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Comment by LeonM | Hacker News Reader

> or make a Skype call that doesn’t drop out every two minutes.

When will people learn that bandwidth has nothing to do with this? You don't need 50mbit for a skype call!

It's usually not the 'last mile' problem, but what I'd call the 'last meters' problem: most SOHO/consumer grade network equipment is just total garbage.

Replace your ISP supplied equipment with something more reliable (I highly recommend Ubiquiti gear) and you'd be surprised how much more usable your internet connection becomes.

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Yup. To invoke the inevitable car analogy, if your problem is it takes too long to get to 40mph from a standing start at the lights, upgrading from 200mph to 250mph top speed won't necessarily help. Even more so if the problem is sometimes it won't start on a cold morning or there aren't enough seats.

The pro-fibre lobby is convinced that somehow 1Gbps will enable an as yet undetermined application and countries where people have 40Mbps will get left behind. But the application doesn't exist. I had 1Gbps for several years, now I have 40Mbps. It's not just that I don't miss it, I don't even notice. I could easily afford faster, but I could also easily afford a giant cardboard Han Solo, and I didn't buy that either.

Reliability matters, but in practice copper reliability isn't bad enough to be a significant factor compared to consumer gear.

Latency matters, but most of the work needed there is in consumer gear, not in the last mile or elsewhere in ISP networks.

Does it matter though? If the ISP is responsible for the "last mile", does it matter if they screw up the last meter of it?

It's one thing if customer supplied boxes are causing problems in the last meter, but if the last mile is end to end controlled by the ISP, and they still screw it up, does it matter what meter is the problem?

The only benefit I see here is that a confident/educated customer could implement the fix themselves as you suggest. However that's sort of dodging the issue, rather than acknowledging that the ISP isn't holding up their end of the agreement (in loose terms at least).

You are paying for that ISP-supplied router, either explicitly as an item in your bill or implicitly factored into the overall cost. People will either go with the cheapest option if there are any options at all or the ISP will simply save costs to do the minimum necessary to provide internet access.

And of course those routers are crap and only do the bare minimum.

For example they often have comically bad firewalls/NATs that can overflow their state tables when you do any P2P, run your own DNS resolver or run a home server through dynamic DNS.

And then there's buffer bloat.

A custom router with OpenWRT and enough RAM will cope with those use-cases and will offer all the nice linux traffic shaping plugins like fq_codel and cake.

Could you recommend modem / router equivalents ( whichever applies to replacing ISP supplied equivalent, I'm assuming both? ) at a few different price brackets?

Ubiquiti gear appears to be quite dear, alternatively are they worth the expense? Are there any benchmarks etc which demonstrate this, or further reading?

Well, in my case, I use a Edgerouter-X with an SFP module that connects directly to my fiber line. Remember, a fibre lines does not even require a modem. I don't have experience with DSL equipment. The equipment my ISP send me (it's still in the box) came with a 'fiber modem', which is a fiber-to-ethernet converter, and a no-name brand router with build-in wifi. The firmware on it is a custom branded build of 3 years old, and I don't expect they ever released a security update for it (KRACK attack, anyone?).

For wireless connectivity I use a Unify AC pro, which has proved highly reliable. See [0]

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/10/review-ubiquiti-unif...

ubiquiti is the least expensive stuff that actually works.

edgerouter x https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-EdgeRouter-Advanced-Gigabit-...

ap-ac-lr https://www.amazon.com/Ubiquiti-Unifi-Ap-AC-Long-Range/dp/B0...

total up to $152 at the moment. the wire cutter's suggestion for best router/access point is a $180 netgear product. and based on my prior experience, the netgear hardware won't last more than 12 months.

Latency is way more important. My last company gave me 100down but it took 3 seconds to load google. I couldn't play any games or even talk online with friends. I switched over to another company for similar price, no speed change, and everything works fantastically. If I had incredible ping/routing I would take 20 down, I'd love to see what the most I use is, probably less than 10.

Probably errors / transmission or a vlan issue

So what latency did you have? I find it hard to believe it was more than 30ms to a nearby pop. Did you have some half-duplex link somewhere?

So for a small fraction of annual per customer income ISPs could transform their service, but they cheap out to save a few quid ... the difference in wholesale cost on the better router-modem must be c.2-3% of a low cost contract.

Somehow that doesn't make the situation seem better.

People should try to understand the difference between bandwidth and latency.

I've found an analogy to a car is a simple way to help people understand.

Bandwidth: This is how big your car is. High bandwidth is like driving a huge truck. You can load a whole bunch of things up at once.

Latency: This is how fast your car is, measured in the time it takes to get between two places (so lower time means a faster car)

So you can think about most web usage like picking up groceries from the store.

Driving a huge slow 18 wheeler is a waste: you're only picking up a few groceries, and it will take a long time to get to the store and back.

Driving a tiny fast corvette is silly, because even though you get there real fast, you're going to have to make three trips to fit all the groceries in the car.

What most people want is good all around car - Big enough to haul what you need, fast enough to not feel sluggish doing it.

Some things work better with the fast car (playing games, video chat, streaming songs)

Some things work better with a big truck (downloading games, streaming HD video, moving large files)

But you have to pay attention to both.

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