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Comment by gok | Hacker News Reader

The actual report: https://broadbandnow.com/report/internet-speed-analysis-marc...

"But New York City, now considered the epicenter of the virus in the U.S., saw download speeds drop by 24% last week, compared to the previous 10-week range. That said, NYC home network connections, which have a median speed of nearly 52 Mbps, are managing."

It took me a few times reading it to understand what this is trying to say. What they mean is that many of these cities that are showing slowdowns already had higher-than-average median speeds. Many of the cities that aren't seeing slowdowns were already pretty slow to begin with. E.g. Chicago has only slowed down 10% but its median speed is only 26.79 mbps.

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It seems more like a mix shift issue, than a real issue.

If most of the fastest internet speeds are in offices, and people start working from home where slower speeds are located than average speed will decline.

Is that true? My home connection has always been far faster than my office connection. Sometimes I go home just to download a particularly large file.

What kind of office is it and where is it located?

not the parent but that kind of situation is pretty normal in germany with consumer gigabit costs of about 50€/month.

enterprise connections pay a premium, and smallish employers often don't want to spend money on monthly expenditures, so mostly ~50-200mbit shared between all people at the office

Only download. Upload is far worse usually.

To be fair, i spent 1500€/m for 1gbit fiber in the center of Frankfurt, which was considered cheap at the time.

You can get 1g down, 50mbit up for less than a tenth of that with cable for example. We used that line heavily and I loved it, but I'm still unsure if I should rather have spent the money differently.

We've moved now to a WeWork Style Location ( Studio from Tishman Speyer ) and are down to 100/100, have put our vpn equipment in a datacenter for 70€/m and nobody complains.

rereading my message makes it sound like a complaint. That wasn't my intention at all. I know how much of a premium it costs and how little you need for anything but streaming video.

The most efficient way is probably to get consumer cable through the CEO(for "private" access to YouTube etc) combined with a smallish business vdsl connection for everything company related.

true, but qos is usually terrible and there is no sla to speak of on the consumer offerings. the most common offer (vodafone cable) has frequent outtages where you only hope is to call a robo-center and the optimal outcome is a troubleticket and maybe a refund. upload speed on gbit-cable is also only 50mbps...

if your business relies on connectity, best to avoid it.

they are often "up to 1Gbps" and also not available everywhere. In my area it's also at least 70 EUR, so I am fine with 400Mbps at home.

How small if its over 5 or so

They do know that consumer internet is asymmetrical and not practicable for real work.

FYI ELM (ethernet last mile) at 70Mbs in the UK costs about £70 pm

Fortune 500 in Portland, Oregon. My home Internet is more than twice as fast as my office line.

A dedicated 50mbps/50mbps fiber circuit for a business will be better quality than a home cable (coaxial) “100mbps” connection, shared between a million houses with 2mbps upload. Notice how you can’t even find upload bandwidth advertised for residential cable internet, much less other factors affecting connection quality.

He may have fiber to the home

I have a fiber optic line coming all the way to the box inside my home. The only coaxial line is the short line from the fiber box to the WiFi router.

the fastest connection available to my home is ~60Mbps, my office has a 1Gb line, soon to be upgraded to 10Gb

Maybe not in your case, but it my case, that big pipe is shared with a lot of people, and full of MITM, shaping, "threat detection" etc, that makes it sloow. And currently fronted by a shite VPN for all of us working from home :)

if you work for smaller or non-tech companies maybe. My employers in the last 5 years have all had at least 1Gbps, current one has 10Gbps and a 2Gbps backup.

On the bigcorp end of things your corporate network is so fucked and the gateway to the public internet so slow you're back down to 50Mbit. With HTTPS MITM.

I am really sorry you have bad experience with your Big Co. Understand, not every company is like that.

Also there is no need for the kind of language. It definitely isn't helping your argument so you might just as well drop it.

Your office connection is probably scaled well. If it was as fast as your home broadband it would mean your company overpays for it and actually looses productivity.

Office work does not require fast Internet access and does not require that your Youtube videos load instantly.

We did some research and it seems broadband Internet access does not improve productivity and may actually reduce it.

Any minuscule increase in productivity (I mean a total of 5 minutes of loading times per employee per day) is meaningless. People can't focus on their real work for 8 hours straight. When Internet works faster, people just use more of it and are less selective about how they use it. People also get quickly used to increased performance and will be complaining at almost any performance point.

Another research on build times showed that hugely increased build times don't improve productivity either. At first yes -- people get excited. But then, when build times are very short (say 5s compared to 10m) most (but not all) developers just stop staring constantly at their IDE and thinking about how to structure their code and instead reduce their iteration to a minimum (say couple of lines of code) and just restart to see if it works. This seems to actually reduce quality of produced code.

I seriously doubt you had the kind of precision to measure a 1% change in productivity. What exactly where you measuring?

Ha!

If I want to download a particularly big file, I use tethering via my phone. Seriously, about 90Mbit/s download on the phone, that's faster than most places I've worked and also faster than my home connection.

It was so obviously better, that I switched home to be on 4G instead of ADSL, because the 4G was both cheaper and faster. It's working out well, but the phone still manages to be faster than the router.

Yes. Most people don't realize this. (4G phone >> home internet)

I tether my iPad to my 4G phone because the latency/bandwidth is much higher than my home internet (40mbps).

I ran Speedtest on my phone vs my desktop with a wired connection to the router and learned that my 4G wireless connection was faster.

I think most of my town must use 4G at home because between 4pm and midnight my ping is too annoyingly high to play counterstrike

In Norway if one has a copper phone line into house, then the speed is typically bound by 40 Mbit/s. And it is not just rural areas. The apartment I live in is close to the center of Oslo. But as it is an old building with few flats it is not profitable to lay down the fiber even if it is just extra 10 meters from the near office building. With 4G with a good phone or modem one gets 50-300 MBit/s depending on the provider and coverage.

For most of us in the US, that does not work when you need to upload a file. (or synchronous communication, like video chatting, etc)

There's also lots of bored folks at home streaming Netflix, Hulu, and the like. That would have been at work using a lot less bandwidth.

I've again switched to BTing what I want to watch rather than watching it streamed because 2-3 hour late evening binges became an exercise in frustration.

> 26.79 mbps

Milli-bit per second? Really?

Feels like it sometimes!

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