Hacker News Reader

Comment by abjKT26nO8 | Hacker News Reader

You're describing an issue specific to US ISPs. It doesn't apply to Europe. From what I read even before the pandemic the US ISPs offered rather crappy services. In Europe, particularly in Poland, I don't have and haven't heard about anyone having any issues with connectivity right now, even though the country is in lockdown, schools and universities are closed, restaurants work only in delivery/take-out mode, companies switched to remote work, ... And still no issues at home nor at work.

Don't make decisions about the European infrastructure based on American problems.

View on HN

This article is literally about the EU asking Netflix to reduce bandwidth in Europe.

And the comment I replied to was "literally" about problems encountered in US (Seattle is in US FYI).

Having issues with the internet here in the UK today. Unsurprising given that half of the world has suddenly discovered video calling. Mobile network seems more stable.

In my country (NL), a lot of the backbone of both cable TV and internet on a street level has been replaced with fiber already; I can imagine that in the US, due to the scale, this process is lower. Doesn't have to be fiber-to-the-home, 20mbit should be enough for everyone for example.

I haven't had any problems with my internet (I do have fiber straight into my house, wired network on my laptop, fast.com reports 600 Mb/s), but Skype, which we use for meetings, has been pretty shit in terms of sound quality.

20mbit is not enough if you have kids with retina display ipads looking at youtube!

I work virtually from New Zealand with my colleague in Lombardy Italy. Today I noticed some more serious degradation in video call quality for the first time.

But mostly I'm amazed how well the internet is working given the circumstances.

I'm in Poland as well and I've been working remotely for over three years. Since the lock down started I feel that everything is a bit slower and less stable, but I haven't experienced major issues during usual work hours doing work-related things (maybe except MS Teams acting up). However Netflix is broken most of the time during afternoon hours (when I want to keep kids occupied with cartoons for an hour or so to get things done). Luckily other streaming services work fine.

In contrast, my internet connection finally started working great since lockdowns started. I suspect my ISP (small local company in central Poland) got some additional bandwidth or somehow finally fixed their infrastructure when they saw increased internet usage among their clients.

It depends. If there is competition, things can be good. I live in a place in the US where there are 3 broadband providers, and I pay far less than $100 for a symmetric gigabit connection, and I get it too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com