Comment by cashewchoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cashewchoo | Hacker News Reader

I used to live in a Google Fiber city, but had to move away. I yearn desperately and dearly for google fiber (or a similarly interests-aligned ISP) to come to my new city.

Unfortunately I moved out of a city metro area and am now in a smaller town that acts like a suburb of the major city I live near (~20-30 mins from the center of downtown). So my hopes for having google pay attention to us is ~0, at least over the next decade or two.

Spectrum offers 940mbps down / 40 up and it's... fine. I watch my bill like a hawk because of the history of all these actors and I really wish I had more upload bandwidth (for linux iso torrents - and I'm actually not being euphemistic here. I host a lot of stuff locally that I wish had a bigger upload pipe - passion project stuff in addition to seeding linux-related content.)

In the 90s consumption was mostly single direction, content was downloaded and consumed. With video conferencing and other interactions, the idea that pipes are overly download oriented is flawed.

We're producing more for the world to see and upload is becoming increasingly as important for stable internet.

If you really want to seed stuff like that, look into a seed box. You can get some pretty cheaply with a fair bit of bandwidth. I have one I use for similar purposes. Seed things like libreoffice iso's and similar open source project torrents.

It costs something around $7/mo for around 3TB of transfer. That's three times the bandwidth I get with Comcast without paying an overage charge.

Iirc the upload speed is capped that way because they're still using the old copper lines, they just improved the modulators so they can give high speeds but only in one direction. They'd have to run actual fiber to improve the upload.

This isn't true for spectrum or Comcast. Both uss fttn nowadays.

Depends on the location, deployment wasn't universal last I looked.

Similar situation and probably the same city. I really miss my Fiber but have been pleasantly surprised with Spectrum so far. I have far better network hardware so for what I do I can't tell much of a difference, for now.

Same. My only option here is spectrum. 940/40 is what I pay for.

I also watch my bill like a hawk and I run a Speedtest exporter with Prometheus and grafana to make sure I’m semi getting what I pay for.

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