Not at consumer pricing. Secondly, having burst capacity is very helpful. Moving big images, videos, etc., which you do only occasionally, benefits a lot from a 1Gb consumer-grade link.
- cortesoft 3y ago
  I recently went from 300mbps to 2gbps, and one big difference is game update time. In the past, I would sometimes go to play a game with my friends and it would require a 10 gig update, and we would have to play a different game because it would take too long to update. Now I can update in under a minute and we can play.
  - phkahler 3y ago
    To me that's more about the company making too many large updates. And when they do have a large updated it should be up to the user to decide when to get it. Downloading it over night should be an option, and not required to play. I've seem games that demanded the update in order to play, which is really annoying and I don't think it should be that way.
superkuh 3y ago
I'm much more excited about the "...and 20 megabits per second for upload". My comcast account for $107/mo with 1.2 TB data transfer cap per month still only has a 5 megabit upload throttle (80/5). I literally had the same upload speed in 2003.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
elromulous 3y ago
I think I speak for many when I say "'bout damn time".
0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago
Will they also change how they define a region? At one point, I thought so long as an ISP service a single customer in a zip code(?), census tract(?), some region definition, the ISP could make claims to offering that tier of service everywhere.
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  The service regions are kind of a government mandated monopoly for who can offer service where. However, the FCC is now requiring automated speed testing so if you say you can offer 100/100 symmetrical you have to prove it. The FCC can pick any customer and say "prove this customer can get the service they are paying for" -- for us, that means installing a cloud connected router that automatically connects and tests. Apparently the fines are pretty gnarly...
jmyeet 3y ago
Waht the government needs to do (but never will) is make the last mile a municipal utility such as in Chattanooga [1]. Instead we have monopolies that do what all monopolies do in a capitalist organization of the economy: they rent-seek, spend their time and money on lobbying to legislatively exclude competition (eg [2]), do the bare minimum and take public money to roll out broadband but then just not do it (eg [3]. The Internet is the US is objectively awful for most people by the standard of other developed economies [4]. It's ridiculous that people still defend this system. [1]: https://qz.com/1996234/the-best-broadband-in-the-us-is-in-chattanooga-tn https://qz.com/1996234/the-best-broadband-in-the-us-is-in-ch... [2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-already-won-limits-on-public-broadband-in-20-states/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-al... [3]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/verizon-ordered-to-finish-fiber-build-that-it-promised-but-didnt-deliver/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/veriz... [4]: https://broadbandnow.com/report/2018-fcc-international-data-insights https://broadbandnow.com/report/2018-fcc-international-data-...
- Zigurd 3y ago
  Municipal ISPs are a good start, and they illustrate how much of your ISP bill goes to debt service from when the commercial ISP bought out competitors. But you don't have to run a municipal ISP like a commercial ISP. If pricing goes low enough, just make it an amenity, like parks and sidewalks, and fund it that way. And then you can choose a totally different architecture than a commercial ISP could operate: no network admission barriers, mesh networks, etc.
bscphil 3y ago
It's 100 Mbps down / 20 Mbps up as the proposal, and 1000 Mbps / 500 Mbps as an eventual goal. I imagine the 20 Mbps upload target is useless for most of us, even those on asymmetric cable, but there's a good chance that if the ISPs were forced to provide 20 Mbps up at their lowest broadband tiers, it would raise the ladder quite a bit. For example, on Comcast I get 800 / 20, but there's also a 400 / 10 tier (and maybe a low-cost tier below that?). If everyone was getting 20 up, maybe I'll get upgraded to 40 Mbps.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  I guess I'm the outlier. I have 300 down / 15 up and never really notice an issue.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    How often do you upload? I notice especially when trying to rsync or upload files to the cloud.
    - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
      Not often and never in large doses - mostly just recorded images or videos to the cloud. I don't know the use cases people have for that outside of streaming large media.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    You don’t notice because you have never had the capability to host content. With symmetric upload, it would be possible to backup our phones/data to our own NAS at home as opposed to relying on Apple/Microsoft/Alphabet/Amazon. You could stream video from your own device, you could share it, etc. The lack of high quality, high bandwidth symmetric connections to the home (and ipv6) is a huge boon to the entrenched big tech companies.
    - chrononaut 3y ago
      > With symmetric upload, it would be possible to backup our phones/data to our own NAS at home as opposed to relying on Apple/Microsoft/Alphabet/Amazon. I am not following this one. Why would upload bandwidth at home inhibit backing up your phone/data to a NAS at home? Or are you referring to remote restoration / access? Wouldn't the NAS be using its download bandwidth to receive backups when your phone is remote? and your phone would be on the local network when you're at home?
happytiger 3y ago
1000 Mbps down / 100 Mbps up should be the minimum for any first world country. Without mandated illegality of data caps and other Comcast data and modem games this does nothing to change the reality of boots on the ground unfortunately. These speeds only really allow you to close your data cap sooner in the month for the vast majority of customers who use Internet for modern things. A fixed data cap locks in an “era” of technology so that when the era ends (HD > 4k, 4k > 8k for example) every one of the customers ends up being a heavy user. It is a scam that should be illegal. We’ve already paid for this with multiple rural broadband bills. It’s time for change. This is woefully (and shamefully) inadequate action by the FCC but at least we don’t have to deal with Ajit’s basically sellout behavior anymore and can at least talk about solutions beyond the current regulatory captured standards. I commend them for moving, but I can’t condone their proposal as it’s truly and utterly inadequate and far behind global standards as well. If you want your country to slip into uncompetitive mess, go ahead and hamper the backbone of the new Industrial Revolution by giving away all the value to your corporate friends and leaving the innovation a generation of true broadband performance could generate laying on the shop floor. Did I mention we have already paid for broadband (ready, was supposed to be fiber rollout)? Twice? Low standards might as well be low standards FCC.
- Culonavirus 3y ago
  Many (most?) people do not even have devices that could utilize 1Gbit/s. My (relatively new) Galaxy Tab S7+ (11ac wifi) has a hard time going over 500Mbit/s (not sure if it's wifi or the slow internal memory, can't be arsed to find out), and it's similar with my (not that old) LG Velvet phone... All of that on a connection that can do a rock solid 1Gbps on my PC through UTP (cat 6)... What I'm trying to say is that many of these devices regular people have don't even have the capability to receive 1Gbit/s streams. It's great for us nerds or people who (also) work from home and need blazing fast connections to work servers etc, but as of 2023, it's overkill for many regular people. Datacaps should be illegal though.
  - d3w4s9 3y ago
    Anyone with a PlayStation/Xbox/gaming PC -- that's a lot of people -- can tell you how much they dislike waiting for a game download. I have 300Mbps download and I still find it too slow. I don't want to start a download, wait for half an hour before I can play the game.
somat 3y ago
Oh boy! pedant time. note that ethernet and gpon(single line fiberoptic) are not broad band, they are base band. Broad band does not mean speed. it means it uses a lot of frequencies at the same time. OK getting dizzy here from too much excitement, pedant time is over for this week. We are all allowed to go back to using the non-technical meaning of broadband where it means speed.
- s1gnp0st 3y ago
  *Pedant
  - somat 3y ago
    Totally fair call, fixed.
    - inemesitaffia 3y ago
      Try again
- aidenn0 3y ago
  If we are being pedants, I object to fiber-optic being labeled as base-band. It is modulating a ~100THz carrier wave, so is clearly not base-band.
  - I_Am_Nous 3y ago
    Maybe old fashioned "blink on means 1, no light means 0" is base-band, but these days they have virtual data channels and bidirectional fiber transmits on a different frequency than it receives on...so definitely broad-band.
xyst 3y ago
FCC should fix the collusion that happens under the table between ISPs. ISPs tend to avoid entering an area where there is already established service. So for a majority of people, the ISPs have a de facto monopoly. No need to improve service or customer support. Also need to overturn legislation at state level which forbids municipal ISPs from being created. This would help break the mini monopolies that ISPs. Defining standards is fine. But the real issue needs to be fixed.
- apex3stoker 3y ago
  There is a ISP which provides fibre internet with great upload speed and low price a few miles away. I once called their signup phone number and asked if they could extend their service to my place. They said no because they had an agreement with Comcast not to encroach on each other territories.
  - xyst 3y ago
    how is this not a blatant violation of anti-trust laws? > The Sherman Act broadly prohibits 1) anticompetitive agreements and 2) unilateral conduct that monopolizes or attempts to monopolize the relevant market.
userinanother 3y ago
Does everyone really need that much bandwidth though? Usally 20mbps is enough for most things. 50 is plenty and after that it’s mostly bragging rights.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  You clearly don't play video games. Waiting on downloads in the mid 10s of GB is common.
  - KerrAvon 3y ago
    - Multiple people videoconferencing at once, as was very common in a lot of households during COVID lockdown. - Gaming. - Other large downloads/uploads for WFH purposes. - High-bitrate 4k UHD streaming.
    - userinanother 3y ago
      All nice to haves but do we really need to build out all the infrastructure for that if most people don’t need that speed and definitely can’t convert that convenience into economic value. This is especially now that most companies are forcing everyone back and the government is pretending covid is no longer a thing
  - userinanother 3y ago
    I buy physical media for the most part because it retains resale value. But also the inconvenience of someone downloading for an extra hour or two shouldn’t drive us to build billions in infrastructure
- wmf 3y ago
  25 Mbps is enough for one person so 100 Mbps is reasonable for a household.
- kcb 3y ago
  It's the difference between playing the game you just bought in 20 mins or having to leave your PC on until the next day.
issafram 3y ago
I had Comcast forever with a maximum upload of 25mbps. They abandoned advertising the upload speed a long time ago. Finally made the switch to AT&T Fiber last weekend. I'll never go back to cable again!
- erwincoumans 3y ago
  Similar here, moved to Sonic fiber, 10G download and upload speed.
danielfoster 3y ago
I recently won a credit card dispute over a hotel resort fee. The hotel claimed they had high-speed Internet. The speed was only 2-3 mbps. I was able to use the current FCC definition of high-speed to claim a refund.
- avarun 3y ago
  Was the wifi access part of the resort fee? Curious how you went about explaining the monetary value of the wifi portion of your stay to the credit card company.
  - danielfoster 3y ago
    Yes, it was advertised as part of the fee.
- xnx 3y ago
  That is awesome. Can you say more about your process?
  - google234123 3y ago
    I feel like you almost always win credit card disputes - could have just said it felt slow and won.
  - joecool1029 3y ago
    probably just called the card issuer. It's a valid chargeback reason, here's Visa's guidance (probably under section 13.3): https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/VCOM/global/support-legal/documents/merchants-dispute-management-guidelines.pdf https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/VCOM/global/support-legal/d... "You inaccurately described the merchandise or services at the time of purchase." (billed as high-speed, it wasn't)
  - danielfoster 3y ago
    I took screenshots of text from the hotel’s website claiming what was included, then sent them to Amex when I filed my dispute online. Of course I tried to work with the hotel before going this route, but they refused to refund anything.
sschueller 3y ago
More effective would be to require all connections to be opened to any other provider (for a fee of course also defined by the FCC). Additionally there should be a over subscriber limit defined based on used capacity based on something like a 95th percentile calculation. It doesn't help if you have a gigabit internet connection when it's unusable because of the lack of backend capacity. Although if you had an open infrastructure the free market every one loves so much would kill bad service.
- KerrAvon 3y ago
  It actually used to work like something like that in the early 2000's (?), and then the rules were changed to give the power back to the big telcos again.
Eumenes 3y ago
Wouldn't this just give the greenlight to crappy internet companies to shove more tracking BS and bloatware into their web/mobile apps? Can the average residential internet user even tell the difference from whats available now and 100mbps vs 1gbps?
adrianmonk 3y ago
My ̶b̶o̶d̶y̶ data terminal is ready.
gnicholas 3y ago
I started with Comcast with 12Mbps service. Over time, they increased the base speed they offer to 20, 25, 50, and now 75. They have done this because they want to have x% of their customers on "broadband", per the federal definition. This is all well and good, but they keep increasing the price, and refuse to offer lower-tier service. I probably wouldn't want 12Mbps anymore, but 20 or 25 would suffice. I wish I could pay a fraction of what I'm paying for 75Mbps and get a lower tier of service. It should suffice that x% of customers are offered "broadband" for a reasonable price, even if some choose a lower speed. Ultimately, this comes down to competition. There are no other wired options where I live (in the heart of Silicon Valley). I have considered using a cellular hotspot, but it's not competitive in terms of pricing. I'm all for prodding companies to move to faster speeds, but there should still be room for consumer choice.
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  In an extreme ironic twist, me, the techie nerd guy, has the slowest internet of the regular-folk friend group of mine. Everyone has got 1Gbps and here I am with 300Mbps.
  - vladslav 3y ago
    My friends in third-world countries get faster and less expensive service than me in Silicon Valley. On top of that, there is no fiber connection in my neighborhood, and they've been on fiber for over 5 years. And there is a data cap also. It's just crazy and sad.
    - gnicholas 3y ago
      Are they in geographic region that is more densely populated? Or an area that was built out more recently? In my last house (also in SV) the choices were between Comcast and AT&T copper. The latter went up to 6/1, so was effectively useless. I'm sure it was laid down decades ago.
      - thumbsup-_- 3y ago
elicksaur 3y ago
When will a SLA be enforced by regulation? Who actually sees 90%+ of the billed speed 90%+ of the time? I paid for 200mbps for a long time and only typically saw 20-30mbps. When I moved, Comcast gave me a deal for 400mbps, I’m now seeing 50-60mbps typically. Never bothered looking at 1g plans because why pay the price to get just 100mbps in reality.
ghostly_s 3y ago
Great, I hope they codify what can be called "Fiber" next. My friend was excited to share Centurylink fiber was available at their new address, but while it is indeed delivered by fiber, it's capped out at 200Mbps.
jdlyga 3y ago
Verizon Fios still advertises in my building at an amazing 50 mbps. They have an old hookup from a decade+ ago when the building was first constructed. Meanwhile, our minimum cable speed available for purchase is 300 mbps. I still get contacted by Fios people every so often. They want 70 per month for 50 mbps!
zbrozek 3y ago
AT&T is offering 18/1 DSL in my neighborhood in 94022. Comcast offers nothing. Pretty sure this goalpost movement isn't going to convince either of them to offer service.
throw0101a 3y ago
How about a future/stretch goal of open access networks so that we can get some competition at OSI Layer 3: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_network Ideally OSI Layer 1/2 would be a neutral third-party that doesn't do an IP but rather only makes sure physical plant is ubiquitous in good working order: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband It was possible to wire up countries and continents with electricity and telephone in the early 1900s, so I don't see why is not technically possible to do the same with fibre in the early 2000s.
layoric 3y ago
Australia broadband is not great, but a few years ago I got fibre installed (at my own expense), and since have benefitted from actual competition among ISPs. The little ISP I’m with bills a daily rate which you can change at any point without penalty. Most days I just stay on a 1000/50 for about $3 USD a day, but can change to a range of plans from 50/20 to 1000/400, and it take only a few minutes to apply and kick in. The monopoly situation I read about in the various areas of the US really sounds like the FCC or another regulator needs to break up region exclusive deals, or something. It feels like Australia, of all places might actually leap frog the US once fibre is more widely available, and that is pretty bad since we have had some of the worst average internet speeds in the developed world at very high prices. Regulatory capture is a plague , and this FCC “proposal” feels like a crumb to delay what sounds like much needed broader disruption of monopolies.
- dottjt 3y ago
  Which company are you with? Also in Australia, although I don't think fibre is available yet to my address. Did you also have to pay for fibre to be installed?
mcoliver 3y ago
Should update the title to 100/20. I still find it amazing that companies can list services without the upload speed (eg Comcast). Of course latency and jitter matter too but that's probably above the heads of a lot of consumers. Upload and latency increasingly matter more and more and is essential to many work from home endeavors. Whether you are uploading content for work or play, or have a family video conferencing, or a host of other things. Perhaps the more interesting part of the doc is the future proposal for 1gb/500mb. I understand the engineering tradeoffs and reasoning for the asymmetrical bandwidth on coax/docsis but perhaps it's time to rethink some of that. That would be a good thing.
- vel0city 3y ago
  The FCC requires ISPs to publish information about their network management practices. That's how you get sites like this: https://www.xfinity.com/networkmanagement https://www.xfinity.com/networkmanagement I do wish this was required to be easily accessible from the marketing pages. Usually it takes some digging to find it. But at least they do have to make these numbers public.
  - portpecos 3y ago
    >The FCC determined that Comcast’s Xfinity Internet broadband Internet access services deliver, on average, over 100 percent of their advertised downstream and upstream speeds during the busiest periods of the day, known as "peak" times, during sustained testing. Peak times are Monday through Friday from 7:00pm to 11:00pm local time. >Latency is typically measured in milliseconds, and generally has no significant impact on typical everyday Internet usage. I took that from their networkmanagement page. Their statements seem to conflict with the consensus of the HN crowd, but I could be wrong.
    - vel0city 3y ago
      People getting their contracted speeds from a company they generally despise probably aren't going to come out of the woodwork to write supporting comments. Note they're not saying 100% of customers got their rated speeds, but the average customer got over 100% of their rated speeds. So, say the 50th percentile customer pays for 100M, they actually got 102M, boom, that metric is met. However easily 25%+ of customers didn't get their rated speeds during that peak period. Some people ranting on an internet forum isn't high quality data of overall network metrics. For a lot of residential customers, once latency is good enough it doesn't really matter. Once you get down below like 30 or so milliseconds, a lot of consumer applications just won't be any different. I could have 80ms latency to HN and my experience of the site would be roughly the same. Not saying all residential applications don't care about latency <30ms, but generally speaking the vast majority have very little difference at the moment. Watching a streaming movie, loading a web page, doom scrolling social media, etc are all going to be the exact same experience at 2ms or 10ms or 30ms. This is changing though, and I do prefer having such low latency with my residential fiber connection.
z_zetetic_z 3y ago
I have had an uncapped symmetric 10Gbps connection for ~50 USD / month for more than 10 years.
manchmalscott 3y ago
The issue with that is even though I have gigabit internet, and we pay over $200 a month for it, my internet speed is still usually measured in kilobytes and sometimes just bytes per second. Speed tests show anywhere between 4-9 hundred MiB/s down and yet it takes YouTube like ten seconds just to load the titles of videos, and I’m in a big city not even a rural area. Just because they “””provide””” a speed doesn’t mean anyone will ever see it in practice.
gnarlouse 3y ago
In Iowa, you can still find fiber speeds as low as 5mbps in an upscale residential neighborhood. They'll sell it to you marked as 100mbps without batting an eye. Customer service will say "oh you've probably got a gamer in the neigborhood" as if that excuses them from their unapologetically horrible service. Gotta love the late stage greed in this world
photonios 3y ago
Everyone here arguing that most people have no practical use for higher speeds at home have never experienced 1 GBit up+down. Once you have it, you'll never settle for less. I have 1 GBit up+down at home, I cabled the whole house with CAT7 cables and set up the best access points money can buy for mobile devices. Everything else is wired. It's an amazing experience and internet everywhere sucks compared to home. When I lived in Romania this costed me €10, now that I am back in the Netherlands it's a bit more pricey at €52, but it's 100% worth it.
- pottertheotter 3y ago
  I think that people also say that they have no practical use for it because they don't have access to it, so they don't realize all the practical uses. For instance, I've worked with a lot of engineering companies that collect a lot of lidar data. Having reasonable speeds (1Gbps up/down) would have a huge impact on how and where we can transmit and process the data.
- smilekzs 3y ago
  I did the same, hoping that someday I will finally get FTTH. Currently still on the only real option here which is Comcast 1G/20M. Sometimes LTE has better upload speed (but not latency, obviously).
runjake 3y ago
What's really hurting me isn't my 400Mbps download. What's hurting me is the advertised 12Mbps upload, or in reality, 9-10Mbps upload. Customers are so focused on synthetic download speeds, but meanwhile the upload rug is being pulled from them. Get a few devices on your network with iCloud Photos enabled and you're hosed, because traffic can't ACK/get out.
- bmicraft 3y ago
  Wow, the worst ratio i've ever seen was 20:1 and that's way below
  - runjake 3y ago
    This is on Spectrum Cable Internet, for anyone wondering.
dathinab 3y ago
as far as I can tell given the IT usage in the country I'm from: - 10mbps is the bare minimum to not have frequent major problems with all kinds of things but it still just a minimum (symmetric, if with reasonable latency and reliable and always actually 10mbps, i.e. not a contract which says 10mbps but is often much less or supper low latency) - 100(down)/~50(up)mbps is "good enough" for quite many (but then bluray dvds are still make some profite here, soo...; also again actual speeds not "marketed speeds") - 500+mbps down are what you really want if you play a lot of AAA games or similar, else download times for updates and similar become quite in-convenient and can infer with you playing with other people (e.g. due to you waiting for a unexped download). Some jobs need speeds like that, too. - there is little point in more then 1gbps down or 250mbps up (where I live; outside some niche cases). It's partially a chicken and egg problem: Without good internet you can't sell services which need/want such speeds but without such services why should anyone spend (larger amounts of) money to buy such internet and if very few buy it where available why should a teleco make it available in other areas Through that's private usage, not b2b, e.g. remote controlled agriculture machines.
speby 3y ago
Remember when a T-1 line was considered to be like the god-level status of internet connections? Whoa.... 1.5Mbps!? Later, more affordable DSL speeds would reach single-digit Mbps and it felt like being on another planet. Now all of those speeds feel like they're dial-up modems.
- pokstad 3y ago
  T1 was a dedicated circuit though, even with DSL there was still a need for T1 lines.
pokstad 3y ago
Isn’t the term “broadband” supposed to reference using the full capacity of the wire medium? Like DSL was broadband because voice lines only used a narrow band of the frequency range of the wire?
medellin 3y ago
This would have been great 10 years ago. In 2023 20 mbps for upload is a joke.
hollander 3y ago
Naming should be megaband, gigaband, teraband etc.
Arubis 3y ago
If I’m Comcast, I’m getting behind this. What a great way to kill off competition from small urban fixed wireless ISPs!
hansvm 3y ago
It's a good start, but networks can have all sorts of pathologies rendering them less useful (or nearly useless), and the current oligopoly is financially incentivized to minimally meet these definitions regardless of how usable the network is: (1) We provide speeds "up to 100mbps" (actual max throughput in any 24h period being 10-60mbps) (2) We provide mean speeds of 200mbps, easily beating the definition (mean is measured over time, not from the customer's perspective, so if most people get on at the same time then most browsing sessions see throughput of 10mbps or less due to poorly handled congestion) (3) We provide mean speeds of 100mbps (upload is 0.01mbps) (4) We provide mean speeds of 100mbps, over 99% of the time (every 3 months an 8h maintenance block drops speeds to 10kbps, rendering the network totally unusable that workday) (5) Mean throughput is 100mbps, mean latency is 2000ms (totally unusuable for real-time _anything_) (6) Mean throughput is 200mbps, mean latency is 20ms, every 5min a few packets will have up to 10s of latency (still totally unusable for most real-time purposes, but naive metrics make it sound good) (7) You're allowed "unlimited" "100mbps" (but if you use that for more than a contiguous day, or a few long evenings in a row, then 100mbps is redefined to mean 100kbps) And on and on and on. More useful metrics might measure actual consumer impact: (a) Can you rely on this every workday to shuffle documents back and forth? (b) Can you rely on this every workday to have low-resolution video calls? (c) Can you usually play a quasi-realtime game for 30min without lag killing your character? (d) During peak hours, can you reasonably expect to be able to stream buffered 720p video? A raw 100mbps floor doesn't guarantee your network suffices for any of those use cases.
nunez 3y ago
This is a very welcome change. 25/3 is fine but maxes out once you have one Netflix 4K stream going and won't work at all once AR/VR becomes more mainstream
imagetic 3y ago
We just moved from 12 years on Bay Area fiber to PNW Comcast Coax, 1Gb down, but 4mb up and averaging 4 brief outages a day. Yay, me!

409 points by KoftaBob 3y ago

Download only, yes? And what about the busy-Sunday night problem? This seems so besides the point. Cable at an apartment building I visit is often 300mbps, but Sunday evening it can have horrible jitter and lag and much slower speeds. It's incredibly frustrating; common sites can be basically unusable. This also feels like it's setting a bar where most DSL systems wont have any chance of competing. In cities I can be more sympathetic (put in more pops) but in rural areas, this feels like a barrier that is extremely cost prohibitive to make happen, for not great reasons.

Bud 3y ago
[dead]
shortcake27 3y ago
I usually pay for 50mbps, but I can live comfortably on 25mbps if need be (sometimes I drop my connection speed to save money). However, I have a fibre connection, where QoS is 100% 100% of the time. 25mbps is totally fine for web browsing, gaming, and streaming. The only issue is downloads, which simply take more time. I'd still rather have a rock solid 25mbps than 300mbps with jitter. Cable is garbage. Always has been, always will be.
wongarsu 3y ago
With VDSL and supervectoring you can get 250MBit/s, provided you aren't more than a quarter of a mile or so from the multiplexer. Which is probably not cost-effective in most of America due to the low density of suburbia, never mind rural places.

andrewmunsell 3y ago

This is nice, but with increased speed, they should also require ISPs do not impose a data cap to be considered broadband.

endisneigh 3y ago
Why shouldn’t there be a cap? Bandwidth isn’t free. It’s sad seeing people on a forum called hacker news having no idea how networking infrastructure works.
- entropicdrifter 3y ago
  Because it's next to free (no additional cost to run the infrastructure we're already running) and we're nowhere near the limits of our existing infrastructure's overall bandwidth limits right now, as evidenced by the lack of caps not affecting quality of internet service for the entirety of 2020, when more people were online per hour than at any previous point in history.
  - endisneigh 3y ago
    Source? Running things requires labor, labor is getting expensive. Pricing isn’t set on simply the marginal cost of materials…
    - vorpalhex 3y ago
      Running a fully utilized fiber line is.. exactly the same amount of labor as running a 10% utilized one. The cost to track and bill people for caps and let them pay overages though..
      - toomuchtodo 3y ago
        Chokepoints are peering exchanges, transit handoffs, and core network gear, which is sized for a percentile of utilization below constant 100%. Having implemented a billing system and utilization monitoring for managed hosting datacenter environment, it is trivial to collect metrics from equipment and bill accordingly. You don't want to nickle and dime or gouge customers, but you do want to ensure proportionality across the customer population. Some combination of caps, overage charges, traffic shaping, and edge CDN appliances is needed (Netflix, Akamai, etc). Off peak unlimited is also a potential strategy to drive low priority transfer to low utilization periods. Pick your poison. There is a reason most of Netflix global infra is monster CDN boxes closest to customers. https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/

ehPReth 3y ago

happy to see upload get the attention it deserves. nothing is more annoying than uploading a video to $messagingapp or $socialmediaplatform and it just taking forever due to slow upload. a nice quality of life improvement to shove that quicker to someone. even stuff like backing up computers, or running security cameras that you can view remotely or that record to the cloud (encrypted) are really hampered by upload speed. there's a lot of cool stuff one can do if only one had the speed to do it with.

voakbasda 3y ago
Oh, it's worse than that. With my 20-1 DSL connection, saturating the uplink effectively causes a DoS for the downlink.
- koito17 3y ago
  You gave me flashbacks to 2010 when I had used ADSL and thought 128 KB/s download was the best thing ever for downloading MP3s. And as you mentioned, using up all upload bandwidth effectively DoSed everyone else on the network, though in my case, any single person downloading also slowed down everything else to a crawl. I must have had less "downstream channels" (or whatever the DSL equivalent is) than your setup. My current internet connection uses DOCSIS 3.1, but I can't recall any resource contention even if I have several computers trying to upload simultaneously. Not a big fan of asymmetric speeds, though, but apparently DOCSIS 4.0 (which is being finalized this year) gets us closer to symmetrical speeds.
- inemesitaffia 3y ago
  Cake or fq-codel on Openwrt
  - voakbasda 3y ago
    That's not viable for me, as my subnet router is on the far side of my DSL connection. There's absolutely no way for me to filter incoming packets before they traverse my downlink. And as far as I know, there's no easy way to get all of my machines on my static subnet to coordinate traffic shaping.

idiot900 3y ago

Honest question: at what point, with real life usage, is 1 Gbps actually necessary for home users? I find that latency rather than throughput is what determines my perceived quality of an Internet connection. But am curious how others think.

lapphi 3y ago
Probably when VR starts popping off
deleted 3y ago
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dawnerd 3y ago
When games are 100+ gigs it starts being something that can make an impact especially when updates are also massive. But this is the same thing people say over every incremental in tech. “Isn’t x enough”
Zigurd 3y ago
First, you are not buying a sustained 1Gb. Not at consumer pricing. Secondly, having burst capacity is very helpful. Moving big images, videos, etc., which you do only occasionally, benefits a lot from a 1Gb consumer-grade link.
cortesoft 3y ago
I recently went from 300mbps to 2gbps, and one big difference is game update time. In the past, I would sometimes go to play a game with my friends and it would require a 10 gig update, and we would have to play a different game because it would take too long to update. Now I can update in under a minute and we can play.
- phkahler 3y ago
  To me that's more about the company making too many large updates. And when they do have a large updated it should be up to the user to decide when to get it. Downloading it over night should be an option, and not required to play. I've seem games that demanded the update in order to play, which is really annoying and I don't think it should be that way.

superkuh 3y ago

I'm much more excited about the "...and 20 megabits per second for upload". My comcast account for $107/mo with 1.2 TB data transfer cap per month still only has a 5 megabit upload throttle (80/5). I literally had the same upload speed in 2003.

deleted 3y ago
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elromulous 3y ago

I think I speak for many when I say "'bout damn time".

0cf8612b2e1e 3y ago

Will they also change how they define a region? At one point, I thought so long as an ISP service a single customer in a zip code(?), census tract(?), some region definition, the ISP could make claims to offering that tier of service everywhere.

I_Am_Nous 3y ago
The service regions are kind of a government mandated monopoly for who can offer service where. However, the FCC is now requiring automated speed testing so if you say you can offer 100/100 symmetrical you have to prove it. The FCC can pick any customer and say "prove this customer can get the service they are paying for" -- for us, that means installing a cloud connected router that automatically connects and tests. Apparently the fines are pretty gnarly...

jmyeet 3y ago

Waht the government needs to do (but never will) is make the last mile a municipal utility such as in Chattanooga [1]. Instead we have monopolies that do what all monopolies do in a capitalist organization of the economy: they rent-seek, spend their time and money on lobbying to legislatively exclude competition (eg [2]), do the bare minimum and take public money to roll out broadband but then just not do it (eg [3]. The Internet is the US is objectively awful for most people by the standard of other developed economies [4]. It's ridiculous that people still defend this system. [1]: https://qz.com/1996234/the-best-broadband-in-the-us-is-in-chattanooga-tn https://qz.com/1996234/the-best-broadband-in-the-us-is-in-ch... [2]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-already-won-limits-on-public-broadband-in-20-states/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-al... [3]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/verizon-ordered-to-finish-fiber-build-that-it-promised-but-didnt-deliver/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/06/veriz... [4]: https://broadbandnow.com/report/2018-fcc-international-data-insights https://broadbandnow.com/report/2018-fcc-international-data-...

Zigurd 3y ago
Municipal ISPs are a good start, and they illustrate how much of your ISP bill goes to debt service from when the commercial ISP bought out competitors. But you don't have to run a municipal ISP like a commercial ISP. If pricing goes low enough, just make it an amenity, like parks and sidewalks, and fund it that way. And then you can choose a totally different architecture than a commercial ISP could operate: no network admission barriers, mesh networks, etc.

bscphil 3y ago

It's 100 Mbps down / 20 Mbps up as the proposal, and 1000 Mbps / 500 Mbps as an eventual goal. I imagine the 20 Mbps upload target is useless for most of us, even those on asymmetric cable, but there's a good chance that if the ISPs were forced to provide 20 Mbps up at their lowest broadband tiers, it would raise the ladder quite a bit. For example, on Comcast I get 800 / 20, but there's also a 400 / 10 tier (and maybe a low-cost tier below that?). If everyone was getting 20 up, maybe I'll get upgraded to 40 Mbps.

SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
I guess I'm the outlier. I have 300 down / 15 up and never really notice an issue.
- freedomben 3y ago
  How often do you upload? I notice especially when trying to rsync or upload files to the cloud.
  - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
    Not often and never in large doses - mostly just recorded images or videos to the cloud. I don't know the use cases people have for that outside of streaming large media.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  You don’t notice because you have never had the capability to host content. With symmetric upload, it would be possible to backup our phones/data to our own NAS at home as opposed to relying on Apple/Microsoft/Alphabet/Amazon. You could stream video from your own device, you could share it, etc. The lack of high quality, high bandwidth symmetric connections to the home (and ipv6) is a huge boon to the entrenched big tech companies.
  - chrononaut 3y ago
    > With symmetric upload, it would be possible to backup our phones/data to our own NAS at home as opposed to relying on Apple/Microsoft/Alphabet/Amazon. I am not following this one. Why would upload bandwidth at home inhibit backing up your phone/data to a NAS at home? Or are you referring to remote restoration / access? Wouldn't the NAS be using its download bandwidth to receive backups when your phone is remote? and your phone would be on the local network when you're at home?

happytiger 3y ago

1000 Mbps down / 100 Mbps up should be the minimum for any first world country. Without mandated illegality of data caps and other Comcast data and modem games this does nothing to change the reality of boots on the ground unfortunately. These speeds only really allow you to close your data cap sooner in the month for the vast majority of customers who use Internet for modern things. A fixed data cap locks in an “era” of technology so that when the era ends (HD > 4k, 4k > 8k for example) every one of the customers ends up being a heavy user. It is a scam that should be illegal. We’ve already paid for this with multiple rural broadband bills. It’s time for change. This is woefully (and shamefully) inadequate action by the FCC but at least we don’t have to deal with Ajit’s basically sellout behavior anymore and can at least talk about solutions beyond the current regulatory captured standards. I commend them for moving, but I can’t condone their proposal as it’s truly and utterly inadequate and far behind global standards as well. If you want your country to slip into uncompetitive mess, go ahead and hamper the backbone of the new Industrial Revolution by giving away all the value to your corporate friends and leaving the innovation a generation of true broadband performance could generate laying on the shop floor. Did I mention we have already paid for broadband (ready, was supposed to be fiber rollout)? Twice? Low standards might as well be low standards FCC.

Culonavirus 3y ago
Many (most?) people do not even have devices that could utilize 1Gbit/s. My (relatively new) Galaxy Tab S7+ (11ac wifi) has a hard time going over 500Mbit/s (not sure if it's wifi or the slow internal memory, can't be arsed to find out), and it's similar with my (not that old) LG Velvet phone... All of that on a connection that can do a rock solid 1Gbps on my PC through UTP (cat 6)... What I'm trying to say is that many of these devices regular people have don't even have the capability to receive 1Gbit/s streams. It's great for us nerds or people who (also) work from home and need blazing fast connections to work servers etc, but as of 2023, it's overkill for many regular people. Datacaps should be illegal though.
- d3w4s9 3y ago
  Anyone with a PlayStation/Xbox/gaming PC -- that's a lot of people -- can tell you how much they dislike waiting for a game download. I have 300Mbps download and I still find it too slow. I don't want to start a download, wait for half an hour before I can play the game.

somat 3y ago

Oh boy! pedant time. note that ethernet and gpon(single line fiberoptic) are not broad band, they are base band. Broad band does not mean speed. it means it uses a lot of frequencies at the same time. OK getting dizzy here from too much excitement, pedant time is over for this week. We are all allowed to go back to using the non-technical meaning of broadband where it means speed.

s1gnp0st 3y ago
*Pedant
- somat 3y ago
  Totally fair call, fixed.
  - inemesitaffia 3y ago
    Try again
aidenn0 3y ago
If we are being pedants, I object to fiber-optic being labeled as base-band. It is modulating a ~100THz carrier wave, so is clearly not base-band.
- I_Am_Nous 3y ago
  Maybe old fashioned "blink on means 1, no light means 0" is base-band, but these days they have virtual data channels and bidirectional fiber transmits on a different frequency than it receives on...so definitely broad-band.

xyst 3y ago

FCC should fix the collusion that happens under the table between ISPs. ISPs tend to avoid entering an area where there is already established service. So for a majority of people, the ISPs have a de facto monopoly. No need to improve service or customer support. Also need to overturn legislation at state level which forbids municipal ISPs from being created. This would help break the mini monopolies that ISPs. Defining standards is fine. But the real issue needs to be fixed.

apex3stoker 3y ago
There is a ISP which provides fibre internet with great upload speed and low price a few miles away. I once called their signup phone number and asked if they could extend their service to my place. They said no because they had an agreement with Comcast not to encroach on each other territories.
- xyst 3y ago
  how is this not a blatant violation of anti-trust laws? > The Sherman Act broadly prohibits 1) anticompetitive agreements and 2) unilateral conduct that monopolizes or attempts to monopolize the relevant market.

userinanother 3y ago

Does everyone really need that much bandwidth though? Usally 20mbps is enough for most things. 50 is plenty and after that it’s mostly bragging rights.

aidenn0 3y ago
You clearly don't play video games. Waiting on downloads in the mid 10s of GB is common.
- KerrAvon 3y ago
  - Multiple people videoconferencing at once, as was very common in a lot of households during COVID lockdown. - Gaming. - Other large downloads/uploads for WFH purposes. - High-bitrate 4k UHD streaming.
  - userinanother 3y ago
    All nice to haves but do we really need to build out all the infrastructure for that if most people don’t need that speed and definitely can’t convert that convenience into economic value. This is especially now that most companies are forcing everyone back and the government is pretending covid is no longer a thing
- userinanother 3y ago
  I buy physical media for the most part because it retains resale value. But also the inconvenience of someone downloading for an extra hour or two shouldn’t drive us to build billions in infrastructure
wmf 3y ago
25 Mbps is enough for one person so 100 Mbps is reasonable for a household.
kcb 3y ago
It's the difference between playing the game you just bought in 20 mins or having to leave your PC on until the next day.

issafram 3y ago

I had Comcast forever with a maximum upload of 25mbps. They abandoned advertising the upload speed a long time ago. Finally made the switch to AT&T Fiber last weekend. I'll never go back to cable again!

erwincoumans 3y ago
Similar here, moved to Sonic fiber, 10G download and upload speed.

danielfoster 3y ago

I recently won a credit card dispute over a hotel resort fee. The hotel claimed they had high-speed Internet. The speed was only 2-3 mbps. I was able to use the current FCC definition of high-speed to claim a refund.

avarun 3y ago
Was the wifi access part of the resort fee? Curious how you went about explaining the monetary value of the wifi portion of your stay to the credit card company.
- danielfoster 3y ago
  Yes, it was advertised as part of the fee.
xnx 3y ago
That is awesome. Can you say more about your process?
- google234123 3y ago
  I feel like you almost always win credit card disputes - could have just said it felt slow and won.
- joecool1029 3y ago
  probably just called the card issuer. It's a valid chargeback reason, here's Visa's guidance (probably under section 13.3): https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/VCOM/global/support-legal/documents/merchants-dispute-management-guidelines.pdf https://usa.visa.com/content/dam/VCOM/global/support-legal/d... "You inaccurately described the merchandise or services at the time of purchase." (billed as high-speed, it wasn't)
- danielfoster 3y ago
  I took screenshots of text from the hotel’s website claiming what was included, then sent them to Amex when I filed my dispute online. Of course I tried to work with the hotel before going this route, but they refused to refund anything.

sschueller 3y ago

More effective would be to require all connections to be opened to any other provider (for a fee of course also defined by the FCC). Additionally there should be a over subscriber limit defined based on used capacity based on something like a 95th percentile calculation. It doesn't help if you have a gigabit internet connection when it's unusable because of the lack of backend capacity. Although if you had an open infrastructure the free market every one loves so much would kill bad service.

KerrAvon 3y ago
It actually used to work like something like that in the early 2000's (?), and then the rules were changed to give the power back to the big telcos again.

Eumenes 3y ago

Wouldn't this just give the greenlight to crappy internet companies to shove more tracking BS and bloatware into their web/mobile apps? Can the average residential internet user even tell the difference from whats available now and 100mbps vs 1gbps?

adrianmonk 3y ago

My ̶b̶o̶d̶y̶ data terminal is ready.

gnicholas 3y ago

I started with Comcast with 12Mbps service. Over time, they increased the base speed they offer to 20, 25, 50, and now 75. They have done this because they want to have x% of their customers on "broadband", per the federal definition. This is all well and good, but they keep increasing the price, and refuse to offer lower-tier service. I probably wouldn't want 12Mbps anymore, but 20 or 25 would suffice. I wish I could pay a fraction of what I'm paying for 75Mbps and get a lower tier of service. It should suffice that x% of customers are offered "broadband" for a reasonable price, even if some choose a lower speed. Ultimately, this comes down to competition. There are no other wired options where I live (in the heart of Silicon Valley). I have considered using a cellular hotspot, but it's not competitive in terms of pricing. I'm all for prodding companies to move to faster speeds, but there should still be room for consumer choice.

Workaccount2 3y ago
In an extreme ironic twist, me, the techie nerd guy, has the slowest internet of the regular-folk friend group of mine. Everyone has got 1Gbps and here I am with 300Mbps.
- vladslav 3y ago
  My friends in third-world countries get faster and less expensive service than me in Silicon Valley. On top of that, there is no fiber connection in my neighborhood, and they've been on fiber for over 5 years. And there is a data cap also. It's just crazy and sad.
  - gnicholas 3y ago
    Are they in geographic region that is more densely populated? Or an area that was built out more recently? In my last house (also in SV) the choices were between Comcast and AT&T copper. The latter went up to 6/1, so was effectively useless. I'm sure it was laid down decades ago.
    - thumbsup-_- 3y ago

elicksaur 3y ago

When will a SLA be enforced by regulation? Who actually sees 90%+ of the billed speed 90%+ of the time? I paid for 200mbps for a long time and only typically saw 20-30mbps. When I moved, Comcast gave me a deal for 400mbps, I’m now seeing 50-60mbps typically. Never bothered looking at 1g plans because why pay the price to get just 100mbps in reality.

ghostly_s 3y ago

Great, I hope they codify what can be called "Fiber" next. My friend was excited to share Centurylink fiber was available at their new address, but while it is indeed delivered by fiber, it's capped out at 200Mbps.

jdlyga 3y ago

Verizon Fios still advertises in my building at an amazing 50 mbps. They have an old hookup from a decade+ ago when the building was first constructed. Meanwhile, our minimum cable speed available for purchase is 300 mbps. I still get contacted by Fios people every so often. They want 70 per month for 50 mbps!

zbrozek 3y ago

AT&T is offering 18/1 DSL in my neighborhood in 94022. Comcast offers nothing. Pretty sure this goalpost movement isn't going to convince either of them to offer service.

throw0101a 3y ago

How about a future/stretch goal of open access networks so that we can get some competition at OSI Layer 3: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-access_network Ideally OSI Layer 1/2 would be a neutral third-party that doesn't do an IP but rather only makes sure physical plant is ubiquitous in good working order: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband It was possible to wire up countries and continents with electricity and telephone in the early 1900s, so I don't see why is not technically possible to do the same with fibre in the early 2000s.

layoric 3y ago

Australia broadband is not great, but a few years ago I got fibre installed (at my own expense), and since have benefitted from actual competition among ISPs. The little ISP I’m with bills a daily rate which you can change at any point without penalty. Most days I just stay on a 1000/50 for about $3 USD a day, but can change to a range of plans from 50/20 to 1000/400, and it take only a few minutes to apply and kick in. The monopoly situation I read about in the various areas of the US really sounds like the FCC or another regulator needs to break up region exclusive deals, or something. It feels like Australia, of all places might actually leap frog the US once fibre is more widely available, and that is pretty bad since we have had some of the worst average internet speeds in the developed world at very high prices. Regulatory capture is a plague , and this FCC “proposal” feels like a crumb to delay what sounds like much needed broader disruption of monopolies.

dottjt 3y ago
Which company are you with? Also in Australia, although I don't think fibre is available yet to my address. Did you also have to pay for fibre to be installed?

mcoliver 3y ago

Should update the title to 100/20. I still find it amazing that companies can list services without the upload speed (eg Comcast). Of course latency and jitter matter too but that's probably above the heads of a lot of consumers. Upload and latency increasingly matter more and more and is essential to many work from home endeavors. Whether you are uploading content for work or play, or have a family video conferencing, or a host of other things. Perhaps the more interesting part of the doc is the future proposal for 1gb/500mb. I understand the engineering tradeoffs and reasoning for the asymmetrical bandwidth on coax/docsis but perhaps it's time to rethink some of that. That would be a good thing.

vel0city 3y ago
The FCC requires ISPs to publish information about their network management practices. That's how you get sites like this: https://www.xfinity.com/networkmanagement https://www.xfinity.com/networkmanagement I do wish this was required to be easily accessible from the marketing pages. Usually it takes some digging to find it. But at least they do have to make these numbers public.
- portpecos 3y ago
  >The FCC determined that Comcast’s Xfinity Internet broadband Internet access services deliver, on average, over 100 percent of their advertised downstream and upstream speeds during the busiest periods of the day, known as "peak" times, during sustained testing. Peak times are Monday through Friday from 7:00pm to 11:00pm local time. >Latency is typically measured in milliseconds, and generally has no significant impact on typical everyday Internet usage. I took that from their networkmanagement page. Their statements seem to conflict with the consensus of the HN crowd, but I could be wrong.
  - vel0city 3y ago
    People getting their contracted speeds from a company they generally despise probably aren't going to come out of the woodwork to write supporting comments. Note they're not saying 100% of customers got their rated speeds, but the average customer got over 100% of their rated speeds. So, say the 50th percentile customer pays for 100M, they actually got 102M, boom, that metric is met. However easily 25%+ of customers didn't get their rated speeds during that peak period. Some people ranting on an internet forum isn't high quality data of overall network metrics. For a lot of residential customers, once latency is good enough it doesn't really matter. Once you get down below like 30 or so milliseconds, a lot of consumer applications just won't be any different. I could have 80ms latency to HN and my experience of the site would be roughly the same. Not saying all residential applications don't care about latency <30ms, but generally speaking the vast majority have very little difference at the moment. Watching a streaming movie, loading a web page, doom scrolling social media, etc are all going to be the exact same experience at 2ms or 10ms or 30ms. This is changing though, and I do prefer having such low latency with my residential fiber connection.

z_zetetic_z 3y ago

I have had an uncapped symmetric 10Gbps connection for ~50 USD / month for more than 10 years.

manchmalscott 3y ago

The issue with that is even though I have gigabit internet, and we pay over $200 a month for it, my internet speed is still usually measured in kilobytes and sometimes just bytes per second. Speed tests show anywhere between 4-9 hundred MiB/s down and yet it takes YouTube like ten seconds just to load the titles of videos, and I’m in a big city not even a rural area. Just because they “””provide””” a speed doesn’t mean anyone will ever see it in practice.

gnarlouse 3y ago

In Iowa, you can still find fiber speeds as low as 5mbps in an upscale residential neighborhood. They'll sell it to you marked as 100mbps without batting an eye. Customer service will say "oh you've probably got a gamer in the neigborhood" as if that excuses them from their unapologetically horrible service. Gotta love the late stage greed in this world

photonios 3y ago

Everyone here arguing that most people have no practical use for higher speeds at home have never experienced 1 GBit up+down. Once you have it, you'll never settle for less. I have 1 GBit up+down at home, I cabled the whole house with CAT7 cables and set up the best access points money can buy for mobile devices. Everything else is wired. It's an amazing experience and internet everywhere sucks compared to home. When I lived in Romania this costed me €10, now that I am back in the Netherlands it's a bit more pricey at €52, but it's 100% worth it.

pottertheotter 3y ago
I think that people also say that they have no practical use for it because they don't have access to it, so they don't realize all the practical uses. For instance, I've worked with a lot of engineering companies that collect a lot of lidar data. Having reasonable speeds (1Gbps up/down) would have a huge impact on how and where we can transmit and process the data.
smilekzs 3y ago
I did the same, hoping that someday I will finally get FTTH. Currently still on the only real option here which is Comcast 1G/20M. Sometimes LTE has better upload speed (but not latency, obviously).

runjake 3y ago

What's really hurting me isn't my 400Mbps download. What's hurting me is the advertised 12Mbps upload, or in reality, 9-10Mbps upload. Customers are so focused on synthetic download speeds, but meanwhile the upload rug is being pulled from them. Get a few devices on your network with iCloud Photos enabled and you're hosed, because traffic can't ACK/get out.

bmicraft 3y ago
Wow, the worst ratio i've ever seen was 20:1 and that's way below
- runjake 3y ago
  This is on Spectrum Cable Internet, for anyone wondering.

dathinab 3y ago

as far as I can tell given the IT usage in the country I'm from: - 10mbps is the bare minimum to not have frequent major problems with all kinds of things but it still just a minimum (symmetric, if with reasonable latency and reliable and always actually 10mbps, i.e. not a contract which says 10mbps but is often much less or supper low latency) - 100(down)/~50(up)mbps is "good enough" for quite many (but then bluray dvds are still make some profite here, soo...; also again actual speeds not "marketed speeds") - 500+mbps down are what you really want if you play a lot of AAA games or similar, else download times for updates and similar become quite in-convenient and can infer with you playing with other people (e.g. due to you waiting for a unexped download). Some jobs need speeds like that, too. - there is little point in more then 1gbps down or 250mbps up (where I live; outside some niche cases). It's partially a chicken and egg problem: Without good internet you can't sell services which need/want such speeds but without such services why should anyone spend (larger amounts of) money to buy such internet and if very few buy it where available why should a teleco make it available in other areas Through that's private usage, not b2b, e.g. remote controlled agriculture machines.

speby 3y ago

Remember when a T-1 line was considered to be like the god-level status of internet connections? Whoa.... 1.5Mbps!? Later, more affordable DSL speeds would reach single-digit Mbps and it felt like being on another planet. Now all of those speeds feel like they're dial-up modems.

pokstad 3y ago
T1 was a dedicated circuit though, even with DSL there was still a need for T1 lines.

pokstad 3y ago

Isn’t the term “broadband” supposed to reference using the full capacity of the wire medium? Like DSL was broadband because voice lines only used a narrow band of the frequency range of the wire?

medellin 3y ago

This would have been great 10 years ago. In 2023 20 mbps for upload is a joke.

hollander 3y ago

Naming should be megaband, gigaband, teraband etc.

Arubis 3y ago

If I’m Comcast, I’m getting behind this. What a great way to kill off competition from small urban fixed wireless ISPs!

hansvm 3y ago

It's a good start, but networks can have all sorts of pathologies rendering them less useful (or nearly useless), and the current oligopoly is financially incentivized to minimally meet these definitions regardless of how usable the network is: (1) We provide speeds "up to 100mbps" (actual max throughput in any 24h period being 10-60mbps) (2) We provide mean speeds of 200mbps, easily beating the definition (mean is measured over time, not from the customer's perspective, so if most people get on at the same time then most browsing sessions see throughput of 10mbps or less due to poorly handled congestion) (3) We provide mean speeds of 100mbps (upload is 0.01mbps) (4) We provide mean speeds of 100mbps, over 99% of the time (every 3 months an 8h maintenance block drops speeds to 10kbps, rendering the network totally unusable that workday) (5) Mean throughput is 100mbps, mean latency is 2000ms (totally unusuable for real-time _anything_) (6) Mean throughput is 200mbps, mean latency is 20ms, every 5min a few packets will have up to 10s of latency (still totally unusable for most real-time purposes, but naive metrics make it sound good) (7) You're allowed "unlimited" "100mbps" (but if you use that for more than a contiguous day, or a few long evenings in a row, then 100mbps is redefined to mean 100kbps) And on and on and on. More useful metrics might measure actual consumer impact: (a) Can you rely on this every workday to shuffle documents back and forth? (b) Can you rely on this every workday to have low-resolution video calls? (c) Can you usually play a quasi-realtime game for 30min without lag killing your character? (d) During peak hours, can you reasonably expect to be able to stream buffered 720p video? A raw 100mbps floor doesn't guarantee your network suffices for any of those use cases.

nunez 3y ago

This is a very welcome change. 25/3 is fine but maxes out once you have one Netflix 4K stream going and won't work at all once AR/VR becomes more mainstream

imagetic 3y ago

We just moved from 12 years on Bay Area fiber to PNW Comcast Coax, 1Gb down, but 4mb up and averaging 4 brief outages a day. Yay, me!