I just did a speed test. 329 down, 22 up. I pay like 45 bucks a month and it’s totally sufficient. I pirate and stream shit all the time, manage a home media server, have a bunch of smart home bullshit. I don’t need 100mbps. Not yet at least.
I just hope Ofcom will have a similar idea for the UK. Currently you only have a “universal service obligation” for 10Mbps, and if you can be provided by 4G then Openreach doesn’t have to upgrade your old copper line. Large areas of my city are still copper only.
On all lines the total amount of available bandwidth has to be split between upload and download. If you’ve got gigabits or even hundreds of megabits to play with then symmetric is great, but on slower connections is makes a world of sense to heavily favour download just because humans are better at consuming information than creating it. Consider how many hours of videos the average person watches per week versus how many they create in the same period. Same for photos, emails, articles, etc. There are people who have parity but they are in a pretty tiny minority.
That said, I hear there are people in the US getting 300Mb/s down and 10Mb/s up which is pretty fucking nuts.
20mbits at bottom tier would be fine, but there are currently top tier cable plans, 1gbps down and still only 10mbps up. Upload speed needs to scale at least proportionallly, if not symmetrically.
Isn’t that partly a consequence of the cable internet network design? The existing DOCSIS standards are designed to favour download speeds, so the infrastructure doesn’t allow asymmetric connections.
If I understand correctly it’s not intrinsic to the DOCSIS standards, it’s just how more or less every cable company chooses to allocate channels. Think like a cable company has 100 channels they may be able to use on a given line, and they choose to put 90 of them on download and 10 on upload (numbers are made up to convey idea). Now they have only a small amount of available upload bandwidth and lots of download, but they could have set it up to be 50/50 to have it be equal.
I felt so gaslit by optimum because they advertise 1gbps parallel. But, if you don’t have their fiber offering in your region they’ll happily sell you 1gbps/24mbps for the same price.
Although, unless I complain, they fail to give me even 300mbps down.
Yeah I’d love to have anything near 100Mbps. Currently get 12Mbps on a good day, usually around 6Mbps. This is after spending thousands of dollars to upgrade the connection last year. Australian internet is fucked.
That’s crazy. Here in São Paulo (Brazil), wired internet plans start at 100 Mbps and you’ll often end up with 300+ Mbps, because there’s almost no difference in price.
We really need some upstream minimums as well. That causes so much lag for me. Most plans are 1 up even with 100 down. I have a 200/10 plan now and it’s difficult to do work with the maybe 5 that I get in practice if I’m lucky, especially after overhead from VPN.
Most broadband access in the US is via coax. And the coax companies refuse to let cable TV, and the packages they can bundle, die. So the portion of the coax that would allow for symmetrical service instead brings all the channels you didn’t buy because everyone streams now.
Central Europe. 300 mbps is pretty much base, not much pricier than 100mbps. If you get 300 mbps on paper, you are entitled to it fully. Not sure how with rural as they are based on mobile internet more.
Data cap is abstract concept for wired internet here, I was literally shocked to hear it is in place in USA :|
In addition to cable being the primary means of providing service in the US which does allow for this, there are two reasons for doing it. First, down is all that is advertised. Up is only mentioned in small print usually. And second, the major ISPs and the content companies have merged so it’s an anti-“piracy” measure. It significantly impacts torrent seeding and hosting sites using residential Internet service.
Right now in a lot of states Verizon has a monopoly on symmetrical internet service. I can’t ever switch ISPs because I can’t get 400/400 anywhere else.
God I wish we had that here. We are pretty much stuck with Comcast as the only option in many places since they were granted a monopoly for so long and the phone company never really expanded much. DSL is too slow in most places. Like I think I can only get 100/1 where I am now, but the last place I was at which was not exactly rural at all, was max 12m/768k. In my current place I do have one other option which is another cable provider. They offer the exact same as Comcast for slightly less money, but the primary reason I use them is because they don’t have a monthly data cap. With my wife and I working from home plus our personal streaming, we would exceed the cap and have to pay a significant amount to increase it.
Yeah ISPs are doing rural America really dirty. I didn’t even know monthly data caps existed with home internet until somebody from a rural town mentioned it. The only internet with monthly data caps around here is cell service and even then that’s usually unlimited now.
I do a lot of download and upload and one month I realized I accidentally moved like 30 TB that month.
Yeah I mean right now I’m in a relatively major city in the US (like 750K population), and the previous place I was just inside a major suburb (like 150K population). Rural is just plain screwed.
I have a home server which is used for quite a bit. Bunch of web apps including storage so downloading stuff to my phone over the internet means upload from my server, also multimedia too (That I actually pay for) via Plex, music, and podcasts. Photo hosting, sharing, and backups.
I have Verizon 5g with the ultra wideband service. Tower is on a light post on the street corner, speeds max out around 700/70 for me. 400/400 sounds like Fios which is a fiber service.
We live in a rural area (but only 16 miles from the nearest city) and have copper. We really hope the infrastructure bill will bring real internet to us in our lifetime.
If congress passes a bill to improve internet infrastructure, it will be a 10s of billions hand out to ISPs that in turn will do little to nothing to actually improve their infrastructure. Just like when they did it in the 90s to get fiber to most Americans.
I would think that per FCC this requirement has loop holes and the minimum 100 Mbps is most likely for only broadband not dial up, so many telecommunication companies will be except
This actually does keep prices in check. Albeit, a bit backasswardsly.
I may be off on the specifics but it’s something like: Having to offer 100mbps at the lowest rates in (poor neighborhoods) increases the speeds of each tier while keeping the price the same.
I was one of the first LPB (low ping bastard). Back in the 90s, some servers would just flat out ban you if you were one or the other. I was very competitive in Quake/Halflife/Counterstrike and even had a shirt with the Ethernet symbol and LPB under it. I fucking loved that shirt.
I was i.am/zzottt if anyone remembers the first days of Counterstrike
I remember the collective shitfit around a decade ago when Obama give out free cell phones to homeless people. It was such a crazy concept to people who have never struggled that yes, you DO need a smartphone to meet your calling, banking and personal management needs. Everything has an online portal. Every job application requires an online portion. It’s how the world works and has worked since the mid 00s.
Wait. What?! Obama gave out phones? I was living abroad for the first few years of the Obama administration when smart phones happened. Can you fill me in on this one?
If the federal government is regulating them can we admit they’re a fucking utility already and stop allowing them to gouge prices when they have more money than they could feasibly spend?
Can you imagine if we said “by 2035 every American household in our electric grid will also be connected to the internet at a speed of 1gbps”?
We did that in the 90s. We gave ISPs billions to deploy fiber everywhere. It was mostly squandered and 25 years later most Americans still don’t have fiber access.
Well, we didn’t. It wasn’t a utility. Utilities are more regulated by the govt. Thats a big part of why it failed and why electricity succeeded with the same effort in the fucking 1800s.
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