5 ms·

I wish they would focus just as much effort on expanding their service area. I’m out here in the Stone Age with Comcast or maybe space x as my only real option

I wish they would focus just as much effort on expanding their service area. I’m out here in the Stone Age with Comcast or maybe space x as my only real options.

acchow 3y ago
Comcast is rolling out Docsis 4.0. I’d hardly call that Stone Age OTOH, I have a rental where most people in the building have opted to cancel Google Fiber in favor of Comcast (even tho Comcast is more expensive) because Google Fiber has had multiple outages each year.
- happytiger 3y ago
  It’s still Stone Age, sorry. Their business is squeezing the most out of old cable infrastructure not building next generation infrastructure to support our increasingly critical digital future. Comcast is rolling Docsys 4.0 out to support, “300 Mbps, 500 Mbps, 1-gig all the way up to 2-gig” service. Their words, not mine. Fiber easily supports 10-gig, or 100-gig with easy upgrades. And here’s the point: that single strand of fiber can support, without replacement and in a single strand, around 44 Tbps. That's not something cable companies like Comcast want you to know. Even if they squeeze 10 or 20 gig out of this aging cable lines, it’s holding society back. People don’t need it. But a T-1 (1.544 mbps) line was the recommended size for 45 people in 1999. Now not 25 years later that’s laughable.
space_ghost 3y ago
Google Fiber started a deployment in my city (Louisville) in 2017 before eventually giving up [0] after ~2 years. AT&T, on the other hand, has been steadily rolling out gigabit fiber across the city since 2016ish, and I've enjoyed their service that entire time. It's consistently stable, fast, and the price is only slightly higher than Google Fiber's - I think I'm paying $90/month right now for symmetric gigabit. The local Spectrum cable ISP guys offer ~300mbit (with a pathetic upload rate), and a Spectrum sales guy once asked me if I "really needed a full gigabit, no one actually needs that much speed." Lol. [0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/google-fiber-exits-louisville-pays-city-3-8m-to-clean-up-the-mess-it-left/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/googl...
- pradn 3y ago
  I'll bite - I've yet to see a big difference between 300mbps and 1GBps speeds. It's completely marginal. Being able to save 8 minutes downloading Fortnite isn't a big enough deal. For video calling, you're limited by how much bitrate the provider is willing to allocate for you. For looking at photos on social media, you're stuck with Instagram compression. Internet browsing more tied to the number of requests and client-side parsing speed than total bandwidth. Should our society be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on laying new fiber for marginal improvements?
  - manuelabeledo 3y ago
    > Should our society be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on laying new fiber for marginal improvements? FTTH is a vast improvement over cable in every metric, so yes.
    - red-iron-pine 3y ago
      Yeah not just in bandwidth, but maintenance, distance, resistance to environmental factors -- I've seen fiber cans caked with mud and flooded, and still pushing data just fine -- are all massive improvements. Plus, upgrading the optics on both ends can often lead to massive improvements without changing the lines, and on a scale that far exceeds copper.
  - 4ensic 3y ago
    Agreed. I think lag / ping is just as important as throughput in determining subjective snappiness of a connection (unless you're doing large up/downloads.
  - jen20 3y ago
    It's not remotely marginal when you have ~4 TVs at a time streaming 4K, two people working at home on video calls, constant cloud backup and so forth. I currently have 5Gbit, and will upgrade to 10 the second it becomes available. With better bandwidth _typically_ also comes better latency, and more competently managed DNS, though your own DNS setup is still likely better than whatever you privacy-invading-telemetry-hungry ISP sets up.

I wish they would focus just as much effort on expanding their service area. I’m out here in the Stone Age with Comcast or maybe space x as my only real options.

acchow 3y ago

Comcast is rolling out Docsis 4.0. I’d hardly call that Stone Age OTOH, I have a rental where most people in the building have opted to cancel Google Fiber in favor of Comcast (even tho Comcast is more expensive) because Google Fiber has had multiple outages each year.

happytiger 3y ago
It’s still Stone Age, sorry. Their business is squeezing the most out of old cable infrastructure not building next generation infrastructure to support our increasingly critical digital future. Comcast is rolling Docsys 4.0 out to support, “300 Mbps, 500 Mbps, 1-gig all the way up to 2-gig” service. Their words, not mine. Fiber easily supports 10-gig, or 100-gig with easy upgrades. And here’s the point: that single strand of fiber can support, without replacement and in a single strand, around 44 Tbps. That's not something cable companies like Comcast want you to know. Even if they squeeze 10 or 20 gig out of this aging cable lines, it’s holding society back. People don’t need it. But a T-1 (1.544 mbps) line was the recommended size for 45 people in 1999. Now not 25 years later that’s laughable.

space_ghost 3y ago

Google Fiber started a deployment in my city (Louisville) in 2017 before eventually giving up [0] after ~2 years. AT&T, on the other hand, has been steadily rolling out gigabit fiber across the city since 2016ish, and I've enjoyed their service that entire time. It's consistently stable, fast, and the price is only slightly higher than Google Fiber's - I think I'm paying $90/month right now for symmetric gigabit. The local Spectrum cable ISP guys offer ~300mbit (with a pathetic upload rate), and a Spectrum sales guy once asked me if I "really needed a full gigabit, no one actually needs that much speed." Lol. [0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/google-fiber-exits-louisville-pays-city-3-8m-to-clean-up-the-mess-it-left/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/04/googl...

pradn 3y ago
I'll bite - I've yet to see a big difference between 300mbps and 1GBps speeds. It's completely marginal. Being able to save 8 minutes downloading Fortnite isn't a big enough deal. For video calling, you're limited by how much bitrate the provider is willing to allocate for you. For looking at photos on social media, you're stuck with Instagram compression. Internet browsing more tied to the number of requests and client-side parsing speed than total bandwidth. Should our society be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on laying new fiber for marginal improvements?
- manuelabeledo 3y ago
  > Should our society be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on laying new fiber for marginal improvements? FTTH is a vast improvement over cable in every metric, so yes.
  - red-iron-pine 3y ago
    Yeah not just in bandwidth, but maintenance, distance, resistance to environmental factors -- I've seen fiber cans caked with mud and flooded, and still pushing data just fine -- are all massive improvements. Plus, upgrading the optics on both ends can often lead to massive improvements without changing the lines, and on a scale that far exceeds copper.
- 4ensic 3y ago
  Agreed. I think lag / ping is just as important as throughput in determining subjective snappiness of a connection (unless you're doing large up/downloads.
- jen20 3y ago
  It's not remotely marginal when you have ~4 TVs at a time streaming 4K, two people working at home on video calls, constant cloud backup and so forth. I currently have 5Gbit, and will upgrade to 10 the second it becomes available. With better bandwidth _typically_ also comes better latency, and more competently managed DNS, though your own DNS setup is still likely better than whatever you privacy-invading-telemetry-hungry ISP sets up.