7 ms·

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

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.
    - ssl-3 2y ago
      Perhaps I wasn't clear. It isn't phoning home to Mother like a Windows box might. :) Factorio runs, by default, completely locally. I was using Factorio, as a single player, with the thing split into two parts: A server component, and a client component. The data betwixt my headless server and my client was just getting too heavy at times for the 20Mbps upstream of that server. Why so much data? Thousands of bots, constant wars, lots of things being moved around, interplanetary mining happening on a decent scale... The data transferred gets bigger as the game becomes more complex. "But, like -- why didn't you just play it remotely like everyone else does using Steam's remote play or something?" The latency of Remote Play sucks in ways that are distracting to me. The h.264 video sucks and has artifacts, presumably because of tradeoffs made to improve latency. My 10Mbps upstream at home works OK with Plex and hardware encoding where latency isn't important, but it doesn't work well at all for me with Factorio. Splitting Factorio into two parts (client and server) eliminates video encoding, but it isn't completely without cost. "But you said you had a server with a 20Mbps connection. What happened to that?" I do. But it's under my desk at work (as is tradition), not at home. And that box doesn't have enough GPU oomph to deal with rendering Factorio. "Right. OK, weirdo. So why aren't you just playing Factorio at home on your presumed gaming PC, then?" Sometimes, I'm not at home or I just don't want to sit at my desk. My laptop has enough GPU to run Factorio smoothly as a client, but it does not have enough CPU to keep a moderately-complex game running smoothly on its own. And that's where splitting the game into two parts becomes worthwhile for me. (Or, you know: Maybe I just want to play it online with a friend, like a normal person might -- but someone still has to run the server, somewhere. Some options include running that server on available hardware with available connections [for "free"], or renting hardware from Hetzner or something [not even a little bit free]. The point is: I've found that it sucks running a Factorio server with a 20Mbps upstream, even with just a single player, and thus a top-flight residential Comcast connection won't keep up. If I had 5 friends who wanted to play instead of 0 friends, that problem would be even more pronounced. I mean. It's 2024, my dudes. What's up with this 60:1 down:up ratio?)
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.

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.
  - ssl-3 2y ago
    Perhaps I wasn't clear. It isn't phoning home to Mother like a Windows box might. :) Factorio runs, by default, completely locally. I was using Factorio, as a single player, with the thing split into two parts: A server component, and a client component. The data betwixt my headless server and my client was just getting too heavy at times for the 20Mbps upstream of that server. Why so much data? Thousands of bots, constant wars, lots of things being moved around, interplanetary mining happening on a decent scale... The data transferred gets bigger as the game becomes more complex. "But, like -- why didn't you just play it remotely like everyone else does using Steam's remote play or something?" The latency of Remote Play sucks in ways that are distracting to me. The h.264 video sucks and has artifacts, presumably because of tradeoffs made to improve latency. My 10Mbps upstream at home works OK with Plex and hardware encoding where latency isn't important, but it doesn't work well at all for me with Factorio. Splitting Factorio into two parts (client and server) eliminates video encoding, but it isn't completely without cost. "But you said you had a server with a 20Mbps connection. What happened to that?" I do. But it's under my desk at work (as is tradition), not at home. And that box doesn't have enough GPU oomph to deal with rendering Factorio. "Right. OK, weirdo. So why aren't you just playing Factorio at home on your presumed gaming PC, then?" Sometimes, I'm not at home or I just don't want to sit at my desk. My laptop has enough GPU to run Factorio smoothly as a client, but it does not have enough CPU to keep a moderately-complex game running smoothly on its own. And that's where splitting the game into two parts becomes worthwhile for me. (Or, you know: Maybe I just want to play it online with a friend, like a normal person might -- but someone still has to run the server, somewhere. Some options include running that server on available hardware with available connections [for "free"], or renting hardware from Hetzner or something [not even a little bit free]. The point is: I've found that it sucks running a Factorio server with a 20Mbps upstream, even with just a single player, and thus a top-flight residential Comcast connection won't keep up. If I had 5 friends who wanted to play instead of 0 friends, that problem would be even more pronounced. I mean. It's 2024, my dudes. What's up with this 60:1 down:up ratio?)

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.