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?
I’d be okay with 200mbps symmetric, with a future goal of 1gbps symmetric. More than ANYTHING, I’m tired of providers providing things like 1gbps down, 10mbps up. And then doing shit like “Here’s you’re 1gbps plan with a 1tb data cap!”
Yeah states with Comcast caps you at 1.2TB unless you pay $50 for the unlimited plan, which I don’t think is even offered everywhere. They discount it to $30 if you use their modem.
They recently changed the prices. It’s $30 extra with your own modem or free of you use theirs since they’ll also use it to supply others with free ‘hot spots’ and cellular service.
Comcast has been doing this for over a decade I believe. By default their routers advertise a hotspot exclusive to other Comcast subscribers. Not sure the security behind it since it’s not technically a password just authenticate via your Comcast account. But I agree it is crazy lol I had a similar reaction when I first found out.
It's $20 for unlimited here with Comcast, or the business plan which is actually less right now for some reason for the same speeds.
AT&T is unlimited with their gigabit plans or faster. Maybe their 300mbps plan too (heck I guess I'm not sure they have any caps at the moment come to think of it).
It does look like the prices changed recently. I have 2 houses currently with similar plans. My currently living in house is using the Xfinity modem and costs $25 /m but I guess that’s the modem and the unlimited so not too bad.
My other house has my own network system and not using any Comcast hardware and that one is $30/m.
The bad part for me was until recently they refused to give me unlimited (when it cost $50) and I wasn’t able to get it for a while. It just wouldn’t go through. I got my fair share of overage charges cause of it. I’m sure if I spent enough time bitching at support I could get something from it but I don’t have it in me to do that lol
It’s normal for businesses to pay for peak and total bandwidth. That’s one of the reasons why they guarantee speed and availability and should be refunding you if they don’t meet those.
My isp used to offer 10mbps up for like a decade, they have recently downgraded it to 5mbps for new subscribers. I’ve uploaded a few things with it and it’s extremely slow. If it wasn’t that I’m only paying $40 for 1gbps down, I’d have switched.
Spectrum? I’ve got the same plan. Sucks because I have trouble streaming my Plex server outside of my apartment. And when I work from home uploads take forever.
How much is Comcast charging you compared to the fiber? If I were in that position I would have decided differently (assuming I owned the property) as the difference for me peaked at $150/mo. Even more if I chose a slightly cheaper plan…and I have AT%T fiber, not municipal.
The asymmetrical aspect of cable will be here to stay. Fiber can do it because it was build on a different foundation.
Copper cable transmits data using electric signals in various frequencies. There are a batch of frequencies reserved for phone and TV. ALL of the tv programming is constantly streamed to your lines whether you have TV or not and whether you pay for it or not. It’s encrypted and is only decrypted by your cable boxes when your provider says they can decrypt it. The phone frequencies are reserved so you can make phone calls and still max out your download.
So what about the rest of the bandwidth? Well, way back in the early days of cable it was pretty much everyone for themselves. Every company did things its own way. That’s where DOCSIS came in. It’s a platform that allows modem manufacturers to make modems that will work on any cable network that supports Docsis. And the key part is that DOCSIS is always backwards compatible. The network upgrade to 3.1 did not break the old d2 devices.
When it was developed the download was extremely more necessary than the upload. You’d be sending small single line commands on upload and receiving entire files in download. So more frequencies went to download than upload. In a lab setting 1.0 could reach 40mbps down and 10 up. That’s not what was sold because real life isn’t a lab and there’s loss over large distances. Realistically most people got 10 mb down and upload wasn’t even listed.
Whats changed? Well today those same download and upload frequencies are still used. We’ve added more around them to deliver higher speeds. But we’ve also kept the same principles that people need more download than upload. Docsis 3.1 was released in 2013. We really didn’t start stressing over upload until Covid and work from home had us on zoom calls all day.
Docsis 4.0 is technically released but requires quite a bit of overhaul to work with existing networks. We pretty much need to do away with cable tv. That’s why many ISP’s are pushing IPTv. It removes the need for all that bandwidth devoted to just TV. If everyone in a region drops traditional cable for IPTv they can easily switch to d4. D4 does increase upload but does not make it symmetrical.
Your cable company does not decide their highest tier realistically. It’s the most that medium will offer. It’s gonna be a while too for d4 to be available everywhere. Everyone would need to drop traditional cable (which is honestly a nice move regardless) and people don’t upgrade plans very often. When I worked in tech support I would frequently deal with customers complaining about slow speeds while on plans from 2002.
They could drop the 200 or so channels that no one fucking watches and use that spectrum for more channels for cable internet upstream. It's entirely possible, with today's tech. Uploads were chopped down to nothing for the simple reason that people were using that bandwidth in the early days to share pirated material.
The technology is there, but we need to free up that space. Cable companies don’t just do things to their own beat. Cable Labs is the one responsible for organizing how that bandwidth is used and removing the cable frequencies to open up more internet frequencies is literally the next step.
But you need to do entire markets at a time. We can’t just upgrade the people that move to IP tv because at a certain point they share lines with people who haven’t upgraded so that bandwidth is already used.
Everyone needs to upgrade in an area to allow the business to reallocate that bandwidth. What you described is literally what is in progress right now. It just takes time
That’s just because they’re not maxing the download. They could push a few a few more gigs download in the same package but that’s close to the cap for upload. That’s like a provider being capable of 1G down and 50 meg up offering a 50 down and up plan. Just marketing is all that is
No, you’re moving the goal post. A company like Comcast offering a symmetrical service is huge, regardless of what the underlying technology is capable of. They could have been offering 200 megs symmetrical with Docsis 3.0, but they didn’t. They restricted customers to 11mbit uploads. This is a big deal
Things with caps aren’t terrestrial broadband. You can have caps on cell based networks and still be considered broadband. One of the biggest issues is it companies like Comcast and AT&t will offer broadband service in an area but not necessarily offer only broadband service or not let you buy broadband service about also having their TV. And then they claim they’re serving the area because they have broadband speeds or you can pay a bunch of money to have your service uncapped but that’s not really the point of having a broadband connection available in the area.
Comcast has broadband speed plans. They also charge you an extra $30 if you don’t have a TV bundle and then give you an actual broadband plan that’s unlimited. They have also been throwing the unlimited data and router and security bs in more competitive areas but that’s not a nationwide product.
I literally can’t do half of what I want to do online efficiently or in a timely manner because I can barely crack 10 up. I do video work on the side. Takes hours if not days for me to upload something. Even pictures nowadays. Great I’ve got a DSLR for a phone and I can shoot raw. Takes 5 mins to upload a pic.
Does this really matter. We aren’t getting it anyway.
The telcom/cable companies are just going to take the “broadband” money, build out a couple of neighborhoods, claim it is too hard, and then keep all the money.
They have already done it many times. Free taxpayer money with zero repercussions. Why would they do anything different.
I have a lot of experience with rural broadband initiatives, and generally yes, the FCC designation sets the minimums we see in terms of new service delivery to underserved communities. I specifically worked with state and municipal entities to build grant packages to fund infrastructure and these new minimums would be a great help.
We are between towns in western WA state stuck with 10Mb DSL service. There are a lot of us folks. After moving in (the PO said the internet was great, lol), we discovered that doing anything excessive like downloading AND streaming would not work. One thing at a time. We were able to bond two pair and get 20Mb which is workable, but that’s where we sit. Gigabit service is all around us, but we’d have to trench a mile up the road and pay for that to even think about getting a provider to lay a line. Century Link outright laughed at me.
I was able to get T-Mo’s home internet as a backup since we WFH, but it isn’t stellar either.
Should that not be enough? There is also the equipment costs and personally my gaming days are waning anyway. When I visit someone with Starkink and use it, it seems very frequently laggy. Bursts seemed common.
I use scheduling/throttling to accommodate this meager link speed. I was on dial-up well into the early 2000’s, so I am no stranger to suffering slow links where patience is key.
Small world, but I helped form many of the broadband action teams in Washington State, and consulted on the broadband plans for each country that was submitted for federal funding. We're getting there, slowly, but progress is being made.
I live in rural Washington too, in the mountains. There was a local ISP that was terrible and amazingly a very small ISP bought them out from Arizona. The first thing they did was start to run fiber to anyone who wanted it. I went from shit DSL to 1gig up and 1 gig down fiber. To top it all off, they’ve lowered my monthly price once and doubled my bandwidth once… Without even asking, I even emailed them to check if my bill was lower and speed was faster and they were like yep! Mind blown.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
100 mbps? That’s 100 millibits per second, or 0.1 bits per second. I’d certainly hope for better bandwidth than one bit every ten seconds; that’s slower than smoke signals.
Sarcasm noted, but: mibi/gibi are the powers of 2 version.
We all say megabit or gigabit when talking about internet speeds, but in many cases under the hood it’s actually measured in mibi/gibibits. Just means it’s 2% more when converted into base 10 ;)
Good point on the first part. On the second... There's very little networking stuff that isn't pretty much handled in powers of 10 everywhere. I mean, eventually every number gets handled as binary at some point, but otherwise it's pretty rare for network values to get converted to some power-of-2 number.
Way more common is the stupid bits/bytes confusion.
The title used the wrong abbreviation and you didn’t read the linked press release. The previous standard was 25/3 Mbps so there’s no reason to downgrade; had you bothered to read the link you’re supposedly commenting on you’d see the new standard is 100/20 Mbps. That’s also laughably low for a regular household with a modicum of modern usage but we can’t really expect much from agencies under regulatory capture.
Anyway, computer scientists split the bit back in 1969, which is how we’re able to make smaller and smaller computers: the bits are all smaller, so we can pack more into a single potato chip.
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.
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.
You might have figured it out by now, but "megabits per second" is abbreviated as "Mbps" with an uppercase m; yeah, it's kinda pedantic, but using lowercase means it's a millibit, which is much, much smaller. The same applies to "gigabits per second," which should be expressed as "Gbps."
At any rate, thank you for posting this, it really is good news. And about time they did this, too.
I think it’s common parlance to use Mbps and mbps interchangeably since nothing uses “millibits” as a unit of measurement. More commonly people misuse Mbps and MBps which is incorrect since it signifies bits and bytes.
To avoid the Mb/MB confusion I've gotten in the habit of writing Mbit and MByte, so there's really no ambiguity (like, even if I used them right, it's reasonable that people might not be sure if I'm using them right or not)
At least when talking about network-related things, particularly transfer rates. With storage and things it's way more rare that anyone might be talking about bits.
No one would ever say millibits, because a bit is the smallest meaningful datapoint. It's a non-existent term, and a very pointless pedantic hill to try to build so that you can die on it
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