5 ms·

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 jitte

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.
    - NoPicklez 3y ago
      <30ms latency is absolutely a good sweet spot. Most people that need any less are likely gaming, heck even I'd like less for gaming but 30ms is more then enough to be able to play FPS games well. I appreciate there is more to latency than just gaming, but I hear more people wanting less ping for those reasons than anything else.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    I'm the only happy Comcast customer on HN. They have consistently delivered their advertised speeds to me with nearly zero downtime. I can't even remember the last time I witnessed an outage lasting longer than a minute. I WFH full time and am utterly reliant on my "consumer tier" service, and they have not let me down. They have also been very progressive and strong early with Native IPv6. They are god awful expensive, but I feel the quality of their product is excellent. And I'm not even a Comcast employee or shill.
m463 3y ago
Upload speed is just a cash grab. It is a way to segregate price-sensitive residential vs price-insensitive business customers who can then be charged enormous amounts.
- SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
  > Upload speed is just a cash grab. No. This lacks all historical and practical understanding of why upload speeds are limited. Back in the 70s/80s when coax was being planned and rolled out for cable, they needed to figure out what frequencies they would use. Cable providers knew they needs a ton in one direction and only a tiny bit for things like buying pay per view in the other. This has been fine traditionally because even up to Netflix and streaming we haven’t needed the upload at residential. No one complained. That may start to change a little. As far as I am aware, all DOCSIS (cable) providers in the USA that are using cable-tv coax are limited to a max of 35Mbps upto DOCSIS3.1. I am writing this on 1250/35 right now. The local tiers for me are 100/15, 400/25, 1000/35, 1250/35. It isn’t a “cash grab” at all. If you need more upload you need a new line that isn’t divided so asymmetrically, which means fiber. And once you fiber, there is zero reason to go go symmetric, as you have two lines with the same equipment on either side, to a point where the ISP will charge differently if you cut into their bandwidth too much.
  - hn_acker 3y ago
    > It isn’t a “cash grab” at all. If you need more upload you need a new line that isn’t divided so asymmetrically, which means fiber. And once you fiber, there is zero reason to go go symmetric, as you have two lines with the same equipment on either side, to a point where the ISP will charge differently if you cut into their bandwidth too much. Everything else you said could be true, yet not the part about a cash grab. Anything worse than $10 for 100 Mbps down and 100 Mbps up from a large ISP is a cash grab now that fiber exists [1], DOCSIS 3.1 can offer up to 1 Gbps (to say nothing of DOCSIS 4) [2], and large ISPs like Comcast keep committing subsidy fraud [3]. I wrote more about pricing in a different comment [4]. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/why-fiber-vastly-superior-cable-and-5g https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/why-fiber-vastly-super... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Comparison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Comparison [3] Pick any one of these links. https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/06/mississippi-says-att-took-283-million-network-it-never-fully-deployed/ https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/06/mississippi-says-att-too... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/15/report-shows-comcast-continues-to-lie-about-its-broadband-coverage/ https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/15/report-shows-comcast-con... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/16/verizon-t-mobile-overstate-wireless-coverage-to-nab-billions-in-undeserved-subsidies/ https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/16/verizon-t-mobile-oversta... [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38105873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38105873

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.
  - NoPicklez 3y ago
    <30ms latency is absolutely a good sweet spot. Most people that need any less are likely gaming, heck even I'd like less for gaming but 30ms is more then enough to be able to play FPS games well. I appreciate there is more to latency than just gaming, but I hear more people wanting less ping for those reasons than anything else.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  I'm the only happy Comcast customer on HN. They have consistently delivered their advertised speeds to me with nearly zero downtime. I can't even remember the last time I witnessed an outage lasting longer than a minute. I WFH full time and am utterly reliant on my "consumer tier" service, and they have not let me down. They have also been very progressive and strong early with Native IPv6. They are god awful expensive, but I feel the quality of their product is excellent. And I'm not even a Comcast employee or shill.

m463 3y ago

Upload speed is just a cash grab. It is a way to segregate price-sensitive residential vs price-insensitive business customers who can then be charged enormous amounts.

SV_BubbleTime 3y ago
> Upload speed is just a cash grab. No. This lacks all historical and practical understanding of why upload speeds are limited. Back in the 70s/80s when coax was being planned and rolled out for cable, they needed to figure out what frequencies they would use. Cable providers knew they needs a ton in one direction and only a tiny bit for things like buying pay per view in the other. This has been fine traditionally because even up to Netflix and streaming we haven’t needed the upload at residential. No one complained. That may start to change a little. As far as I am aware, all DOCSIS (cable) providers in the USA that are using cable-tv coax are limited to a max of 35Mbps upto DOCSIS3.1. I am writing this on 1250/35 right now. The local tiers for me are 100/15, 400/25, 1000/35, 1250/35. It isn’t a “cash grab” at all. If you need more upload you need a new line that isn’t divided so asymmetrically, which means fiber. And once you fiber, there is zero reason to go go symmetric, as you have two lines with the same equipment on either side, to a point where the ISP will charge differently if you cut into their bandwidth too much.
- hn_acker 3y ago
  > It isn’t a “cash grab” at all. If you need more upload you need a new line that isn’t divided so asymmetrically, which means fiber. And once you fiber, there is zero reason to go go symmetric, as you have two lines with the same equipment on either side, to a point where the ISP will charge differently if you cut into their bandwidth too much. Everything else you said could be true, yet not the part about a cash grab. Anything worse than $10 for 100 Mbps down and 100 Mbps up from a large ISP is a cash grab now that fiber exists [1], DOCSIS 3.1 can offer up to 1 Gbps (to say nothing of DOCSIS 4) [2], and large ISPs like Comcast keep committing subsidy fraud [3]. I wrote more about pricing in a different comment [4]. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/why-fiber-vastly-superior-cable-and-5g https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/why-fiber-vastly-super... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Comparison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Comparison [3] Pick any one of these links. https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/06/mississippi-says-att-took-283-million-network-it-never-fully-deployed/ https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/06/mississippi-says-att-too... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/15/report-shows-comcast-continues-to-lie-about-its-broadband-coverage/ https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/15/report-shows-comcast-con... https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/16/verizon-t-mobile-overstate-wireless-coverage-to-nab-billions-in-undeserved-subsidies/ https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/16/verizon-t-mobile-oversta... [4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38105873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38105873