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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 c

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.
        basil-rash 2y ago
        Strange that when one talks about a particular application using a lot of upstream bandwidth, we are meant to assume what they actually mean is that a separate application responsible for recording the UI of that first application and uploading it to a server uses a lot of upstream bandwidth.
  - Bene592 2y ago
    Is that enough for just the TCP ACKs?
  - ornornor 2y ago
    Can you even achieve 1200 down with only 20 up? Is it enough bandwidth to send all the ACKs back and get full speed down?
    - tsimionescu 2y ago
      It depends on the window size. A pure TCP ACK packet is going to be 64 bytes (the minimum ethernet frame size). If you were to ACK every incoming packet, that would then mean the incoming packets have to be at least 3804 bytes, which puts them in jumbo frames territory, which are unlikely to work over the Internet. However, you only need to send an ACK when the TCP window is full, not for every incoming packet. If the TCP window is set at 64k, for example, and assuming an MSS of 1460, then you can receive a total of ~66K bytes for each ACK you send ((64k/1460)*1500, assuming the provider counts every byte in every packet, not just the TCP payload). The window size can actually scale much higher though, up to 1GB. So, in principle, yes, you can comfortably get this much download speed with only this much upload speed. Of course, this would only apply for downloading huge files with a very efficient implementation. If you are using HTTP to download lots of small resources, your uplink would be saturated with GETs far before you saturate your downlink.
  - jorvi 2y ago
    That's pretty much all DOCSIS providers worldwide. I'm not sure if it is a technical limitation or just what the customer wants, but you pretty much always see ~ 1/5 ratio <200mbits and a 1/10 ratio >200mbits. So, 5 up / 20 down or 60 up / 600 down.
    - kdmtctl 2y ago
      It is a technical limitation. Depends on number of shared downstream and upstream channels in a given network.
  - Hikikomori 2y ago
    Its not just the US as most last mile standards are not symmetric because they only use one line for both directions and use different frequencies for each side (most DSL, cable, PON). So the spectrum available is limited and since most users will benefit from more download rather than upload the split is not even by choice. But like in your example the ISP can sometimes tweak how much is available in each direction and you end up with those insane differences. Where I live we mostly have symmetrical ethernet fiber, and some cable. We started using fiber long before PON came out and it never became popular here so pretty much all fiber here is 100/100, 1000/1000 or even 10000/10000.
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 :)

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.
        basil-rash 2y ago
        Strange that when one talks about a particular application using a lot of upstream bandwidth, we are meant to assume what they actually mean is that a separate application responsible for recording the UI of that first application and uploading it to a server uses a lot of upstream bandwidth.
- Bene592 2y ago
  Is that enough for just the TCP ACKs?
- ornornor 2y ago
  Can you even achieve 1200 down with only 20 up? Is it enough bandwidth to send all the ACKs back and get full speed down?
  - tsimionescu 2y ago
    It depends on the window size. A pure TCP ACK packet is going to be 64 bytes (the minimum ethernet frame size). If you were to ACK every incoming packet, that would then mean the incoming packets have to be at least 3804 bytes, which puts them in jumbo frames territory, which are unlikely to work over the Internet. However, you only need to send an ACK when the TCP window is full, not for every incoming packet. If the TCP window is set at 64k, for example, and assuming an MSS of 1460, then you can receive a total of ~66K bytes for each ACK you send ((64k/1460)*1500, assuming the provider counts every byte in every packet, not just the TCP payload). The window size can actually scale much higher though, up to 1GB. So, in principle, yes, you can comfortably get this much download speed with only this much upload speed. Of course, this would only apply for downloading huge files with a very efficient implementation. If you are using HTTP to download lots of small resources, your uplink would be saturated with GETs far before you saturate your downlink.
- jorvi 2y ago
  That's pretty much all DOCSIS providers worldwide. I'm not sure if it is a technical limitation or just what the customer wants, but you pretty much always see ~ 1/5 ratio <200mbits and a 1/10 ratio >200mbits. So, 5 up / 20 down or 60 up / 600 down.
  - kdmtctl 2y ago
    It is a technical limitation. Depends on number of shared downstream and upstream channels in a given network.
- Hikikomori 2y ago
  Its not just the US as most last mile standards are not symmetric because they only use one line for both directions and use different frequencies for each side (most DSL, cable, PON). So the spectrum available is limited and since most users will benefit from more download rather than upload the split is not even by choice. But like in your example the ISP can sometimes tweak how much is available in each direction and you end up with those insane differences. Where I live we mostly have symmetrical ethernet fiber, and some cable. We started using fiber long before PON came out and it never became popular here so pretty much all fiber here is 100/100, 1000/1000 or even 10000/10000.

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 :)