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We’ve had symmetrical 1gb fiber owned and installed by our public utilities for almost two decades here in central Washington. Was $80 a month until a year or t

We’ve had symmetrical 1gb fiber owned and installed by our public utilities for almost two decades here in central Washington. Was $80 a month until a year or two ago, then it went down to $60.

wlesieutre 2y ago
Just got gigabit in Knoxville for $65. Which is actually a tough sell since AT&T already offers 300 megabit for $55 and I’m not sure what I’d do with a faster connection. But $65 from AT&T would only get me 500 megabit, so for people who do want faster speeds the KUB option is looking good.
- lillecarl 2y ago
  There's more to a connection than speed, there might be data limits, there might be latency differences and it might just be unavailable or expensive. I'm not from the US, but if it's somewhat economically viable, go for the underdog.
  - wlesieutre 2y ago
    Speed is consistently higher than advertised (330-350ish), latency is fine, 1 TB/month (it says this, but then also says X GB of unlimited used), and I don’t think I’ve had an outage in the two years that we’ve been here. I’ll be considering it still (just became available last week in my neighborhood) but since I work remotely I have to be risk averse on switching internet providers.
  - jwells89 2y ago
    In the US it’s also not uncommon for connections to be not only asymmetrical, but downright lopsided. Comcast sells “gigabit” in my area that’s 1.2Gbps down but only like 20Mbps up which is just silly. Thankfully a competitor offers true gigabit for about the same price, and so that’s what I subscribe to.
    - wlesieutre 2y ago
      AT&T currently doing 390 down / 340 up on my symmetric 300 plan, can’t complain
      - rsingel 2y ago
        Except you are paying the company that built the NSA's domestic spying apparatus, paid to flood the FCC with millions of fake anti net neutrality comments, and paid Michael Cohen $600k to fight net neutrality and anti-trust. Other than than that, totally great
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      That is probably not a terrible configuration for a lot of users. It is disappointing that the internet didn’t remain a network of mostly peers where everyone might host something. But, realistically, lots of people approximately just use their bandwidth to stream video, right?
      - ssl-3 2y ago
        Netflix themselves say that 15Mbps is enough for 4k. 1.2Gbps downstream is enough for >50 such 4k video streams without saturation -- something that will probably never happen in any household, even in Grandma's house on Christmas Eve with a bunch of grandkids around. Meanwhile, I've had single-player games of Factorio of medium complexity that would saturate 20Mbps upstream. Nobody needs a connection that is so heavily lopsided as 1.2Gbps/20Mbps is except for the marketing department, and the DOCSIS sunk-cost-fallacy department.
        basil-rash 2y ago
        Why is single player factorio phoning home so heavily?
        mschuster91 2y ago
        It's about video streaming. The challenge with Factorio is that there is always lots of very tiny little changes on the screen from all the tiny boxes and trays of stuff moving around on belts, which means if you want acceptable video quality, you need a lot of bitrate as the usual h264/h265 compression magic of just encoding differences between frames doesn't work out any more - too much change between frames, you're (effectively) forcing the codec to transmit full frames all the time.
- nottorp 2y ago
  > I’m not sure what I’d do with a faster connection I have a 500 mbps and a 1 Gbps fiber into my home. For redundancy (WFH 100%) and because it's cheap (Romania). The only time I notice which one I'm on is when I install games from gog/steam/psn. Even operating system isos (which are only a few gigs, not 50-100 G like modern games) don't make a dent any more. Streaming is a-ok, but I'm stuck in the last century with an 1080p TV. Both of my providers^H^H^H one of my providers now offer 2.5 Gbps I think. And I wonder why :)
qwerpy 2y ago
Meanwhile over here in Bellevue, home of T-Mobile and (close enough) Microsoft, I’m stuck with Comcast or really crappy DSL. How is it that central WA gets way better internet than Bellevue? Oh right. Comcast lobbying.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- mtnGoat 2y ago
  The big telcos ignored us so we took it into our own hands. Had it been a bigger market I’m sure they would have lobbied our local ISP out of existence. They still do some questionable marketing around here.

We’ve had symmetrical 1gb fiber owned and installed by our public utilities for almost two decades here in central Washington. Was $80 a month until a year or two ago, then it went down to $60.

wlesieutre 2y ago

Just got gigabit in Knoxville for $65. Which is actually a tough sell since AT&T already offers 300 megabit for $55 and I’m not sure what I’d do with a faster connection. But $65 from AT&T would only get me 500 megabit, so for people who do want faster speeds the KUB option is looking good.

lillecarl 2y ago
There's more to a connection than speed, there might be data limits, there might be latency differences and it might just be unavailable or expensive. I'm not from the US, but if it's somewhat economically viable, go for the underdog.
- wlesieutre 2y ago
  Speed is consistently higher than advertised (330-350ish), latency is fine, 1 TB/month (it says this, but then also says X GB of unlimited used), and I don’t think I’ve had an outage in the two years that we’ve been here. I’ll be considering it still (just became available last week in my neighborhood) but since I work remotely I have to be risk averse on switching internet providers.
- jwells89 2y ago
  In the US it’s also not uncommon for connections to be not only asymmetrical, but downright lopsided. Comcast sells “gigabit” in my area that’s 1.2Gbps down but only like 20Mbps up which is just silly. Thankfully a competitor offers true gigabit for about the same price, and so that’s what I subscribe to.
  - wlesieutre 2y ago
    AT&T currently doing 390 down / 340 up on my symmetric 300 plan, can’t complain
    - rsingel 2y ago
      Except you are paying the company that built the NSA's domestic spying apparatus, paid to flood the FCC with millions of fake anti net neutrality comments, and paid Michael Cohen $600k to fight net neutrality and anti-trust. Other than than that, totally great
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    That is probably not a terrible configuration for a lot of users. It is disappointing that the internet didn’t remain a network of mostly peers where everyone might host something. But, realistically, lots of people approximately just use their bandwidth to stream video, right?
    - ssl-3 2y ago
      Netflix themselves say that 15Mbps is enough for 4k. 1.2Gbps downstream is enough for >50 such 4k video streams without saturation -- something that will probably never happen in any household, even in Grandma's house on Christmas Eve with a bunch of grandkids around. Meanwhile, I've had single-player games of Factorio of medium complexity that would saturate 20Mbps upstream. Nobody needs a connection that is so heavily lopsided as 1.2Gbps/20Mbps is except for the marketing department, and the DOCSIS sunk-cost-fallacy department.
      - basil-rash 2y ago
        Why is single player factorio phoning home so heavily?
        mschuster91 2y ago
        It's about video streaming. The challenge with Factorio is that there is always lots of very tiny little changes on the screen from all the tiny boxes and trays of stuff moving around on belts, which means if you want acceptable video quality, you need a lot of bitrate as the usual h264/h265 compression magic of just encoding differences between frames doesn't work out any more - too much change between frames, you're (effectively) forcing the codec to transmit full frames all the time.
nottorp 2y ago
> I’m not sure what I’d do with a faster connection I have a 500 mbps and a 1 Gbps fiber into my home. For redundancy (WFH 100%) and because it's cheap (Romania). The only time I notice which one I'm on is when I install games from gog/steam/psn. Even operating system isos (which are only a few gigs, not 50-100 G like modern games) don't make a dent any more. Streaming is a-ok, but I'm stuck in the last century with an 1080p TV. Both of my providers^H^H^H one of my providers now offer 2.5 Gbps I think. And I wonder why :)

qwerpy 2y ago

Meanwhile over here in Bellevue, home of T-Mobile and (close enough) Microsoft, I’m stuck with Comcast or really crappy DSL. How is it that central WA gets way better internet than Bellevue? Oh right. Comcast lobbying.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
mtnGoat 2y ago
The big telcos ignored us so we took it into our own hands. Had it been a bigger market I’m sure they would have lobbied our local ISP out of existence. They still do some questionable marketing around here.