- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews@derp.foo
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Should be 1gbps asymmetric now, with a near future goal of 1gbps symmetric.
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!”
I really wish symmetric broadband was standard. Having 500 down (as a homelabber especially) means nothing if you have only 25 up 😭
Same boat here with Comcast. I would gladly give up some of the 800Mbps download to increase the 12Mbps upload speed I’m getting.
800Mbps*
*with SPEEDBOOST! (We throttle lawl)
We don’t throttle to our company-owned Speedtest servers though so we can disprove you when claiming we are not offering you peak speeds.
Homelabber here, stuck in Comcast hell with 10Mbps upload.
I wish I could afford to bring the local municipal fiber to my house, but to go like 2 city blocks with it would be tens of thousands of dollars. :(
I’m considering a local colocation/ datacenter to move my homelab to. But then it wouldn’t be a homelab anymore
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.
maybe you could last mile it with microwave point to point?
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.
Was definitely a big factor in going from Comcast to ATT (symmetric)in my area. Although Comcast has gotten faster too.
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.
Great info, thanks.
You get a terabyte cap? Jfc, where I live it’s like a few gigs, and that can cost into the hundreds for maybe 25.
You guys have caps? Jfc, how do you pirate 3TB a month in pure spite of the hegemony of current year capitalism?
I shouldn’t be too cocky though, I have a 40GB cap. On my phone. 😢
War walking.
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.
Mine is $30/mo for unlimited (on top of my plan cost) with my own modem.
Luckily there’s a few FTTH companies that are almost done laying fiber in my area. I’m finally giving comcast the boot.
I had to get a fucking business plan to not deal with this BS. Still never got half the speed I’m paying for. The only other option is $100 for DSL.
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
How much do they charge you to 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.
Uhhh, how does that work? I’m hoping separate passwords!
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.
Yes, it’s a different SSID on an isolated network.
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.
~500Kb/s. Yay…
All right I have 1000 seconds of internet, what a deal
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.
Worse, they do that crap for my business account. Great for the vpn to the office.
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.
The internet needs to be classified as a utility, living without it is just not possible in the world we have created.
It was until Ajit Pai unraveled that.
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.
BuT yOu CaN aLwAyS gO tO tHe LiBrArY
The libraries that many of the people who say this are trying to shutter, of course.
The libraries that will allow me a maximum of an hour, maybe two if I’m lucky?
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.
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.
My coworkers mom lives in the same general area and has been using Starlink for a while now without issue. She gets around 300Mbps.
I considered it, but it isn’t good for online gaming and then there is…Musk. Had to pass.
~20ms ping times are perfectly fine for gaming. Admit it, it’s just Musk.
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.
Western MT here. Starlink is consistently 100+
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.
I can imagine it.
I can imagine the next jerk off administration rescinding that goal in the name of private enterprise or whatever bullshit excuse they choose.
Can’t wait til they give another few hundred billion to ISPs who turn it into bonuses instead of infra improvement
I just don’t get it. Why not making upload speed same as download speed?
the most simple explanation is that total bandwidth is limited and more upload speed they give you the less download speed.
What about full duplex links?
You can still spend more of the links on download if you wanted to
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.
Australia here. 250 down, 20 up
Because regular users need more download than upload, while servers need more upload than download.
I could give a shit what they call it. How about enforcing some god damn price restrictions or make data caps illegal? Speed means little otherwise
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.
100 mbps? That’s 100 millibits per second, or 0.1 bits per second. I’d certainly hope for better bandwidth than one but every ten seconds; that’s slower than smoke signals.
I wish we can all move to MB/s and get rid of the endless confusion on names
We should change to mibibits! We need easily factored numbers of 10, not this old powers of 2 stuff! (/s if it wasn’t obvious)
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.
How about Mebinibbles?
Gibiwords
The reason we don’t is because the network does not care how the files you transfer are formatted.
It measure the amount of bits it can transfer.
Whether the file in question is for example a text document (8bit) or a HEIF (10bit)
I say we split the different and go for nibbles per fortnight.
Mbps, megabits per second, is the standard. No idea why this author opted to use the highly unusual millibit.
👆 Pedant.
👆 Humorless git.
Debate pervert 👆
You’re right, I’m horny for words.
I tried to get it to point to my username (but it’s cool if you want to argue)
I almost replied saying you had no idea you were talking about, but then I realized… Lol
Except that’s like dividing by zero. A millibit is undefined. A bit is the smallest indivisible unit of digital information.
But capitalization is important to distinguish between b for bit and B for Byte.
No, that’s like dividing by 1,000.
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.
Lol thanks for the chuckle
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.
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.
Literally no one means “millibit” when they type mbps…
There is no 1000ths of a 0 or 1.
Milibit does not exist.
Network speed is measured in Megabits per second, which is indeed 8 times smaller than Megabyte per second that OSes show when transferring files.
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
It should also require allowing incoming connections. Too much ISPs, especially mobile, are gives one-way Internet now. Basically like having a phone line with no phone number.
You should google “CG-NAT” and learn why mobile providers don’t (and simply can’t) provide you a public IP. Get yourself a cheap VPS, set up a reverse proxy, and open all the ports you want.
VPS + Wireguard is great. And my DNS provider allows private range IPs as “A” records, so I have subdomains for my different home servers.
I know why they do that, lack of v4 space and other reasons. Why we need to push forward with such legislations.
That’s due to there not being enough IPv4 address, and IPv6 is… forgotten I guess.
IPv6 is actually widely implemented. Home ISPs are mixed on providing IPv6, but mobile providers widely embrace IPv6, some even running IPv6-only networks that rely on translation services to reach IPv4 destinations. T-Mobile is IPv6-only for example
Interesting. Unfortunately, my carrier is IPv4-only (Swan Mobile).
Yeah, IPv6 adoption varies quite a bit by country and region. It’s a shame that it’s going so slow
It is not forgotten. https://youtube.com/watch?v=vo5glK9czIE
My ISP have full IPv6 support, but block all traffic via firewall…
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/watch?v=vo5glK9czIE
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
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.
If I could also get 100mbps for less than $80 a month that’d be great.
This. 100mbps is great and all except what good is it if people can’t afford it.
Slightly off topic but I seriously hope the Dems have a good plan to tell the general public of the US, just how much Biden and his administration has done for good progressive legislation this far.
They don’t.
Source: They keep not executing the plan
Go get them FCC! Lets move into the future.
I’m out here living on 10 Mbps up / 1 Mbps down.
I hate living in LATAM.
I found the HPB
I am sorry, friend, but what does HPB mean?
It’s an old school diss
High ping bitch/baby
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
Thanks for explaining, comrade. May Shub-Internet be kind to you.
