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And here in SF we have like 55%? Been waiting for it for 10 years in my hood.
by MrGando 1mo ago
And here in SF we have like 55%? Been waiting for it for 10 years in my hood.
- chalupa-supreme 1mo agoIn metro Atlanta, just outside of city limits, I was desperate for fiber for a long time. Forced to watch other neighboring cities get Google Fiber at great monthly rates. I pay a bit more with AT&T now, but it’s so worth every penny between streaming, gaming, and personal projects.
- testing22321 1mo agoDo you really notice it with streaming? I have 80Mbps cable, and nothing has ever slowed down. If I download something over a couple of gigs I just get a glass of water and it’s done.
- kccqzy 1mo agoThey are probably talking about streaming to an audience (upload speed).
- RiverCrochet 1mo agoDo you have a data cap? The cable provider near me charges you $10 for every 50GB over 1.25TB monthly. A while ago they offered an "unlimited" plan without that cap at a higher monthly rate. I've never heard of a fiber connection with a data cap like that. I ended up moving to fiber eventually, it was cheaper for the same speed and the upload speed matched the download speed as well.
- testing22321 1mo agoI intentionally get the slowest speed possible that has no data cap. Was 50, then it went up to 80 a year ago.
- outworlder 1mo agoNot the person you are asking, but definitely yes. Bandwidth isn't the only metric at play here. Bufferbloat was horrendous with Comcast so latency varied wildly depending on what was happening on the network. The only way around it was to cap download and upload to 80%, and that's a large dent on the already anemic upload. And I had to cap client upload too, otherwise one client could easily saturate upload and now not even TCP ACK packets were being reliably sent. The main problem isn't cable per se, is the asymmetric link. EDIT: Also 1Gbps symmetric allows me to backup my NAS offsite without impacting anyone else.
- AndrewDucker 1mo agoAbsolutely. Buy multi-GB game, watch it download quickly at gigabit speeds, be able to play it two minutes later. Can't do that on 80Mbps.
- frollogaston 1mo agoI don't notice. I had 60mbit/s for a while and it was fine. That's two typical 4K streams. Now I have 1gbit/s that I never use. What I did notice was the 1mbit/s upload speed that came with it. Uploading large files to Google Drive was impossible, not just slow but would actually time out, plus bad things happen when you saturate the uplink that way.
- chalupa-supreme 1mo agoI think there were big issues in my area because there are only two providers so congestion would peak in the evening from 4pm - 8pm. Netflix/Youtube would playback lower resolution and we’d be stuck with loading circles if we manually set it higher. If I remember correctly, that issue became less frequent before the switch, but I haven’t had the lower resolution issues since.
- bob1029 1mo agoI think it's pretty wild that parts of the Houston metro have a better ISP story than SF. The last home I was in had multiple competing fiber providers available. My current home is in the middle of the woods and I have a 5gbps symmetric link.
- lotsofpulp 1mo agoFor a new build or overhead wiring, it's a trivial cost that is easily recouped. For buried infrastructure where the coaxial cable company already sells internet, you will almost never recoup your investment to bury new fiber and run it to all the homes. You can have the superior product, but insufficient people will pay enough more than the existing coaxial cable prices.
- nemomarx 1mo agoI wonder why companies do run new fiber in the US in cities, given all this? I got underground fiber direct to the basement of a student apartment years ago and it was basically a hundred dollars for install fees. They must have already been laying it on the street, but still. Competition?
- lotsofpulp 1mo agoIf stuff is already being dug up for another reason, then the numbers can pencil out. But it’s pretty rare for somewhere that does not have fiber to gain access to fiber, at least on any reasonable timescale.
- piva00 1mo agoSweden pushed for FttH even though all outdated cabling was already buried, no idea why just a city like SF cannot do the same. Probably a main difference is that the Swedish infrastructure was deployed by municipalities with an open access model, so no need for 10 different ISPs to dig their own cabling.
- robin_reala 1mo ago
- inigyou 1mo agoWhy haven't you run your own fiber from your house to the nearest carrier hotel? I'm not expecting you to do that, but I want to trigger some discussion on what are the exact reasons we all don't do that.
- PaulKeeble 1mo agoThe expense for one is enormous. Getting all the rights to dig and running the job is a full time job for a long period time. In many cases its not even possible and the existing firms might tie you up in court and bankrupt you long before you complete.
- pocksuppet 1mo agoWhat if you dug without rights? Be an Uber?
- forgotaccount3 1mo agoI don't have Fiber. I have never needed more bandwidth. I work from home 1 or 2 days a week. My current bandwidth is more than sufficient for my personal usage. And I exclusively use Wifi, other than a TV and a Nintendo Switch that happen to be right next to the router so are plugged in. So even if I had fiber, I literally wouldn't know a difference because my wifi would be the bottleneck still. Back when Google Fiber was rolling in, no one I knew was looking forward to it because they had need for the increased bandwidth. They looked forward to it because the expectation of a 'Google' branded product was better than the expectation of a 'Comcast' branded product. It was more about the expected uptime and consistency.
- wmichelin 1mo agoDamn! We had it in the sunset when I lived there back in 2017
- dietr1ch 1mo agoIt's ironic that SF has such a bad network. When I moved there like 10yrs ago I thought I would finally have 1gig fiber, but bandwidth was on par with what I had with my parent's VDSL connection from the country side, and latencies were worse, I went from sub-5ms to 30ms because many servers were actually in LA and the routes were bad (I expected ~1ms per 100km, not ~5ms/100km). ISP gerrymandering to avoid competition was unexpected coming from the land of free markets
- vlovich123 1mo agoThat’s because infra telecom is done incorrectly. Look at Sweden’s municipal fiber model how you make infrastructure cheaper and make competition actually work for customers. Having each carrier have to run lines to each customer is the wrong model. Sweden somehow got it done in a moment of sanity when the leading telecom pushed for this model.
- chermi 1mo agoLol yeah it's basically early days of electricity
- outworlder 1mo agoI guess we need to burn more stuff on the streets? It worked for the French.
- epistasis 1mo agoIn SF they burn stuff on the streets to prevent any change to the physical structure. No new apartments, no new infrastructure allowed.
- sonar_un 1mo agoI spent a lot of time in SF in the early 2010s and I couldn't believe how absolutely terrible the internet was in the heart of silicon valley. It's incredibly sad honestly. You'd expect that SF would have the worlds top internet speeds, but nope. It was quite disappointing.