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FYI SF has legislation in place that allows tenants in multi-units to choose any ISP provider (1). This was part of a broader effort to deploy internet as a utility that I was fortunate to have been a part of (2). Unfortunately the Mayor passed away and we lost political sponsorship (and of course the constant and expected lobbying from incumbents didn't help)(3)

> Back in 2016 in Toronto, I chose a condominium specifically because it had Beanfield fiber

I'm in Toronto, thank goodness this is becoming more common, not less. I was recently condo hunting and I noticed most new buildings had Beanfield or their competitor, FibreStream. The building we ended up with has the latter, so we're getting 500Mbps symmetric/no cap.

Yay for not having to annually fight with Bell for a "promotional" rate anymore!

I'm looking forward to this when I move next. I currently have Rogers 1Gbps on a promotional rate, which is pretty good, but 30Mbps upload cap. Also double what you're paying!

The asymmetry between download and upload speeds on cable connections is really awful in recent years. I see advertised download speeds like 300 Mbps and 1 Gbps available in many places, but the upload speeds seem to never exceed 30 Mbps around here (which is just 3% of the download speed at 1 Gbps!). Having something like 250/250 Mbps symmetric available would be overall more preferable than 1000/30 in all but the most extreme download situations, in my opinion.

I suppose maybe the cable networks are more optimized for average user behaviour (far more download than upload), but maybe there's also a fundamental limitation with the cable infrastructure that prevents faster uploads, perhaps to do with cable's legacy delivering television broadcasts? Whereas with fibre, almost everything I've seen available comes with symmetric speeds by default.

The major reason that upload speeds tend to be far lower is that they are the lowest part of the spectrum on a cable network. As everything on a shared cable network is receiving everything else, encryption and noise filters are imperative. The higher the frequency of your noise, the more likely it is to cause issues on the rest of the hardware. There are high-pass filters all over the coax network to ensure that nothing over a certain frequency is able to get out on the network and screw things up for other customers. In order to expand the bandwidth by making the coax frequency pie larger, CATV providers would not only need to replace everybodys equipment to ensure it could handle the increased noise but also check every single meter of cable to find and remove all the high-pass filters.

A high-pass filter removes low frequencies, I think you mean there are low-pass filters.

I require symmetric since I upload a lot, plus I am on videoconferences frequently. I'd personally rather go for 100/100 than gigabit/something less than 100.

DOCSIS 3.0 (I think that's the latest) allocates a particular ratio of download vs upload frequencies, so even when speeds increase the asymmetry is still the same. I heard the next version of DOCSIS might change that though. Ideally there'd be enough fiber to not require DOCSIS anyway, but I don't have my hopes up for that.

Hopefully with a lot more WFH arrangements people start demanding symmetric connections. But

Most video conference uses ~4Mbps for your video feed going out. It is more likely you need 100Mbps upload for doing backups or uploading photos or home videos etc. For a household with 2 people working from home and also watching a ton of streaming content, 50Mbps up/down would be just fine, if you can get it reliably.

Anything more than that, especially in gigabit range is just gimmicks, IMO.

Totally agreed. Reliable 30 Mbps is enough for me and my wife to simultaneously join Teams or Zoom video calls without issues. It's enough even when our preschooler wants to call a friend on Zoom at the same time, which happened once. And it's enough to watch Netflix in HD on two screens at once.

Here in Northern NJ Comcast is a quite reliable broadband provider... but in the almost 18 years we've had their service the download speed has risen to 225 Mbps, while the upload speed has remained at around 5 Mbps. In practice this doesn't seem to matter much. I assume they could potentially add additional upstream frequencies but I doubt they get many complaints about it, or that very many of their customers are even aware of the asymmetry.

Switch to their business class offering if you need the upstream. I'm also in northern NJ and on 200/20 tier. There's no technical limitation on that bandwidth restriction so long as you have a docsis 3 modem or later that can bond multiple upstream channels.

However, there was a technical issue I had some months ago with a faulty Arris modem provisioning file that disabled upstream bonding across most of their models. It took an email to the CEO to sort it out (after a Reddit and DSLReports post on the matter).

How did you figure out the root cause? Usually you can't fetch those files yourself.

I bought 3 different Arris modems and they all bonded upstream until activated on the network through comcast's walled garden. Once activation was run the upstream sync light changed to show it was no longer bonding upstream. If a deactivated one was plugged in, again it would bond.

Previously I had been on a 50/10 tier and when the new business class tiers were released they blamed my trusted old SB6121s for being too old, so I bought 2 newer ones in the SB series and had same issues. After writing the CEO and CC'ing all the techs I spoke to and including links to the threads they gave me a direct engineering contact that confirmed the issue. For the trouble they credited me out 2 months of service.

It's market segmentation. You can get symmetric cable, but you have to pay for the business service

I checked before we moved to SF, and apparently FibreStream has 5Gbps service in select buildings in downtown Toronto. Pretty awesome!

This sounds very strange that You have those exclusivity arrangements there. Most of the buildings in Riga, Latvia has at least 2-5 physical connections to choose from (an even more providers as they could share one cable). Maybe it is because most of the buildings are soviet ones and only flats themselves ar privately owned but building itself is owned by municipality. Last mile is owned by private companies mostly but everything before that is owned by state.

I can get up to 1gbit connection for 15 EUR, 100mbit for 7 EUR because of competitive market

It easy to run cables to those buildings because they are built according the same blueprint. You can run the cables the same way, no need to create separate plans which is an extra cost. In Budapest old soviet buildings have the best internet(fiber).

We usually only have one or two competing provider per building, but their prices are still low(same as yours).

In both cases, where buildings had exclusivity agreements or had the fiber providers lay the fiber themselves, residents are worse off.

This is an opportunity for wireless. I've lived in buildings with exclusive internet agreements. I was able to bypass those in some cities back when WiMax was still available. I got double the speed for half the price when I was living in an AT&T building, and the same speed for half the price when I was in a Qwest building.

I'm not a fan of the new breed of satellite internet startups, but if they put fear into the wired/fibered carriers, then at least some good will come out of them.

when I was living in an AT&T building

The dystopian future is here.

My father actually worked for a startup providing wireless access to rural and urban areas back in the late 90s. It was nice to have a 27 megabit connection to my house when the hottest thing was a 2 megabit DSL line.

What cost that company $200,000 in 1998 and took up an entire rack now can be bought for about $2,000 from Ubiquiti and mounted in a few U in a rack. They even have the software available to run your own ISP!

I love their gear. It has a lot of warts and strange issues, but it fills a space above standard consumer stuff. You can end up with a ridiculous setup if you aren’t careful.

Beanfield is especially amazing. They recently reduced (!) the rates of their gigabit service to $50/month from $100, and increased everyone's service to gigabit if they weren't already on it.

Canada struggles with regulation. Not too much or too little, but rather poorly executed and manipulated for political reasons.

Builders get big providers to pay for communications wiring, in some cases including that of their competitors, for the privilege of exclusive advertising rights. Those same big providers need to provide (some level of) service to all the people in their geography.

Between influences like these and regulation, the big providers have to shoulder significant costs which they pass on to their consumers. The upstarts don't have these costs and can offer much better pricing.

The regulators and politicians can then step in and gain voter favor by going after these big, "bad" providers by enabling new entrants into the market with must better cost structures (e.g. regional service only) or even just outright subsidizing them, ultimately seeming to go after a problem that they actually created.

Whether this public/private capitalist mess is more cost effective than a public entity is unclear, but it does succeed in shifting accountability away from the government.

In the end the citizens pay for it all, just inequitably. Perhaps it is a capitalist victory that a price sensitive consumer can invest the time to find a better deal and opt out of subsidizing rural communities.

Also look at the other side: if you’re at&t and have the opportunity to lock in while buildings or neighborhoods into your service and dictate their pricing, that’s ... well, priceless!

So the expenses around lobbying, wining and dining a few politicians etc. are totally worth it.

I believe Sonic uses AT&T fiber, so you actually are getting the same service...

Sonic resells AT&T fiber when their own fiber offering is not built out in that area. This allows the customer to utilize Sonic's services and support (being able to call Sonic instead of AT&T is a feature for many people) as well as use sonic services, and allows Sonic to still make a small amount of money per customer and have a built in audience of people what likely want to upgrade if Sonic fiber is built in the area as it will be cheaper for them (and still more profitable for Sonic).

Disclosure: I work for sonic, and this is my personal understanding of the strategy, which may have other nuances.

More explicitly: Sonic has run quite a bit of their own fiber all over the city. Sonic can also use AT&T fiber, which they do in parts of the city that they don't have fiber in.

I don’t think that’s true. They use ATT copper for reselling their DSL but for fiber they roll their own. I’m lucky and have Sonic 1Gb symmetrical service for $40.

See the post above yours; they do both. I'm in a building where Sonic is offered but it's through AT&T. I went with AT&T since the price was the same, would still need to rent AT&T's stupid PON device (which I bypass anyway), and Sonic mentioned that AT&T provided poor customer service for Sonic customers.

I'd love it if the fiber in the building was public so I could just pay 1/2 what I pay AT&T for Sonic instead.

Yes, I'm a Sonic fiber customer on AT&T fiber. AT&T terminated fiber to the house, and my bits go over their network (with all the negatives that implies), but my service is uncapped and my bill comes from Sonic. It's more than $40 though.